THeBlueCashew

QuoteThe UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.  The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was "only a few dozen experts," he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.



"Claims such as '2,500 of the world's leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate' are disingenuous," the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered "the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism."



Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia –  the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK's most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC's co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on 'Climate scenario development' for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.



Hulme's depiction of IPCC's exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/13/the-ipcc-consensus-on-climate-change-was-phoney-says-ipcc-insider/

QuoteOffering new insights into our fragile polar regions, European Space Agency's CryoSat mission has provided three consecutive years of Arctic sea-ice thickness measurements, which show that the ice continues to thin.



Although satellites have witnessed a downward trend in the extent of sea ice over the last two decades, it is essential to have accurate information on the mass or volume of ice being lost. This is a more accurate measure of the changes taking place.



Along with observations of ice extent, CryoSat's measurements of thickness now span from October 2010 to April 2013, allowing scientists to work out the real loss of ice, monitor seasonal change and identify trends.



Prof. Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds, UK, said, "CryoSat continues to provide clear evidence of diminishing Arctic sea ice.



"From the satellite's measurements we can see that some parts of the ice pack ice have thinned more rapidly than others, but there has been a decrease in the volume of winter and summer ice over the past three years.



"The volume of the sea ice at the end of last winter was less than 15 000 cubic km, which is lower than any other year going into summer and indicates less winter growth than usual."



While it seems unlikely that a record minimum of sea-ice extent will be set this September, the thinner ice at the start of summer could mean that the actual volume of ice may reach a new low.



//http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Living_Planet_Symposium_2013/New_dimensions_on_ice

QuoteGlobal warming has stalled and will not raise world temperatures over the next five years, according to a new prediction from the British national weather service.



The updated computer model of the planet's climate lowers by about 20% an earlier prediction of how much hotter the coming few years will be than the long-term average since 1971.



The new prediction "does not necessarily tell us anything about long-term predictions of climate change," the Met Office said in a statement, and it is "actively researching potential causes of the recent slowdown in global warming, including natural variability."



"I suspect a lot of modelling groups are going to have to start revising their forecasts down, because most of them are running too hot," said Ross McKitrick, a University of Guelph economist who was instrumental in debunking the famous "hockey stick" graph of rising global temperatures. "There are so many models that are now so far off that it suggests a wider problem with the technique."



The downgraded prediction recalls the 2006 report by the British government that pegged the economic cost of climate change at 20% of global GDP each year "now and forever," but was criticized for relying too heavily on extreme and unlikely outcomes, and is now outdated after the global economic downturn.



"This does not mean that there is no man-made global warming," said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish academic and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. "But it does mean that we perhaps should not be quite as scared as some people might have been from the mid '70s to about 2000, when temperatures rose dramatically, because they were probably at least partially rising dramatically because of natural variation, just like they are now stalling because of natural variation."

He called the revised prediction "a return to the humility that we probably should have had right from the start," and a reminder that the climate is harder to predict than scientists once "naively" thought.



"The short-term prediction has always been dodgy. It's really hard to say what's going to happen in five years. Global warming is about what's going to happen in 20 or 50 or 100 years," Mr. Lomborg said.



The public announcement of a minor adjustment to a massively complex computer model also highlights the dangers for scientists of making predictions on controversial matters of public policy.



Bruce Pardy, a professor of environmental law at Queen's University, said such predictions are especially dangerous because the common understanding of climate change remains simplistic on all sides. He cited the impulse to blame Hurricane Sandy on global warming as an example of wrong-headed thinking.

"In an ideal world, the policy that's put in place should not be designed to change what's going to happen in the short term. But the game that everybody is playing is to emphasize short-term things so as to produce pressure in the direction they prefer," he said.



"If the impetus required for a universal, binding, international commitment is to have the sky falling, this [new report] doesn't say the sky is falling, at least not tomorrow. It doesn't change the idea that the sky might fall, or be in the process of falling, further out. But if what is missing in these international negotiations is a crisis, this doesn't help paint it as a crisis, or at least an immediate crisis," Prof. Pardy said.



"It all depends upon your policy preference, and frankly a lot of policy preferences exist before the data."

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/08/global-warming-hasnt-stopped-but-it-has-stalled-says-new-prediction-from-british-national-weather-service/

QuoteWhen projections from the newer CMIP5 models are combined with observations, and specifically including the surface temperatures from the last 10 years, the upper bound of projections of warming are slightly reduced, but the lower bound is largely unchanged. More importantly, the most likely warming is reduced by only 10%, indicating that the warming that we might previously have expected by 2050 would be delayed by only a few years.



//http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/3/r/Paper3_Implications_for_projections.pdf

QuoteNext month the UN bureaucracy in charge of global warming, called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will release its first major scientific report in six years. Word has leaked out that they have revised downward their projections for global temperatures.



