The Washington Post, as alarmist as anyone, published an editorial suggesting that Mr. Obama must (paraphrasing here) get something done now!
Climate Depot responded, WaPo responded back (insultingly,) and then CD kicked Wapo’s ***.
Here’s the full C. Depot article with lots of links to more interesting stuff, covering the whole warming discussion. You probably shouldn’t read it unless you have an hour or so…
Some of the topics covered are:
UN/Alarmists deceit
UN “Scientific Methods”
About that “consensus”
About being “Heartless…”
Politcs and money. The UN IPCC is a political group, not a scientific one.
The Reference Frame did a calculation of temps for central England, from 1659. As you have probably guessed there is no unusual modern warming recorded.
Because the Hadley Center has released the final temperatures in Central England for 2009, I decided to calculate a few things. Although I have also played with the monthly data, this text will be purely about the 1659-2009 annual data. It’s 351 years in total.
The average of the 351 numbers is 9.217 °C. The Pythagorean average of the deviation of the annual data from this average is 0.659 °C. The global warming advocates like to emphasize the warming trend in the last 30 years. How does the warming trend in the last 30 years – and in all other 30-year periods since 1659 – look like in Central England?
Latif thinks the cold snap Americans, Brits, and Europeans have been suffering through is the beginning of another cycle, this one a down cycle. He says we’re in for 30 years of cooler temperatures. While maybe it is a harsh prediction, he calls it a “mini ice age”. That phrase is sure to stick in the craw of more than a few people. His theory is based on an analysis of natural oscillations in water temperatures in the oceans.
According to (the article) he believes our current cold weather pattern is a pause, a “30-years-long blip”, in the larger cycle of global warming, which postulates that temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming years.
Note: Latif essentially says that he was misquoted. WUWT has the updates, so click through to read them.
Now, if the current cooling trend is caused by various natural factors that are suppressing Warming, then it’s reasonable to conclude that similar factors enhanced the warming in the 80’s and 90’s.
Piers Corbyn, of WeatherAction.com, has made a climate/weather forecast for the next 100 years. It will probably be more accurate than anything the IPCC will come up with.
This is from an article by Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action
The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.
Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well.
Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now.
More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.
Oxygen makes up 21% of the Earth’s atmosphere, and we need it to breathe. But early organisms would have found this environment toxic. Ancient bacteria evolved protective enzymes that prevented oxygen from damaging their DNA, but what evolutionary incentive did they have to do this? Researchers have discovered that ultraviolet light hitting the surface of glacial ice can release molecular oxygen. Bacteria colonies living near this ice would have needed to evolve this protective defense. They were then well equipped to handle the growth of atmospheric oxygen produced by other bacteria that would normally be toxic.
I’ve made jokes about the news reports in The Bacterial Times regarding the toxic Oxygen that was appearing in the atmosphere. No doubt the UBN (United Bacterial Nations) was discussing ways to reduce their oxygen footprint…
Early bacterium discovers that its clone is an O2 denier…
And then the most recent series of ice ages started and the Earth cooled…
Except for a few short interglacials, when it warmed again, and we are in one of those interglacials.
The late Ordovician period (about 450 million years ago) was an ice age with CO2 levels 10-12 times higher than today’s levels.
This page shows a history of the Earth over the last 600 million years. Even with the uncertainty of measurement, it’s still fascinating. Among other things, it notes that the Earth has been cooling over the last 30 million years. It also offers a geological hypothesis for ice ages.
Recent, in this context, is over the last 180 years. Prior to putting a CO2 monitoring station on an active, CO2 spewing volcano, scientists used other methods. Those methods are detailed in a draft paper by Ernst-Georg Beck.
Here are the first three points of his summary
1. There is no constant exponential rising CO2-concentration since preindustrial times but a varying CO2-content of air following the climate. E.G. around 1940 there was a maximum of CO2 of at least 420 ppm, before 1875 there was also a maximum.
2. Historical air analysis by chemical means do not prove a preindustrial CO2-concentration of 285 ppm (IPCC),as modern climatology postulates. In contrast the average in the 19th century in northern hemisphere is 321 ppm and in the 20th century 338 ppm.
