Another "Orifice" statistic

Probabilities are a pervasive feature of scientific reporting.  It is very rare to be able to study all the instances of some phenomenon so sampling the available instances and reporting the probability that the sample will generalize to the whole is routine.

But to report a probability in a scientific paper, one normally has to do several other things.  One has to report on how the data was gathered, summarize the data (often in the form of means and standard deviations) and nominate the statistical procedure  used to convert the data into probabilities. Leaving out any of those steps renders the final conclusion dubious to say the least.  If any of those steps is omitted the editor's referees will normally ask for them to be added before publication.

Warmists don't work like that.  Their prized probability statistic is that it is 90% certain that humans are causing global warming.  But nobody has ever revealed how that statistic was calculated  or upon what data it was based.  "Leaks" have suggested that it was simply decided on a show of hands among the Warmists in the room at the time.  So what looks like a solid scientific assessment is  nothing of the sort.  It is just opinion -- and the opinion of a small, self-interested group at that.

So how are the Warmists coping with the fact that there is NO recent warming to base ANY estimate of human culpability on?  Have they abandoned their pseudo probabilities altogether, as logic  would suggest they must?  Not at all.  They have upped the ante and now say that they are 95% certain of human-caused warming.  Until they explain how that figure is arrived at, however, skeptics are calling it an "orifice" statistic -- meaning that it was just pulled out of a well-known body orifice.  A excerpt of the latest nonsense follows

Climate scientists are surer than ever that human activity is causing global warming, according to leaked drafts of a major UN report, but they are finding it harder than expected to predict the impact in specific regions in coming decades.

Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the UN panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities - chiefly the burning of fossil fuels - are the main cause of warming since the 1950s. That is up from at least 90 percent in the last report in 2007, 66 percent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995, steadily squeezing out the arguments by a small minority of scientists that natural variations in the climate might be to blame.

That shifts the debate onto the extent of temperature rises and the likely impacts, from manageable to catastrophic. Governments have agreed to work out an international deal by the end of 2015 to rein in rising emissions. "We have got quite a bit more certain that climate change ... is largely manmade," said Reto Knutti, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. "We're less certain than many would hope about the local impacts."

SOURCE




German Warmist Claims “New Generation” Of Climate Models Are Robust Because “They Can Predict The Past Very Well”!

By P Gosselin

PIK scientist Stefan Rahmstorf at Twitter directs our attention to an interview he gave on German Public Radio.

The interview is about new models that predict the frequency of heat waves globally will double in the next seven years alone, i.e. by 2020, and quadruple again by 2040. I wrote about this yesterday here.

In the interview Rahmstorf says “the probability of experiencing extreme weather events multiplied over the last decades, simply as a consequence of global warming.” Rahmstorf then explains how models have discovered this:

"Today’s climate models can well reproduce this trend of increasing heat extremes in the past. And as you have confirmed, they used these models to look into the future and have determined that these heat extremes will double by the year 2020 and then once again quadruple in frequency by the year 2050.”

Here Rahmstorf claims that if a model is able to reproduce the past, then it can reproduce the future. Just forget that any model can be made to reproduce the past and then project any future you so desire. Rahmstorf is sounding more and more like a swindler selling phony fortune-telling services with each passing interview. And above I understand from his words a frequency increase of 8 times.

German Public Radio moderator Fecke then asked what exactly makes the projections so robust? Rahmstorf:

    "Robust is that we use the measured data of the last 130 years and look at how well the newest generation of climate models, that is the complete range that we have from the various research groups from the whole world, can reproduce the past. And it has been determined that they can do this very well, and for this reason we are confident that the results are also robust for the future development.”

Good hindsight automatically means good foresight?

But does it really matter how new or how old the models are? The only fact that matters is that temperatures haven’t risen at all in 15 years, and if that trend continues, then Rahmtorf’s much ballyhooed new generation of robust models are going to be just as wrong. Heat waves aren’t going to quadruple should temperatures remain stagnant or fall.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Rahmstorf, and the likes of him, have quit talking about the global mean temperature. Instead they are using a new yardstick for measuring global warming: the undefined vague frequency of weather events. No alarmist wants to talk about the global mean temperature anymore.

SOURCE




Soaring bills force cash-strapped British families to cut energy use by 25% in just six years

Cash-strapped families have cut their energy use since 2005 as bills have soared.  A combination of increased charges and wages flatlining have forced households to turn their heating off to cut costs.

