When glaciers are growing, it is due to special factors.  When they are shrinking it is due to global warming

The fact of the matter is that they grow and shrink randomly

A summer 'vortex' of cold air over the Karakoram, a large mountain range spanning the borders of India, Pakistan, and China, is causing the glaciers in the region to grow in spite of global warming, scientists have shown.

"While most glaciers are retreating as a result of global warming, the glaciers of the Karakoram range in South Asia are stable or even growing," said study co-author Hayley Fowler, Professor at Newcastle University in Britain.

In their study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the team reported the identification of a large scale circulation system -- or vortex -- centred over the Karakoram.

In winter, the vortex affects the temperature over the whole 2,000-kilometre mountain range, but in the summer the vortex contracts and has an effect only over the Karakoram and western Pamir, said the study.

This induces an anomalous cooling in summer which is different to the warming seen over the rest of the Himalayas.

This Karakoram vortex goes some way to explaining why the glaciers in this region are behaving differently to those in most other parts of the world, Fowler said.

The Karakoram anomaly was first described in 2005 and since then, scientists have been trying to determine what might be causing the expansion of glaciers in the region -- which includes the world's second tallest K2 mountain peak.

Acting like a counter-weighted temperature control, the unique summer interaction of the Karakoram vortex and the South Asian Monsoon causes temperatures in the Karakoram and Pamir to cool while those in the Central and Eastern Himalayas are warming, and vice versa, according to the study.

"This vortex provides an important temperature control," lead author of the study Nathan Forsythe of Newcastle University said.

"It is, therefore, important to look at how it has changed and influenced temperature over the last century so we can better understand how a change in the system might affect future climate," Forsythe said.

"This is of huge importance in terms of food security because of the large populations that rely on water resources from snow and ice melt from the mountainous catchments to grow their irrigated crops in the Indus Plains of the Sindh and Punjab states and provinces of Pakistan and India," Forsythe added

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UK: Peter Hitchens: The REAL villain behind your surging electricity bill

I feel sorry for British Gas, attacked for raising the price of electricity. I still find it confusing a gas company sells electricity, but the facts are quite simple.

British Gas and the other power companies are raising charges because we have a mad Government. Under New Labour’s unhinged Climate Change Act, backed by the Tories and virtually unopposed in Parliament, we are steering straight into an iceberg.

Perfectly good coal-fired power stations all over the country are being shut down and blown up so they can’t be reopened, because of crazed Green regulations.

In some cases, they are being converted to burning wood chips imported from the USA. If this did any good (which is, er, unproven) it would be immediately cancelled out by the huge number of new coal-fired power stations recently built in India and China.

Our nuclear generators are slowly dying. Plans to replace them are hopelessly behind. The Government assumed that the growing gap between what we use and what we generate would be met by new gas-fired stations, but nobody has built them.

So instead, it hopes to meet the need with French nuclear electricity brought under the Channel, which we can’t rely on if the French need it more; and on power generated by wind, which doesn’t blow all the time, and sun which doesn’t shine all the time.

And it is the cost of subsidising the sun and wind power which is forcing up electricity prices. So is the need to link remote windmills expensively to the grid. There’s also the cost of setting up special parks of diesel generators to prevent power cuts if all else fails.

Diesel? Yes, the devilish fuel we’re trying to drive off the roads could be what saves you from a Christmas blackout.

Currently, the Green levy, the main reason for the latest price rise, makes up at least £73 of an average £562 annual electricity bill. It’s going to go up a lot more. I think the power companies should put this on their bills in big letters. Then Parliament might be forced to rethink its mad warmist dogma, and follow a sane power policy.

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RECORD DAY FOR POLAR BEAR SIGHTINGS AT SEAL RIVER

Not "endangered" then?

Our first record bear day on Birds, Bears and Belugas started after having lunch down by the Seal River.

The mud was flying as we traversed the shoreline on our ATV tour to the mouth of the river. Once there, we enjoyed a spectacular lunch of tomato bisque and egg salad filling in a sundried tomato wrap, followed by espresso with lemon raspberry cupcakes.

