Four scientists warn 'global warming out, global cooling in'

Four scientists, four scenarios, four more or less similar conclusions without actually saying it outright - the global warming trend is done, and a cooling trend is about to kick in. The implication: Future energy price response is likely to be significant.

Late last month, some leading climatologists and meteorologists met in New York at the Energy Business Watch Climate and Hurricane Forum. The theme of the forum strongly suggested that a period of global cooling is about emerge, though possible concerns for a political backlash kept it from being spelled out. However, the message was loud and clear, a cyclical global warming trend may be coming to an end for a variety of reasons, and a new cooling cycle could impact the energy markets in a big way. Words like "highly possible," "likely" or "reasonably convincing" about what may soon occur were used frequently. Then there were other words like "mass pattern shift" and "wholesale change in anomalies" and "changes in global circulation."

Noted presenters, such as William Gray, Harry van Loon, Rol Madden and Dave Melita, signaled in the strongest terms that huge climate changes are afoot. Each weather guru, from a different angle, suggested that global warming is part of a cycle that is nearing an end. All agreed the earth is in a warm cycle right now, and has been for a while, but that is about to change significantly.

However, amid all of the highly suggestive rhetoric, none of the weather and climate pundits said outright that a global cooling trend is about to replace the global warming trend in a shift that could begin as early as next year. Van Loon spoke about his theories of solar storms and how, combined with, or because of these storms, the Earth has been on a relative roller coaster of climate cycles. For the past 250 years, he said, global climate highs and lows have followed the broad pattern of low and high solar activity. And shorter 11-year sunspot cycles are even more easily correlated to global temperatures.

It was cooler from 1883 to 1928 when there was low solar activity, he said, and it has been warmer since 1947 with increased solar activity."We are on our way out of the latest (warming) cycle, and are headed for a new cycle of low (solar) activity," van Loon said. "There is a change coming. We may see 180-degree changes in anomalies during high and low sunspot periods. There were three global climate changes in the last century, there is a change coming now."

Meanwhile, Madden noted that while temperature forecasts longer than one to two weeks out has improved, "what has really gotten much better is climate forecasting . predicting the change in the mean," he said. And the drivers impacting climate suggest a shift to cooler sea surface temperatures, he said.

Perhaps the best known speaker was Colorado State University's Gray, founder of the school's famed hurricane research team. Gray spoke about multi-decade periods of warming and cooling and how global climate flux has been the norm for as long as there have been records. Gray has taken quite a bit of political heat for insistence that global warming is not a man-made condition. Man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) is negligible, he said, compared to the amount of CO2 Mother Nature makes and disposes of each day or century. "We've reached the top of the heat cycle," he said. "The next 10 years will be hardly any warmer than the last 10 years."

Finally, climate scientist Melita spoke of a new phase in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation."I'm looking at a new, cold-negative phase, though it won't effect this summer, fall or winter `08," he said.

Conference host, analyst and forecaster Andy Weissman closed the conference by addressing how natural gas prices and policy debates would be impacted by a possible climate shift that could leave the market short gas.This would be especially problematic if gas use for power generation were substantially increased at the expense of better alternatives."If we're about to shift into another natural climate cycle, we can't do it without coal-fired generation. So the policy debate has to change," he said. "Coal has to be back on the table if we're ever going to meet our energy needs."As for natural gas: "Next year, may see a bit of price softening," Weissman said. "After that, fogetaboutit!".

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A climate prediction that has been confirmed by reality

Unilke the IPCC model predictions that are NOT confirmed by reality. An email below from John L. Casey [mail@spaceandscience.net]

Please accept my thanks for the posting of excerpts from the recent July 1, 2008 Climate Change Declaration issued by the Space and Science Research Center, (SSRC). In addition to my thanks I wanted to send this short message to you and other sites regarding the nature of the Declaration and why it was issued. Here are some key points:

1. The original independent research done without any knowledge of any related research, was completed in April-May of 2007. Given the importance of the findings and conclusions, the results were immediately passed on to key government and media offices.

2. In January of 2008 the formal peer reviewed paper was published on line by the SSRC as SSRC Research Report 1-2008 and is available at the web site: www.spaceandscience.net.

3. The reason for the July news conference and the Declaration was not to restate the previous press releases or what was in the research report. It was much more important.

4. It was to announce that the RC Theory developed from the research and the prediction that the next cold era would begin with solar cycle #24 was now confirmed! The next climate change to a long lasting cold era has begun as forecast. This was the fundamental message of the news conference. The global warming caused by the sun because of a particular 206 year long solar cycle has now reversed to the next phase, a pronounced cold period.

5. During the detailed news conference I went on to congratulate the many other researchers world wide who on their own have come to the same conclusion that we were about to enter a cold era. Though the SSRC is leading the effort here in the US to get out the word about this new climate period, we are certainly not alone. On the RC Theory page at the web site is a partial list of others who have made a prediction similar to the SSRC.

