Posts Tagged ‘global warming’
January 6, 2011
Most homes in Delhi have no insulation and no central heating. Double glazing is almost unheard of. No doubt Pachauri’s home in the prestigious Golf Links area of Delhi is an exception. Current Delhi temperatures are running some 45°C lower than maximum summer temperatures. And from my week in Delhi during December 2010 I can testify that it is a mind and body numbing experience when temperatures inside the home are less than 10°C.
The claims that global warming is responsible and Pachauri’s IPCC must seem like bad jokes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12125207
A continuing cold snap has forced authorities in the Indian capital to keep schools closed till Sunday. Delhi has been badly hit by the cold, along with Indian-administered Kashmir, and the states of Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.
Temperatures have been hovering around 4°C after dipping to 3.7°C on Tuesday morning, the city’s lowest this winter. The death toll in the cold snap that has disrupted life across northern India has reportedly risen to 47.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/north-india-in-the-grip-of-intense-cold-wave-77387
The cold wave intensified further in Kashmir division, including Ladakh region, as the minimum temperature across the state dipped several degrees further, with Leh town freezing at -23 °C.
Leh recorded the coldest temperature in Kashmir division at -23 °C, which was 2.8 degrees lower than the minimum temperature recorded on Tuesday. The maximum temperature recorded in Leh was three degrees below the freezing point. In Srinagar city, the minimum temperature dipped by 1.3 deg C to settle at -5.4 °C. Kargil town witnessed an extremely cold night as the minimum temperature remained -18 °C for the second consecutive night. In Kashmir Valley, the tourist resort of Pahalgam recorded a temperature of – 11.6 °C which was nearly four degrees lower compared to Tuesday’s minimum of -7.7 °C.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/other-states/article1032332.ece
Daily wage labourers on their way to work braving the cold and windy conditions in New Delhi even as the minimum temperature dropped below 3.4°C the season's lowest, on 04, January 2011. Photo: V.V.Krishnan
Tags:Delhi winter, global warming, India cold wave, IPCC, Pachauri
Posted in India, Weather, Winter | Comments Off on Northern India shivers: Schools closed in Delhi till Sunday
January 5, 2011
The UK Met Office is busy spinning the story that it actually did forecast the coldest December in the UK in a 100 years but secretly informed only the cabinet of the UK government about this in October 2010. Secret forecasts for fear of being wrong! After all kings of old also had their own private soothsayers to study the entrails but they were usually executed if they could not spin their way out of wrong forecasts. But the Met Office story does not stand up and their credibility is in tatters.
The UK Met office (as an institution) is one of the most ardent supporters of Global Warming dogma which is concerned with climate not weather. This can only be a “political” choice or an act of faith since climate trends are of little significance for their main task of weather forecasting. While weather is only a subset of climate I find it difficult to believe that poor weather forecasting can be a sound bottom-up basis for forecasting climate.
I say that climate trends are of little significance for detailed weather forecasting because climate change considers temperature changes of about one degree per century or less whereas the daily variation at any particular location is typically 10 to 15 degrees, seasonal variations at any location are around 40 – 50°C over a year and geographical variation around the globe is also upto 50 °C at any moment in time. Any climate trends of the order of 1°C per century are then immaterial for the immediate weather forecast.
At a cost of some £200 million per year they do forecast the weather with some accuracy for upto about 5 days ahead but are notoriously poor with their long range forecasts (but I note that even their short term forecasts are not more accurate – statistically – than the simple statement that “the weather tomorrow will be the same as today”). As recently as October 2010 the Met Office published weather maps showing warm expectations for November, December and January – but they insist they did not make any long range forecasts. We are told by Harrabin of the BBC that this was because of their sensitivity to the ridicule poured on them after their forecasts of a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and a mild 2009/2010 winter proved spectacularly wrong. But , we are assured by Harrabin, they actually did forecast – correctly – a cold and snowy winter but only informed the UK cabinet secretly.
Presumably any future ridicule or budget cuts by the cabinet of the UK Government for being wrong would be preferable to any public ridicule!!
