Other voices on climate change

“Turn up the heat, somebody. The globe is freezing. Even Al Gore is looking for an extra blanket. Winter has barely come to the northern latitudes and already we’ve got bigger goosebumps than usual. So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports 63 record snowfalls in the United States, 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. Only 44 Octobers over the past 114 years have been cooler than this last one.

“The polar ice is accumulating faster than usual, and some of the experts now concede that the globe hasn’t warmed since 1995. You may have noticed, in fact, that Al and his pals, having given up on the sun, no longer even warn of global warming. Now it’s “climate change.” The marketing men enlisted by Al and the doom criers to come up with a flexible “brand” took a cue from the country philosopher who observed, correctly, that “if you’ve got one foot in the fire and the other in a bucket of ice, on average you’re warm.” On average, “climate change” covers every possibility.”

For the full article in the Jewish World Review website by the editor of the Washington Times, click here.

“Temperature has risen, slightly, falteringly and gradually for about 150 years or so (even ‘warmer’ scientists can’t claim that this started because of us). The period before this rise has long been known as a ‘Little Ice Age’, from which we are evidently making a welcome recovery. We only started pumping out CO2 properly in the postwar boom, but what did temperatures do? In the postwar period they fell, till about the mid-70s. Then they went up again (just like they did at the beginning of the 20^th Century, and then for the past ten years they’ve more or less flat-lined, decreasing slightly. Where is the evidence that humans are changing the climate? This is nothing but prejudice. It is not serious science. …

“It does not upset the left, or the greens at all, that they are proved wrong again and again and again. They are motivated by things other than Reason. Sadly, this is true also of people who, professionally, are meant to be intellectuals.”

For the entire FrontPageMagazine.com interview with Martin Durkin, producer of The Great Global Warming Swindle, click here.

A recent study by Shipper et al. warns that a major extinction of mammals and marine mammals is possible due to many factors, including habitat loss and overharvesting. Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso argue:

“Shipper et al. conclude their review by stating that their results “paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide.” And so they do. However, we can reduce the loss and degradation of habitat and animal harvesting on land, as well as accidents and pollution at sea, but only if we truly dedicate ourselves to doing so. On the other hand, attempting to prevent catastrophic mammal extinctions by trying to change the world’s climate, as Al Gore, James Hansen and others claim we must do by restricting CO2 emissions, is even worse than wishful thinking, for it simply cannot be done. What is more, fully half of all the archived content of our website is a testament to the fact that atmospheric CO2 enrichment significantly increases primary productivity, both on land and at sea; and this phenomenon is the greatest known force for maintaining earth’s mammal species richness.”

For the full article click here.

From the Daily Express, Nov. 5, 2008:

“When I first stuck my head above the parapet to say I didn’t believe what we were being told about global warming I had no idea what the consequences would be. I am a scientist and I have to ­follow the directions of science but when I see that the truth is being covered up I have to voice my ­opinions.

“According to official data, in every year since 1998 world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased. Why, then, do we not hear about that? The sad fact is that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been allowed to make a TV programme. …

“I’ve seen evidence, which I believe, that says there has not been a rise in global temperature since 1998, despite the increase in carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere. This makes me think the global warmers are telling lies – carbon dioxide is not the driver.

“The idiot fringe have accused me of being like a Holocaust denier, which is ludicrous. Climate change is all about cycles, it’s a natural thing and has always happened. When the Romans lived in Britain they were growing very good red grapes and making wine on the borders of Scotland. It was evidently a lot warmer. If you were sitting next to me 10,000 years ago we’d be under ice. So thank God for global warming for ending that ice age; we wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

To read the full article, click here.

“Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply. As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before].”

“Now, this is completely wrong. For most of the past seven years, those temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there’s been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of the significance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but the facts are clear.

For the full article by Australian columnist Michael Duffy, which originally appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, click here.

The evidence continues to mount that the IPCC models are too sensitive, and therefore produce too much
global warming. If climate sensitivity is indeed considerably less than the IPCC claims it to be,
then increasing CO2 alone can not explain recent global warming. The evidence presented here
suggests that most of that warming might well have been caused by cloud changes associated with
a natural mode of climate variability: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

The IPCC has simply assumed that mechanisms of climate change like that
addressed here do not exist. But that assumption is quite arbitrary and, as shown here, very likely wrong.
My use of only PDO-forced variations in the Earth’s radiative energy budget to explain two-thirds of
the global warming trend is no less biased than the IPCC’s use of carbon dioxide to explain global warming
without accounting for natural climate variability.

