His Excellency Ban Ki Moon

Secretary-General, United Nations
New York, NY
United States of America

8 December 2009

Dear Secretary-General,

Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ - the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.

Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.

We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.

Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:

1.Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
2.Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
3.Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
4.Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
5.The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
6.Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
7.Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
8.Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
9.Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
10.Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.

It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do so.

Signed by:

1.Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, Dr. Sci., mathematician and astrophysicist, Head of the Russian-Ukrainian Astrometria project on the board of the Russian segment of the ISS, Head of Space Research Laboratory at the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
2.Göran Ahlgren, docent organisk kemi, general secretary of the Stockholm Initiative, Professor of Organic Chemistry, Stockholm, Sweden
3.Syun-Ichi Akasofu, PhD, Professor of Physics, Emeritus and Founding Director, International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska, U.S.A.
4.J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Civil Engineering, University of Pretoria, South Africa; Member, UN Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, 1994-2000, Pretoria, South Africa.
5.Jock Allison, PhD, ONZM, formerly Ministry of Agriculture Regional Research Director, Dunedin, New Zealand

Read the rest of this entry »

By James Delingpole

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!”

Read the rest of this story at the Telegraph.

By Robert Ferguson

The Senate testimony of Sec. Chu is predicated upon false assumptions, points out Christopher Monckton in a succinct letter to Senators posted by the Science and Public Policy Institute [SPPI], a Washington DC –based NGO.
 
The letter points out that Chu’s testimony cites the now-outdated 2007 Climate Assessment Report of the IPCC and a subsequent but also now-outdated MIT study, saying global warming by 2100 would be 7-11 Fº. “These excessive estimates are founded solely on computerized guesswork,” says Christopher Monckton, former adviser to UK Prime Minister Thatcher and current SPPI policy adviser.
 
Monckton reviews a number of recent papers having appeared in the peer-reviewed literature that put the man-made warming scare to rest, and render regulation of CO2 emissions needless and blindingly fatuous.
 
Particular attention is given to the recent paper of Lindzen and Choi (2009).  Using direct measurements of outgoing radiation, the two researchers found that the IPCC models get both the science and their “predictions” wrong.  Monckton presents a series of IPPC model graphs and compares them to the one produced from real measurements.  “The IPPC model predictions,” reports Monckton, “actually trend in a direction opposite to that of the graph from observed reality.”
 
Concludes Monckton, “By patient, painstaking measurement, the two researchers have trumped the computer models’ unanimously erroneous guesswork, and have definitively ended the debate over the question how much warming CO2 causes.  Therefore, Secretary Chu’s declaration that the ‘threat’ from ‘climate change’ is ‘grave’ and that current levels of CO2 emission are ‘unsustainable’ has no scientific justification.”

Read the rest of this article at Wooeb News.

Read Lord Monckton’s letter here.

How Freezing Temperatures are Starting to Shatter Climate Change Theory

By Daily Mail Reporter

In the freezing foothills of Montana, a distinctly bitter blast of revolution hangs in the air.

And while the residents of the icy city of Missoula can stave off the -10C chill with thermals and fires, there may be no easy remedy for the wintry snap’s repercussions.

The temperature has shattered a 36-year record. Further into the heartlands of America, the city of Billings registered -12C on Sunday, breaking the 1959 barrier of -5C.

Closer to home, Austria is today seeing its earliest snowfall in history with 30 to 40 centimetres already predicted in the mountains.
Such dramatic falls in temperatures provide superficial evidence for those who doubt that the world is threatened by climate change.

But most pertinent of all, of course, are the growing volume of statistics.

According to the National Climatic Data Centre, Earth’s hottest recorded year was 1998.

If you put the same question to NASA, scientists will say it was 1934, followed by 1998. The next three runner-ups are 1921, 2006 and 1931.

Which all blows a rather large hole in the argument that the earth is hurtling towards an inescapable heat death prompted by man’s abuse of the environment. 

Indeed, some experts believe we should forget global warming and turn our attention to an entirely differently phenomenon - global cooling.

