Global warming: Australian scientists find explanation for pause in rising temperatures




Scientists have come up with an explanation for the pause in global warming, which has long been a point of contention raised by climate change sceptics.

Over the past 15 years the rate of global warming has slowed - and more recently almost stalled.

Sceptics say the slowdown suggests warming is not as bad as first thought, while most climate scientists say it is just a natural climate variability.

Now an Australian-led team of researchers has found strong winds in the Pacific Ocean are most likely to be behind the hiatus.

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) researcher Matthew England said oceans were much more dominant in terms of their heat uptake.

"Obviously we have implications of that such as sea level rise," Professor England said.

Professor England led a team of researchers from around the world that has come up with an explanation for why the oceans soak up the heat.

Their research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, has found the answer lies in stronger than usual trade winds whipping across the Pacific Ocean.
What do you make of the findings? Leave your comments below.

Pacific winds to 'reverse', warming to rise: researcher

It was found the winds were churning the Pacific like a washing machine, bringing the deeper colder water to the surface and pushing the warmer water below.

"The phase we're in of accelerated trade winds particularly lasts a couple of decades," Professor England said.

"We're about 12 to 13 years in to the most accelerated part of the wind field.

"It's important to point out there's a cycle we expect to reverse and when they do reverse back to their normal levels we'd expect global warming to kick in and start to rise."

We want the community to have confidence in the climate models. They are very good but in this instance the wind acceleration has been... much stronger than what the models projected."
Professor Matthew England

Professor England rejects the argument from sceptics that the slowdown suggests global warming is not as bad as first thought and that the climate models are not working.

"We want the community to have confidence in the climate models," he said.

"They are very good but in this instance the wind acceleration has been that strong and that much stronger than what the models projected."

Scientists used satellite measurements and an array of floats in the Pacific to observe two-decades worth of temperature and current information.

The CSIRO's Steve Rintoul said understanding the oceans was the key to understanding climate change.

"What's not commonly understood is that when we talk about global warming we mean ocean warming," Dr Rintoul said.

"Over the last 50 years, 90 per cent of the extra heat that's been stored by the earth is found in the ocean.

"So if we want to track how climate is changing we need to be looking in the ocean to understand it."

http://m.rollingstone.com...d-of-meteorology-20140212

Third Coldest Winter On Record So Far In The US


If February ended today, this would be the third coldest winter on record in the US, after 1979 and 1899.

http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/#!/content/1.2540627/

- Doppleganger

- Doppleganger

Third Coldest Winter On Record So Far In The US


If February ended today, this would be the third coldest winter on record in the US, after 1979 and 1899.



- Doppleganger

Lawrence Solomon | December 19, 2013


2013 has been a gloomy year for global warming enthusiasts. The sea ice in the Antarctic set a record, according to NASA, extending over a greater area than at any time since 1979 when satellite measurements first began. In the Arctic the news is also glum. Five years ago, Al Gore predicted that by 2013 “the entire North polar ice cap will be gone.” Didn’t happen. Instead, a deflated Gore saw the Arctic ice cap increase by 50% over 2012. This year’s Arctic ice likewise exceeded that of 2008, the year of his prediction. And that of 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Weather between the poles has also conspired to make the global warming believers look bad. In December, U.S. weather stations reported over 2000 record cold and snow days. Almost 60% of the U.S. was covered in snow, twice as much as last year. The heavens even opened up in the Holy Land, where an awestruck citizenry saw 16 inches of snow fall in Jerusalem, almost three feet in its environs. Snow blanketed Cairo for the first time in more than 100 years.

2013 marks the 17th year of no warming on the planet. It marks the first time that James Hansen, Al Gore’s guru and the one whose predictions set off the global warming scare, admitted that warming had stopped. It marks the first time that major media enforcers of the orthodoxy — the Economist, Reuters and the London Telegraph – admitted that the science was not settled on global warming, the Economist even mocking the scientists’ models by putting them on “negative watch.” Scientific predictions of global cooling – until recently mostly shunned in the academic press for fear of being labeled crackpot – were published and publicized by no less than the BBC, a broadcaster previously unmatched in the anthropogenic apocalyptic media.


