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Sunday, December 30, 2007

Global Temperaturers 2,500 BC - 2007 AD

75 major temperature swings in past 4,500 years per Harris-Mann study.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Heat Island Effect

Website link of weather station sites with photographs of locations

Friday, December 28, 2007

Long Range Weather Trends

Harris-Mann Climatologists

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Antarctic Trek Snowed Out by "Storm of the Century" Twenty years-worth of snow in ten days

28 Dec 07

A Philadelphia main line entrepreneur who set out with a partner on a trek across the Antarctic to the South Pole had to abandon his effort after days of crippling snow made the situation too dangerous.

After Todd Carmichael's partner became injured shortly after the 700 mile trek began on November 28th, he had a decision to make: should he leave on the rescue plane with his partner or stay? Carmichael decided to stay: "I put a good five days into it and got a day and a half lead over the world record, and then the storm of the century. For the next 10 days, I walked completely blinded in a white out. It's a continent that receives about an eighth of an inch of snow each year. And I got 24 inches in 10 days."

That's about 20 years of snow all in one shot. Add to that the fact Carmichael was pulling a sled of gear weighing 250 pounds, he lost 25 pounds during his odyssey.

See entire article by KYW Newsradio's Michelle Durham
Thanks to Ed Allison for this link

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

A New Low in Climate Science: The Hockey Stick

The `Hockey Stick': A New Low in Climate Science

by John L. Daly

The evidence from the `exhibits' is overwhelming. From all corners of the world, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age clearly shows up in a variety of proxy indicators, proxies more representative of temperature than the inadequate tree rings used by Michael Mann.

What is disquieting about the `Hockey Stick' is not Mann's presentation of it originally. As with any paper, it would sink into oblivion if found to be flawed in any way. Rather it was the reaction of the greenhouse industry to it - the chorus of approval, the complete lack of critical evaluation of the theory, the blind acceptance of evidence which was so flimsy. The industry embraced the theory for one reason and one reason only - it told them exactly what they wanted to hear.

Proponents of the `Hockey Stick' should recall George Orwell's `Nineteen Eighty-Four', a black SF drama in which his fictional totalitarian regime used `memory holes' to re-invent past history [22]. In this age of instant communication, there is no `memory hole' big enough to overturn the historical truth about the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

More Evidence for No Net Warming the Last 70 Years

By meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

25 Dec 07

Data from 1221 climate stations shows little (0.21F) in the way of net warming since the last cyclical peak in 1930.
CO2 Science has been doing a weekly plot of climate stations showing the cyclical nature of the changes and the lack of warming in most stations. This month the station is Binghamton, NY, which actually has shown a cooling of 2.67F over the period.

Joseph D’Aleo was the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting

Monday, December 24, 2007

co2 Parts per Million Measurements from Mauna Loa Observatory

Keep in mind that the unit of measure is ppmv (parts per million by volume). It is clear that CO2 is a very small portion of the atmosphere. Among the so called greenhouse gases, it is a very distant second to H2O. And yet, some people portray CO2 as if it had almost mythical powers of dominating climate around the globe.

While temperatures have gone up and down, the parts per milion by volume increased from 315 to 375 between 1960 and 2003....that's parts per MILLLION!

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Man-Made Global Warming: 10 Questions

by Pat Sajak

Posted: 12/20/2007

The subject of man-made global warming is almost impossible to discuss without a descent into virulent name-calling (especially on the Internet, where anonymity breeds a special kind of vicious reaction to almost any social or political question), but I’ll try anyway. I consider myself to be relatively well-read on the matter, and I’ve still come down on the skeptical side, because there are aspects of the issue that don’t make a lot of sense to me. Though I confess to have written none-too-reverentially on the subject, I want to try to put all that aside and ask ten serious questions to which I have been unable to find definitive answers:

1. What is the perfect temperature?

If we are to embark on a lifestyle-altering quest to lower the temperature (or at least minimize its rise), what is our goal? I don’t ask this flippantly. Can we demonstrate that one setting on the global thermostat is preferable over another? If so, what is it, and how do we get there? And, once there, how do we maintain it? Will we ever have to “heat things up” again if it drops below that point?

2. Just what is the average temperature of the earth?

At any one time there are temperature extremes all over the planet. How do we come up with an average, and how do those variations fit in with our desire to slow global warming?

