Even if they now claim that it fits their theories
The UN's "Nobel Prize Winning" IPCC Report in 2007 predicted "warmer northern winters" for Europe.
As summarized in this UN Press Release of April, 2007, we should expect to see:
"the ongoing thawing of European glaciers and permafrost, the delayed winter freeze of rivers and lakes, the lengthening of growing seasons, the earlier spring arrival of migratory birds... In addition to warmer winters, Europe's northern regions will experience more precipitation and run-off.
The expansion of forests and agricultural productivity will be accompanied by greater flooding, coastal erosion, loss of species and melting of glaciers and permafrost."
A classic case of a "failed prediction." Theories making predictions that fail are called "refuted."
America's "Snowpocalypse"
More travel chaos expected in the US northeast after hundreds of flights were cancelled and the region dug out from what some are calling "Snowpocalypse".
The frustration for travellers remains after one of the biggest blizzards in years, which slammed much of the eastern seaboard from the Carolinas into Canada's Maritime provinces. Piles of snow as deep as 80cm were left by snowfalls and gales, creating more havoc for travellers, especially those flying.
Passengers are accusing airlines of poor customer service after thousands were unable to get through to reservation agents to reschedule or refund flights, and critics are incensed over what they say is the airlines' effort to blame everything on the weather and take themselves off the hook.
Airlines have since resumed limited service, but some 800 flights were cancelled on Tuesday, mostly in the New York area, which was spinning its wheels following the storm that roared up the coast on Sunday and Monday.
Officials expect it will take several days for New York and its all-important transport hubs to be fully back on track following the sixth heaviest snowfall in the city's history. "This storm is not like any other we've had to deal with," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, noting that emergency vehicles were among those stuck in the snow. "Until we can pull out the ambulances, pull out the fire trucks, pull out the buses, pull out the private cars, the plows just can't do anything," he said. "We still have a long way to go."
New York police have removed some 1000 vehicles from just three busily trafficked thoroughfares, a fraction of the stalled vehicles stranded on city roads. Snow plows and salt spreaders struggled in Manhattan, battling through knee-high snow in many streets.
The three major area airports - John F. Kennedy International, LaGuardia and Newark International in New Jersey - reopened late on Monday, but the cancellations of more than 5000 flights meant a huge backlog and more delays.
SOURCE
Exasperation in Russia
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin rebuked officials Wednesday after bad weather brought air traffic in Moscow to a virtual standstill, telling them to forget about New Year's holidays and stop whining.
The tough-talking prime minister said all the officials in charge of transportation and relevant matters were banned from going on New Year's holidays until the situation got back to normal.
"Instead of proceeding with New Year's celebrations, everyone who is in charge of the situation should have been present on the job from the very beginning," Putin told a government meeting in televised remarks.
"There is no need to whine - everyone needs to work. Entire settlements remain without power, the situation is difficult on the roads and thousands of people are stranded in airports."
A bout of icy weather and freezing rain wreaked havoc in Moscow in recent days, disrupting the holiday plans of thousands of air travelers in Moscow.
Scuffles broke out Tuesday at Moscow's two main airports, Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo, as exasperated passengers threatened to sue airlines including Russia's flagship carrier Aeroflot - but officials said the situation was getting back to normal Wednesday as flights were beginning to take off in accordance with the schedule.
President Dmitry Medvedev earlier instructed his chief prosecutor to look into the matter.
SOURCE
Coldest Swedish December In 110 Years
Sweden’s English language The Local has the following headline today:
Coldest December in Sweden in 110 years
The last few days of the year look to be very cold throughout Sweden, according to a forecast by the Swedish meteorological agency SMHI.
"This means that several parts of Sweden, including the southern region Götaland and eastern Svealand, will have experienced the coldest December in at least 110 years.”
This reality of course flies in the face of what climate models had predicted earlier. The SMHI (Sweden’s Met Office and devout warmist organisation) keeps archives, and so I thought surely there must be something there that had earlier forecast warmer winters for Sweden. I didn’t have to look very long to find it.
First there’s this report dated 16 September 2010 here: New climate projections indicate more extreme weather. Here are just a couple of excerpts (Warning – you might first want to tie your butt to yourself to keep from laughing it off!):
"New climate projections for severe weather situations in 100 years also show that truly cold days will virtually disappear.”
And:
"The new scenarios show the effects of global warming with more details than before, thanks to more computer power and high geographical resolution.”
And:
"As a whole, the new ensembles are an important foundation for continued climate research. However, they can already be applied to many areas,’ says Grigory Nikulin.”