2013 was likewise bleak for businesses banking on global warming. Layoffs and bankruptcies continued to mount for European and North American companies producing solar panels and wind turbines, as did their pleas for subsidies to fight off what they labelled unfair competition from Chinese firms. Starting in 2013, though, their excuses have been wearing thin. China’s Suntech, the world’s largest solar panel manufacturer, has now filed for bankruptcy, as has LDK Solar, another major firm. Sinovel, China’s largest manufacturers of wind turbines and the world second largest, reported it lost $100-million after its revenues plunged 60%, and it is now closing plants in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.

While these no-carbon technologies get buried, carbon rich fuels go gung ho. Last month Germany fired up a spanking new coal plant, the first of 10 modern CO2-gushers that Europe’s biggest economy will be banking on to power its economy into the 21st century. Worldwide, 1200 coal-fired plants are in the works. According to the International Agency, coal’s dominance will especially grow in the countries of the developing world, helping to raise their poor out of poverty as they modernize their economies.

But important as coal is, the fossil fuel darlings are indisputably shale gas and shale oil. This week the U.K. sloughed off the naysayers and announced it will be going all out to tap into these next-generation fuels. Half of the UK will be opened up to drilling to accomplish for the U.K. what shale oil and shale gas are doing for the U.S. – drastically lowering energy costs while eliminating the country’s dependence on foreign fuels. China, too, has decided to tap into the shale revolution – in a deal with the U.S. announced this week, it will be exploiting what some estimate to be the world’s biggest shale gas reserves, equivalent in energy content to about half the oil in Saudi Arabia.

2013 as well marks a turning point for the governments of the world. January 1, 2013, Day One of the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol, saw Kyoto abandoned by Canada and Russia, two fossil fuel powerhouses. With their departure Kyoto became a club for the non-emitters – the Kyoto Protocol now only covers a paltry 15% of global emissions. At UN-sponsored talks on global warming in Warsaw last month, the Western countries of Europe, North America, and Australia refused to even discuss a proposal from developing countries that would limit emissions in the future.

2013 also saw Australia elect a climate-skeptic government in an election that was hailed as a referendum on climate change. Upon winning, the government promptly proceeded to scrap the country’s carbon tax along with its climate change ministry, now in the rubbish heap of history. Other countries are taking note of the public’s attitude toward climate change alarmism – almost nowhere does the public believe the scary scenarios painted by the climate change advocates.

2013 was the best of years for climate skeptics; the worst of years for climate change enthusiasts for whom any change – or absence of change — in the weather served as irrefutable proof of climate change. The enthusiasts fell into disbelief that everyone didn’t join them in pooh-poohing the failure of the climate models. That governments and the public would abandon the duty to stop climate change was in their minds no more thinkable than Hell freezing over. Which the way things are going for them, may happen in 2014.


- Doppleganger

Antarctic Sea Ice Sets New Record For Jan 31st



Antarctic sea ice extent continues to break records. Extent at 31st January, of 4.540 million sq km, beat the previous record set in 2008. This is 26% higher than the climatological average for this date of 3.598 million sq km.



On average, Antarctic sea ice reaches minimum on 20th February, about a month earlier, relatively speaking, than the Arctic. It is likely then that we will see a new record high minimum set this month. The current record was set in 2008, with 3.691 million sq km.



Meanwhile, global sea ice area is normal.

Climate Scientist Who Got It Right Predicts 20 More Years of Global Cooling
January 28, 2014
Dr. Don Easterbrook – a climate scientist and glacier expert from Washington State who correctly predicted back in 2000 that the Earth was entering a cooling phase – says to expect colder temperatures for at least the next two decades.

Easterbrook’s predictions were “right on the money” seven years before Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for warning that the Earth was facing catastrophic warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide, which Gore called a “planetary emergency.”

“When we check their projections against what actually happened in that time interval, they’re not even close. They’re off by a full degree in one decade, which is huge. That’s more than the entire amount of warming we’ve had in the past century. So their models have failed just miserably, nowhere near close. And maybe it’s luck, who knows, but mine have been right on the button,” Easterbrook told CNSNews.com.

“For the next 20 years, I predict global cooling of about 3/10ths of a degree Fahrenheit, as opposed to the one-degree warming predicted by the IPCC,” said Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University and author of 150 scientific journal articles and 10 books, including “Evidence Based Climate Science,” which was published in 2011. (See EasterbrookL coming-century-predictions.pdf)

In contrast, Gore and the IPCC’s computer models predicted “a big increase” in global warming by as much as one degree per decade. But the climate models used by the IPCC have proved to be wrong, with many places in Europe and North America now experiencing record-breaking cold.