3. What factors have led to global warming in the past, and how do we know they aren’t the causes of the current warming trend?

Again, I don’t ask this in a judgmental way. There is no argument that warming cycles (or cooling, for that matter) have been a part of earth’s history. Why are we so sure this one is different?

4. Why is there such a strong effort to stifle discussion and dissent?

I’m always troubled by arguments that begin, “Everybody agrees...” or “Everyone knows...” In fact, there is a good deal of dissent in the scientific world about the theory of man-made global warming. A large (and growing) segment of those who study such things are questioning some of the basic premises of the theory. Why should there be anything wrong with that? Again, this is a big deal, and we should have the best information and opinion from the best minds.

5. Why are there such dramatically different warnings about the effects of man-made global warming?

Predictions of 20-foot rises in ocean levels have given way to talk of a few inches over time. In many cases, those predictions are less than the rises of the past few centuries. Whatever the case, why the scare tactics?

6. Are there potential benefits to global warming?

Again, I don’t ask this mockingly. Would a warmer climate in some areas actually improve living conditions? Would such improvement (health, crop production, lifestyle) balance any negative impact from the phenomenon?

7. Should such drastic changes in public policy be based on a “what if?” proposition?

There are some who say we can’t afford to wait, and, even if there’s some doubt, we should move ahead with altering the way we live. While there are good arguments for changing some of our environmental policies, should they be based on “what it?”

8. What will be the impact on the people of the world if we change the way we live based on man-made global warming concerns?

Nothing happens in a vacuum; there are always unintended consequences to our actions. For example, if we were to dramatically reduce our need for international oil, what happens to the economies of the Middle East and the populations that rely on oil income? There are thousands of other implications, some good and some bad. What are they? Shouldn’t we be thinking about them and talking about them?

9. How will we measure our successes?

Is the measuring stick going to be temperature, sea level, number of annual hurricanes, rainfall, or a combination of all those things? Again, do we have a goal in mind? What happens when we get there?

10. How has this movement gained such momentum?

We’ve faced environmental issues throughout our history, but it’s difficult to remember one which has gained such “status” in such a short time. To a skeptic, there seems to be a religious fervor that makes one wary. A gradual “ramping down” of the dire predictions has not led to a diminution of the doomsday rhetoric. Are these warning signs that the movement has become more of an activist cause than a scientific reality?

Just asking.

Mr. Sajak is the host of "Wheel of Fortune" and PatSajak.com.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Holes in Global-Warming Theory Put Mitigation Effort at Risk

• NEW STATESMAN --

12/19/07

Has global warming stopped? The Earth's temperatures have held steady since 2001, says a veteran science writer, a pattern that raises questions about the intense efforts under way to stem the impact of greenhouse gases.

What is indisputable, says David Whitehouse on the Web site of the New Statesman, a generally left-leaning British weekly, is that the amount of gases such as carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has been increasing steadily for decades as humans burn more fossil fuels.

Scientists believe those gases absorb outgoing infrared radiation from the Earth's surface, causing heat to be retained. In principle, that produces the greenhouse effect that is the fundamental theory behind global warming.

The world's temperatures rose sharply from 1980 to 1998 but have leveled off since then, according to Mr. Whitehouse's reading of U.S. and United Kingdom government statistics. In other words, he says, global warming has ceased.

While scientists have proposed a variety of theories for the recent plateau in temperature, those explanations are inadequate, says Mr. Whitehouse, who spent 18 years covering the sciences at the British Broadcasting Corporation and holds a doctorate in astrophysics. The working hypothesis of global warming remains a good one, says Mr. Whitehouse, but it doesn't fully explain what is occurring in the Earth's atmosphere. "Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what" or risk wasting billions of dollars on the wrong solutions.

Mr. Whitehouse's observations didn't go over well with many New Statesman readers. While a few posted comments to the Web site applauding his skepticism, others said factors such as melting glaciers and rising sea levels had to be taken into account. They also criticized Mr. Whitehouse for drawing conclusions based on a short time frame.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Heat From Earth's Magma Contributing To Melting Of Greenland Ice

ScienceDaily (2007-12-18) -- Scientists have discovered what they think may be another reason why Greenland's ice is melting: a thin spot in Earth's crust is enabling underground magma to heat the ice. They have found at least one "hotspot" in the northeast corner of Greenland -- just below a site where an ice stream was recently discovered.

