Swiss Snow Makes 50-year Record

Swiss ski resorts are expecting a record season after promising early snowfall, it has been reported. Ski break spots including Davos, St Antonien and Braunwald have experienced exceptionally strong snowfall for so early in the season, swissinfo has reported.Last weekend, some 62 cm of the white stuff fell in the eastern resort of Davos, while St Antonien received 64 cm and Braunwald got 72 cm of snow on Sunday, states national weather service Meteo Swiss.

According to the report, Switzerland has not received such a strong start to its winter ski season since 1952, with the amount of snow being swept to the southern areas by the wind cited as a particularly interesting feature of the weather.

Resorts are said to be anticipating a busy ski season, with many readying themselves for a rush of bookings as reports of the good weather disseminate.The Ski Club of Great Britain described the prospects for Verbier, Saas Fee and Engelberg as "promising" last week.

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UK Scientist predicts 'People will listen, increasingly less over time' to alarmist climate predictions

Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s, if not earlier. By 1973, and the 'global cooling' scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years, exacerbated by the impacts of a nuclear winter. Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million [the 2007 population estimate is 302,824,000] and the average intake of the average American would be a mere 2,400 calories (would that it were!).

In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to 'global warming', and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988), issuing its first assessment report in 1990, which served as the basis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The second assessment report was then issued in 1995, the third in 2001, and, of course, the draft fourth assessment report on Saturday.

In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. We have been serially doomed. So it comes as no surprise to note that the latest IPCC Draft Report's panel yet again declares that action must be taken within a decade or so if we are to save the world from 'global warming'.

This is all so reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's nonsense masterpiece, 'The Hunting of the Snark':

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried

As he landed his crew with care;

Supporting each man on the top of the tide

By a finger entwined in his hair."

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:

That alone should encourage the crew.

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:

What I tell you three times is true."

The IPCC's crew, and their fellow passengers, have been hunting their particular snark for nearly twenty years, and their desperation is getting feverish, worse than that of Carroll's Bellman. In their case: "What I tell you four times is true."

Indeed, one wonders if the IPCC is functioning by J. B. S. Haldane's three great theorems: the Bellman's Theorem ("What I tell you three times is true"); Aunt Jobisca's Theorem ("It's a fact the whole world knows" - from The Pobble Who Had No Toes by Edward Lear); and, Oresme's Theorem ("If you say it often enough or hear it enough you will accept it as truth" - derived from Nicole Oresme (1350), On the Marvels of Nature.

I understand that Oresme invented the graph - how he would have loved the infamous 'hockey stick'). Yet, this particular snark remains elusive, the pobble can't find its toes, and the acorn keeps falling on Chicken Little's head.

After 50 years of terminal decades, the world goes on, economies grow, CO2 rises, and more people become just that little bit better off. As I point out in 'Reality, Rhetoric, and Risk' (November 17), we shall no more land the IPCC's snark than the pobble will find its toes.

People will listen (increasingly less over time), and maybe, for a short period, even believe it to be 'true', but - "It's a fact the whole world knows" - we can't do a blind thing about it (as one senior Labour cabinet member was reported to me to have admitted in an aside at a Conference). Life will go on to hunt for new, different snarks and lost toes. Indeed, we may even be able to modify genetically that poor old pobble.

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Prof. Stott on the unrealism of the new IPCC summary

On the very day that the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issues its latest, and 4th, Draft Report (.pdf), and Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, employs his rhetoric to pressurize states to act on climate change before the Bali talks about the UN climate convention and the Kyoto Protocol, which open on December 3, the hard reality of climate-change economics and politics strikes in the heart of London.

As The Guardian (November 17) reveals, `Climate change department faces 300 million pound cuts': "The measures at Defra [Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] have become necessary, in part, because the department has been overwhelmed by huge bills for a series of disasters, from the foot and mouth outbreak to blunders over the payments of billions of pounds of EU cash to farmers. The ministry's management board was told this week that it had to find an additional 270m popunds from its main budget on top of savings agreed only a month ago. The Guardian has seen a document which reveals ministers are to be presented with a package for 130m of immediate cuts with radical options for another 140m of savings. This is in addition to a 5% year-on-year cuts on administrative costs.

