Archive for the ‘Climate’ Category
January 20, 2013
It is cold that kills not warmth. It is global cooling that will provide the greater challenge for humans – not global warming. But whether cooling or warming or both, humans will be better served by figuring out the best ways to adapt and not waste time and energy on trying to control the climate based on fanciful theories and religious beliefs about what causes climate change.
It’s the Sun, stupid!
Yesterday we had about -20°C, which is pretty cold but not unusual for this time of year. A friend in Australia was sweltering in +44°C -pretty hot but also not unusual. Another friend in Alberta had a normal winter day at about -25°C. Yesterday across the world humans were living and managing over temperatures ranging from about -50°C to about +49°C. Coping – quite successfully – with a temperature range caused by local weather of almost 100°C .
Snowpocalypse Russia
On Friday, Moscow was on a verge of traffic collapse as more than 10 inches of snow fell on the city, which is more than half of January’s average. Thousands of passengers were stranded overnight in the capital’s major airports, as several dozen flights were delayed. Muscovites woke up and found their cars, driveways and houses buried under a thick layer of snow, with city workers unable to get to smaller streets.
Moscow (Reuters / Sergei Karpukhin)
While the snowstorms have caused inconvenience for large population centers in western Russia, they have been life-threatening further east in the country. The polar circle city of Norilsk has been buried under 10 feet of snow – entire apartment blocks, markets, stores and offices were buried under snow overnight.
Banks of snow were as high as two people put together, reaching the second-story windows of some apartment buildings. Cars, stores, garages were blocked. Norilsk metropolitan workers were forced to dig passageways through the snow banks to create access between the outside world and the barricaded city. Meanwhile, icicles up to three feet in length have formed off the ledges of buildings, breaking at random and causing a lethal hazard for pedestrians below.
Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)
Tags:climate change, Moscow, Norilsk, Russia, Snow, wintwr
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Russia, Weather, Winter | Comments Off on Just another Russian winter — or is it global warming?
January 11, 2013
Swedish Radio is one of the more rabid and unthinking supporters of global warming orthodoxy (as are all the main stream media in Sweden). So I was rather surprised to see them giving prominence today to Per Krussel, Professor of Economics at Stockholm University. Normally Swedish Radio is so biased and bigoted on this subject that they would have made no mention of this if Krussel had not been a Swedish Professor. Of course – for balance – they then also interviewed a Professor on Environmental Economy who just happens to be a member of the IPCC and clearly backed the alarmist line — what else? He was less than impressive. For representing the IPCC they might just as well have interviewed someone from Greenpeace!
Krussel skewers the Stern Report on fundamental methodology but this itself is nothing new. The Stern Report from 2006 is another one where the content has been massaged to come to a pre-determined conclusion and is almost embarrassingly bad. In my view any document today which cites the Stern Report as support is itself discredited.
Swedish Radio: (free translation from the Swedish)
Many researchers believe that the threat from climate change is the critical issue of our time. But Per Krusell, professor of economics at Stockholm University, and leading a major international effort to calculate the economic costs of climate change, believes that the threat is not that critical in financial terms
“Climate change is a threat, it’s pretty big, but it’s not that huge when translated into dollars and cents” says Per Krusell.
Per Krusell leads an international research project to develop an economic model, which the world’s countries can use to figure out their future costs of climate change. The model should be finished in about a year and will be the world’s most advanced tools in this context, according to Per Krusell. So far, they have concluded that GDP in the worst case will only drop by a few percent in most countries, such as Sweden. This differs from the widely publicized Stern Report in 2006 pointing to significantly higher costs.
…….. above all, Krusell is critical of Stern for putting together all anticipated costs, without discounting these costs properly in the way economists usually do for future costs. …
(The Stern report used a discounting factor of 0.1% – but it is normal to use a discount rate of 1%, which therefore lowers the cost of future generations substantially.) …. Economist Per Krusell agrees that climate change is a big problem, but thinks it’s more important to focus on the economic development of the poor countries rather than combating climate change.
“When we consider the effects of climate change, we expect also that there will be a cost especially in poor countries, but it sums up to no great critical issue for the world. It is more important to get the poor countries to develop. I’m a little worried that “environmental thinking” leads to more important issues being ignored.”
Tags:climate change, climate change costs, Per Krusell, Stern Review, Stockholm University, Sweden
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Economics, Sweden | Comments Off on Climate change costs are not that critical compared to economic development of poor countries – Prof. Per Krussel
January 10, 2013
Not much comment needed.
