New paper finds IPCC models predicted decrease in Antarctic sea ice, which is currently near record highs

A paper published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres finds "most climate models from the [IPCC] archive simulate a decrease in Antarctic sea ice area over the recent past," however, "average Antarctic sea ice area is not retreating but has slowly increased since satellite measurements began in 1979."

Further, the authors find the latest generation of IPCC climate models "have not improved" over the prior generation, and "show an unrealistic spread in the mean state that may influence future sea ice behavior."

The paper, co-authored by Climategate co-conspirator Susan Soloman, attempts to save face for the models, claiming the increase in Antarctic sea ice is still within natural variability. With Antarctic sea ice currently near 'unprecedented' high levels, how long can this IPCC model flimflam persist?

Historical Antarctic mean sea ice area, sea ice trends, and winds in CMIP5 simulations

By Irina Mahlstein et al.

Abstract

In contrast to Arctic sea ice, average Antarctic sea ice area is not retreating but has slowly increased since satellite measurements began in 1979. While most climate models from the CMIP5 archive simulate a decrease in Antarctic sea ice area over the recent past, whether these models can be dismissed as being wrong depends on more than just the sign of change compared to observations. We show that internal sea ice variability is large in the Antarctic region, and both the observed and modeled trends may represent natural variations along with external forcing. While several models show a negative trend, only a few of them actually show a trend that is significant compared to their internal variability on the timescales of available observational data. Further, the ability of the models to simulate the mean state of sea ice is also important. There presentations of Antarctic sea ice in CMIP5 models have not improved compared to CMIP3, and show an unrealistic spread in the mean state that may influence future sea ice behavior. Finally, Antarctic climate and sea ice area will be affected not only by ocean and air temperature changes but also by changes in the winds. The majority of the CMIP5 models simulate a shift that is too weak compared to observations. Thus, this study identifies several foci for consideration in evaluating and improving the modeling of climate and climate change in the Antarctic region.

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Church of Global Warming feels the heat



It is a bad time to be a global warming believer.  Seventeen straight years of climate stability will straighten even the most ardent true believer's hockey stick.

Russian scientists have even expressed concern that the globe may be facing more than 200 years of global cooling even going so far as worrying about a mini-Ice Age.  How very 1970s of them – maybe they will also be predicting a return of disco and the Brady Bunch.

Environmentalists had a plan on how to bring down western industrialized civilization under the weight of dire prognostications of environmental doom, and the darn planet just refused to comply.  You’d think Mother Earth would be more grateful.

Of course, the global warming alarmists should have known that they could not trust the Russkies to play along with their clever ruse.  After all, Russia is now going all nostalgic with a back to the 70’s Cold War theme, might as well go all the way and pull up some old Newsweek covers predicting an Ice Age.

In the same new Ice Age report, the Russian scientists reveal something their western European and U.S. counterparts hope no one in Washington, D.C. ever reads:

“According to the scientist, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has risen more than 4% in the past decade, but global warming has practically stopped. It confirms the theory of “solar” impact on changes in the Earth’s climate, because the amount of solar energy reaching the planet has drastically decreased during the same period, the scientist said.”

If man-made carbon dioxide concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere cause global warming, and these Russian scientists assert that the CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere has increased by 4 percent, but global warming has practically stopped.  Then there is clearly zero correlation between CO2 and global warming.

To make matters worse, even the U.S. climate is betraying the alarmists.  With this past three months being deemed one of the coldest in history, and the darned continent of Antarctica is having the audacity of actually increasing the levels of ice on its bottom dwelling surface.  Of course, believe it or not, the church of global warming explains away the growing Antartica sea ice as just one more bit of evidence for global warming.

What is even more shocking is that a cursory review of that revered scientific resource, Wikipedia, in the opening couple of paragraphs on the term “Ice Age” reveals the following:

“Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres.  By this definition, we are still in the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist.”

Woe is me, said the alarmist, even Wikipedia is in on the conspiracy, daring to actually use the real definitions of terms to declare that our current climate period is actually the end of the last Ice Age.

What is a good faithful servant to do with the facts that not even their most ardent leaders can deny?

How about blame weather events like Katrina or Sandy on global warming.  That is the card President Obama pulled out of his hat during the recent State of the Union message to justify his continued administrative assault on so-called “fossil fuels.”

You could just feel the earth move during the speech as Al Gore took time away from counting the $100 million of oil money Al Jazeera gave him for the broadcast footprint his CurrenTV had established.

