Climate change 'could kill 4.5 million children' (?)

Another work of unrestrained imagination by a do-gooder group below. The truth is opposite to what they say. Cold weather is much more likely to kill you than hot weather is. A warmer climate would SAVE lives

AT least 4.5 million children could die if wealthy nations fail to provide more funds to help impoverished countries combat global warming, development charity Oxfam has warned. The organisation said in a report it was concerned that industrialised nations would take money out of existing funds dedicated to economic development in order to help poor countries battle climate change.

World leaders will meet in Denmark in December to negotiate a new climate pact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming. Funds to help the world's poorest nations develop an environmentally-friendly economy and adapt to the consequences of global warming are major issues to be negotiated in the Danish capital December 7-18.

In a report titled Beyond Aid, Oxfam warned that 75 million fewer children were likely to go to school and 8.6 million less people would have access to AIDS treatment if aid was diverted to the fight against climate change.

The report was released ahead of a summit in New York on September 22 aimed at preparing for the Copenhagen meeting. "Forcing poor countries to choose between life-saving drugs for the sick, schooling for their children or the means to protect themselves against climate change is an unfair burden that will only exacerbate poverty,'' chief executive of Oxfam Great Britain Barbara Stocking said. "Stealing money from tomorrow's schools and hospitals to help poor people adapt to climate change is neither a moral nor effective way of rich countries paying their climate debt. "Funds must be increased, not diverted.''.

SOURCE






Warmist delusions getting worse

They seem to think that if you shriek loudly enough, people will believe them. More likely to have the opposite effect in my view. But the stuff below is full of "ifs" anyway. I could do some pretty good "if"-case predictions myself if I wanted to. Let me try one: If scientists stuck to the known facts, there would be no global warming scare. That "if" is roughly as likely to come about as the stuff below -- even though it should not be an "if" at all

Deadly tsunamis like those that have hit Asia may be heading to Britain. From tsunamis in Britain to huge avalanches in the Alps and volcanic eruptions in Germany, some of the world's top geologists are warning these potential natural catastrophes could become reality, if global temperatures continue to rise. ["Continue"?? They stopped rising in 1998]

At a three-day conference starting today at University College London (UCL), scientists will show how alterations in the earth's crust could trigger unexpected events. They say evidence from the past reveals that times of dramatic climatic change are characterised by heightened geological activity. For example, 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, melting ice and rising sea levels triggered a significant rise in volcanic activity.

Professor Bill McGuire, Director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at UCL warned earth's future could be explosive. He told Sky News Online: "Climate change is very doom and gloom I'm afraid and it's one of those problems that the closer we look at it the worst it seems to get. "If you want some faint glint of good news from this I suppose that if we see a big volcanic response, the gases pumped into the atmosphere will cool things down at least temporarily, but that's not recommended. "We need to be cutting emissions, not waiting for all the volcanoes on the planet to erupt."

As the Arctic ice melts, geologists are particularly concerned that the planet's deposits of methane - a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide - are stored underneath the permafrost. As the ice melts, a build-up of methane hydrates in the atmosphere would accelerate the process of climate change.

Droughts may hit too. Other experts warn that disintegrating glaciers could cause earthquakes, triggering tsunamis off Chile, New Zealand and Canada, perhaps even sending one across the Atlantic capable of reaching British shores. Professor David Tappin of the British Geological Survey said: "If the temperatures warm and the oceans warm then the hydrates at the sea bed will melt. "They will melt catastrophically and in so doing they'll be forced into the atmosphere but also, they will create submarine landslides which could trigger a tsunami."

The geological conference is the latest in a series of scientific gatherings organised in the run up to the UN's climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. More evidence, many climate experts now believe, for the international community to reach a strong global emissions reduction agreement sooner rather than later.

SOURCE





Another derisive comment on the fraudulent "re-opening" of the Northeast passage

One of Russia's commercial maritime trade routes for the past 70 years has been "re-opened" by a press hungry for dramatic Global Warming scare stories - but who failed to check the most basic facts.

I've traced this fascinating example of "eco-churnalism" - peddled by both BBC Radio and its website, the Daily Mail, The Independent, Reuters and many others - back to its origins, with a press release from a German shipping group. But first of all - what on Earth is the Northern Passage?

Also called the Northeast Passage or North Sea Passage, it's a trade route that in summer months links the North European and Siberian ports to Asia, around the Arctic Circle. Orient-bound traffic heads east, then South via the Bering Straight. Much of the Siberian North coast lies outside the Arctic Circle, and the route offered significant gains over the alternatives via Suez or the Cape. But until technological advances in the early 20th Century it was considered too hazardous for commercial operation.

