Climate Change Blamed for First Baghdad Snows in 100 Years

Post below lifted from Newsbusters. See the original for links. I wonder what caused the snow of 100 years ago. Was that the doing of mankind too? If so, how?

Add another item to the growing list of things caused by the liberal bogeyman known as global warming: SNOW!!! I kid you not. For those thinking NewsBusters has fallen prey to a satire, think again, as the following was hysterically logged by Agence France-Presse moments ago:

Light snow fell in Baghdad early on Friday in what weather officials said was the first time in about a 100 years. Rare snowfalls were also recorded in the west and centre of Iraq, plunging temperatures to zero degrees Centigrade (32 degrees Fahrenheit) and even colder, an official said. The snow in Baghdad, which melted as it hit the ground, began falling before dawn and continued until after 9 am, residents said. "Snow has fallen in Baghdad for the first time in about a century as a result of two air flows meeting," said a statement by the meteorology department.

Now, you would think that cold weather in areas that normally don't experience such would be evidence that global warming isn't happening, right? Wrong! You see, what the alarmists - led of course by Nobel Laureate Al Gore - have brilliantly done is renamed the bogeyman "climate change" such that anything that occurs on this planet dealing with weather exemplifies the threat they avow will destroy us all if we don't stop burning fossil fuels:

The director of the meteorology department, Dawood Shakir, told AFP that climate change was possibly to blame for the unusual event. "It's very rare," he said. "Baghdad has never seen snow falling in living memory. "These snowfalls are linked to the climate change that is happening everywhere. We are finding some places in the world which are warm and are supposed to be cold."

There it is. As such, folks, with solar cycle 24 having just begun, it is a metaphysical certitude that as the planet cools during this phase, alarmists will blame it on climate change and carbon dioxide rather than the sun. And, of course, a global warming obsessed media will dutifully report the insanity. Heaven help us.





Breaking News- Snow in the Middle of the South America Summer

You think the weather has been wild and extreme here in the United States the last 10 days. Take a look at this!!!

Metsul Weather Center, [Brazil]:

The weather went crazy. This is the most read sentence in the press of Buenos Aires at this moment. The central and northern areas of Argentina are experiencing a brutal heat wave that brought the electrical grid of country to near a collapse point. The temperature soared to 39C (102F) in Buenos Aires with a heat index of 42C (108F), but in some provinces of Argentina the heat index reached 54C (129F) yesterday.

This morning it snowed in several locations of southern Argentina as the famous resort of Bariloche in the Andes Mountains. It even snowed in downtown Bariloche (photo), a rare event for January. Local press described the snow blanketed the Cordillera of Chubut, an unusual event for January. "I do not know if I use my plastic swimming pool or the skis", told a local resident that saw snow this morning and just few hours earlier suffered with much above average temperature reaching 30C (86F) in the Patagonia region.

Snow was also reported in San Martins de Los Andes. Tourists in the regional, used to see snow in the colder months of the years, could not believe the white thing was falling in the middle of January. Just like this week in the United States (winter storm in the West and unusually warm in the East), the northern areas of Argentina were under very warm weather warnings at the some moment it was snowing in the southern provinces.

Source. Note that this follows a punishingly long and cold Argentine winter.




World warming despite cool Pacific and Baghdad snow (?)

An air of desperation in the Reuters article excerpted below. Even the heading (reproduced above) is misleading. There is record cooling across most of central Asia -- not just in Baghdad. Note that IPCC head Pachauri is explicitly wondering about the 21st century temperature plateau. That is a grudging admission in itself

Climate change is still nudging up temperatures in the long term even though the warmest year was back in 1998 and 2008 has begun with unusual weather such as a cool Pacific and Baghdad's first snow in memory, experts said. "Global warming has not stopped," said Amir Delju, senior scientific coordinator of the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) climate program.

Last year was among the six warmest years since records began in the 1850s and the British Met Office said last week that 2008 will be the coolest year since 2000, partly because of a La Nina event that cuts water temperatures in the Pacific. "We are in a minor La Nina period which shows a little cooling in the Pacific Ocean," Delju told Reuters. "The decade from 1998 to 2007 is the warmest on record and the whole trend is still continuing."