After all, there is no disputing that a Hurricane hit the mid-Atlantic, and because that hadn’t happened for a while, it must have been due to climate change.

And even though the temperatures haven’t increased for seventeen years,  man-made carbon dioxide emissions have to be responsible for some catastrophic disruption, or else it is hard to justify trying to shut down the U.S. coal, oil and natural gas industries.

Too much time, money and effort have been put into indoctrinating the American public to accept climate change/global warming to allow inconvenient climate truths to get in the way.

So expect a full on assault from the Obama Administration over the next four years in a desperate attempt to wring every political advantage out of the public’s continued acceptance of a theory that has as many holes as the flag that hung over Ft. McHenry.

Perhaps using the same nimbleness that they used in changing the term “global warming” to “climate change” when environmentalists figured out the globe wasn’t warming, they could re-brand their effort once again.

Scientists in Russia might suggest, “Hey, it is getting really, really cold outside, America must be to blame somehow” as the next campaign slogan.

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Environmentalism as the spear-point of socialism

Rich Kozlovich

An excerpt from  Yuri Glazov’s "The Russian Mind Since Stalin’s Death"

In 1985, the USSR seemed immortal. Most of the observers of Soviet affairs were aware of the insuperable systemic tensions (in Hegelian-Marxist parlance, “contradictions”), but very few anticipated the regime’s imminent end. In fact, such insights existed especially among the small and beleaguered dissident enclaves in the Soviet Union itself and in East-Central Europe. Most Western academics, however, were too busy to scrutinize the arcane workings of the Politburo and regarded the dissident activities as marred by romantic daydreaming. Dissidents could be admired, but not taken too seriously……

Both thinkers understood that, once the ideological zeal was extinct, the system was doomed. The degradation of faith was a decisive catalyst for the demise of the whole system. From the original Marxist-Leninist utopia nothing remained but cynicism, confusion, and disgust with broken promises. For Glazov, the indication of the revolutionary breakdown was the fact that even party bureaucrats were treating the official mythologies as empty, soporific phrases. Nothing captures better the nature of that system than a joke quoted by Yuri Glazov– Radio Yerevan asks : “What is Marxism-Leninism, a science or an art? The answer: “It is probably an art. If it were a science it would have been tried out first on animals.”

This is one of the more profound articles I have posted over the years since it clearly outlines why leftism fails.  One of my favorite phrases is; “It’s all about the basics!” Socialism in all its permutations such as fascism, communism, and environmentalism are a doomed because they are based on ideological zeal that has no sound moral, logical or factual foundation to support the gigantic structural programs of social engineering they create.  When we give in to the greenies we are merely enablers to concepts that are failures in fact, failures in logic, failures in morality and failures in application.  At some point we reach the "inevitability factor when reality reaches its zenith", which is when the world can clearly see the lack of rational structure because of the totality of their failure.

Leftism has failed everywhere at every point in history because it despises the individual and adores the collective.  That creates a system that is irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.  It has no sound stable moral foundation.  How else can you explain the horrible abuses the left has heaped on humanity?  The socialist monsters of the 20th century like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Pot Pol have been responsible for the deliberate murder of over 100 million people, many of them deliberately starved to death by these leftist madmen.  The environment movement, through their policies and programs has been responsible for at least that many deaths and they aren’t done yet.

Environmentalism is a true scion of the left.  Currently it is the spear point of the world wide socialist movement, sharing the morally defective views of the left, their claims about concern for human health and conditions are nothing more than the same propaganda that the left has spouted for over 100 years.....and it is no less a lie now that it was when Marx spouted it in his life and the madmen of the French Revolution spouted it during The Terror.

We should recognize their cries about “it’s for the children” as nothing more than an emotional smoke screen to hide their real objectives because we have more than enough historical foundation to know what their schemes do “to the children”!

What we need is clarity of thought and definition.  That leads to understanding.  Understanding leads to solutions.  Give me the history and I will give you the answer.

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‘Smart' technology will cost Britons billions - and thousands of lives

The electricity industry is  at the forefront of the Government’s eco-plans to reduce CO2 emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, and at least 80 per cent by 2050. To achieve that, our dependence on fossil fuels must be drastically reduced in favour of electricity generated by a mix of nuclear and renewables – which will involve defacing our country with at least 7,000 additional wind turbines.

