BMI's Dan Gainor has a great column on the Fox Forum about the silence around "global cooling."
This is the winter of environmentalists’ discontent. They desperately want the earth to be warming to prove Al Gore’s truth inviolate and they are going to make you pay thousands of dollars for it no matter whether it’s true or not.
But the weather has been inconveniently cold. Thirty-two states have experienced record or near-record lows this winter – poking holes in the predictions of imminent fiery doom. Just ask the die-hard global warming activists who showed up in Washington last week to protest the nation’s use of coal. Their event was hampered by nearly a foot of snow in the nation’s capital – enough to freeze out luminaries like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Still, there they were, a couple thousand idiots standing in a winter wonderland, chanting about global warming. What’s amazing is that NASA’s climate chief James Hansen was part of this foolishness. Here we have a man who the left keeps telling us is so smart we need to listen to everything he says and he doesn’t have the public relations sense of a freshman communications major.
I have a news flash for Mr. Hansen – it gets cold in the winter. Sometimes it snows – even in Washington. If you want to promote global warming, look at a thermometer and wait until that red stuff climbs up real high.
This would seem the basis of a good strategy. Cede the winter months to your critics and opponents and keep the global warming activism to times when you might actually get warm weather.
Only a fool would hold a global warming event in a foot of snow – unless he or she was desperate.
That desperation might get to the heart of the issue. Hansen recently told Britain’s Observer that time was running out – fast. “We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world.” Prince Charles, a fellow alarmist with a scientific resume as microscopic as Al Gore’s, recently declared we have “less than 100 months to act” on climate change.
But four years, eight years or Gore’s much-cited 10 years all add up to one thing. It’s not the planet that’s running out of time – it’s the environmentalists. The warming of the earth has flatlined like Tom Daschle’s political career.
In fact, now the theme – even from the global warming camp is … (drum roll, please) we could have up to three decades of cooling. Michael Reilly, of Discovery News, summed it up well: “Earth’s climate continues to confound scientists.” He quoted a new study by Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, saying “global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.”
Just as the global warming reality is cooling, the opposition is heating up. This week marked the second annual “International Conference on Climate Change” in New York, sponsored by The Heartland Institute. It brought together hundreds of climate skeptics from around the world and was headlined by European Union President Vaclav Klaus.
Klaus got to the heart of the matter during his opening night address. The climate debate isn’t just about temperature, he told the gathering of scientists and public policy experts. He said “environmentalists want to change us and our behavior” because “their mission is control.”
They are working hard to take that control. Forget the laughably inept Kyoto treaty. Environmentalists and politicians are working to give birth to its bastard child of a successor in Copenhagen this December. The midwives are already prepping for the birth of this Frankenstein baby in the run up to the G-20 conference in April.
Advocates want the meeting of some of the world’s powerhouses to focus not just on economics but on going green. That way they can show they have all the major nations working together.
That’s not the only push for quick action. Denmark’s minister for climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, is urging Obama to ram through global warming laws prior to Copenhagen and Obama looks like he is doing just what he was asked to do. His cap-and-trade proposal is already on deck despite criticism that it will cost an already damaged economy an average of $2,180 a year. Even Obamaphile Warren Buffett says such a tax is “pretty regressive.” What does that mean? Essentially that ordinary people will pay through the nose for cap-and-trade while elitists fly around and tell us how to live.
With Democratic control of Congress virtually a lock, cap-and-trade could fly through Congress faster than lies fly out of a politician’s mouth. Just in time, perhaps, to encounter a problem that may well be going the opposite direction for 30 years.
Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Fellow and Vice President of the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum and he can be seen each Thursday from 9-10:30 on Foxnews.com’s “Strategy Room.”
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GW Update
March 11, 2009 - 09:29 ET by MOONSTRUCK-2 in awesome Northern Minnesota, with a beautiful six inches of fresh snow.
Please. Please. Please Send some GW our way.
No kool-aid for me!!! Thank you very much!!
I know...they're so stupid.
March 11, 2009 - 09:30 ET by supercon"I have a news flash for Mr. Hansen – it gets cold in the winter.
Sometimes it snows – even in Washington. If you want to promote global
warming, look at a thermometer and wait until that red stuff climbs up
real high."
This is like having Rosie O'Donnell complain about how day time T.V. is filled with obnoxious retards.
You would think that they would figure that out.
Do not have a global warming conference during a blizzard.
Duh....
Because with a name like Obama... you know it has to be good.