The Jerusalem Light Rail on a snow covered Jaffa Road on Wednesday (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90 – The Times of Israel)
Jerusalem Post:
Greatest snowfall since 1992 sees Jerusalem municipality announce closure of schools, kindergartens; police shut Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway as snow predicted to persist until afternoon.
.. Elisha Peleg, an official in charge of emergencies with the Jerusalem Municipality, urged the city’s residents to remain at home and stay off the streets, telling Army Radio the area had overnight seen its greatest snowfall since 1992. He said 10 to 15 centimetres (4 to 6 inches) of snow had piled up in the city center and more than that in outlying areas. “The downtown area is bathed in white,” Peleg said.
“The elders of Jerusalem don’t remember such a snowstorm in years,” Peleg also said.
Tags:climate change, global warming, Israel, Jerusalem, Snow
Posted in Climate, Israel, Weather, Winter | 1 Comment »
January 9, 2013
UPDATE! The important point of this story is not whether global warming has stopped or is continuing or if the world is cooling. Climate will go the way it will. The real significance of this story is that climate models are not just far from perfect – they are plain wrong. And what is worse is that when a model is not borne out by reality, the “politically correct” but false assumptions (such as that man-made CO2 causes significant warming or that solar effects are minor) are not even reviewed.
This has been doing the rounds for a few days now but the BBC – which tends to be one of the pillars of the Global Warming religion – has finally come round to reporting that the British Met Office has predicted that global temperatures could decrease somewhat over the next decade. Of course it is good to see that a climate model is being revised in the face of reality. Unfortunately most climate models just retain their assumptions and add fudge factors every time reality fails to meet their forecasts where – instead – they ought to be questioning the very assumptions their models are built on. But that loss of face would be too expensive in terms of the funding already flowing into continuing with discredited models and would be too much to take in one go. But the fundamental requirement of good science is that when models don’t fit it is time to question the assumptions in the model – not to find fudge factors.
BBC: Climate model forecast is revised
The UK Met Office has revised one of its forecasts for how much the world may warm in the next few years. …. If the forecast is accurate, the result would be that the global average temperature would have remained relatively static for about two decades.
…. Climate scientists at the Met Office and other centres are involved in intense research to try to understand what is happening over the most recent period.
The most obvious explanation is natural variability – the cycles of changes in solar activity and the movements and temperatures of the oceans.
Infographic (Met Office): The forecasts are based on a comparison with the average global temperature over the period 1971-2000
Of course the BBC report then goes on to proclaim that this not a global cooling and that global warming will continue.
But of course neither this or any of the other exaggerated models will remove the assumed global warming – man-made carbon dioxide link for which there is no direct evidence whatever.
Tallbloke reported on the story here a few days ago.
Tags:carbon dioxide, climate change, Climate model, global warming, Met Office, Temperature record
Posted in Alarmism, Climate | 1 Comment »
January 6, 2013
In spite of the urban heat effect and perhaps because of the religious fanaticism of the global warming pundits, every winter witnesses a significant death toll in Delhi and North India from bitterly cold weather conditions. Cold is the real killer not warmth. It is adaptation to cold which is more difficult and it is what is required.
Delhi schools to be closed till Jan 12 due to cold wave: indiatvnews.com
If instead of the Canute-like arrogance of following a pseudo-scientific religion in trying to arrest climate change, we focused on adapting and coping with the normal and real-life, variations of weather — where the magnitude of these variations in real time dwarf those of long-term climate change — we would all be better served. It is successfully adapting to the on-going vagaries of weather (during both warming and cooling climate cycles) that has produced the greatest advances in human history. Futile attempts to control what are natural climate cycles is just plain stupid.
Cold records in Delhi: The minimum temperature in Delhi has been recorded at 1.9 degrees Celsius, which is five degrees below normal. The maximum temperature is 12.8 degrees, which is eight degrees below normal. This is the lowest minimum for January in the past five years.
…. On Saturday also, the capital had got no respite from the bitter cold as the minimum temperature settled at 2.9 degrees Celsius – four notches below average. … On Wednesday, the city witnessed the coldest day in 44 years when the maximum plummeted to 9.8 degress Celsius.
