HURRICANES HAVE NOT INCREASED IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC

By William M. Briggs, Statistician

My paper on this subject will finally appear in the Journal of Climate soon. You can see it's status (temporarily, anyway) at this link. You can download the paper here.

The gist is that the evidence shows that hurricanes have not increased in either number of intensity in the North Atlantic. I've only used data through 2006; which is to say, not this year's. But if I were to, then, since the number and intensity of storms this past year were nothing special, the evidence would be even more conclusive that not much is going on.

Now, I did find that there were some changes in certain characteristics of North Atlantic storms. There is some evidence that the probability that strong (what are called Category 4 or 5) storms evolving from ordinary hurricanes has increased. But, there has also been an increase in storms not reaching hurricane level. Which is to say, that the only clear signal is that there has been an increase in the variability of intensity of tropical cyclones.

Of course, I do not say why this increase has happened. Well, I suggest why it has: changes in instrumentation quality and frequency since the late 1960s (which is when satellites first went up, allowing us to finally observe better). This is in line with what others, like Chris Landsea at the Hurricane Center, have found.

I also have done the same set of models of global hurricanes. I found the same thing. I'm scheduled to give a talk on this at the American Meteorological Society's annual meeting in January 2008 in New Orleans. That paper is here

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THE PRICE OF CLIMATE HYSTERIA: GREENFLATION

We coined the term Greenflation back in May 2006 and revisited it at the beginning of this year. Now global recession is beginning to bite and the threat is serious, which makes the universal conspiracy of silence even more egregious. Newspapers and television commentators talk about inflation as though it were a mystery, when it is merely the outcome of deliberate policy. Green taxes filter through the economy, but in the end they are always paid by the ordinary punter. Green prohibitions, such as the prevention of development of new, realistic energy sources, will also end up being paid for by the masses, some with their lives (in the inevitable power cuts).

Since the establishment are taking care not to explain it to them, people do not understand that remote policy decisions, such as building vast arrays of useless, heavily-subsidised wind turbines, always end up with a raid on their own pockets and the risk of worse. The subsidies for biofuels have led inevitably to a substantial rise in food prices, but people are too ill-informed to see the connection, because they are not being told by the media.

Today we simultaneously have the other negative force of recession . This was largely caused by governments ignoring the excesses going on in the banking world. In Britain it partly took the form of failing to protect the mutual societies and letting the carpet baggers persuade their short-sighted members to turn them into third rate banks, such a Northern Rock, thus selling their birthright for a mess of pottage. One of Gordon Brown's characteristic changes was to make the bank regulation system so complicated that in the end it was nobody's responsibility.

The Bank of England has actually acted outside its Brownian remit, which is solely to deal with inflation, in joining the world effort to solve the "liquidity crisis" by reducing interest rates, while the spectre of inflation haunts it in the background. But this inflation is no accident. It has been deliberately engineered by Green politicians and bureaucrats in undemocratic organisations like the EU and the UN. Only in the last week we have heard calls in Bali for a wholly meaningless world carbon tax, while Brown crept shamefully into the ceremonial chamber, when all but he had left, to sign away Britain's last vestiges of control over its own destiny, making its parliament even more of an irrelevant superfluity than it was before.

Economic collapse is the sole end and purpose of Green policy. They are determined to drag the rest of us kicking and screaming into the new Stone Age and, thanks to their media cronies, we are letting them do it.

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UN issues warning, but averts eyes from its own role

Post below lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links

The United Nations is issuing a warning about the world's food stocks dwindling, highlighting the possible future consequences of the future global warming it believes is coming. It mentions the problems created by high oil prices for aid agencies shipping emergency food supplies.

But there is one factor that right now is raising food prices and diminishing the supply. A factor which grows out of the UN's own efforts. A factor which is conspicuously downplayed in this report written by Elisabeth Rosenthal in the International Herald-Tribune, published by the New York Times Company:

Biofuels. The only mention is an entirely subsidiary and indirect factor, as noted here:

Diouf blamed a confluence of recent supply and demand factors for the crisis, and he predicted that those factors were here to stay. On the supply side, these include the early effects of global warming, which has decreased crop yields in some crucial places, and a shift away from farming for human consumption toward crops for biofuels and cattle feed. Demand for grain is increasing with the world population, and more is diverted to feed cattle as the population of upwardly mobile meat-eaters grows.

