Here’s Cato Institute’s climate ad signed by 100 scientists who claim that climate change has been grossly overstated. Of course, the AGW side has already dismissed this action. Same old, same old, they say. No new names on the list. Just the usual suspects, getting more and more desperate.

The following is a new ad from United Nations Development Program (UNDP). It pretty much sums up why the global warming issue has such a strong grip on the public.

According to a just released poll from the Gallup Organization, 41 percent of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated. That is the highest percentage of “skeptics” since 1998. The exaggerated statistic has been steadily rising since 2005 after a drop from 2004 to 2005.

At the conference in New York, almost everybody was a skeptic. It felt bizarre to hear that the claims of global warming are grossly exaggerated, while at the same time, media frolic on future catastrophes.

The Swedish government has just issued a climate proposition to reduce Sweden’s CO2-emissions by 40 percent. The already high CO2-tax will be raised even further. In 2030, all cars in Sweden are supposed to run on other than gasoline or diesel. Worth knowing is that Sweden’s CO2-emissions make up for 0.2 percent of total global carbon dioxide emissions. Yet, the Swedish government is out there to save the world.

Parallelly with the Heartland conference, there was a big AGW-meeting in Copenhagen. AGW-people signalize that we are facing an even greater disaster than previously anticipated. Greenland is melting fast. The CO2 will stay in the atmosphere forever. The world as we know it is about to end. At the same time, the sun remains quiet, and the temperatures refuse to rise. And no matter how hard I try, I still cannot see the emperor being other than stark naked.

Fred Goldberg: PDO changes might be caused by changes in Earth’s rotation speed. The PDO then in turn effects the climate. An increase in LOD means the Earth rotation slows down, which causes the PDO to turn positive. A decrease in LOD causes that Earth rotation to speed up a little bit, which causes the PDO to turn negative. Changes in LOD may be caused by changes in gravitional forces of the sun and the planets.

Craig Loehle: There is a divergence problem with the tree ring data and the temperature records. Perhaps trees respond more to precipitation than temperature changes? Assuming linear growth response is wrong.

Also, oceans have been cooling since 2003, according to ARG temperature data down to 700 m. Craig Loehle published this paper in Energy & Environment, since both Science and Nature instantly turned the paper down.

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.

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.

Read Christopher Booker’s column in The Telegraph.

“Mr Obama begins by saying that “the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”. “Sea levels,” he claims, “are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Far from the science being “beyond dispute”, we can only deduce from this that Mr Obama has believed all he was told by Al Gore’s wondrously batty film An Inconvenient Truth without bothering to check the facts. Each of these four statements is so wildly at odds with the truth that on this score alone we should be seriously worried.

(…)

Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a “federal cap and trade system”, a massive “carbon tax”, designed to reduce America’s CO2 emissions “to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050″. Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.

Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage “clean energy” sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing “18 gigawatts of installed capacity”, only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.

He talks blithely of allowing only “clean” coal-fired power plants, using “carbon capture” - burying the CO2 in holes in the ground - which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn’t even yet been developed. He then babbles on about “generating five million new green jobs”. This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those “dirty” coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity.

If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth’s richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even “sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant”. The only way to avert the “collapse of human civilisation”, according to the Great Moonbat, would be “the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050″.

For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.”

In January 2008, three gentlemen at the Met office Hadley Centre published a paper named: “Human contribution to rapidly increasing frequency of very warm Northern Hemisphere summers”. Those three were Gareth S. Jones, Peter A. Stott and Nikolaos Christidis.

In the abstract we can read the following:

The European summer of 2003 was exceptionally warm, and there is evidence that human influence has at least doubled the risk of such a hot summer. It is possible that by the 2040s, summers over southern Europe will be as warm or warmer 50% of the time. (…) We detect the dominant influence of anthropogenic factors on observed warming in almost every region, which has led to a rapidly increasing risk of hot summers. We show that hot summers which were infrequent 20–40 years ago are now much more common and that our projections indicate that the current sharp rise in incidence of hot summers is likely to continue.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to read the entire paper yet, but a few questions arise immediately. How were these scientists able to prove that human influence has doubled the risk of heat waves? How can they know that Southern European summers will be as warm as 2003 or warmer half of the time? And what are the signs of human influence on the observed warming?