Easterbrook noted that his 20-year prediction was the “mildest” one of four possible scenarios, all of which involve lower temperatures, and added that only time will tell whether the Earth continues to cool slightly or plunges into another Little Ice Age as it did between 1650 and 1790.

“There’s no way to tell ‘til you get there,” he told CNSNews.com. But he lamented the fact that governments worldwide have already spent a trillion dollars fighting the wrong threat.

“How does it feel to have been right?” CNSNews.com asked Easterbrook.

“To be really truthful, it’s wonderful. There’s nothing that makes you feel better than to be right and be able to say, ‘I told you so,’” replied Easterbrook, who was also an official reviewer of the IPCC reports. “But I’m not gloating about it because it’s not good news. It’s bad news.

“And in many respects, I hope that I’m wrong. And the reason I hope that I’m wrong is because it’s going to cost several million people their lives if I’m right. In Third World countries where food and water are a problem right now, it’s going to get worse. Cold is way worse for humanity than warm is.”
Easterbrook said he made his earlier prediction by tracing back “a consistently recurring pattern” of alternating warm and cool ocean cycles called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) that occurs naturally every 25 to 30 years. He discovered that the PDO corresponded with a similar temperature cycle demonstrated by isotope ratios found in Greenland ice cores going all the way back to 1480.

“We don’t know what the driving mechanism is, but it’s very consistent. It’s happened five times a century and every time it’s happened, there’s been a corresponding change in global temperature, either warm or cool,” Easterbrook told CNSNews.com.

“What I did was I projected this same pattern forward to see what it would look like. And so in 1999, which was the year after the second warmest year on record, the PDO said we’re due for a climate change, and so I said okay. It looks as though we’re going to be entering a period of about three decades or so of global cooling.

“And so in 2000, I published a paper with the Geological Society of America in which I predicted that we were going to stop warming and begin cooling for about 25 or 30 years, on the basis of taking the temperature records that go back a century or more and simply repeating the pattern of warming and cooling, warming and cooling, and so on.

“And that in fact has happened. We have now had 17 years with no global warming and my original prediction was right so far. But we have still probably another 20 years or so to see if the cooling trend continues, and if it does, then my prediction will be right and my methods will be right. And so what it boils down to is, so far so good.”

Easterbrook added that his long-term prediction until the end of century is “a lot more nebulous” due to the still-unknown effect of the sun, which has entered a “grand solar minimum” occurring every 200 years. “Everything we think depends on what’s going to happen with the sun.”

But based on past climate data, he says the most likely scenarios are “either deep cooling, or a return to another 25-year cycle of light warming/cooling, but nothing even approaching the 10 degrees warming the IPCC folks are predicting.”


When CNSNews.com asked Easterbrook if anybody from the IPCC, which “ignored all the data I gave them,” ever admitted that he had been right, he laughed.“No, every time I say something about the projection of climate into the future based on real data, they come out with some modelled data that says this is just a temporary pause, like a tiger waiting under the rug.”

Easterbrook noted that 32,000 American scientists have signed a statement that there’s no correlation between climate change and carbon dioxide levels. “I am absolutely dumbfounded by the totally absurd and stupid things said every day by people who are purportedly scientists that make absolutely no sense whatsoever….

“These people are simply ignoring real-time data that has been substantiated and can be replicated and are simply making up stuff,” he told CNSNews.com. Driven by a quest for money and power, he added, “what they’re doing in the U.S. is using CO2 to impose all kinds of restrictions to push a socialist government.”

“One thing many people don’t realize is that CO2 by itself is incapable of causing significant climate change. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 39/1,000ths of one percent. It’s nothing. Ninety-five percent of the greenhouse effect is water vapour, and water vapour is not changing. …

“No doubt CO2 has been climbing, but the total change in atmospheric composition [since 1945, when CO2 levels began to increase] is one 9/1,000ths of one percent. So how are you going to have a 10 degree climate change by changing this tiny amount? You can’t do it,” he says, which is why the trillion dollars already spent worldwide on reducing carbon dioxide has had little effect.

