X-Message-Number: 31529 Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:25:40 -0800 (PST) From: Subject: Climate change double-think X4 [Four articles give several interesting views on this Global Warming myth. You'd think that the idiots who still believe in this would stick their heads out the door and wake up. However idiots don't do rational things, else they wouldn't be idiots. It is interesting that when I asked my fellow shivering Canadians in person what they thought about Global Warming, I could not find a single believer. Believers seem to exist only in well heated government think tanks, and in academia.] Climate change double-think Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, March 02, 2009 The Earth has been cooling for a decade. While it may be true (or not, depending on whose figures one uses) that 1998 was the second-warmest year on record, and that seven or eight of the years since were in the top 10, no year since has been warmer than 1998 and nearly every one has been cooler than the one before it. The trend is decidedly downward. Indeed, the drop in temperatures since late-2007 has been so precipitous --nearly a full degree Celsius-- that almost all of the global warming that has occurred since the late-1970s has disappeared. One of the criticisms of global warming predictions is that models cannot even reproduce climate for which we already have detailed records. So last spring, when climate scientists at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology managed -- finally -- to use their supercomputer to recreate the climate of the past half-century, there was much anticipation of what their predictions would be for the next half. What they said was that global temperatures would continue to fall for at least another decade, perhaps longer. When I wrote last year that this 20-year intermission in upward temperature trends bruised the credibility of global warming scientists and alarmist environmentalists, several of them wrote me to say they had never predicted steadily rising temperatures. No, no, they insisted, all along they had expected periods -- even some long ones -- in which temperatures would retreat before surging ahead again. So the currently cooling fit right in with what they had been predicting all along. This, of course, was revisionist hogwash -- if only because the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed there was no doubt that disastrous manmade warming was already upon us. The IPCC further predicted temperatures this decade would rise 0.3C and by similar amounts every decade through 2100. I had been fully prepared for the alarmists to take credit for the cooling once it became undeniable. What I had not predicted was the hubris and intellectual dishonesty that permitted the warmers to insist they knew all along of facts contrary to their theories, but believed those facts reinforced, rather than undermined, the validity of their earlier claims. Now, a similarly Orwellian doublethink is happening over Arctic sea ice. Since last fall, Arctic ice has been expanding faster than at any time since satellite records became available in 1979. The ice cap is now only a fraction smaller than in 1980 -- when it was at its largest. Not only has this news not received much reporting, but the fact that ice sensors in the North have been malfunctioning, which has very likely led to a further underestimating of the amount of ice around the pole, has set off another we-never-claimed-it-was-an-emergency moment among greenies. Taking exception to a column written by The Washington Post's George Will, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin -- one of the warmers' most reliable trumpets -- wrote recently, "I've not met a single scientist focussed on sea ice who would point to a single year's changes as evidence" of global warming Pardon me!? Since hurricanes stopped menacing the U. S. coastline, the supposedly rapidly melting polar ice has been the biggest alarmist story. Consider these two examples from the scores of articles and scientists claiming the proof of dangerous warming is visible in each melting ice flow: -Mark Serreze, one of the most prominent Arctic ice scientists in the world and a researcher at the U. S. National Snow and Ice Center, said last summer's melt proved "Arctic ice is in its death spiral," and would be completely gone each summer by 2030. -Last fall, a group of international scientists, led by Environment Canada climatologist Nathan Gillett, insisted in the journal Nature Geoscience that, among other factors, Arctic melting was proof manmade warming was harming the planet. Winston Smith, of course, was the character in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty- Four whose job it was to rewrite history, literally, and send the old, embarrassing versions that had been overtaken by facts down the memory hole for destruction. As the consensus on warming crumbles, expect more such Winston Smith denials from the theory's true believers. ________________________________________________ Expert pessimistic on Arctic warming Scientist says summer sea-ice cover could be non-existent by 2013, decades earlier than predicted By David Ljunggren, Reuters March 6, 2009 The Arctic is warming so quickly that the region's sea-ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said Thursday. Warwick Vincent, director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models," which call for an ice-free summer in 2013. The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong; each year we're finding it's a little bit faster than expected," he said. The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and the sea-ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing slightly in 2008. In 2004, a major international panel forecast the cover could vanish by 2100. Some experts said in December the summer ice could go in the next 10 or 20 years. If the ice cover disappears, it could have major consequences. Shipping companies are already musing about short cuts through the Arctic, which also contains enormous reserves of oil and natural gas. Vincent's