This year has started with odd weather including the first snows in Baghdad in memory on Friday and a New Year cold snap in India that killed more than 20 people. Frost hit some areas of Florida last week but orange groves escaped mostly unscathed.....

The record year for world temperatures was 1998, ahead of 2005, according to WMO data. Among recent signs of the effects of warming, Arctic sea ice shrank last year to a record low.

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N. Panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, said he would look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century. "One would really have to see on the basis of some analysis what this really represents," he told Reuters, adding "are there natural factors compensating?" for increases in greenhouse gases from human activities. He added that skeptics about a human role in climate change delighted in hints that temperatures might not be rising. "There are some people who would want to find every single excuse to say that this is all hogwash," he said.

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Comment on the NYT blog about attacks on the Inhofe report

By Senate staffer Marc Morano

There is no time for resting when such easily debunked critiques of the Senate report on over 400 scientists are floating about. I am responding to your critique here of the Senate Report of over 400 scientists disputing man-made global warming claims.

First off, the well over 400-plus names (and still growing) scientists are not "all" of the skeptical scientists in the world; they are merely a sampling of scientists who spoke out recently. The report is also weighted to English speaking scientists; it does not pretend to capture all of the large amounts of skepticism growing around the world to the hyped "climate crisis." (See full Senate report here)

Second, you claim that there are a few scientists "who are flatly unqualified to make any pronouncements on climate science" because they do not meet your criteria or because the report has a few economists in it. Such charges are simply unsustainable.

Do you hold the UN IPCC scientists to that same standard? Please take the time to read this excellent research by Climate Resistance revealing that the so-called "thousands" of scientists from the UN are made up of significant numbers of economists and engineers as well. After all, you could argue that half the climate change debate is premised on economics that falls under Stern Review-inspired "it's cheaper to act now" than wait category.

Also, the head of UN IPCC, Rajendra K. Pachauri, is an economist and engineer. It appears Nobel winner Pachauri would not meet your standards to comment on climate change. Pachauri's training as an economist has not stopped the New York Times from erroneously referring to him as a "climatologist" (see here) or the AP from referring to Pachauri as the "chief climate scientist" for the UN. See here. Are you going to chastise the NY Times and AP for referring to the "thousands" of UN experts as "scientists" as well?

Note: Many current and former members of the UN IPCC are featured in the Senate report of over 400.) Or do you only selectively "disqualify" scientists if they do not share your views?

Third, your citation of Prof. Andrew Dessler's articles at Grist is amusing. Dessler has monumentally embarrassed himself by recently claiming there were only two dozen scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears. Dessler is now trying desperately to salvage his unsupportable assertions over at Grist with increasingly shrill and comical posts.

It is made clear you have not read the Senate report when you parrot Dessler's claims that Dr. Christopher Castro "unabashedly and explicitly endorses the IPCC consensus." If you took the time to read Castro's entry in the Senate report you would find that even though he accepts the idea that mankind is responsible for most of the recent warming, he has serious doubts about future dire predictions of warming. Excerpt from report:

Castro, who studied under skeptical climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. "agrees that `other possible forcings to the climate system besides CO2 (like land-use change, aerosols, etc.) are not accounted for well, if at all' and "models are highly sensitive to parameterized processes, like clouds, convection, and radiation, and these processes can have significant impacts on their results.'"

Remember, many skeptical scientists believe the Earth has already seen most of the warming impact of rising CO2, so agreeing that a 20th century CO2 rise has caused some warming is not the same as believing future catastrophic climate projections.

Also, Dessler mocks a meteorologist for citing God as part of his belief that mankind is not causing a “climate crisis,” but Dessler completely ignores the scientific reasons the meteorologist presents. Be wary of critiques that do not publish the Senate Report's full excerpt on the scientist being analyzed.

Fourth, your cut and paste attack from Real Climate on award-winning physicist Claude Allegre and his colleague Vincent Courtillot is without merit. The propaganda team at RealClimate.org routinely ridicule scientists who dissent from their view of climate orthodoxy. An interesting note on Allegre is he recently converted from a believer in catastrophic climate change to a skeptic as new scientific studies debunked fears. See full report here (includes many other scientist who reversed themselves on global warming as well)

The Senate report of dissenting scientists has gained a giant foothold in the climate debate. For a sampling of the impact the report is having in redefining the climate debate, see here.

