If global warming equals more storms, where are they?

Metro International
Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The now iconic image of murky dust rising from a smokestack in the shape of a hurricane on the cover of Al Gore’s global warming documentary draws a distinct correlation between rising temperatures and stronger storm patterns.

But here’s an inconvenient truth: This year’s hurricane season has gotten off to the slowest start in 17 years. And yet global warming alarmists continue to ring their doomsday sirens.

The official start of the hurricane season is June 1. And not since 1992 — the year of Hurricane Andrew — has the Atlantic Ocean been silent past Aug. 4. Meteorologists have yet to name even a single tropical storm in the Atlantic in 2009.

So is global warming really doing anything?

“While it is commonly thought that global warming would increase hurricane activity, that is far from a settled issue,” said Rob Eisenson, a meteorologist at Western Connecticut State University. “There are some research studies that suggest global warming would not have that effect.”

But Eisenson cautions that looking at one season’s activity cannot determine whether a long-term trend is or is not happening.

“I don’t think the slow start to the hurricane season can be pointed to as an erosion of the claims of global warming or hurricane activity. Likewise, I don’t think a single especially active hurricane year is highly supportive of these claims. … Anyone can claim anything in this debate — fact is, there is no way to prove or disprove any of it.”

[Click on chart to enlarge]

Doubts In The Midst Of Greens

The Green Man
Irregular Times
Monday, August 10, 2009

I’m attending New York Green Fest this weekend. The Green Fest promises to “celebrate sustainable living and Green politics”, but I’ve that even within this group of people who ought to be among the most environmentally aware, there are patches of of soot grey obscuring the green color.

One attendee from close by, who uses electricity obtained through the burning of coal that very likely is obtained through mountaintop removal mining, mentions her interest in organizing against the construction of wind turbine. She doesn’t want it in her backyard, she says.

Another attendee, a college professor, confided to me in private conversation that, “I’m not sure climate change is real.” She said that, though she’s not a scientist herself, she gathers that there is a great deal of controversy and disagreement among scientists about whether climate change is actually happening. She also speculated that the measurements of rising global temperature might be due to the “urban heat island effect”, with temperatures measured only in cities with increasing amounts of hot pavement. (Actually, where temperatures are measured as warming the most is in the polar regions, where there are no cities at all.)

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The Sun, Not CO2, Caused Ice Age Glaciers To Melt

by Doug L. Hoffman on Sun, 08/09/2009 - 16:32

Increased insolation 20,000 years ago caused deglaciation in the Norther Hemisphere, according to a new report in the August 7, 2009, edition of Science. Further more, it was the onset of deglaciation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which occurred between 14 - 15 thousand years ago, that was the source of sea-level rise at the beginning of the Holocene warming. Such events are often associated with rising CO₂ levels by climate catastrophists but the evidence says otherwise.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) is typically defined as the most recent interval in Earth history when global ice sheets reached their maximum volume. This is conventionally calculated from sea-level records but, according to Peter U. Clark et al. this is an overly simplistic approach. Sea-level records do not distinguish between globally synchronous ice-sheet maxima and temporary regional ice-sheet maxima that can combine to produce apparent sea-level low points that can last for a thousand years or more. In their report the author's describe their improved approach as follows:

We drew on 4271 ¹⁴C ages and 475 terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide (TCN) ages that span the interval from 10,000 to 50,000 years ago (10 to 50 ka) to constrain the timing of maxima in global ice-sheet extent. For all but the Barents-Kara and Greenland Ice Sheets, the spatial distribution of ages is sufficient to evaluate regional variability in the timing of maxima for different sectors of individual ice sheets. Because ice-sheet extent scales with ice volume, our constraints on regional variability in ice-sheet maxima allow us to evaluate the temporal evolution of individual ice-sheet contributions to global sea-level change. Because mountain glaciers are highly sensitive to climate change, we used an additional 172 ¹⁴C ages and 786 TCN ages to constrain mountain-glacier fluctuations from five widely distributed regions of the world, allowing a more comprehensive assessment of the response of the cryosphere to climate change.

The sea-level change at a number of the sites studied reflected relative changes in sea-level and not change on a global basis. This is because of variations in Earth's gravitational field, deformation of the planet's crust, and rotational effects on local sea levels driven by the shift of water mass from glacial ice to the ocean. “In order to evaluate these effects, we used a state-of-the-art theory that includes a realistic glaciation phase to predict the RSL change at these far-field sites,” states the report. From these up-to-date theoretical constraints a new model was built to predict the actual LGM.

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Major New Report: Human Influences, The Sun, Volcanic Activity and El Niño ALL Affect Climate

Washington’s Blog
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

A major new report to be published by Geophysical Research Letters, concludes that global warming will accelerate so quickly in the next 5 years - 150% of the IPCC's predictions - that it is "expected to silence global warming sceptics".

What I find interesting is that the report acknowledges that all 4 of the following factors affect climate:

1. Human influences
   


2. The sun
   


3. Volcanic activity
   


4. El Niño, also called the "southern oscillation"
   

Whether or not the report is correct about the next 5 years, I think it is important that mainstream scientists are now admitting that climate is affected by the 3 natural conditions of the sun, volcanism and the southern oscillation, as well as human influences.

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Government monopsony distorts climate science, says SPPI

The climate industry is costing taxpayers $79 billion and counting

Washington, DC 7/22/2009 09:12 PM GMT (TransWorldNews)

The Science and Public Policy Institute announces the publication of Climate Money, a study by Joanne Nova revealing that the federal Government has a near-monopsony on climate science funding. This distorts the science towards self-serving alarmism. Key findings:

Ø The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary.

Ø Despite the billions wasted, audits of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of “global warming” theory and to compete with a lavishly-funded, highly-organized climate monopsony. Major errors have been exposed again and again.

Ø Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks, which profit most, are calling for more. Experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion in the near future. Hot air will soon be the largest single commodity traded on global exchanges.

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