Nothing new here
March 11, 2009 - 09:52 ET by Caligula"They" do want to change our behavior, to control us. Case in point... Remember the "ozone hole" over Antarctica? Scary, no? We were told it was from aerosols, and really that evil R-12 refrigerant, like we all used for airconditioning. If we don't change this, stop this, we will destroy our planet! Problem was, it wasn't quite that simple or true. I know this, because I was there. I was the upper air program supervisor for the 36th winter-over crew (1990-91, Commander Naval Support Force Antarctica, Detachment Mcmurdo, Operation Deep Freeze). We also had a rarity with us...an actual scientist with a lot of really cool equipment that we got to share. Like a mass spectrometer that used liquid helium. Guess what we found? It wasn't dichlorodiflouromethane...(R-12)
We did find chlorine, though. Chemically, it was bound as O-Cl-O. And would you imagine this? It came from the active volcano that lies inside what is known as the Antarctic Convergence. It's called Mt. Erebus. And during the sunless winter months, we had higher "dobson units" than the rest of the world. (Those are the official measuring units of ozone.) Which simply means that everything was fine...very normal. And we reported those results, obviously. The good doctor's data and our upper-air data from our radio and ozonosondes.
Now raise your hand if you have ever heard any of this. That's about what I thought. But do you see any R-12 for sale now? No. And why is that? Because a small but vocal group wanted to control our behavior. And they succeeded. And in the years after I came back to the states, I was appalled at what happened, and why it happened, although I guess I shouldn't have been.
evil R-12 refrigerant
March 11, 2009 - 10:32 ET by dmambroseevil R-12 refrigerant patent ran out so the monoploy ended so Dupont need to have it ban. Beside that I like how they point to Ozone to global warming which has nothing, not one thing to do with any warming. Ozone is created from sun light during the 6 months of darkness, it is natural for the artic to have low amounts of ozone. Plus with the prevailing which go away from the south pole, the ozone does not redistributive that well. But even more remarkable, CFC is heavier than air and when it is release it goes into the soil and breaks down there.
Just another smoke and mirrors.
With their global warming story they are trying to sell. They have to go to congress during the winter because they have the summer off. Thank you congress for taking vacations. Anyways, 8 years ago was a perfect time to bring up because the sun active was more intense but in the last 3 years the sun active has diminished to nothing. They need to active now before science start to prove that AGW is not as much as a factor. In fact the sun has not moved into a new cycle yet causing some real concern. In the last few months, predictions of the next solar cycle has been push backed and there has been a few sun spots from the last solar cycle. Global cooling should be a bigger concern to us than global warming. Plants don't really grow in the winter.
http://www.spaceweather.com/
http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?a=130
Do you need help?
March 11, 2009 - 17:35 ET by CaligulaI hope not...maybe you were just getting your drink on when you penned the above missive. First of all, I was agreeing with the EU president and what he said environmentalists were trying to do. I was simply giving a first person example of how I've seen it in action, not equating ozone depletion with AGW. You can see that, can't you?
Second...patent on R-12 ran out about 50 YEARS prior to that whole fiasco, it would be better to say that Dupont NEEDED a new patent for bigger profits (and they got one with R-134a.)
Hmm... next...."Ozone is created from sunlight (TRUE) during the six months of darkness, (HUH? FALSE) it is natural for the arctic to have low amounts of ozone. (TRUE)
I will generally say OK to the rest of what you wrote, if I understand it correctly. (as I said, little drinky drink?) But not with the smoke and mirrors part. That just ain't cool, because as I stated at the beginning, I am only trying to be illustrutive here on how the environmentalists (and their willing accomplices) operate when it comes to anything that they want to cram down our gullets.
Why Does Anyone Listen To This Guy?
March 11, 2009 - 10:17 ET by dboYikes! 20 years after James Hansen's doomsday predictions and testimony to congress, the planet has cooled.
Beat me to
March 11, 2009 - 10:44 ET by danboBeat me to it.
Here
Limited Disclosure: I used to belong to the Sierra Club untill they went crazier. Worse of all, I was bribed by Exxon with free New Orleans Saints glasses with fill ups in the 70's.
Must be something to it.
March 11, 2009 - 10:45 ET by KevroyMust be something to it. Temps are expected to rise 40 degrees here in Alaska over the next 4 months!
The tide is beginning to
March 11, 2009 - 11:06 ET by winston smithThe tide is beginning to turn against the hysterical warmists. Many scientists and climatologists who were once on board with AGW are now having second thoughts and joining the growing rank of skeptics. Dr. Nir Shaviv, David Evans, Bruno Wiskle, Tad Murtry, Claude Allegre are just a few of the former supporters of Al Gore who have now done an about face on AGW and are coming around to believe in the far more rational solar climate, solar activity explanation of the slight global temperature rise in the last 20 years. Eventually, AGW will go the way of the supposed heterosexual AIDS epidemic, Bird Flu, embryonic stem-cell cures and other government-inspired myths.