New figures also reveal wide variations in the amount of energy people use in different parts of the country, with people in the East Midlands using almost double that of homes in the South West.
Energy bills: New figures show how the amount of energy households use has fallen by 25 per cent since 2005

Energy bills: New figures show how the amount of energy households use has fallen by 25 per cent since 2005

The average home usage in England and Wales fell by 24.7% over the period to 2011, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Consumer groups said that while energy savings measures may have played apart, the big drop will have been caused by people simply switching off their heating altogether.

A study this month found people struggling with energy bills face a gap of £438 between their bills and what they can afford to pay – an increase of almost £200 over the last decade.

The gap means those in fuel poverty in England alone face bills totalling £1.05billion more than they can afford – a jump from £606million in 2003.

Richard Lloyd, executive director of consumer watchdog Which? said: ‘Energy efficiency measures may have played a part in the fall in energy usage but the fact is many consumers will have cut back in order to save money in the face of spiraling prices and squeezed incomes.

‘Consistently four in ten have told us that they plan to cut back on future spending on their energy bills.’

He called for the government to do more to help people cope with the rising cost of energy bills.

‘People will not feel confident that they are getting a fair deal unless prices are simplified and the costs that make up our energy bills are open, transparent and subject to robust scrutiny.’

The highest regional consumption levels - which were adjusted to take into account the variations in weather - were in the East Midlands, the data showed.

It appeared that regions with the highest level of Economy 7 consumption of night-time cheap electricity use more energy overall.

Across England and Wales, average household energy consumption fell from 26.2 megawatt hours (mWh) in 2005 to 19.7mWh in 2011.

Improvements such as better loft and cavity wall insulation as well as more efficient boilers may be among the reasons for the decrease, the ONS said.

Another could be the introduction of energy rating scales for properties and household appliances, allowing consumers to make informed choices about purchases, it added.

There has also been ‘increasing public awareness of energy consumption and environmental issues’ while at the same time the price of gas and electricity across the UK has been rising.

The average household energy consumption in the East Midlands in 2011 was 27.5 mWh, well above the national average, while the South West had the lowest, at 16.1 mWh.

A breakdown of local authorities showed that those consuming less energy tended to be in more rural areas, with a higher proportion of households without piped gas and therefore possibly using other sources of energy.

Of the 10 authorities with the lowest consumption - topped by the Isles of Scilly - eight included rural parts of Wales and the South West, although two were in the capital - the City of London and Tower Hamlets.

The ONS said that areas that consumed more household energy tended to have higher levels of net income after taking account of housing costs.

All the top 10 areas for consumption were in the East Midlands - a region that had the second highest level of Economy 7 use as a proportion of all energy.

‘It could be that households which receive some electricity at a cheaper rate may use more energy overall because it is cheaper,’ the ONS said.

Industry body Energy UK said: ‘This fall in consumption shows how effective it is to insulate your home. Britain's homes are notoriously leaky and energy companies have been busy improving properties to make them warmer and easier to heat.

‘They have installed insulation and other measures in millions of homes across the country over the past few years.’

SOURCE





DDT ban linked to population control

By Larry Bell

Slightly more than four decades ago, the U.S. banned the use of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichlororethane (thankfully, DDT, for short) which must certainly qualify as the most controversial synthetic chemical ever devised by humankind. There can be no doubt that DDT use has prevented deaths of many millions of the world’s most vulnerable residents from malaria and other insect-borne diseases. Nor can there be any real question that long-term bans on its use in the most desperate nations have resulted in deaths of far many more. Publicity campaigns against its use premised upon toxicity to wildlife and humans, whether true or not, have been enormously effective.

While many of the arguments against DDT are based upon dubious quasi-scientific claims, there are also studies that raise certain legitimate concerns warranting further investigation. Accordingly, a great need exists for truly objective research which avoids persistent political and ideological influences. In addition to comprehensive analyses of human and bio-system risks, benefits and necessary controls, consequences of delayed interventions must also be assessed. The more than 30,000 annual cases of avoidable Lyme disease in the U.S. are but one example.

To better appreciate the past and present-day significance of this remarkable chemical compound, let’s flash back to a time soon after its properties were first “put into action” nearly seven decades ago. Robert Zubrin discusses this history in his excellent new book, Merchants of Despair.