Cold wave in North India: The entire North India on Saturday continued to remain in the grip of severe cold, which claimed 11 more lives in Uttar Pradesh, taking the death toll this winter to 140.
Tags:climate, cold wave, deaths due to cold, winter
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, India, Weather, Winter | Comments Off on A week of new cold records in Delhi – must be punishment for man-made global warming
January 5, 2013
The January 2013 NASA forecast for the development of Solar Cycle 24 is out.
SC 24 prediction Jan 2013 – Hathaway -NASA
The current prediction for Sunspot Cycle 24 gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 69 in the Fall of 2013. The smoothed sunspot number has already reached 67 (in February 2012)due to the strong peak in late 2011 so the official maximum will be at least this high and this late. We are currently over four years into Cycle 24. The current predicted and observed size makes this the smallest sunspot cycle since Cycle 14 which had a maximum of 64.2 in February of 1906.
With sunspot activity at this low level the planet will cool. It remains to be seen whether this is the start of something like a Dalton Minimum (SC5 and 6) or even a Maunder Minimum. This cooling has begun and global temperatures peaked about 16 years ago and are now declining slightly while carbon dioxide concentration continues to increase. It is only a matter of time before the belief that carbon dioxide concentration (whether man-made or not) causes global warming will have to be completely discarded. But there is so much money now riding on this belief (and even though there is only conjecture and no direct evidence for this belief), that we will likely see a decade or more of rationalisation of reality before the belief is abandoned.
SC24 compared to SC5 in 2011 is shown below:
SC24 compared to SC5
Tags:climate change, Dalton minimum, global cooling, Maunder Minimum, SC 24, SC14, SC5, Solar cycles
Posted in Climate, Solar science | 1 Comment »
December 20, 2012
Down to -50C: Russians freeze to death…
Russia is enduring its harshest winter in over 70 years, with temperatures plunging as low as -50 degrees Celsius. Dozens of people have already died, and almost 150 have been hospitalized.
The country has not witnessed such a long cold spell since 1938, meteorologists said, with temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than the seasonal norm all over Russia.
Across the country, 45 people have died due to the cold, and 266 have been taken to hospitals. In total, 542 people were injured due to the freezing temperatures, RIA Novosti reported.
The Moscow region saw temperatures of -17 to -18 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, and the record cold temperatures are expected to linger for at least three more days. Thermometers in Siberia touched -50 degrees Celsius, which is also abnormal for December.
If this is global warming …. image. RIA Novosti / Aleksey Malgavko
The cold spell, along with snowfalls, has disrupted flights all over the country, and led to huge traffic jams. In the southern city of Rostov-on-Don some highways were closed due to snowfalls over the past two days, triggering a traffic collapse. …
Over the weekend, meteorologists predict temperatures will plunge even lower in the Moscow region, hitting -25. The Russian capital is also expected to be swept with snow, RIA Novosti reported.
Tags:global warming, Russia, weather, winter
Posted in Climate, Russia, Weather, Winter | Comments Off on Harshest Russian winter in 70 years – must be global warming
December 19, 2012
The International Energy Agency has just released its annual Medium-Term Coal Market Report (MCMR) and reports that “coal’s share of the global energy mix continues to rise, and by 2017 coal will come close to surpassing oil as the world’s top energy source”.
Yet global temperatures have not risen for 16 years and continue to decline. And the demonisation of the use of coal has increased electricity prices quite unnecessarily. The end of the world will not happen either on 21st December 2012 or by the use of fossil fuels.
In a press release the IEA says:
“Thanks to abundant supplies and insatiable demand for power from emerging markets, coal met nearly half of the rise in global energy demand during the first decade of the 21st Century,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven. “This report sees that trend continuing. In fact, the world will burn around 1.2 billion more tonnes of coal per year by 2017 compared to today – equivalent to the current coal consumption of Russia and the United States combined. Coal’s share of the global energy mix continues to grow each year, and if no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade.”
China and India lead the growth in coal consumption over the next five years. The report says China will surpass the rest of the world in coal demand during the outlook period, while India will become the largest seaborne coal importer and second-largest consumer, surpassing the United States.
The report notes that in the absence of a high carbon price, only fierce competition from low-priced gas can effectively reduce coal demand. “The US experience suggests that a more efficient gas market, marked by flexible pricing and fueled by indigenous unconventional resources that are produced sustainably, can reduce coal use, CO2 emissions and consumers’ electricity bills, without harming energy security,” said Ms. van der Hoeven. “Europe, China and other regions should take note.”
