Hansen's Extrapolations Are Pure Fiction



GISS extrapolated that the entire region north of 80N was more than 2C above the 1958-2002 average in May, despite the fact that they have essentially no data there.

DMI actually has data north of 80N, and they showed May as below the 1958-2002 average.



GISS fabricates big numbers in the Arctic, which has the effect of disproportionately dragging the global temperature upwards. Even so, they still can’t get temperatures up to scenario C.

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Global warming, 1914 style

"Rapid reduction of ice at both poles"



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10 Reasons to be Cheerful About the Coming New Ice Age

James Delingpole

It’s official: a new Ice Age is on its way. In what has been described as “the science story of the century”, heavyweight US solar physicists have announced that the sun is heading for a prolonged period of low activity. This makes global cooling a much more plausible prospect in the next few decades than global warming. Indeed, it might even usher in a lengthy period of climate grimness such as we saw during the Maunder Minimum (when Ice Fairs were held on the Thames) or the Dalton Minimum (which brought us such delights as the 1816 Year Without A Summer).

Here’s how Watts Up With That reports the bad news:

A missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest period even as it is acting up for the first time in years, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, independent studies of the solar interior, visible surface, and the corona indicate that the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all…..

….“This is highly unusual and unexpected,” Dr. Frank Hill, associate director of the NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network, said of the results. “But the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.”

Oh dear. Or is it “Oh dear?”. Could there yet be a glimmer of hope and joy amid this black, treacly splurge of impending climate doom?

Of course there could, and here are just a few reasons why we should welcome the arrival of the imminent Ice Age.

1. Well I’ve never ice-skated on the Thames. Have you? Also, I’d be quite interested to hear what that “expert” has to say: the one at Alan Howard’s Downing College climate conference who blithely assured us that 17th frost fairs had NOTHING to do with the Little Ice Age. (It was all because the Thames flowed in a much more turgid way back then, apparently….)

2. People will no longer merely be mildly irritated at the way their landscape has been disfigured by bat-chomping eco-crucifixes for rent-seeking toffs (aka wind farms) in the name of saving us from “global warming.” They will be incandescent. Lynch-mob incandescent.

3. As the starving polar bears march southward on the new sheet ice now extending from the North Pole to Gibraltar, desperate citizens will be forced to make tough decisions about which sacrificial victim should be fed next to the ravening beasts so that they leave the rest of us alone. Happily I have a suggestion. His name is Richard Kemp and – apparently – he is Vice Chairman of the Local Government Association. And among his taxpayer-funded functions – again, apparently – is to give quotes to newspapers telling us how grateful and happy we should be that our bins will now be emptied less often.

He said: “Weekly rubbish collection is dead and finished. I’m delighted reason has prevailed. It’s not what most local people want, it’s not what most local councils want and it’s certainly not what the advisers want. What local people want is a system that helps maximise recycling and helps to promote healthy living.”

Feed, my hungry ursine brothers! Feed!

4. Never in our lifetimes will we have to read another tendentious story about how daffodils are coming up three months earlier than usual/lambs are being born in December instead of spring/wildebeeste could soon be migrating across Salisbury Plain as a result of “global warming.”

5. The 10-foot maneating Oceanic Whitetips which have been drawn to Cornwall’s waters by the Concept Formerly Known As Global Warming will now be replaced by 30 foot maneating Greenland sharks. Which will kind of serve the Cornish right for being such impassioned early adopters of wind farms.

6. New edicts will be issued by world leaders including President Ryan of the US, Prime Minister Farage of Great Britain and Aussie premier Plimer, scrapping High Speed Rail, abandoning all renewable energy schemes (apart from, maybe, hydroelectric) and making the ownership of 4 x 4s or similar gas-guzzling vehicles compulsory by 2015. Stringent punishments to be introduced for those whose carbon footprint falls below a certain agreed minimum level.

7. Monbiot* the Musical (libretto: James Delingpole; music: James MacMillan) – a light-hearted celebration of one of the late 20th century’s great comic figures* – opens simultaneously on Broadway and in the West End to enormous acclaim.

8. Woolly mammoth steaks are said to be surprisingly delicious. They taste like chicken, apparently.

9. Britain now stands a reasonable chance of cleaning up in the medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics. As, unfortunately, do Jamaica, Bora Bora, Egypt and, of course, the 2022 Olympics’ host nation, Dubai.

10. The Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri, James Hansen, Paul Ehrlich, David Cameron, Leonardo Di Caprio, Ed Begley Jr, Sir P Nurse of the Royal Society and Britain’s second most famous celebrity mathematician Simon Singh will be among the many former Warmists who put their names to a grovelling apology published in all the world’s newspapers explaining how incredibly bad and stupid they feel for all the economic damage they have inflicted, all the careers ruined, all the unnecessary fear promoted as a result of their misguided promotion of the “Man-Made Global Warming” myth. Yeah, right. Hell will freeze over before that happens. But wait: what are all those spike-tailed, horned, red figures doing gliding on blades across the surface of the Styx?