The Other Secret Weapon of WWII

During the last days of WWII, the Nazis systematically destroyed aqueducts, reservoirs and the sewer system in Naples. Left without sanitation, the city of more than a million people was plagued with a lice-transmitted typhus epidemic which killed one out of four of the thousands who contracted it. Alarmed about the threat to our invading troops as well as the local population, General Eisenhower made a desperate plea to Washington for help.

Fortunately, a secret weapon called DDT was ready just in time. By January 1, 1944, the first shipments of what would eventually amount to 60 tons arrived in Italy. People lined up as military police officers dusted them with the powder while other spray teams dusted public buildings and shelters. By month’s end a miracle occurred…the lice were virtually exterminated and the epidemic was over.

As Allied forces advanced north from Naples to Rome, the retreating Germans then demolished dikes which Mussolini had constructed before the war to drain the mosquito-infested Pontine marsh — which made the area an uninhabitable malaria hellhole. The tactic temporarily served as an effective defense. Malaria struck 22,000 Allied troops during the early summer of 1943, a greater casualty toll than was inflicted by Axis forces directly.

But again, Americans turned their secret weapon DDT on the problem, deploying airborne crop dusters and infantry spray teams. Success was total. The Pontine mosquitos were wiped out, and GIs pushed on with negligible malaria losses to liberate Rome in the early morning of June 5. The Allied high command declared that from then forward, “DDT marches with the troops.”

As Winston Churchill stated on September 24, 1944: “We have discovered many preventives against tropical diseases, and often against the onslaughts of insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes and back again. The excellent DDT powder which had been experimented with and found to yield astonishing results will henceforth be used on a great scale by the British forces in Burma and by the Americans and Australian forces in the Pacific and India in all theaters.”

And they did. Similar successes were achieved when British and American troops advanced in Europe and encountered, treated and saved lives of millions of victims of Nazi oppression who were dying from insect-borne diseases: civilians under occupation, slave laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates. The DDT triumphs over diseases were realized in the Asia-Pacific theater: in the Philippines, Burma, China and elsewhere. Never before had a single chemical saved so many lives in so many places in such a short period.

In 1948, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Paul Miller for discovering the chemical’s marvelous pesticide application. As the Nobel committee stated: “DDT has been used in large quantities in the evacuation of concentration camps, of prisoners and deportees. Without any doubt, the material has already preserved the life and health of hundreds of thousands.”

After WWII DDT became widely available to public health agencies around the world, very much including the U.S. Prior to the war between one and six million Americans, mostly drawn from rural regions of the South, contracted malaria annually. In 1946 the U.S. Public Health Service initiated programs to apply DDT to interior walls of homes, and by the first half of 1952, there were only two confirmed malaria cases in the entire nation!

Thanks to DDT, comparable results were being realized in other countries: Malaria virtually disappeared in Europe by the mid-1950s; rates rapidly dropped by 80 percent in South Africa; Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) saw a malaria incidence drop from 2.8 million in 1946 to 17 total cases in 1963; and similarly, India cut its malaria death rate to nearly zero.

In 1955, with U.S. financial backing the UN World Health Organization (WHO) launched a global DDT campaign to eradicate malaria across large areas of the developing world which cut rates in Latin America and Asia by 99 percent or better.

A New War: DDT Becomes the Enemy

Not everyone, however, was happy about all of these achievements. One such person was Club of Rome co-founder Alexander King. In 1990 he expressed why: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem.”

Powerful counter-forces against the use of DDT can be traced to the birth of a new “environmental movement”.  An early salvo of the attack on DDT came from Aldous Huxley, who became famous for his 1932 book, Brave New World. Huxley’s subsequent Brave New World Revisited (1958) warns that the danger to civilization posed by Third World overpopulation would lead to communist revolution, attacking DDT as an important contributor: “We go to a tropical island…and with the aid of DDT we stamp out malaria, and in two or three years, save hundreds of thousands of lives.”

Huxley continued that: “This is obviously good, But the hundreds of thousands of human beings thus saved, and the millions whom they beget and bring to birth, cannot be adequately clothed, housed, educated or fed out of the island’s available resources. Quick death by malaria has been abolished; but life made miserable by undernourishment and over-crowding is now the rule, and death by outright starvation threatens ever greater numbers.”