As you might expect many of us have taken much ad hominem criticism for coming out publicly with our research.






How the Hadley Centre spins the data on non-warming

Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research is in a bit of a pickle at the moment. On the one hand, the Hadley Centre is a firm believer in the hypothesis that humans are the main cause of global warming and that we're heading toward catastrophe. It even devotes several of its web pages to waving a nagging finger at those foolish enough or unprincipled enough to believe otherwise.

On the other hand, the Hadley Centre, as part of the British Meteorological Office, is also churning out data showing that the planet isn't warming at the moment, and hasn't for the past 10 years or so.What to do?

As principled scientists, the Hadley staff can't cook the books so the temperature figures fit the hypothesis, although at least one other major climate centre is doing its best to keep its figures matching the hypothesis. On the other hand, if the general public got the idea that maybe the planet wasn't warming after all, despite what we've all been told so often, they might rebel against punitive carbon taxes and go back to their materialist-loving ways.

The Hadley Centre's solution is a combination of spin-doctoring and let's hope nobody notices.You find the spin in its finger-wagging admonitions that we mustn't take this non-warming trend at all seriously. Just temporary. Planet's still warming. Move along; nothing to see here.So, in its webpage on Climate Facts #1, it says: "There is indisputable evidence from observations that the Earth is warming."

This is hardly controversial; even the pesky warming skeptics who annoy the Hadley Centre so much agree on the earth is, overall, on a warming trend. But, just to make sure we're clear so far: the earth is in an overall warming trend (interglacial) right now and would be whether humans were a factor or not. Humans causing `most of the warming'?

Hadley goes on: "Concentrations of CO2, created largely by the burning of fossil fuels, are now much higher, and increasing at a much faster rate, than at any time in the last 600,000 years. Because CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the increased concentrations have contributed to the recent warming and probably most of the warming over the last 50 years" So, just so we're clear: humans are the primary (Al Gore likes to use the term "principal") cause of global warming - that's what's meant by causing "most of the warming."

But then, Climate Fact #3 tells us: "Earth's climate is complex and influenced by many things, particularly changes in its orbit, volcanic eruptions, and changes in the energy emitted from the Sun. It is well known that the world has experienced warm or cold periods in the past without any interference from humans". So, humans are causing "most of the warming" at the moment, but not warming in the past, and there are many other causes of warming as well, all natural, and all, one would think, a lot more powerful - solar orbit changes, volcanoes, variations in solar energy - than anything humans could throw at the planet.

The site goes on: "In recent ice ages, natural changes in the climate, such as those due to orbit changes, led to cooling of the climate system. This caused a fall in CO2 concentrations which weakened the greenhouse effect and amplified the cooling. Now the link between temperature and CO2 is working in the opposite direction. Human-induced increases in CO2 are driving the greenhouse effect and amplifying the recent warming".

Driving or amplifying? They aren't the same thing. We've got two processes here, described by two different verbs: driving and amplifying. Even though the planet is warming naturally (Fact #1), which would naturally tend to increase CO2 levels anyway, human-emitted CO2 is "driving" the greenhouse effect. This is an amazing feat when you consider that human-added concentrations of CO2 are only about five per cent of natural carbon emissions every year from factors like rotting vegetation, volcanoes, and the like. And amazing considering that 90 to 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect is produced by water vapor, not CO2.

Never mind. For the Hadley Centre, five per cent of a trace gas like carbon dioxide (CO2 is only 380 parts per million in the atmosphere, to which human emissions add about 10 ppm every five years) is "driving" the greenhouse gas system.

Then the Centre backtracks a bit and says we humans are "amplifying," rather than "driving," the recent warming. How much are we "amplifying" natural warming? Presumably about five per cent. Is an amplification of five per cent enough to produce "most of the warming" we've experienced over the past 30 years? It's unlikely, especially considering that the planet warmed about the same amount from 1850-1940, when human carbon emissions were still relatively low.

Furthermore, in the 1850s the planet came out of more than 400 years of cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Before that, during the Medieval Warm Period (900-1350), global temperatures were a degree or two Celsius higher than today's. Temperatures were warmer about 2,000 years ago (the Roman Warm Period) and about 3,500 years ago (the Minoan Warm Period).Natural warming occurs every 1,000 years or so. This means that over the past 5,000 years there's been a major warming and cooling cycle every 1,000 years or so. The current warming, a millennium after the Medieval Warm Period, is right on track as part of that cycle. In other words, the planet may be going about its natural warming at the moment, with a bit of "amplification" - five per cent? - from humans. "Amplifying" doesn't mean the same as "driving" the climate, but the Hadley Centre doesn't make this fine distinction.

