Wind turbines – not just hateful but ruddy dangerous too!

Telegraph
"And lest you think this is the perniciously biased propagandising of an evil climate change denier probably in the pay of Big Oil, Big Carbon, Big Koch, etc allow me to remind of the latest convert to the anti-wind cause. Here is what one man wrote in a letter to Torridge district council objecting to plans to erect an 84 metre turbine at Witherdon Wood in one of the loveliest parts of North Devon.
I am James Lovelock, scientist and author, known as the originator of Gaia theory, a view of the Earth that sees it as a self-regulating entity that keeps the surface environment always fit for life… I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood and misapplied. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation.

Single graph demonstrates man-made CO2 is not the driver of global warming

The Hockey Schtick
"Plot for yourself here a single graph that simultaneously demonstrates the clear observational evidence that
temperature drives CO2
CO2 does not drive temperature
man is not the cause of the rise in CO2 levels
The effect follows the cause; the cause does not follow the effect. Short-term global temperature changes precede CO2 levels by about 1 year as shown by observations, and by 800+ years in ice core data."

Inconvenient truth: Sea level rise is decelerating

The Hockey Schtick
"A paper published in the Journal of Coastal Research finds that sea level rise around mainland Australia decelerated from 1940 to 2000. According to the latest NOAA sea level budget, global sea levels rose at only 1.1 - 1.3 mm/year from 2005-2012, which is less than half of the rate claimed by the IPCC [3.1 mm/yr] and is equivalent to less than 5 inches per century. Contrary to alarmist claims, sea level rise decelerated over the 20th century, has also decelerated since 2005, and there is no evidence of any human influence on sea levels."

In the faint hope Emerson can be educated

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"One man presents science on the ABC. The other is a senior minister in the government that’s imposed the carbon tax. You would expect both not to be so ignorant about the very basic data on global warming: ......In the foolish hope that these two men may reconsider their opinions after consulting the evidence, here is data from the British Met showing no statistically significant warming for 16 years: ..."

Japan’s ‘Cool Hand Luke’ moment for surface temperature

WUWT
"The Japanese data line in purple is about .25 degree cooler than the NASA, NOAA, and Met Office data sets after the year 2000. ....Is very telling, because it suggests that Japan is using an entirely different method for both land and sea data. For the post 2001 land data, it suggests they use the CLIMAT data as is, rather than the “value added” processing that NCDC/NOAA and NASA GISS do. The Met Office gets the NCDC/NOAA data already pre-processed with the GHCN3 algorithms. NASA GISS deconstructs the data then applies their own set of sausage factory adjustments, which is why their anomaly is often the highest of all the data sets.
Prior to 2001, Japans Met Agency uses the GHCN data, which is pre-processed and adjusted through another sausage recipe pioneered by Dr. Thomas Peterson at NCDC. .......So, it appears that Japan’s Meteorological agency is using adjusted GHCN data up to the year 2000, and from 2001 they are using the CLIMAT report data as is, without adjustments. To me, this clearly explains the divergence when you look at the NASA plot magnified and note when the divergence starts. .......If anyone ever needed the clearest example ever of how NOAA and NASA’s post facto adjustments to the surface temperature record increase the temperature, this is it.
Now, does anyone want to bet that the activist scientists at NOAA/NCDC (Peterson) and NASA (Hansen) start lobbying Japan to change their methodology to be like theirs?"

The wind turbine that couldn't cope with a gale: £250,000 tower crashes to the ground after its blades spin out of control

Daily Mail

"A £250,000 wind turbine was blown down by gale-force winds after its blades span out of control and caught fire. The controversial 115-foot tower at East Ash Farm in Devon, near Holsworthy, toppled over and was left a 'mangled, blackened wreck'. The massive structure - which is as tall as a ten-storey building - collapsed in the stormy weather as Britain was battered by gusts of up to 135mph. The turbine was was only built in 2010, and was supposed to have lifespan of 25 years.
Oooops! (at least they didn’t name it ‘robust’(WUWT)
Wind turbine collapses in high wind (Telegraph)

Antarctic Sea Ice – 4th Largest For This Day

sunshine hours
"As Antarctic Sea Ice approaches minimum for the year, Antarctic Sea Ice for Day 26 is the 4th largest amount behind 2008, 1995 and 2004. The way things are tracking there is a good chance a record for most ice at minimum may be set."

Is there A sea level?

E M Smith
"What we call “Sea Level” is the MEAN Sea Level. It is an average taken from a bunch of places around the planet and averaged. This “has issues”. ...... We’ve got 5 meter range fluctuations over 1000 years. So if the present ‘sea level’ rose by 5 meters, it would be back where it was in 1000 A.D.! So what SUV and coal fired power plants caused it to be so high back then? Eh? I have no idea if that bit of history is due to global shifts of ‘sea level’ or local geology shifts. Nor does anyone else. That there are similar dated ports and harbors in Turkey and Italy, now found well inland, implies to me that ‘sea level’ was higher, and has been dropping, and that any recent ‘rise’ is likely just due to a normal cycle of rise / fall on a 1000 to 2000 year basis. Pointing at present sea level changes as evidence of human induces warming is folly."

The Overwhelming Judgment of Science Rejects Obama’s Global Warming Claims

Climate Realists
"Unfortunately for global warming alarmists, Obama’s case was exceptionally flimsy. Then again, Obama did not have much to work with, as the overall case for global warming alarmism is exceptionally flimsy. .....Thankfully, President Obama, the “overwhelming judgment of science” shows the asserted global warming crisis exists solely in the minds of global warming alarmists."

Latest Uphere magazine: Polar bear invasion; "There aren’t just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears"

Tom Nelson
"In villages across the Arctic, Inuit are reporting an invasion. Polar bears, once rare, are now strolling the streets, peeking in windows, killing dogs – even stalking kids. No place has been more menaced than Arviat."

New paper finds worst-case scenario is ice-free Arctic by year 2400

The Hockey Schtick
"A paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters finds that even under the most exaggerated "strongest" forcing scenario simulated by climate models, the Arctic "becomes summer ice-free by the end of the 21st century and year-round ice-free by the end of the 23rd century." Leaving aside that climate models offer little more than simulating a random walk, many alarmist climate scientists have had no shame from incorrectly predicting a year-round ice-free Arctic many times in the past or within the next two years.

Gillard’s carbon scheme faces collapse

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"The Gillard Government has hit Australia with a carbon tax of $23 a tonne. It predicts that when we switch to international carbon trading in 2015/16, the world price for carbon credits will be $29 a tonne. That now seems highly unlikely, given the collapse of the two main carbon trading markets: ........ This confronts the Gillard Government with a financial and political disaster. It is giving many Australians compensation to match a carbon price of $23 - and rising as the carbon tax increases. That compensation is paid for by the carbon tax. But if the tax does not match the compensation, a great financial crater opens under the Government’s feet - unless it slashes the handouts: ...."