The evidence for both remains inconclusive, which is unlikely to help the legions of world leaders meeting in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new climate change deal.

Read the rest of this story at Daily Mail.

GCS Editor’s Note: I met Lord Christopher Monckton yesterday, and he mentioned that he’d prodded BBC reporters about when they were going to report on new data that conlusively shows the Earth has been cooling.  At that point, the only UK reporting he was aware of was on the BBC website. It seems that word is starting to spread.

Minnesota Majority / GlobalClimateScam.com will be at the Climate Chains / Lord Monckton event at Bethel tonight. Hope to see you all there!

The Minnesota Free Market Institute will be premiering the new documentary film, “Climate Chains” at an event featuring keynote speaker, Lord Christopher Monckton on Wednesday, October 14th. Monckton was an advisor to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, serves as the chief policy adviser to the Institute of Science and Public Policy and is known as the man congressional Democrats were afraid would humiliate Al Gore if he’d been allowed to testify alongside him in a congressional hearing back in April. Naturally, that couldn’t be allowed. Career climate alarmists fear Lord Monckton.

Climate Chains was produced by the Cascade Policy Institute and it addresses the perils of cap and trade legislation while examining free market solutions to actual environmental concerns.

This FREE event promises to be entertaining and informative.

Wednesday, October 14th
7:00pm
Free Admission

Benson Great Hall
Bethel University
3900 Bethel Drive
St. Paul, Minnesota 55112

Dr. Fred Singer and Event Organizer, Pat Anderson

A tornado touchdown in Minneapolis and driving rains threatened to waylay the Symposium on Climate Change organized by the Free Market Institute on Wednesday.

Fortunately, no one was ushered into the storm shelters at the Earle Brown Heritage Center and the storm quickly passed allowing the presentation to go on as planned.

Because of the controversial nature of the climate change debate, managers at the Earle Brown Center took the precaution of staffing security at the event, but aside from a brief misunderstanding about a yellow feather-suit being donned in a restroom, there was no threat of anarchy. Minnesotans for Global Warming’s exhibit included a man in a Chicken Little costume, who security officer Larry Deiman initially mistook for a potentially disruptive protestor. The half-dressed Chicken Little quickly explained himself and got to work in the hall announcing his trademark alarm, “the sky is falling!”

Dr. Fred Singer, author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years kicked off the event with a detailed debunking of several popular climate science misconceptions and a thorough analysis of problems with several IPCC reports.

State Senator Jungbauer explained the state of arctic ice, the nature of sea level rise and Greenland’s ice cover in a breakout session.

There were several other national and local climate experts making presentations, including Dr. Pekarek from St. Cloud University.

About 300 people attended the event. The Minnesota Taxpayers League, Minnesotans for Global Warming and Minnesota Majority maintained information booths there.

For some, the symposium was a refresher course in skepticism of man-made (anthropogenic) global warming. For others it was an eye-opener. “I came here with an open mind,” said one attendee, who stopped at the Minnesota Majority / GlobalClimateScam.com booth, “I didn’t really know what to think [about global warming]. A lot of the things I heard here, I’d never heard before,” she said.

Update: Video from the Symposium is now available.

• Videos Batch 1
• Videos Batch 2

On Wednesday, August 19th, Dr. Fred Singer (physicist, research professor at George Mason University and author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years) will headline the Minnesota Symposium on Climate Change at the Earle Brown Center. The program begins at 3:00 and will be followed by a reception at 7:00.

Dr. Pekarek from St. Cloud State University as well as other noted Minnesota Climate experts will also speak.

Following a general presentation, there will be a series of breakout sessions following either the economics or science of global warming theories and policies.

This event is being sponsored by the Minnesota Free Market Institute. Minnesota Majority will maintain a GlobalClimateScam.com booth there and Minnesotans For Global Warming are expected as well.

Registration is $30. Students with a current student ID get in for half-price.

Register online here.

By Pat Anderson

This week, as Governor Pawlenty was making his historic announcement, I was part of a delegation of Minnesotans attending the Third International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute. This is the third conference in little over a year to draw attention to the widespread and growing dissent over the alleged “consensus” on “Global Warming” or “Climate Change.”