The researchers don't yet know how warm the hotspot is. But if it is warm enough to melt the ice above it even a little, it could be lubricating the base of the ice sheet and enabling the ice to slide more rapidly out to sea. “The behavior of the great ice sheets is an important barometer of global climate change,” said Ralph von Frese, leader of the project and a professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. “However, to effectively separate and quantify human impacts on climate change, we must understand the natural impacts, too.

“Crustal heat flow is still one of the unknowns -- and it's a fairly significant one, according to our preliminary results.” Timothy Leftwich, von Frese's former student and now a postdoctoral engineer at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, presented the study's early results on Thursday, December 13, 2007, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. von Frese's team combined gravity measurements of the area taken by a Naval Research Laboratory aircraft with airborne radar measurements taken by research partners at the University of Kansas. The combined map revealed changes in mass beneath the Earth's crust, and the topography of the crust where it meets the ice sheet.

Below the crust is the mantle, the partially molten rocky layer that surrounds the Earth's core. The crust varies in thickness, but is usually tens of miles thick. Even so, the mantle is so hot that temperatures just a few miles deep in the crust reach hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit, von Frese explained. “Where the crust is thicker, things are cooler, and where it's thinner, things are warmer. And under a big place like Greenland or Antarctica , natural variations in the crust will make some parts of the ice sheet warmer than others,” he said.

The ice thickness, the temperature at the base of the ice, and ground topography all contribute to the forming of an ice stream -- a river of ice that flows within a larger ice sheet. In recent years, Greenland ice streams have been carrying ice out to sea faster, and ice cover on the island has been diminishing. Once the ice reaches the sea, it melts, and global sea levels rise.
“The complete melting of these continental ice sheets would put much of Florida, as well as New Orleans, New York City and other important coastal population centers, under water,” von Frese said.

The ice sheet in northeast Greenland is especially worrisome to scientists. It had no known ice streams until 1991, when satellites spied one for the first time. Dubbed the Northeastern Greenland Ice Stream, it carries ice nearly 400 miles, from the deepest interior of the island out to the Greenland Sea. “Ice streams have to have some reason for being there. And it's pretty surprising to suddenly see one in the middle of an ice sheet,” von Frese said. The newly discovered hotspot is just below the ice stream, and could have caused it to form, the researchers concluded. But what caused the hotspot to form? “It could be that there's a volcano down there,” he said. “But we think it's probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice.”

Collaborator Kees van der Veen began working on the project when he was a visiting associate professor of geological sciences and research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State. He is now at the University of Kansas. “Recent observations indicate that the Greenland Ice Sheet is much more active than we ever believed,” van der Veen said. “There have been rapid changes in outlet glaciers, for example. Such behavior is critically linked to conditions at the ice bed. Geothermal heat is an important factor, but until now, our models have not included spatial variations in heat, such as this hotspot. “Our map is the first attempt at quantifying spatial variations in geo-heat under Greenland -- and it explains why the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream is where it is,” van der Veen added.

To measure actual temperatures beneath the ice, scientists must drill boreholes down to the base of the ice sheet-- a mile or more below the ice surface. The effort and expense make such measurements few and far between, especially in remote areas of northeast Greenland.
For now, the researchers are combining theories of how heat flows through the mantle and crust with the gravity and radar data, to understand how the hotspot is influencing the ice.
Once they finish searching the rest of Greenland for other hotspots, they hope to turn their attention to Antarctica.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Adapted from materials provided by Ohio State University.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Global Warming Lies Create a Climate of Crisis

Alan Caruba
MichNews.com

Dec 17, 2007

The United Nations conference in Bali, attended by some 10,000 participants and observers, is likely to make future generations conclude that ours was deranged to be discussing how humans could have any affect whatever on the climate. They will, in retrospect, agree that the global warming theory was a lie whose agenda was to retard anything that might extend and enhance life on earth.

The Protocol is based entirely on a lie that predicts dramatic and imminent global warming. Global warmers insist that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced, but carbon dioxide does not cause climate change. Climatologists will tell you that any rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not precede, but follows warming cycles.

The science is well known, but hucksters like the odious Al Gore and those behind the original Kyoto Protocol, with the media as accessories, have created a climate of crisis.

It’s a very good thing that our Senate voted unanimously in 1997 against binding America to the United Nations Kyoto Protocol on Climate Control and that both the Clinton and Bush Administrations refused to act on the proposed limits. The reason for the Senate resolution was to avoid “serious harm to the economy of the United States.”