Matt Ridley: A Lukewarmer’s Ten Tests

WUWT
"I have written about climate change and energy policy for more than 25 years. I have come to the conclusion that current energy and climate policy is probably more dangerous, both economically and ecologically, than climate change itself. ........At the moment, it seems highly likely that the cure is worse than disease.We are taking chemotherapy for a cold."

Carbon Credit Traders Shut As FSA Warns On Scams

IE
"Fears that some investment firms offering carbon credit investment opportunities are just scams has been confirmed after the government closed down one of the industry’s leading players. The government-run Insolvency Service has ordered that Eco Global Markets Ltd be put into provisional liquidation on ‘public interest grounds’. The petition for liquidation was brought on behalf of Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) at Manchester Crown Court." (h/t Tom Nelson)

Expert predicts ‘Monsoon Britain’

WUWT
"Last summer was the second wettest on record and experts who have studied rainfall and river flow patterns over 250 years say we must prepare for worse to come. Professor Stuart Lane, from Durham University’s new Institute of Hazard and Risk, says that after about 30 to 40 less eventful years, we seem to be entering a ‘flood-rich’ period. More flooding is likely over a number of decades.
Prof. Lane, who publishes his research in the current edition of the academic journal Geography, set out to examine the wet summer of 2007 in the light of climate change. His work shows that some of the links made between the summer 2007 floods and climate change were wrong. ....
However, in looking at longer rainfall and river flow records, Prof. Lane shows that we have forgotten just how normal flooding in the UK is. He looked at seasonal rainfall and river flow patterns dating back to 1753 which suggest fluctuations between very wet and very dry periods, each lasting for a few years at a time, but also very long periods of a few decades that can be particularly wet or particularly dry. In terms of river flooding, the period since the early 1960s and until the late 1990s appears to be relatively flood free, especially when compared with some periods in the late 19th century and early 20th Century.
As a result of analysing rainfall and river flow patterns, Prof. Lane believes that the UK is entering a flood rich period that we haven’t seen for a number of decades. He said: “We entered a generally flood-poor period in the 1960s, earlier in some parts of the country, later in others. ..."

MORE SIGNS THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS JUST HOT AIR

Daily Express
"GLOBAL warming is likely to be less extreme than claimed, researchers said yesterday. The most likely temperature rise will be 1.9C (3.4F) compared with the 3.5C predicted by the Intergovern­mental Panel on Climate Change. .......the climate sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation said: “This research confirms what we have been saying all along. The global warming standstill of the last 16 years is having a dramatic effect on climate models and predictions. The Met Office should now reassess its own, flawed ­computer models and tone down the alarmist pronouncements which are no longer trustworthy.”

Alarmist scientist admits: whoops, we exaggerated

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"A new study by warmist scientists admits the IPCC probably over-estimated predicted warming by nearly 100 per cent. But don’t you dare doubt the catastrophe is coming: ...... The significance of these findings lie not just in that they confirmed sceptics were right to doubt. That the climate scientists we were told not to “deny” predicted twice the warming some now say is actually coming. That the pause in the warming sceptics were howled down for noticing is actually so real that warmist scientists now openly acknowledge it.
The great significance is this: if warmists now predict only half the warming they once did, huge schemes to “stop” global warming become even more vastly expensive when costs are reckoned against benefits."

Obama speaks: the evidence is overwhelmed

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" President Obama suggested in his second inaugural speech that God expects us to “preserve our planet” by taking steps to combat “the threat of climate change”. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science,” he said, “but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling droughts and more powerful storms.”
He seemed clearly to be blaming man-made climate change for the fact that his country last year endured its worst drought for 75 years; for Storm Sandy, which flooded New York; and for a record acreage of forest lost to fires. But one wonders how closely Mr Obama consulted “the overwhelming judgment of science” on these matters.
The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no rising trend of drought in the US since the 1880s (the 1930s Dust Bowl disaster long preceding the scare over global warming). Figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration similarly show no rising trend in US hurricane activity (more intense in the 1950s than in recent years). As for forest fires, there are many experts (as in Australia and Spain) who argue that much of the increase in fire damage is due to pressure from “green” environmentalists to forbid the clearing of underbrush, which encourages fires to spread quicker and further than proper woodland management would allow.
I am not sure that the President’s wish to see yet more subsidies poured into windmills and solar panels will do as much to change the Earth’s climate as he fondly believes."

Mann overboard! Pot, kettle, conspiracy edition

WUWT
"While dodging the issue of his own ten thousand dollar speaking fees this past week, Mike Mann thinks its all a big hugely funded conspiracy (like those WUWT calendar sales). From a hilarious interview at The Independent:
A climate scientist who says he has been subjected to a vitriolic hate campaign has denounced the way that American billionaires have been able to secretly finance the climate-sceptic organisations that have attacked him.
......On the subject of the Koch Brothers and funding of sceptic organizations, Dr. Mann might recall that his criminal acquaintance, Dr. Peter Gleick’s document theft was helpful it putting that issue to rest once and for all. From Junkscience.com
As this page shows, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation only gave $25,000 to Heartland in 2011 (about 0.5% of Heartland’s budget) for a health care project. Heartland only hoped to get $200,000 from the Foundation in 2012 — again for its health care project. But Dr. Mann would never talk about such adverse results.
...[versus Mann's money].For those keeping score, that’s almost $6 million total for various predictions,models and reconstructions over the last 13 years by Mann and his playmates."

Always Trust Your Gut Extinct

WUWT
"The backstory for today’s adventure is that this is the first scientific question I seriously researched. It is also the reason I don’t trust the “experts” or the “consensus”. In 1988, E. O. Wilson, an ant expert with little knowledge of extinction, made a startling claim that extinction rates were through the roof. .....This claim quickly went viral and soon was believed by everyone. So back in 2003, a decade ago now, I researched the question, found that Wilson was wrong by orders of magnitude, wrote it up, ....... For years I was the only person I knew of who was making the claim that E. O. Wilson should have stuck to his ants and left extinctions alone. Wherever I looked scientists disagreed with my findings. .....What I learned in that episode was that my bad number detector works quite well, that I should stick to my guns if I think I’m right, and that I should never, ever, ever place any faith in the opinions of the experts. They were all wrong, every single last swingin’ Richard of them, and I was right. .....It is my strong belief that I will also be vindicated in my claim that the earth’s temperature is regulated, not by CO2, but by a host of interlocking and mutually supportive homeostatic mechanisms that maintain the temperature within a fairly narrow range … time will tell. In my opinion, the experts in the climate field have shown that they don’t know a whole lot more about the real underpinnings of the climate than E. O. Wilson knew about extinctions … but that’s just me, and YMMV."
------------------------------------
David Suzuki and Scientific and Social Responsibility. (Dr Tim Ball)
"Wilson’s extinction claim was 27,000 per year, or 3 per hour. He also predicted 22 percent of all species will be extinct by 2022. Can Wilson or Suzuki identify any extinctions in the last 10 years? During that time over a million new species were discovered and that’s only part of what remains. Here’s why.
“Furthermore, the study, published by PLoS Biology, says a staggering 86% of all species on land and 91% of those in the seas have yet to be discovered, described and catalogued.”

