2007: WARMEST YEAR PREDICTIONS AND DATA THAT HASN'T YET BEEN MEASURED

An email below to Benny Peiser from David Whitehouse [david@davidwhitehouse.com]

With just a few weeks to go it's looking like 2007 will be the coolest year this century and possibly the coolest since 1995. If so then one more year like this and we will begin to have enough statistical information to speculate about a downward trend, though a few more years will be better. With this in mind may I remind readers what the UK Met Office predicted on 4th January 2007:

"2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998, say climate-change experts at the Met Office. Global temperature for 2007 is expected to be 0.54 øC above the long-term (1961-1990) average of 14.0 øC; There is a 60% probability that 2007 will be as warm or warmer than the current warmest year (1998 was +0.52 øC above the long-term 1961-1990 average)."

But the most amazing sentence in their prediction is this:

Katie Hopkins from Met Office Consulting said: "This new information represents another warning that climate change is happening around the world. Our work in the climate change consultancy team applies Met Office research to help businesses mitigate against risk and adapt at a strategic level for success in the new environment."

I wasn't aware that a "prediction" represents "new information." Well, perhaps it does to a certain breed of consultant. I wonder if the Met Office's clients will ask for their money back if the Met Office's prediction proved way off the mark?

My article in the independent about the forthcoming solar cycle 24 has attracted much comment and I'm glad it's a talking point. However, I am rather disappointed by the quality of the letter complaining about it in today's Independent:

Sir: Contrary to the claim by David Whitehouse (Extra, 5 December) that the sun could save us from global warming, the sun would have to go through an unprecedented decline in activity to significantly mitigate the warming that is projected from the continuing emissions of greenhouse gases.

While the sun has likely played a role, together with other natural influences, the recent assessment by the IPCC concluded that the increase in global surface temperatures over the past 50 years has been predominantly associated with increases in greenhouse gases, partially offset by other pollutants from human activities.

Solar activity, as measured by sunspots, peaked in the late 1950s, and has been fairly stable over the past 30 years. In addition, recent research suggests that volcanic eruptions may have as big or bigger influence on cooler periods, such as the so called "Little Ice Age", than solar activity.

Over the next century, warming from human-induced greenhouse gases is likely to dwarf any cooling from changes in the sun, even assuming that solar activity reduces to levels not seen for 400 years.

Dr Gareth S Jones
Dr Peter A Stott
Met Office Hadley Centre Exeter

They quote the IPPC's view although one of the points of my article was that the IPCC has ignored the sun in this regard. They are wrong about the sun's activity peaking in the 1950's and has been fairly static over the past 30 years. They are predictably picky about the research they quote. But note that they also talk of the warming that is "projected" - again, being the Met Office, their argument is based on future data not actual data. One can't argue against "data" that hasn't yet been measured!





CONTAMINATED DATA: HOT CITIES, NOT CO2, CAUSE URBAN THERMOMETERS TO RISE

Below is the famous graph of "global average surface temperature," or "global temperature" for short.



The data come from thermometers around the world, but between the thermometer readings and the final, famous, warming ramp, a lot of statistical modelling aims at removing known sources of exaggeration in the warming trend. In a new article just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, a co-author and I have concluded that the manipulations for the steep post-1980 period are inadequate, and the above graph is an exaggeration. Along the way, I have also found that the United Nations agency promoting the global temperature graph has made false claims about the quality of its data.

The graph at right comes from data collected in weather stations around the world. Other graphs come from weather satellites and from networks of weather balloons that monitor layers of the atmosphere. These other graphs don't show as much warming as the weatherstation data, even though they measure at heights where there is supposed to be even more greenhouse-gas-induced warming than at the surface. The discrepancy is especially clear in the tropics.

The surface-measured data has many well-known problems. Over the post-war era, equipment has changed, station sites have been moved, and the time of day at which the data is collected has changed.

Many long-term weather records come from in or near cities, which have gotten warmer as they grow. Many poor countries have sparse weather-station records and few resources to ensure data quality. Fewer than one-third of the weather stations operating in the 1970s remain in operation.