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Australian broadcaster and friends versus Svensmark

Well-known German Warmists use simplistic theory to show that history was wrong. Svensmark uses better theory to explain why history is right

ABC belatedly reported (borrowing from AFP) on a study that suggests the sun is entering a quiet period similar to the Maunder Minimum, which was a 70-year period when hardly any sunspots were observed between 1645 and 1715, a period known as the 'Little Ice Age'. ABC's report provided reference to a recent study by Georg Feulner and Stefan Rahmstorf based on the results of climate modelling that indicated the potential affect on global temperatures may not be significant with just "a 0.3°C dip by 2100 compared to normal solar fluctuations."

In the interests of balance (lacking in the ABC's report) we decided to ask a real solar scientist. It seems the impact of reduced solar activity may be more significant than the ABC's one sided report suggesting more research is required. Correspondence below:

Dear Dr Svensmark,

ABC News cite a paper by Georg Feulner and Stefan Rahmstorf to suggest that a solar mimnimum would reduce global temperatures by 0.3 degrees by 2100. see GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 37, L05707, 5 PP., 2010 doi:10.1029/2010GL042710 On the effect of a new grand minimum of solar activity on the future climate on Earth

"Here we use a coupled climate model to explore the effect of a 21st-century grand minimum on future global temperatures, finding a moderate temperature offset of no more than −0.3°C in the year 2100 relative to a scenario with solar activity similar to recent decades. This temperature decrease is much smaller than the warming expected from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century."

I am interested in your opinion on the evidence for a future solar minimum based on recent results in the news and its effect on global temperature for a news story.

Dear Marc Hendrickx,

I have had a quick look at the paper, and as far as I can see the authors are only looking at solar irradiance changes, and effects like the one that I have been involved in -- like an amplification of the solar signal caused by clouds and cosmic ray modulation -- is not taken into account.

We known with good confidence that the terrestrial response to the solar signal is 3-7 times larger than from solar irradiance alone (see for example the work of Nir Shaviv, attached-Using the oceans as a calorimeter to quantify the solar radiative forcing-doi:10.1029/2007JA012989).

Now if such effects are taken into account the result would be very different (larger solar influence). So I do not think that the present work is particularly helpful in understanding the solar impact in the near future. It is only an estimate of the impact of solar irradiance as determined from numerical modeling. In the coming years the sun will show by itself how important it is.

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Australian Labor Party has fingers crossed that they can eventually sell a carbon tax to the electorate

But it's not looking good so far

THERE'S a sense of a parallel universe happening in Canberra, where the carbon-pricing debate is very up close and personal. Meetings upon meetings are held among politicians, staffers and bureaucrats at what is the business end of an almost five-month process. People from all sides report progress, albeit often agonisingly slow.

At the same time, Tony Abbott's relentless, 24/7 campaign against the carbon tax - as the "market mechanism" is universally and somewhat misleadingly known - grinds on.

To many observers who spend their thankless days inside Malcolm Fraser's monumental Parliament House there is progress, although some pointy, potentially deal-breaking issues are emerging and being fought over.

The idea the Government is "making ground" in the debate is becoming the accepted wisdom, but this bubble is soon burst after just a few conversations in any of the capital cities around Australia.

Among voters, Abbott is well and truly winning the carbon tax debate. Almost any discussion about anything in national politics quickly turns to a gripe about the proposed action on climate change. "You talk to anyone in the street and after the first sentence they'll say 'And I don't like the carbon tax'," says one Labor MP. "And because we haven't got any detail to put to them, their fears and concerns just hang there."

Every day he is in Canberra, Abbott finds a new way to attack the tax proposal. He goes to every kind of shop - from bakers to greengrocers to cafes - and every small workshop that makes things ("This tax will kill manufacturing in Australia," he warns) and even to childcare centres, which he claims will have to increase fees because of higher power bills.

When Parliament is not sitting Abbott takes this never-ending election campaign on the road, taking his case to factories, mines and any other location which has large numbers of people who in days gone by might have looked like Labor voters.

He's getting a warm reception - something acknowledged tacitly by the two unions most likely to have members affected by a carbon price, the Australian Workers Union and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, which are both lobbying to minimise any impact on jobs.

Coalition strategists say Abbott's carbon tax campaign is cutting through and a series of important political messages are sticking. "The public are acutely aware of anything that adds to their cost of living at the moment - everyone feels they are running fast just to stand still in dealing with the weekly bills," says one Liberal official. "Everyone hates new taxes and have locked on to the idea of a carbon tax like a laser. They just don't like the idea which makes them hungry for information."

