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]

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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Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites

Geologist Ian Plimer takes a contrary view, arguing that man-made climate change is a con trick perpetuated by environmentalists

By Jonathan Manthorpe,
Vancouver Sun
July 29, 2009

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia's best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me -- and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour -- cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks -- can reverse the trend.

Photograph by: Tim Fraser/Calgary Herald, Canwest News Service

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Global Warming or Global Cooling? A New Trend in Climate Alarmism

by Dr. David Evans

Global Research, July 23, 2009

abc.net.au

Senator Steve Fielding recently asked the [Australian] Climate Change Minister Penny Wong why human emissions can be blamed for global warming, given that air temperatures peaked in 1998 and began a cooling trend in 2002, while carbon dioxide levels have risen five per cent since 1998. I was one of the four independent scientists Fielding chose to accompany him to visit the Minister.

The Minister's advisor essentially told us that short term trends in air temperatures are irrelevant, and to instead focus on the rapidly rising ocean heat content:

Figure 1: Wong's graph.

This is the new trend in climate alarmism. Previously the measure of global warming has always been air temperatures. But all the satellite data says air temperatures have been in a mild down trend starting 2002. The land thermometers preferred by the alarmists showed warming until 2006, but even they show a cooling trend developing since then.

(Land thermometers cannot be trusted because, even in the USA, 89 per cent of them fail siting guidelines that they be more than 30 meters from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source, and their data is forever being "corrected".)

Ocean temperatures were not properly measured until mid-2003, when the Argo network became operational.

Before Argo, ocean temperatures were measured with bathythermographs (XBTs)—expendable probes fired into the water by a gun from ships along the main commercial shipping lanes. Geographical coverage of the world's oceans was poor, XBTs do not go as deep as Argo, and their data is much less accurate.

The Argo network consists of over 3,000 small, drifting oceanic robot probes, floating around all of the world's oceans. Argo floats duck dive down to 1,000 meters or more, record temperatures, then come up and radio back the results.

Figure 2: The Argo network has floats measuring temperature in all of the oceans.

Figure 3: An Argo float descends to cruising depth, drifts for a few days, ascends while recording temperatures, then transmits data to satellites.

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