The obvious problem with this ‘decarbonisation’ is that the wind doesn’t blow all the time.

In fact, it is common during the coldest periods in winter for there to be no windmills turning anywhere in the UK – just when energy demand is at its highest.

The simple answer is to build dozens of flexible gas-fuelled power stations, says Richard North

The simple answer is to build dozens of flexible gas-fuelled power stations to provide near-instant electricity when the windmills fail to deliver,  so guaranteeing cheap and reliable electricity for industry, schools, hospitals and homes. But these have failed to materialise and it has become clear that what is in store for us is ‘demand management’ – effectively an advanced form of rationing.

‘Demand management’ turns the accepted priority of the electricity industry on its head. Rather than adopting a system capable of meeting flexible demand from a varied network of power stations, the nation’s electricity supply will be fixed, even though this means it cannot always meet demand. Instead, demand must be ‘managed’ by stopping customers from using electricity.

This is done by changing the price of energy, at five-minute intervals, according to supply-and-demand principles. Rates at peak times may be ten times or more that of the dead of night, when electricity use is at its lowest. And in an extraordinary Big Brother move, energy suppliers will effectively reach inside your homes to shut down appliances or prevent them being turned on.

To achieve this unprecedented degree of control, suppliers need  to invest billions in a ‘smart’ grid, ‘smart’ meters, and ‘smart’ appliances. Unsurprisingly, consumers will foot the bill.

It is common during the coldest periods in winter for there to be no windmills turning anywhere in the UK - just when energy demand is at its highest

For the National Grid to become smart, it has to be modified at a  cost of an estimated £27 billion – the price of two giant nuclear power plants – to enable it to collect information about the behaviour of  customers and micro-manage power distribution.

This grid will talk to the smart meters, supposedly to be fitted to all of Britain 30 million homes by 2019, at a cost of at least another £12 billion, but probably much more.

When there is not enough electricity to go round – which will be routine in only a few years’ time – power cuts will be avoided by shutting down millions of individual smart appliances, using computer chips fitted by manufacturers.

These appliances will also be  programmed to switch themselves on and off according to the electricity price, leaving the washing machine, for instance, only able to run at  2am or 3am when prices are rock-bottom – unless the  owner pays a punitive premium.

If this all sounds like science fiction, it isn’t ....

At the end of last year,  on the Danish island of Bornholm, a four-year, £17.5 million EU-funded experiment, EcoGrid, was set in motion. More than 2,000 homes were kitted out with smart meters, and washing machines, TVs and computers were networked, ready to be controlled by the local utility company.

The project hopes to tackle the problem of unpredictable wind by providing each household with an electric car. When the wind blows  at times of low demand, the smart grid will divert this ‘wrong time electricity’ to charge the batteries of the cars. When the windmills stop turning and no electricity is produced, the grid finds all cars still coupled to the mains and takes the stored electricity back, a concept known as ‘V2G’ or ‘vehicle to grid’.

This, they hope, means black-outs will be avoided. The consequence is that at peak times, the cars may no longer be available for use.

But then there is the other side  of the coin, the dark side of this ‘seismic shift’ in energy policy (the phrase used by former Energy Minister Chris Huhne before his career came crashing down around his ears.)

The plan is to double the price of electricity by the end of the decade, even though it is already twice as costly as it was a decade ago.

This will be done through George Osborne’s carbon tax, windmill subsidies and other levies, all to make the investment in the technology economically attractive – for those who can afford it.

That is where the fantasy falls down. Already, thousands of pensioners and families are being driven into fuel poverty. As a result of this year’s freezing conditions, more than 6,000 extra deaths were registered in February and March.

Campaigners at Age UK say 26,000 people die needlessly in winter every year, and for every one degree drop in average temperature, there are about 8,000 extra deaths.

The Government’s disastrous energy policies will cripple our industry and prove ruinously expensive for all but the wealthiest  householders. Millions of us will be forced to choose between eating  and keeping warm. But for hundreds of thousands of our most  vulnerable citizens, the so-called ‘green revolution’ could be fatal.

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A chill in the air for crony climate cash?

While Europeans bail on climate, Washington presses full speed ahead toward the iceberg!

The past 17 years of flat global temperatures are creating a big chill for lots of global warming doom-premised industries. Those experiencing cold sweats must certainly include legions of climate scientists who have come to depend upon the many tens of billions of taxpayer bucks for studies that would have little demand without a big crisis for the public to worry about….

