Canada doesn't follow the script

"Sun Stays Sluggish as Weathermen Fight for Anti-Ice Age Funding," declares the headline in Popular Mechanics. What? Anti-Ice Age funding? I thought the global warming scam that is enriching ADM, GE and Al Gore, among many others, was enough. Now they want funding in order to study a possible Ice Age?

I think the Canadians are on to something. We've seen that a scientific examination of some of the underlying assumptions and methods used to establish a case for the so-called "Hockey Stick" reveals significant problems in the data, methods and assumptions. More honest, open, scientific study; less uniformed action, please. Certainly we can agree that the solutions we choose should contain as little corporate welfare as possible in order to be economically viable.

The earth may be warming, the adverse consequences of warming may be harmful to life, and there may be actions that man can take to address those actions. However, forcing developing nations into adoption of no-growth policies that essentially keep those countries depressed and under the thumbs of despots is no solution. Man has adapted to his environment for thousands and thousands of years. There is no question that we can do so again, and I bet that we can do so without causing poorer nations to suffer the consequences of tree-hugger angst and liberal guilt.

H/T: Instapundit.

Accuracy of the IPCC's forecasts? Not so much

A number of scientists who question the accuracy of the models and assumptions used to project future disasters due to global warming have discussed various experimental approaches that could be used to measure the accuracy of the models used. Here's one; the results aren't favorable to the global warming alarmists.

It's about time

As reported in The New York Times, the F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Well Spent

Instapundit forwards a link to one of the silliest articles on "global warming" ever. I especially enjoyed his assertion on the timeline of the catastrophe.

The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

It may well occur within the lifetime of his two cats, but not, perhaps, before his mother finally gives up and makes him move out of the basement.

Democrat party pols and environmental politics are discussed in this post in The Corner on National Review Online. Would they embrace an Al Gore presidential candidacy? Would they really take up and pass the Kyoto treaty? It's not Gore Agonistes; he'd have to give up his "Father Theresa" demigod status with the gaia movement to descend to the level of a mere President of the United States.

Not to mention having to move to poorer living quarters than this.

In Chill Out, Bjorn Lomborg repeats his eminently logical argument that the prudent course to take in addressing global warming is not to attempt to reverse a process that may or may not be the cause of climate change. Instead, he writes
"We must accept that climate change is real and that we've helped cause it. There is no hoax. But neither is there a looming apocalypse.
To some people, cutting carbon emissions has become the answer, regardless of the question. Cutting emissions is said to be our "generational mission." But don't we want to implement the most efficient policies first?
Combating the real climate challenges facing the planet -- malaria, more heat deaths, declining polar bear populations -- often requires simpler, less glamorous policies than carbon cuts. We also need to remember that the 21st century will hold many other challenges, for which we need low-cost, durable solutions.
I formed the Copenhagen Consensus in 2004 so that some of the world's top economists could come together to ask not only where we can do good, but at what cost, and to rank the best things for the world to do first. The top priorities they've come up with are dealing with infectious diseases, malnutrition, agricultural research and first-world access to third-world agriculture. For less than a fifth of Kyoto's price tag, we could tackle all these issues.
Obviously we should also work on a long-term solution to climate change. Solving it will take the better part of a century and will require a political will spanning political parties, continents and generations. If we invest in research and development, we'll do some real good in the long run, rather than just making ourselves feel good today.
But embracing the best response to global warming is difficult in the midst of bitter fighting that shuts out sensible dialogue. So first, we really need to cool our debate."

Well said.

The Belmont Club discusses signs that the environmental movement is becoming more and more of a religion in Terraforming on Terra.

Wizbang points to a rare admission by scientists that climate change isn't only about global warming and cooling, but large scale effects of wind and current are at work as well.
An Overdue Dose of Humility in the Global Warming Debate?

James Lewis writes in American Thinker: NASA's Hansen Reaches Escape Velocity

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago."
In an email to the Globe and Mail, Hansen writes
"If we follow 'business-as-usual' growth of greenhouse gas emissions... I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several meters, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose."For all you non-metric folks, 25 meters equals 82 feet, or about as high as an eight-story building. "Several meters" is only about 9-15 feet. That's the wall of water that is going to drown all the coastal plains of the world if Hansen's predictions come to pass.

Interesting conclusion to Little Ice Age (Regional - Asia: China) – Summary:

"In light of these several observations, it is clear that the Little Ice Age was manifest in China as a cold node of the millennial-scale oscillation of climate that brought this vast region, as well as most of the rest of the world, the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages Cold Period, the Medieval Warm Period and the Modern Warm Period, which suggests there is nothing unusual about the planet's current state of warmth and, therefore, that there is no need to invoke the historical increase in the air's CO2 content as its cause."