“The people who are climate deniers are the people who are denying global cooling," Easterbrook told CNSNews.com. "We haven’t had any global warming in 17 years, and they are denying that. And so we’re not the deniers. They’re the deniers.”
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"The climate of New-York and the contiguous Atlantic seaboard has long been a study of great interest. We have just experienced a remarkable instance of its peculiarity. The Hudson River, by a singular freak of temperature, has thrown off its icy mantle and opened its waters to navigation.” – New York Times, Jan. 2, 1870

“Is our climate changing? The succession of temperate summers and open winters through several years, culminating last winter in the almost total failure of the ice crop throughout the valley of the Hudson, makes the question pertinent. The older inhabitants tell us that the winters are not as cold now as when they were young, and we have all observed a marked diminution of the average cold even in this last decade.” – New York Times, June 23, 1890

“The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.” – New York Times, Feb. 24, 1895

Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.” – Chicago Tribune, Aug. 9, 1923

“The discoveries of changes in the sun's heat and southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to the conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age – Time Magazine, Sept. 10, 1923

Headline: “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise” – New York Times, March 27, 1933

“America is believed by Weather Bureau scientists to be on the verge of a change of climate, with a return to increasing rains and deeper snows and the colder winters of grandfather's day.” – Associated Press, Dec. 15, 1934

Warming Arctic Climate Melting Glaciers Faster, Raising Ocean Level, Scientist Says – “A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a "serious international problem," Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist, said today. – New York Times, May 30, 1937

“Greenland's polar climate has moderated so consistently that communities of hunters have evolved into fishing villages. Sea mammals, vanishing from the west coast, have been replaced by codfish and other fish species in the area's southern waters.” – New York Times, Aug. 29, 1954

“An analysis of weather records from Little America shows a steady warming of climate over the last half century. The rise in average temperature at the Antarctic outpost has been about five degrees Fahrenheit.” – New York Times, May 31, 1958

“Several thousand scientists of many nations have recently been climbing mountains, digging tunnels in glaciers, journeying to the Antarctic, camping on floating Arctic ice. Their object has been to solve a fascinating riddle: what is happening to the world's ice? – New York Times, Dec. 7, 1958

“After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.” – New York Times, Jan. 30, 1961

“Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age.” – Los Angeles Times, Dec. 23, 1962

“Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two." – New York Times, Feb. 20, 1969

“By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half . . . ." – Life magazine, January 1970

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” – Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day, 1970

"Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind. We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation." – Barry Commoner (Washington University), Earth Day, 1970

Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor, "the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” – Newsweek magazine, Jan. 26, 1970

“The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.” – New York Times, July 18, 1970

“In the next 50 years, fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun's rays that the Earth's average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age." – Washington Post, July 9, 1971

“It's already getting colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes. . . .” – Los Angles Times, Oct. 24, 1971

“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.” – New York Times, Jan. 5, 1978

“A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.” – New York Times, Feb. 18, 1978

“A global warming trend could bring heat waves, dust-dry farmland and disease, the experts said... Under this scenario, the resort town of Ocean City, Md., will lose 39 feet of shoreline by 2000 and a total of 85 feet within the next 25 years.” – San Jose Mercury News, June 11, 1986

“Global warming could force Americans to build 86 more power plants -- at a cost of $110 billion -- to keep all their air conditioners running 20 years from now, a new study says...Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010, and the drain on power would require the building of 86 new midsize power plants – Associated Press, May 15, 1989

“New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now.” -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 17, 1989

"[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers . . . The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.” – "Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect," Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle, 1990.

"It appears that we have a very good case for suggesting that the El Ninos are going to become more frequent, and they're going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so, we'll go into a permanent El Nino. So instead of having cool water periods for a year or two, we'll have El Nino upon El Nino, and that will become the norm. And you'll have an El Nino, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years,” according to Dr. Russ Schnell, a scientist doing atmospheric research at Mauna Loa Observatory. – BBC, Nov. 7, 1997

"Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people." -- The Birmingham Post in England, July 26, 1999

“This year (2007) is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998.” – ScienceDaily, Jan. 5, 2007

Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer (2008), report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field. "We're actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history]," David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker. – National Geographic News, June 20, 2008

"So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually." Dr. James Hansen (NASA GISS), The Observer, Feb. 15, 2009.