Following lunch, we took a short walk to the shore of the river and soon saw a mother and COY (cub of the year). We realized as she walked by us that our coolers, containing the remains of our lunch, were being threatened by her interests. We discouraged that, so instead she decided to lie down in front of us to nurse her cub!

We backed off to see if we could find another bear and lo and behold, around the corner, a mother and two COYS had followed the tracks of the first bears! Mother was a big bear and her cubs looked healthy, but she soon wandered into the bushes and we lost sight of her.

We were again focused on the nursing Mom when another single bear surprised us from the bushes. We were surrounded, but the single bear backed off to the sound of Andy clapping his hands, entered the water and swam off to the north. Then the Mom and two cubs reappeared, looking off to the west, and we soon noticed that she had her eye on another big male bear that was moving with a calorie conserving gait.

As we were watching the big male, another smaller male passed by the bigger male and disappeared into the bushes. Now the second Mom with the two cubs settled down to nurse in front of us. She finished nursing and decided to lie down, but was looking behind her, scenting.

Soon the young male came out from behind the cabin and spooked her. He circled around past her and pushed her towards our group. We stood up and told her she couldn’t come any closer, and she trotted by us, looking over her shoulder and hissing at the male bear, who was by now chasing her, very excited and interested.

She would have none of that. She ran off into the water with her cubs and swam straight out, heading south. Andy admonished the other bear to leave her alone. The bear skidded to a stop and scented around her trail. He was wound up and decided our group looked more interesting. The guides discouraged him with their superior intellect and he eventually thought better of it and wandered off.

The big male who had witnessed all of this lifted his head at all the excitement and wandered in for a look of his own. While at a slow, purposeful gait, he checked us out and then settled down into a picturesque bed of yellow mastodon flowers alongside some seaside chamomile. At the same time, three other bears appeared, two of them running from a huge male across the river.

This brought our total bear count for the day to 11, and set a new record for polar bear sightings on a single day at Seal River Heritage Lodge this season!

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Gore’s sequel comes in dismal 15th at box office

Former Vice President Al Gore’s new film, “An Inconvenient Sequel”, came in a dismal 15th this weekend at U.S. theaters, according to Box Office Mojo.

Gore’s defenders have been quick to blame Paramount Pictures for the dismal performance of Gore’s sequel. “Al Gore Gets Ripped Off Again,” screamed the headline of D.R. Tucker in Washington Monthly.  “This was not supposed to happen,” Tucker wrote, adding, “he should have demanded a recount.”

“Sadly, the box-office under-performance of An Inconvenient Sequel will be seized upon by climate-change deniers as ‘proof’ that Americans don’t really care about this issue,” Tucker wrote.

According to Deadline Hollywood, Gore’s sequel “grossed $900K, averaging $5,000 (per screen). That brought its cume (cumulative) over seven figures, landing at $1,052,000. Its weekend gross placed it 15th in the overall box office as of Sunday morning.

 Paramount said it will expand the title to over 500 locations next weekend. Update: UK Daily Mail reports that Gore’s sequel made “less than original – despite appearing on more than TWICE as many screens.”

The box office performance will disappoint Gore, who had urged his followers to pack movie theaters to send a message to “Trump and the other climate deniers.” “By filling theaters, we can show Donald Trump and the other climate deniers in the White House that the American people are committed to climate action –– no matter what they do, say, or tweet!” Gore wrote in an email alert sent to his supporters on Friday August 4th, the day of his nationwide opening.

Many of the political left no longer want to see Gore as the face of the global warming movement.

Gore’s climate claims are failing to materialize as many of his assertions are exactly the opposite of the current climate data.

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Amazing! A Solid Journalism Academic

The adage that 'those who can't do teach' might have been uttered with our universities' media faculties in mind. There is at least one exception, however, a Wollongong lecturer who gets students to check facts, especially about climate-change claims. Sadly, he is retiring

blackall smallCan you even imagine it! A  journalism lecturer  shows students how to fact-check the climate alarmists’ wild claims and doom-laden forecasts. And he publishes a peer-reviewed commentary, Environmental  Reporting in a Post Truth World, analysing how the media ignores research that runs contrary to the alarmist narrative.

