this is assuming global warming is still happening? we dont know.
Global Warming? New Data Shows Ice Is Back
Are
the world's ice caps melting because of climate change, or are the
reports just a lot of scare mongering by the advocates of the global
warming theory?
Scare mongering appears
to be the case, according to reports from the U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that reveal that almost all the
allegedly “lost” ice has come back. A NOAA report shows that ice levels
which had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just
1.5 million square miles in October, are almost back to their original
levels.
Moreover,
a Feb. 18 report in the London Daily Express showed that there is
nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than usual, challenging the
global warming crusaders and buttressing arguments of skeptics who deny
that the world is undergoing global warming.
The
Daily express recalls the photograph of polar bears clinging on to a
melting iceberg which has been widely hailed as proof of the need to
fight climate change and has been used by former Vice President Al Gore
during his "Inconvenient Truth" lectures about mankind’s alleged impact
on the global climate.
Gore fails to
mention that the photograph was taken in the month of August when
melting is normal. Or that the polar bear population has soared in
recent years.
As winter roars in across the Northern Hemisphere, Mother Nature seems to have joined the ranks of the skeptics.
As
the Express notes, scientists are saying the northern Hemisphere has
endured its coldest winter in decades, adding that snow cover across
the area is at its greatest since 1966. The newspaper cites the one
exception — Western Europe, which had, until the weekend when
temperatures plunged to as low as -10 C in some places, been basking in
unseasonably warm weather.
Around the
world, vast areas have been buried under some of the heaviest snowfalls
in decades. Central and southern China, the United States, and Canada
were hit hard by snowstorms. In China, snowfall was so heavy that over
100,000 houses collapsed under the weight of snow.
Jerusalem,
Damascus, Amman, and northern Saudi Arabia report the heaviest falls in
years and below-zero temperatures. In Afghanistan, snow and freezing
weather killed 120 people. Even Baghdad had a snowstorm, the first in
the memory of most residents.
Editor's Note: Special: Gore Went Nuts When He Read This
AFP
news reports icy temperatures have just swept through south China,
stranding 180,000 people and leading to widespread power cuts just as
the area was recovering from the worst weather in 50 years, the
government said Monday. The latest cold snap has taken a severe toll in
usually temperate Yunnan province, which has been struck by heavy
snowfalls since Thursday, a government official from the provincial
disaster relief office told AFP.
Twelve people have died there, state Xinhua news agency reported, and four remained missing as of Saturday.
An
ongoing record-long spell of cold weather in Vietnam's northern region,
which started on Jan. 14, has killed nearly 60,000 cattle, mainly bull
and buffalo calves, local press reported Monday. By Feb. 17, the spell
had killed a total of 59,962 cattle in the region, including 7,349 in
the Ha Giang province, 6,400 in Lao Cai, and 5,571 in Bac Can province,
said Hoang Kim Giao, director of the Animal Husbandry Department under
the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, according
to the Pioneer newspaper.
In Britain
the temperatures plunged to -10 C in central England, according to the
Express, which reports that experts say that February could end up as
one of the coldest in Britain in the past 10 years with the freezing
night-time conditions expected to stay around a frigid -8 C until at
least the middle of the week. And the BBC reports that a bus company's
efforts to cut global warming emissions have led to services being
disrupted by cold weather.
Meanwhile
Athens News reports that a raging snow storm that blanketed most of
Greece over the weekend and continued into the early morning hours on
Monday, plunging the country into sub-zero temperatures. The agency
reported that public transport buses were at a standstill on Monday in
the wider Athens area, while ships remained in ports, public services
remained closed, and schools and courthouses in the more
severely-stricken prefectures were also closed.
Scores
of villages, mainly on the island of Crete, and in the prefectures of
Evia, Argolida, Arcadia, Lakonia, Viotia, and the Cyclades islands were
snowed in.
More than 100 villages were
snowed-in on the island of Crete and temperatures in Athens dropped to
-6 C before dawn, while the coldest temperatures were recorded in
Kozani, Grevena, Kastoria and Florina, where they plunged to -12 C.
If global warming gets any worse we'll all freeze to death.
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
'The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 and every year since 2001'. Plus read
Mark Lynas's response
Global
warming stopped? Surely not. What heresy is this? Haven’t we been told
that the science of global warming is settled beyond doubt and that all
that’s left to the so-called sceptics is the odd errant glacier that
refuses to melt?
