1/02/09>>Except for the well known fact that temperature changes precede CO2 changes, the supposed CO2-driven raise of temperatures works ok before temperature reaches max peak. No, the real problems for the CO2-rescue hypothesis appears when temperature drops again. During almost the entire temperature fall, CO2 only drops slightly. In fact, CO2 stays in the area of maximum CO2 warming effect. So we have temperatures falling all the way down even though CO2 concentrations in these concentrations where supposed to be a very strong upwards driver of temperature.
I write “the area of maximum CO2 warming effect “…
The whole point with CO2 as the important main temperature driver was, that already at small levels of CO2 rise, this should efficiently force temperatures up, see for example around -6 thousand years before present. Already at 215-230 ppm, the CO2 should cause the warming. If no such CO2 effect already at 215-230 ppm, the CO2 cannot be considered the cause of these temperature rises.
So when CO2 concentration is in the area of 250-280 ppm, this should certainly be considered “the area of maximum CO2 warming effect”.
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02/02/09>>

The UK Met Office forecast last Autumn “the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. ” We have now passed the 2/3 mark of the meteorological winter, and it is time for another report card to send home. Yesterday’s press release was titled “Wintry start to February” which stated “So far, the UK winter has been the coldest for over a decade” and “Met Office forecasters expect the cold theme to the weather to continue well into next week with the chance of further snow.”

The UK is expecting the heaviest snow in about 20 years tomorrow. “Snow and freezing weather threaten to shut down Britain Arctic blizzards are set to cause a national shutdown on Monday as forecasters warn of the most widespread snowfall for almost 20 years.” “Now is the time you’d expect to see the daffodils coming out but we’re not expecting them for two or three weeks at best if it warms up.“

So why is this important? Climate is not weather, after all. The Met Office is one of the most vocal advocates of human induced global warming, and they have gotten into a consistent pattern of warm seasonal forecasts which seemingly fall in line with that belief system. Is it possible that their forecasts are unduly influenced by preconceived notions about the climate? It is worth remembering that London had it’s first October snow in 70 years this past autumn.

Or perhaps they know exactly what they are doing, and are just having a several year run of extremely bad luck with their long term forecasting.