Five years after Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited was published, a more direct broadside hit on DDT in the form of a blockbuster book by marine biologist and nature writer Rachael Carson would prove to have devastating public impact. Silent Spring presented a poignant, fictional story about a town whose people had been poisoned, and whose spring had been silenced of birdsong, because all life had been exterminated by pesticides. Many credit her book not only for subsequent global bans against DDT, but also for energizing anti-industry/anti-capitalist Malthusian socialist activism of incalculably huge influence.

Central to Carson’s story is a claim that DDT threatened many avian species with imminent extinction due to thinning eggshells. Some of the research cited in her book to support that conclusion appears to be faulty since the original studies were performed on captive chickens fed a lab diet with insufficient calcium to support normal egg shell development. In fact, as Zubrin notes, during a period of widespread DDT spraying preceding Silent Spring bird populations had increased significantly…quite possibly influenced by suppression of avian parasites.

Having said this, more recent research does add some credence to Carson’s hypothesis. A 2009 study conducted on domestic hens suggests that exposures of higher doses of DDT than are reported in wild birds, acting as a synthetic estrogen, can cause egg thinning and reduced egg production.

The research also theorizes that wild birds are exposed to other estrogen contaminates that might act “additively”. Since abnormally high laboratory doses of a great many natural and synthetic substances can and do have a variety of deleterious health effects, questions remain regarding what pesticide application dose levels are permissible, how they can be controlled, and other natural and synthetic estrogens to be taken into account in determining application-specific safeguards.

Carson’s book also claimed that synthetic insecticides can affect the human body in “sinister and often deadly ways,” asserting that cumulatively, the “threat of chronic poisoning and degenerative changes of the liver and other organs is very real.” She also reported that one expert specifically rated DDT as a “chemical carcinogen.”

Yet numerous World Health Organization studies have indicated that workers with intense exposures to DDT as much as thousands of times more than an average dose have failed to show “any convincing evidence of patterns of associations between DDT and cancer incidence or mortality.” Such studies involving thousands of people have investigated many different cancers, including breast cancer, lung cancer, testicular cancer, prostate cancer and others over many decades.

There was, however, a later study suggesting that DDT exposure prior to puberty might be linked to increased breast cancer risk later in life. In October 2007 the Environmental Research Foundation (EMF) reported that University of California-Berkeley research based upon 129 Bay Area women born between 1945 and 1965 when DDT was being sprayed in the U.S. to control mosquitos and other insects later developed breast cancer at five times the rate of those born earlier.

As reported by EMF, several earlier much larger studies found no such evidence that DDT caused breast cancer. The largest, in 2002 involving 3,000 Long Island, N.Y., women concluded that the breast cancer rate did not rise with increased blood DDT levels.

Referring to the Berkeley study, Steven Stellman, a professor of clinical epidemiology at Columbia University, commented at the time that a five-fold increased breast cancer risk is considered very high, but admitted that because relatively few women were involved, the study was prone to statistical weakness, which might mean the result is partly attributable to chance. Other known risk factors include alcohol consumption, hormone therapy and age of menstruation.

Political Science and Its Deadly Consequences

Summarizing all relevant research up to 2002, the U.S. Government Agency for Toxic Substances and Registry (ATSDR) reported that “there is no clear evidence that exposure to DDT/DDE causes cancer in humans.” Still, responding to public panic and political pressure aroused in good measure by Carson’s book, governments of several developing countries ended their DDT-based anti-malaria programs. Her claims are also clearly credited with a prohibition against DDT use in the U.S. since 1972, and a similar ban in Europe.

These widespread actions to prohibit DDT use occurred after the U.S. National Academy of Sciences issued a 1970 report stated: “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase in agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably, perhaps, scrub typhus, and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that, in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.”

NAS also concluded: “Abandonment of this valuable insecticide should be undertaken only at such time and in such places as it is evident that prospective gain to humanity exceeds the consequent losses. At this writing, all available substitutes for DDT are both more expensive per crop-year and decidedly more hazardous.”

Disregarding the NAS, the U.S. DDT prohibition was issued in a decision by then newly formed EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus following a seven month-long hearing on risks and benefits of the material in 1971. But after calling 125 witnesses and reviewing 9,362 pages of testimony, Judge Edmund Sweeney, the appointed hearing examiner, had actually concluded that alarm was unwarranted: 1) “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man”; 2) “DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man”; and 3) “The use of DDT under the registrations involved does not have a deleterious effect on fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.”