Steve McIntyre of Toronto operates http://www.climateaudit.org/ as a hobby, essentially. I discovered the site accidentally a few years ago. Steve has waged an often lonely campaign to examine the accuracy of the data and methods behind the "consensus" view of climate change.

Steve has uncovered a whopper of an error, one that calls the "consensus" into question and the diligence of all those so-called scientists who shared the consensus. True scientific progress relies upon open sharing of experimental data--the inputs, the data, the environment, etc.--and the scientist's proposed theory is only considered proven if the experiment can be repeated successfully by any other scientist acting independently. Steve has fought to obtain the data and methods used by "the team", the scientists who Crazy Al relies on most to bolster his claim that we only have 10 years left to act. "The team" admitted an error that invalidated their claim for a hockey stick in Congressional testimony this year. Now NASA and their famed muzzled scientist (who's been muzzled into giving perhaps hundreds of tiresome interviews) admit a key error that calls more of the "consensus" view into question.

Al Gore's Global Warming Hysteria the Result of a NASA Programming Error (Wizbang)

Crazy Al takes his Taft impression to Singapore, the land where conviction on a charge of committing an "outrage of modesty" is a caning offense, and unintentionally makes a true statement in his increasingly shrill defense of the indefensible.

My Way News - Gore: Polluters Manipulate Climate Info

Al is quoted as saying, "They're trying to manipulate opinion and they are taking us for fools." I agree as long as the "they" he refers to is the climate change alarmist group, and the "us" are the rest of us who simply live our lives and notice that short term weather models are laughably wrong every day.

As for examples of manipulation of the data, there's this, this indictment of the quality of measurement data in many cases, this on the hurricane count flap, and this summary of presentations by scientists who apparently didn't get the memo that the debate is over.

The argument that scientific consensus means that the facts are in and the debate is over for climate change is laughable if you focus on what science and the scientific method actually mean.

The definition of the scientific method at Wikipedia contains the following: "Among other facets shared by the various fields of inquiry is the conviction that the process must be objective to reduce a biased interpretation of the results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so it is available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called "full disclosure", also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established."

We have seen attempts to keep data and methods away from skeptics on numerous occasions. Who's afraid of legitimate inquiry that would either confirm or question their work? Politicians--scientists with a policy or other non-scientific axe to grind.

More inconvenient research reported in ScienceDaily: Synchronized Chaos: Mechanisms For Major Climate Shifts

Excerpt:

"In the mid-1970s, a climate shift cooled sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and warmed the coast of western North America, bringing long-range changes to the northern hemisphere.

After this climate shift waned, an era of frequent El Ninos and rising global temperatures began.
Understanding the mechanisms driving such climate variability is difficult because unraveling causal connections that lead to chaotic climate behavior is complicated.

To simplify this, Tsonis et al. investigate the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation.

By studying the last 100 years of these cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times.

Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed. Then. a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability.

The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century. "

In "Against the grain: Some scientists deny global warming exists," Astrophysicist Nir Shariv describes his passage from man-made climate change believer to his present opinion. He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. "In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."

The article continues: Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

Two takes on the politicization of science here and here.

Jason Miks is lucky enough to have had A Conversation with Bjorn Lomborg. He's still correct; I hope he's right that more climate scientists are becoming global warming catastrophe skeptics, at least for the next half century. I also applaud his efforts to attempt to get mankind focused on real problems like indoor air pollution caused by burning the wrong fuels to heat homes, lack of drinking water and encouraging responsible use of pesticides in developing countries to control disease.

Glenn links to Ronald Bailey's article in Reason Magazine in which he asks the question, "Brother, Can You Spare 22 Terawatts?: Big ideas for the future of energy."

The first sentence should hook you into reading the whole thing: "The flip side of the climate change conundrum is energy."

Where is the energy going to come from to feed the growth of not only the west, but the developing world? Can we trust government to make the right choices, or should government take a less activist role in terms of the technologies selected to produce the energy to meet our needs?

Move along, nothing to see here: "Hurricane predictions off track as tranquil season wafts away."

Global Warming: it's worse than we thought--even other planets are affected.

H/T: Jerry Pournelle

The National Center for Public Policy Research documents the distribution of "Kyoto Protocol Survival Kits" at a United Nations Global Warming Conference.