The conference coincided with the release of  “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.” The report thoroughly documents the challenges to the global warming thesis, from problems with the models, to faulty temperature record observations and other data and with competing theories about the biology and physics of the effects of the gasses that impact the climate.   The entire 800+ page report is available for free online at the Heartland Institute web site.

At the same time that there are serious doubts about the science, the costs of government regulation touting environmental benefits in reducing carbon and greenhouses gasses are becoming clearer.  And they are high.  According to the Heartland Institute, reducing greenhouse gas emissions “even modestly” is estimated to cost the average household in the U.S. approximately $3,372 per year and would destroy 2.4 million jobs. Electricity prices would double, sending more businesses into bankruptcy and others overseas to countries that aren’t burdened with high regulatory costs.  Much of the funding for “climate change” will do nothing to help the environment at all, instead going directly to radical environmental groups who will use those resources to create sophisticated propaganda and lobbying campaigns to promote an anti-business, anti-growth agenda.  If supporters of the free market do not continue to work to expose the fact the very basis, for the theories of  global warming and climate change are in dispute, we will be fighting an uphill battle for our future economic prosperity down the road.  

Pat Anderson is President of the Minnesota Free Market Institute.

Univac Computer

Posted at Climate Skeptic on December 12th

In particular, a few computers at NASA’s Goddard Institute seem to be having a disproportionate effect on global warming.  Anthony Watt takes a cut at an analysis I have tried myself several times, comparing raw USHCN temperature data to the final adjusted values delivered from that data by the NASA computers.  My attempt at this compared the USHCN adjusted to raw for the entire US:

See the charts and read the rest at Climate Skeptic.

Happy New Year!

Study: Half of warming due to Sun! –Sea Levels Fail to Rise? - Warming Fears in ‘Dustbin of History’

POZNAN, Poland - The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.  Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The U.S. Senate report is the latest evidence of the growing groundswell of scientific opposition rising to challenge the UN and Gore. Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists’ equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices and views of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. [See Full report Here: & See: Skeptical scientists overwhelm conference: '2/3 of presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC' ]

Full Senate Report Set To Be Released in the Next 24 Hours – Stay Tuned… 

A hint of what the upcoming report contains:    

“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” - Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.   

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” -  Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology  and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”  

Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.  

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.  

“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” - Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico  

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA. 

“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” - Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.  

“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” - Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Read the rest at the United State Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works.

By Carleton Bryant 

More than 650 scientists from around the world dispute the claims made by the United Nations and former Vice President Al Gore about global warming, saying that science does not support that climate change is a manmade phenomenon, according to a posting on the Senate environmental committee’s press blog.

According to the posting, a full Senate report on the dissenting scientists’ views is to be released within 24 hours.

Is it hot in here, Al, or is it just you?

I’ve found that you’ve really got to pay close attention to how people talk about global warming or climate change. Most scientists agree that climate change indeed is occurring — they just differ on the reason why it is occurring.

As for myself, I’m no scientist (or a Nobel Prize-winning former vice president), but I think that if you’re trying to find out why things are heating up, the sun would be a good place to start, especially since there’s plenty of scientific data showing that the earth has been running hot and cold for thousands of years.

(One time I walked into my kitchen and it felt unusually warm. At first I thought it might be due to a build up of greenhouse gases from the trash can. Then I thought, “Is the oven on?” It was.)

Read the rest of this piece at the Washington Times

By Victoria Guay

While a large number of people, including some scientists, believe that we are in an unprecedented period of global warming caused primarily by humans, Dr. James Koermer, a meteorology professor at Plymouth State University, would beg to differ.

During a presentation at the university on Wednesday, Koermer explained why there are a growing number scientists, such as himself, who don’t subscribe to the popular theory on global warming.

Koermer said the Earth’s climate has always changed and has experienced alternate warming and cooling trends long before the dawn of man.

Koermer said most research suggests that at the beginning of the last millennium, there was a global warming period that ended around 1600, when a significant cooling trend — which he called a mini ice age — lasted for approximately 100 years.