Environmental Religion
March 11, 2009 - 11:10 ET by GeneralAlThe people involved in this movement are Pantheists. They worship the earth and all its creatures except for human beings. The liberal panty waists always raise the flag regarding separation of church and state [Another philosphy that has its roots in the American Communist Party which now is known as the Dempcrat Communist Parety!] when faith based initiatives are suggested yet in the Tele Prompter Messiah's Pelousy-Dingy Harry Stinkulous Bill, over 5 billion dollars is sent to this religion. Wheres the outcry MSM? Oh yeah! There having erotic emissions over the Tele Prompter Messiah and Miss I'm Finally Proud of My Country! Hey Mischelle, do you have any more five dollar helicopters for sale?
Now, a word from our "Top Climate Scientists"
March 11, 2009 - 11:21 ET by ThisnThatHere's what the world's top climate scientists said on Tuesday in Copenhagan: sea levels could rise twice as much as previously projected. And how did they come to this conclusion? By reviewing new data -- which they won't reveal.
And the conclusion? "This means that if the emissions of greenhouse gases is not reduced quickly and substantially even the best-case scenario will hit low-lying coastal areas housing one-tenth of humans on the planet hard". Yep -- the non-existant (or manipulated data) points to one and only one thing -- man-made causes of global weather changes! No other options are possible, of course.
That's what you get when you have primitive cultists gathering together to practice their pagan religion; supported by a compliant MSM more than willing to parrot unsubstantiated lies.
___________________________________
The challenge is to follow a consistent plan despite inconsistent prices - Sarah Palin, State of the State of Alaska speech
Waiting for Summer might not help
March 11, 2009 - 13:17 ET by NBFIn June of 2008, it was so unseasonably cold where I live that people were calling it "Junuary". People were more than exasperated.
If these idiots had their goverment supremacist global warming party about that time, they probably would have been torn limb from limb.
Feedback Systems & Cycles
March 11, 2009 - 22:32 ET by nofateThis is a repost of a comment I made on previously.
Just to emphasize a point made by Richard Lindzen, from a link put up by slickwillie2001, http://www.redstate...., coverage of the ICCC climate apostate conference:
And that leads me to another series of questions regarding the cycles discussed by S. Fred Singer in "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years". In the book, there is a mind numbing series of examples of documented research that essentially shows a cycle of 1500 (more or less) years of climate warming and cooling of about (total) 8 or 9 degrees Celsius. Note the two graphs I have found that show what is going on here, and here (scroll down to the third graph). These two graphs were taken from glaciers over 1500 miles apart; the first in Greenland, and the second from the Vostok glacier in Antarctica. What they show is that for most of the time shown on these graphs, the earth has been in an ice age. There are only brief periods of warming lasting only a few thousand to tens of thousands of years. We happen to be in a warm era that has lasted over 10,000 years now.
Within those warm periods between ice ages lasting 100,000 years or so, are 1500 year fluctuations of warming and cooling. History documents a so-called Roman Warming in the 1st century AD, a Medieval Warming in the 11th, and the Little Ice Age that gripped the planet from 1400 to 1850. And, right on Nature's schedule, we're now 150 years into a Modern Warming. I've played with the numbers a little and it appears that there are mini-cycles embedded within the 1500 year cycle. Note that during the Little Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum of sunspots lasted from about 1640 to about 1720, then there was a warmup, and then another milder cooling during the late 1700's (i.e. Valley Forge) and lasting until around 1820 or so.
We are now experiencing a spotless sun episode that has been going on since sometime in 2007. If you look at the Spaceweather.com website, nearly every day, under an image of a blank sun, it reads "The sun is blank--no sunspots." Here at Solarcycle24.com, are three graphs that show the blank sun vs. the previous cycle, and sunspot number projections according to David Hathaway who is the guy at NASA who runs the SpaceWeather site. It is possible that we are entering a brief cooling period within a longer warming trend. Or, we may still be at the tail end of the little ice age and experiencing another cooling period as we climb further into an era of warmer temperatures. The reason I say that is that the complete cycle of the Roman Warming (800 yrs.) and the Dark Ages (450 yrs) lasted about 1250 years. The most recent cycle of the Midieval Warming (400 years) and the Little Ice Age (550 yrs) has lasted only about 950 years. That would be a short cycle, so we may still be at the tail end of the same cycle that included the Little Ice Age.