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8/02/09>>
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Bushfires continued to rage across Australia's southeast on Sunday as the death toll from one major blaze rose to 25, with fears that as many as 40 people have been killed, said police.
Many of those killed were trapped in cars trying to flee a huge inferno north of Melbourne , while survivors on Sunday described "walls of flames" destroying homes and engulfing entire towns.
Wildfires are a natural annual event in Australia, but this year a combination of scorching weather, drought and tinder-dry bush has created prime conditions for blazes to take hold
Australia's worst bushfires occurred in 1983 when 75 people were killed in Victoria.
The fires are around towns about 80 km (50 miles) north of Melbourne , Australia's second largest city.
Fourteen people were killed on Saturday night -- six at Kinglake, four at Wandong, three at Strathewen and one in Clonbinane. Police have not said where the other 11 died.
Kinglake resident Gemima Richards said her husband, his brother and their parents dived into a reservoir on their property to escape the inferno.
"They drove through the fire to get down to the dam and take refuge with their parents," Richards told Australia's Sky television. "The fireball fell from the sky and hit their car, but luckily it bounced off their car."
The main Victorian bushfire had burned some 3,000 hectares of mainly national park on Saturday. Within hours, the fire had burned some 30,000 hectares after the wind changed direction, fire officials said.
"We got in the car to have a look and I drove to the end of our road. There was just a wall of flame," Kinglake resident Peter Mitchell told local radio on Sunday.
DEVASTATION
A Strathewen resident said the town had been devastated.
"There's a lot of families in Strathewen that we haven't been able to account for," said Georgina, a caller on local radio.
"The school's gone, the hall's gone ... some people left it too late. We've lost friends, and we're just waiting for more (deaths to be confirmed) -- children, loved ones."
Local media reported the death toll could reach 40 and police say the death toll could rise.
The town of Marysville was also virtually destroyed.
Victoria fire official Greg Esnouf said: "This latest report says Marysville possibly one building left standing -- that's just shocking."
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd , sending his thoughts and prayers to the families and communities hit, said: "This is an appalling loss of life, an appalling loss of property."
With more heatwave conditions and strong winds forecast for Sunday, tens of thousands of firefighters battled more than 60 blazes in Victoria and New South Wales states.
Firefighters said fires continued to burn right across Victoria state, destroying 100,000 hectares and more than 100 homes, and would takes days to control.
"We still have about eight major fires that are burning across the state," said Darren Grevis-James, a spokesman for southern Victoria state's Country Fire Authority which has deployed about 3,000 firefighters to battle the blazes.
Authorities said a final death toll would take days to confirm as emergency officials moved into burned out areas.
"The property loss, the houses and even people missing can take days (to determine) because the focus at the moment is putting out the fires," said Grevis-James, adding that the fires had raced through both suburban areas and farmland.
On Saturday, temperatures in Melbourne soared to 46.4 degrees Celsius (115.5 Fahrenheit), the highest on record, but temperatures eased on Sunday.
"We've had a sprinkling of rain but it's not enough to do anything," Grevis-James said.
Nearly 60 fires were also burning in New South Wales state, reported local media, with firefighters preparing for 40 degrees Celsius plus temperatures and strong winds on Sunday.
"The prospects of containing these fires is remote at best," said Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons.
(Additional reporting by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Alison Williams) ******************************************************************************************************************************
13/02/09>>During the past few weeks, there have been several warnings of apocalypse from noted scientists. Dr. Hansen warned in The Guardian that President Obama has “four years to save the planet.” James McCarthy, head of the American Association for The Advancement of Science (AAAS) made a similar statement. Nobel Prize winning scientist Al Gore is going to take it a step further at next week’s AAAS meeting. Steven Chu, President Obama’s Secretary of Energy, warned that California will no longer be able to support agriculture or cities due to drought caused by global warming.
Then something remarkable happened.
Today’s Guardian has a lead story unlike anything we have seen before.

‘Apocalyptic climate predictions’ mislead the public, say experts’
Experts at Britain’s top climate research centre have launched a blistering attack on scientific colleagues and journalists who exaggerate the effects of global warming. The Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the most prestigious research facilities in the world, says recent “apocalyptic predictions” about Arctic ice melt and soaring temperatures are as bad as claims that global warming does not exist.

Nobody has been pushing the global warming story harder than the Met Office and The Guardian. Whom could they be referring to in this passage “scientific colleagues and journalists who exaggerate the effects of global warming?”
Some more quotes from the article.

Pope says there is little evidence to support claims that Arctic ice has reached a tipping point and could disappear within a decade or so, as some reports have suggested. Summer ice extent in the Arctic, formed by frozen sea water, has collapsed in recent years, with ice extent in September last year 34% lower than the average since satellite measurements began in 1979. ”The record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather, with summer ice increasing again over the next few years,” she says.
“It is easy for scientists to grab attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction. But in doing so, the public perception of climate change can be distorted. The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change.”
The criticism reflects mounting concern at the Met Office that the global warming debate risks being hijacked by people on both sides who push their own agendas and interests.

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15/02/09>
One point apparently causing confusion among our readers is the relative abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere today as compared with Earth’s historical levels. Most people seem surprised when we say current levels are relatively low, at least from a long-term perspective - understandable considering the constant media/activist bleat about current levels being allegedly “catastrophically high.” Even more express surprise that Earth is currently suffering one of its chilliest episodes in about six hundred million (600,000,000) years.
Given that the late Ordovician suffered an ice age (with associated mass extinction) while atmospheric CO2 levels were more than 4,000ppm higher than those of today (yes, that’s a full order of magnitude higher), levels at which current ‘guesstimations’ of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 suggest every last skerrick of ice should have been melted off the planet, we admit significant scepticism over simplistic claims of small increment in atmospheric CO2 equating to toasted planet. Granted, continental configuration now is nothing like it was then, Sol’s irradiance differs, as do orbits, obliquity, etc., etc. but there is no obvious correlation between atmospheric CO2 and planetary temperature over the last 600 million years, so why would such relatively tiny amounts suddenly become a critical factor now?
Adjacent graphic ‘Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time’ from Climate and the Carboniferous Period (Monte Hieb, with paleomaps by Christopher R. Scotese). Why not drop by and have a look around?
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19/02/09>