They still say the world will heat up. They're just making their new guesses less extreme, because their last guesses have been so wrong.



"Projections" and "guesses" are more appropriate terms than the word "prediction." Because as the prestigious scientific journal, Nature Climate Change, reveals this month, out of 117 climate computer models over the past 15 years, 114 of them were wrong, and all of those were wrong in the same direction. Out of 117, 114 projected the world would warm far more than it has.

If you had 117 monkeys randomly throwing darts at a dart board, you would have a few bullseyes, and the rest would be evenly scattered - some high, some low, some left, some right. But the UN's predictions all skewed high. That doesn't happen by chance. That's a sign of inherent bias. To use a computer science term, "garbage in, garbage out." If you build a computer model that is tilted to yield a certain outcome, you can be pretty sure that it will.



Nature's peer-reviewed study showed that since 1998, actual recorded temperatures on the Earth went up by a microscopic 0.05 degrees per decade. As in, 1/20th of a degree, over 10 years. That's so small it's almost unmeasurable. Global warming stopped back when Clinton was president. Titanic was the hit movie.



Shania Twain's You're Still the One topped the charts. That's a long time ago.



But 114 official projections claimed there would be massive global warming. A Ouija board would be more accurate. So would a kid's magic eight ball, or a pair of dice.



Anyone who has heard of the ice ages, and knows we're not in one now, acknowledges the world has warmed and cooled over the millennia, and those cycles will likely continue. The brilliant political innovation of the IPCC was to politicize those natural changes, and to blame them on something taxable: carbon dioxide, or CO2.

It is that fetishization of carbon that is so absurd - carbon, the stuff of life, the sixth element on the periodic table, the essential element in our own bodies, let alone our foods (carbs) and industrial activity (carburetors).



A prominent anti-oil lobby group was formed called 350.org , named after the so-called "tipping point" of parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, after which warm-mongers said we would never recover. Except that CO2 is now nearing 400 ppm, in part because of China's booming industrial economy. But the temperature has stopped moving.

This is like the Y2K millennium bug that companies and governments spent billions of dollars fixing, that launched a thousand TV news special reports. But it turned out to be a hoax - a scheme for lobbyists and consultants. At least it ended on Jan. 1, 2000. And at least the Mayan apocalypse had an end date, too: 2012.



How many more years will politicians keep demonizing carbon dioxide for global warming that isn't happening? A better question is, how much longer will voters - and taxpayers - go along for the ride?

http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/straighttalk/archives/2013/09/20130917-073409.html

QuoteColorado flooding has not only overwhelmed roads and homes, but also the oil and gas infrastructure stationed in one of the most densely drilled areas in the U.S. Although oil companies have shut down much of their operations in Weld County due to flooding, nearby locals say an unknown amount of chemicals has leaked out and possibly contaminated waters, mixing fracking fluids and oil along with sewage, gasoline, and agriculture pesticides.



"You have 100, if not thousands, of wells underwater right now and we have no idea what those wells are leaking," East Boulder County United spokesman Cliff Willmeng said Monday. "It's very clear they are leaking into the floodwaters though."



Photographs shared by East Boulder County United, a Colorado environmental group that opposes hydraulic fracturing, show many tanks have been ruptured and others floating in the flood. At least one pipeline has been confirmed broken and leaking.



No one, from oil companies to regulators, seems to know the exact extent of the damage yet as they survey the damage. But Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources Mike King told the Denver Post that, "The scale is unprecedented." Meanwhile, the Colorado Department of Public Health has advised everyone to stay away from the water, as it is possibly contaminated by "raw sewage, as well as potential releases from homes, businesses, and industry."



//http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/17/2630131/oil-fracking-colorado-flooding/

QuoteDo we finally get an apology on global warming science?



The alarmists have not only been wrong. Many of them have been unspeakably rude.



And normally when that happens, you say sorry.



I thought so when the scandal erupted around University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit e-mails in 2009. And I certainly think so now that the latest IPCC report admits they and their computers have drastically exaggerated warming since 1990.



They can't even predict the past, let alone the future. Isn't that kind of embarrassing given the shrillness of their rhetoric?



To be sure, public policy is a place for vigorous debate. Not every public remark I make radiates Christian charity.



You can't debate important matters without criticizing important errors bluntly. But people who went around sneering about flat-earthers and "deniers" and comparing them to people unwilling to admit smoking causes cancer or HIV causes AIDS were not engaging in debate.



They were trying to prevent it. They were not trying to refute their adversaries but to crush them. And they were also wrong, and ignorant.



In a schoolyard, that behaviour would be classified as bullying. When it happens on a major policy issue, I think someone somewhere should act sorry.



Especially those who went around saying the skeptics were in the pay of the oil companies, which amounted to hitting the other guy below the belt.