Scientists readily acknowledged that temperature measurements are contaminated for the purpose of measuring climate change. But they argue that adjustments fix the problem. To deal with a false warming generated by urbanization, they have the "Urbanization Adjustment." To deal with biases due to changing the time of day when temperatures are observed, they have the "Time of Observation Bias Adjustment." And so forth.

How do we know these adjustments are correct? In most studies, the question is simply not asked. A few studies argue that the adjustments must be adequate since adjacent rural and urban samples give similar results. But closer inspection shows some of these papers don't actually give similar results at all, or when they do they define "rural" so broadly that it includes partly urbanized places. Other studies say the adjustments must be adequate because trends on windy nights look the same as trends on calm nights. But the long list of data problems includes issues just as serious under both windy and calm conditions.

The papers describing the adjustments aim to construct data showing what the temperature would be in a region if nobody had ever lived there. If the adjustments are right, the final output should not be correlated with the extent of industrial development and variations in socioeconomic conditions. But in a 2004 study with climatologist Patrick Michaels, we found that the adjustment models were not removing the contamination patterns as claimed. If the contamination were removed, we estimated the average measured warming rate over land would decline by about half. Dutch meteorologists using different data and a different testing methodology had come to the same conclusions.

In response to criticisms of our paper, I began assembling a more complete database, covering all available land areas and a more extensive set of climatological and economic indicators. Meantime, in 2005, I was asked to serve as an external reviewer for the IPCC report, which was released earlier this year. I accepted, in part to address the data-contamination problem.

Scientists who attribute warming to greenhouse gases argue that their climate models cannot reproduce the surface trends from natural variability alone. They then attribute it to greenhouse gases, since (they assume) all other human influences have been removed from the data by the adjustment models. If that has not happened, however, they cannot claim to be able to identify the role of greenhouse gases. Despite the vast number of studies involved, and the large number of contributors to the IPCC reports, the core message of the IPCC hinges on the assumption that their main surface climate data set is uncontaminated. And by the time they began writing the recent Fourth Assessment Report, they had before them a set of papers proving the data are contaminated.

How did they handle this issue? In the first draft of the IPCC report, they simply claimed that, while city data are distorted by urban warming, this does not affect the global averages. They cited two familiar studies to support their position and ignored the new counter-evidence. I submitted lengthy comments criticizing this section. In the second draft there was still no discussion, so again I put in lengthy comments. This time the IPCC authors wrote a response. They conceded the evidence of contamination, but in a stunning admission, said:

"The locations of socioeconomic development happen to have coincided with maximum warming, not for the reason given by McKitrick and Mihaels [sic] (2004), but because of the strengthening of the Arctic Oscillation and the greater sensitivity of land than ocean to greenhouse forcing, owing to the smaller thermal capacity of land."

Note the irony: Confronted with published evidence of an anthropogenic (but non-greenhouse) explanation for warming, they dismissed it with an unproven conjecture of natural causes. Who's the "denialist" now? Furthermore, the claim is preposterous. The comparison of land and ocean is irrelevant since we were only talking about land areas. The Arctic Oscillation is a wind-circulation pattern that affects long-term weather trends in the Arctic. It certainly plays a role in explaining Arctic warming over the past few decades. But for IPCC lead authors to invoke it to explain a worldwide correlation between industrialization and warming patterns is nonsense.

FULL STORY here




GREEN PANIC: DEVELOPING COUNTRIES TO CAUSE 'CLIMATE CRISIS'

Given the usual Warmist assumptions, what these guys say below is logical. That most governments act differently shows how much those governments believe the Warmist theories



Carbon emissions from developing countries will result in a climate crisis within a generation, according to new research. Within 20 years they will be producing more CO2 than the rich industrialised countries based mainly in the northern hemisphere. And even if the 'North' - Europe, North America, the former Soviet Union (FSU) Japan, Australia and New Zealand - eliminated all its emissions immediately it wouldn't be enough to stop severe climate change. The 'South' - Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific islands - faced an environmental disaster.

The shock claims are made by the Centre for Global Development (CGD), an American independent, think tank that works to reduce global poverty and inequality. It says its research has been empirically reviewed. The CGD said it was a dangerous fallacy to believe that the North was responsible for climate change and should dramatically cut its emissions while the South should be given the time to catch up with more prosperous countries through economic expansion powered by fossil fuels.