The UK has been experiencing the coldest winter in several decades, and hopefully policymakers have learned a few basic lessons from this. Here is my wish list, which seem painfully obvious.

1. Britain can’t rely on global warming to stay warm in the winter.
2. Britain can’t rely on solar power to stay warm in the winter. There just isn’t enough sun (which is why it is cold in the winter.)
3. Britain can’t rely on wind power to stay warm in the winter. During the coldest weather the winds were calm (which is one reason why the air temperatures were so low.)
4. Britain can’t rely on Russian natural gas to stay warm. The gas supply was cut off for weeks due to politics.

The only large scale energy supplies the UK can rely on in the near future are coal, oil and a small amount of nuclear. So next time you see a “coal train of life“ remember to wave at the driver. And I hate those ugly, motionless windmills popping up all over the countryside.

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26/02/09>Here is a weather curiosity. We’ve been hearing a lot about snowfall in the northern hemisphere this year. In Oslo, they have given up on trying to pile it up so they have resorted to dumping it in the sea. If this happened in Seattle they’d probably get into a tizzy for polluting Puget Sound with fresh water snow. And it is not just Oslo, the problem seems widespread. Here are some other news stories in London, UK Geneva, Ohio Chardon, OH Wasatch, UT Chicopee, MA and Rochester, NY where they say the piles are making driving dangerous. In Wenatchee, WA they want to spray warm sewage water on the snow to melt it. I know they could use the USHCN temperature sensor at the sewage treatment plant there to check the temperature to make sure conditions are right. Yeah, that’s the ticket! .
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4/03/09>>>It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
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5/03/09>> The UK had its coldest winter for 13 years, bucking a recent trend of mild temperatures, the Met Office has said.
The average mean temperature across December, January and February was 3.1C - the lowest since the winter beginning in 1995, which averaged 2.5C. February /.The famously cold winter of 1962-63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 or 200 years before 1850," he said
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9/03/09>>

On March 4, 2009 Dr. David Hathaway issued a new sunspot prediction for March 2009 which includes sunspot data through the end of February 2009. After no changes in the February 2009 prediction, solar maximum for Solar Cycle 24 was pushed back an additional three (3) months from 2012/10-2012/11 to 2013/01-2013/02. The predicted sunspot number at solar maximum was reduced from 104.9 to 104.0.
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14/03/09>>
Very important: global hurricane activity includes the 80-90 tropical cyclones that develop around the world during a given calendar year, including the 12-15 that occur in the North Atlantic (Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean included). The heightened activity in the North Atlantic since 1995 is included in the data used to create this figure.
As .As previously reported here and here at Climate Audit, and chronicled at my Florida State Global Hurricane Update page, both Northern Hemisphere and overall Global hurricane activity has continued to sink to levels not seen since the 1970s. Even more astounding, when the Southern Hemisphere hurricane data is analyzed to create a global value, we see that Global Hurricane Energy has sunk to 30-year lows, at the least. Since hurricane intensity and detection data is problematic as one goes back in time, when reporting and observing practices were different than today, it is possible that we underestimated global hurricane energy during the 1970s. See notes at bottom to avoid terminology discombobulation. Read
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14/03/09>

Gore says he has also detected a shift in the view of many business leaders. “They’re seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps right before their eyes in just a few years,” .