The most recent global warming trend picked up during the 1700s, which coincides with the start of the Industrial Age, Koermer said.

Going back millions of years, some research suggests the Earth has had much more extreme climate changes than are occurring today.

“Over millions of years there have been periods when we have been hotter than we are today,” Koermer said.

He added that while humans do have an impact on the climate, it is minimal compared to natural phenomena. He also said that humans are not the biggest producers of carbon dioxide and that the gas is not the most abundant green house gas in the atmosphere. That title goes to water vapor, which is produced by the world’s oceans.

Koermer said that water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the green house gas effect in a given year while another 4.72 percent is caused by a mix of other greenhouse gases, including methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide, which are naturally produced.

Humans are only responsible for .28 percent of all greenhouse gases produced during a year, he said.

Koermer said just because he doesn’t think man-made carbon dioxide is contributing significantly to climate change, it does not mean he is opposed to the increased use of renewable fuel sources. He said that fossil fuels are a limited resource, so finding alternatives is necessary.

Koermer said scientists are not yet sure what has caused climate change in the past, but factors may include shifts in the Earth’s axis as well as changes in the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Over time, Koermer said, the Earth’s yearly path around the Sun changes from circular to more elliptical before changing back.

Sunspots and solar flares may also effect the Earth’s climate. Koermer said solar flares and spots seem to increase and decrease on an 11-year cycle. He noted that there was a marked decrease in solar flares during the mini ice age of the 1600s.

Read the rest of this story at The Citizen.

Despite the message favoured by environmental campaigners, temperatures in this decade have not been worse than expected 

By Björn Lomborg  

Have you noticed how environmental campaigners almost inevitably say that not only is global warming happening and bad, but also that what we are seeing is even worse than expected?

This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost invariably see it as 100-0.

If we are regularly being surprised in just one direction, if our models get blindsided by an ever-worsening reality, that does not bode well for our scientific approach. Indeed, one can argue that if the models constantly get something wrong, it is probably because the models are wrong. And if we cannot trust our models, we cannot know what policy action to take if we want to make a difference.

Yet, if new facts constantly show us that the consequences of climate change are getting worse and worse, high-minded arguments about the scientific method might not carry much weight. Certainly, this seems to be the prevailing bet in the spin on global warming. It is, again, worse than we thought, and, despite our failing models, we will gamble on knowing just what to do: cut CO2 emissions dramatically.

But it is simply not correct that climate data are systematically worse than expected; in many respects, they are spot on, or even better than expected. That we hear otherwise is an indication of the media’s addiction to worst-case stories, but that makes a poor foundation for smart policies.

The most obvious point about global warming is that the planet is heating up. It has warmed about 1C (1.8F) over the past century, and is predicted by the United Nations’ climate panel (IPCC) to warm between 1.6-3.8C (2.9-6.8F) during this century, mainly owing to increased CO2. An average of all 38 available standard runs from the IPCC shows that models expect a temperature increase in this decade of about 0.2C.

But this is not at all what we have seen. And this is true for all surface temperature measures, and even more so for both satellite measures. Temperatures in this decade have not been worse than expected; in fact, they have not even been increasing. They have actually decreased by between 0.01 and 0.1C per decade. On the most important indicator of global warming, temperature development, we ought to hear that the data are actually much better than expected.

Likewise, and arguably much more importantly, the heat content of the world’s oceans has been dropping for the past four years where we have measurements. Whereas energy in terms of temperature can disappear relatively easily from the light atmosphere, it is unclear where the heat from global warming should have gone – and certainly this is again much better than expected.

We hear constantly about how the Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than expected, and this is true. But most serious scientists also allow that global warming is only part of the explanation. Another part is that the so-called Arctic oscillation of wind patterns over the Arctic Ocean is now in a state that it does not allow build-up of old ice, but immediately flushes most ice into the North Atlantic.

More importantly, we rarely hear that the Antarctic sea ice is not only not declining, but is above average for the past year. IPCC models would expect declining sea ice in both hemispheres but, whereas the Arctic is doing worse than expected, Antarctica is doing better.

