New research has shown that the mighty ice sheet covering the Antarctic froze into being when the world had a much higher level of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere than it does today.
By analysing ancient algae found in deep-sea core samples, Professor Matthew Huber and his colleagues determined that the mile-thick ice which now covers the south polar continent formed around 34 million years ago. At that stage the atmosphere held much more CO2 than it does now, some 600 parts per million (ppm) as opposed to today’s level of 390 ppm.
If Michael Crichton had lived to write a follow-up to State of Fear, the plotline might well have gone like this: at a top secret, state of the art laboratory in Switzerland, scientists finally discover the true cause of “global warmingâ€. It’s the sun, stupid. More specifically – as the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long postulated – it’s the result of cosmic rays which act as a seed for cloud formation. The scientists working on the project are naturally euphoric: this is a major breakthrough which will not only overturn decades of misguided conjecture on so-called Man Made Global Warming but will spare the global economy trillions of dollars which might otherwise have been squandered on utterly pointless efforts to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, these scientists have failed to realise just how many people – alarmist scientists, huckster politicians, rent-seeking landowners like (the late Michael Crichton’s brilliant and, of course, entirely fictional creation) the absurd, pompous Sir Reginald Leeds Bt, green activists, eco-fund managers, EU technocrats, MSM environmental correspondents – stand to gain from the Man Made “Climate Change†industry. Their discovery must be suppressed at all costs. So, one by one, the scientists on the cosmic ray project find themselves being bumped off, until only one man remains and must race against time to prove, etc, etc…
Except of course in the real world the second part wouldn’t happen. No one would need to go to the trouble of bumping off those pesky scientists with their awkward, annoying facts and their proper actual research. That’s because the MSM and the scientific “community†would find it perfectly easy to suppress the story anyway, without recourse to severed brake cables or ricin-impregnated hand-washes or staged “suicidesâ€.
The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun – not human activities – as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.
NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.
Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.
Authors de Jager and Duhau (2009) write that (1) “solar activity is regulated by the solar dynamo,” that (2) “the dynamo is a non-linear interplay between the equatorial and polar magnetic field components,” and that (3) “so far, in sun-climate studies, only the equatorial component has been considered as a possible driver of tropospheric temperature variations.”
In the present study, based on “direct observations of proxy data for the two main solar magnetic field components since 1844,” de Jager and Duhau derived “an empirical relation between tropospheric temperature variation and those of the solar equatorial and polar activities.”
When the two researchers applied the relation they derived to the period 1610-1995, they found a rising linear relationship for temperature vs. time, upon which are superimposed “some quasi-regular episodes of residual temperature increases and decreases, with semi-amplitudes up to ~0.3°C,” and they note that “the present period of global warming is one of them.”
In the LA Times, there was a story on Richard Muller’s invitation to DC to testify to congress about the Berkeley Project, which attempts to reconstruct global dataThe Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study is led by physicist Richard Muller, a longtime critic of the scientific consensus on climate change, who plans to testify on the effort Thursday before the House Science Committee in the latest of several congressional inquiries on climate science since the GOP majority was seated. Temperature data from tens of thousands of weather stations across the globe, many of which have incomplete records, are “very contentious,” Muller said in an interview. “The skeptics are raising legitimate concerns.”
Muller and many of those who question the temperature data are drawn to the “urban heat island” phenomenon, maintaining that gauges may be registering latent heat from asphalt, concrete and other urban features. Over time, some weather stations that once recorded temperatures in rural areas have been surrounded by cities and suburbs. The Berkeley project is analyzing information from 39,000 stations -five times as many as the other groups, Muller said – and will address the fact that temperature data have been recorded at varying times of day.
The project also will put its calculations on the Internet in a “transparent” way, Muller said. Other scientists, he said, “put homogenized data online. They don’t put up the [software] tools that get you from the raw data to the homogenized data. How do they pick the [weather station] sites? That involves human judgment.”
I don’t feel hugely energetic right now in terms of writing anything very complicated. As a simple exercise, I decided to quickly revisit the everchanging Hansen adjustments, a topic commented on acidly by E.M. Smith (Chiefio) in many posts – also see his interesting comments in the thread at a guest post at Anthony‘s, a post which revisited the race between 1934 and 1998 – an issue first raised at Climate Audit in 2007 in connection with Hansen’s Y2K error.
As CA readers recall, Hansen’s Y2K error resulted in a reduction of US temperatures after 2000 relative to earlier values. The change from previous values is shown in red in the graphic below; the figure also shows (black) remarkable re-writing of past history since August 2007 – a rewriting of history that has increased the 2000-6 relative to the 1930s by about 0.3 deg C.
This impacts comparisons made in 2007 between GISS and CRN1-2 stations. At the time, it was noted that GISS adjustments for UHI resulted in the GISS US temperature anomaly having quite a bit in common with a TOBS average from Anthony’s CRN1-2 stations. Critics of Anthony’s surfacestations.org project commented on this rather smugly – too smugly given the large differences with NOAA and CRU versions in the US and the incoherence of Hansen’s adjustments outside the US. The post-2007 adjustments to GISS adjustments change this. The increased trend in the GISS US statistic comes at the expense of reconciliation with CRN1-2 stations: the trends no longer cohere.