Does he mean like governments preparing for winters? And finally:
"Truly cold weather, such as -10°C in Spain or -30°C in southern Sweden, is unlikely to occur in future.”
How stupid must they feel now? The assertions made above likely stem in part from an SMHI-published report 2 years ago called: Temperature and precipitation changes in Sweden; a wide range of model-based projections for the 21st century.
The report analyzed the climate change signal for Sweden in scenarios for the 21st century in a large number of coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs), used in the AR4 by the IPCC.
At the SMHI Rossby Centre, regional climate models were run under different emission scenarios and driven by a few AOGCMs. They used the results of the runs as a basis in climate change in Sweden. What did they find? (Crap, of course, but read it for yourself):
"Projected responses depend on season and geographical region. Largest signals are seen in winter and in northern Sweden, where the mean simulated temperature increase among the AOGCMs (and across the emissions scenarios B1, A1B and A2) is nearly 6°C by the end of the century, and precipitation increases by around 25%. In southern Sweden, corresponding values are around +4°C and +11%."
Okay, it’s still a long way to the end of the 21st century. But as Sweden’s 2010 December-of-the-century shows, the models and calculations seem to have forgotten a few important details. Back to the drawing board!
SOURCE (See the original for links)
Time for global warming lobby to admit they could be wrong, says meteorologist
Here’s something you’ll never hear from the Met Office. Joe Bastardi, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, has laid into the the global warming lobby for making absurd claims, especially their assertion that the cold weather is caused by global warming.
First he told Fox Business Network last week that: “These folks claiming that global warming is causing severe cold – that’s like the kid on the playground who doesn’t get his way and takes his ball home”. In fact, the cold weather “is predictable if you study cycles, if you study climatology… and don’t just say everything is global warming”.
And now he’s continued the offensive on his blog this week, writing that: "My advice is to get ready for more of this [cold weather] in coming decades. And the CO2 people should open their eyes to other sides of the argument, since in 30 years or so when we come out of the cooling cycle, there may be room for your argument being pressed forth… but first we have to watch and see if the naturalists like me (that is my new nickname… nature boy) have a point."
Ozone hole, Ice Age, Y2K, etc, etc, etc. Is it any wonder why this just looks like another in a string of missed ideas that cause needless worry? You know what is the most hideous thing about all this? The money, time and energy wasted on what may be nothing more than a fictional ghost that man has nothing to do with, while tangible societal problems that need attention are given the short end of the stick.
And it’s interesting to see that whether by magic, coincidence, or lord forbid, the actual ideas laid out here a few years ago as to why this [the cooling] is going to start happening again, WHO THE TRUE DENIERS ARE!
This is a big deal, because here we have one of the world’s biggest meteorological firms saying the global warming consensus is probably wrong. Of course, in the world of politics, no one is allowed to say this without being falsely demonised for “denying the science”. Yet the science is irrelevant to a theory that has always been little more than an excuse to expand the state. And that is why – in an increasingly cold climate – the true believers are upset.
SOURCE
EPA Green Priest Jackson: Regulation a ‘Moral Obligation’
People who say: "There is no such thing as right and wrong" are quick to use moral language when it suits them. It's been going on for a long time
From crèches on government property to Christian greetings in the workplace, Americans go to great lengths this religious season to separate Christmas from our public life. Not so the Obama administration and its campaign to tear down the wall separating the Green Church and the state.
In an extraordinary speech before The National Council of Churches in New Orleans this November, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Lisa Jackson — a committed Green and Christian — urged that the U.S. government and religious leaders unite in their “moral obligation” to heal the planet and “build on the religious and moral reasons for being good stewards of our environment.”
“The question now is, ‘What we can do?’” the High Priestess of Green concluded, adding that the effort was blessed by the White House’s Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership program.
On the Thursday before Christmas, she answered her own question, dictating a controversial cap on industrial emissions that will have profound negative consequences if enacted on jobs and economic growth in Michigan and the Midwest.
The EPA’s creche is in the public square, Mother Earth is in the manger, and Washington’s wise men are bringing gifts of taxpayer money.
“We are following through on our commitment to proceed in a measured and careful way to reduce greenhouse gas pollution that threatens the health and welfare of Americans and contributes to climate change,” said Jackson on Dec. 23 in imposing global warming regulations on power plants and refineries.
SOURCE
CARB’s carbon capers
In a nearly unanimous vote, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) just approved a statewide cap-and-trade scheme to limit emissions of CO2 from six hundred major industrial plants, starting in 2012. Proposition 23 on the California ballot, defeated in November, was an attempt to at least delay the state’s Cap-and-Trade law, AB-32, until California’s record unemployment eased.
However, the slanted description appearing on both the official Voter Guide and the ballot, written by then-State Attorney General Jerry Brown and his office, the well-funded “No-on-23” campaign, and some very heavy media bias, had Californians believing that Prop. 23 would thwart efforts to curb air pollution—i.e., smog. So Prop 23 went down in flames, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, and perhaps a million.
The “Cooler Heads” blog relates that the adopted regulation is more than three thousand pages long, but most of the details have yet to be worked out. CARB rushed to meet a December 31 deadline set by the 2006 legislation that authorizes CARB to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
In order to protect California businesses from out-of-state competition, CARB will (initially) allocate emissions credits (aka energy-rationing coupons) for free. The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is the only precedent for free allocation of carbon credits; it resulted in windfall profits for politically connected industries and higher electricity prices for consumers.
Not surprisingly, the New York Times approves of the scheme: “[AB32] will put the state far ahead of the rest of the country in energy reform.”
The regulations, if they go into effect, will create the largest market for carbon trading in the country. (Ten states including New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and the New England states are participating in a less extensive system known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which covers only electric utilities.)
By the time the CARB program takes effect in 2012, California regulators plan to have created a framework for carbon trading with New Mexico, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec—some of its partners in the Western Climate Initiative. But as long as Congress and the Obama administration shun cap and trade, California, instead of being the forerunner of a national movement, will remain part of a far-flung archipelago of states and provinces participating in a small carbon market.
Mary D. Nichols, CARB’s chairwoman, said, “We are well aware that we in California are on a different path from many other states in our willingness to be at the front” of the cap-and-trade movement. An idea of her mindset comes from a speech at the University of Rhode Island in November 2008, where she mentioned California’s efforts on climate change:
We know that the economic crisis we will face from unmitigated climate change could dwarf [sic] anything we have ever seen. That alone is a compelling enough reason to take swift action. But there’s another reason also, which is that developing a new clean energy economy that drives and rewards investment and innovation, creates jobs and serves as the engine for sustainable economic growth is exactly what we need at a time like this.
Transportation and utility industry representatives see Nichols’ push on climate-change regulation in California as evidence of an ingrained pro-regulatory bias.
I recollect Nichols as a former assistant EPA administrator in the Clinton years, under Carol Browner. In testimony to Congress in 2000, on phasing out the chemical fumigant methyl bromide (of great economic importance to agriculture but suspected of causing damage to the ozone layer), she claimed benefits of 32 trillion dollars! And no one questioned how she arrived at this wild number. A more reasonable value, I argued in my opposing testimony, would be zero benefits: There was no evidence of MeBr, with an atmospheric lifetime of only a few months, reaching the stratosphere; no evidence of a bromine-caused ozone depletion; and no evidence from ground-level monitoring stations of any increase in cancer-causing solar UV.
Among the industries immediately affected by the CARB rules will be producers of cement, which requires an industrial process in which the release of carbon dioxide is an integral part. Steve Regis, vice president of CalPortland, said in an interview, “We feel like we’re really exposed because 60 percent of our direct emissions are from the process—nothing we can do about them.” The re-engineering of that process, Regis said, would entail major costs, if it is even possible. He added that some California plants had recently shut down and moved their production out of state.
The midterm elections turned into a sweeping repudiation of the Democrats’ failed status quo—except, that is, in California, says Investor’s Business Daily. With the exception of the governor’s office, California has been a virtual one-party state since the 1960s. Now, thanks to decades of anti-business policies promulgated by a series of left-leaning legislatures, its economy and finances are a mess, and it is hemorrhaging jobs, businesses, and productive entrepreneurs to other states.
How bad has it gotten in the erstwhile Golden State? Consider:
* Some 2.3 million Californians are without jobs, making for a 12.4-percent unemployment rate—one of the highest in the country.
* From 2001 to 2010, factory jobs plummeted from 1.87 million to 1.23 million—a loss of 34 percent of the state’s industrial base.
* With just 12 percent of the U.S. population, California has almost a third of the nation’s welfare recipients; meanwhile, 15.3 percent of all Californians live in poverty.
* The state budget gap for 2009–2010 was $45.5 billion, or 53 percent of total state spending—the largest in any state’s history.
* Unfunded pension liabilities for California’s state and public employees may be as much as $500 billion—roughly 17 percent of the nation’s total $3 trillion at the state and local level.
This disaster has been building for decades. In the end, only the voters of California could have changed things. But on Tuesday, November 2, they opted for more of the same governance. Empowering CARB regulation will only make conditions worse.
SOURCE
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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