Because it is Abbott who's talking about the carbon tax the most, he appears to have more detail even if, as the Government says, it is highly speculative and may not match the reality if and when the carbon scheme is decided.

Abbott, who is a campaign manager's dream with a steely discipline to sticking with simple, punchy lines, has drilled three propositions into the collective consciousness of the electorate. People believe a carbon price will be a new tax on everything (a stunningly simple line first coined by Queensland Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce).

The idea that no matter what the starting price is for carbon - expected to be $20 a tonne of emitted carbon at most - it will go up year after year. This is a feature of a market mechanism to price carbon although, as the Europeans have found, the price can also go down.

The third killer line Abbott has delivered is that any compensation will disappear as quickly as it's given out.

The Government acknowledges Abbott is winning the carbon war but they remain confident that if they clinch a deal with the Greens (the other key Independents, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, are ready to sign up to the basic design of the scheme) they will be able to match the Coalition's arguments. "No one is kidding themselves people don't hate the idea of a carbon tax right now," a senior government figure says. "But in 18 months the story could be very different - at least we hope it will be."

A senior minister involved in the negotiations with the Greens and Independents says there will be plenty of hard factual information to push back against Abbott's campaign. "The policy is solid with much of the work having been done when we designed the carbon pollution reduction scheme in 2009," the minister says. "We can answer every point Abbott is making and, as long as people are engaged, we think it will hit home."

More here





Australian Labor Party apes Europe -- providing the smoke and mirrors for a carbon tax

IF a new federal tax of $11.6 billion represents economic reform, then the Australian political culture has changed fundamentally, and economic reform means roughly the opposite of what it meant under Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard.

"First, rectify the names," as Confucius said. The complete inversion of the language of economic reform under the Gillard government, especially in relation to the proposed carbon tax, is a clue to the much more fundamental question at hand.

Australia faces a profound and defining strategic choice. The carbon tax is part of that choice. Our choice is not, as international relations experts sometimes allege, between the US and China. Rather, it is whether Australia is to refashion the culture of its politics, economy and society along European lines or to continue the path we have generally followed of being somewhere along the US-East Asian continuum.

For some decades, Australia has sat between the US and Europe on a range of social, economic and cultural indicators. We provide a social safety net more generous than the US but less comprehensive than that offered by European Union nations. We are more regulated than the US, less regulated than Europe. The state is a bigger part of our life, and our economy, than in the US, but a smaller part than in Europe.

The Gillard government is taking us down a European road. The carbon tax is a part of that, both in substance and in the style of its politics.

The Rudd and Gillard governments have been big-spending, budget-deficit governments. In Labor's first term, the justification was the global financial crisis. If the carbon tax passes at $26 a tonne, the federal government will have a magnificent new gusher of money to spend, for redistribution, social policy, whatever.

The US has a chronic budget deficit but does not embrace big government as an ideal.

Gillard's is a highly regulatory government. Re-regulating industrial relations, a la Europe, is central to this.

In the National Broadband Network the government is seeking to create a major, state-owned corporation, along classically European lines.

Economic reform for the past 30 years has meant deregulation, privatisation, surplus or balanced budgets, low inflation and free trade. It also has meant welfare reform to cut long-term welfare dependency. In Europe, this never caught on. Yet just as the Gillard government is moving decisively down the European road, the European model itself is in catastrophic collapse. The model can no longer sustain itself.

The common European currency, the euro, is a central cause of the inability of peripheral European states such as Greece to respond with policy flexibility through measures such as devaluation. Numerous European nations are on the brink of debt default. Germany is in a rolling process of bailout. Unemployment is 20 per cent in Spain, 13 per cent in Greece, 11 per cent in Portugal, 10 per cent across the euro area.

Europe has made a comprehensive mess of illegal immigration, leading disenfranchised voters to parties of the far Right.

Europe plays a role in our carbon tax debate in several ways. Bizarrely, it is the government's model. The latest report by Ross Garnaut constantly extols Europe's emissions trading scheme.

Europe also sends us a steady stream of sanctimonious officials and busybodies to tell us our climate change policies are inadequate.

Even more important, perhaps unconsciously, the culture of European politics has seeped into the Gillard government's management of the carbon tax debate.

Ashton Calvert, a former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who served both Labor and Liberal governments, was perhaps the brainiest official I have met. He told me once that the EU was a menace to Australia in a quite specific way. The EU vastly over-regulated itself and thus suffered enormous, unnecessary, economic costs. It then tried to impose those costs on everybody else by transforming them into international norms and enforcing them by treaty.

The US was big enough to ignore the EU. Asian nations didn't feel bound by EU norms. But Australia and Canada were the two nations, both with wildly different economic structures from Europe, likeliest to suffer from European political imperialism.

There is always something undemocratic and tricky about the EU. If at all possible, it removes issues from democratic political bodies and puts them in the hands of Euro-bureaucrats. This fits perfectly with Garnaut's proposal that Australia's carbon reduction targets should be set by "independent", but of course appointed, officials.