Bjorn Lomborg: Climate-Change Misdirection

WSJ
"In his second inaugural address on Monday, President Obama laudably promised to "respond to the threat of climate change." Unfortunately, when the president described the urgent nature of the threat—the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms"—the scary examples suggested that he is contemplating poor policies that don't point to any real, let alone smart, solutions. ...Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%. .......Claiming that droughts are a consequence of global warming is also wrong. The world has not seen a general increase in drought. A study published in Nature in November shows globally that "there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years." .......As for one of the favorites of alarmism, hurricanes in recent years don't indicate that storms are getting worse. Measured by total energy (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), hurricane activity is at a low not encountered since the 1970s. The U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century—the last Category 3 or stronger storm was Wilma, more than seven years ago." (h/t Matt Ridley)

Al Gore’s Travelin’ Global Warming Show

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
"For some people, environmentalism has become a religion. With its own hellfire-and-brimstone preachers. ...."

Uniform priors and the IPCC

Bishop Hill
"So quantitative results from any studies that use the flat prior should just be disregarded, and journals should stop publishing any results based on flat priors. Let’s hope the IPCC authors understand all that."

Japan drops out of the carbon race

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"Japan will rethink its international pledge to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Thursday, indicating the nation may have to lower its goal. Suga told a news conference that Tokyo will set a new target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions because the Fukushima nuclear crisis has made the original goal difficult to achieve."

Germany’s Solar Bloodbath Continues….Bosch Solar Arm Loses More Than $2 Billion in 3 Years!

NoTricksZone
"Klimaretter, the German catastrophe-obsessed warmist site that dedicates itself to “rescuing the climate”, has a story today of the ongoing bloodbath in the German solar industry, here. .."

Leaked UN climate report slammed for citing WWF, Greenpeace

Fox News
"This isn’t the first time the WWF has been used as a source in a climate assessment report by the U.N.'s IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2007, the panel relied on statements made in a WWF article to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. That claim was based on nothing more than a remark that a scientist made in a 1999 interview with New Scientist magazine."

New paper finds why weather & climate models are so often wrong

The Hockey Schtick
""Fluid dynamics expert and engineering professor Julie Crockett has figured out why the weatherman is so often wrong. According to Crockett, forecasters make mistakes because the models they use for predicting weather can't accurately track highly influential elements called internal waves." "Internal waves are difficult to capture and quantify as they propagate, deposit energy and move energy around," Crockett said. "When forecasters don't account for them on a small scale, then the large scale picture becomes a little bit off, and sometimes being just a bit off is enough to be completely wrong about the weather." Note climate models are the same computer models used by weather forecasters, only run for longer periods of time. If short term weather cannot be reliably predicted, long term climate change projections are exponentially more uncertain."

Breaking: Major shale oil find in South Australia (geopolitical shift coming?)

JoNova
"SOUTH Australia is sitting on oil potentially worth more than $20 trillion, independent reports claim - enough to turn Australia into a self-sufficient fuel producer. Brisbane company Linc Energy yesterday released two reports, based on drilling and seismic exploration, estimating the amount of oil in the as yet untapped Arckaringa Basin surrounding Coober Pedy ranging from 3.5 billion to 233 billion barrels of oil. At the higher end, this would be "several times bigger than all of the oil in Australia", Linc managing director Peter Bond said. This has the potential to turn Australia from an oil importer to an oil exporter."

Eu Carbon price loses 40% of its value in one day

WUWT
"CO2 prices in freefall as traders despair over EU vote"

Obama's covert plans for climate

POLITICO
"Energy insiders say the White House will dribble out executive actions and federal rules over the next four years — the same low-key, bureaucratic approach the administration has taken since 2009." (h/t Climate Depot)

New paper notes long-term climate change may be 'inherently unpredictable'

The Hockey Schtick
"A paper published today in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences reveals the abject failure of climate models to project either the transient or long-term ["equilibrium"] climate change from greenhouse gases. The paper notes, "The Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) has a large uncertainty among models participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) and has recently been presented as “inherently unpredictable”. One way to circumvent this problem is to consider the Transient Climate Response (TCR)[short-term response to greenhouse gases]. However, the TCR among AR4 models also differ by more than a factor of 2." Furthermore, the authors find that the projections vary by 30% even within the same model with the same equilibrium climate sensitivity."

Team of Former NASA Scientists Conclude: 'There is no convincing physical evidence to support the man-made climate change hypothesis'

Climate Change Dispatch
"WASHINGTON, Jan. 23, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A group of 20 ex-NASA scientists have concluded that the science used to support the man-made climate change hypothesis is not settled and no convincing physical evidence exists to support catastrophic climate change forecasts. Beginning in February 2012, the group of scientists calling themselves The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS) team received presentations by scientists representing all sides of the climate change debate and embarked on an in-depth review of a number of climate studies. Employing a disciplined approach of problem identification and root cause analysis honed from decades of dealing with life threatening safety issues in successfully sending astronauts up through Earth's atmosphere and returning them safely home, the TRCS team concluded that no imminent threat exists from man-made CO2."

Global Temperature Updates – 2012

WUWT
"While Obama is imploring us to stop the global warming that is bringing us “the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms”, it would seem to be a good idea to see exactly what global temperatures have been doing in the last year. ......Perhaps the President might care to tell us what global warming he is talking about!"

Leading German Meteorologist Dismisses Climate Horror Scenarios…”Are Without Any Scientific Merit”

NoTricksZone
"Dr. Karsten Brandt is one of Germany’s leading commercial meteorologists and runs www.donnerwetter.de/, which provides forecasting services in the private sector. He often appears as an expert in the German media, ..."

Spiegel’s stunning 8 part series – Climate Catastrophe: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research

WUWT
"If you have not read this yet, now is the time. Given what president Obama recently said about skeptics in his inauguration address, I thought this 2010 article would be worth revisiting.
In Germany, there’s a revolution going on. That revolution is that they are backing away from the global warming issue, and taking on much more pragmatic outlook on it an many things “green”. For example, they are going big on coal power. Below is one excerpt from the series, describing the David and Goliath story of Steve McIntyre. Links to all eight articles of the series follow. I suggest sharing this far and wide, because it tells the skeptic story quite well.