In any event the cabinet did not do very much with this confidential information (perhaps it was anonymous) and all the counties were woefully unprepared.
Sources:
Tags:Forecasting, global warming, Met Office, weather
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Weather | Comments Off on UK Met Office fears ridicule from public more than from their paymasters!
January 4, 2011
Munich Re – like all insurance companies – is in the business of alarmism. The insurance business relies on the total risk perceived by all the buyers of insurance products being significantly higher than the actual risk that materialises. The bigger this difference the greater the insurance company’s profits.
In a new press release Munich Re presents its overall picture of natural catastrophes in 2010.
Several major catastrophes in 2010 resulted in substantial losses and an exceptionally high number of fatalities. The overall picture last year was dominated by an accumulation of severe earthquakes to an extent seldom experienced in recent decades.
The facts are not in doubt but Munich Re’s opinionated conclusion and the introduction of global warming into the same breath as earthquakes and extreme weather is intellectually bankrupt and blatantly self-serving:
The high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change.
Munich Re’s business is best served if the perception of risk is very high, the actual risk is much lower than than that perceived and more and more people take to insuring these exaggerated risks. Munich Re – as other insurance companies – have become expert at taking real data, blending it with unjustified opinions and then applying a totally bogus “pondus” to exaggerating the perceived risk.
(more…)
Tags:Alarmism, climate change, earthquakes, global warming, hurricanes, Insurance, maximisation of risk perception, Munich Re
Posted in Alarmism, Business, Climate, Natural Disasters | 4 Comments »
December 29, 2010
NASA has made a new reduced forecast for the peak sunspot number and the time of occurrence of the peak of Solar Cycle 24. The peak number has been reduced from 90 to 64 and the time of the peak is unchanged at June 2013.
I have superimposed the development of the forecast peak and time of the peak on the base forecast. This is not any criticism of the forecast. It only emphasises that the forecasts are about something which is not very well understood. So far the forecast development is only in the direction of reducing sunspot numbers and delays in the time of attaining the peak. As the peak actually approaches the forecasts should stabilise but there is still some room for further reduction. It is not inconceivable that the SC24 will not peak till early 2014 and will only achieve peak sunspot numbers around 55. Solar cycle 24 could well have a length of 150+ months instead of the nominal 132 months.
That SC24 represents a very quiet sun and that taken together with SC23 this Landscheidt minimum represents a behaviour similar to the period leading up to the Dalton minimum is quite clear insofar as sunspot number is concerned. But the length of Solar Cycle 23 and its extended quiet period also has precedence.
Further similarities to SC4 and 5 were reported in
Agee, Ernest M., Emily Cornett, Kandace Gleason, 2010: An Extended Solar Cycle 23 with Deep Minimum Transition to Cycle 24: Assessments and Climatic Ramifications. J. Climate, 23, 6110–6114.
The extended length of solar cycle 23 and the associated deep quiet period (QP) between cycles 23 and 24 have been examined using the international sunspot record from 1755 to 2010. This study has also introduced a QP definition based on a (beginning and ending) mean monthly threshold value of less than 10 for the sunspot number. Features addressed are the length and intensity of cycle 23, the length of the QP and the associated number of spotless days, and the respective relationships between cycle intensity, length, and QP. The length of cycle 23 (153 months) is second only to cycle 4 (164 months), with an average of 132.5 months for the 11-yr cycle. The length of the QP between cycles 23 and 24 ranks eighth, extending from October 2005 through November 2009 (but subject to continued weakness in cycle 24). The number of spotless days achieved within this QP was 751 (and for all days within the transition from cycle 23 to cycle24, a record number of 801 spotless days had been observed through May 2010). Shortcomings of solar-convection-model predictions of sunspot activity and intensity are also noted, including the failure in the initial predictions of cycle-24 onset.
It would not be too surprising if SC24 only reached levels which were lower than the Dalton minimum and perhaps even approaching the lows of the Maunder minimum.
Tags:Dalton minimum, global warming, Landscheidt Minimum, Maunder Minimum, Solar Cycle 24, Solar cycles, Solar science
Posted in Science, Solar science | 2 Comments »
December 26, 2010
Christopher Booker has an interesting article in The Sunday Telegraph describing how a supposedly science-based institution can be perverted by political dogma; in this case global warming dogma perverting the forecasts of the UK Met Office.
