Met Office recycles last years PR: 2009 to be one of the warmest on record December 31, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Met Office
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Met Office recycles last years PR: 2009 to be one of the warmest on record
From Watts Up with That, 30 December 2008
LONDON (Reuters) – Next year is set to be one of the top-five warmest on record, British climate scientists said on Tuesday.
The average global temperature for 2009 is expected to be more than 0.4 degrees celsius above the long-term average, despite the continued cooling of huge areas of the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Nina.
That would make it the warmest year since 2005, according to researchers at the Met Office, who say there is also a growing probability of record temperatures after next year.
Currently the warmest year on record is 1998, which saw average temperatures of 14.52 degrees celsius – well above the 1961-1990 long-term average of 14 degrees celsius.
Warm weather that year was strongly influenced by El Nino, an abnormal warming of surface ocean waters in the eastern tropical Pacific.
Theories abound as to what triggers the mechanisms that cause an El Nino or La Nina event but scientists agree that they are playing an increasingly important role in global weather patterns.
The strength of the prevailing trade winds that blow from east to west across the equatorial Pacific is thought to be an important factor.
“Further warming to record levels is likely once a moderate El Nino develops,” said Professor Chris Folland at the Met Office Hadley Center. “Phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina have a significant influence on global surface temperature.”
Professor Phil Jones, director of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia, said global warming had not gone away despite the fact that 2009, like the year just gone, would not break records.
“What matters is the underlying rate of warming,” he said.
He noted the average temperature over 2001-2007 was 14.44 degrees celsius, 0.21 degrees celsius warmer than corresponding values for 1991-2000.
(Reporting by Christina Fincher; Editing by Christian Wiessner)
Why Climate Models Fail December 29, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in Climate Models.Tags: climate change, Climate Models, global warming
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Why Climate Models Fail
From ICECAP
By Ken Gregory
The IPCC used the CO2 forcing of 3.71 W/m2. They multiply this by a feedback factor of 3.08, which boosts the total forcing due to CO2 to 11.4 W/m2. Monckton’s summary shows that 76% of this feedback factor is due to clouds and water vapour (with lapse rate change). But both of these feedbacks are the wrong sign! Roy Spencer shows that clouds cause a negative feedback, not positive, based on satellite data. He shows that modeler have interpreted cloud changes as a feedback, instead of a cause of temperature change. This reversal of cause and effect makes cloud seem like a positive feedback, when they actually cause a negative feedback. But more importantly, the IPCC assumes that water vapour causes the largest positive feedback, but the Hartcode simulation runs using the NOAA water humidity data shows that water vapour causes a large negative feedback. You have seen my graph of relative humidity before which is linked here.
All climate models assume that relative humidity remains approximately constant with global warming. So if CO2 initially causes a small warming, this causes an increase in water content in the models, resulting is a large positive feedback But the data shows a 21% drop of relative humidity at about 9 km altitude, just where the predicted hot spot is missing, directly contradicting the models.
The Hartcode simulation makes no assumptions of how the greenhouse effect works, or how much temperatures changes with optical depth changes. (Optical depth is related the surface radiation flux Su by Su = OLR(1+tau +exp(-tau))/2, where tau = optical depth). Here is a graph showing the optical depth changes over the last 60 years (water vapour and CO2), and the change due to CO2 only.
Look at the pink curve, CO2 only. This is with water vapour held constant and CO2 only changing. The trend (orange line) shows an increase of 1.152 10-4 X 60 years = +0.0069, or about +0.37% in 60 years, confirming our belief the CO2 has a tiny direct effect on temperature.
The blue curve shows the optical depth including CO2 and water vapour. Note that water vapour varies much more that CO2. But instead of causing a huge positive feedback, water caused a strong negative feedback, and reduced the optical depth trend (green line) to 2.58 10-5 X 60 years = + 0.0015, or about 0.083% in 60 years. This means that water vapour has offset 78% of the greenhouse effect of CO2 change over the last 60 years. This is very significant! Note also that there has been a dramatic drop in water vapour at all altitudes in 2008, which is not included in the above calculations. I do recognize that the early NOAA data might be less accurate than more recent data, but this is what the data shows.
