Posts from — January 2009

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Penny Wong, the Minister for Climate Change, plans to spend 10 million AUD (approx. 6,5 million USD) to look at what will happen to human health as temperatures rises due to global warming.

“By 2020, for example, the number of heat-related deaths in our capital cities is projected to double to about 2300 a year. We are likely to see more food-safety related illness and dengue fever is likely to spread southwards.”

As far as I understand, there is no vaccine for dengue. The best prevention is to avoid getting bitten by a mosquito. Now, how much does a mosquito net cost? 1 USD? Why not try preventing future outbreaks instead of spending millions on studying rather obvious facts?

The Indepedent speculates today if the all changing weather patterns can be attributed to climate change.

“Wash-out summers, big chills, extreme heatwaves. Each time the weather goes mad, we’re given the same reason: climate change. Is that the whole story?”

We are being told that the world is warming. But at the same time new cold records are broken all over the world. How is that possible?

Roger Street, technical director of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP), says that we understand the system better than we used to, “but knowing more doesn’t necessarily make things easier – it just brings to light more and more complicated things that are going on. We may actually increase the uncertainty.”

It’s like my Mom says: the more we know, the less we understand.

“Five years ago,” says Tom Clarke, gardener at the National Trust’s Trelissick Garden in Cornwall, “everyone was saying we’d all be growing olives down here. Well, that hasn’t happened. All you seem to be able to guarantee is that things will be changeable.”

Even though many scientists seem pretty certain that the planet is warming, they can’t say anything about possible climate changes on local basis.

Says Mat Collins, a climate scientist at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre: “There are just more competing effects at a local scale. There are more uncertainties, and the sources of the uncertainty change more.”

“We have a range of uncertainty,” says Kay Jenkinson, communications director at UKCIP, “and the next set of information will make it more apparent what that range is. But real life being what it is, it could be that the real answer lies outside that. And we won’t know what it is until we get there.”

How about that?

While most skeptics question the reliability of climate models used to predict our warmer future, even some AGW-followers now warn not to oversell model scenarios.

“To what extent should we accept these projections at face value?”, asks Steve Tracton in The Washington Post. “How certain is the stated range of uncertainty? Can today’s climate models provide credible predictions of the regional impacts of climate change (e.g., on the scale of U.S. states or most European countries)?”

Lenny Smith, a statistics professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science believes human activities are changing the global climate, but that climate scientists are “overselling” their results.

“…we must stop pretending that we know the details of how it will all play out,” comments Lenny, who points out that the estimates of uncertainty — based on the distribution of results from as many as 300 runs of global climate models — are themselves uncertain. This is especially true, he says, in the extremes (or “tails”) of the distribution, which are often particularly important for decision-makers. Thus, it’s quite possible that future warming could be significantly more or less than the range indicated by the models.

Read more in The Washington Post, or in New Scientist.

The Huffington Post continues promoting the AGW hypothesis. This time in an article signed by Jerry Cope, designer, filmmaker and eco activist. Jerry Cope is thrilled now that Obama has been installed in the White House. Finally, there will be some action on global warming. And the need is urgent!

“Seemingly every day now, a new scientific study or paper is published (peer reviewed) with ever more alarming results as climate forcing mechanisms kick in far sooner than previously anticipated. Scenarios predicting an ice-free North Pole by 2025 have been fed into the shredder as the lack of ice-cover and subsequent loss of solar reflectivity lead to faster ever accelerating melting. The consensus now has the top of the world ice-free by 2015. Polar bears are now drowning and starving. At the bottom of the world, Antarctica is also heating dramatically and losing mass. How soon the Western ice-sheet will collapse is no longer an esoteric question. Sea level rise as estimated by the IPCC of 60cm by the end of the century is now revised to 1.4 meters. Fully 75% of the people alive on the planet today will have to deal with the consequences of global warming. It is no longer a problem just for future generations.”

How about that? Starving, drowning polar bears. Haven’t seen any of these lately.