By far the biggest story of recent days, of course, has been the astonishing chaos inflicted, to a greater or lesser extent, on all of our lives by the fact that we are not only enjoying what is predicted to be the coldest December since records began in 1659, but also the harshest of three freezing winters in a row….. But central to all this – as the cry goes up: “Why wasn’t Britain better prepared?” – has been the bizarre role of the Met Office…… in these past three years the Met Office’s forecasting record has become a national joke. Ever since it predicted a summer warmer and drier than average in 2007 – followed by some of the worst floods in living memory – its forecasts have been so unerringly wrong that even the chief adviser to our Transport Secretary might have noticed.
The real question, however, is why has the Met Office become so astonishingly bad at doing the job for which it is paid nearly £200 million a year – in a way which has become so stupendously damaging to our country?
The answer is that in the past 20 years, as can be seen from its website, the Met Office has been hijacked from its proper role to become wholly subservient to its obsession with global warming. (At one time it even changed its name to the Met Office “for Weather and Climate Change”.) This all began when its then-director John Houghton became one of the world’s most influential promoters of the warmist gospel. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and remained at the top of it for 13 years. It was he who, in 1990, launched the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change, closely linked to the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia (CRU), at the centre of last year’s Climategate row, which showed how the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy.
The full article is here.
Tags:Christopher Booker, climate change, global warming, Met Office
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Science, Weather | Comments Off on Green hijack of the UK Met Office
December 21, 2010
It used to be that the Global Warming zealots warned about the possible disappearance of snow and the mild and wet winters to come in Europe. But their arrogance knows no bounds. They have changed their tune and irrespective of what weather may prevail they mange to put it down to Global Warming. They now put the coldest December in a hundred years and the current white-out across Northern Europe down to Global Warming.
That snow outside is what global warming looks like
James Delingpole at The Telegraph is lauging his socks off.
Not to be outdone, the SMH thinks the possibility of having a White Christmas during the height of Australia’s summer is also due to Global Warming!!!!
The Alarmists cannot live with the thought that man made effects are puny and inconsequential compared to the effects of the sun.
Mild winters, warm winters, early winters, coldest winters in 100 years are all quoted in defence of global warming dogma. They are all merely grist to the mill of Global Warming arrogance.
Science has been left behind in some far and distant galaxy.
Tags:climate, climate change, early winter, global warming, weather, white Christmas
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Science, Weather, Winter | Comments Off on Global warming arrogance takes “credit” for the white-out in Europe and the White Christmas in Australia
December 8, 2010
Image via Wikipedia
While visiting relatives in Bangalore I notice that all their solar powered lamps – installed a year or so ago in a surge of environmental consciousness – are all just ornaments on the garden path and provide no light any more. Any talk about them is somewhat embarassing and discouraged!!!
But at least in India the incandescent light bulb is not banned as it is in the environmentally alarmist EU.
As I have posted before I find the entire low energy lamp movement totally unconvincing and whenever I do the sums I find the environmental impact on reducing carbon footprint (which in any case is of little importance) to be quite insignificant.
Moreover, I find the low energy lamps cold and unattractive compared to the simple old-fashioned, incandescent light bulb.
Now comes confirmation that in fact the low energy lamps are not that environmentally friendly:
Consumer protection organisations have demanded a suspension of the EU ban on incandescent light bulbs, citing official tests that showed the new compact fluorescent lamps to be dangerous if broken.
The energy saving bulbs show mercury levels 20 times higher than regulations allow in the air surrounding them for up to five hours after they are broken, according to tests released Thursday by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA).
“If the industry can’t manage to offer safe bulbs, then the incandescent bulbs must remain on the market until autumn of 2011,” said Gerd Billen, the leader of the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZVB).
I for one would be very happy to see their return.
Tags:Alarmism, global warming, Incandescent light bulb
Posted in Alarmism, Business, Energy, Environment | 4 Comments »
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