Godfrey Bloom: Al Gore Snakeoil Salesman and Crook

Well Dang! Someone besides me had to say it!

Godfrey Bloom, a Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), let the EP members now how he really feels about the climate change scam. At a debate in Strasbourg yesterday on the outcome of the Copenhagen, he calls Al Gore a snake oil salesman and crook, East Anglia’s Phil Jones a crook, and in a new charge, calls the New Zealand National Climate Database “all fraudulent.”

Climategate

IPCC Caught In Himalayan Glaciers Lie

The wheels continue to fall off the Global Warming bus.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Much More Here

And Here

I Keep Telling You: The Ice Age Cometh

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.

Read more: HERE

Global Warming? Give It Up!

From Moonbattery. Can’t add a thing to it.

It may seem that if they could pass off FDR as a great president, Hitler as a conservative, the Tet Offensive as a grand victory for communism, and Barack Obama as qualified to run the country, there is absolutely no lie too preposterous for our liberal elite ruling class to ram down our throats. But even NBC ought to realize that it’s time to pull the plug on the global warming hoax. They can’t even totally suppress the ClimateGate emails that reveal the “crisis” as deliberate fraud; how are they going to hide this:

Britain
When Britain woke up on the first day of the New Year it was met with freezing cold temperatures, feet of snow in places and the promise of travel chaos. And now, three days into 2010, forecasters have warned to expect continued snowfall for the next 10 days…

Swiss Alps
A series of weekend avalanches in the Swiss Alps killed at least five people, including a rescue doctor swept up while searching for a group of buried skiers. …heavy snowfall in recent days have prompted officials to warn of a heightened avalanche risk in the Swiss Alps.

America
Freezing weather gripped large parts of the United States early this morning – with no relief in sight for the rest of the week. Wind chill took the temperatures in Minneapolis, Minnesota, down to -17C. While the upper Midwest is used to frigid weather, the sunshine state Florida is also suffering freezing temperatures. … Along with the dangerously cold temperatures, residents in Montana are braced for blizzard conditions with snowfall of 12 to 20 inches possible across parts of the state. … In the Northeast, the Weather Service warned that a large storm off the New England coast would continue to bring heavy snow to much of central New York state.

China
Snow storms today have caused chaos in China’s capital of Beijing, grinding aeroplanes to a halt and causing severe traffic delays. Around 90 per cent of all flights were either delayed or cancelled, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. … The snow shows no sign of stopping, however, and temperatures are expected to drop to -16C in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday, causing more problems for those attempting to returning to work after a three-day New Year holiday.

India
Not a country usually associated with snow, India has experienced severe problems since Saturday when snowfall and a dense blanket of fog began to cause chaos. More than 30 people died in cold-weather related incidents in Northern India over the past 24 hours, with 10 of those losing their lives in train accidents caused by the fog. … Meanwhile, 24 homeless people have also died in the Uttar Pradesh state since Saturday due to the severe drop in temperature. Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir were all hit with heavy snow, while Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and Delhi also recorded snowfall over the past 24 hours.

Russia
Russia saw temperature lows of a chilling -20C in Moscow today.

Germany
The snow caused more problems with flights in Germany, with one jet veering off the runway at Dortmund airport in western Germany.

Austria
While they are much more accustomed to dealing with snow, even native Austrians were struggling to cope with the freezing lows of -8C at night and -3C during the day.

Let me guess: the earth is getting chills from having a fever.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not forever when it comes to lying about the weather. Our rulers should have stuck with the Coming Ice Age scare they were hyping in the 70s.

The Ice Age Still Cometh

Want some real facts?

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen.

Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know:

• The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.

• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.

• Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.

• There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.

• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.

We also know a lot about Earth temperature changes:

• Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.

• The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.

• Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.

• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.

• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change.

Contrary to many public statements:

• Effects of temperature change are absolutely independent of the cause of the temperature change.

• Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows. Any increase in cost of damages by storms is a product of increasing population density in vulnerable areas such as along the shores and property value inflation, not due to any increase in frequency or severity of storms.

• Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years — extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes.

• The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records.

• Rate and magnitude of sea level changes observed during the last 100 years are within normal historical ranges. Current sea level rise is tiny and, at most, justifies a prediction of perhaps ten centimeters rise in this century.

The present climate debate is a classic conflict between data and computer programs. The computer programs are the source of concern over climate change and global warming, not the data. Data are measurements. Computer programs are artificial constructs.

Public announcements use a great deal of hyperbole and inflammatory language. For instance, the word “ever” is misused by media and in public pronouncements alike. It does not mean “in the last 20 years,“ or “the last 70 years.” “Ever” means the last 4.5 billion years.

For example, some argue that the Arctic is melting, with the warmest-ever temperatures. One should ask, “How long is ever?” The answer is since 1979. And then ask, “Is it still warming?” The answer is unequivocally “No.” Earth temperatures are cooling. Similarly, the word “unprecedented” cannot be legitimately used to describe any climate change in the last 8,000 years.

There is not an unlimited supply of liquid fuels. At some point, sooner or later, global oil production will decline, and transportation costs will become insurmountable if we do not develop alternative energy sources. However, those alternative energy sources do not now exist.

A legislated reduction in energy use or significant increase in cost will severely harm the global economy and force a reduction in the standard of living in the United States. It is time we spent the research dollars to invent an order-of-magnitude better solar converter and an order-of-magnitude better battery. Once we learn how to store electrical energy, we can electrify transportation. But these are separate issues. Energy conversion is not related to climate change science.

I have been a reviewer of the last two IPCC reports, one of the several thousand scientists who purportedly are supporters of the IPCC view that humans control global temperature. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of us try to bring better and more current science to the IPCC, but we usually fail. Recently we found out why. The whistleblower release of e-mails and files from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University has demonstrated scientific malfeasance and a sickening violation of scientific ethics.

If the game of Russian roulette with the environment that Adrian Melott contends is going on, is it how will we feed all the people when the cold of the inevitable Little Ice Age returns? It will return. We just don’t know when.

Source

H/T Mike C. at GCP

Global Warming Scam Takes Another Hit

Sittin pretty with the coming ice age

How much more evidence do we need before the Global Warming Cult is finally exposed for the fraud it is? The BBC takes another brick out of the wall.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth’s warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists’ main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. “Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity,” said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

Ocean cycles

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth’s great heat stores.

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.”

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.

The Rest Here.

So the sun has more influence than has been thought? Who Knew? Well actually any third grader could have figured that out, but getting ‘adults’ to listen is another story. It’s all cyclical and man has very little effect at all. In the 70′s it was the ice age that was going to kill us all, then in the 90′s Algore decided to scam us with global warming. Now it’s starting to cool again and hopefully the Kool-Aid drinkers will just fade away. But they will probably just turn their scam around to say the cooling is caused by man and call it “Climate Change”.

Ski Resorts Opening This Weekend

How’s that global warming workin out for ya? Many ski resorts are opening the first week of October, a new record for earliest opening for some.

The Loveland ski area opened Wednesday, Arapahoe Basin on Friday, “boasting its earliest opening day in 40 years.” Loveland officials today announced the area will open for skiing today. Other ski resorts are opening, too, and some Idaho school kids enjoyed an early snow day.  Better get that cap and trade passed fast, Bamster! It’s getting cold out there!

Source: Rush Limbaugh.

Boreal is opening this weekend also. A new record!

Solar Cycle 24 Still Setting Records

The ice age is looking a lot more likely than any warming at all. As always Watts Up With That? Has all the details.

Spotless

Out of the numbered solar cycles, #24 is now in 7th place. Only 5, 6, and 7 of the Dalton Minimum and cycles 12, 14, and 15 of the Baby Grand Minimum had more spotless days.  Since we’ve now beaten cycle #13, we are clearly now competitive with the Baby Grand minimum.