Lomborg: Electricity prices for German households have increased 61% since 2000 – renewables blamed

WUWT
"Real German electricity prices for households have increased 61% since 2000. One quarter of household costs now stems directly from renewable energy. Also, the increase is *not* because of increasing production costs (which have actually slightly declined since 1978). The increase is due to dramatically increasing taxes, most noticeably from the Renewable Energy Act (EEG). In 2013 the EEG will increase 50% to 6.28 euro-cent (5.28 cents plus 19% VAT). In June 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel famously promised to keep EEG prices stable, but this promise has now clearly been broken. The German household will pay 24% of its electricity bill to renewables."

Chicago warehouse turns to ice after firefighter's water freezes on building as Midwest experiences day 4 of cold snap with temperatures plummeting below -36F

Daily Mail
"A wave of arctic air from Canada is sweeping through the Midwest - Historic warehouse in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood was destroyed in five-alarm fire last night; building is today sheathed in ice - Authorities believe the cold could have killed at least three people so far and are issuing health warnings - The air north of Great Lakes 'colder than that of the North Pole'

Extreme cold encases Midwest, Northeast: It's even too cold to ski

LA Times
"For many parts of the Midwest and Northeast, the extreme cold snap is bad -- it's so bad that even a winter resort had to close temporarily. It was too cold to ski. Freezing, bitter temperatures have hugged parts of the nation, turning the usual winter chill into a fond memory. Beginning late Saturday, Arctic air swept down through Canada, pushing temperatures so low that a return to merely zero would seem like a tropical heat wave. The National Weather Service said states from Ohio through to the far northeast of Maine could expect to be slammed by that Arctic blast on Wednesday and even into the weekend.
How cold was it? It was so cold that Embarrass, Minn., lived up to its name, reporting temperatures of minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Other parts of Minnesota reported temperatures within a few degrees. But it is more than just the temperatures. Icy winds made the chill seem worse. Wind-chill warnings fell like snowflakes throughout the Northeast, from Presque Isle and Caribou in Maine through Vermont and even into New York City, where icy blasts were expected to make it feel well below zero, although forecasters thought temperatures might actually climb into single digits. It was so cold that Wildcat Mountain in New Hampshire announced it would close Wednesday and Thursday. Temperatures in the negative double digits are expected, but icy winds will create a chill effect of minus 48 degrees Fahrenheit."

Of climate science and stomach bugs

Quadrant Online
"There are some instructive examples to make us wary of the claims that thousands of scientists support the “certainty” of climate change being due mostly to atmospheric carbon dioxide from the use of fossil fuels, and one of the most persuasive case studies of the “so convinced” collective view being proven wrong is the celebrated and once-controversial debate about the cause of stomach ulcers and the best way to cure them."

Greenpeace’s Vision for America: Unemployed, Broke, Miserable

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
"Greenpeace thinks President Obama should destroy lives now. Because of an ill-defined, generalized risk of climate change sometime in the future."

Cold Claims Over 300 Lives In Eastern Europe – Tens Of Thousands Without Power…Media Pretend It’s Warming!

NoTricksZone
"The European media are just too embarrassed about having gotten it completely wrong when it comes to global warming. So they just continue pretending that the cold isn’t really happening. As people are freezing to death all around them this winter, they keep telling themselves (and us) it’s getting warmer! I’ve never witnessed such an astonishingly surreal situation."

Inaugural Lies and the Big Chill

Climate Change Dispatch
"To what “climate change” is Obama referring? Is it the now thoroughly debunked “global warming” hoax? Is it the climate change of the 11,500 years since the last ice age? Or is it “the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms” to which Obama referred? If it is the latter, does anyone actually believe that these natural events can be mitigated by anything Americans or the entire population of the world can do? Did any among the thousands in attendance at the inauguration, shivering in the frigid weather, wonder what the President was talking about or why?"

Europe Today: Stealing Wood, Burning Wood

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
"Last month, I took a six-hour train ride from Munich to Berlin. As we swept through the German countryside, I noticed a great deal of firewood. It was piled high, close to houses and outbuildings. It was stacked in long rows against stone walls and fences. My guess is that we burn a comparable amount of wood in Canada and the US during the winter, but I hadn’t expected to see so much of it in a nation as environmentally conscious as I imagine Germany to be. .......What’s more interesting to me is that some Europeans apparently feel so pinched by their heating bills that they’re now stealing firewood. The weekly German news magazine, Der Spiegel, is currently running an English-language story titled Woodland Heists: Rising Energy Costs Drive Up Forest Thievery. We hear a great deal about Germany’s aggressive pursuit of renewable energy. What we hear less about is the fact that renewable energy is expensive. Germans reportedly purchased 400,000 new wood stoves in 2011, and have been doing so in increasing numbers since 2005."

How The Change Comes, a remarkable article

E M Smith
"Here is an example of what I have been waiting 1/2 decade to see. An article where someone says ~”Hang on a minute. Isn’t it cold and snowy? Just how is that ‘warming’?” It is a remarkable article, both for what it says, and for how. It is well written. But also for something about the “by whom”. The author clearly says he’s all for more energy efficiency and cleaner air. He also says he’s not got the background to sort out the “science”. Even given that, he is looking at the “Argument from Authority” and seeing the fallacy. He is looking at the cold and snow and saying ~’that is just not right’. He’s seeing the scam of “cap and tax” and “global warming” for what it is. In short, we are starting to see folks say “But the King has no clothes”…
......As a cold wet snowy frozen winter covers everywhere from Alaska, through Canada, the UK, Germany (EU in general), on down through the Levant where the Holy Land got snow, and on through Russia and even to China where they are having a very hard winter… Finally on to Korea and Japan… All around the globe, the story is the same. It’s the 1950s to 1970s all over again. Yes, there will be some places, and some times, when the Loopy Jet Stream bring excess (Welcome!) warmth. All that cold headed south in some ‘blobs’ has to have counter current warmth headed north to be disposed out the polar IR window. But over time that built up heat will fade, and we will be increasingly left with only the cold.

Obama declares war on reality

Telegraph
" Barack Obama has used his second inaugural address to declare war on an even more nebulous threat to the security of the world: reality, itself.
Here's how he put it in his inaugural address:
'We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.'
The first sentence is a blatant untruth ....... The second sentence is a devious combination of the junk factoid and the non sequitur.That "overwhelming judgement of science" is a reference to the comprehensively discredited Doran survey: the one where the "97 per cent of climate scientists" turned out to consist of just 75 out of 77 climate scientists who could be bothered to reply to two silly and dubious questions.
As for the idea that "science" ever has such a thing as an "overwhelming judgement": this would be news to Galileo, Newton, Einstein and indeed all the great scientists of history, all of whom made their names by advancing theories which completely overturned the "overwhelming judgement" of their contemporaries.
It's probably true, up to a point, that "none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms". But only if you accept that everyone lives in a region susceptible to fires, drought and powerful storms, which not everyone does. ...."