After all,

Quotethe government grants available to global warming alarmists dwarf the funding available to those lonely "fringe" voices who dispute that the sky is on fire and humans are the arsonists.

I'm not saying anyone should be legally punished for being loudly, rudely wrong on a major policy issue.



Unlike, say, David Suzuki, who mused in 2008 about jailing leaders for daring to disagree with him.



Such malevolence would have tarnished and possibly humbled a lesser man.



But I am saying if they can be this aggressively wrong and unrepentant on a major issue, it might be better not to listen to them as carefully in future.



As I've said before, I don't know whether global warming is happening.



It probably is, because the Earth's temperature has been well under the typical average for at least 2.5 million years and in all likelihood has been drifting back toward the norm for the last 15,000. But if so, man is not causing it, and can't stop it, so we better find ways to adapt.



My colleague Ezra Levant just wrote: "Anyone who has heard of the ice ages, and knows we're not in one now, acknowledges the world has warmed and cooled over the millennia, and those cycles will likely continue."



But we are, because an ice age is defined as a period with significant polar ice. Fortunately we're in a comparatively benign part of one that began around 15,000 years ago. And we'll be in a right mess if it goes away.



None of this was ever a secret. It was on the public record.



So the latest revelations that the computer models can't even predict the past are merely a good time to apologize for the abuse, not a justification for it until now.



We've always known the computer "models" can't predict the last 1,000 years, including the famous Medieval Warm Period, the past 15,000 including the well-known Younger Dryas, or the Pleistocene with its 11 major glaciations that start and stop abruptly and mysteriously.



And if we didn't know, we could easily look it up online.



Those who instead spent their time searching for new insults to silence opponents should now be seeking out ways to apologize to them.

Surely elementary decency demands it.



Got any?

http://www.edmontonsun.com/2013/09/18/no-scientific-evidence-of-global-humility

QuoteFor years, we've all heard that global warming is threatening our planet. But now, in a stunning turnaround, world scientists are warning that an era of global cooling seems to be upon us, complete with extraordinary expansions of ocean ice being recorded in just the past year.



Even the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report seems to indicate that an era of global cooling is now underway, according to many scientists.



It turns out that global warming predictions were little more than doom-and-gloom fear mongering based on failed computer models.



For example, in 2007, the BBC reported that the Arctic would be "ice-free" by the summer of 2013. Here's exactly how that fear mongering was published by the BBC:



Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years. Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html

QuoteWorld's top climate scientists confess: Global warming is just QUARTER what we thought - and computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong Leaked report reveals the world has warmed at quarter the rate claimed by IPCC in 2007



Scientists accept their computers may have exaggerated



A leaked copy of the world's most authoritative climate study reveals scientific forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong.

The Mail on Sunday has obtained the final draft of a report to be published later this month by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the ultimate watchdog whose massive, six-yearly 'assessments' are accepted by environmentalists, politicians and experts as the gospel of climate science.

They are cited worldwide to justify swingeing fossil fuel taxes and subsidies for 'renewable' energy.

Yet the leaked report makes the extraordinary concession that over the past 15 years, recorded world temperatures have increased at only a quarter of the rate of IPCC claimed when it published its last assessment in 2007.Back then, it said observed warming over the 15 years from 1990-2005 had taken place at a rate of 0.2C per decade, and it predicted this would continue for the following 20 years, on the basis of forecasts made by computer climate models.

But the new report says the observed warming over the more recent 15 years to 2012 was just 0.05C per decade - below almost all computer predictions.





The 31-page 'summary for policymakers' is based on a more technical 2,000-page analysis which will be issued at the same time. It also surprisingly reveals: IPCC scientists accept their forecast computers may have exaggerated the effect of increased carbon emissions on world temperatures  – and not taken enough notice of natural variability.

They recognise the global warming 'pause' first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real – and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997.

They admit large parts of the world were as warm as they are now for decades at a time between 950 and 1250 AD – centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and when the population and CO2 levels were both much lower.

The IPCC admits that while computer models forecast a decline in Antarctic sea ice, it has actually grown to a new record high. Again, the IPCC cannot say why.

A forecast in the 2007 report that hurricanes would become more intense has simply been dropped, without mention.



This year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons in history and the US is currently enjoying its longest-ever period – almost eight years – without a single hurricane of Category 3 or above making landfall.



She said  it therefore made no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in its forecasts and conclusions has increased.

For example, in the new report, the IPCC says it is 'extremely likely' – 95 per cent certain – that human  influence caused more than half  the temperature rises from 1951 to 2010, up from 'very confident' –  90 per cent certain – in 2007.Prof Curry said: 'This is incomprehensible to me' – adding that the IPCC projections are 'overconfident', especially given the report's admitted areas of doubt.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420783/Worlds-climate-scientists-confess-Global-warming-just-QUARTER-thought--computers-got-effects-greenhouse-gases-wrong.html