Here’s a table of how the NOAA panel’s new SC#24 prediction is doing:

November 2008:  predicted = 1.80, actual = 1.67 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 83.7)
December 2008:  predicted = 1.80, actual = 1.69 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 84.7)
January 2009:  predicted = 2.10, actual = 1.71 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 73.2)
February 2009: predicted = 2.70, actual = 1.67 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 55.6)
March 2009: predicted = 3.30, actual = 1.97 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 53.8)

April would require the October data which is still very incomplete.  If this analysis intrigues you, I’d be happy to keep you updated on it.  Please also find a couple of  interesting graphs attached as images.

The Graphs are HERE.

Global Warming Cult Targeting School Kids

The Global Warming Cult is creeping into every corner of our lives it can. The election of the far left socialist/marxist to be our President only makes it easier to get to your children. Pay attention before it’s too late.

You Will Learn To Worship Me

Guilt trips for driving gas-powered vehicles, eating hamburgers and powering gadgets are the order of the day. Then teens are to go home and tell mom and dad about their sins too.

Global warming is proving more dubious by the day, but the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) is not shy about recruiting Boston’s next generation to promote their alarmism.

The nonprofit group launched months ago and wants to inspire 140,000 teenagers to join its climate-change activism by the end of this year.

They’ve hired educators with flair for the theatrical to deliver their one-sided message via high school assemblies, captivating hundreds at a clip.

Rappers, actors, athletes, ministers and other dynamic personalities sync their talks with amusing PowerPoint presentations and slick animation to pump up the fear.

The idea is to motivate teenagers, and subsequently everyone in their spheres of influence, to modify their behaviors so as to stop global warming. This is achieved by cutbacks in their energy use, which ACE believes produces too many greenhouse gases (from fossil-fuel combustion like coal and oil) that warm the planet.

So guilt trips for driving gasoline-powered vehicles (carbon dioxide), eating hamburgers (methane from cow flatulence) and powering gadgets (more carbon dioxide) are the order of the day. Then teens are to go home and tell mom and dad about their sins too.

ACE is based in Oakland, Calif., and was created by wealthy wind-energy entrepreneur Michael Haas. The organization has targeted five metropolitan areas besides Boston: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and Houston.

Haas, who donated $24,600 to President Barack Obama’s campaign and victory funds last year, stands to reap millions of dollars in government subsidies that climate change-driven renewable energy policies would bring. ACE looks like an effort to assure the growth of his business into future generations.

ACE lobbies school boards and administrators for permission to give its presentations, ensuring delivery of its propaganda to hundreds of potential foot soldiers for the cause.

But ACE’s talks are infected with falsehoods, like telling the students they’ve lived through the 10 hottest years on record (1934 was really the hottest) and that greenhouse gas emissions are jacking up the global thermostat way too high.

Scientific studies that counter these fibs and exaggerations are left out of the presentations.

For example, many solar physicists believe we may be entering a prolonged cooling period due to diminished sunspot activity.

Atmospheric scientists, who observe actual data rather than depend on dubious climate models, have seen no recent temperature increase (on average) in the oceans or on the surface of the earth during the last decade.

Unfortunately many teachers and administrators don’t do their homework and let the Alliance for Climate Education pull students from classrooms to be taught rewritten history and biased forecasting.

Source

Do Not Fear Global Warming

Warmer weather is better for humans, animals and vegetation. It is the cold that has wiped out civilizations.

American Thinker has this article about the coming ice age. The Global Warming Cult would benefit by listening to some facts.

Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk.  In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt.  But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years.  So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously.  On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides.  In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth’s climate has been an ice age.  Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago.  It began instantaneously.  For a hundred-thousand years, temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia.  The ice age ended nearly as abruptly as it began.  Between about 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the temperature in Greenland rose more than 50 °F.

