posted February 03, 2015 11:51 AM            

It was a big storm, but the Northeast has seen lots of big snowstorms before and will probably see lots of big snowstorms again. That's called winter.

Unfortunately, we're not likely to hear similar apologies from those who've promoted "global warming" hysteria for years, in defiance of data that fail to fit their climate models.

What is at issue is not whether there is "climate change" — which nobody has ever denied — but whether the specific predictions of the "global warming" crowd as to the direction and magnitude of worldwide temperature changes are holding up over the years.

The ultimate test of any theoretical model is not how loudly it is proclaimed but how well it fits the facts. Climate models that have an unimpressive record of fitting the facts of the past or the present are hardly a reason for us to rely on them for the future.

Putting together a successful model — of anything — is a lot more complicated than identifying which factors affect which outcomes. When many factors are involved, which is common, the challenge is to determine precisely how those factors interact with each other. That is a lot easier said than done when it comes to climate.

Everyone can agree, for example, that the heat of the sunlight is greater in the tropics than in the temperate zones or near the poles. But, the highest temperatures ever recorded in Asia, Africa, North America or South America were all recorded outside — repeat, OUTSIDE — the tropics.

No part of Europe is in the tropics, but record temperatures in European cities like Athens and Seville have been higher than the highest temperatures ever recorded in cities virtually right on the equator, such as Singapore in Asia or Nairobi in Africa.

None of this disproves the scientific fact that sunlight is hotter in the tropics. But it does indicate that there are other factors which go into temperatures on Earth.

It is not only the heat of the sunlight but its duration that determines how much heat builds up. The sun shines on the equator about 12 hours a day all year long. But in the temperate zones, the sun shines more hours during the summer — almost 15 hours a day at the latitude of Seville or Athens.

It is also not just a question of how much sunlight there is falling on the planet but also a question of how much of that sunlight is blocked by clouds and reflected back out into space. At any given time, about half the Earth is shielded by clouds, but cloudiness varies greatly from place to place and from time to time.

The Mediterranean region is famous for its cloudless summer days. The annual hours of sunlight in Athens are nearly double those in London — and in Alexandria, Egypt, there are more than twice as many annual hours of sunlight as in London.

How surprised should we be that cities around the Mediterranean — Alexandria, Seville and Tripoli — have had temperatures of 110 or more, while many tropical cities have not? Clouds and rain are common in the tropics.

American cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas often hit 110 degrees, because they are located where there are not nearly as many clouds during the summer as are common in most other places, including most places in the tropics. The highest temperatures on earth have been reached in Death Valley, Calif., for the same reason, even though it is not in the tropics.

Putting clouds into climate models is not simple, because the more the temperature rises, the more water evaporates, creating more clouds that reflect more sunlight back out into space. Such facts are well known, but reducing them to a specific and reliable formula that will predict global temperatures is something else.

Meteorology has many facts and many scientific principles but, at this stage of its development, weather forecasts just a week ahead are still iffy. Why, then, should we let ourselves be stampeded into crippling the American economy with unending restrictions created by bureaucrats who pay no price for being wrong?

posted February 03, 2015 04:43 PM            

I dont think they have a handle on it either way but as you say, climate IS changing. Meanwhile the new vegetation you keep crowing about will not replace crops lost to drought and pollution.

Aqueducts with built in turbines could carry water to where it it's needed, create jobs and clean power all at once.

posted February 08, 2015 02:23 PM            

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.

One of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.

Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.

posted February 10, 2015 01:33 PM            

The latest blow against the credibility of the of those demanding urgent, sweeping political change in response to human activity allegedly threatening the sustainability of earth appeared in Saturday’s edition of the London Daily Telegraph. Columnist Christopher Booker cites the work of Paul Homewood on his “Not A Lot of People Know That” climate blog.

Two weeks earlier, Booker noted that Homewood compared the original temperatures recorded at weather stations in Paraguay over a 60-year period with the numbers now being used in climate reports.

“In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming,” wrote Booker.

In the new piece, Booker reports on Homewood’s research into the original and revised data at many other South American weather stations.

“In each case he found the same suspicious one-way ‘adjustments,’” reported Booker.