No matter where we are in those cycles, it seems ludicrous to base government policy on the rantings of a non-scientific politician who has been proven to have his own financial and political interests as a driving force. As Singer points out, in a section called "The World of Glaciers",
I would add, warming and cooling is what the earth does, and the majority of the time is spent cool!
Singer again:
We need to be developing strategies for dealing with the eventual cooling of the earth rather than taxing people into poverty in the mistaken notion that if we don't we will all burn up. Oh, and by the way, the oligarchs who have taken the reigns of power will be living like fat cats, high on the hog, livin' large, while the rest of us scrape to get by.
Update: In light of the current post and the fact that we may be headed into a cooling cycle that these fools can't even admit too, it seems possible that we may be headed into a 30 year or so cooling cycle within a more general warming cycle. That's if the Little Ice Age actually ended around 1850. If the warming we've seen since then was just a minor warmup within the possibly still ongoing Little Ice Age, then we've got a lot more warming to do at some later date in the future. There is no doubt from the scientific records that there have been significantly warmer periods during the last two complete cycles, than what we are experiencing now.
Alternatively, we could be at the tail end of the current warm era spotted between the 100,000 year ice ages that are the norm. Take a look at the far right side of that 400,000 year record from the Vostok glacier. We have been overdue for a while now for a return to a true ice age! Let's see the climate modelers model that!
"The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
michaelyon-online.com
Nofate... do you know
March 11, 2009 - 23:10 ET by NL207Nofate... do you know anything about feedback systems, damping, phase loops or resonance?
I hope so. You might appreciate this. Our friends in the Alarmist camp tell us we should be very concerned about unrealized feedback in the climate system. There is a way to test this notion.
Recall that the last two centuries, the modern era, have encompassed three catastrophic volcanic events: Mt. Pinatubo 1991, Krakatoa 1883, and Tambora 1815. These were respectively, VEI level 6, 6 and 7 events of sufficient power to disrupt the climate. It takes little expertise to study the temperatures after these events to see that the propagation time constant of these atmospheric emissions must be short, on the ortder of months, as the full effects of these eruptions were felt around the globe and at their maximum within 18 months of these events. This implies there is no delayed feedback of any significance for temperature events. Applying to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, this suggests that the full temperature effects of all CO2 emitted by humans more than 18 months ago are already with us, and the Alarmists are simply wrong when they suggest that significant future warming attributable to past anthropogenic emissions will occur.
NL207
March 12, 2009 - 00:15 ET by nofate"...do you know anything about feedback systems, damping, phase loops or resonance?"
No, not in a scientific sense. I am not a scientist, just a sleep technician with an interest in subjects that I have to have explained to me by the experts in layman's terms. I have done some reading of Roy Spencer's site where he explains the negative feedback of the water vapor system that is apparently discounted by the climate modelers. The light bulb moment for "negative feedback" came when I read the notes about Richard Lindzen's explanation, especially the line “Nature is dominated by negative (stabilizing) feedback, not positive (destabilizing) feedback.” That was the first time I remember a "negative" feedback (in the climate) being called a "stabilizing" influence. Previous to that, even though there were explanations, they didn't ring my bell. I'm an old fart and it pretty much takes a 2X4 to the head to make a point with me, sometimes. I'm also very visually oriented, so unless I can see a picture, I have to read a lot to find the right description that works for me. That's why I like those two graphs I put up, and all the picures in Singers book :-)
I also check out Anthony Watts' site, which he uses for technical discussions, much of which goes over my head, but he also gets into explanations that an interested layman can understand and use to make informed decisions. Here are several that I have found interesting lately that relate in some way to the CO2 controversy and may be interesting to the more scientifically challenged but inquiring mind type Newsbusters among us:
Negative feedback in climate - empirical or emotional?
A short primer: The Greenhouse Effect Explained
CO2 Does Not Drive Glacial Cycles
Basic Geology Part 2 - CO2 in the Atmosphere and Ocean
CO2, Temperatures, and Ice Ages
"The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
michaelyon-online.com
I get the visual
March 12, 2009 - 00:28 ET by NL207I get the visual orientation thing.
Wish I could explain it better for you in a format that fits a post. Feedback loops all have time constants. This represents the delay between the time an output appears and the time its effects reappear at the inputs. The Alarmists claim this delay is many years, perhaps even decades, in length. The volcanic events demonstrate that at least in the temperature domain, this feedback is much faster than that, on the oprder of months, not years. Sea levels are another matter.