Aren’t we told that if we don’t act now rising temperatures will
render most of the surface of the Earth uninhabitable within our
lifetimes? But as we digest these apocalyptic comments, read the recent
IPCC’s Synthesis report that says climate change could become
irreversible. Witness the drama at Bali as news emerges that something
is not quite right in the global warming camp.
With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global
temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 – there has been
no warming over the 12 months.
But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.
The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the
same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has,
temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are
not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory
behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is
happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend
hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.
In principle the greenhouse effect is simple. Gases like carbon
dioxide present in the atmosphere absorb outgoing infrared radiation
from the earth’s surface causing some heat to be retained.
Consequently an increase in the atmospheric concentration of
greenhouse gases from human activities such as burning fossil fuels
leads to an enhanced greenhouse effect. Thus the world warms, the
climate changes and we are in trouble.
The evidence for this hypothesis is the well established physics of
the greenhouse effect itself and the correlation of increasing global
carbon dioxide concentration with rising global temperature. Carbon
dioxide is clearly increasing in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s a
straight line upward. It is currently about 390 parts per million.
Pre-industrial levels were about 285 ppm. Since 1960 when accurate
annual measurements became more reliable it has increased steadily from
about 315 ppm. If the greenhouse effect is working as we think then the
Earth’s temperature will rise as the carbon dioxide levels increase.
But here it starts getting messy and, perhaps, a little inconvenient
for some. Looking at the global temperatures as used by the US National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK’s Met Office and the
IPCC (and indeed Al Gore) it’s apparent that there has been a sharp
rise since about 1980.
The period 1980-98 was one of rapid warming – a temperature increase
of about 0.5 degrees C (CO2 rose from 340ppm to 370ppm). But since then
the global temperature has been flat (whilst the CO2 has relentlessly
risen from 370ppm to 380ppm). This means that the global temperature
today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid
increase continued.
For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has
stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an
observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer
than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the
northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those
elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as
such has ceased.
The explanation for the standstill has been attributed to aerosols
in the atmosphere produced as a by-product of greenhouse gas emission
and volcanic activity. They would have the effect of reflecting some of
the incidental sunlight into space thereby reducing the greenhouse
effect. Such an explanation was proposed to account for the global
cooling observed between 1940 and 1978.
But things cannot be that simple. The fact that the global
temperature has remained unchanged for a decade requires that the
quantity of reflecting aerosols dumped put in our atmosphere must be
increasing year on year at precisely the exact rate needed to offset
the accumulating carbon dioxide that wants to drive the temperature
higher. This precise balance seems highly unlikely. Other explanations
have been proposed such as the ocean cooling effect of the Interdecadal
Pacific Oscillation or the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
But they are also difficult to adjust so that they exactly
compensate for the increasing upward temperature drag of rising CO2. So
we are led to the conclusion that either the hypothesis of carbon
dioxide induced global warming holds but its effects are being modified
in what seems to be an improbable though not impossible way, or, and
this really is heresy according to some, the working hypothesis does
not stand the test of data.
It was a pity that the delegates at Bali didn’t discuss this or that
the recent IPCC Synthesis report did not look in more detail at this
recent warming standstill. Had it not occurred, or if the flatlining of
temperature had occurred just five years earlier we would have no talk
of global warming and perhaps, as happened in the 1970’s, we would fear
a new Ice Age! Scientists and politicians talk of future projected
temperature increases. But if the world has stopped warming what use
these projections then?
Some media commentators say that the science of global warming is
now beyond doubt and those who advocate alternative approaches or
indeed modifications to the carbon dioxide greenhouse warming effect
had lost the scientific argument. Not so.
Certainly the working hypothesis of CO2 induced global warming is a
good one that stands on good physical principles but let us not pretend
our understanding extends too far or that the working hypothesis is a
sufficient explanation for what is going on.
I have heard it said, by scientists, journalists and politicians,
that the time for argument is over and that further scientific debate
only causes delay in action. But the wish to know exactly what is going
on is independent of politics and scientists must never bend their
desire for knowledge to any political cause, however noble.
The science is fascinating, the ramifications profound, but we are
fools if we think we have a sufficient understanding of such a
complicated system as the Earth’s atmosphere’s interaction with
sunlight to decide. We know far less than many think we do or would
like you to think we do. We must explain why global warming has
stopped.