This data supports Miskowski’s theory of the greenhouse effect. Miskolcki shows the standard theory uses inappropriate boundary conditions. When real boundary conditions are used, he shows that the atmosphere maintains a saturated greenhouse effect, controlled by water vapor content. I encourage you to review this article, based on a draft by Dr. Noor van Andel. In summary, I think there are two main reasons climate models fail: 1. water vapour causes a negative feedback, not a large positive feedback, 2. clouds cause a negative feedback, not a positive feedback. See PDF here.
2008 – THE YEAR THE ‘CONSENSUS’ COLLAPSED December 27, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming
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2008 – THE YEAR THE ‘CONSENSUS’ COLLAPSED
From NZ Climate Science
“The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grew louder in 2008 as a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments challenged the UN’s and former Vice President Al Gore’s claims that the ‘science is settled.'” A US Senate report includes links to dozens of news reports, statements and studies and concludes, “Developments further secured 2008 as the year the ‘consensus’ collapsed.” LINK
Christmas Dinner Causes Global Warming December 25, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in humour.Tags: climate change, global warming
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Christmas Dinner Causes Global Warming
By Noel Sheppard
From Newsbusters, December 25, 2008
First it’s Christmas lights, now it’s Christmas dinner…causing global 
warming.
Yep. People who cook more than their guests will eat and throw the food away are destroying the planet.
I’m not kidding.
ABCNews.com in Australia reported the following absurdity on Christmas Eve:
Wasted food at Christmas time is now being highlighted as an environmental problem.
Jon Dee, the chairman of Do Something, says gases from leftover food rotting in landfill are 20 times more potent than the carbon pollution from car exhausts.
Mr Dee says there are simple ways to avoid over-catering at Christmas and damaging the environment.
“Australians waste more than 3 million tonnes of food every year and of course a lot of that food is wasted at Christmas,” he said.
Okay, I’ll bite: if “gases from leftover food rotting in landfill are 20 times more potent than the carbon pollution from car exhausts,” why are we worried about carbon pollution from car exhausts? Or from coal-fired power plants?
Now, add in all the methane being released from cows, bogs, and wetlands across the planet, and the fact that methane is a signficantly more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and hasn’t this article pointed out the extraordinary absurdity in the entire anthropogenic global warming myth?
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/12/25/christmas-dinner-causes-global-warming
UK Met Office Christmas wishlist December 24, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in humour.Tags: cartoon, climate change, funny, Global Cooling, global warming, humor, humour, joke, Met Office, uk met office
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UK Met Office Christmas wishlist
By the blogowner, honestclimate, December 25, 2008
No Matter What Happens, Someone Will Blame Global Warming December 24, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming
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No Matter What Happens, Someone Will Blame Global Warming
From FoxNews, December 23, 2008
Global warming was blamed for everything from beasts gone wild to anorexic whales to the complete breakdown of human society this year — showing that no matter what it is and where it happens, scientists, explorers, politicians and those who track the Loch Ness Monster are comfortable scapegoating the weather.
FOXNews.com takes a look back at 10 things that global warming allegedly caused — or will no doubt soon be responsible for — as reported in the news around the world in 2008.
1. Cannibalism
In April, media mogul Ted Turner told PBS’s Charlie Rose that global warming would make the world 8 degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years. “Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state, like Somalia or Sudan, and living conditions will be intolerable,” he said.
Ted Turner tells PBS host Charlie Rose that global warming will turn those who survive into cannibals.
Turner blamed global warming on overpopulation, saying “too many people are using too much stuff.”
Crops won’t grow and “most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals,” Turner said.
2. The Death of the Loch Ness Monster
In February, Scotland’s Daily Mirror reported that 85-year-old American Robert Rines would be giving up his quest for Scotland’s most famous underwater denizen.
A World War II veteran, Rines has spent 37 years hunting for Nessie with sonar equipment. In 2008, “despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming.”
3. Beer Gets More Expensive
In April, the Associated Press reported that global warming was going to hit beer drinkers in the wallet because the cost of barley would increase, driving up the price of a pint.
