Inconvenient Truth For Al Gore As His North Pole Sums Don't Add Up

source: Times.co.uk

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal.

World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal.

Meanwhile, five hours of negotiating time were lost yesterday when developing countries walked out in protest over the lack of progress on their demand for legally binding emissions targets from rich nations. The move underlined the distrust between rich and poor countries over the proposed legal framework for the deal.

Last night key elements of the proposed deal were unravelling. British officials said they were no longer confident that it would contain specific commitments from individual countries on payments to a global fund to help poor nations to adapt to climate change while the draft text on protecting rainforests has also been weakened.

Even the long-term target of ending net deforestation by 2030 has been placed in square brackets, meaning that the date could be deferred. An international monitoring system to identify illegal logging is now described in the text as optional, where before it was compulsory. Negotiators are also unable to agree on a date for a global peak in greenhouse emissions.

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”

Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.

“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Maslowki, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.

He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” he said. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at, based on the information I provided to Al Gore’s office.”

Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”

Hurricane Expert Rips Climate Fears

source: newswithviews.com

By Marc Morano

'There has been an unrelenting quarter century of one-sided indoctrination'

Climategate Revelations 'are but the tip of a giant iceberg'

The following commentary is from Atmospheric Scientist and Hurricane forecasting specialist Dr. William Gray. Gray is the renowned hurricane forecaster and Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU).

Puncturing the Climate Balloon

by Bill Gray

Had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events I would have likely been concerned over the possibility of humans causing serious global climate degradation.

There has been an unrelenting quarter century of one-sided indoctrination of the western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon dioxide (CO_2 ) induced global warming disaster. These warming scenarios have been orchestrated by a combination of environmentalists, vested interest scientists wanting larger federal grants and publicity, the media which profits from doomsday scenario reporting, governmental bureaucrats who want more power over our lives, and socialists who want to level-out global living standards.

These many alarmist groups appear to have little concern over whether their global warming prognostications are accurate, however. And they most certainly are not. The alarmists believe they will be able to scare enough of our citizens into believing their propaganda that the public will be willing to follow their advice on future energy usage and agree to a lowering of their standard of living in the name of climate salvation.

Rising levels of CO_2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be a honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO_2 's influence on global temperature. The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO_2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.

The last century's global warming of about 1 degree F is not a consequence of human activities. This warming is primarily the result of a multi-century changes in the globe's deep ocean circulation. These ocean current changes have lead to a small and gradual increase in the globe's temperature. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age and into a generally warmer climate state. This is akin to the warmer global climate of the Medieval Period. We can do nothing but adapt to such long period natural temperature changes.

The recent 'ClimateGate' revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years. This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publically funded climate research groups of the US and of foreign governments were ever made public.

The disastrous economic consequences of restricting CO_2 emissions from the present by as much as 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 (as being proposed in Copenhagen) have yet to be digested by the general public. Such CO_2 output decreases would cause very large increases in our energy costs, a lowering of our standard of living, and do nothing of significance to improve our climate.

The Cap-and-Trade bill presently before Congress, the likely climate agreements coming out of the Copenhagen Conference, and the EPA's just announced decision to treat CO_2 as a pollutant represents a grave threat to the industrial world's continued economic development. We should not allow these proposals to restrict our economic growth. Any United Nations climate bill our country might sign would act as an infringement on our country's sovereignty.

Climategate: The Ailing 'Mainstream' Media Are Committing Suicide by Ignoring The Scoop of The Century

source telegraph.co.uk

by Gerald Warner

Climategate is a global household name. No cat has ever emancipated itself more completely from the bag. It is a world-wide scandal – thanks to the internet. Yet, as its ramifications proliferate and dominoes continue to fall, the most repeatedly asked question online is: how can the mainstream media (MSM) ignore this? Well, we know the answer to that: the MSM are in thrall to the leftist consensus. End of story. But let me pose a follow-up question that may be becoming more imminently relevant.

Are the mainstream media capable of surviving their side lining of the number one global scoop? Are they finally committing suicide? Are they, in fact, any longer mainstream? Every historian knows that any significant trend in society will show warning symptoms over a long period; but the final catastrophe will usually be triggered by a single event. For the moribund MSM that decisive blunder may well be Climategate.

Another feature of any doomed institution is that it signals its imminent demise by behaving in a manner that is contrary to its nature and purpose. Every city in the developed world contains news rooms in which cringing journalists struggle to satisfy the imperative demands of editors for a scoop. Yet the obvious scoop – the BIG ONE of journalistic mythology – is consigned to the waste basket. This is the journalism of Isvestia and Pravda, with all the commercial viability that attached to that school of news reporting.