David Whitehosue was BBC Science Correspondent 1988–1998, Science
Editor BBC News Online 1998–2006 and the 2004 European Internet
Journalist of the Year. He has a doctorate in astrophysics and is the
author of
The Sun: A Biography (John Wiley, 2005).] His website is www.davidwhitehouse.com
There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998
By Bob Carter
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/04/2006
NO VIEW
For
many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large
and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem
is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political
fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature
records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia,
that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not
increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate
that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you
did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of
temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station
and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere.
In response to these facts, a global
warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change
over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will
assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred
between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming.
Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a
period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to
the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling
occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human
emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.
advertisement
Sniffer Code for Flash version=80
Does something not strike you as
odd here? That industrial carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of
earth's recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn't seem at all
odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long
appreciated - ever since the early 1990s, when the global warming
bandwagon first started to roll behind the gravy train of the UN
Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that such
short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin. Yet the
public appears to be largely convinced otherwise. How is this possible?
Since
the early 1990s, the columns of many leading newspapers and magazines,
worldwide, have carried an increasing stream of alarmist letters and
articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Each such
alarmist article is larded with words such as "if", "might", "could",
"probably", "perhaps", "expected", "projected" or "modelled" - and many
involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and
principles, that they are akin to nonsense.
The
problem here is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of
the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on
the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike. Governments generally
choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent
scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested
science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No
matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct
science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely
reported.
Marketed under the imprimatur of the
IPCC, the bladder-trembling and now infamous hockey-stick diagram that
shows accelerating warming during the 20th century - a statistical
construct by scientist Michael Mann and co-workers from mostly tree
ring records - has been a seminal image of the climate scaremongering
campaign. Thanks to the work of a Canadian statistician, Stephen
McIntyre, and others, this graph is now known to be deeply flawed.
There
are other reasons, too, why the public hears so little in detail from
those scientists who approach climate change issues rationally, the
so-called climate sceptics. Most are to do with intimidation against
speaking out, which operates intensely on several parallel fronts.
First,
most government scientists are gagged from making public comment on
contentious issues, their employing organisations instead making use of
public relations experts to craft carefully tailored, frisbee-science
press releases. Second, scientists are under intense pressure to
conform with the prevailing paradigm of climate alarmism if they wish
to receive funding for their research. Third, members of the
Establishment have spoken declamatory words on the issue, and the
kingdom's subjects are expected to listen.
On
the alarmist campaign trail, the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir
David King, is thus reported as saying that global warming is so bad
that Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by
the end of this century. Warming devotee and former Chairman of Shell,
Lord [Ron] Oxburgh, reportedly agrees with another rash statement of
King's, that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism. And
goodly Archbishop Rowan Williams, who self-evidently understands little
about the science, has warned of "millions, billions" of deaths as a
result of global warming and threatened Mr Blair with the wrath of the
climate God unless he acts. By betraying the public's trust in their
positions of influence, so do the great and good become the small and
silly.
Two simple graphs provide needed context,
and exemplify the dynamic, fluctuating nature of climate change. The
first is a temperature curve for the last six million years, which
shows a three-million year period when it was several degrees warmer
than today, followed by a three-million year cooling trend which was
accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of the pervasive, higher
frequency, cold and warm climate cycles. During the last three such
warm (interglacial) periods, temperatures at high latitudes were as
much as 5 degrees warmer than today's. The second graph shows the
average global temperature over the last eight years, which has proved
to be a period of stasis.
The essence of the
issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in
predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and
rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We
are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last
10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than
90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder,
and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate
record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and
will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th
century phase of gentle warming.
The British
Government urgently needs to recast the sources from which it draws its
climate advice. The shrill alarmism of its public advisers, and the
often eco-fundamentalist policy initiatives that bubble up from the
depths of the Civil Service, have all long since been detached from
science reality. Intern-ationally, the IPCC is a deeply flawed
organisation, as acknowledged in a recent House of Lords report, and
the Kyoto Protocol has proved a costly flop. Clearly, the wrong horses
have been backed.
As mooted recently by Tony
Blair, perhaps the time has come for Britain to join instead the new
Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6), whose
six member countries are committed to the development of new
technologies to improve environmental outcomes. There, at least, some
real solutions are likely to emerge for improving energy efficiency and
reducing pollution.