Defra has not fully recovered from the 200m cuts imposed by the Treasury last year after the department mismanaged the biggest reform of agricultural subsidy in a generation. The new cuts are expected to affect all 50 of Defra's agencies,dealing with canals, animal health, waste groups, national parks, forestry, fisheries , sustainable development and environmental protection."

What neither the IPCC, nor Mr. Ban, nor most media commentators seem to grasp is that the precautionary principle works both ways. Which is riskier, trying to follow the climate-change rhetoric of the IPCC and Green groups by warping world economics and politics to deal (impossibly) with climate change, or facing up to the economics and politics of the real world.

Completely changing the world's economic and political basis for something that actually may not happen - and will most certainly not occur exactly as predicted - is for me a much, much riskier proposition, especially when one takes into account the fact that there will be benefits, as well as problems, from climate changes.

Just remember that, if one takes all the models that exist for climate change, not just those of the IPCC, the error bar is for a change of between -2 degrees Celsius to nearly 7 degrees Celsius (a nine degree Celsius error bar in all). Even I think that climate is likely to vary (all the time) within such a range. It tells us nothing. It is a tautology.

Moreover, what Mr. Ban demands just won't happen. Indeed, it can't happen, as the little Defra story encapsulates so perfectly, whatever the IPCC, Mr. Ban, Hillary Clinton, Gordon Brown, and `Dave' Cameron might say. Let's face the basic facts: to achieve cuts that would have any meaningful impact in terms of the IPCC's view would demand four billion people losing their livelihoods, the grounding of all planes, the dry-docking of all ships, the crushing of all cars, and the closing down of all fossil-fuel fired power stations, and all within the next ten years. Now that would be a disaster.

The conclusion is clear: whatever the politicians' rhetoric, reality will ensure that, in practice, we will view the risks quite differently from the IPCC and Mr. Ban. Nevertheless, all sorts of well-meaning to frankly barking-mad attempts will be made to force people into this or that lifestyle, some of which could undermine our capacity to adapt to whatever climate does at any particular time, whether hot, wet, cold, or dry, or all at once. But worse, the ability of the rich world to help the poorer world could be reduced significantly.

In truth, the latest IPCC report says nothing new. It is still the same old tale with just a bit more political pep. But the global response will be the same. Reality will see to that. Yet further, never lose sight of the fact that `The Great Global Warming Story' appeals to some people precisely because it can be employed to intervene into everybody's life, from the poorest rice farmer to the richest entrepreneur. The risk of this is greater, both politically and economically, than any IPCC model-generated projections. After all, we need some social and economic discounting: precisely why should a poorer generation pay for what will still be a richer generation, even if some `global warming' were to occur?

Interestingly, reporters at the BBC are beginning to see that there might be a powerful reality check to the IPCC mantra, witness Richard Black's latest piece (November 17), `Tackling the fossil fuel juggernaut': "One suspects that in the real world it is still liable to get side-swiped by the seductive juggernaut of business-as-usual. In that case, we will have a trackside view if the impacts projected in this seminal IPCC climate treatise come to pass." Reality at the last. Reality, Rhetoric, And Risk

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Sun and global warming: A cosmic connection?

By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News

The article below does give a good airing to the case for a solar influence on terrestrial warming but it of course slants its coverage toward the conventional view. Two rather amusing features are that Lockwood refuses to offer a refutation of Svensmark on the exceedingly flimsy ground that he does not like where Svensmark has posted his paper! If he DID have any answers, he would be keen to offer them. The second amusing thing is that the BBC author says that the acid test will be what the planet does henceforth. Will it continue warming or not? That it has ALREADY stopped warming (since 1998) is conveniently not taken into account

In February 2007, depending on what newspaper you read, you might have seen an article detailing a "controversial new theory" of global warming. The idea was that variations in cosmic rays penetrating the Earth's atmosphere would change the amount of cloud cover, in turn changing our planet's reflectivity, and so the temperature at its surface. This, it was said, could be the reason why temperatures have been seen to be varying so much over the Earth's history, and why they are rising now.