Reportedly, Ruckelshaus had never attended a single hour of the hearings, and according to his chief of staff, didn’t even bother to read Judge Sweeney’s report.

The World Health Organization had pleaded at the EPA hearings that DDT was very beneficial in fighting malaria in many parts of the world and should not be banned, stating that withdrawal of its use would be “…a major tragedy in the chapter of human health.”

Still, due to threatened European trade restrictions against countries that used the chemical, African nations terminated use of the effective mosquito pesticide for malaria control with catastrophic results. In Ceylon, for example, where the chemical’s use had cut malaria cases from millions each year to only 17 by 1963, a resurgence following the ban raised the infection rate back to half a million victims by 1969.

Yes, As a Last Resort…Some New Science Please

World views about use of insecticides in general and DDT in particular have finally become more receptive in recent years. In 2006, nearly thirty years after phasing out widespread use of indoor spraying with DDT and other insecticides (with limited exceptions), WHO, UNICEF, and USAID finally approved it as a measure of last resort. This has reversed policies established in 2004 by a Stockholm Convention which legally bound most UN-participant nations to “take actions to reduce or eliminate the production, use and/or release” of DDT.

WHO, which had previously promoted indoor spraying until anti-DDT protests won final influence in the early 1980s, has now re-instituted the practice in epidemic malaria regions and areas with constant and high transmission including throughout Africa. The Environmental Defense Fund, which originally launched a large anti-DDT campaign in the 1960s along with the Sierra Club and the Endangered Wildlife Trust, has joined WHO to endorse DDT spraying on inside walls of households in countries where malaria epidemics exist.

The President George W. Bush administration earmarked $1.2 billion to a program aimed at cutting malaria deaths in half through efforts which included indoor DDT spraying. As program coordinator Admiral R. Timothy Ziemer explained, “Because it is relatively inexpensive and very effective, USAID supports the spraying of homes with insecticides as part of a balanced, comprehensive malaria prevention and treatment program.” Thanks in large part to U.S. support, India has witnessed a dramatic reduction in malaria cases and fatalities. At least 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa are conducting indoor spraying with long-lasting insecticides, with DDT the most popular.

Tragically, earlier interventions would very likely have avoided countless millions of unnecessary deaths. The vast majority of these past and current victims are black and desperately poor, including large numbers of young children and elderly who are especially vulnerable.

As Dr. Arata Kochi, Director of WHO’s global Malaria Programme, said: “We must take a position based on the science and the data. One of our best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT.”

And what about here in America? Should those pesky mosquitoes and more than 30,000 annual cases of Lyme disease be tolerated if they are avoidable through selective and carefully monitored indoor and outdoor spraying of high infestation locations? Under what conditions might that be a safe thing to do? And if serious, responsible, unbiased research is required to make those decisions, shouldn’t we all be itching to have that begin?

SOURCE




Global Warmers Get it Wrong on Arctic Ice

A reader last night posted an article via Reddit that dug back into the BBC archives from 2007.

It was the journalistic equivalent of a high school yearbook photo of the Global Warming crowd sporting mullets in 1987, complete with high tops and black jeans.

“Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice,” said the BBC article. “Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.”

The article was very dramatic but… it also contained many of the hokum, nostrums and fake ‘ems that we’ve all grown used to with decades-long global warming alarmism.

The article was propped up by many impressive sounding titles and contained acronyms and experts that in subsequent years we have all learned to have little faith in. Their predictions have been less reliable than Republican pollsters handicapping a presidential race.

The researcher in the BBC article, Wieslaw Maslowski , we are told, worked at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. His “group includes co-workers at NASA and the Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS).”

And, of course, what attempt to frighten people over global warming would be complete without a cameo appearance from Al Gore? I guess we all NEVER get tired of Al Gore sounding off on Global Warming.

In what today would pass for a punch line of a good joke rather than serious science, the BBS, er, BBC concluded with this high point: “Former US Vice President Al Gore cited Professor Maslowski's analysis on Monday in his acceptance speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.”

Ha, ha, ha.

Because those projections of an ice-free Arctic Sea, with dachas lining sugar-sand beaches in Northern Canada, all reposing in a warm, tropical breezes, made audible only by the sound of palm trees rustling…well, that prediction was just a tad premature.