We don’t know what causes ice ages to begin or end.  In 1875, a janitor turned geologist, James Croll, proposed that small variations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun were responsible for climate change.  This idea enjoyed its greatest heyday during the 1970s, when ocean sediment cores appeared to confirm the theory.  But in 1992, Ike Winograd and his colleagues at the US Geological Survey falsified the theory by demonstrating that its predictions were inconsistent with new, high-quality data.

The climate of the ice ages is documented in the ice layers of Greenland and Antarctica.  We have cored these layers, extracted them, and studied them in the laboratory.  Not only were ice ages colder than today, but the climates were considerably more variable.  Compared to the norm of the last million years, our climate is remarkably warm, stable and benign.  During the last ice age in Greenland abrupt climatic swings of 30 °F were common.  Since the ice age ended, variations of 3 °F are uncommon.

For thousands of years, people have learned from experience that cold temperatures are detrimental for human welfare and warm temperatures are beneficial.  From about 1300 to 1800 AD, the climate cooled slightly during a period known as the Little Ice Age.  In Greenland, the temperature fell by about 4 °F.  Although trivial, compared to an ice age cooling of 50 °F, this was nevertheless sufficient to wipe out the Viking colony there.

In northern Europe, the Little Ice Age kicked off with the Great Famine of 1315.  Crops failed due to cold temperatures and incessant rain.  Desperate and starving, parents ate their children, and people dug up corpses from graves for food.  In jails, inmates instantly set upon new prisoners and ate them alive.

The Great Famine was followed by the Black Death, the greatest disaster ever to hit the human race.  One-third of the human race died; terror and anarchy prevailed. Human civilization as we know it is only possible in a warm interglacial climate.  Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.

The oscillation between ice ages and interglacial periods is the dominant feature of Earth’s climate for the last million years.  But the computer models that predict significant global warming from carbon dioxide cannot reproduce these temperature changes.  This failure to reproduce the most significant aspect of terrestrial climate reveals an incomplete understanding of the climate system, if not a nearly complete ignorance.

Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models.  But our knowledge of ice ages is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.  In this case, it would be perspicacious to listen to the geologists, not the meteorologists.  By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age.  Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration’s announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering.  Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age.  It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.

Earth’s climate is controlled by the Sun.  In comparison, every other factor is trivial.  The coldest part of the Little Ice Age during the latter half of the seventeenth century was marked by the nearly complete absence of sunspots.  And the Sun now appears to be entering a new period of quiescence.  August of 2008 was the first month since the year 1913 that no sunspots were observed.  As I write, the sun remains quiet.  We are in a cooling trend.  The areal extent of global sea ice is above the twenty-year mean.

We have heard much of the dangers of global warming due to carbon dioxide.  But the potential danger of any potential anthropogenic warming is trivial compared to the risk of entering a new ice age.  Public policy decisions should be based on a realistic appraisal that takes both climate scenarios into consideration.

American Thinker

Lies, Damned Lies and Al Gore on Climate

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, aka Lord Christopher Monckton, refutes some of Al Gore’s lies.

Gore: The Arctic is warming at an unprecedented rate. New research, which draws upon recently declassified data collected by U.S. nuclear submarines traveling under the Arctic ice cap for the last 50 years, has given us, for the first time, a three-dimensional view of the ice cap, and researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School have told us that the entire Arctic ice cap may totally disappear in summer in as little as five years if nothing is done to curb emissions of greenhouse gas pollution. For most of the last 3 million years, it has covered an area the size of the lower 48 states. Almost half of the ice has already melted during the last 20 years. The dark ocean, once uncovered, absorbs 90 percent of the solar heat that used to bounce off the highly reflective ice. As a direct consequence, some of the vast amounts of frozen carbon in the permafrost surrounding the Arctic Ocean are beginning to be released as methane as the frozen tundra thaws, threatening a doubling of global warming pollution in the atmosphere.