Informal discussions have
already begun about a new AP6 audit body, designed to vet rigorously
the science advice that the Partnership receives, including from the
IPCC. Can Britain afford not to be there?
There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998
By Bob Carter
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/04/2006
NO VIEW
For
many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large
and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem
is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political
fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature
records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia,
that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not
increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate
that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you
did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of
temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station
and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere.
In response to these facts, a global
warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change
over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will
assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred
between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming.
Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a
period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to
the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling
occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human
emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.
advertisement
Sniffer Code for Flash version=80
Does something not strike you as
odd here? That industrial carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of
earth's recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn't seem at all
odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long
appreciated - ever since the early 1990s, when the global warming
bandwagon first started to roll behind the gravy train of the UN
Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that such
short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin. Yet the
public appears to be largely convinced otherwise. How is this possible?
Since
the early 1990s, the columns of many leading newspapers and magazines,
worldwide, have carried an increasing stream of alarmist letters and
articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Each such
alarmist article is larded with words such as "if", "might", "could",
"probably", "perhaps", "expected", "projected" or "modelled" - and many
involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and
principles, that they are akin to nonsense.
The
problem here is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of
the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on
the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike. Governments generally
choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent
scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested
science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No
matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct
science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely
reported.
Marketed under the imprimatur of the
IPCC, the bladder-trembling and now infamous hockey-stick diagram that
shows accelerating warming during the 20th century - a statistical
construct by scientist Michael Mann and co-workers from mostly tree
ring records - has been a seminal image of the climate scaremongering
campaign. Thanks to the work of a Canadian statistician, Stephen
McIntyre, and others, this graph is now known to be deeply flawed.
There
are other reasons, too, why the public hears so little in detail from
those scientists who approach climate change issues rationally, the
so-called climate sceptics. Most are to do with intimidation against
speaking out, which operates intensely on several parallel fronts.
First,
most government scientists are gagged from making public comment on
contentious issues, their employing organisations instead making use of
public relations experts to craft carefully tailored, frisbee-science
press releases. Second, scientists are under intense pressure to
conform with the prevailing paradigm of climate alarmism if they wish
to receive funding for their research. Third, members of the
Establishment have spoken declamatory words on the issue, and the
kingdom's subjects are expected to listen.
On
the alarmist campaign trail, the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir
David King, is thus reported as saying that global warming is so bad
that Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by
the end of this century. Warming devotee and former Chairman of Shell,
Lord [Ron] Oxburgh, reportedly agrees with another rash statement of
King's, that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism. And
goodly Archbishop Rowan Williams, who self-evidently understands little
about the science, has warned of "millions, billions" of deaths as a
result of global warming and threatened Mr Blair with the wrath of the
climate God unless he acts. By betraying the public's trust in their
positions of influence, so do the great and good become the small and
silly.
Two simple graphs provide needed context,
and exemplify the dynamic, fluctuating nature of climate change. The
first is a temperature curve for the last six million years, which
shows a three-million year period when it was several degrees warmer
than today, followed by a three-million year cooling trend which was
accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of the pervasive, higher
frequency, cold and warm climate cycles. During the last three such
warm (interglacial) periods, temperatures at high latitudes were as
much as 5 degrees warmer than today's. The second graph shows the
average global temperature over the last eight years, which has proved
to be a period of stasis.
The essence of the
issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in
predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and
rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We
are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last
10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than
90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder,
and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate
record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and
will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th
century phase of gentle warming.
The British
Government urgently needs to recast the sources from which it draws its
climate advice. The shrill alarmism of its public advisers, and the
often eco-fundamentalist policy initiatives that bubble up from the
depths of the Civil Service, have all long since been detached from
science reality. Intern-ationally, the IPCC is a deeply flawed
organisation, as acknowledged in a recent House of Lords report, and
the Kyoto Protocol has proved a costly flop. Clearly, the wrong horses
have been backed.
As mooted recently by Tony
Blair, perhaps the time has come for Britain to join instead the new
Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6), whose
six member countries are committed to the development of new
technologies to improve environmental outcomes. There, at least, some
real solutions are likely to emerge for improving energy efficiency and
reducing pollution.
Informal discussions have
already begun about a new AP6 audit body, designed to vet rigorously
the science advice that the Partnership receives, including from the
IPCC. Can Britain afford not to be there?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml