Global Warming Heat Records X 5

Poo says:

I’m convinced the researchers and scientists at the aptly named Institute are all under 20. How else to explain their never ending conviction that it all started with them. Nothing ever happened before they arrived on the scene. I remember as a boy thinking that my parents knew absolutely nothing about sex. Where I came from never occurred to me. Maybe I believed in the stork. Later, when I found out, to my horror, that my parents actually had sex I was aghast and a little disgusted. These sorts of lads now work at the Institute but are, unlike wee me, more than capable of putting an acceptable spin on any new fact they uncover. These people can even spin science. But that’s okay; in the debate about climate change, which in reality should be to all of our benefit, the truth simply doesn’t matter.

Like most people who have lived a few years and are capable of reading a book, I do believe in man-made global warming particularly if one includes humans, livestock and pets as emitters. The world has added over 5 Billion people since I came screaming onto the scene. I have no idea how many livestock and pets have been added in that time. I do know that collectively we have put out a lot of CO2 all by ourselves never mind our cars, factories and power plants. I do not, however, believe disaster is right around the corner anymore than I believe that we will crash into the sun anytime soon. I can wait the 2 Billion years or so for that one. Well, maybe not but I’ll try, I really will.

Potsdam, like many others, continues to prove if you look for something long enough and hard enough you are bound to find it. You want hot? We got hot? You want drought? We got drought.

Of course, in the 1930s and the 1950s drought covered more of the U.S. (National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina) than what has been recently experienced. You want to see drought? Look up the Dirty 30s. Entire towns were covered. You didn’t sweep it; you shoveled it!

Droughts are unfortunately cyclical and have ravaged the northern Great Plains of the U.S. and the Prairie Provinces of Western Canada for thousands of years. Scientists expect these devastating events to continue.

“These drought cycles have gone on pretty consistently throughout the last 4,500 years,” said Jim Clark (ecologist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Durham, North Carolina). “They are pretty severe, so they have a large impact on the full set of ecosystem processes.”

Why doesn’t anyone talk about cold? It’s weather. Its part of climate too, isn’t it?

Europe, England and others have experienced exceptionally cold winters these last three years. Records were broken in some areas and many deaths occurred. Winter temperatures in Russia also went to the extreme. The air in some regions of the republic of Yakutia (Siberia) reportedly cooled down to -50 degrees Centigrade at their worst. The European part of Russia braved temperatures that were ten degrees below the norm. The Ukraine also endured extreme cold. These severely low temperatures were also seen over large parts of Europe. There has been considerable snowfall over various parts of the continent as well as the British Isles. Frost became an ongoing problem in eastern, southeastern, central and large parts of western Europe. Eastern European countries (Latvia, Belarus, northeastern Poland, Ukraine) experienced minimum temperatures of around -30°C while northern Russia went down to -37°C. In eastern Germany, minimum temperatures below -20°C were common place in many areas. Not all temperatures were new records, of course, but the long duration of the cold period is noteworthy. Cold air even extended over the Balkan Peninsula. Frost was recorded in northern Greece.

Temperatures have also been extremely low from the northern part of East Asia to Central Asia (in and around Mongolia and Kazakhstan). In Makhachkala, which is in the North-Caucasus district, the minus 13.6 degrees Celsius temperature was the coldest registered since 1889!

Global 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. Sure we’ll have hot days, cold days, rainy days and snow. There will even be hurricanes. That’s weather.

I am not a huge fan of computer models other than as a source of employment for students but the latest updated computer model of the planet’s future climate lowers earlier temperature predictions by about 20%. This is based on the long-term average since 1971. (Everyone else quotes models, why can’t I?) 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 just bet they are.

“I suspect a lot of modeling 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.”

Guess I’d better stop quoting models. You’d think a Canadian would have found comfort in the hockey stick model.

Bruce Pardy, (professor of environmental law, Queen’s University) said such predictions are especially dangerous because the general understanding of climate change remains simplistic. He cited the impulse to blame Hurricane Sandy on global warming as an example of wrong-headed thinking. Me, I like the phrase “climate porn.”

“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.”

That’s kind of my point.

Even the much discredited UN has leaked a draft of the next five-year assessment report which appears to show that CO2 has less of an effect on global temperatures than previously thought, that the sun is a bigger “driver” of climate change and that global temperatures have not risen appreciably in the past 16 years.

It is no surprise that the corrupt, bureaucratic and expensive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has overestimated the effect of CO2 on global temperatures, underestimated the effects of the sun and incorrectly predicted how much the Earth will warm over the next 100 years or so. It suits their agenda.

The IPCC is noted for creating two reports, one for scientists and another for political leaders and the media, where the money and manipulation really is. The UN climate change agencies are more about the politics of global warming and far less about the science. The science only figures in when it suits the political ends of alarmist scientists and UN bureaucrats. It’s about the money, stupid. There is just so much of it around the UN. From the enviro-alarmists and their lobbies the issue has become a political exercise.

Climate negotiations, like the rigged and failed Kyoto Agreement, have always really been about global wealth redistribution. Developed nations are being asked/ordered to contribute $100 billion annually by 2020 to developing nations. This is supposedly to help them reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. In fact, the UN’s “global” emissions treaty covers only 15% of global emissions, which have gone up more than 50% under Kyoto. They were supposed to have fallen by 5%. Ah well, the idea isn’t to de-industrialize the developed world while at the same time prevent the developing world from industrializing. But then again, aren’t all protests and interest groups about money in the end?
Where’s the truth in that? I’ll tell you. It’s lost.