scientific team has spent the past 10 summers on remote Ward Hunt Island. "I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the 10 years I've been working there," he said after making a presentation to MPs. "We're losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality." In 2008 the maximum summer temperature on Ward Hunt hit 20 C compared with the usual 5 C. Last summer alone, the five ice shelves along Ellesmere Island in Canada's Far North, which are more than 4,000 years old, shrunk by 23 per cent. Vincent said in September that it was clear some of the damage would be permanent and that the warming in the Arctic was a sign of what the rest of the world could expect. He struck a similarly gloomy note in his presentation. "Some of this is unstoppable. We're in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse, the loss of these ice shelves, for example," he said. "But what we can do is slow down this process and we have to slow down this process because we need to buy more time. We simply don't have the technologies as a civilization to deal with this level of instability that is ahead of us." (c) Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun ________________________________ Professor William Happer's statement on climate change can be found at the following link. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/happer_senate_testimony.html _____________________________________________ The real 'deniers' Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, March 09, 2009 William Happer is hardly a climate change "denier." A physics professor at Princeton, he is a former director of energy research for the U. S. Department of Energy, where he supervised work on climate change between 1990 and 1993. He is also one of the world's leading experts on "the interactions of visible and infrared radiation with gases," and on carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect. Two weeks ago, he told the U. S. Congress, "I believe the increase of CO2 (in the atmosphere) is not a cause for alarm." Claims that an increase of atmospheric CO2 will lead to catastrophic warming "are wildly exaggerated," according to Prof. Happer. While a doubling (we have seen about a 35% rise since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution) might lead to a 0.6C rise in global temperature, he told Congress, "additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 ... that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can." Prof. Happer added that while CO2 concentrations have risen steadily for more than 100 years, warming began before that -- 200 years ago -- and even during the time when temperatures and carbon concentrations have risen together, the link has hardly been consistent. For instance, while CO2 was rising rapidly from 1950 to 1970, temperatures were going through an especially cold period. Over the past decade, while carbon dioxide concentrations have continued to grow, there has been "a slight cooling," according to the Princeton physicist. Any warming in recent decades, then, "seems to be due mostly to natural causes, not to increasing levels of carbon dioxide." Why then do organizations such as the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continue to put faith in climate supercomputer models that show disastrous warming in the coming century? Because, as Prof. Happer explained, the IPCC believes in what is called a "positive feedback loop." In short, water vapour and clouds account for about 98% of the greenhouse effect versus less than 2% for CO2. The IPCC believes, though, that a doubling of CO2, while not significant on its own, will trigger a huge increase in the greenhouse impact of water vapour. But so far, in the realworld, "the feedback is close to zero and may even be negative." Prof. Happer testified. The significance of Prof. Happer's statement is not that it proves global warming is false, but rather that it shows there is no consensus among respected scientists. The notion that the "science is settled," as claimed by global warming advocates, is not true. Also, two weeks ago, three of five independent scientists asked by Japan's Society of Energy and Resources to assess the current state of climate science concluded that global warming, to the extent it is still occurring, is a natural phenomenon, not manmade. In his official contribution, Kanya Kusano, program director at the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, called the IPCC's warming theories "an unprovable hypothesis" and likened the current supercomputer models to ancient astrology. Even the Discovery Channel, never a fan of scientists who dissent from climate orthodoxy, reported last week on a University of Wisconsin study that shows global temperatures have at least flatlined during the past decade and that that trend could continue for another 30 years. The authors of that report -- Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis -- think rapid warming could resume after that. But for now, warming has ceased. Against this legitimate scientific doubt, recent statements by environmentalists and alarmist scientists sounds positively hysterical. Robert Kennedy, Jr. called coal companies "criminal enterprises" and demanded their CEOs be jailed "for all eternity." Michael Tobis, a climate modeller at the University of Texas labelled as "palpably evil" anyone who questioned the wisdom of former U. S. vice-president Al Gore and suggested that doubting Mr. Gore was "morally comparable to killing 1,000 people." U. S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu claimed warming will lead to "no more agriculture in California." Meanwhile Susan Solomon, of the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead scientist with the IPCC, said even if carbon emissions are stopped, temperatures around the globe will remain high until at least the year 3000 and within 10 years "the oceans will be toxic, and all life in them will die." Ironic, isn't it, that those who doubt the warming theories are the ones called the "deniers." Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=31529