Is it just me who smells a rat in here?

Wednesday’s Seattle Times article, ”UW Study Examines Decline of Snowpack” begins as follows,

“Maybe the snow in the Cascade Mountains isn’t in such immediate peril from global warming after all.

Despite previous studies suggesting a warmer climate is already taking a bite out of Washington’s snowpack, there’s no clear evidence that human-induced climate change has caused a drop in 20th century snow levels, according to a new study by University of Washington scientists.”

The study findings (note: the study has not yet been peer-reviewed) have already become part of a scientific debate with an unusually political tone. A leading scientist on the other side of the debate (presumably an AGW-supporter) said the latest analysis speculates about the future and offers little new about the past. Well, almost the same is applicable to IPCC’s reports. Aren’t they just loose speculations about the future with no empirical evidence whatsoever?

We’ve been warned that the North Pole will be ice-free this summer. But according to the latest ICESat thickness estimates, it appears that the first-year sea ice in the Arctic Ocean so far this season is comparable in thickness to what it was in 2006 and 2007. Why is that?

The NSIDC says that sparse snow cover over the Arctic Ocean last winter resulted in less insulation from the bitterly cold air, resulting in faster, first-year ice growth. Snow was unable to accumulate last autumn since much of the Arctic Ocean was still ice-free, causing the snow to just melt into the open waters. Once the ice formed later in the fall, it accumulated more quickly than normal as there was very little barrier (snow) between the ice and the cold air just above the surface.

And how about that global warming anyway? The recent years’ fall in global temperatures has led to increasing speculation that global warming is over. The AGW-supporters explain that even if global temperatures rise and fall year-on-year this does not mean that global warming has stopped; only that the continuing rise in temperatures due to man made emissions of greenhouse gases is being temporarily masked.

So the first important question we should ask is:

Is the Earth warming?

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has confirmed that an impending phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation will likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years.

What if the planet is actually entered a cooling phase while the world’s governments do their best to restrain the use of fossil fuels with no viable alternative at hand?

Regardless of the answer to the first question (“yes” or “no”), there are further uncertainties. Question number two is therefore:

If the world indeed is warming, what is the main cause of this warming and can we do anything to control climate change? And should the world be cooling, can we do anything to stop that?

If climate change is something beyond our control, shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to adapt instead of putting our money on useless mitigation measures?

IPCC indicates that the consequences of a global warming will be dire, with floods, droughts, famine and overall misery devastating the lives of all people.

But what if warming actually turns out beneficial? What is it is cooling we should worry about?

That is the third question we need to ask.

The papers are full of reports on shrinking glaciers, collapsing ice-sheets and worried polar bears. But the most important questions, those above, questions that still remain unanswered, have eluded us. So let’s get back to the basics of climate discussion instead of losing ourselves among thousands of fairly vague implications of what might or might not happen.

As an antidote to Earth Hour, an organization that calls itself Grassfire.org, is calling on people around the globe to dramatically increase their carbon dioxide emissions and thereby the so-called Carbon Footprint on Carbon Belch Day, June 12.

“It’s time (…) to purge ourselves of the false guilt that Al Gore and the Climate Alarmists have placed on us,” says Grassfire.org President Steve Elliott. “The fact is, reducing my personal carbon output has no impact on the so-called planetary emergency. That’s why for this one special day we are encouraging every American to unleash a historic Carbon Belch that will be symbolic of our release from the absurdity of green extremism.”

On the Carbon Belch Day website, there is a 21-question calculator to help us quantify our personal carbon belch.

“There’s something for everyone in our calculator”, says Elliott. Some of the examples given are hosting a barbie, going for a long drive, taking a plane trip and drinking bottled water.

As a skeptic to AGW I did not take part in the Earth Hour. But neither did I try to exaggerate my energy use in order to counteract this initiative. A Carbon Belch Day, when everyone skeptic of man-made climate change tries to maximize his or hers energy consumption and CO2-emissions seems an exceedingly juvenile idea. I just don’t get why we should regress an adult sandpit just to make a statement. Surely, there must be better and more sound ways to change public opinion.

I am sorry, Grassfire.org, this is just plain stupid.