Got that? Global warming has decreased crop yields in some places (high temperatures are actually generaly a positive development for crops and no doubt in other some places yields are up). Biofuels are lumped together with cattle feed as a demand factor, and mentioned only in passing. Compare the extra verbiage for cattle feed with the treatment of biofuels. One word, and then nothing more.

Taking corn and other food crops and converting them into ethanol decreases the food supply, raising prices on the remaining supplies destined for human consumption. Every corn farmer in the Middle West knows this, for they had a very, very good year thanks to ethanol subsidies and the rush to proclaim companies are "doing something" about global warming. Corn prices, followed with a lag by beef and portk prices, are up over recent years' levels.

The hypothetical dangers of global warming, hyped so vigorously by the UN, are creating conditions that actually damage the world's billions of poor people for whom an adequate diet is a matter of affordability.

The food supply is acting as a coal miner's canary, warning us of even bigger privations ahead. Wait until industries have to shut down and electricity multiplies in price, should the restrictions necessary to meet the goal of a radical reduction on carbon dioxide emissions ever be enforced. For rich countries, it will be a matter of unemployment, slowed or negative economic growth, and cutbacks.

But for the poor, which the UN ostensibly cares about, it will be malnutrition or starvation, disease, and mass deaths, should the Warmists succeed in enforcing their dirigiste aims.





Year of global cooling

By David Deming (David Deming is a geophysicist, an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis, and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma)

Al Gore says global warming is a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see how this can be so when record low temperatures are being set all over the world. In 2007, hundreds of people died, not from global warming, but from cold weather hazards.

Since the mid-19th century, the mean global temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. This slight warming is not unusual, and lies well within the range of natural variation. Carbon dioxide continues to build in the atmosphere, but the mean planetary temperature hasn't increased significantly for nearly nine years. Antarctica is getting colder. Neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased. The 2007 season was the third-quietest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.

Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

Last January, $1.42 billion worth of California produce was lost to a devastating five-day freeze. Thousands of agricultural employees were thrown out of work. At the supermarket, citrus prices soared. In the wake of the freeze, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked President Bush to issue a disaster declaration for affected counties. A few months earlier, Mr. Schwarzenegger had enthusiastically signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, a law designed to cool the climate. California Sen. Barbara Boxer continues to push for similar legislation in the U.S. Senate.

In April, a killing freeze destroyed 95 percent of South Carolina's peach crop, and 90 percent of North Carolina's apple harvest. At Charlotte, N.C., a record low temperature of 21 degrees Fahrenheit on April 8 was the coldest ever recorded for April, breaking a record set in 1923. On June 8, Denver recorded a new low of 31 degrees Fahrenheit. Denver's temperature records extend back to 1872.

Recent weeks have seen the return of unusually cold conditions to the Northern Hemisphere. On Dec. 7, St. Cloud, Minn., set a new record low of minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. On the same date, record low temperatures were also recorded in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. On Dec. 4, in Seoul, Korea, the temperature was a record minus 5 degrees Celsius. Nov. 24, in Meacham, Ore., the minimum temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the previous record low set in 1952. The Canadian government warns that this winter is likely to be the coldest in 15 years.

Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri are just emerging from a destructive ice storm that left at least 36 people dead and a million without electric power. People worldwide are being reminded of what used to be common sense: Cold temperatures are inimical to human welfare and warm weather is beneficial. Left in the dark and cold, Oklahomans rushed out to buy electric generators powered by gasoline, not solar cells. No one seemed particularly concerned about the welfare of polar bears, penguins or walruses. Fossil fuels don't seem so awful when you're in the cold and dark.

If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you're hopelessly naive. Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming. I can't make this stuff up. Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.

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Fortnight Of The Undead

By Christopher Monckton in Nusa Dua, Bali

Down the Poxy, our local fleapit late on a Saturday night, voodoo flicks like Night Of The Undead were always popular when I was a lad. To shrieks of scornful merriment from the teenage audience, mindless zombies would totter aimless across the clumsily-constructed sets with lugubrious expressions frozen on their messily-made-up death-masks until the hero, with the lurv interest wrenched screeching from the clutches of the late Baron Samedi and draped admiringly on her rescuer's extravagantly-muscled arm, triumphantly saved the day.