The dead-tree press is already on the critical list. In the United States, in the six months to 31 March this year, newspaper circulation slumped by 7 per cent, according to the US Audit Bureau of Circulations. This was a steeper decline than in the two previous recorded periods (you can reasonably attribute that to the vomit-inducing idolatry of Barack Obama that permeated the American press at that time). In the UK the comparable figure was 5 per cent. How many businesses do you know that record such declines, in an unreversed trend, and survive?

The BBC – or, to give the Corporation its proper name, British state television – is on a multi-billion pound life support system, thanks to the licence fee extortion racket by which it acts as gatekeeper to 200 other television channels by charging £142.50 a year to viewers, the majority of whom do not want to watch its programmes. The BBC’s own report to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in 2005 revealed that, if the licence fee were abolished, 58 per cent of viewers (14 million households) would opt out of all BBC television, leaving the Corporation with a paltry £1.2bn in revenue.

That is the despised organisation that relentlessly inflicts climate alarmist propaganda, fairy tales, “bedtime stories” on the British public, in the style of Radio Moscow, circa 1954 (“Implement the resolutions of the 23rd Congress…” “We have 27 minutes to save the polar bears from melting…”). No intelligent or inquiring individual believes, respects or trusts the BBC. Ditto the print media that is similarly spewing out Al Gore’s trashy superstition.

So, instead of proving its worth, serving truth and debate, arresting the attention of the public by exposing our rulers’ lies, the MSM are rolling over to become a mouthpiece of the consensus, repelling readers and viewers as they go online, just as citizens in Iron Curtain countries once tuned in covertly to Western media. The internet is the new samizdat. All of this may still be a relatively gradual process while all citizens are being deprived of is information and debate. But when the bill is presented to sustain the phoney religion consecrated at Copenhagen, when taxes rocket, when we can barely see by the light of mercury bulbs, when every amenity of life is threatened – will people still be willing to pay money for newspapers and television channels that tell them to submit to this tyranny, when they could be exploding the myth and freeing society?

It seems less than likely. The Mainstream Media are hanging themselves – it is doubtful that they can any longer be described as mainstream. These are turkeys voting for Christmas.

Lord Monckton Adresses A Greenpeace-Campaigner On Global Warming

Global Warming: Was it Ever Really a Crisis?

source: globalwarmingheartland.org

Professionally produced for The Heartland Institute, this 20-minute video features leading climate scientists who spoke at the Second International Conference on Climate Change in New York City in March 2009.

Solar Geomagnetic Activity Is At An All Time Low – What Does This Mean For Climate?

source: wattsupwiththat.com

Yesterday, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center released their latest data and graph of the interplanetary geomagnetic index (Ap) which is a proxy for the activity of the solar dynamo. Here is the data provided by SWPC.

At a time when many predicted a ramp up in solar activity, the sun remains in a funk, spotless and quiet. The Ap value, for the second straight month, is “3″. The blue line showing the smoothed value, suggests the trend continues downward. To get an idea of how significant this is in our history, take a look at this data (graph produced by me) from Dr. Leif Svalgaard back to the 1930’s.

The step change in October 2005 is still visible and the value of 3.9 that occurred in April of this year is the lowest for the entire dataset at that time. I’m hoping Dr. Svalgaard will have updated data for us soon.

Why is this important? Well, if Svensmark is right, and Galactic Cosmic Rays modulated by the sun’s magnetic field make a change in cloud cover on Earth, increasing it during low solar magnetic activity, we are in for some colder times.

There’s a presentation by Jasper Kirkby, CLOUD Spokesperson, CERN, which shows what we currently know about the correlations between Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR’s) and variations in the climate.

The CLOUD experiment uses a cloud chamber to study the theorized link between GCR’s and cloud formation in Earth’s atmosphere. Kirkby talks about the results from the first CLOUD experiment and the new CLOUD experiment and what it will deliver on the intrinsic connection between GCR’s and cloud formation. This is from the Cern, one of Europe’s most highly respected centers for scientific research.

Kirkby’s one hour video presentation is hosted here. It is well worth your time to view it.

The Scam of Our Lifetime

sources: Calgary Herald/wattsupwiththat.com

Global Warming Caused by Human-made CO2?
By Bill Bell

The idea that humans are causing global warming is little more than nonsense. The goal of the perpetrators is a transfer of wealth with the apparent forfeiture of power to a proposed environmental world government formed by the United Nations. A possible vote on this sociopolitical concept could be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.

This would be the abandonment of everything hard working, decent individuals have accomplished over hundreds of years, and satisfies only the cravings of a power hungry, unscrupulous intelligentsia that somehow believe they should rule the world.

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