While coal consumption and carbon dioxide have been rising, global temperatures have not been paying any attention – much to the dismay of alarmist models.
(more…)
Tags:climate change, IEA, IEA Coal Market Report, International Energy Agency
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Coal, Energy | Comments Off on Coal consumption growing inexorably — but global temperatures are still declining
December 15, 2012
The draft IPCC AR5 report has been leaked and is available on the net.
IPCC AR5 draft leaked, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing – as well as a lack of warming to match model projections, and reversal on ‘extreme weather’
Of course this is only the draft report and AR5 is not due to be final till the end of 2013. The political summaries are not yet finalised and there is still plenty of time for data to be cherry-picked to support the conclusions to be drawn. But what is clear is that climate models are a load of old codswallop!
Observations just do not support the alarmist global warming models. The impact of solar forcings are beginning to be acknowledged. The role of carbon dioxide emissions is nothing but conjecture.
One picture tells the tale.
Model predictions versus observations
Here is the caption for this figure from the AR5 draft:
Estimated changes in the observed globally and annually averaged surface temperature (in °C) since 1990 compared with the range of projections from the previous IPCC assessments. Values are aligned to match the average observed value at 1990. Observed global annual temperature change, relative to 1961–1990, is shown as black squares (NASA (updated from Hansen et al., 2010; data available athttp://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/); NOAA (updated from Smith et al., 2008; data available at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.html#grid); and the UK Hadley Centre (Morice et al., 2012; data available at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/) reanalyses). Whiskers indicate the 90% uncertainty range of the Morice et al. (2012) dataset from measurement and sampling, bias and coverage (see Appendix for methods). The coloured shading shows the projected range of global annual mean near surface temperature change from 1990 to 2015 for models used in FAR (Scenario D and business-as-usual), SAR (IS92c/1.5 and IS92e/4.5), TAR (full range of TAR Figure 9.13(b) based on the GFDL_R15_a and DOE PCM parameter settings), and AR4 (A1B and A1T). The 90% uncertainty estimate due to observational uncertainty and internal variability based on the HadCRUT4 temperature data for 1951-1980 is depicted by the grey shading. Moreover, the publication years of the assessment reports and the scenario design are shown.
Tags:AR5, climate change, global warming models, IPCC, IPCC Fifth Assessment Report
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, UN | 1 Comment »
December 3, 2012
COP18 in Doha enters its second week and politicians are now arriving in droves. A small fortune has already been spent during the first week. But this is a gathering of an alarmist movement built on unprovable fears. Inevitably the greedy “groupies” gather (some 17,000 of them). A convention of the cowardly in the “theatre of the absurd”.
As The Economist puts it
NEVER let it be said that climate-change negotiators lack a sense of the absurd. Thousands of politicians, tree-huggers and journalists descended on Doha this week, adding their mite of hot air to the country that already has the world’s highest level of carbon emissions per head. The feeling of unreality is apt. ……. The jamboree in Doha is the 18th UN climate-change summit, but the third since a landmark one at Copenhagen in 2009.
We shall see – and are seeing — new alarmist articles and press releases every day till the end of this week. But the fundamental problem is not so much the politics of alarmism connected with this one non-issue of climate change, but the fact that the once laudable environmental movement now resorts to the politics of fear. Courage is singularly lacking.
Courage is the subordination of fear to purpose. Today however with the politics of alarmism, fears dominate purpose. Inevitably these are fears which can never be disproved because they are forecasts of what lies a long way in the future. And the politics of fear generates its own greedy “groupies”
Once upon a time, the environmentalists were a courageous lot and were surely instrumental in the cleaning up of many areas from the effects of real pollution … But the simple virtues of keeping things clean and preventing disease and improving the standard of living for humans has given way to the more pompous and pretentious goals of preventing global warming (an unbridled arrogance), of maintaining bio-diversity (and why is this important?) and of preserving “scarce resources due to the “limits to growth”…
… Inevitably the politics of alarmism are accompanied by the opportunists whose greed leads to all the scams surrounding environmental subsidies for renewable power or for carbon trading.
Tags:Alarmism, climate change, Courage, Doha, environment, Environmental cowardice, KyotoProtocol, United Nations, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, UN | Comments Off on COP18 in Doha: A convention of the cowardly in the “theatre of the absurd”
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