Since the 1930s the route has seen major ports spring up, carrying over 200,000 tons of freight passing through each year, although this declined with the fall of the Soviet Union.

But none of this ever happened, we learned on Saturday. The Independent reported that the journey had been traversed for the very first time, proclaiming that two German ships had completed "the first commercial navigation of the fabled North-east Passage", proclaiming it "a triumph for man, a disaster for mankind". BBC Radio followed suit. Others have followed the BBC.

It didn't take long to trace the origin of the story. On Wednesday, German shipping group Beluga claimed "the first non-Russian commercial vessels to make it through the Northeast Passage from Asia to Europe". You can still read their press release, here. Journalists failed to challenge Beluga's claim that the Northeastern Passage was "formerly impenetrable", but bloggers had debunked it within seconds. (See An Englishman's Castle here - and Richard D North's EU Referendum blog here and here.)

North unearthed a fascinating account of the past 80 years of this sea route (pdf, 17pg) by a retired mariner Jan Drent, who made the Europe to Asia Northeast Passage himself. Drent writes that the Soviet Union offered to open the route to global commerce in 1967, but with war in the Middle East closing the Suez, Russia didn't want to offend its Arab allies.

In their haste to bring us Thermageddon, journalists now simply manufacture the evidence. But wasn't the recent warming period - which started began in the mid-1970s and with temperatures peaking in the late-1990s - a contributory factor? Arctic Ice has recovered the past couple of years, but it's still down on 30 years ago.

As it happens, the thaw has helped, but isn't the primary reason, according to maritime historians. "In the past ten years voyages between the northern coast and Japan and Canada have demonstrated how modern ice-strengthened vessels and contemporary ice forecasting have extended the navigation season."

Ignore all that, however. If the BBC is to remain trusted, we can only conclude that these are phantom ships, failing to penetrate a previously impenetrable trade route, dropping off phantom cargo at phantom port towns.

More HERE (See the original for links)




Wise after the event

Warmists have just found that their models can be made to fit current climate events -- even if no model ever predicted what has been happening in the last 10 years. One wonders what else they will find in their models. I think it shows that you can get anything you like out of models -- except accurate predictions. If it was in the models all along, how come nobody predicted it? Note that small changes in the model assumptions -- say a reversal of the dubious assumptions about clouds -- would cause the models to predict global cooling. The latest attempt to wriggle out of the non-existent predictive skill of the models below

Do global temperature trends over the last decade falsify climate predictions?

By J. Knight, J. J. Kennedy, C. Folland, G. Harris, G. S. Jones, M. Palmer, D. Parker, A. Scaife, and P. Stott

Observations indicate that global temperature rise has slowed in the last decade (Fig. 2.8a). The least squares trend for January 1999 to December 2008 calculated from the HadCRUT3 dataset (Brohan et al. 2006) is +0.07±0.07°C decade–1—much less than the 0.18°C decade–1 recorded between 1979 and 2005 and the 0.2°C decade–1 expected in the next decade (IPCC; Solomon et al. 2007). This is despite a steady increase in radiative forcing as a result of human activities and has led some to question climate predictions of substantial twenty-first century warming (Lawson 2008; Carter 2008).

El Niño–Southern Oscillation is a strong driver of interannual global mean temperature variations. ENSO and non-ENSO contributions can be separated by the method of Thompson et al. (2008) (Fig. 2.8a). The trend in the ENSO-related component for 1999–2008 is +0.08±0.07°C decade–1, fully accounting for the overall observed trend. The trend after removing ENSO (the "ENSO-adjusted" trend) is 0.00°±0.05°C decade–1, implying much greater disagreement with anticipated global temperature rise.

We can place this apparent lack of warming in the context of natural climate fluctuations other than ENSO using twenty-first century simulations with the HadCM3 climate model (Gordon et al. 2000), which is typical of those used in the recent IPCC report (AR4; Solomon et al. 2007). Ensembles with different modifications to the physical parameters of the model (within known uncertainties) (Collins et al. 2006) are performed for several of the IPCC SRES emissions scenarios (Solomon et al. 2007). Ten of these simulations have a steady long-term rate of warming between 0.15° and 0.25ºC decade–1, close to the expected rate of 0.2ºC decade–1. ENSO-adjusted warming in the three surface temperature datasets over the last 2–25 yr continually lies within the 90% range of all similar-length ENSO-adjusted temperature changes in these simulations (Fig. 2.8b). Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.