Lordy! How can this fellow get away with it in our all-pervading Left-alarmist academic establishment?

Meet Dr David Blackall (above), senior lecturer in journalism at Wollongong University. His paper is in the journal Asia Pacific  Media Educator. But since he’s in the process of retiring after 25 years with the university, he can rock the boat without fearing for his career prospects.[1]

“I’m packing up my office right now,” he tells Quadrant Online. “I haven’t had any backlash, even though the climate debate seems to be getting increasingly toxic and nasty. Younger academics can’t call out the fake news on climate like I can, because they’d risk their jobs and mortgages.”

The Wollongong Bachelor of Journalism course takes in about 80 entrants a year, plus others from an allied course, Bachelor of Communication and Media Studies. Blackall’s first degree is a Bachelor of Science (Agriculture), and he taught senior HSC agriculture, biology, physics and chemistry for ten years into the 1980s. This broad science background advantages him over non-science journalism academics, and over scientists so over-specialised that they miss the big picture.

Blackall is an ardent conservationist of biodiversity. He has his own 16ha wildlife  refuge reserve ‘Nadjunuga’ at Cambewarra  Mountain, previously a university field station, which he has managed for nearly 40 years. He has also taught and practiced investigative journalism, and last year co-authored an FOI-based study in the Lawyers Alliance journal Precedent on the Ponzi-style fraud and collapse of the Trio Capital Group during 2003-10.

The Blackall Post Truth paper has been re-blogged by leading European sceptic Pierre Gosselin, who asks, “Would it be so difficult for journalists to actually seek scientific verification of their claims before publishing? Or is the pursuit of real-world scientific confirmation too much to expect from journalists and media sources bent on advancing an agenda in this ‘Post Truth World’?”

Blackall writes that journalism students can be defensive about climate because they want careers in corporate media where the “greenhouse warming” narrative holds sway. “Contrary but accurate science journalism  must be generated for balancing societal discourse and demonstrating the Earth’s natural variability,” he writes. Journalists fail to verify facts, including that polar bear populations are increasing, contrary to what he calls the ‘emotional propaganda’ and ‘fake news’ of alarmists.

To deflect being labelled a ‘climate denier’, he gives students assignments on hypotheticals such as the impact of deforestation on clouds and climate. “In previous epochs, CO2 levels were around 400ppm, as they are now, but never in human history has the Earth’s surface been as denuded,” he writes. He cites a study this year that CO2 emissions from land-use changes –  such as tree harvesting and clearing for shifting  agriculture – have been substantially under-estimated.

“However, as a journalism educator, I also recognise that my view, along with others, must be open to challenge both within the scientific community and in the court of public opinion,” he continues.

“It is my responsibility to provide my students with the research skills they need to question – and test – the arguments put forward by key players in any debate.  Given the complexity of the climate warming debate, and the contested nature of the science that underpins both sides, this will provide challenges well into the future.  It is a challenge our students should relish, particularly in an era when they are constantly being bombarded with ‘fake news’ and so-called ‘alternative facts’.

“To do so, they need to understand the science. If they don’t, they need to at least understand  the key players in the debate and what is motivating them. They need to be prepared to question these people and to look beyond their arguments to the agendas that may be driving them. If they don’t, we must be reconciled to a future in which ‘fake news’ becomes the norm.”

He alerts his students to fake climate pictures, such as the use by Reuters of a 2010 photo-shopped image of two Adelie penguins on a block of melting Antarctic ice. The same faked picture (below) had also been used in 2013 to illustrate arctic warming (notwithstanding that penguins aren’t found in the Arctic). He also directs students to look into the  dubious ‘pause-busting” paper by Tom Karl of NOAA, timed to influence the 2015 Paris climate summit. “There are many agendas at play, with careers at stake,” he says.

Blackall’s paper queries why journalists fail to report the widening gap between climate models’ temperature forecasts and actual temperatures. Similarly, they don’t report the non-acceleration of sea-level rise, a big problem for the alarmist narrative.