The BBC froze me out because I don't believe in global warming: Outspoken as ever, David Bellamy reveals why you don't see him on TV any more

Daily Mail
"Conservationist dismissed man-made global warming as 'poppycock' in 2004 - BBC 'stopped giving him work' and his career dried up as a result, he says - Campaigners spat at him in street and sent him 'paedophile' hate mail
"‘And it’s just nonsense. For the last 16 years, temperatures have been going down and the carbon dioxide has been going up and the crops have got greener and grow quicker. We’ve done plenty to smash up the planet, but there’s been no global warming caused by man.’

Snowed by the experts

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
" 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… In the Altai Republic in Western Siberia, 12 Russian settlements were isolated because of the snowstorm… In the end of 2012, Russia saw extreme winter not witnessed since 1938. The coldest-ever December in Russia led to the evacuation of hundreds of people in Siberia, where temperatures fell below -50 degrees Celsius; Moscow also saw its coldest night ever for the season."

Johnson dares doubt warmists

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
" Very, very few senior politicians dare to challenge the global warming “consensus” - even now, after 16 years of no warming. It seems political suicide to challenge the latest faith of the cultural elite. Ask Tony Abbott.
One exception has been Czech President Vaclav Klaus. But now comes another, London mayor Boris Johnston, seen as a future contender for leadership of Britain’s Conservative Party. What’s important is not so much the argument he puts, but that he dares to put it: ........Johnson is therefore right. It is now proper for senior politicians to keep an open mind on global warming, and especially when deciding whether to spend billions to “stop” it."

Coldest Air of the Season Arriving

The weather channel
"Monday will be the coldest day of the cold snap for most of North Dakota and Minnesota, with some places shivering through highs in the double digits below zero! Extremely dangerous wind chills of 40 to 50 below zero will grip northern North Dakota and northern Minnesota Monday."

Uncanny Winter Weather Accuracy of Britain’s Most Astonishing Forecaster

Climate Realists
"Astrophysicist and weather expert, Piers Corbyn who runs WeatherAction.com, has been uncannily accurate so far this winter. Londoner Corbyn produces long-range weather forecasts so good that they never cease beating and baffling Britain’s gigantic £200 million-a-year official weather forecaster, the Met Office. What is truly remarkable is that the details for Corbyn’s daring January 2013 forecast were made 45 days ahead, a task beyond the competency of “traditional” methods. In the early part of this winter this mild-mannered and avuncular upstart had already made fools of the Met Office (MO) for their “Beast from the East” scare. The MO flunked badly while Corbyn’s bold prediction for a mild early winter proved totally accurate."

It’s snowing, and it really feels like the start of a mini ice age

Telegraph
"Lower solar activity means – broadly speaking – that there is less agitation of the warm currents of air from the tropical to the temperate zones, so that a place like Britain can expect to be colder and damper in summer, and colder and snowier in winter. “There is every indication that we are at the beginning of a mini ice age,” he says. “The general decline in solar activity is lower than Nasa’s lowest prediction of five years ago. That could be very bad news for our climate. We are in for a prolonged cold period. Indeed, we could have 30 years of general cooling.”

It’s snowing, and it really feels like the start of a mini ice age – London Mayor Boris Johnson

WUWT
"When the solar acne diminishes, it seems that the Earth gets colder. No one contests that when the planet palpably cooled from 1645 to 1715 — the Maunder minimum, which saw the freezing of the Thames — there was a diminution of solar activity. The same point is made about the so-called Dalton minimum, from 1790 to 1830. And it is the view of Piers Corbyn that we are now seeing exactly the same phenomenon today."

The climate fools rush in at the inaguration

WUWT
"From AP Video: President Barack Obama is pledging to respond to what he calls “the threat of climate change.” He says that failing to do so would be a betrayal of the nation’s children, and of future generations. (Jan. 21)
From the comments:
The Boris Johnston quote on your site an hour ago sums it up fully: As a species, we human beings have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands — when the reality is that everything, or almost everything, depends on the behaviour and caprice of the gigantic thermonuclear fireball around which we revolve."

World Economic Forum: Curbing climate change will cost $700 billion a year

Junk Science
"Maybe Obama could milk the rich a little more?
“The world must spend an extra US$700-billion a year to curb its addiction to fossil fuels blamed for worsening floods and heat waves and rising sea levels, a study issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF) showed on Monday.” [Financial Post]

The Beeb, Swallows Hard, Says It’s Cold & Snowy

E M Smith
"But you just know that deep down inside, someone, somewhere at The Beeb, is just gritting their teeth… "

The Alleged Unintended Consequences of the Carbon Dioxide Causes Climate Change Scam !

nollyprott
" ...its always the poor who get hit by Green taxes almost as though the whole object of the exercise was to economically cleanse low income families from rural areas, ...... It would appear that the whole object of the Green taxation exercise is to prop up market prices for energy speculators ....Its all about generating false economic growth which in turn increases the financial apartheid between rich and poor ....... Its the same principle with wind farms, if they ever meet the EU target it could precipitate regular power cuts ........Their latest investment scam is wood bio-mass which puts further pressure on the rainforests in that it probably makes chipboard more expensive in comparison to imported ply-wood .....I could go on and detail overseas examples of Corporate Ethnic Cleansing in places like Uganda where 1000s of subsistence farmers were thrown off their land and an entire village forcibly cleared in the name of a UK company Carbon Capture forestry project where rich people could buy credits to offset their flights for example and espouse their inner guilt about how their luxury lifestyle was impacting their revered mother earth. ..." (h/t Tom Nelson)

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

WSJ
"The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
.......Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them."

New paper finds solar cycle changes Earth temperature

The Hockey Schtick
"A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics finds a significant influence of solar activity upon Earth temperature during the second half of the 20th century. The authors find surface temperature linked to the 11-year solar cycle, and also influenced by the timing of volcanic eruptions. Once again, the claim by climate alarmists that small variations in solar activity cannot control temperature or climate has been debunked by observations."

Bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain may last for weeks

Telegraph
" The cause of all the misery is a disturbance that happened in early January, above the surface of the earth. The disturbance hit the fast-moving winds above the Arctic, making them suddenly reverse, so that the air at the centre of the circle collapsed, warming as it moved. The pressure from this then hit the jet stream that sits to the north of Britain and which normally shields the UK from polar weather, shifting the jet stream south. This was what allowed in wetter and cooler conditions. Much colder air was dragged in, from places in the east such as Siberia. Today, a yellow weather warning is in place for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and southern parts of Scotland, suggesting a risk of snow and ice. The forecast suggests that by Tuesday, the warning will apply to most of Scotland but nowhere else, and that it will be lifted completely the next day. However, meteorologists say the effects of sudden stratospheric warming are highly unpredictable and can last for up to six weeks."