The 10 model simulations (a total of 700 years of simulation) possess 17 nonoverlapping decades with trends in ENSO-adjusted global mean temperature within the uncertainty range of the observed 1999–2008 trend (−0.05° to 0.05°C decade–1). Over most of the globe, local surface temperature trends for 1999–2008 are statistically consistent with those in the 17 simulated decades (Fig. 2.8c). Field significance (Livezey and Chen 1983) is assessed by comparing the total area of inconsistent grid boxes with the range of similar area values derived by testing the consistency of trends in each simulated decade with those in the remaining simulated decades. The 5.5% of the data area that is inconsistent in the observed case is close to the median of this range of area values, indicating the differences are not field significant. Inconsistent trends in the midlatitude Southern Hemisphere strongly resemble the surface temperature pattern of the negative phase of the SAM (Ciasto and Thompson 2008), which did indeed show a negative trend in the last decade.

These results show that climate models possess internal mechanisms of variability capable of reproducing the current slowdown in global temperature rise. Other factors, such as data biases and the effect of the solar cycle (Haigh 2003), may also have contributed, although these results show that it is not essential to invoke these explanations. The simulations also produce an average increase of 2.0°C in twenty-first century global temperature, demonstrating that recent observational trends are not sufficient to discount predictions of substantial climate change and its significant and widespread impacts.

Given the likelihood that internal variability contributed to the slowing of global temperature rise in the last decade, we expect that warming will resume in the next few years, consistent with predictions from near-term climate forecasts (Smith et al. 2007; Haines et al. 2009). Improvements in such forecasts will give greater forewarning of future instances of temporary slowing and acceleration of global temperature rise, as predicted to occur in IPCC AR4 projections (Easterling and Wehner 2009).

SOURCE (Above is extracted from a PDF so there may be minor errors. See the original for graphics)






Self-censorship of climate skepticism in the Finnish media

An email from Hannu Tanskanen [hannu_tanskanen@yahoo.com]. With a few grammatical corrections. See his blog here (in a mixture of Finnish and English)

Finland has always been described as "model pupil" in the European Union. Not long ago the EU tried to issue a "directive" prohibiting critisism of "climate change", fortunately without success. But Finland, more papal than Pope himself, has applied this rule for a long time already.

In 2007 our Centre Party prime minister declared, that "it is time for the climate critics to shut their mouths". Consequences of this statement were soon obvious. Since 1989 and regularly between 2003-2008, I had been a free-lance science writer in Scandinavia's biggest popular technology publication TM Tekniikan Maailma -- and where just recently I wrote a large article on climate change, where I Iet two leading critical scientists express their opinions.

The editor in chief of TM changed in that same year and he fired me immediately without any explanation. Also the leading daily newspaper, HS Helsingin Sanomat, where I have had articles on science pages since 2003 refused to take any more of my articles. They even refused to publish my opinion on their readers' pages. Orwelliania was in 1984, but in the Finnish media it is in 2009 !





Another Greenie false prophet shown up for what he is

Tim Flannery must be running a close second to Paul Ehrlich by now. See the graphic first below about Perth's "declining" water supplies and after that a current picture of the Mundaring Weir in the Perth area (The difference between a weir and a dam is that water does not flow over a dam). Dam and weir levels are up in most of Australia at the moment. Fuller version of the first graphic here. The article has gone offline at its original source, "The West Australian" newspaper (originally June 25, 2004) but some pesky people keep copies of things. Tim should stick to fossils. He knows something about them.



A LONG spell of winter rain in Perth's catchment areas has lifted the city's dams to their highest level in almost a decade. Water Corporation spokesman Phil Kneebone today said the West Australian Government's winter sprinkler ban and consistent winter rainfall had helped fill dams to more than 49 per cent capacity. This compares with levels around 30 per cent before the seasonal winter rains arrived in June.

The Bureau of Meteorology said Perth and its surrounds had recorded rain on all but one day this month - the longest recorded stretch of daily September rainfall since 1915. However, this year's total rainfall of 536.8mm is still well below the city's average of 766mm to the end of September. A weather bureau spokesman said much heavier falls had been received in the catchment areas of the Perth hills and Mr Kneebone said he expected dams to rise above their current volume of 195.7 billion litres.

"I expect they will reach more than 50 per cent capacity by the end of the week," Mr Kneebone said. "It is easily the most water we have had in the dams, in any year, since 2000."

Mr Kneebone said the daily water consumption over the past week was down 16 per cent from this time last year. He said the sprinkler ban had directly contributed to a saving of 50 million litres of water a day, enough to fill about 22 Olympic swimming pools. "We currently have enough to get through an extra 50 hot summer days," he said. "It's great to see the community showing restraint with water use. "We will be able to give our biggest ground water source, the Gnangara Mound, a rest, which is also good news."

SOURCE

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