Answer: For most of the last 3 million years, the Earth endured ice ages, with brief interglacial periods of 5000 years occurring roughly every 125,000 years. Naturally, therefore, Washington and much of the contiguous US was under miles of ice most of the time. We are in an unusually-prolonged interglacial period at present – 11,000 years. For most of that period – and notably during the Minoan, Roman, and medieval warm periods – it was warmer than today in the Arctic and worldwide. Indeed, in the 1930s and early 1940s it was up to 4 Fahrenheit degrees warmer than today in the Arctic.

It is not true that “almost half” of the Arctic sea ice has melted – its winter extent has barely declined at all, though there has been some decline in summer, particularly in 2007, for largely natural reasons (we know the reason cannot have been “global warming”, because the planet had been cooling for six years at the time – a cooling that has continued and is now seven and a half years long).

At present, both Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extents are at or near record high levels for the time of year – the Arctic has set a nine-year record according to IARC/JAXA, and the Antarctic is approaching the record-high sea-ice extent set in late 2007, according to the University of Illinois. There is no likelihood of a total disappearance of Arctic sea ice any time soon.

That is only a teaser. Be sure to read it all at Science & Public Policy Institute.

H/T JunkScience

More Global Warming Lies From The Obama Crowd

Despite all evidence to the contrary, the left just will not quit with their lies. There has been no warming since 1998, temperatures are falling everywhere and the solar cycles say we are heading into another ice age. Why do these people keep beating this dead horse? Money and power. It’s a perfect way to control the citizens and people like Al Gore, who has at least two carbon credit selling businesses, can continue to commit fraud for profit. Look at what the “Energy Secretary” had to say the other day about global warming and it’s tragic results. He’s either lying, which seems to be encouraged in the Obama administration, or he’s ignorant of the facts. Either way, he needs to go.

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — Caribbean nations face “very, very scary” rises in sea level and intensifying hurricanes, and Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be overrun with rising water levels due to global warming triggered by carbon-based greenhouse gases, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Saturday.

Chu’s comments followed meetings with environmental ministers attending the fifth Summit of the Americas. He did not shy away from the most perilous predictions about the potential effects of global warming.

He said global temperatures have already risen by 0.8 degree Centigrade, that another 1 degree increase was certain to occur and “there’s a reasonable probability we can go above 4 degrees Centigrade to 5 and 6 more.”

Chu painted a dire picture of the implications.

“So imagine a world 6 degrees warmer. It’s not going to recognize geographical boundaries. It’s not going to recognize anything. So agriculture regions today will be wiped out,” Chu said.

“I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent — I remember this number — one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will — some of them will disappear,” he added.

Chu said the United States would not be spared, either.

“Let me state what the official IPCC (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) prediction is: It (sea levels) could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that,” Chu said.

He said a rise in levels of one meter, coastal areas around Florida around Louisiana would move much farther inland.

“Lots of area in Florida will go under. New Orleans at three-meter height is in great peril. If you look at, you know, the Bay Area, where I came from, all three airports would be under water. So this is — this is serious stuff. The impacts could be enormous,” he said.

At least he’s being challenged.

Conservative climate change skeptics immediately denounced Chu’s assessment of the threat and potential consequences of global warming.

“Secretary Chu still seems to believe that computer model predictions decades or 100 years from now are some sort of ‘evidence’ of a looming climate catastrophe, said Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com and former top aide to global warming critic Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

“Secretary Chu’s assertions on sea level rise and hurricanes are quite simply being proven wrong by the latest climate data. As the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute reported in December 12, 2008: There is ‘no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.’”

Morano said hurricane activity levels in both hemispheres of the globe are at 30 years lows and hurricane experts like MIT’s Kerry Emanuel and Kerry Knutson “are now backing off their previous dire predictions.”

He said Chu is out of date on the science and is promoting unverified and alarming predictions that have already been proven contrary. SOURCE

Monday Quick Bites

What, me worry?