3. Todays CO2 value of. 380 ppm, which is considered as threatening has been known several times in the last 200 years, in the 20 th century around 1942 and before 1870 in the 19th century. The maximum CO2-concentration in the 20th century roses to over 420 pmm in 1942.
I’ll just drop them in as I come across them. Most recent are at the top of the list.
In 1971, the world’s top climate scientists Schneider, Hansen and Rasool predicted that burning fossil fuels would trigger an ice age. They also determined that CO2 was nothing to worry about. Here.
The End Holocene – a discussion of abrupt climate change leading to an ice age. Includes clips from the 70s of scientists warning Nixon of exactly that. Also see Glacial Inception and the prior articles linked to from these two posts.
PopTech added a comment noting that the list of cooling alarmism is his. Here’s his page: 1970s Global Cooling Alarmism. (It’s also linked to, below.) The comment below, from Newsbusters, is also his.
Update 2/7: Some wags claim that the 70s ice age scare has been discredited. Unfortunately for their argument and their meme of “Doom!”, they’re wrong. As usual.
Deniers from the hockey team tell us that the 1970s ice age scare never happened, or that scientists were not behind it. They are as well informed as holocaust deniers. Below is overwhelming evidence that the 1970s were colder than earlier in the century.
update 12/17: ClimateDepot has a writeup on the subject:
Despite many claims to the contrary, the 1970’s global cooling fears were widespread among many scientists and in the media. Despite the fact that there was no UN IPCC organization created to promote global cooling in the 1970s and despite the fact that there was nowhere near the tens of billions of dollars in funding spent today to promote man-made global warming, fears of a coming ice age, showed up in peer-reviewed literature, at scientific conferences, voiced by prominent scientists and throughout the media.
Newsweek Magazine even used the climate “tipping point” argument in 1975. Newsweek wrote April 28, 1975 article: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”
But on October 24, 2006, Newsweek admitted it erred in predicting a coming ice age in the 1970’s.
The following selection of links is from Newsbusters, and was posted in the comments section: (5/27/13 – this list was posted on Newsbusters by PopTech.)
Read the whole Newsbusters article here: 100 Years of Headlines About Catastrophic Climate Change (The video above is an updated version of the one on the Newsbusters page, provided by one of their commenters, and is much easier to watch.)
Lies? Truths?
The alarmists say that the warnings of cooling in the 70s are a skeptic lie. Yeah, well, somebody was feeding those stories to the media. Maybe it was a noisy Al Gore type or maybe the media made it all up, much like they do today. Maybe it’s the alarmists who are lying, given the hysteria that their side is pushing.
Either way, the media is relevant, since that’s where most people get their info. The media IS the voice of science for most people. Perhaps the alarmists should be concerned about modern reporting on climate?
NASA (no scientists there, right?) predicted the coming ice age back in ’71. The model for the prediction seems to have been written by… one James Hansen.
Love this quote, “One might almost conclude that, in the world of climatology, theories are made to order.” From this article describing a ’74 CIA report on the threat of global cooling.
In a few years will the media be telling us, again, of the approaching ice age? Will the fear-mongering crowd (Al Gore crowd) be telling us that “scientists were not warming of Global Warming in the 90s and early 2000s?”
The World in Winter (Alpha Books) – A post apocalyptic world where an ice-age has rendered much of the northern world uninhabitable. Out of print, but available used.
Fallen Angels – Reeling under a new ice age, the lunatic fringe of the environmental movement controls the US government. Abandoned by Earth, the space colonies replenish their air by scoop-ships diving into the atmosphere – but Alex and Gordon’s ship was hit by a missile, and they are now wanted dead or alive.
Washington Times reports on upcoming climate disaster:
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
– A post apocalyptic world where an ice-age has rendered much of the northern world uninhabitable. Out of print, but available used.
– Reeling under a new ice age, the lunatic fringe of the environmental movement controls the US government. Abandoned by Earth, the space colonies replenish their air by scoop-ships diving into the atmosphere – but Alex and Gordon’s ship was hit by a missile, and they are now wanted dead or alive.
Another View on Climate 