Jim Salinger, a climate scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said Australia would be particularly hard hit as droughts caused a decline in malting barley production in parts of New Zealand and Australia. “It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up,” Salinger said at a beer brewer’s convention, the AP reported.
4. Pythons Take Over America
Giant Burmese pythons – big enough to eat alligators and deer in a single mouthful – will be capable of living in one-third of continental U.S. as global warming makes more of the country hospitable to the cold-blooded predators, according to an April report from USAToday.com.
The U.S. Geological Survey and the Fish and Wildlife Service investigated the spread of “invasive snakes,” like the pythons, brought to the U.S. as pets. The Burmese pythons’ potential American habitat would expand by 2100, according to global warming models, the paper reported.
“We were surprised by the map. It was bigger than we thought it was going to be,” says Gordon Rodda, zoologist and lead project researcher, told USAToday.com. “They are moving northward, there’s no question.”
Read the rest, click below link
ETS a big pain for little gain December 24, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: australia, climate change, ets, global warming, Professor Bob Carter
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ETS a big pain for little gain
Professor Bob Carter
By Professor Bob Carter, December 19, 2008
THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model of dangerous, human-caused climate change has failed. Independent science relevant to supposed human-caused global warming is clear, and can be summarised in four briefpoints.
First, global temperature warmed slightly in the late 20th century and has been cooling since 2002. Neither the warming nor the cooling were of unusual rate ormagnitude.
Second, humans have an effect on local climate but, despite the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($70 billion) looking for it since 1990, no globally summed human effect has ever been measured. Therefore, any human signal must lie buried in the variability of the natural climate system.
Third, we live on a dynamic planet; change occurs in Earth’s geosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and oceans all the time and all over the world. No substantive evidence exists that modern rates of global environmental change (ice volume; sea level) lie outside historic natural bounds.
Last, cutting carbon dioxide emissions, be it in Australia or worldwide, will likely result in no measurable change in future climate, because extra increments of atmospheric CO2 cause diminishing warming for each unit of increase; at most, a few tenths of a degree of extra warming would result from a completion of doubling of CO2 since pre-industrial times.
These facts notwithstanding, the Rudd Government is poised to introduce a CO2 taxation bill on doubly spurious grounds. It presumes, first, that dangerous warming caused by human emissions is occurring, or will shortly occur. And, second, that cuts to emissions will prevent significant amounts of future warming.
There is, therefore, now a dramatic disjunction between scientific reality and the stranglehold that global warming alarmism has on planned Australian climate policy.
Today’s public views about climate change are based upon 20 years of promulgation of dangerous global warming by what has become a hugely powerful coalition of self-interested groups and agencies.
Beneficiaries of warming alarmism include individual scientists, managers of research centres, morally pretentious environmental non-government organisations, prestigious science academies and societies, bureaucrats from government greenhouse and climate agencies, big businesses poised for carbon trading (think Enron and Lehman Brothers), alternative energy providers, those in the media who remorselessly promulgate environmental alarm stories, and, last but not least, those uninformed politicians who seek political advantage from cynical exploitation of the public’s fear of global warming.
The Australian Government does not possess a national climate policy; instead, it has an imaginary global warming policy, based on sub-prime science, sub-prime economics and sub-prime politics.
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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24820742-7583,00.html
Heat or Cold: Which Is More Deadly? December 24, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Global Cooling, global warming
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Heat or Cold: Which Is More Deadly?
From New American, December 24, 2008
Which poses the greater health risk to humans: hot weather, or cold? According to global-warming alarmists, the answer is simple: heat kills. However, statistical evidence shows that cold weather is twice as deadly as hot weather.
But the public is being told otherwise by global-warming alarmists, who in recent years have tried to ramp up the fright factor of their message with claims that an increase in global temperatures will also result in a dramatic increase in heat-related deaths. This motive may have provided the impetus for recent reporting on the climate “death map.”