Ironically, the Associated Press, along with many other news outlets, told us in 2007 that the “Arctic is screaming,” and that the Northwest Passage was open “for the first time in recorded history.” Yet the BBC reported in 2000 that the fabled Northwest Passage was already without ice.

We are constantly inundated with stories of how sea levels will rise, and how one study after another finds that it will be much worse than what the IPCC predicts. But most models find results within the IPCC range of a sea-level increase of 18-59cm (7-23in) this century. This is of course why the thousands of IPCC scientists projected that range. Yet studies claiming one metre or more obviously make for better headlines.

Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels, and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2mm per year (1/8 of an inch) – spot on compared to the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the last two years, sea levels have not increased at all – actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?

Read the rest of this article at the UK’s Guardian.

By Lorne Gunter 

In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.

Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures — they’re going down, not up.

On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to “a negative PDO” or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs — El Ninos — produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones — La Ninas — produce below average ones.

Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as “solar minimums” magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded — none — and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. “This is no coincidence,” he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate.

Also in September, American Craig Loehle, a scientist who conducts computer modelling on global climate change, confirmed his earlier findings that the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago did in fact exist and was even warmer than 20th-century temperatures.

Prior to the past decade of climate hysteria and Kyoto hype, the MWP was a given in the scientific community. Several hundred studies of tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediment, ice cores and early written records of weather — even harvest totals and censuses –confirmed that the period from 800 AD to 1300 AD was unusually warm, particularly in Northern Europe.

But in order to prove the climate scaremongers’ claim that 20th-century warming had been dangerous and unprecedented — a result of human, not natural factors — the MWP had to be made to disappear. So studies such as Michael Mann’s “hockey stick,” in which there is no MWP and global temperatures rise gradually until they jump up in the industrial age, have been adopted by the UN as proof that recent climate change necessitates a reordering of human economies and societies.

Dr. Loehle’s work helps end this deception.

Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, “It’s practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling,” as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an “almost exact correlation” between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost “no correlation at all with CO2.”

An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, “Man-made global warming is junk science,” explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year “equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration … This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.”

Read the rest of this article at National Post.

There’s a lot most people don’t know about compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). The advertising message tells people that CFLs are “green” solutions that will help save the planet, and a few bucks on household electric bills. It’s also a common belief that the bulbs last five years between replacements. This notion probably stems from the 5- year guarantee on GE’s CFL bulbs. Here’s the catch: The guarantee is based on 4 hours of use per day for five years, and the bulb must be mailed back with receipt and proof of purchase for a refund if it fails to last 7,300 hours. The price of postage may exceed the cost of replacing the bulb and this expense is borne by the consumer. Probably not many get sent back, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they do not last the advertised five years under normal conditions. Some have been reported to burn out in a year or less.

CFLs, as many consumers have discovered to their dismay, do not function properly with dimmer switches. They need the full voltage to operate and attempting to use a CFL with a dimmer switch voids it’s warranty.

According to GE, CFLs should not be used in an enclosed fixture, like a ceiling fan light because this can cause them to overheat. Applications that produce vibration should also be avoided, so CFLs are a poor choice for garage door openers and are doubly bad for ceiling fans. Additionally, CFLs tend to literally burn out at the end of their life, melting plastic and other components, emitting smoke and toxic vapor. In rare instances this has led to house fires.

Compact fluorescent lights are known to cause radio frequency interference with wireless networks and cordless phones.

Beginning in 2012, thanks to a new federal law enacted in 2007, Edison’s incandescent light bulb, the very symbol of American innovation for over a century will be banned. Many people are unaware of the approaching light bulb ban, probably due, at least in part to the fact that Congress designed the ban to take effect seven years after it was passed. Compact fluorescent lights will soon be the only electric lighting option for household use.

Most people have heard that CFLs contain mercury, but they’ve probably also heard the message from CFL manufacturers and some government agencies that the amount of mercury in each CFL is small and not a serious concern.

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