Then there's that pesky decade of warming. To counter this inconvenient truth, Hadley tells us in its webpage on Climate Facts #2 that "the rise in global surface temperature has averaged more than 0.15 øC per decade since the mid-1970s. Warming has been unprecedented in at least the last 50 years, and the 17 warmest years have all occurred in the last 20 years. This does not mean that next year will necessarily be warmer than last year, but the long-term trend is for rising temperatures."

Translating this into understandable English, the Centre is saying that just because it's not warming now doesn't mean it hasn't warmed in the past, which is hardly news. Therefore, it concludes, because it's been warm in the past three decades, the planet is going to be warmer in the future. It was warm from 1850 to 1940, too, but in 1940 the planet cooled for 30 years. However, this cooling can't happen again, according to the Hadley Centre.

How does it know? Because its computers tell it so - the same computers that couldn't predict the recent 10 years of non-warming. But why isn't the planet warming now? After all, humans are "driving" the climate, aren't we? Well, not quite. As the Hadley Centre tells us in Fact #2: "The recent slight slowing of the warming is due to a shift towards more-frequent La Nina conditions in the Pacific since 1998. These bring cool water up from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, cooling global temperatures" ("slight slowing of the warming" is an unsual way of describing "no warming").

So the oceans are driving this non-warming through an El Nina (a cold current), overriding our human-caused carbon dioxide. Maybe humans aren't as powerful a "driving" force as the Hadley Centre would like us to believe after all. And if humans aren't the main cause of cooling, maybe we're not the main cause of warming, either.

How Hadley chart buries non-warming

Finally, again, the Hadley Centre is stuck with a bunch of numbers that show the planet isn't warming, despite its computers' predictions that human CO2 would warm things up. It can't sweep this data under the rug so it does the next best thing: it produces a graph that makes the lack of warming barely discernible. Here's the chart the Hadley Centre uses to illustrate temperatures over the last 157 years:

Hadley Centre temperature data, 1850-2007. The current flat-lined warming shows as a tiny, horizontal tail on the right side of the chart. If you get out a magnifying glass, you'll see that, yes, the blue temperature line flattens out after the year 2000. I've searched the Hadley site and can't find any graphic that shows the last 10 years in detail, although the numbers are there as a long list.

However, on his site, Anthony Watts has produced a graph of the past 10 years, using the Hadley Centre's numbers. Here's what that graph looks like (I've added a red line to show average temperatures).Anthony Watts chart, 1988-2008, from Hadley Centre data

Why hasn't the Hadley Centre produced a graphic like this? Isn't an average temperature that hasn't gone up in 10 years worthy of public attention? Shouldn't even a temporary pause in warming be good news? Why bury that news in a tiny fillip at the end of a very long-term chart? Why work so hard to hide the truth? Because the truth doesn't agree with the Centre's hypothesis that humans are the "driving" force behind climate. In short, it's an embarrassment, and therefore to be underplayed as much as possible.

I argue that much of what the public is told by "consensus" climate science about global warming is misleading, exaggerated, or plain wrong. The Hadley Centre's spin effort isn't exaggerating the data (far from it), nor is it plain wrong - the true figures are on the site. But the Centre is doing everything it can to mislead the public in hopes that the planet will start warming again before the peasants figure out that, maybe, the "consensus" climate science prophets are, in fact, plain wrong.

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How warming really happens is actually quite simple

Email from Jim Peden:

As a dissenting physicist, I simply can no longer buy the notion that CO2 produces any significant warming of the atmosphere at any rate. I've studied the atomic absorption physics to death, from John Nicol's extensive development to the much longer winded dissertation by Gerlich & Tscheuschner and everything in between, it simply doesn't add up. Even if every single IR photon absorbed by a CO2 molecule were magically transformed into purely thermal translational modes , the pitifully small quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't add up to much additional heat. And if the aforementioned magical 100% transformation from radiation into "heat" were true, then all arguments concerning re-emission ( source of all the wonderful "greenhouse effect" cartoons with their arrows flying in all directions ) are out the window.

More and more, I am becoming convinced that atmospheric heating is primarily by thermal conduction from the surface, whose temperature is determined primarily by solar absorption. I get a lot of email from laymen seeking simple answers ( I'm sure you all do as well ). My simple reply goes like this:

1. The sun heats the earth.
2. The earth heats the atmosphere
3. After the sun sets, the atmosphere cools back down

With a parting comment: "If we were to have 96 continuous hours without sunlight, temperatures would likely be below freezing over all the world's land masses. The warmest place you could find would be to take a swim in the nearest ocean. There is no physical process in the atmosphere which "traps" heat. The so-called "greenhouse effect " is a myth."





