Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Nobody listens to the real climate change experts
The minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers, says Christopher Booker.
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 6:52PM GMT 14 Mar 2009

Cold comfort: If the present trend continues, the world will be 1.1C cooler in 2100

Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.

The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".

Climate change leading the world into catastrophe, claims Lord SternWhat worries them are all the signs that when the world's politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.

Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be "much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report". Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, "much more than previously predicted". The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting "much faster than predicted". The number of people dying from heat could be "twice as many as previously predicted".

None of the government-funded scientists making these claims were particularly distinguished, but they succeeded in their object, as the media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.

What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by the Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.

Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. For two days in New York we heard distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tear apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.

Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google "Heartland" and "Quadrant").

Yet the terrifying thing, as President Klaus observed in his magisterial opening address, is that there is no dialogue on these issues. When recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he found the minds of his fellow world leaders firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers. As I said in my own modest contribution to the conference, there seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore. The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.

More here. . . .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4990704/Nobody-listens-to-the-real-climate-change-experts.html

The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".

No, he meant environmentalism - said such frequently and in several languages (including English).

Besides that: I personally practise environmentalism, neither as a religion but not at all as science. Just practically.

I think it is obvious what the term, "environmentalism" denotes, Walter, regardless of what you may practice. Environmentalism, as it is popularly understood nowadays, is a political movement. The politics of the movement utilizes a dose of science, carefully massaged to fit the agenda, but it is largely political. And it clearly incorporates a religious fervor, which worships the creation, over the creator.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport#report

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Dr. Edward J. Wegman, a professor at the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University and chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, played a prominent role in questioning the statistical validity of Michael Mann's UN promoted "Hockey Stick" temperature graph of last 1000 years of Northern Hemisphere temperatures. Wegman and a panel of statisticians conducted a third-party review the "Hockey Stick." According to a November 28, 2006 article in Canada's National Post, Wegman found that Mann made a basic error that "may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimate studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians." Wegman found that Mann's "small group of climate scientists were working on their own, largely in isolation, and without the academic scrutiny needed to ferret out false assumptions." "I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn't matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science," Wegman said. (LINK) Wegman also noted how the peer-review process can be skewed by a cozy group of scientists within a specific field. "Of course, if a given discipline area is small and the authors in the area are tightly coupled, then this process is likely to turn up very sympathetic referees. These referees may have coauthored other papers with a given author. They may believe they know that author's other writings well enough that errors can continue to propagate and indeed be reinforced," Wegman wrote in his report to the U.S. Congress.

Which means that it is anything anybody decides it is.

Some of them put "green" petrol in their car and only fly on "green" airlines.

Energy Update
53% Say U.S. Should Build More Nuclear Power Plants
Monday, March 16, 2009

Fifty-three percent (53%) of U.S. voters believe more nuclear power plants should be built in the United States, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Thirty percent (30%) are opposed to building new plants, and 18% are not sure.

While 72% of Republicans favor building more nuclear plants, Democrats are much more conflicted on the question: 39% support new plant construction, but 43% are opposed. Among voters not affiliated with either party, a majority (51%) is in favor of new nuclear plants, but 27% disagree.

Sixty-five percent (65%) of voters say finding new sources of energy is more important that reducing the amount of energy Americans now consume. Thirty percent (30%) say energy conservation is more important.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/environment/energy_update

UW-Milwaukee Study Could Realign Climate Change Theory
Scientists Claim Earth Is Undergoing Natural Climate Shift
POSTED: 3:18 pm CDT March 15, 2009
UPDATED: 11:50 am CDT March 16, 2009


MILWAUKEE -- The bitter cold and record snowfalls from two wicked winters are causing people to ask if the global climate is truly changing.

The climate is known to be variable and, in recent years, more scientific thought and research has been focused on the global temperature and how humanity might be influencing it.

However, a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee could turn the climate change world upside down.

Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.

"Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate," researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.

Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other.

Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.

"In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century," Tsonis said. "The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001."

The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000.

Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?

"But if we don't understand what is natural, I don't think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand -- first the natural variability of climate -- and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural," Tsonis said.

Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

http://www.wisn.com/weather/18935841/detail.html

Sixty-five percent (65%) of voters say finding new sources of energy is more important that reducing the amount of energy Americans now consume.