To read the full article, click here.

The following comment by Ross McKitrick, co-author with Christopher Essex of Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming, appeared originally at Climate Audit at http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4064. The Ann Henderson article appeared at http://climatesci.org/2008/10/02/an-essay-the-ipcc-report-what-the-lead-authors-really-think.

“Roger Pielke Sr has an essay online from Anne Henderson-Sellers who surveyed the IPCC lead authors shortly after completion of the AR4. There are lots of interesting quotes about their private doubts about the quality of models, their ironclad convictions abut what the right answers are, the sense that what they really need to do is improve their political advocacy, and so forth. But what caught my attention was this paragraph:

In some places there is an (unhealthy?) fear of mis- (or out of context) quoting by global warming “deniers”. We are hesitant to stress comments such as “the Fourth Assessment Report missed doing this owing essentially to the timelines that were arranged.” Another interesting example of this fear is that the original suggestion was to entitle the Sydney workshop, “What did the IPCC get wrong?” This proposal was quickly squashed in the corridors of the World Meteorological Organisation lest the anti-greenhouse lobby picked it up and repeated it as criticism of the IPCC.

“The attitude of Mann and Schmidt infects the whole IPCC organization. They can’t admit any errors or problems with their work lest their critics find out (as if we didn’t already know). So they cover it up, stick to the script and even squash the idea of asking what they got wrong. I suppose there are other organizations that operate this way, just none that one would trust.”

Newspaper articles are claiming “record warmth” for the Arctic. But is it true? No, says Anthony Watts on his blog, quoting several authorities. In fact, the ice cover is increasing and already 31% greater than 2007. These claims of record warmth are being called “pseudoscience” by reputable climate scientists. For example, biologist Ernst-Georg Beck notes:

“The annual report issued by researchers at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other experts is the latest to paint a dire picture of the impact of climate change in the Arctic. [...] The real averaged temperatures of the whole Arctic circle (70-90 N) can be found in the same data base used by NOAA (CRU, Phil Jones): The graph shows a strong Arctic warming during 1918 and 1960, stronger than today with a rise of about + 4°C up to 1938. Referencing only a rise since 1960 we got the illusion of a dramatic rise in modern times.

“Conclusion: The news item:” Arctic air temperatures climb to record levels” is selective science and wrong because the Arctic Ocean (covering an area of more than 50% of the Arctic circle) has been left unconsidered. The NOAA study summarizes: “5°C record levels in temperature in autumn”, presents the averaged temperatures only on land stations and discusses melting sea ice as a cause! This is pseudoscience. In contrast the current Arctic warming mimics the 1920s-1940s event, as a recent study from the Ohio State University reveals. The scientists recognized from using weather station records, maps and photos from the past century that temperatures in Greenland had warmed in the 1920s at rates equivalent to the recent past.”

To read Watts’ article, click here.

Globally, more than one third of the nineteen subpopulations of polar bears are increasing or stable, while the remaining third have insufficient data available; its status in the central Arctic Basin, the largest of the nineteen designated regions, is completely unknown.

Polar bears routinely hunt on new ice < 30 cm thick and are quite capable of utilizing thick first year ice (> 120 cm thick or more.) for over-wintering and denning. They do not require thick multi-year ice.

The polar bear survived two major warming periods over the last 11,000 years, the first of which saw temperatures rise rapidly to at least 2.5 C higher than present and there is no evidence that Arctic sea ice disappeared entirely during those times or that any ice-dependent species became extinct.

The computer model results, presented in 2007, which forecast dramatic declines in polar bear numbers based primarily on predicted reductions in seasonal sea ice thickness and extent, have not yet been tested against even a single years worth of independent data.

To read the full article by Dr. Susan Crockford, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Victoria, online and in PDF, click here.

The most obvious point about global warming is that the planet is heating up. It has warmed about 1C (1.8F) over the past century, and is predicted by the United Nations’ climate panel (IPCC) to warm between 1.6-3.8C (2.9-6.8F) during this century, mainly owing to increased CO2. An average of all 38 available standard runs from the IPCC shows that models expect a temperature increase in this decade of about 0.2C.

But this is not at all what we have seen. And this is true for all surface temperature measures, and even more so for both satellite measures. Temperatures in this decade have not been worse than expected; in fact, they have not even been increasing. They have actually decreased by between 0.01 and 0.1C per decade. On the most important indicator of global warming, temperature development, we ought to hear that the data are actually much better than expected.

For the complete article, which first appeared in The Guardian, by the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, click here.