According to Booker, Homewood is now studying similar data from arctic stations from Canada to Siberia.

“Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded,” he wrote.

Homewood’s research shows a consistent changing of temperature data and always in a way that makes it appear the earth is growing warmer. Moreover, these changes were not made by obscure organizations. They were done through the U.S. government’s Global Historical Climate Network. Additional responsibility lies with the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Climate Data Center.

Climate scientists who do not buy into the global analysis on climate change say this manipulation is a devastating indictment of the movement.

“It’s enormously significant because the whole thrust of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is supposedly the official source of climate change data, have been saying that currently it is warmer than it has ever been in the historic record or the instrumental record,” said Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology and author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”

Ball said while Homewood’s discoveries does not amount to breaking news, the reporting by the Telegraph is monumental.

“There’s nothing new about this, other than that it’s finally got into the mainstream media, but only into the conservative mainstream media because the Telegraph is a conservative newspaper in Britain,” Ball explained.

Ball elaborated on the temperature fudging that he says has been happening for quite a while.

“This adjustment of the historic record has been going on for a very long time,” he said. “It started with the elimination of a period known as the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago, when it was warmer than today.”

Nonetheless, he said Homewood has uncovered valuable evidence of a massive scientific and political con job.

“What is now being disclosed by Homewood, but has been disclosed by others long before this, is that they are adjusting the modern instrumental temperature record so that the older records appear colder than they actually were,” Ball said. “What that does is that it changed the gradient or slope of the temperature increase, making it look like the warming is much greater than it actually is. So this is what’s going on.”

Ball said the scientific history of events like the Medieval Warm Period is a major problem for activists looking to convince people that human industrial activity over the past few hundred years is responsible for record-high temperatures. So, he said, they’ve determined to rewrite history.

“They’ve got to keep saying, ‘Oh no, it’s warmer now than it’s ever been,’ Ball said. “So anything that suggests it was warmer in the past must be eliminated. So they created the infamous ‘hockey stick,’ which essentially rewrote the historic record.”

Homewood’s research and Booker’s reporting have the potential of making this the biggest scandal since the revealed emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, in which climate scientists allegedly admitted to manipulating data to reach preferred conclusions. Ball said this new potential scandal could actually be bigger. He said most people couldn’t decipher the contents of the emails very easily, but the temperature changes are a very different story.

“This kind of thing is much more clear,” he said. “When you start changing numbers and you can show that it’s clearly deliberate and it’s clearly all in one direction … this is much more understandable to the public.”

Ball expects even more evidence of unethical science to be revealed before long.

“It isn’t just that they lowered the historic temperature,” he said. “They also reduced the number of stations that they were using to determine the global temperature. They argued that in vast areas, where you only have one or two stations, that one station was representative of the temperature in a 1,200 kilometer radius. I mean it’s absolutely outrageous what they’ve done.”

But far from deflating the climate-change movement, Ball said revelations like the ones from Homewood will only intensify efforts to enact sweeping policy changes in the U.S. and beyond.

“Look for a cover-up because there’s huge volumes of money involved,” he said. “There are political implications with this [and] with Obama with climate change as the key thing. Now they’ve got the pope involved in it. So there will be a scramble to counteract this. I mean a real vigorous scramble.”

So how will climate-change activists fight back against these revelations? Ball expects the same tactics he’s witnessed through the decades in this debate.

“They tell lies,” he said. “They come out and say severe weather has increased when it hasn’t. They say that the temperature is continuing to increase when it hasn’t. They just tell lies about it, and that’s what’s going on. Of course, as everybody knows, it’s not the original crime that gets you in trouble. It’s the cover-up.”

“Once the cover-up is exposed, you’re done,” Ball said.

At the end of his column in Saturday’s Telegraph, Booker says, “This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.”

Ball agrees.

“I do think this is the greatest deception in history, as I say in my book. There have been scandals in history, but they’ve been regional or they’ve only impacted certain areas. This whole climate thing has had a global impact on energy and government policies around the world,” he said. “So it really is the biggest deception in history. There’s so much money and so many political careers riding on this that it’s going to be a battle royale.”