“Heat is more likely to kill an American than an earthquake, and thunderstorms kill more than hurricanes do, according to a ‘death map’ published on Tuesday.” So reports Reuters in a December 17 story on
researchers who compiled the county-by-county look at what natural disasters kill Americans. The Reuters story continues:
Heat and drought caused 19.6 percent of total deaths from natural hazards, with summer thunderstorms causing 18.8 percent and winter weather causing 18.1 percent, the team at the University of South Carolina found.
Earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes combined were responsible for fewer than 5 percent of all hazard deaths.
Writing in BioMed Central’s International Journal of Health Geographics, they said they hoped to dispel some myths about what the biggest threats to life and limb are.
“According to our results, the answer is heat,” Susan Cutter and Kevin Borden of the University of South Carolina wrote in their report, which gathered data from 1970 to 2004.
But the conclusions of Cutter and Borden conflict with overwhelming evidence that cold weather is a much bigger killer than hot weather (excluding the tropics, of course).
In an article entitled, “The impact of global warming on health and mortality,” published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2004, W.R. Keatinge and G.C. Donaldson of Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of London note: “Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold.”
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http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/621
Mystic Met: A Review of UK Met Office Predictions and Statements December 24, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, uk met office
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Mystic Met: A Review of UK Met Office Predictions and Statements
From Climate Research News, December 24, 2008
The Met Office is the UK Government’s official Meteorological agency and a key promoter of climate alarmism, which claims that simulation models are now accurate predictors of both global and local effects of stimuli to the climate.
Presented below is a chronology of notable predictions via Met Office press releases and media articles starting on January 4th 2007:
2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998, say climate-change experts at the Met Office.”
On April 11th they issued a press release stating “there is a high probability that summer temperature will exceed the 1971-2000 long-term average of 14.1 C … there are no indications of an increased risk of a particularly dry or particularly wet summer.”
This was interpreted by The Guardian as “Britain set to enjoy another sizzling summer.”
On August 31st, The Met announced that summer 2007 was the wettest on record with “normal temperatures,” although his description did not adequately describe the miserable summer – because high temperatures and sunshine were well below normal.
On August 10th, The Met Office announced new climate models, which included modeling of “the effects of sea surface temperatures as well as other factors such as man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, projected changes in the sun’s output and the effects of previous volcanic eruptions”. The same press release forecast that “2014 is likely to be 0.3 C warmer than 2004.”
In fact, global temperatures in 2007 dropped nearly 0.8 C according to satellite data, one of the sharpest drops on record. In order to hit The Met’s 2014 prediction, there will have to be a large increase over the next few years.
2008
Clearly, the Met Office didn’t want to repeat the 2007 mistake of predicting the warmest ever recorded year globally in 2008, so the press release of 3th January was entitled, ‘Global temperature 2008: Another top-ten year,’ stating, “2008 is set to be cooler globally than recent years say Met Office and University of East Anglia climate scientists, but is still forecast to be one of the top-ten warmest years.”
On April 3rd the Met made their annual UK summer forecast — “The coming summer is expected to be a ‘typical British summer’, according to long-range forecasts issued today. Summer temperatures across the UK are more likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or above average for the three months of summer.”
On August 29th The Met Office reported that the summer of 2008 was “one of the wettest on record across the UK.”
This is how The Independent described the UK summer – “It has been a miserable summer for bugs as well as people…The combined effect of low temperatures and rain has presented Britain’s invertebrates with a double whammy.”
On September 22nd The Guardian reported the Met Office claim that, “Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand,” which referred to climate sceptic Nigel Lawson and attempted to play down the fact that there has been no global warming trend since 2002.
On September 25th the Met Office issued a press release entitled, ‘Trend of mild winters continues’ stating, “The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.” This was qualified with, “In contrast to last year’s exceptionally mild winter, this year is likely to feel somewhat colder and although the forecast of a milder winter is good news, we should still be prepared for the risk of colder spells at times.”
On 25th November this forecast was updated: A cold start to winter, “The latest update to the Met Office winter forecast suggests that although the coming winter will have temperatures near or above average, it is very likely that December will be colder than normal.”
On 6th December there was an article in The Guardian by James Randerson entitled, ‘Explainer: Coolest year since 2000.’
Read the rest, click below link
An Honest Climate Debate 