An Honest Climate Debate

Global warming is making the world colder February 29, 2012

Best – warming – headline – evah

Watts Up With That
February 28, 2012

I’ve been getting a lot of pressure to cover the story by warmspinner Richard Black over at the BBC about a supposed feedback between Arctic sea ice and colder, snowier, winters in the UK and the EU. For example, WUWT “elftone” says:

I’ve been resisting covering this for a little bit, because I knew sooner or later some MSM media fool would mangle this story into something unrecognizable (they always do). I was right, and the result is the most hilarious global warming headline ever:

They really have lost the plot, haven’t they?

Read the rest here

Modern-day climate change witch hunt December 26, 2011

Modern-day climate change witch hunt

Brendan O’Neill
The Drum, 26 December 2011

What is it about freakishly cold winters that so agitates intolerant moralists?

In Europe 500 years ago, any sign of a dip in the winter weather would be greeted by much gnashing of teeth from the morality police. Sometimes they’d even burn at the stake “witches” who were said to have caused the extreme cold through their wicked behaviour and sorcery.

Fast-forward to the 21st century and still there’s nothing like a bitingly cold winter to drive moralists mad with priestly fury. Only today, in a more PC, less pyromaniacal version of what their forebears did, they don’t burn people at the stake for causing cold winters – no, they prefer to hector us with op-eds and insults instead.

The last couple of winters in western Europe have been bitterly cold. Last year the British Isles were coated in thick snow, causing chaos. This winter is shaping up to be a bit warmer, though cold snaps are expected in the new year.

All this iciness has put green-leaning moralists in a tailspin. They scour the press and the blogs for any whiff of a hint of a suggestion that perhaps these cold winters disprove the global-warming thesis, and inform us that, actually, extreme coldness is yet another side-effect of man’s constant farting of CO2 into the environment.

This week, a top Welsh scientist highlighted one of the key problems associated with very cold winters – no, not the possibility of elderly people going hypothermia or an increased risk of car accidents on slushy roads, but the danger that the dumb public will think all this snow proves hot-headed environmentalists wrong.

Professor Michael Hambrey of the University of Aberystwyth said “the public must not be misled into believing that a series of cold winters are evidence that climate change is a myth”.

Read the rest here

Breaking News! It’s Global Warming! No Wait it’s Cooling! No Wait…(Part 2) October 25, 2010

Breaking News! It’s Global Warming! No Wait it’s Cooling! No Wait…(Part 2)

By Art Horn and Michael J. Economides
Energy Tribune, October 22, 2010

The stories of a warming world continued into the late 1950s as the media inertia plowed forward adding to the warming stories of the 1930s and 40s. The Atlantic Ocean had been warming since the mid 1920s. This warming was keeping the arctic milder by pumping warmer water northward trough the Gulf Stream . On February 15, 1959 the New York Times reported “Arctic findings in particular support theory of rising global temperatures.” However the temperature of the earth was not warming, it was falling. The massive and dominant Pacific had been cooler since the mid 1940s and would continue to be so into the mid 1970s. Climate data show that starting in the mid-1940s the earth began a multi-decadal cooling trend. Around 1960 the Atlantic began to cool again. Now both oceans were in their cooler phase. The two oceans were working in tandem to chill the planet. It was not until later in the 1960s that the media began to really notice.

On November 15, 1969 Science News quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilizations.” Where have we heard that before? Mitchell continued “If the cooling continues for another 200 to 300 years the earth could be plunged into an ice age.” On January 11, 1970 the Washington Post ran the headline “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age” The story read “Better get a good grip on your long johns cold weather haters, the worst may be yet to come.” Fortune Magazine reported in February of 1974 “It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude.” Sound familiar? In the June 24, 1970 edition Time Magazine wrote “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” Newsweek on April 28, 1975 wrote that “The earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” According to Newsweek “meteorologists” were “almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

So it looked like we were on the precipice of a new ice age with cataclysmic consequences for the world. Then, stealthily to all, the Pacific Ocean began to warm again and so did the earth’s temperature. All the stories of the next ice age, the dramatic drop in food production and all the hardships to come disappeared fast…again.

Read the rest here

It’s 15 below zero as weathermen go witch-hunting January 12, 2010

It’s 15 below zero as weathermen go witch-hunting

By Frank Furedi
The Australian, January 13, 2010

IT is snowing big time in my town in Kent. The family sits in front of the television to discover whether there is more of the white stuff to come. However, instead of an informative weather forecast we are offered a political broadcast.

A dramatic sounding voiceover informs us that David Shukman, who is the BBC’s environment and science correspondent, will report “on how one of the longest cold snaps for a generation fits in with theories of a warming planet and global climate change”.