A 'thing of the past’ comes back - again

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" Having read, in recent years, scores of books, hundreds of scientific papers and thousands of blog posts on every side of the great global-warming debate, I have concluded that there are only two things that can be said with certainty about our changing climate. The first is that no one in the world actually knows what global temperatures will be even next month, let alone in 100 years’ time. The other is that every one of the vaunted computer-model predictions on which, in the past 25 years, the warming scare has rested has been proved wrong.
All we are left with are the astronomic bills we will all continue paying into the indefinite future. These were foisted on us by politicians, scarcely any of whom have done their homework, simply accepting what they were told by seemingly plausible scaremongers who, as has become increasingly apparent, didn’t have a clue about what really drives our climate."

Warmist Spiegel/Euro-Media Concede Global Warming Has Ended…Models Were Wrong…Scientists Are Baffled!

NoTricksZone
"Spiegel has finally gotten around to conceding that global warming has ended, at least for the time being. .......Spiegel science writers would be well-advised to read Fritz Vahrenholt’s and Sebastian Lüning’s “Die kalte Sonne“. Practically every question brought up by Bojanowski has been answered there – one year ago. Moreover, Lüning”s and Vahrenholt’s temperature model for the next 100 years so far has been dead on."

Home BOOK About Climate Bible More Authors of ‘Extreme Misrepresentation’

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
"A majority of the 13 senior scientists responsible for a US government report are also associated with activist groups. (Eight of them have an IPCC connection.)"

Great moments in failed predictions

WUWT
"While searching for something else, I came across this entertaining collection of grand predictive failures related to resources and climate change, along with some of the biggest predictive failures of Paul Ehrlich. I thought it worth sharing."

Thousands stranded in airports across Europe as big freeze cancels flights forcing passengers to sleep on CAMP BEDS

Daily Mail
"Snow and freezing temperatures force airport closures across Europe - Countries affected include Switzerland, Austria and Germany - Around 20,000 could be left stranded in Germany as flights are grounded ..... Austria gets worst snowfall for a decade."

Airports shut and flights cancelled as UK shivers under a blanket of snow with high of TEN INCHES falling in the Brrrr-econ Beacons

Daily Mail
"Ten inches of snowfall was recorded at Powys, near Brecon, and eight inches (19 cm) at Sennybridge in Wales. A major mountain rescue operation was launched to find a hillwalker who became separated from her group at Cairn Toul mountain in the Cairngorms at around 12.45pm. She was later found and reunited with the group. There were cancellations and delays at most airports, but flights continued to arrive and depart. The M4 closed between Bristol and Bridgend and there were 352 cancellations at Heathrow. Just 10 flights left Europe's busiest airport every hour – compared to the usual 42."

Weather Service Warns of “Shock Cooling” Coming To Europe…4th Bitter Cold Euro-Winter In 5 Years Shaping Up!

NoTricksZone
"For those waiting for warmer winters with little snow and balmy temperatures, as the warmists used to promise us, you’ll just have to forget about it this winter too. If the current cold keeps up, then this will be the 4th colder-than-normal winter in Central Europe in the last 5 years."

A follow up on the ‘it was warmer in 1790 in Sydney’ story

WUWT
"Readers may recall the story Global Warming?……. It was warmer in Sydney in 1790 by Craig Kelly, MP in NSW Australia in response to some of the recent alarmist caterwauling in the press about the hot summer in Australia being a sign of ‘global warming’. He writes in with an update regarding criticisms by Steven Mosher regarding instrument calibration."

William Kininmonth: Is it Extreme Weather or Climate Change?

JoNova (Australia)
"Following in the heatwave theme… William Kinninmonth points out that the long term data on the red hot centre of Australia shows that this January is not unusual."

Australia – was hot and is hot. So what? This is not an unusual heat-wave

JoNova (Australia)
"The media are in overdrive, making out that “the extreme heat is the new normal” in Australia. The Great Australian Heatwave of January 2013 didn’t push the mercury above 50C at any weather station in Australia, yet it’s been 50C (122F) and hotter in many inland towns across Australia over the past century. See how many are in the late 1800′s and early to mid 1900′s. You can’t blame those high records on man made global warming."

European Carbon Trading Hits Another Record Low

WUWT
"LONDON, Jan 17 (Reuters Point Carbon) – EU carbon prices hit a fresh record low on Thursday as poor economic data from Germany and relatively healthy supply of coal continued to force European power and coal prices lower. .....It looks like the EU Carbon price is following the trend of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) before it flatlined and folded."

UK snow: weather conditions live

Telegraph
"Much of Britain is expected to be brought to a standstill today by a 40–hour snowstorm."

Croatia snowfall shatters record set in 1861 – Video

IceAgeNow
"“Just want to inform you about epochal snow event in Croatian capital Zagreb (SE Europe),” says reader Mihael Krstic. “We have new record snow depth for January set to 68cm (27 inches) beating previous 49cm (19 inches) and all of that in just 24 hours! That’s biggest snowfall from 1861. “More snow is on the way until end of the week!" (h/t Tom Nelson)

Two new papers predict fewer Northern Hemisphere cyclones in future

The Hockey Schtick
"The first paper, published in the Journal of Climate, projects "Statistically significant decreases in cyclone frequency are found on the flanks of the North Atlantic storm track and in the Mediterranean basin." The second paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, projects a "significant decrease" of extreme cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere and "Overall, CMIP5 models project larger decrease in storm track activity in the [Northern Hemisphere] troposphere, especially over North America in winter, where [sea level pressure] variance as well as cyclone frequency and amplitude are all projected to decrease significantly." The papers add to many other peer-reviewed papers projecting that cyclones and storms such as Sandy will become less frequent and less severe in the future, despite the protests of uninformed climate alarmists."

Paper finds the Sun controls climate & 'gives no support to theory of anthropogenic climate change'

The Hockey Schtick
"A paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research finds temperatures in the troposphere behave similarly to changes in solar activity over short timescales and a "cumulative negative [not positive as claimed by climate alarmists] feedback in the Earth climate system governing the tropospheric variability during the last 22 years." According to the paper, "The result emphasizes a dominating role of the solar irradiance variability in variations of the tropospheric temperature and gives no support to the theory of anthropogenic climate change," and "Increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth atmosphere appeared to produce too weak forcing in order to dominate in the Earth climate system."

Arctic Sea Ice Area Back To Normal! Dramatic Record Refreeze Wipes Out “Dramatic” Melt Of August!

NoTricksZone
"Arctic sea ice extent today is, for all practical purposes, BACK TO NORMAL!"

The Secret Santa Leak: Translations & IPCC Reaction

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
The IPCC itself responded late on the day of the leak with a three-paragraph statement totally in character for that organization. As usual, it expects the world to take its word for it. ......Slowly, one data point at a time, the degree to which the IPCC has been misrepresenting, fudging, and exaggerating becomes clear. .......The IPCC’s expert review process has been highjacked by pressure groups. Any genuinely scientific organization would hang its head in shame at this revelation. But the IPCC trundles on."