Thus it was in Bali during the Fortnight Of The Undead. There was surreality in the air. The overwhelming majority of the governmental delegates, journalists, quango stallholders, fortune-hunters and environmental lobbyists who attended the UN climate conference in the soulless Nusa Dua conference centre tottered aimlessly among the clumsily-constructed sets with lugubrious expressions frozen on their messily-made-up death-masks. Monckton's Rule: the further Left, the tackier the make-up. The only laughter came from our gallant band of doubters, the heroes of this otherwise gloomy production.

I nearly didn't go to Bali. The UN, which had not wanted any dissent at this carefully-staged event, rejected my journalistic credentials out of hand, and without explanation. However, a non-government organization came to the rescue and the high priests didn't dare to say No a second time. That would have looked too obvious. I proved my journo-cred by writing a major article in the Jakarta Post on day 1 of the conference, cheekily claiming my share of the Nobel Prize because the IPCC had made a correction to its latest Holy Book at my suggestion, and concluding that, since our influence on the climate is a non-problem, and the correct approach to a non-problem is to do nothing, my fellow-participants should have the courage to do nothing and push off home.

The Post circulated the article to all delegates and syndicated it worldwide, provoking weeping and gnashing of dentures among the zombies at my challenge to the scientific accuracy of the Holy Books of the IPCC. I don't think the UN will dare to question my journalistic credentials again.

The UN's sinister bureaucrats were furious that their attempt to stop me writing in the newspapers from the conference had failed. So they interrupted a presentation by me to delegates, threatened to have me thrown out by Security if I addressed any meeting open to the Press in the conference venues, and cancelled without reason a room they had previously booked for our team's daily conferences. The room wasn't even needed for someone else: it stood empty. So we mounted a demo outside the conference: half a dozen scientists (and me) in white lab-coats and (for some reason) wrap-around shades, holding a banner saying, "New science drives out old fears: Kyoto 2 is not needed".

The UN, whose pot-bellied goons had taken over the entire Nusa Dua conference zone from the leaner and more competent Indonesian and Balinese security forces, moved us on within minutes, while allowing anti-nuclear protesters, Greens and even Hilary Benn, described as a UK Minister, to mount demonstrations for hours on end.

The official propaganda mantra at the conference, first suggested by a UK pressure-group last year and now enthusiastically adopted by the UN, was that "The Science Is Settled". The zombies, led by the outgoing and incoming conference chairmen, recited this mantra with glazed but increasingly desperate pietism.

An IPCC lead author came to one of the press conferences we managed to hold before the UN showed its alarm at our effect on the delegates by shutting us down. He said a mere layman like me had no business challenging the supposed "consensus". And he tried to maintain that a table of figures in the latest Holy Book had been added up correctly when, as a slide I was showing made quite clear, it had not added up to within a factor of two of the right answer. In the land of the zombies, two plus two equals nine.

Outside the conference hall, I went up to a fragrant Japanese lady manning one of the exhibits set up by the ever-growing number of taxpayer-funded quangos with bewildering but important-sounding initials that are profiting by the lavish State handouts available to anyone willing to proselytize for the cult of the wrathful God Siotu. "What disasters?" I enquired, with an expression of shambling, potty-Peer innocence. This usually provoked a lurid list of plagues, droughts, floods, deaths, cataclysms and mass extinctions worthy of St. John the Divine at his most hyperbolic. The UK High Court judge who condemned Al Gore for exaggerations of this sort would have locked up most of the stallholders and sent me the key.

But this lady had somehow escaped the zombies. She drew me to one side and whispered, "Don't tell my boss, but two-thirds of the delegates here are mad." They would have been mad, if they'd had minds at all. One of the most enduring impressions on all of our team was that the Enlightenment has been switched off. Enter the Dark Age of Unreason. Ever since the high priests tampered with the scientists' text of the IPCC's 1995 Holy Book, deleting multiple references to the absence of credible evidence for any anthropogenic effect on climate and inserting the directly contrary statement that there was now a discernible human influence, anyone who dares to check the science is regarded as a heretic for daring to question the Holy Books of voodoo. Never mind the facts: just believe the nonsense, even when it doesn't add up.