A November 30 Bloomberg News article by Kristian Rix and Mathew Carr reported that Japan, Spain, and Italy face as much as $33 billion in fines as the result of having agreed to reduce so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions and failed. These three nations are deemed the “worst performers among 36 nations that agreed to curb carbon dioxide gases that cause climate change.”

Among the nations exempt from the Kyoto Protocol are China and India, both of whom represent two of the six billion people on planet Earth. The idea that limits on carbon dioxide emissions could be achieved without their participation is idiotic.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) plays a minor role in determining the Earth’s climate but at the same time plays an essential role in the maintenance of all of the Earth’s vegetation, whether it takes the form of crops, jungles, forests, and just someone’s front lawn. Without CO2 all animal life, including our own dies because of its dependence on food crops.

The Earth’s atmosphere is composed of 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of other gases, including water vapor. We call this “air” and, humans depend on the oxygen content for life. At the same time all six billion of us individually exhale about two pounds of carbon dioxide every day. By contrast, Nature emits about 30 times more CO2 than humans. The oceans of the world absorb and release CO2 all the time. This is Nature’s balance that maintains all life, animal and vegetable, on earth.

Consider now how many schools, hospitals, bridges, roads, and other benefits to their citizens that $33 billion represents to Japan, Spain, and Italy. Such fines will be transferred to the coffers of the United Nations for having failed to curb CO2 emissions that are actually a benefit to the Earth!

An entirely bogus system of “carbon credits” has been created to transfer huge amounts of money from industrialized nations accused of producing too much CO2 to those nations that, for lack of development—failed economies—will garner funding as they “sell” their excess credits. The same system would allow various industries to sell the same worthless credits to those—primarily producers and users of energy—deemed to be major CO2 “polluters.”

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has fallen prey to the lie that CO2 represents a form of “pollution” and should be regulated, the known science renders this decision an egregious juridical error

The Earth, over billions of years, has gone through cycles of warming and cooling that are well established. It has gone through periods when the CO2 content in the atmosphere was far higher than today. The latest cooling period is called the mini-ice age and lasted from around 1300 to 1850. The Earth has been warming naturally since then.

There is no dramatic warming occurring. Predictions of this are based on totally flawed computer models, none of which can begin to approximate the sheer chaos and complexity of the Earth’s weather system.

These computer models, put forth by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control, have been repeatedly revealed to be inaccurate to the point of deliberate deception. The constant assertion that there is a “consensus” among scientists that global warming is caused by humans is yet another part of the lie.

As the anti-capitalist forces meet in Bali, the rest of us must demand that we shall not be penalized and threatened by limits imposed on industries and agriculture around the world.

The people of the world must not submit to a lie of global warming that is intended to deprive them of the future benefits that energy use, improved transportation, technological innovations, and the expanded production of food portends.

----------------------------------------
Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com.
He also maintains a blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com.
© Alan Caruba, December 2007 Copyright© MichNews.com. All Rights Reserved.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Pope Condemns the Climate Change Prophets of Doom

Pope Benedict XVI warns the climate change prophets of doom that any solutions to climate change must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology. The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

Extra Sunshine Blamed for Part of Arctic Meltdown

Friday, December 14, 2007

By Andrea Thompson

National Snow and Ice Data Center

Aug. 29: The long-desired Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, which opened up this year for the first time in history.

SAN FRANCISCO — Clouds were likely a culprit in this summer's record Arctic meltdown which temporarily opened up the fabled Northwest Passage, scientists announced Wednesday.
While Earth's rising temperatures fueled by global warming are certainly a factor in the Arctic melt, unusual weather patterns this summer also influenced how much of the sea ice melted.
One result of these patterns was a decrease in cloud cover, scientists said today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which would have allowed more sunlight to penetrate Earth's atmosphere and warm the Arctic ocean waters.

New data from NASA satellites observing the western Arctic, where most of the ice loss occurred, showed a 16 percent decrease in cloud coverage this summer compared to 2006.
"There's been quite dramatic reductions of cloudiness this summer," said study member Graeme Stephens of Colorado State University.

The amount of sunlight from these clearer skies would have been enough to heat ocean waters by 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4 degrees Celsius), or enough to melt 1 foot (0.3 meters) of sea ice, the scientists said.