NL
March 12, 2009 - 00:48 ET by nofateI found this in the "CO2, Temperatures, and Ice Ages" link:
This is what I was getting at when I was speculating that we could be at the end of the warm era that man has enjoyed for about 12,000 years, and we wouldn't even know it for quite a while yet. If I'm understanding what you are saying (just thinking out loud, here), if the output=blank sun for several hundred or thousand years, and the effect=ice age for, oh, about 100,000 years, there must be a huge time constant in play here. I'm not quite clear on "effects reappear at the inputs". In this case would a sunspot active sun be the input at the other end?
"The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
michaelyon-online.com
The time constants for the
March 12, 2009 - 00:53 ET by NL207The time constants for the oceans are much longer than the atmosphere. That stands to reason since the specific heat of water is very much greater than the same volume of air.
I think the idea that an ice age might be immenent in geologic time is quite valid basede on the paleoclimate history as it is known. the term immenent might best be construed as 500 - 5000 years.
Only 500 Years?!!!
March 12, 2009 - 01:00 ET by nofateThat's scary. I'd feel a lot better knowing it's 5,000 ;-)
"The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
michaelyon-online.com
The whole Glacial cycle is
March 12, 2009 - 01:09 ET by NL207The whole Glacial cycle is only about 100,000 years in length. 5% of that is 5000 years.
Study the paleoclimate reconstructions of the last 400,000 years. See how fast things can change. 500 years is only 7 human lifetimes. In my own family, we can span a century and a half in just three generations. 500 years is not that long.
NL
March 12, 2009 - 01:34 ET by nofateAbsolutely. I can't get over the temperature implications in this graph, especially when correlated with the one that was taken from Greenland, over 11,000 miles away. We are in the longest warm era the earth has seen for over 400,000 years. The oscillations of temperature we have seen for the last 12,000 years or so have all been in a narrow range that allows for our agriculture, etc. to flourish. And we now have a bunch of power hungry politicians worldwide who want to tax us into oblivion because they think we- men- can have any influence whatsoever on what the earth has in store for us over the next few millenia! This is truly a mania.
"The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
michaelyon-online.com
In your chart. On the down
March 12, 2009 - 08:02 ET by danboIn your chart. On the down swing. CO2 lags behind temperture. If CO2 were the driving force behind tempertures it would keep the tempertures up. Obviously CO2 isn't the driving force behind tempertures.
Sadly, warmers and politicians can't see that cooling is the real danger. And as you pointed out it can happen really quick. (The last 2 years were a small sample.)
Warmers are doing everything in their power to prevent us from dealing with a serious cooling.)
That's dangerous.
Limited Disclosure: I used to belong to the Sierra Club untill they went crazier. Worse of all, I was bribed by Exxon with free New Orleans Saints glasses with fill ups in the 70's.
danbo
March 12, 2009 - 10:58 ET by nofate"On the down swing. CO2 lags behind temperture. If CO2 were the driving force behind tempertures it would keep the tempertures up. Obviously CO2 isn't the driving force behind tempertures."
Good eye. Several of the articles I linked up above pointed out similar conclusions, such as:
"The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
michaelyon-online.com
Your chart is
March 12, 2009 - 13:38 ET by NL207Your chart is interesting.
I think it represents an "interpretation" of the ice core data from the Vostok core. The publisher claims to be a scientist. Since he did not attribute the source of this chart, or the data behind it, I don't think he is much of a real scientist. Sources ae important. He didn't provide one for this.
Give the values I see in the plot, I am going to guess the source was either the UK Met Office or NASA/GISS. I say this because the magnitude of the Eemian waming is understated compared with reconstructions of the Vostok data sourced from the Russians who originally collected that data. This discrepancy is well known point of disagreement between these factions of the scientific community. Hansen [NASA/GISS] has often claimed other interpretations of the data overstate warmth during prior interglacials and most particulary the Eemian period.
NL Didn't you get the memo.
March 12, 2009 - 07:51 ET by danboSorry double post.
NL Didn't you get the memo.
March 12, 2009 - 07:50 ET by danboNL Didn't you get the memo. Volcanos don't effect climate. Neither 3/4ers of the planets surface (the oceans), nor that itty bitty glowing ball in the sky. But tiny increase in a minor gas does.
Limited Disclosure: I used to belong to the Sierra Club untill they went crazier. Worse of all, I was bribed by Exxon with free New Orleans Saints glasses with fill ups in the 70's.
"But tiny increase in a
March 12, 2009 - 13:41 ET by NL207"But tiny increase in a minor gas does"
I have heard that the gas from cattle farts warms the globe. And most cerrtainly all that hot air pouring out of these envronmentalists wack jobs has caused a climate crisis. In fact, I would observe there would be no climate crisis at all if these enviro-crazies were not making all these emissions.