I couldn't resist baiting the stallholder at the stand run by a certain national weather bureau. This particular tax-gobbler, reliably Messianic in its Siotological fervour, had a childishly imaginative poster that ramped up the imagined disasters as global temperature rose by each additional degree Celsius. At just 2 degrees, the poster said the Greenland ice sheet would be permanently destabilized. Oo-er. The message was illustrated by the usual picture of a glacier calving spectacularly into the water.

"'Scuse me," I said, Earl-of-Emsworth expression in place, "but isn't that a picture of a glacier that cuts across a freshwater lake in Argentina?" For it wasn't Greenland. It looked suspiciously like a grainy vid-grab from the traditional collapsing-glacier footage shown every few minutes on the unspeakable BBC. As the waters of the freshwater lake build up behind the glacier, it breaks apart spectacularly every eight years. Or rather, as I pointed out to the stallholder, every five years these days, because much of the southern hemisphere is cooling. This image did not demonstrate "global warming" but regional cooling.

The stallholder robotically reached for the IPCC's latest Holy Book and showed me graphs of sharply-rising temperatures in South Africa, Australasia and South America. She didn't show me the Antarctic, of course: that has been cooling for half a century. It had not occurred to the poor dear to wonder why the IPCC's temperature graphs for all continents but one were shown as rising steeply in recent years, when the global mean temperature has not shown any statistically-significant rise since the IPCC's previous Holy Book came out in 2001. The thing about stable average temperatures is that if some have risen others must have fallen. Or so it seems to me. But then I'm not a zombie.

"Anyway," I said, "doesn't the 2007 rewrite of the Holy Book say that the Greenland Ice Sheet would only lose significant ice-mass if a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius or more were to be sustained for several millennia?" That, after all, was what a UK High Court judge had recently found, when he condemned Al Gore's ludicrous hundredfold exaggeration of sea-level rise as alarmist and told ministers to correct this and eight other flagrant errors in Gore's rocky-horror movie before exposing hapless schoolchildren to it.

Here's a question. If the science behind the scare is as certain as the zombies say, why are they so terrified of a few doubters? Google me and you'll find hundreds of enviro-loony websites, such as Wikipedia, now an international music-hall joke for inaccuracy, that call me a fraud (for writing about climate science when I'm not a climate scientist), a plagiarist (for citing learned papers rather than making up scare stories), and a liar (for saying I'm a member of the House of Lords when - er - I'm a member of the House of Lords, though, being merely hereditary, I don't have a seat there).

One of these bedwetting sites even has a "Monckton Watch" page, with a hilarious collection of colourful stories, including the story of how I told the stallholder that much of the southern hemisphere was cooling. No mention that the location of the BBC's favourite glacier has indeed been cooling. And, of course, no mention of the elephant in the room - that a national weather bureau had flagrantly exaggerated the Holy Book's official ramblings about Greenland on its silly, taxpayer-funded poster.

You'll find precious little science on the zombie websites. They specialize in global whingeing ad hominem, rather than scientific argument ad rem. The frenetic personal assaults have become so self-evidently ludicrous that I'm getting an increasing number of emails from people who have first heard of my work from the Kool-Aid slurpers and have gone on to find, to their surprise, that the peer-reviewed science to which my climate papers politely draw attention does suggest that the Holy Books have exaggerated both the influence of Siotu over temperature and the consequences of warmer weather.

An example. A couple of months back I posted a paper citing peer-reviewed evidence that the fingerprint of greenhouse-gas warming - temperature rising over the decades at a rate three times faster six miles up in the tropical troposphere than at the surface - is absent from all of the real-world records of actual temperature change throughout the past half-century. During the Bali conference, I presented my own linear regression analysis going back 25 years and demonstrating that the rate of change in temperature falls with altitude, while the IPCC's models predict that if CO2 is at fault it should be increasing with altitude. Two days later our team of heroes had the pleasure of circulating to delegates a paper just published by the formidable John Christy and his colleagues, spectacularly and definitively confirming this result.