Cooler temperatures blow ill winds for government bureaucrats, crony-capitalist rent-seekers, and other hucksters whose ambitions depend upon hot air. Even Western Europe, the cradle of carbon-caused climate craziness and cap-and-trade corruption, is feeling a cold draft. As Alister Doyle, reporting from Reuters in Oslo, recently observed: “Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’ willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the end of 2015 to combat global warming”….

….   There is good reason for this cooling climate consternation. As David Whitehouse at the Global Warming Policy Foundation points out: “If we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change.” Whitehouse notes that there has been no statistically significant increase in annual global temperatures since 1997. He goes on to say: “If the standstill (lower temperatures) continues for a few more years, it will mean that no one who has just reached adulthood, or younger, will have witnessed the Earth get warmer during their lifetime.” (Since 1997, atmospheric CO2 has increased from 370 ppm to 390 ppm.)

These observed developments have prompted the U.K.’s Met Office Climate Center (the national weather service) to quietly revise its projections. They now say: “The latest decadal prediction suggests that the next five years are likely to be a little bit lower than predicted from the previous prediction.” The predicted increase from 2013 through 2017 was 0.43º C above the 1971-2000 mean, while the previous prediction said temperature would increase 0.54º C from 2012 through 2016. Simply stated, it will be cooler than they expected!

The London Daily Mail published a chart that, as they say, “reveals how [the IPCC’s] ’95% certain’ estimates of the Earth heating up were a spectacular miscalculation.” Comparing actual temperatures against the IPCC’s 95% certainty projections, the lines track closely until recent years, at which point the line representing the observed temperatures “is about to crash out of” the boundaries of the lowest projections. They were supposed to climb sharply after 1990.

Whereas the IPCC has predicted that temperatures will rise by 3º  C by 2050 if CO2 doubles from pre-industrialized levels of 1750, The Research Council of Norway plugged in real temperature data from 2000 to 2010 and determined that doubling would cause only a 1.9º  C rise. Another study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences links temperature changes from 1750 to natural changes (such as sea temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean) and suggests “…the anthropogenic global warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of 2 in the second half of the 20th century”….

Within the past two years, at least seven peer-reviewed studies published in the scientific literature have concluded that the influence of doubling the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is likely to be substantially lower than IPCC has determined and have ruled out the high-end projections.

James Annan, formerly a strong defender of Michael Mann’s infamously flawed alarmist “hockey stick” graph and an expert on “climate sensitivity” to CO2 and other influences, recently concluded in his blog that the IPCC is increasingly acting in a wholly unscientific manner.  He referred to a list of scientists polled as largely constituting “the self-same people responsible for the bogus analyses [he] criticized over the years, and which even if they were valid then, are certainly outdated now”.

Annan also said: “Since IPCC can no longer defend their old analyses in any meaningful manner, it seems they have to resort to an unsupported ‘this is what we think, because we asked our pals’…having firmly wedded themselves to their politically convenient long tail of high values, their response to new evidence is little more than sticking their fingers in their ears and singing ‘la la la I can’t hear you’”….

Reacting to hot temperatures in much of the U.S. last summer, former NASA employee and eternal anti-fossil fuel activist James Hansen warned us that August was “the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet.” Echoing this, Al Gore lamented on his website, “dirty weather is created by “dirty energy” …” a lot of people are saying out loud, ‘I’m too hot!’ “. Even NOAA said that the lower 48 had seen the warmest year on record in 2012.

Yet as well-known Climate Depot blogger Marc Morano, recognizes: “NOAA can only claim that 2012 was the warmest single year on record through statistical tricks … including “adjusting” raw data and adding data to the overall data set from stations that did not exist when the record first started being recorded. Absent these illegitimate actions, the measured temperatures from the 1930′s still match or exceed the measured temperatures from the 1990′s and 2000′s.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we haven’t heard much in the media about the fact that in June last year, 46 U.S. cities, including some in the Deep South, set or tied record lows … or that Alaska, which isn’t part of the lower 48, has been reporting some of the coldest winters on record since 2000. According to the Alaska Climate Research Center at University of Alaska-Fairbanks, that record has held true for 19 of 20 National Weather Stations sprinkled from one corner of the state to another.