The theory was detailed in a book, The Chilling Stars, written by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark and British science writer Nigel Calder, which appeared on the shelves a week after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had published its landmark report concluding it was more than 90% likely that humankind's emissions of greenhouse gases were warming the planet.

In truth, the theory was not new; Dr Svensmark's team had proposed it a decade earlier, while the idea of a cosmic ray influence on weather dates back to 1959 and US researcher Edward Ney. The bigger question is whether it amounts to a theory of global warming at all.

Over the course of the Earth's history, the main factor driving changes in its climate has been that the amount of energy from the Sun varies, either because of wobbles in the Earth's orbit or because the Sun's power output changes. Most noticeably, it changes with the 11-year solar cycle, first identified in the mid-1800s by astronomers who noticed periodic variations in the number of sunspots. If it varied enough, it could change the Earth's surface temperature markedly. So is it?

"Across the solar cycle, the Sun's energy output varies only by about 0.1%," says Sami Solanki from the Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. "When you look across much longer timescales, you also see changes only of about 0.1%. So just considering directly variations in energy coming from the Sun, this is not enough to explain the climatic changes we have seen and are seeing now."

This is why scientists have been investigating mechanisms which could amplify the changes in solar output, scaling up the 0.1% variation into an effect that could explain the temperature rise of almost half a degree Celsius that we have seen at the Earth's surface in just the last few decades.

One is Joanna Haigh from Imperial College, London, UK. She realised that although the Sun's overall energy output changes by 0.1%, it changes much more in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. "The changes in the UV are much larger, between 1% and 10%," she says. "And that primarily has an impact in the stratosphere (the upper atmosphere) - UV is absorbed by ozone in the stratosphere and also produces ozone, and this warms the air."

Using computer models of climate, Dr Haigh's team showed that warming in the stratosphere could change the way energy is distributed across the troposphere, the lower atmosphere, changing wind and weather patterns. But not by much. "We found it might raise temperatures by a maximum of half to one Celsius in certain regions," she says. "But in terms of an impact on the global average temperature, it's small, maybe about 0.2C." Which is not enough to explain the warming that has occurred since the late 1970s.

Henrik Svensmark and his collaborators at the Danish National Space Center (DNSC) believe the missing link between small solar variations and large temperature changes on Earth are cosmic rays. "I think the Sun is the major driver of climate change," he says, "and the reason I'm saying that is that if you look at historical temperature data and then solar activity and cosmic ray activity, it actually fits very beautifully.

"If CO2 is a very important climate driver then you would expect to see its effect on all timescales; and for example when you look at the last 500 million years, or the last 10,000 years, the correlation between changes in CO2 and climate are very poor."

When hugely energetic galactic cosmic rays - actually particles - crash into the top of the atmosphere, they set in train a sequence of events which leads to the production of ions in the lower atmosphere. The theory is that this encourages the growth of tiny aerosol particles around which water vapour can condense, eventually aiding the formation of clouds.

And the link to the Sun? It is because cosmic rays are partially deflected by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles rushing away from the Sun, and the magnetic field it carries. A weaker solar wind means more cosmic rays penetrating the atmosphere, hence more clouds and a cooler Earth.

The theory makes some intuitive sense because over the last century the Sun has been unusually active - which means fewer cosmic rays, and a warmer climate on Earth. "We reconstructed solar activity going back 11,000 years," relates Sami Solanki. "And across this period, the level of activity we are seeing now is very high - we coined the term 'grand maximum' to describe it. We still have the 11-year modulation on top of the long-term trend, but on average the Sun has been brighter and the cosmic ray flux lower."