Some Solar Cycle Information. Two pieces from Watts Up With That?

The Double Quiet Sun
Usually, and that means in the past year, when you look at the false color MDI image from SOHO, you can look at the corresponding magnetogram and see some sort of disturbance going on, even it it is not visible as a sunspot, sunspeck, or plage area.
Not today.
Is That a Sunspot?
Yesterday I lamented that the sun was blank, not only on the SOHO MDI, but also the magnetogram. Within a couple of hours, one sunspeck appeared. I cited Murphy’s Law. As one commenter put it: ” I think if you check back for the last six months or so whenever you mention the lack of sunspots on here, one shows up.”.

And a couple from Green Hell Blog

New planetary burden: Meat-eating pets
Paul Greenberg opines today in the New York Times that dogs and cats should go vegan. Writing about his cat, Greenberg says,

California (of course) to limit car color choices More evidence of California Communism
Carbon Control News reported today that California regulators have proposed that car makers use so-called “cool” paints to reduce the interior temperature of cars, thereby reducing air conditioning use and, consequently, improving gas mileage.

And some picks from around the blogasphere.

Skeptics Global Warming
We’ve got an update on the Companies Lobbying to Raise Your Energy Taxes.

HE’S MY PRESIDENT, BUT I DON’T HAVE TO LIKE IT
If I hear one more person point out that Obama is the president and that it’s our duty to support him, I just might run amok. For one thing, I resent being reminded that he actually won the election and that it’s not all a bad dream from which I’ll awaken as soon as the alarm clock rings. For another, there was a very good reason that I voted for John McCain, and it certainly had nothing to do with my having great expectations of the man, and everything to do with my conviction that Obama was a left-wing ideologue.

The Challenge Ahead: More than a Third of Senate Now “Swing” Vote on Climate – A high hurdle: of the 36 Senators identified as swing votes, all but seven must be convinced to vote “Yes” in order to secure passage of any climate policy in the U.S. Senate. (Breakthrough Institute)
Think we should encourage Senators to hold the line? Have your say and register your vote here.

New, All Natural, Climate Change!

A common sense study from UW-Milwaukee.

Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?

“But if we don’t understand what is natural, I don’t think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand — first the natural variability of climate — and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

Veeerrryy Interesting. Read It All

More Science Fiction From The Global Warming Cult

This is straight out of An Inconvenient Truth. Then they add some gloom and doom hysterics for good measure. And all while we head into the next ice age.

WASHINGTON – Melting ice from global warming may raise sea levels even more than had been expected, an analysis suggests. Long-term melting of ice in Antarctica and other areas could raise sea levels by 16 feet to 17 feet, previous studies have indicated. But a report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science warns that factors not previously considered could boost that increase to up to 21 feet in some areas.

Earlier research has focused on melting ice adding water to the oceans and on thermal expansion of sea water in a warmer climate.

In the new report geophysicist Jerry X. Mitrovica and physics graduate student Natalya Gomez of the University of Toronto, Canada, and Oregon State University geoscientist Peter Clark, say other factors need to be considered.

_When an ice sheet melts, its gravitational pull on the ocean is reduced and water moves away from it. That means sea levels could fall near Antarctica and rise more than expected in the northern hemisphere.

_Antarctic bedrock that currently sits under the weight of the ice sheet will rebound from the weight, pushing some water out into the ocean.

_The melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet will cause the Earth’s rotation axis to shift, potentially moving water northward.

“The net effect of all of these processes is that if the West Antarctic ice sheet collapses, the rise in sea levels around many coastal regions will be as much as 25 per cent more than expected,” Mitrovica said in a statement.

Those are some good old scare tactics right out of The Goracle’s Global Warming Handbook. The 20ft sea level rise has been debunked even by the gloworms themselves. The Antarctic ice is growing, not melting.  And that axis shift, pure science fiction gold! And notice how it all is unprovable. Just words, just speeches, just theories…..

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