Exclusive New Video: Calls cap-and-trade an ‘horrendous scam’ — Joins other left of center scientific and activist dissenters
By Marc Morano
Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt, a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement.Â
In a hard-hitting and new exclusive video just released by Climate Depot, Dr. Rancourt declares that the entire man-made global warming movement is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else,” Rancourt, who has published peer-reviewed research, explained in a June 8, 2010 essay. (Rancourt’s email: claude.cde@gmail.com)
“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.Â
“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he stated.
Read here. Map source here. Brand new peer-reviewed study that analyzes subfossils from a Swiss lake confirms what hundreds of previous peer-research have found: that the Medieval Warming had temperatures significantly warmer than modern ones.
Multi-millionaire filmmaker James Cameron on Sunday backed out of a global warming debate that he asked for and organized.
For those that haven’t been following the recent goings on concerning Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s favorite money-making myth, an environmental summit was held this weekend in Aspen, Colorado, called AREDAY, which is short for American Renewable Energy Day.
Ahead of this conference, Cameron challenged three noted global warming skeptics to a public debate where he was going to personally “call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads.”
One of the invited skeptics, Ann McElhinney of NotEvilJustWrong.com, wrote about Cameron’s surprise cancellation Sunday…
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Former Vice President Al Gore spent the last decade as a larger-than-life figure, more of a symbol than a living, breathing human being. Stolen from the pages of a Danielle Steele novel and plopped on stage at the 2000 Democratic Convention, this normally lifeless personality was possessed by the ghost of Madmen’s Jon Hamm and political pop-culture history was made. Al and Tipper’s kiss marked the dawn of Gore’s personal stardom and his pet project: anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmism.
Since his mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, Gore has been married to the AGW cause. And just as Al’s and Tipper’s kiss represented the dawn of the most successful movement in pseudoscience, their divorce aptly marks its end.
A stark trend toward accepting empirical science instead of speculation has caused the ground beneath AGW to cave in quickly. Like the news of the Gore divorce, the scientific evidence hit the public as if from nowhere. But both these cases are results of major, longstanding problems instead of a single cataclysmic event.
For AGW alarmism, what were once dismissed as minor discrepancies are being exposed as major contradictions of the scientific facts.
At first, AGW was a smooth talker. Graphs, models, charts, PowerPoints, and Hollywood movies all worked to persuade. As questions began to arise, however, patronizing and talking down turned small spats into explosive arguments. The Michael Mann “hockey stick” diagram was exposed as being based on a trick that would make any trend look like a spike. Gore’s new mansion was built in an area he had predicted would be underwater in the near future. The Climategate scandal showed us AGW was hiding the facts. Stories weren’t adding up.
It’s like watching the lights go out over the West. Sinan Unur has mapped the surface stations into a beautiful animation. His is 4 minutes long and spans from 1701-2010. I’ve taken some of his snapshots and strung them into a 10 second animation.
You can see as development spreads across the world that more and more places are reporting temperatures. It’s obvious how well documented temperatures were (once) in the US. The decay of the system in the last 20 years is stark.
For details on just how sinister the vanishing of data records is, see my previous post on Anthony Watts and Joe D’Aleo’s extraordinary summary of Policy Driven Deception.
Sinan points out that people might not realize that many thermometers haven’t actually disappeared – they are often still collecting data – it’s just that their records are not being included in the “global” compilations. Though, as Watts and D’Aleo point out, sometimes these forgotten thermometers are still used to calculate the baseline averages.
In November last year a file appeared on the internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a startling view into the world of climate research.
In what has become known as Climategate, one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation.
Moreover, the emails showed collusion with other prominent researchers in the US and elsewhere. The CRU supplies many of the authors for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
One might have thought the revelations would discredit the science underlying proposed global warming policy. Indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December’s Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits.
But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the effect of the emails appears to have been small.
The general approach of the scientific community (at least in the US and Britain) has been to see whether people will bother to look at the files in detail (they mostly have not) and to wait until time diffuses the initial impressions to reassert the original message of a climate catastrophe that must be fought with widespread carbon control. This reassertion, however, continues to be suffused by illogic, nastiness and outright dishonesty.
There were, of course, the inevitable investigations of individuals such as Penn State University’s Michael Mann (who manipulated data to create the famous “hockey stick” climate graph) and Phil Jones (director of the CRU).
The investigations were brief, lacked depth and were conducted mainly by individuals already publicly committed to the popular view of climate alarm. The results were whitewashes that are incredible given the data.
So let us see, the hockey stick of Michael Mann predicted that the temperature of the Earth would rise exponentially and melt the polar ice caps.
That seems to have ebbed.
And now from a real scientist, Hiroshi L. Tanaka of the University of the University of Tsukuba in Japan: “It is concluded that the arctic warming before 1989 especially in winter was explained by the positive trend of the AOI. Moreover the intensified Beaufort High and the drastic decrease of the sea ice concentrations in September after 1989 were associated with the recent negative trend of the AOI [Arctic Oscillation]. Since the decadal variation of the AO is recognized as the natural variability of the global atmosphere, it is shown that both of decadal variabilities before and after 1989 in the Arctic can be mostly explained by the natural variability of the AO not by the external response due to the human activity.â€
The high-pressure sales techniques of junk scientists like Michael Mann is one tip-off that he and his crackpot theory is a scam. The other tip-off is Al Gore and company have done nothing to ameliorate their carbon footprint is another tip-off.
Not going to melt any time soon, says boffin
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