He also acknowledged something important about his scientific limitations :

Responding to James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, who said the European trading system for carbon was “disastrous”, Gore says: “James Lovelock has forgotten more about science than I will ever learn. “

Given that sea ice area at the poles is right at the 30 year mean (red line below,) one might conclude that Gore’s first comment is baseless and that his second comment about his own limited learning potential, is correct.

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20/03/09>>

An undersea volcano erupts off the coast of Tonga, tossing clouds of smoke, steam and ash thousands of feet (meters) into the sky above the South Pacific ocean, Tuesday, March 17, 2009. The eruption was at sea about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the southwest coast of the main island of Tongatapu an area where up to 36 undersea volcanoes are clustered. Besides the unusual feet to meters conversion in the quote above, I found it interesting because the SST maps show a warm anomaly in that region, and extending off to the east. Is that anomaly a result or coincidence?

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30/03/09>>

Even during Earth Hour. President of the Tennessee Center For Policy Research Drew Johnson takes a Saturday drive by Al Gore’s during the time most environmentalists went dark:

I pulled up to Al’s house, located in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, at 8:48pm – right in the middle of Earth Hour. I found that the main spotlights that usually illuminate his 9,000 square foot mansion were dark, but several of the lights inside the house were on.
In fact, most of the windows were lit by the familiar blue-ish hue indicating that floor lamps and ceiling fixtures were off, but TV screens and computer monitors were hard at work. (In other words, his house looked the way most houses look about 1:45am when their inhabitants are distractedly watching “Cheaters” or “Chelsea Lately” reruns.)
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30/03/09>
I will be thinking about the 1.8 billion people on Earth who have no access to electricity, and how insane they must think we are.
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9/04/09>.

The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.
John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.
“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”

Full story
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10/04/09>Arctic Ice Thickness Survey has been conducted from the comfort of a warm living room over the last half hour, without sponsors, excessive CO2 emissions or hypothermia. The data is collected from the US military web site http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil. All of the active military buoys show significant thickening ice over the past six months to a year, as seen below.
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11/04/09>>
I(not me) have changed my mind about participating in the carbon credit program. And have resolved to give the money I received to St Jude’s Children’s Hospital.
Here is why.
Recently I sat in the fire hall with a few dozen farmers. We had been invited to hear how we can get paid for carbon credits.
The speaker explained how their satellites can measure the carbon in our land individually and how much money we could get. Then asked for questions.
I asked “what is the source of this money”?
The presenter said it comes from big companies that pollute.
I asked “where do they get this money”? He had no answer.
So I answered for him, asking, “won’t it come from everyone who pays their power bill”? He then agreed and said “that could be”.
I then said isn’t this about the theory of man made global warming? he said “we are not going to talk about that”. Here they are on the prairie soliciting land for carbon credits tempting us with free money.
I believe that agreeing to take their money means you agree with taxing cattle gas also, because methane is a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than carbon. I believe taking this money without considering its source makes us no better than the bankers who lent money to people, knowing they could not pay it back. Collecting their fees then selling the bad loans in bundles to someone else. They did not care where the money came from either.
Let’s be clear.
Carbon is not a new commodity! No new wealth is being created here! Is this the way we want to make a living? Let me ask you, what if their satellites determine that your land has lost carbon? You will get a bill, not a check, right? If you make a tillage pass you will get a bill for emitting carbon, is this not correct?
It is also a fact that this income will, in short order, get built into your land cost. You will keep very little and be left with the burden of another bureaucratic program.
Let’s be honest, we feel compelled to take this money because of the need to be competitive, however we also need to hold true to our values and lead by example that means placing our principals ahead of money.
No good citizen is opposed to using the earth’s resources wisely, however, wisdom means a person who has both intelligence and humility. In my view many of the proponents of man made global warming have the first and lack the second. We are able to exercise our freedom in this country because we have abundant, reliable and affordable power. It is ironic that we sat in front of the flag in that fire hall and considered trading our liberty for money.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Roy Disney:
“Decision making becomes easier when your values are clear to you”
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