Also note that this report goes way beyond scientists' dissenting but includes numerous recent peer-reviewed studies debunking rising CO2 fears and Arctic and Greenland melting fears.

2008 is ushering in a truly new era in the climate debate. No longer will activists be able to claim that the "debate is over" or, as Naomi Oreskes once claimed, no peer-reviewed studies cast doubt on the "consensus."

For an insight into why there is a growing number of skeptical scientists worldwide, please read this article just up today by one of the Senate 400 plus scientists. It is written by Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review. (I hope you consider him "qualified" to speak on this issue)

I urge everyone on this board to actually read the full Senate report (well over 80,000 words) and then re-evaluate your views. Full report available here

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More Inconvenient Truths

Despite Al Gore's contention that the CO2 in the atmosphere is approaching dangerous levels, scientists tell us that CO2 levels have been as high as 15 times the current level of about 380 parts per million (ppm) and levels of about 5 times the current level were common.

In Al Gore's environmental tome and movie, An Inconvenient Truth, he claims that anthropogenic (human-caused) activity will cause irreversible damage to the planet. The basis of this claim is that by using carbon-based fuels (oil, gas, coal, wood) to produce energy, we will increase the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and cause global warming. According to Gore, this global warming will cause glaciers to melt, causing the oceans to rise thereby flooding all the coastal communities. Of course, the poor, minorities, women, and children will die first.

Gore erroneously assumes that current conditions on earth are the natural state. Even a cursory study of the earth would reveal that nothing related to the earth is constant. Continents move, the oceans rise and fall, glaciers advance and retreat, the magnetic poles have moved and reversed, the composition of the atmosphere has varied and the earth's temperature has warmed and cooled. All of these events occurred without any human influence.

The earth's tectonic plates constantly move. The continents have moved thousands of miles. The clash of these tectonic plates has created massive mountain ranges. Earthquakes are the result of the movement of these tectonic plates.

Fossilized kelp and fossils of ocean creatures have been found at altitudes over 5,000 feet above the current sea level. We know the kelp and sea creatures lived in the oceans so either the land was pushed up or the oceans receded. Either scenario makes the global warming doomsday predictions laughable. The sea level changes predicted by these global warming zealots are dwarfed by previous variations of sea level changes.

Ice cores have established the existence of at least 17 Ice Age Cycles in just the past 2 million years. During those Ice Ages Cycles, glaciers several thousand feet thick came as far south as the mid-U.S. Each Ice Age Cycle lasted about 100,000 years separated by an interglacial warming period of about 10,000 years. We are in an interglacial period now, so another Ice Age is a safe bet.

The north and south magnetic poles wander independently and it been theorized that the north and south magnetic poles have reversed numerous times. The last reversal occurred about 740,000 years ago. Evidence of these reversals is recorded in the magnetism of ancient rocks. The sun also reverses poles but on a more predictable cycle. The next reversal of the sun's magnetic poles will be in 2012. The earth's pole reversals are unpredictable and many scientists feel another magnetic pole reversal is overdue. A reversal of the earth's magnetic poles would be far more serious than the predicted rise in the earth's temperature of 2 degrees Celsius over the next 100 years.

Despite Al Gore's contention that the CO2 in the atmosphere is approaching dangerous levels, scientists tell us that CO2 levels have been as high as 15 times the current level of about 380 parts per million (ppm) and levels of about 5 times the current level were common. The current level of 380 ppm is like comparing the contents of an eye dropper to a swimming pool. Plants thrived at the higher CO2 levels and varying CO2 levels aren't harmful to plants, animals, or humans.

Dr. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist from the University of Virginia, summed up these Inconvenient Truths this way. Singer said, "We have to remember that the climate has always been changing ever since we have records, and we have geologic records going back millions and millions of years. We know that there have been huge climate changes on the earth long before human beings actually came into existence."

On December 13th, over 100 prominent international scientists released an open letter to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The letter in part states, "Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems." An analogy for this futile effort could be draining the ocean with a spoon. The Washington Post also noted that the number of global warming skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking. Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears bite the dust." Will Al Gore and fellow Gorons recognize these Inconvenient Truths or will they continue to perpetuate this global warming fraud?

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