If you scroll down the page, though, you will find another interesting article by Jarl R. Ahlbeck, a D.Sc. and lecturer at Abo Akademi University, Finland. His claim is that there hasn’t been any significant global warming since 1995. To prove it, he shows two temperature graphs, one from Hadley and one from NASA.

The Guardian’s Leo Hickman has been studying registration details for the 2d International Conference on Climate Change, arranged by Heartland Institute in New York, March 8-10. What bothers him is that Heartland offers a 20 percent discount off the registration fee for those who have signed the Oregon Petition, a well-known list of skeptics to AGW.

According to Leo Hickman, signing the petition is worth the massive amount of 144 dollars. No wonder there are so many climate skeptics in the world.

What Leo Hickman forgets to mention is, however, that free admission is available to all qualified journalists. Why then bother putting your name on a petition and risking to look like a fool? It’s enough to get a part-time reporter job at some obscure local paper.

According to a new study published in Nature Geoscience, the warming observed in Europe during the last 30 years can be explained by less fog, and thus more sunshine reaching the earth.

“Clearer skies due to changing weather patterns and less air pollution have contributed on average to about 5 to 10 percent of the region’s warmer temperatures during this period”, said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. (…) The warming trend due to less fog will ease, however, in the future because when it comes to air pollution governments can only make the skies so clean, he added.

“Climate is not simple and this is a new factor,” Van Oldenborgh said.

So, perhaps it is not the carbon dioxide alone?

Here’s an article about the same study from AFP.

Only a few days left till the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama. But while he and his team say reducing the carbon dioxide emissions will be first priority, the inauguration itself will leave a huge carbon footprint on the presidential red carpet.

Using data from the EPA, environmentalist organizations, and various news accounts, the Institute for Liberty estimates more than 500 million pounds of carbon dioxide will be released during the four-day festivities.

The 600 private jets expected to fly visitors to and from the event will produce 25,320,000 pounds of CO2.

Personal vehicles could account for 262,483,200 pounds of CO2.

The horses in the parade will produce more than 400 pounds of CO2.

It would take the average household 57,598 years to produce as much CO2 as Obama’s inauguration. If Barack Obama’s administration is going after small business for its carbon footprint, then maybe they should look at themselves first.

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When Britain is experiencing “arctic cold”, and a great part of Europe is shivering, one can wonder what happened to the global warming. But, don’t despair. According to WMO’s meteorologists, the warming trend is still there, buried deep under all natural variations. Once they are gone, swish!, the heat will explode right in front of our eyes.

What’s funny is that scientists now say that weather extremes are to be expected and “neither phenomenon can be used as a case for or against global warming”.

Still, media indulge in drawing conclusions and predicting the future. Everything can be and is explained by global warming. Climate change everyone’s favorite scapegoat. Hence, humans are made responsible for practically everything. That’s bordering divinity, isn’t it?

As the CO2-levels continue to rise relentlessly, some of the AGW-people state that it is too late to stop climate change in the conventional way of cutting down on emissions. The time has come for geo-engineering. Some of the, rather radical, ways to save our planet are, according to them, for example:

- seeding the oceans with iron filings to stimulate phytoplankton growth,

- putting a giant sunshield in space,

- creating artificial weather by spraying salt into the clouds, and

- covering glaciers with giant blankets to prevent them from melting.

Read more about the climate weirdness on Mail Online. And weep.

A little update on what’s happening on this blog. Sadly enough, I haven’t had enough time to write here regularly. All my time was divided between the Swedish blog (www.theclimatescam.se) and writing a book about the climate “threat”. The manuscript is now finished and hopefully, the book itself will soon appear on the shelves. Unfortunately, it is in Swedish. (To start with).

In just a couple of months, it is time for the 2d International Climate Conference in New York and I have already made all travel arrangements. Wouldn’t miss it for anything! I hope I will see many familiar faces as well as make new acquaintances.

Please, bear with me, if I don’t update this blog very often. My conscience is bad enough already as it is.

Wish you all the best in the New Year!