There is evidence too that cosmic rays and climate have been intertwined over timescales of millennia in the Earth's past. And the theory received some experimental backing when in October 2006, Henrik Svensmark's team published laboratory research showing that as the concentration of negative ions rose in air, so did the concentration of particles which could eventually become condensation nuclei.

Other scientists, meanwhile, had started putting the idea to the test in the real world. In 1947, British meteorologists began deploying instruments in various sites across the country to measure sunlight. Whether through foresight or luck, they included one feature which was to prove very useful; the capacity to measure the relative amounts of direct and diffuse light. It is the difference between a sunny day, when light streams directly from above, and a cloudy day, when it seems to struggle in from everywhere, and photographers give up and go home.

Giles Harrison from Reading University realised that the UK Met Office's record of hourly readings from its sunlight stations could be used to plot the extent of cloud cover over a period going back more than 50 years; the larger the ratio of diffuse to direct light, the cloudier the skies.

By chance, cosmic rays have been recorded continuously over almost exactly the same period. So Dr Harrison's team compared the two records, looking for a correlation between more intense cosmic rays and more clouds. "We concluded that there is an effect, but that it is small - 'small but significant' was how we described it," he recalls. "It varied UK cloud cover only by about 2%, although we suggested it would have a larger effect on centennial timescales; and it's difficult to assess what effect this would have on global surface temperature." He concludes it would be premature to lay global warming at the door of cosmic rays. Perhaps surprisingly, you will find no references to his work in The Chilling Stars.

In July, Mike Lockwood from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory attempted a definitive answer to the question with what appeared to be a simple method. He simply looked at the changing cosmic ray activity over the last 30 years, and asked whether it could explain the rising temperatures. His conclusion was that it could not. Since about 1985, he found, the cosmic ray count had been increasing, which should have led to a temperature fall if the theory is correct - instead, the Earth has been warming. "This should settle the debate," he told me at the time.

It has not. Last month Dr Svensmark posted a paper on the DNSC website that claimed to be a comprehensive rebuttal. "The argument that Mike Lockwood put forward was that they didn't see any solar signal in the surface temperature data," he says. "And when you look at [temperatures in] the troposphere or the oceans, then you do see a solar signal, it's very clear."

Dr Lockwood disagrees; he says he has re-analysed the issue using atmospheric temperatures, and his previous conclusion stands. And he thinks the Svensmark team has been guilty of poor practice by not publishing their argument in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. "Lots of people have been asking me how I respond to it; but how should I respond to something which is just posted on a research institute's website?" he asks. "This isn't on, because the report title says it is a 'comprehensive rebuttal'; if it were that, then it would be his duty to publish it in a scientific journal and clean up the literature - that's how science filters out what is incorrect, and how it comes to a consensus view as to what is correct." This dispute presumably has some distance to run.

But Mike Lockwood's larger conclusion that current warming has nothing to do with solar changes is backed up by others - notably the IPCC, which concluded earlier this year that since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of the Sun by a factor of about 13 to one.

Even though misguided journalists have sometimes mistaken his work as implying a solar cause to modern-day warming, Sami Solanki agrees with the IPCC verdict. "Since 1970, the cosmic ray flux has not changed markedly while the global temperature has shown a rapid rise," he says. "And that lack of correlation is proof that the Sun doesn't cause the warming we are seeing now."

Even to prove that the link between cosmic rays and cloud cover matters in the real world needs a lot more work, observes Joanna Haigh. "You need to demonstrate a whole long chain of events - that the atmosphere is ionised, then that the ionised particles act to nucleate the condensation of water vapour, then that you form droplets, and then that you get clouds; and you have to show it's important in comparison to other sources of nucleation. "And that hasn't been demonstrated. Proponents of this mechanism have tended to extrapolate their results beyond what is reasonable from the evidence."