The New York Times breathlessly reported: ”The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year’s 55.3º  F average [in the contiguous United States] demolished the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.” But somehow they didn’t see fit to mention that 2008 was 2º cooler than 2006, or that 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998. And, by the way, don’t forget that the U.S. isn’t the globe. Those contiguous states, which omit Alaska and Hawaii, represent only 1.58% of the Earth’s surface.

During most of the 2011-2012 winter, the Bering Sea witnessed an ice extent between 20% to 30%  above the 1979 to 2000 average, with the highest February expanse ever measured.  James Taylor reported that Antarctic sea ice also set record, with the largest amount of ice ever recorded occurring on day 256 of the 2012 calendar year. In fact Antarctic sea ice has been growing ever since satellites first began measuring it 33 years ago, and the expanse exceeded the 33-year average throughout 2012.

Much of recent warming alarmism centered upon a temperature trend that began in the 1980′s, occurring less than a decade after our planet came out of a three-decade cooling trend that led many to fear a coming Ice Age. As climatologist Patrick Michaels recalls: “When I was going to graduate school, it was gospel that the Ice Age was about to start. I had trouble warming up to that one too.” Referring to recent alarmism, he observes: “This (greenhouse hysteria) is not the first climate apocalypse, but it’s certainly the loudest”….

It might be worth mentioning that some heavyweight U.S. solar physicists are once again predicting that Planet Earth may very well be heading into a period of protracted cooling due to a lengthy spell of low sunspot activity…potentially another “Little Ice Age”. This announcement that came from scientists at the U.S. National Solar Observatory and U.S. Air Force Laboratory was based upon three different analyses of the Sun’s recent behavior.

One of the world’s leading solar scientists, Habibiullo Abdussamatov, head of the Russian Academy of Sciences Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg and director of the Russian segment of the international Space Station, agrees that Planet Earth may be in for a long cold spell. He points out that deep cold periods have occurred five times over the last 1,000 years. Each is correlated with declines in solar irradiance, much like we are experiencing now.

Dr. Abdussamatov believes: “A global freeze will come about regardless of whether or not industrialized countries put a cap on their greenhouse gas emissions. The common view of Man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect.” He predicts that a new Little Ice Age will commence around 2013/2014, the depth of the decline will occur around 2040, and a deep freeze will last for the rest of this century….

Let’s accept the fact that climate changes for many reasons without permission or help from us…it always has…always will…and not always for the worse. And let’s be skeptical about advice from alarmists who obviously depend upon scare tactics to sell us a hot bill of goods.

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Skeptics strike back at campaign aiming to 'smear and intimidate' GOP lawmakers

A climate skeptic blog today denounced a liberal group's new campaign that spotlights congressional Republicans who don't believe in man-made climate change.

On his "Climate Depot" blog, Marc Morano, a former aide to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), said the activist group Organizing for America was attempting to "smear and intimidate global warming skeptics" in Congress.

A video released yesterday to OFA's member email list showed 12 Republican lawmakers making statements about the science of climate change. These ranged from Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-Fla.) statement that he has seen "reasonable debate" about the role human emissions may be playing in driving global warming to Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) declaring, "I don't think CO2 is a problem."

The video will be part of a larger effort by the group that is affiliated with President Obama to pressure lawmakers in hopes of paving the way for eventual legislation

"OFA believes that it is hard to make progress in Congress without confronting the challenge that there are still a lot of members of Congress who do not believe that climate change is caused by carbon pollution," OFA's Ivan Frishberg said in an email. "Despite the overwhelming scientific agreement that man-made climate change is real, there are climate change deniers all over Congress and we are going to call them out and start exposing just how dangerous and extreme this denial is."

But Morano cried foul.

"Obama's new campaign hopes to silence skepticism, despite the fact that the GOP is the party taking a pro-science stand when it comes to man-made global warming fears," Morano writes.

Morano cites a post by Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who in December was evicted from the United Nations climate change conference after impersonating a delegate from Myanmar so he could gain access to a microphone

In his post today on a blog maintained by the Science and Public Policy Institute, a skeptic group, Monckton offered a vindication of each of the 12 Republican statements in the OFA campaign. For example, he said, Barton was correct that carbon dioxide is not a problem because "even if CO2 were a problem, the cost of stopping it today would be 50 times the cost of adapting to it the day after tomorrow."

Monckton praised House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans for refusing requests by the "Donkey Party" to hold additional hearings on climate science. "The Eeyores are upset," he said, referring to panel Democrats led by California Rep. Henry Waxman who helped launch the OFA effort on a call Wednesday night.

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