The ice, it turns out, is still there!!??

I know what you’re thinking: It’s shocking to all of us.

Especially shocking to guys like Al Gore who will have to put off their timeshare scheme developed for an island in the Arctic Circle called Umingmak Nuna. Umingmak Nuna is apparently the Inuit phrase for “land of the Muskox.”

I’ve never seen a real muskox before; only pictures.  Kind of looks like it’s half man, half bear, half pig.  Kind of a pig-bear-man.

There was a time I suppose when each of us were inclined to believe experts who told us that the rainforest would be gone by the year 2000, the extinction of whales would trigger an alien arms race to kill our planet in revenge and the artic sea ice would disappear by the summer of 2013.

And more than being shown to be fanciful predictions that have been born mostly out of fiction rather than science, such prophesies have served to reinforce skeptics’ claims that the whole “science” of global warming is based on faulty assumptions.

The absolute inability of warming science to have any predictive value ought to cause us to reexamine the whole debate.

Normal science works that way.

But instead of accepting the obvious answer-- that there is something wrong with their models—warmists blame others for questioning the basic assumptions underlying their premise.

Any fair-minded, objective persons would now have to admit that at this point, most projections of doom and gloom predicated on the false science of global warming have not materialized despite a mighty attempt to tie EVERY WEATHER EVENT to global warming.

But of course global warmists are not fair-minded, objective persons.

Instead, they are high-priests of expertism, technocrats with the power to legislate the cosmos; nerds with power.

A poll done conducted by the Washington Post in 2012 on global warming found that only 26% of respondents trusted scientists “completely” while 35% trusted them “not at all.” For the skeptic crowd that’s an 11 point swing from 2007 when only 24% of respondents trusted scientists “not at all.”

That lack of trust sits right now like a mullet on the head of the scientific community.

SOURCE




What Global Warming? 2012 Data Confirms Earth In Cooling Trend

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently released its “State of the Climate in 2012” report, which states that “worldwide, 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record.”
But the report “fails to mention [2012] was one of the coolest of the decade, and thus confirms the cooling trend,” according to an analysis by climate blogger Pierre Gosselin.

“To no one’s surprise, the report gives the reader the impression that warming is galloping ahead out of control,” writes Gosselin. “But their data shows just the opposite.”

Although the NOAA report noted that in 2012, “the Arctic continues to warm” with “sea ice reaching record lows,” it also stated that the Antarctica sea ice “reached a record high of 7.51 million square miles” on Sept. 26, 2012.

And the latest figures for this year show that there’s been a slowdown of melting in the Arctic this summer as well, with temperatures at the North Pole well below normal for this time of year. Meteorologist Joe Bastardi calls it “the coldest ever recorded.”

The Associated Press had to retract a photo it released on July 27 with the caption, “The shallow meltwater lake is occurring due to an unusually warm period.”

“In fact, the water accumulates in this way every summer,” AP admitted in a note to editors, adding that the photo was doubly misleading because “the camera used by the North Pole Environment Observatory has drifted hundreds of miles from its original position, which was a few dozen miles from the pole.”

NOAA also reported that the “average lower strastospheric temperature, about six to ten miles above the Earth’s surface, for 2012 was record or near-record cold, depending on the dataset” even while the concentrations of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, continued to increase.

"Even with all this data manipulation, the trend is down as shown by this Hadley global plot," writes Joseph D'Aleo, former director of meteorology at The Weather Channel. (See D'Aleo - Real Story About Temps.pdf)

"Last year was the 8th warmest but 7th coldest since 1998. They explain it away with the predominance of La Ninas or a solar blip, but say it was the warmest decade nonetheless, so stop questioning us," he said.

On August 7th, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten quoted Irish solar expert Ian Elliott predicting that lower levels of sunspot activity over the next few years “indicates that we may be on the path to a new little ice age.”

“If you think scientists just couldn’t get any more incompetent, then think again. NOAA scientists even appear to believe that cold events are now signs of warming,” Gosselin points out.

“When one carefully reads the report, we find that the NOAA findings actually do confirm precisely what the skeptics have been claiming all along:

1. The Earth has stopped warming.

2. The climate models exaggerated future warming [caused by] CO2 climate sensitivity is much lower than we first thought.

“That’s the real issue at hand,” he added.

SOURCE

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