* * *

Climate change? Yes, there has been plenty of that during the past 140 years. Despite warnings by "experts of the day" of approaching climate disasters, mankind somehow managed to survive. A decade or so from now, after earth's climate changes once again, those who are old enough will recall with amusement the time, early in the 21st century, when the world went crazy over an imaginary threat called “global warming.”

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: February 20 2014

I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.


Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.

So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?

They deal with the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans, argues Dyson, ignoring the effect of biology, i.e., vegetation and topsoil. Further, their predictions rest on models they fall in love with: “You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real.” Not surprisingly, these models have been “consistently and spectacularly wrong” in their predictions, write atmospheric scientists Richard McNider and John Christy — and always, amazingly, in the same direction.

Settled? Even Britain’s national weather service concedes there’s been no change — delicately called a “pause” — in global temperature in 15 years. If even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science?

But even worse than the pretense of settledness is the cynical attribution of any politically convenient natural disaster to climate change, a clever term that allows you to attribute anything — warming and cooling, drought and flood — to man’s sinful carbon burning.

Accordingly, Obama ostentatiously visited drought-stricken California last Friday. Surprise! He blamed climate change. Here even the New York Times gagged, pointing out that far from being supported by the evidence, “the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter.”

How inconvenient. But we’ve been here before. Hurricane Sandy was made the poster child for the alleged increased frequency and strength of “extreme weather events” like hurricanes.

Nonsense. Sandy wasn’t even a hurricane when it hit the United States. Indeed, in all of 2012, only a single hurricane made U.S. landfall . And 2013 saw the fewest Atlantic hurricanes in 30 years. In fact, in the last half-century, one-third fewer major hurricanes have hit the United States than in the previous half-century.

Similarly tornadoes. Every time one hits, the climate-change commentary begins. Yet last year saw the fewest in a quarter-century. And the last 30 years — of presumed global warming — has seen a 30 percent decrease in extreme tornado activity (F3 and above) versus the previous 30 years.

None of this is dispositive. It doesn’t settle the issue. But that’s the point. It mocks the very notion of settled science, which is nothing but a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate. As does the term “denier” — an echo of Holocaust denial, contemptibly suggesting the malevolent rejection of an established historical truth.

Climate-change proponents have made their cause a matter of fealty and faith. For folks who pretend to be brave carriers of the scientific ethic, there’s more than a tinge of religion in their jeremiads. If you whore after other gods, the Bible tells us, “the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit” (Deuteronomy 11).

Sounds like California. Except that today there’s a new god, the Earth Mother. And a new set of sins — burning coal and driving a fully equipped F-150.

But whoring is whoring, and the gods must be appeased. So if California burns, you send your high priest (in carbon -belching Air Force One, but never mind) to the bone-dry land to offer up, on behalf of the repentant congregation, a $1 billion burnt offering called a “climate resilience fund.”

Ah, settled science in action.

i got a sunburn yesterday

More proof that the "Humans cause Global Warming" HOAX is nothing more than a way for some people to get rich by getting gullible sheeple to buy into the hoax, even though the ACTUAL recorded DATA proves the "predictions" made based on computer models from 20 years ago were wrong.



Biofuels do more harm than good, UN warns

Growing crops to make “green” biofuel harms the environment and drives up food prices, admits the United Nations

The United Nations will officially warn that growing crops to make “green” biofuel harms the environment and drives up food prices, The Telegraph can disclose.

A leaked draft of a UN report condemns the widespread use of biofuels made from crops as a replacement for petrol and diesel. It says that biofuels, rather than combating the effects of global warming, could make them worse.

The draft report represents a dramatic about-turn for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Its previous assessment on climate change, in 2007, was widely condemned by environmentalists for giving the green light to large-scale biofuel production. The latest report instead puts pressure on world leaders to scrap policies promoting the use of biofuel for transport.

The summary for policymakers states: “Increasing bioenergy crop cultivation poses risks to ecosystems and biodiversity.”



The report into the impact of man-made climate change is the most authoritative of its kind. For the first time, it considered the impact of biofuels on the environment.

Biofuels were once billed as the green alternative to fossil fuels, but environmental campaigners have voiced concern about them for some time.

They note that growing biofuel crops on a large scale requires either the conversion of agricultural land used for food crops or the destruction of forests to free up land, possibly offsetting any reduction in carbon emissions from the use of biofuels.