By 2025 atmospheric CO2 from the South, combined with widespread deforestation, would match global amounts that triggered the first climate crisis conference in Rio in 1992. Things would get steadily worse for the South if carbon-intensive growth was allowed to continue in a last-minute fossil-fuelled development push before the onset of catastrophic climate change. "We conclude that the conventional wisdom is dangerously misguided," the report states.

"The South cannot relegate mitigation to the North until it achieves prosperity. In fact, cumulative emissions from a carbon-intensive South have already reached levels that are dangerous for the South itself. They are more than sufficient to create a global climate crisis, even if the North eliminates all of its emissions immediately. "So we face another inconvenient truth: a carbon-intensive South faces environmental disaster, no matter what the North does. For its own sake, the South must recognise this hard truth, accept the necessity of serious, costly mitigation, and immediately embark on a low-carbon development path. "The North must clearly do the same, while recognising that its own survival requires an immediate, large-scale commitment to assisting emissions reductions in the South."

The report claims that by 2030, if the South's industrial expansion is unchecked, scientists in an isolated South would observe unequivocal global warming, widespread glacial and polar melting, and a rising sea level. The South's governments would then have to introduce plans for a carbon-free future. If global emissions continued unabated, the resulting increases in temperatures and sea level, greater storm intensity, reduced agricultural productivity, and dwindling freshwater supplies would be likely to undermine the South's development long before it arrived at northern income levels.

Focusing on the North's obligations to cut emissions would be a dangerous distraction because the South's own emissions had already moved it close to the brink of rapid global warming. Cumulative emissions from the North would force the South to take fundamental and unavoidable decisions about cutting its emissions much earlier than previously thought.

David Wheeler, the lead author of the study, said: "The South's population is over four times greater than the North's, so it has been trapped by the sheer scale of its emissions at a much earlier stage of development. "The South finds itself weighed down by a mass of humanity, as well as the energy technologies and fuels of an earlier age. The question is not if the South will commit to emissions reductions - under any scenario it eventually must for its own sake - but whether it will do so in time, and how the costs of the transition are to be shared."

Wheeler and his co-author, Kevin Ummel, compiled CGD's recently released Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) online database, which discloses for the first time the CO2 pollution of all power plants and companies in the world.

Source




Deliberate Greenie lies again

A press release issued this week said the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a high-profile collection of 33 corporations and environmental nonprofits, pledged to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2050, and demanded that no new coal power plants be built. The only problem with that announcement was that it was a lie, CNET News.com reports.

The story, picked up by the Dallas Morning News and other media outlets, originated from a phony press release issued by environmental activists Rising Tide North America. The trick was timed to coincide with the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia. The exploit aimed to throw egg on the face of USCAP for attempting to seem green without making radical changes. Members of the coalition include BP America, General Electric and Xerox, as well as the National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Nature Conservancy, reports CNET writer Elsa Wenzel on the site's Green Tech blog.

The responsible Rising Tide activists, calling themselves Greenwash Guerillas, built a fake website for a public relations company and another site impersonating that of USCAP to complete the illusion. In October they infiltrated the Point Carbon conference to oppose carbon-trading schemes.

These are the latest in a series of digital disinformation pranks that could be a nightmare for reporters on a tight deadline. Not many writers were fooled in this case, however, maybe because media releases about corporate-greening efforts are piling so high in editorial inboxes lately. In January, for example, Greenpeace concocted a video of its own fake Steve Jobs pledging to make Apple products more eco-friendly. That tongue-in-cheek campaign was meant to embarrass Apple without fooling reporters. By May, the real Jobs announced that his company would phase out the use of some toxic chemicals.

Source






SWITCH OFF YOUR COMPUTER NOW! OR YOU'LL HELP DESTROY THE PLANET

Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry, warns a new report. Global Action Plan, a UK-based environmental organisation, publishes a report today drawing attention to the carbon footprint of the IT industry in the UK. "Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk," says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. "But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."

The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year - a similar figure to the global airline industry.

The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.

FULL SCARE here

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