Other voices on climate change

For the full article from Warren Meyer at Climate Skeptic, click here.

For the full New York Times article, click here.

“Scientists involved in NASA’s Ulysses project report that the intensity of the sun’s solar wind is at its lowest point since the beginning of the space age — one more indication that the sun, the biggest source of energy affecting the Earth, is getting quiet. The weaker solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field, but the cause is unknown. Sunspots, which normally fluctuate in 11-year cycles, are at a virtual standstill. In August, the sun created no visible spots. The last time that happened: June 1913.

“The results of the Ulysses spacecraft’s mission, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory project scientist Ed Smith, show that “we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated.”The consequences for Earth are enormous. The lack of increased activity could signal the start of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event that occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century. It leads to extended periods of severe cooling such as what happened during the Little Ice Age.

“It may already be happening. The four major agencies tracking Earth’s temperature, including NASA’s Goddard Institute, report that the Earth cooled 0.7 degree Celsius in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the Earth was in 1930. The climate is changing, but not in the direction Al Gore thinks. As the Earth demonstrably cools under a weakening sun, a 10-state coalition on Thursday held the nation’s first carbon allowance auction to deal with a warming trend that may have ended a decade ago.”

To read the full article from Investor’s Business Daily, click here.

“Iain Stewart, professor of geosciences communication at Plymouth University, introduced last week’s instalment [of the BBC's series on climate] with the words: ‘Global warming - the defining challenge of the twenty-first century.’ The programme examined the arguments made by the two putative ‘sides’ in the global warming debate, to show ‘how [the sceptic’s] positions have changed over time’. But Stewart misconstrued scepticism of the idea that ‘global warming is the defining issue of our time’ with scepticism of climate research. In this story, ‘the scientists’ occupied one camp (situated conveniently on the moral high ground) and the bad-minded, politically and financially motivated sceptics the other. But there was no nuance, no depth and no justice done to the debate in this unsophisticated tale, and it did nothing to help the audience understand the science.”

Ben Pile’s second article on the BBC series on climate appears in Spiked magazine: to read it, click here.

“Dr. Iain Stewart’s new BBC2 series Earth: The Climate Wars promised to be a ‘definitive guide’ to the climate debate. Instead, this week’s (September 17) episode ‘Fightback’, which focused on the sceptics, was as shallow and as hollow as any old commentary. …

“Contrary to Stewart’s claim that the world was united by scientific evidence in the early 1990s, even by 1995, there was still only the ’suggestion’, on the ‘balance of evidence’, that there had been a ‘discernible human influence on global climate’ — and that’s in the Summary for Policymakers document, which has consistently been far more alarmist than the more technical parts of the report. The First Assessment Report, which would have been the basis for the 1992 UNFCCC had concluded that ‘The unequivocal detection of the enhanced

greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more’, making it clear that in the early 1990s, there could have been no consensus as Stewart describes it.

For the full article from the Climate Resistance website, click here.

“Yes, some of it. But its a little more complicated than the global warming community lets on. First, note the last 100 years of the hockey stick. The big upwards spike begins in 1900, long before any large man-made concentrations of CO2 were put into the atmosphere. In fact, even those most fanatical about assigning maximum blame for climate change to man don’t blame man-made effects for most of the first half of the 20th century temperature spike.

“Which begs the question, what caused the 1900-1940 spike of about 1/2 a degree? Answer: Nobody really knows. Which begs the follow-on question: If we don’t know what caused the 1900-1940 run-up, how do we know that this same force is not responsible for some of the run-up since 1950? Answer: We don’t.

“As I will explain below, climate scientists trying to validate their models have reasons for wanting the post-1950 temperature rise to be all man-made. But just because they assume it to be due to man-made rises in atmospheric CO2 concentrations does not make it so — correlation does not equal causation.”

For the full article, click here.

A comprehensive list by climatologist and solar physicist Douglas Hoyt of the problems with anthropogenic global warming theory that the consensus would prefer to ignore. Click here.

For Hoyt’s scorecard of how well the IPCC and other climate models have done in matching actual real-world observations, click here. Preview: Correct, 1, Incorrect 27, Tie 4.

This online book by Warren Meyer of the Global Warming Cause blogsite is a useful overall look at the unwarranted alarmism over global warming. To get to the download site, click here.

“AN EXTRAORDINARY SERIES of postings at www.climateaudit.org, the deservedl y well-
trafficked website of the courageous and tenacious Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, is a
remarkable indictment of the corruption and cynicism that is rife among the alarmist climate
scientists favored by the UN’s discredited climate panel, the IPCC.

“In laymen’s language, the present paper respectfully summarizes Dr. McIntyre’s account of the
systematically dishonest manner in which the “hockey-stick” graph falsely showing that today’s
temperatures are warmer than those that prevailed during the medieval climate optimum was fabricated
in 1998/9, adopted as the poster-child of climate panic by the IPCC in its 2001 climate assessment, and
then retained in its 2007 assessment report despite having been demolished in the scientific literature.
It is a long tale, but well worth following. No one who reads it will ever again trust the IPCC or the
“scientists” and environmental extremists who author its climate assessments.”

To read Christopher Monckton’s paper in PDF format, click here.

“The first half of this year was the coolest in at least five years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). And the global warming that has taken place during the past 30 years is over, says geologist Don J. Easterbrook, a professor emeritus at Western Washington University.

“Easterbrook, who has written eight books and 150 journal publications, predicts that temperatures will cool between 2065 and 2100 and that global temperatures at the end of the century will be less than 1 degree cooler than now. This is in contrast to other theories saying that temperatures will warm by as much as 10 degrees by 2100.”

For the full text of this article by Phil Brennan from Newsmax.com, click here.

The figure most often used for the human contribution to CO2 each year is three to five per cent. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says it’s even smaller: a mere two per cent, although it still considers this a problem. From the JPL website:

“Natural sources of CO2 emit approximately 300 Gigatons* of CO 2 each year. Human activities are responsible for about 6 Gigatons, or a mere 2% of that total. Measurements from a global network of surface stations over the past 40 years indicate an average annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere of about 1%.”

* A Gigaton is a billion metric tonnes.