Oh Noes! The clock of doom is stuck again, global warming blamed

WUWT
"... On the plus side, it makes sense that the clock is stuck in time, since there hasn’t been any global warming in 16 years. Of course, the laughable Richard Somerville doesn’t see it that way, indicating in the PR that “climate disruption” is “now unavoidable”. Well then, if it is “unavoidable” why is it that we need to do something about it again? Do they even read their own press releases?"

Matt Ridley responds to Tim Lambert’s War @ Deltoid

WUWT
"Since it has been mostly silent in the last few months, I didn’t even know Deltoid blog was still up and running, but I’m happy to publish this rebuttal for Matt Ridley against Tim Lambert’s claim that Ridley was wrong 20 years ago in a piece Mr. Lambert has focused on. Mr. Lambert can hopefully learn a few things by reading this, mostly, that he’s out of his league when arguing with Matt Ridley, who’s far more versed in the subject than Lambert. I suppose the word “pwned” might apply here. – Anthony"

EPA Doubles Down on ‘Richard Windsor’ Stonewall

WUWT
"In EPA’s first production of Lisa Jackson’s secondary or “alias” email account traffic in what is now known as the “Richard Windsor” FOIA lawsuit, EPA has apparently decided to not search Richard Windsor account(s). That is, EPA seemingly is pretending — to the court, as well as Congress and the American taxpayer — that the Windsor account doesn’t exist. That’s the one they previously acknowledged exists. The one they claimed was used for internal correspondence (at least, certain internal correspondence).
CEI’s Chris Horner Says Agency Has ‘Gone Bunker’ Over Growing Richard Windsor Scandal

Global Warming?……. It was warmer in Sydney in 1790

WUWT
"Australia has recently experienced a hot summer leading to calls of “global warming did”, but its actually been cooler than the time when the first convicts arrived in Australia back in 1790 .....For while the mercury peaked at 42.3 C last Tuesday at Observatory Hill in Sydney – more than 222 years ago at 1.00pm on the 27th Dec 1790 (measured at a location just stones-throw from Observatory Hill) the mercury hit 108.5 F (42.5 C) before peaking at 109 F (42.8 C) at 2.20pm. The extreme heat of Sydney’s summer of 1790/91 is detailed by Watkins Tench (1758 –1833) in his book ‘A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson’ published in 1793. (Available to download from the internet for free, here).
.....It also worth noting that in 1790, Sydney (population 1,715) was still surrounded by mostly natural bushland, where modern day Observatory Hill in Sydney (population 4,627,000) is now surrounded by the concrete, steel and glass of a modern city, not to mention the tens of thousands of air-conditioners pumping out hot air into the surrounding streets, nor the 160,000 cars & trucks that cross the Sydney Harbor Bridge daily and pass within 100 meters of Observatory Hill."

Extreme Misrepresentation: USGCRP and the Case of Floods

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog
"Here I explain that in an area where I have expertise on, extremes and their impacts, the report is well out of step with the scientific literature, including the very literature it cites and conclusions of the IPCC. Questions should (but probably won't) be asked about how a major scientific assessment has apparently became captured as a tool of advocacy via misrepresentation of the scientific literature -- a phenomena tha occurs repeated in the area of extreme events. Yes, it is a draft and could be corrected, but a four-year effort by the nation’s top scientists should be expected to produce a public draft report of much higher quality than this. .......In no US region is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing CO2. This is precisely the opposite of the conclusion expressed in the draft report, which relies on Hirsch and Ryberg (2011) to express the opposite conclusion.
....However, given the problematic and well-documented treatment of extremes in earlier IPCC and US government reports, I'd think that the science community would have its act together by now and stop playing such games.
So while many advocates in science and the media shout "Alarm" and celebrate its depiction of extremes, another question we should be asking is, how is it that it got things so wrong? Either the IPCC and the scientific literature is in error, or the draft USGCRP assessment is -- But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself.

New paper confirms findings of Lindzen & Spencer of very low climate sensitivity to CO2

The Hockey Schtick
"A paper under review for Earth System Dynamics uses a novel technique based on satellite data and surface air temperatures to find that global warming due to increased CO2 is is much less than claimed by the IPCC. According to the author, the findings confirm those of Spencer & Braswell and Lindzen & Choi that a doubling of CO2 levels would only lead to an increase in top of the atmosphere temperature of 0.67°C, or global surface temperature of about 0.18°C, instead of the alleged 3°C claimed by IPCC computer models."

Climate Change Morality

Donna Laframboise,(Canada)
"Climate change is, indeed, a moral issue. Because the green plan for fighting it amounts to a war against the poor."

We have met the 1%, and he is us

WUWT
"So I find it both reprehensible and incomprehensible when those of us who are in the 1% of the global 1%, like President Obama and Secretary Chu, blithely talk of doubling the price of gasoline and sending the cost of electricity skyrocketing as though there were no negative results from that, as though it wouldn’t cause widespread suffering, as though cheap energy weren’t the best friend of the poor. What Chu and Obama propose are crazy plans, they are ivory-tower schemes of people who are totally out of touch with the realities faced by the poor of the world, whether inside the US or out. ......Despite the historical warming, there is no sign of any historical increase in weather extremes of any kind. Given two degrees C of historical warming with no increase in extreme events or catastrophes, why should I expect such an increase in some hypothetical future warming? So I’m sorry, but I am totally unwilling to trade inexpensive energy today, which is the real actual salvation of the poor today, for some imagined possible slight reduction in the temperature fifty years from now. That is one of the worst trades that I can imagine, exchanging current suffering for a promise of a slight reduction in temperatures in the year 2050.
Finally, for those who think that these quotes and ideas of Chu and Obama only affect the US, nothing could be further from the truth. Sadly, the policies are being exported and imposed, both by force and by persuasion, on the poorer countries of the world. To take just one example, pressure on the World Bank from the western countries and NGOs is denying financing to coal-fired plants in countries like India with coal resources. So the poor of India are denied inexpensive coal-fired electricity, they end up paying the price for the western one-percenters’ guilt and fear ridden fantasies about what might happen fifty years in the misty future."

Almost too cold to type this message to a warmist

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
" As it happens, I am in Los Angeles, freezing my backside off in an unusually cold spell: Temperatures in downtown Los Angeles fell to 34 degrees, breaking the previous record of 36 degrees set on Jan. 14, 2007. A week or two ago I was caught outside in Boston in the coldest weather of my life: While locally, lows ranged from the low 20s to near 30 (F.), there was some bone-chilling cold to our north. Parts of Vermont and upstate New York dropped from -10 to -20 , colder than anything experienced all of last winter. Boston even dropped to 7, just one degree warmer than its low in 2012. I wouldn’t be so stupid or dishonest as to claim that weather in one part of the world says anything about the climate everywhere. In other words, I do not write for the Daily Kos. Or work for the Greens.
Fact: to measure what we call “global warming” we need global records, not anecdotes about temperatures in Australia or California. And what those global records tell us is that the rise in temperature paused 16 years ago. Now the Met even predicts basically no further global warming for at least four more years - giving us a total of 20 years of no additional warming.. The world is not warming as was predicted. And gloating over some bushfires in Australia does not changed that central truth. Indeed, it strikes me as dishonest."