White House Responds 'You're Wrong' to Gore Charges That U.S. Blocking Bali Climate Talks
E.U. Threatens to Boycott U.S.-Led Climate Talks if Emissions Deal Not Struck
Pope Condemns Global Warming Prophets
Study: Part of Global-Warming Model May Be Wrong

"Clouds are conspiring, they're playing a role in this," said study author Jennifer Kay, a post-doctoral research fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Kay says the result of this work highlights the importance of the influence of weather pattern variability on an already stressed-out Arctic system.

"As Arctic sea ice thins, its extent is more sensitive to year-to-year variability in weather and cloud patterns," Kay said. "Our data show that clearer skies this summer allowed more of the sun's energy to melt the vulnerably thin sea ice and heat the ocean surface."

Copyright © 2007 Imaginova Corp. All Rights Reserved.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Will Al Gore Make Peace With Reality?

Thursday, December 13, 2007
By Steven Milloy

Accepting his share of the Nobel Peace prize this week, Al Gore said that ". . . we have begun to wage war on the Earth itself. It is time to make peace with the planet."

A new study published this week, however, provides more evidence that Mr. Gore is, in fact, at war with reality and that he would do well to make peace with the science.

Climate scientists reported in the December issue of the International Journal of Climatology, published by Britain's Royal Meteorological Society, that observed temperature changes measured over the last 30 years don't match well with temperatures predicted by the mathematical climate models relied on by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The global-warming hypothesis is based on climate models that suppose that temperature trends in the troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere, should be 2-3 times greater than trends in surface temperatures.

As noted in 2000 by the National Academy of Sciences, however, this notion conflicts with real-life observations indicating that the Earth's surface is warming more quickly than the middle and upper parts of the troposphere, defined as between 1 to 6 miles in altitude.

The new study — authored by David Douglass (University of Rochester), John Christy (University of Alabama-Huntsville), Benjamin Pearson (also University of Rochester) and S. Fred Singer (University of Virginia) — compared all 10 available observational data sets with the major models used by the IPCC.

Douglass et al. report in the new study that observational data are in drastic disagreement with the climate models.

The models predict significantly warmer atmospheric temperatures than have actually occurred, despite that "the last 25 years constitute a period of more complete and accurate observations and more realistic modeling efforts."

"We suggest, therefore, that projections of future climate based on these models be viewed with much caution," they concluded.

Caution, unfortunately, is the last thing on the minds of Al Gore and co-Nobelist IPCC, who rely on their suspect climate models to predict that average global temperature will rise anywhere from 2 degrees Fahrenheit to 12 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, depending on the level of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

But it's tough to take such predictions seriously when the global-warming hypothesis and the models that rely on it are flatly contradicted by 30 years of reality.

Another entity that needs to come to grips with what constitutes yet another fatal flaw in the global-warming hypothesis is the U.S. Congress.

Just last week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 11-8, largely along party lines, to send the so-called "Lieberman-Warner bill" for consideration by the full Senate.
The goal of Lieberman-Warner is to slash U.S .greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent by 2050. It would attempt to achieve this goal through a so-called cap-and-trade mechanism that would place increasingly stringent limits on industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.
Lieberman-Warner is a recipe for social and economic disaster, according to testimony offered in November by Dr. Margo Thorning, chief economist for the American Council on Capital Formation.

While population and economic growth are projected to result in a 30 percent increase in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, Lieberman-Warner would require that the emissions level be 55 percent lower than the 2030 projection. "Sharp cutbacks in energy use would be necessary to close the 55 percent gap," Thorning testified. Thorning pointed out to the Senate that during 1990-2000, per capita U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by 0.8 percent and are projected to decline by 0.6 percent during 2000-2012, thanks primarily to increased a long-term trend in energy efficiency.

But Lieberman-Warner would require per capita emissions to fall by 50 percent during 2000-2030. "The technologies simply do not exist to reduce emissions over the next 17 years by the amounts mandated in [Lieberman-Warner] without severely reducing the growth in the U.S. economy and in employment," said Thorning.

Other Senate testimony by the consulting firm CRA International projected that Lieberman-Warner would eventually cause an annual economic loss of $1 trillion. To provide context, current annual Social security outlays are about $600 billion.

The bill was also projected to result in a net loss of 1.5 million to 3.4 million jobs by 2020, throttling the fantasy that "going Green" will create more jobs.