Other concerns include increased stress on water supplies and rising corn prices as a result of increased demand for the crop, which is fermented to produce biofuel.

Bioethanol, made from corn and sugar cane, can be used as a substitute for petrol, while biodiesel, made from rapeseed, sunflower or palm oil, is an alternative to diesel.

A European Union directive set a target for biofuels used in transport to double to 10 per cent by 2020, although it has limited the amount from food crops to 5 per cent.

Around 5 per cent of fuel sold in the UK comes from biodiesel. The latest Department for Transport figures show 1.33 billion litres were consumed here for the 12 months to April 2013. The IPCC report appears to recognise environmentalists’ concerns. It states: “If production [of biofuels] is not carefully managed, biofuel feedstocks can displace land for food cropping or natural, unmanaged ecosystems.”

Referring in part to deforestation, it says any benefit of biofuel production on carbon emissions “may be offset partly or entirely for decades or centuries by emissions from the resulting indirect land-use changes”. On biofuel production from corn, it adds: “Resulting increases in demand for corn contribute to higher corn prices and may indirectly increase incidence of malnutrition in vulnerable populations.”

An IPCC spokesman said she could not comment until the final report is published on March 31.

Climate change: the debate is about to change radically


The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due out next week. If the leaked draft is reflected in the published report, it will constitute the formal moving on of the debate from the past, futile focus upon "mitigation" to a new debate about resilience and adaptation.

The new report will apparently tell us that the global GDP costs of an expected global average temperature increase of 2.5 degrees Celsius over the 21st century will be between 0.2 and 2 per cent. To place that in context, the well-known Stern Review of 2006 estimated the costs as 5-20 per cent of GDP. Stern estimates the costs of his recommended policies for mitigating climate change at 2 per cent of GDP – and his estimates are widely regarded as relatively optimistic (others estimate mitigation costs as high as 10 per cent of global GDP). Achieving material mitigation, at a cost of 2 per cent and more of global GDP, would require international co-ordination that we have known since the failure of the Copenhagen conference on climate change simply was not going to happen. Even if it did happen, and were conducted optimally, it would mitigate only a fraction of the total rise, and might create its own risks.

And to add to all this, now we are told that the cost might be as low as 0.2 per cent of GDP. At a 2.4 per cent annual GDP growth rate, the global economy increases 0.2 per cent every month.

So the mitigation deal has become this: Accept enormous inconvenience, placing authoritarian control into the hands of global agencies, at huge costs that in some cases exceed 17 times the benefits even on the Government's own evaluation criteria, with a global cost of 2 per cent of GDP at the low end and the risk that the cost will be vastly greater, and do all of this for an entire century, and then maybe – just maybe – we might save between one and ten months of global GDP growth.

Can anyone seriously claim, with a straight face, that that should be regarded as an attractive deal or that the public is suffering from a psychological disorder if it resists mitigation policies?

The 2014 Budget recognised reality, with the Government now introducing special measures to keep energy prices low for energy intensive firms – abandoning what little pretence remained that it was attempting to prevent climate change by limiting energy use so as to limit CO2 emissions. The new IPCC report – though it remains as robust as ever in saying that there will be climate change and its effects will be material (points that relatively few mitigation policy sceptics deny) – has a marked change of focus from the 2007 report.

Whereas previously the IPCC emphasised the effects climate change could have if not prevented, now the focus has moved on to how to make economies and societies resilient and to adapt to warming now considered inevitable. Climate exceptionalism – the notion that climate change is a challenge of a different order from, say, recessions or social inclusion or female education or many other important global policy goals – is to be down played. Instead, the new report emphasised that adapting to climate change is one of many challenges that policymakers will face but should have its proper place alongside other policies.

Quite so. It has been known since the late 1970s that there would be material warming during the 21st century and we will need to adapt to it. At present, though, in the UK we still carry the legacy of a panoply of enormously expensive but futile policies that were designed to be pieces of a global effort to mitigate that is just not going to happen.

Our first step in adapting to climate change should be to accept that we aren't going to mitigate it. We're going to have to adapt. That doesn't mean there might not be the odd mitigation-type policy, around the edges, that is cheap and feasible and worthwhile. But it does mean that the grandiloquent schemes for preventing climate change should go. Their day is done. Even the IPCC – albeit implicitly – sees that now.

i got a sunburn yesterday
- kicksave856