New Hope for Global Warming Deniers

Why would anyone be a global warming denier? What's the point? You earn the scorn of Al Gore and maybe Dr. James Hansen, NASA's pre-eminent climate scientist will call for you to be put in jail. Of fossil fuel company CEOs, Hansen recently testified to Congress: In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

If Dr. Hansen turns out to be wrong about climate change should he be tried for high crimes and misdemeanors too? Steve McIntyre and his collaborators at climateaudit.org have already found one big error in Dr. Hansen's GISS global temperature data series. How many mistakes add up to a felony?

But things are looking up for the global warming skeptics. First of all there is the global temperature. After holding constant since 1998 it has dropped markedly in the last two years. You can see the latest numbers at Dr. Roy Spencer's home page here

Recently the Germans prudently declared a ten-year hold on non-stop global warming. What with a flip in the Gulf Stream they realized that the numbers weren't going to look too good for the alarmists in the next few years. "There is a long-periodic oscillation that will probably lead to a lower temperature increase than we would expect from the current trend during the next years," they wrote. Clearly, more research is needed.

The World Bank in a "secret" report has found most of the recent increase in food prices was due to biofuels production. Writes Aditya Chakrabortty in the lefty Guardian: Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

Apparently, according to Chakrabortty, the World Bank refrained from publishing the report to avoid embarrassing President Bush! The US recently issued a report blaming China and India for the food price increases and this new report "emphatically contradicts" it. I say to heck with President Bush and the evil biofuels program that he rammed through Congress with the help of Halliburton in the teeth of opposition from sensitive, caring environmentalists and advocates for the global poor. Let's teach President Bush a lesson and stop biofuel subsidies now! What do you say, Senator Obama? Here is an opportunity for real change.

But the most fascinating and encouraging news for the deniers is from Australian astrophysicists I.R.G. Wilson, B.D. Carter, and I.A. Waite. They have developed a theory that the sunspot cycle and its intensity is driven by the gravitational relationships between the Sun and the Jovian planets Jupiter and Saturn.

The Sun wobbles a bit around the center of the Solar System. Sometimes the center of the Solar System lies outside the surface of the Sun, only 1,000 times heavier than Jupiter and 3,000 times heavier than Saturn. All that wobbling seems to affect the behavior of the Sun.

Here is the nub of the paper, as explained by author Ian Wilson to Andrew Bolt. It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World's mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C.

Wilson and Co. should talk to the Germans who think that the cooling will only last for 10-15 years and try to come up with a cooling consensus. Either way, it adds up to a comfortable truth for Al Gore who can now feel virtuous about warming up the planet with his mega-mansion and his compulsive jet-travel habit.

It's all so confusing. Liberals tell us that we mustn't develop energy resources because of the impact on the polar bear -- even though polar bear numbers are on the increase. We shouldn't develop oil resources in ANWR because it is a pristine wilderness. We shouldn't develop offshore oil resources because 40 years ago there was an oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel. Anyway there's no point in developing oil and gas resources because it won't make any difference to the price of gasoline. Anyway we are running out of oil and gas so there isn't any point in developing any more oil and gas resources. We shouldn't mine coal because coal creates global warming. We shouldn't develop nuclear power because Jane Fonda once made a scary movie about it. We should develop solar and wind power, "renewables," even though both are extremely expensive right now. But we shouldn't build wind farms where Ted Kennedy could see the wind turbines from his window.

And now with a straight face liberals say we'll have to starve the people in order to save the planet. Now who's in denial?

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BRAMWELL'S HIDDEN HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

What follows is a critical and supplemented condensation of the three books on the history of environmentalism written between 1985 and 1994 by Oxford History Professor Anna Bramwell. The latter two books were published by Yale University. The books make clear the Third Reich was a radical environmentalist regime. The Nazis promoted organic farming, reforestation, species preservation, naturalism, neo-paganism, holistic biology, animal rights, solar-worship, herbalism, anti-capitalism, ecology, anti-urbanism, alternative energy, hysterical anti-pollutionism and apocalyptic anti-industrialism. At the same time the British ecology movement was stridently, treasonously fascist. While these aspects of Bramwell's writing have been commented upon, however inadequately, much less has been said about her treatment of post-WWII environmentalism. Here she provides useful insights into the wholesale corruption of the scientific community, the capturing of key organizations, and the manipulation of the mass media by the environmental movement. Bramwell is not a passive spectator of this process and she conceals central actors and motives.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Bramwell
Anna through the Platonist Glass
Peasantists outstanding in their Fields
Alchemy, Astrology, Augury, Ecology
Soil with Soul
Darre the Enserfer
Die Klein Englische
How Green is Your Nazi?
The Polish Holocaust
The Luciferian Rebellion - Environmentalism in the UK 1945-94
Goebbel Warming
Heil Hippy!
Neo-fascism Eco-fascism
To the East
Deep Doo Doo
Tomorrow the World
Summary and Conclusion

(75 pages 481 footnotes - free from www.ecofascism.com)

More here

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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