The Congressional Budget Office and economists such as former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, supply-sider Arthur Laffer and Harvard's Greg Mankiw have all condemned cap-and-trade as dangerous to the economy — yet like Al Gore, Lieberman-Warner marches on, oblivious to reality.

One co-author of the new study, John Christy, said in a media release that, "We have good reason [based on our study] to believe that the current climate models greatly overestimate the effects of greenhouse gases."

Co-author Fred Singer added, "Our research demonstrates that the ongoing rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide has only a minor influence on climate change. We must conclude, therefore, that attempts to control carbon dioxide emissions are ineffective and pointless — but very costly."
As the science continues to roll in against greenhouse-gas panic, Al Gore just keeps getting shriller in hopes of pushing the Green-whipped, Democrat-controlled Congress toward economy-killing regulation.

Though it's hard to see how Gore will ever bring himself to make peace with the real inconvenient truth, we must nevertheless demand a reality check from our elected representatives.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

New Study Increases Concerns About Climate Model Reliability

ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2007) — A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere.

This research, published online in the Royal Meteorological Society's International Journal of Climatology, raises new concerns about the reliability of models used to forecast global warming.
"The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth's climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic," said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. "Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? "It seems that the answer is no."

Scientists from Rochester, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and the University of Virginia compared the climate change "forecasts" from the 22 most widely-cited global circulation models with tropical temperature data collected by surface, satellite and balloon sensors. The models predicted that the lower atmosphere should warm significantly more than it actually did.

"Models are very consistent in forecasting a significant difference between climate trends at the surface and in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere between the surface and the stratosphere," said Dr. John Christy, director of UAH's Earth System Science Center. "The models forecast that the troposphere should be warming more than the surface and that this trend should be especially pronounced in the tropics.

"When we look at actual climate data, however, we do not see accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere. Instead, the lower and middle atmosphere are warming the same or less than the surface. For those layers of the atmosphere, the warming trend we see in the tropics is typically less than half of what the models forecast."

The 22 climate models used in this study are the same models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which recently shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

The atmospheric temperature data were from two versions of data collected by sensors aboard NOAA satellites since late 1979, plus several sets of temperature data gathered twice a day at dozens of points in the tropics by thermometers carried into the atmosphere by helium balloons. The surface data were from three datasets.

After years of rigorous analysis and testing, the high degree of agreement between the various atmospheric data sets gives an equally high level of confidence in the basic accuracy of the climate data.

"The last 25 years constitute a period of more complete and accurate observations, and more realistic modeling efforts," said Dr. Fred Singer from the University of Virginia. "Nonetheless, the models are seen to disagree with the observations. We suggest, therefore, that projections of future climate based on these models should be viewed with much caution."

The findings of this study contrast strongly with those of a recent study that used 19 of the same climate models and similar climate datasets. That study concluded that any difference between model forecasts and atmospheric climate data is probably due to errors in the data.
"The question was, what would the models 'forecast' for upper air climate change over the past 25 years and how would that forecast compare to reality?" said Christy. "To answer that we needed climate model results that matched the actual surface temperature changes during that same time. If the models got the surface trend right but the tropospheric trend wrong, then we could pinpoint a potential problem in the models.

"As it turned out, the average of all of the climate models forecasts came out almost like the actual surface trend in the tropics. That meant we could do a very robust test of their reproduction of the lower atmosphere.

"Instead of averaging the model forecasts to get a result whose surface trends match reality, the earlier study looked at the widely scattered range of results from all of the model runs combined. Many of the models had surface trends that were quite different from the actual trend," Christy said. "Nonetheless, that study concluded that since both the surface and upper atmosphere trends were somewhere in that broad range of model results, any disagreement between the climate data and the models was probably due to faulty data.

"We think our experiment is more robust and provides more meaningful results."

Adapted from materials provided by Wiley-Blackwell.

Nitrous Oxide From Ocean Microbes Could be Adding to Global Warming

Nitrous Oxide From Ocean Microbes Could Be Adding To Global Warming
ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2007) — A large amount of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide is produced by bacteria in the oxygen poor parts of the ocean using nitrites according to Dr Mark Trimmer of Queen Mary, University of London.