Adopting a solemn tone that hints at catastrophes to come, Shukman announces that it is minus 15C in the Pennines and five cars are stranded before stating, “No wonder many are asking, `What about global warming?’ ”

Just in case the cold temperature encourages the British public to assume a degree of scepticism towards climate change alarmism, Shukman reassuringly informs us that the big freeze is not inconsistent with theories of global warming. A swift cut to a chap from Kew Gardens who insists that “snowdrops are already blooming” . Apparently flowering is starting much earlier than previously, which must mean that the world is getting very, very warm.

Concern that the present episode of cold weather might encourage public scepticism towards apocalyptic climate change scenarios is not confined to the BBC.

“Britain’s cold snap does not prove climate science wrong,” argue two climate alarmist journalists in The Guardian.

(more…)

Cognitive Disconnect: Cold Equals Warming January 11, 2010

Cognitive Disconnect: Cold Equals Warming

By Alan Caruba
CFP, January 10, 2010

Over the course of Obama’s first year in office I have become convinced that he and his cronies think you are STUPID.

That’s why Nancy Pelosi could say the process by which Obamacare was put together and passed in the House and Senate was “open” and still think that doing it behind closed doors in both chambers while bribing every Democrat vote with public funds went unnoticed by the voters.

She thinks you’re STUPID.

It’s why Harry Reid may still hold onto his job as Majority Leader in the Senate after saying things about his favorite “Negro” that got Trent Lott removed from the same job in just under a month. We tend to forget that, from FDR to JFK, the Democrats thwarted civil rights legislation until they no longer could.

He thinks you’re STUPID.

The latest example of the complete disdain the White House has for the public is a response by press secretary Robert Gibbs who dismissed the worldwide cold snap as just another example of “climate change”, the new term for “global warming.”

On January 6, the Drudge Report headline links were as follows:

Winter Could Be Worst in 25 Years for USA…
CHILL MAP…
Britain’s big snow shuts cities…
GAS SUPPLIES RUNNING OUT IN UK…
Elderly burn books for warmth?
Army drafted to rescue 1,000 snow stranded motorists…
Vermont sets ‘all-time record for one snowstorm’…
Iowa temps ‘a solid 30 degrees below normal’…
Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years…
3 die in fire at Detroit home; power was cut…
Midwest Sees Near-Record Lows, Snow By The Foot…
Miami shivers from coldest weather in decade; Florida Gov Signs Emergency Order …
Cold snap spurs power rationing in China…

It’s “cognitive disconnect”, a fancy way of saying that the White House and Congress is under the impression that Americans actually believe that “warming” means “colder” and colder “proves” that warming is happening.

Read the rest here

The mini ice age starts here January 10, 2010

The mini ice age starts here

Daily Mail, 10 January 2010

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.

SNOW CHAOS: AND THEY STILL CLAIM IT’S GLOBAL WARMING January 7, 2010

SNOW CHAOS: AND THEY STILL CLAIM IT’S GLOBAL WARMING

Express.co.uk, January 6,2010

AS one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is growing warmer.

With millions of Britons battling through snow and ice to get to work today, scientists claim that the cold conditions should not be used as evidence against man-made climate change.

Blizzards, ice and sub-zero temperatures that have gripped the UK for almost a month in a record deep freeze are not “robust” indicators of global weather patterns, they say.

Their claims come despite the fact that the rest of the northern hemisphere, from America to Europe and Asia, is suffering some of the worst winters in living memory.

Huge snowfalls are being witnessed from China and South Korea, across eastern, central and western Europe and to America where even Florida is struggling to record temperatures above freezing.

Last night critics of the global warming lobby said the public were no longer prepared to be conned into believing that man-made emissions were adding to the problem.

Long-term forecaster and trends analyst Piers Corbyn, of WeatherAction, said: “Global warming is a failed science built on falsified data. It is a sham to say that man has caused it.”

Read the rest here

“Global Warming” Cancels Christmas for Many Travelers – Breaks Records December 26, 2009

“Global Warming” Cancels Christmas for Many Travelers – Breaks Records

Via Watts Up With That, 25 December 2009

Hundreds of passengers spent the night sleeping in Dallas Fort Worth Airport near Dallas, Friday, Dec. 25, 2009 after a winter storm forced the cancellation of many flights from Dallas. The Star-Telegram newspaper said Dallas-Fort Worth was experiencing its first White Christmas in more than 80 years. (AP Photo/J Pat Carter)

From the “weather is not climate” department, inconvenient travel:

Here’s a sample of headlines related to difficult if not impossible holiday travel:

Christmas Eve storm in central states creates travel misery (WaPo)
A slow-moving storm spread snow, sleet and rain across the nation’s midsection Thursday, making last-minute holiday travel treacherous but promising a white Christmas for some.

The National Weather Service issued blizzard warnings for parts of Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Texas. It cautioned that travel would be extremely dangerous in those areas through the weekend and that drivers should pack a winter survival kit.

Read the rest here