Greenies and the media love to attribute extreme temperatures to global warming and say that global warming is steadily getting worse. But when have extreme temperatures mostly occurred? Recently? The graph above shows U.S. extreme temperatures as far back as records stretch. I think it speaks for itself. Temperatures were in fact unusually high in the depressed 1930s! See Hall of Record for the details.
Mon Dieu! Le Hornet! Le Global Warming!
Post lifted from Cheat-seeking Missiles
Asian hornets are spreading through Europe and have already killed off more than half of France's honeybees, which reportedly waved tiny white flags before succumbing to the new Yellow Peril.
The hornets arrived in a shipment of ceramic pots from China so we could blame globalization -- but how passe is that? No, let's pin it on global warming instead!
It's true -- the pinning part at least. The latest manefestation of Warmie hysterics is the Great Asian Hornet Invasion, so we're adding "habitat change" to "climate change" in the global vernacular. Here's the explain-o from the UK Telegraph:
"There's no doubt that these hornets are heading north and will probably find their way to Britain at some point," said Stuart Hine, manager of the Insect Information Service at London's Natural History Museum.
"Climate change certainly means they can cope with European summers. However, they would still have difficulty coping with our winter frosts."
It's bunk, of course. Europe's summers may be warmer than a few years ago (disputable), but they're still 10 degrees F colder than Beijing's, with mean August temps of 67 degrees in Paris and 77 degrees in Beijing. Relative to climate change increases in the hundreths of degrees, 10 degrees F is positively cataclysmic.
In the winter, Beijing is colder, 31 degrees mean to 40 degrees, so the idea that the hornets will have trouble surviving the European winters is climatological poppycock, as is so much of Warmie hysterics.
The climate differences between Beijing and Paris are naturally much, much greater than any changes brought by climate change, so let's attribute this to survivability, not SUVs. Hornets have survived the millenia through global cold spells and global hot spells more severe than what we're experiencing today ... but how many newspapers will that sell?
Inconvenient Truths: Gore's science fiction on global warming
This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.
The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland's 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.
Where's the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker's Summary from the United Nations' much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore's film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.
Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn't changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC's methane emissions scenarios as "quite unlikely."
Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.'s new projection is about 30-percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001. "The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993," according to the IPCC, "but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future."
According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.
"Was" is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland's ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed.
Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any support for Gore's hypothesis. Instead, there's an unrefereed editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal Climate Change - edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that scientists had to choose "the right balance between being effective and honest" about global warming - and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.
These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to "do" something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the real clock must be down to eight years!
It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about various "solutions" for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That's too small to measure, because the earth's temperature varies by more than that from year to year.
The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto - i.e., less than nothing - for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today).
Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it's well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob.
And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below present levels - resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than Kyoto allows.
And there's other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get there if we can't even do Kyoto?
When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it's not just Gore's movie that's fiction. It's the rhetoric of the Congress and the chief executive, too.
Source
COSMIC RAYS AND CONCERNS ABOUT MODELLING
Last month the National Environment Research Council invited those sceptical of the science underpinning man's effect on the climate to challenge NERC's panel of experts in a web-based Climate Change Challenge. Alan Thorpe, NERC's chief executive, told contributors: "We are confident about the greenhouse effect. We are confident that warming is going on. We are confident that human activity is adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The onus is now on those who deny this to say why that additional greenhouse effect is not responsible for warming the planet."
Although the perception is often of a polarised debate within the scientific community between a majority who endorse the IPCC viewpoint and a minority who attribute change to natural factors, this oversimplifies a discussion with many different facets and a diversity of views. Some scientists do believe that natural factors can explain climate change. In the book The chilling stars, to be published next month, Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder, the former editor of New Scientist, will point the finger at cosmic rays. Calder, writing in The Sunday Times last weekend, said: "More cosmic rays [equals] more clouds. The sun's magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world... We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle the book 'A new theory of climate change'."
Climate scientist Roger Pielke Snr of the University of Colorado, Boulder believes the IPCC and policy-makers generally are too focused on CO2 emissions. "Humans are significantly altering the global climate but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide," says Pielke, a former co-chief editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Science, on his Climate Science weblog.
He praises the analysis in the US National Research Council's 2005 report Radiative Forcing of Climate Change, which concluded that changes in land-use and industry emissions (aerosols) have much larger regional climate impacts than revealed in the way the IPCC calculates radiative forcing. Pielke says the spatial concentration of aerosol emissions and land-use changes means that they present a greater threat of bringing about 'threshold' changes to the climate system than rising global CO2 concentrations. "As a simple example of this, we find a greater impact of sunlight on a piece of paper when we focus it with a lens," he told LTT.
He says the emphasis on cutting CO2 to control temperature is "scientifically flawed", estimating that man's CO2 emissions have accounted for about 30% of warming up to the present - substantially lower than the IPCC estimates. Pielke (who is a co-author of the book Human impacts on weather and climate, the second edition of which is to be published by Cambridge University Press this month) also disputes many of the observational records that underpin the IPCC analysis, such as global surface land surface temperature, glacier retreat and ocean temperature. "The reported 'warming' from the Hadley Centre/University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit data [the source of the IPCC's 0.7C warming estimate] has a warm bias of significant value (certainly tenths of a degree) in its construction," he says.
On glacier evidence he says recent peer reviewed research shows that "the general message that glaciers are receding almost everywhere is clearly not accurate when the data is evaluated in detail".
Climate physicist Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US disagrees vehemently with alarming global warming predictions. Lindzen, who was a lead author for the IPCC's third assessment report, says there is broad agreement that the world warmed in the 20th century, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that man has been responsible for recent increases in CO2. But he says the temperature change of a few tenths of a degree recorded in the late 20th century is so small that it could be explained by nothing more than "natural, internal, unforced variability".
Lindzen says climate models vastly overestimate temperature changes resulting from increases in CO2. All other things being equal, Lindzen says a doubling of CO2 should result in a global mean warming of just 1C. "Alarming predictions all require that water vapour and clouds act so as to greatly amplify the impact of CO2," he (and fellow critics) say in a recent critique of the Stern Review published in World Economics. "But it is freely acknowledged, including by the IPCC, that water vapour and especially clouds are poorly modelled, while the underlying physics for determining their behaviour is missing or even unknown."
Pielke believes many scientists, policy-makers, journalists and other commentators place too much confidence in climate model results. "The overselling of regional and global models as robust projections rather than as sensitivity simulations, adds to the existing politicisation of climate science and provides justifiable criticism of the [IPCC] assessment reports," he says.
Source
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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