Dr Trimmer looked at nitrous oxide production in the Arabian Sea, which accounts for up to 18 % of global ocean emissions. He found that the gas is primarily produced by bacteria trying to make nitrogen gas.
"A third of the 'denitrification' that happens in the world's oceans occurs in the Arabian Sea (an area equivalent to France and Germany combined)" said Dr Trimmer. "Oxygen levels decrease as you go deeper into the sea. At around 130 metres there is what we call an oxygen minimum zone where oxygen is low or non-existent. Bacteria that produce nitrous oxide do well at this depth."
Gas produced at this depth could escape to the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas some 300 times more so than carbon dioxide, it also attacks the ozone layer and causes acid rain.
"Recent reports suggest increased export of organic material from the surface layers of the ocean under increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This could cause an expansion of the oxygen minimum zones of the world triggering ever greater emissions of nitrous oxide."
Adapted from materials provided by Society for General Microbiology.

Arctic Sea Ice Re-Freezing at Record Pace

12 Dec 07

Some 58,000 square miles of ice formed per day for 10 days in late October and early November, a new record.

The record melting of Arctic sea ice this summer was widely viewed as a harbinger of global warming, though unusual wind patterns played a role and many factors affecting fluctuations in Arctic ice are poorly understood by scientists.

Still, so much ice melted that the fabled Northwest passage opened for the first time in history (not true), and the melting broke a record, set just two years ago that at the time was seen as unprecedented and worrying.

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/arctic-sea-ice-47121205

Thanks to Michael Jenkins for this link

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Study: Divorce hurts environment

Associated Press

December 4, 2007

Divorce can be bad for the environment.

In countries around the world, divorce rates have been rising — and each time a family dissolves, the result is two new households. "That really has a big impact in terms of the environment," said Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University whose analysis of the environmental effect of divorce appears in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More households means more use of land, water and energy, three critical resources, Mr. Liu explained. Households with fewer people simply are not as efficient as those with more people sharing, he explained. A household uses the same amount of heat or air conditioning whether there are two or four persons living there. A refrigerator uses the same power whether there is one person home or several. Two persons living apart run two dishwashers, instead of just one.
Mr. Liu, who researches the relationship of ecology with social sciences, said people seem surprised by his findings at first, and then consider it simple. "A lot of things become simple after the research is done," he said. Some extra energy or water use may not sound significant, but it adds up.

The U.S., for example, had 16.5 million households headed by a divorced person in 2005 and more than 60 million households headed by a married person. Per person, divorced households spent more per person per month for electricity compared with a married household, as multiple people can be watching the same television, listening to the same radio, cooking on the same stove or eating under the same lights. That means some $6.9 billion in extra utility costs per year, Mr. Liu calculated, plus an added $3.6 billion for water, in addition to such costs as land use. And it isn't just in the U.S.

Mr. Liu looked at 11 other countries including Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002. In the 11, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been a million fewer households using energy and water in these countries. "People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered," Mr. Liu said. He stressed that he isn't condemning divorce: "Some people really need to get divorces." But, he added, "one way to be more environmentally friendly is to live with other people, and that will reduce the impact."

But married people should not get smug: Savings also apply to people living together, and Shaker communities or hippie communes would have been even more efficient.

My Rant

The claim that climate change is direct result of man's energy consumption is simply unproven and politically motivated. While they propound lies that certain lightbulbs or cars will destroy the earth and raise ocean levels as much as 20 feet within the next century, fascists, like Al Gore, fly around in their Gulfstream jets and live in homes that use 22 times the energy of an average American's home! Their propaganda is outrageous and potentially catastrophic for the economies of United States, the developed world and developing world.

The proof of global warming or man's influence on climate change is not settled science. Just consider the source of the big lie: the proselytizing hypocritical high priest of the pagan environmental religion Al Gore or the other Kool-Aid drinking climateers from the left such as Learjet liberals, Hollywood high school drop-outs, billonaire elitists, the left-leaning mainstream media, the United Nations, academia, environmental radicals, socialists, other anti-capitalists and so called "researchers", "experts" and/or "scientists" whose paychecks depend upon the apparent existence of the "issue".

United States energy conservation and independence is a worthy goal that should be supported by Republicans, the Democrat Party, true Democrats, Independents and environmentalists. Energy independence is a major national security concern. However, lying to our people, implementing the cap & trade boondoggle which will crush our economy or doing anything that will cause the United States to transfer an portion of its sovereignty to the United Nations is idiotic. Not in my name!
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