The Gillard government has been consistently tricky, in a very European way, in the politics of the carbon tax. It ruled out a carbon tax before the election last year. Then it decided to introduce one three years before the voters could pass a judgment on it.

Meanwhile, it has spent a vast fortune of taxpayers' money on a series of government bodies, headed by Garnaut, Tim Flannery and other long-term friends of the Labor Party, to conduct an incessant campaign of indoctrination in favour of government policy.

With Australia having a very European-style public broadcaster in the ABC, which is ideologically in favour of the carbon tax and inherently inclined to accept the Garnauts and Flannerys as embodying a kind of wisdom and virtue above politics, this is a plausibly effective strategy.

It is much less a strategy of persuasion, however, and much more a strategy of coercion. Indeed, Garnaut rejoiced in a speech at the "narrowing" of the debate in recent months.

Now the government has gone a step further, announcing a $12 million taxpayer-funded advertising campaign to support the carbon tax. This seems to be in addition to a further $13m set aside in the budget for a similar process.

It is perfectly true that the Howard government spent money in exactly the same way. It was an anti-democratic abuse of process when Howard did it and it is an anti-democratic abuse of process now.

And of course it embodies a central paradox. If it is so overwhelmingly clear that the best way to respond to the still uncertain science of climate change is through a carbon tax, then why is the Gillard government so hopelessly incapable of winning the argument through its own powers of persuasion?

At the same time, elite opinion has simply rubbished and rejected the Coalition's direct action plans to reduce carbon emissions by 5 per cent. There is hardly a single person in Australia who knows more about this subject than the opposition's Greg Hunt, who has been studying it for many years. Yet the elite media, overwhelmed by Garnaut, Flannery and limitless other pro-government propaganda, has not given his plans any serious consideration.

But here is a deeper paradox still. Garnaut's latest report is a partisan abuse of process. It is an extremely flawed document that is misleading about the international scene. It pretends the whole world is as obsessed with reducing greenhouse gas as Garnaut himself is. The strategic object of this deception is obvious.

If the Australian people can be convinced that they alone, among all the nations of the world, do not take this problem with the proper seriousness, that they alone are redneck enemies of "economic reform", then they might be shamed into supporting a carbon tax. They might even be threatened into it.

Trade Minister Craig Emerson this week told parliament that if Australia didn't have a carbon tax then other nations would impose punitive tariffs on us.

But other nations here can only mean Europe, and it would have to impose similar tariffs on the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea and all the many other nations that do not have carbon taxes.

Indeed, as the infinitely better Productivity Commission report noted: "No country imposes an economy-wide tax on greenhouse gases or has in place an economy-wide ETS."

Is it not possible there are sensible reasons no other country has an economy-wide carbon tax?

But to sustain the fiction that the rest of the world is obsessed with climate change and acting with resolution and boldness, Garnaut must take the declaratory aspiration of every other nation as though it were settled, concrete policy.

Thus Garnaut declares: "US officials at the highest levels state that the emissions reduction target will be met, despite the absence of a national market-based instrument for securing that result."

This is a heroic, indeed ludicrous, position. But here is the larger paradox. Garnaut is stating with his usual faux-infallibility that the US, where there is absolutely no bipartisan support for action, will succeed absolutely with its direct action plans. But at the same time, the routine assumption of all Garnaut's media acolytes is that Tony Abbott's direct action plan is a ridiculous fraud.

In its first six years of operation, the EU ETS has raised just $2.5bn and covered only a small part of the economy. That means the European ETS has not been central to carbon reductions in Europe.

In fact, as usual, the Europeans rigged this process from the start. They chose 1990 as their base year because that was the year of peak European emissions. The decommissioning of east European industry, the conversion in Britain from coal to gas, and the presence of nuclear power, none of which involved any sacrifice, allowed the European emissions reduction.

Even the British commitment to halve greenhouse emissions by 2025 is much less than meets the eye. Prime Minister David Cameron has made it clear he has an escape clause. This commitment will be reviewed in 2014 and if the rest of Europe is not on the same path, a highly unlikely eventuality, Britain will change its course.

In Australia the polls do not support a carbon tax. Like the US, our democracy is vigorous and the public has a history of rejecting elite solutions if they are costly and unpractical, and provided they are opposed by a portion of the mainstream political parties.

It may not be designed for this purpose but the carbon tax is part of a combination of policies that would massively increase the size of the state, bring much greater regulation to economic life, entrench European economic and political norms, and demonstrate a way for voters to be browbeaten into acceptance of a policy they don't like.

The democratic way to win a policy argument is to champion it clearly, argue for it convincingly and win an election. The European way, with its tricks and deceits, is much less attractive, and generally produces much less satisfactory policy.

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