We circulated a one-page summary of the Christy paper showing the tropical upper-troposphere "hot-spot" as predicted in the Holy Book, and the total absence of the "hot-spot" in the observed data. We explained that, in the words of Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT, who knows more about the bad behaviour of the atmosphere than anyone, the missing "hot-spot" means that the IPCC's estimate of the impact of greenhouse-gas enrichment on temperature is at least a threefold exaggeration.

As I was handing our flyer round the Press tent, a "development journalist" angrily said: "How dare you criticize the IPCC's scientists?" I sat down and said: "I don't attack the scientists, though they certainly attack me. I attack the bad science."

"Well, then," he said, "how dare you substitute your judgment for that of thousands of climate scientists?" I said that the crucial chapter in the Holy Book attributing rising temperatures to Siotu had been written by only 53 people, not all of whom were scientists, and that - by coincidence - 53% of the comments by 60 reviewers had been rejected by the authors of the chapter. Not exactly the 2,500 scientists claimed by the high priests, and not exactly a consensus either.

I explained that I was an old-fashioned scribbler who had been taught to be sceptical of all sides of every debate, and that the authors of the Holy Book were obviously not good at sums. "Give me an example," he said. So I did.

The Holy Book saith: "The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20% during the last 10 years (1995-2005)." Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5% higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true increase in radiative forcing was 1%, not 20%. The high priests have exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.

"So how are you so nauseatingly certain that you're right?" he asked. "Well," I said, "because I worked out that the proportionate increase in CO2 between 1995 and 2005 was 5%, not 20%, and then did a simple calculation from this to work out the radiative forcing. It's called `checking'." He looked baffled. Voodoo has indeed replaced science, and the paradox is that the new religion claims to worship science.....

Gore needs to pretend that the situation is urgent when it is becoming increasingly plain to everyone that it isn't. The robust corn-stalk chewers of Iowa, polled recently about election issues, ranked "global warming" so low that fewer than one in 200 thought it mattered at all. Therefore, to whip up the flagging panic that keeps the gravy-train of "global warming" rolling, Baron Thursdi came up with a new, improved list of 50 errors and exaggerations:

* Floods in 18 countries, plus Mexico: Four errors in one. First, individual extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to "global warming". Secondly, the number of floods is not unprecedented, though TV makes them more visible than before. Thirdly, even if the floods were caused by warming, the fact of warming does not tell us the cause. Thirdly - and it was astonishing how few of the zombies knew this - there has been no statistically-significant increase in mean global surface temperature since the last IPCC Holy Book in 2001. "Global warming" has stopped.

* The Arctic ice-cap will be gone within 5 to 7 years: Six errors in one. First, as a paper published by NASA during the conference demonstrates, Arctic warming has nothing much to do with "global warming": instead, as numerous studies confirm, it is chiefly caused by decadal alterations in the ocean circulation affecting the region. Thirdly, it was warmer in the Arctic in the 1940s than it is today. Fourthly, thinner pack-ice is surprisingly resistant to melting, so the ice-cap will probably be still there for many years to come, even if (which is unlikely) the warming trend resumes. Fifthly, the ice-cap was probably absent during the mediaeval warm period, and almost certainly absent during the Bronze Age climate optimum, when temperatures were higher than today's for almost 2,000 years. Sixthly, the Greenland ice sheet melted completely away 850,000 years ago. There cannot have been an Arctic ice-cap then. So the disappearance of the Arctic ice-cap, even if it occurred, would be neither unprecedented nor alarming.

* Forest fires are causing devastation: Five errors in one. First, most forest fires are caused by humans - power-lines sparking in the wind, carelessly-tossed cigarette-butts, or even arson. Secondly, individual events of this kind cannot be attributed to "global warming". Thirdly, warmer weather is generally wetter weather, because - as the Clausius-Clapeyron relation demonstrates - the space occupied by the atmosphere can carry near-exponentially greater concentrations of water vapour as the weather becomes warmer. Fourthly, it has not got warmer since 2001, so there is no factual basis whatsoever for attributing more forest fires to warmer weather. Fifthly, the fact of warming does not tell us the cause......

Much much more here

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