And Giles Harrison believes climate sceptics need to apply the same scepticism to the cosmic ray theory as they do to greenhouse warming - particularly those who say there are too many holes in our understanding of how clouds behave in the man-made greenhouse. "There is some double-speak going on, as uncertainties apply to many aspects of clouds," he says. "If clouds have to be understood better to understand greenhouse warming, then, as we have only an emerging understanding of the electrical aspects of aerosols and non-thunderstorm clouds, that is probably also true of any effect of cosmic rays on clouds."

Dr Svensmark agrees it would be wrong for anyone to claim the case has been proved. "If anyone said that there is proof that the Sun or greenhouse gases alone are responsible for the present-day warming, then that would be a wrong statement because we don't really have proofs as such in the natural sciences," he says.

Two events loom on the horizon that might settle the issue once and for all; one shaped by human hands, one entirely natural. At Cern, the giant European physics facility, an experiment called Cloud is being constructed which will research the notion that cosmic rays can stimulate the formation of droplets and clouds. There may be some results within three or four years.

By then, observations suggest that the Sun's output may have started to wane from its "grand maximum". If it does, and if Henrik Svensmark is right, we should then see cosmic rays increase and global temperatures start to fall; if that happens, he can expect to see a Nobel Prize and thousands of red-faced former IPCC members queuing up to hand back the one they have just received.

But if the Sun wanes and temperatures on our planet continue to rise, as the vast majority of scientists in the field believe, the solar-cosmic ray concept of global warming can be laid to eternal rest. And if humankind has done nothing to stem the rise in greenhouse gas emissions by then, it will be even harder to begin the task.

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Australia: Greens to fight Victorian desal plant

Greenies constantly block dam-building and have as a result given most of Australia a water shortage. Governments are now trying to fix that shortage by building desalination plants. But desal is no good either the Greens now say. They clearly WANT us to suffer severe water shortages. I think all known Greenies should have their town water cut off. That might bring them down to earth with a bump. Why let them benefit from what they irresponsibly oppose?. Andrew Bolt goes into the matter further

GREENS leader Bob Brown received a hero's welcome at Kilcunda Beach yesterday as he pledged to do all he could to stop the Victorian Government building a desalination plant. About 300 people turned out to the sixth protest rally in as many months aimed at stopping the $3 billion project. Senator Brown said if the community stuck together there was a good chance the desalination plant would not be built. He described the desalination plant as a monstrosity that wasn't needed, and said that he would take the fight against it to Canberra.

"We determinedly take this into the national Parliament and fight it every step of the way until the only evaporation out of here is those planning for this wrong-headed project," he said. "Politicians who don't listen to the community ultimately suffer the consequences."

Senator Brown said he was more confident heading into Saturday's election than he had been for the past four. The Tasmanian senator, who entered Parliament's Upper House the year John Howard became Prime Minister, said there was a real mood for change across Australia.

Support for the Greens, who could win the balance of power in the Senate, continues to grow, with yesterday's Galaxy poll in the Sunday Herald Sun showing 11 per cent support for the party in marginal seats. "I think the Government is going to lose and that there will be a big move away from the big parties in the Senate," he said. "We are going to have to work with one or other of the major parties if we get the balance of power, and we will do that responsibly. "Leaving either one of them in control of both houses of parliament is not only bad democracy but, everywhere I go, people don't want it."

For the first time, the environment is a crucial election issue across the country with some polls showing 80 per cent of people saying it will affect their vote. Greens policies including drawing up a plan to phase out coal exports, reducing emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, scrapping university fees, forgiving HECS debts and redirecting the $3 billion private health insurance rebates into public health and hospitals.

Senator Brown said Mr Howard was out of touch with the public and his 11 years in office had been plagued with injustice including the treatment of refugees, the war in Iraq and a total disregard for the environment. After yesterday's rally, Senator Brown met Tony and Virginia Eke, whose land will be compulsorily acquired by the State Government to build the desalination plant. The couple have spent the past seven years building their dream of an eco-tourism spa and cottage retreat on the Wonthaggi coastline. "You are the first politician who has come here who is talking from the heart," Mr Eke told Senator Brown.

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