His main argument is that human-caused greenhouse gases are not the main source of climate change, as claimed by the climate establishment.  The flat-lining of global temperatures in the past two decades despite massive CO2 increases is an obvious problem for the orthodox narrative, he says. There are multiple interacting and little-understood natural causes, but computer modelling is privileged over other relevant disciplines, such as geology. Alarmists play down the major uncertainties and use ‘consensus’ as a culture of gatekeeping  against contrary views. “Then, and dangerously, dissenters are silenced so that chosen and ‘necessary’ discourses arrive in journals, conferences and boardrooms,” he writes.

Blackall outed himself as a climate sceptic nearly a decade ago. In a 2010 paper also published in Asia Pacific Media Educator   (“Anti-terrorism, climate change and ‘dog whistle’ journalism”) he wrote of the compliant mainstream news media fanning fears on behalf of governments about imaginary climate catastrophes.[2]

Educators of journalists need to give students double skills – of integrity and fearlessness, plus the ability to maintain employability in the mainstream media, he wrote. The students need to become ‘highly adept chameleons’ to further their careers. They are given ‘hypotheticals’ requiring checking narratives against science literature. But the drafts must also be written conservatively. “No newspaper would run anything too removed from the dominant view on climate variability,” Blackall continued.

The media seemed unable to do routine internet searching to act as a ‘watchdog’ on government. This was reflected in its ‘advocacy journalism’ about the 2009 Copenhagen summit and downplaying of the Climategate email leaks, he wrote. [3]

In this paper he was prescient in highlighting the corrupted temperature  data relied on for the alarmist narrative and modelling –  including data from non-existent weather stations and stations affected by the non-CO2 urban heat island effects. In contrast, rural stations typically showed decades of consistent temperatures, he said. “News media have failed to explain or examine  these simple anomalies,” he complained. He also instanced floods being blamed by media on climate change when  the immediate cause was irresponsible local activities upstream, including tree-felling and mismanagement of dams.

He argued that without acutely educated scepticism, journalism graduates fall prey to the seductive and political tune of the dog whistle, such as believing the myth of a ‘climate consensus’.

Blackall’s arguments can be verified by  journalists’ climate ignorance in their use of the nonsense propaganda phrase “carbon pollution” when they actually mean “CO2 emissions”. Not one in a hundred journalists who quote the so-called “97% consensus” on climate alarm would be aware that the John Cook (UQ) study actually found that only 0.3% of 12,000 studies supported the IPCC line that more than half the past 60 years’ warming is human-caused.

Blackall’s critique of journalists can be tested against The Age (Garry Maddox) and The Australian (Rosemary Neill) stories last weekend about Al Gore marketing his climate-alarm film An Inconvenient Sequel in Melbourne.  Neither thought it worth mentioning that anti-emissions campaigner Gore inhabits a 20-room house (one of his three homes) whose pool heating alone uses as much electricity as six average US homes, and whose total electricity consumption is that of 21 normal residences.[4] The Age’s Maddox did not mention that Gore and his business partner from Goldman Sachs, according to Forbes, made nearly $US220m in carbon trading profits from 2008-2011.

The Australian’s Neill commendably reported the accusations of Gore’s enrichment via green schemes, and unlike Maddox, she drew attention to the UK High Court’s 2007 finding of nine scientific and other errors in Gore’s first film. The court also ruled that the film’s partisan stance made it inappropriate for UK school children unless accompanied by balancing  material. Neill should have queried why Gore had not corrected the nine errors or issued an errata, instead permitting the flawed film to mislead further millions of students. The film even asserts in its ignorance that some Pacific nations “have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”

The Australian, via ex-ABC chair Maurice Newman, reported that Gore’s opposite number, top US sceptic blogger Marc Morano, was in Melbourne concurrently with Gore and promoting his own film Climate Hustle. The Age and the ABC ignored Morano (while the ABC gave Gore blanket coverage) but Andrew Bolt (Herald Sun) gave Morano a prominent interview.

Dr Blackall’s retirement is a loss to journalist education. Let’s hope there are others like him out there, with the guts, smarts and integrity to take on the “kindergarten science” of climate alarm.

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