Wind farm contracts that will lead to higher energy bills should be re-written, says MP

Telegraph
" A report by MPs on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) yesterday disclosed that households across the country face seeing their bills rise after deals worth £17 billion were agreed with energy firms delivering wind-generated power. Under the contracts, which were agreed by Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, during the last government, but implemented by the Coalition, energy companies are guaranteed an RPI inflation-linked income for 20 years even if they fail to deliver energy to households. MPs on the PAC accused ministers of failing to learn lessons from failed private finance initiatives and said the costs from the wind farm contracts would now be passed on to consumers. Ofgem, the energy watchdog, has said it will in future “refine the tender process to deliver greater efficiencies and further benefits to consumers”.

Has the Met Office committed fraud?

WUWT
"The truth is out. No amount of hand-wringing or numerical prestidigitation on the part of the usual suspects can any longer conceal from the world the fact that global warming has been statistically indistinguishable from zero for at least 18 years. The wretched models did not predict that. When I told the December 2012 UN climate summit in Doha that there had been no warming for at least 16 years, the furious delegates howled me down. The UN later edited the videotape to remove the howling. The delegates were furious not because I was speaking out of turn (they did not know that at the time) but because the truth was inconvenient."

Germany Gives Up On Binding Global Climate Treaty, Now Pushing For A “Coalition Of The Willing” On Green Energy

NoTricksZone
"If there ever was a confirmation that the UN climate conferences have been a total failure, then this is it."

New paper finds European temperatures are not unusual or unprecedented

The Hockey Schtick
"A new paper published in Climate of the Past reconstructs temperatures in Switzerland from 1444 to 2011 on the basis of grape harvest dates and finds temperatures were about the same as today at the beginning of the record around 1450 AD, and that temperatures of today have been matched or exceeded several times in the past. In addition, the paper finds European temperatures during the summer of 1540 were 4.7 °C to 6.8 °C higher than those of 2003, causing more extreme heat & drought than the "record breaking" heat & drought of 2003."

No respite for North India from cold, death toll rises to 233

IBN Live
"New Delhi: At least 34 more deaths have been reported from Uttar Pradesh as the unabated cold wave continued in North India, taking the death toll to 233 people. Meanwhile, the minimum temperature in New Delhi rose to 4.4 degree Celsius from its previous 3.3 degree Celsius on Wednesday, but the Met department says mercury dipped to sub-zero levels in some parts of Uttar Pradesh." (h/t Tom Nelson)

The Global Warming Myth

NZCPR
"I don’t like being called a denier because deniers don’t believe in facts. There are no facts linking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global warming there are only predictions based on complex computer models. Name calling may be acceptable in political circles but it has no place in the language of science, indeed what is happening in the annals of global warming smacks of Macarthyism complete with witch hunts. Robust science is carried out in a robust way through reasoned argument based on well researched data and although it may dent the ego of the loser it does not smear the name of science."
ED: from 2007, but remains true today....

The Green propaganda continues....

ABC (Australia)
Rising seas may put $300b of property at risk: scientists
""If the climate science is right - and that's that we can expect a sea-level rise of somewhere between 80 centimetres and 1.1 metres by the year 2100 - that lifestyle is under threat," he said. "Also under threat are the properties that are going to be developed in vulnerable areas along the coast which are being approved at the moment in states all around Australia." Rising sea levels are a direct result of melting glaciers, and according to some of the most recent peer-reviewed reports, the melt is accelerating.
John Church is from the CSIRO's atmospheric research section and a lead author on sea-level rise for the UN's chief science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "The Greenland ice sheet is increasing its surface melt ... if we are to avoid some of the extreme scenarios, to avoid the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, it's urgent that we start mitigating or reducing emissions significantly and in a sustained way into the future," Dr Church said.
Australia's Climate Commission has done modelling on a rise above one metre, which it says could be devastating for all Australian coastal cities, as well as the 6 million people outside the main population centres. For example, in Sydney it forecasts that runways at the main domestic airport could be inundated and terminals flooded."
ED: Just get someone to read this -Maldives Opening Four New Underwater Airports

Golden windfall of UK's Green guru: Firm owned by ex-Tory Minister John Gummer connects up wind turbine power - and it paid him £1,750 PER HOUR

Daily Mail
"Lord Deben is better known as John Selwyn Gummer, who was once Margaret Thatcher’s Environment Secretary. He was appointed last September as chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, which gives the Government formal advice about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and replacing fossil fuel with ‘renewable’ energy.
When quizzed by MPs before his appointment was confirmed, he was asked about his chairmanship of the £500 million company Veolia Water UK. Lord Deben insisted it did no energy-related business and only dealt with water. If it had ‘even a remote connection’ with the environment or climate change, he promised, he would step down.In fact, Veolia – of which Lord Deben remains chairman – boasts on its website of supplying ‘large electrical grid connections for renewable energy producers’, and illustrates this with a large photograph of wind farms.
The firm also publishes a ‘case study’ of how its engineers ‘braved the Scottish gales’ to install 12 miles of high-voltage cable to connect the national grid to the Dalswinton windfarm near Dumfries."

Deadly Cold Continues To Grip Asia – Hundreds Dead – Subtropical Bangladesh Sees Coldest Temps Since 1960s!

NoTricksZone
"Asia has been having one of its coldest winters in memory. And the headlines of bitter cold have not been limited to Russia, Siberia, Mongolia and China, but also to subtropical regions, way down in southern Asia. People there have been dying of record cold.
FOCUS magazine here reports that also “Bangladesh is shivering under a record cold wave. In the subtropical country temperatures have fallen to 3°C over the course of the week – the lowest in 45 years”. The FOCUS video also reports that “90 people in Bangladesh have died of the cold so far” and that “meteorologists are predicting a series of cold blasts for the rest of the month.”

Global warming stopped 16 years ago, Met Office report reveals: MoS got it right about warming... so who are the 'deniers' now?

Daily Mail
"On Tuesday, news finally broke of a revised Met Office ‘decadal forecast’, which not only acknowledges the pause, but predicts it will continue at least until 2017. It says world temperatures are likely to stay around 0.43 degrees above the long-term average – as by then they will have done for 20 years.
This is hugely significant. It amounts to an admission that earlier forecasts – which have dictated years of Government policy and will cost tens of billions of pounds – were wrong. They did not, the Met Office now accepts, take sufficient account of ‘natural variability’ – the effects of phenomena such as ocean temperature cycles – which at least for now are counteracting greenhouse gas warming.
..... The problem is not the difficulty of predicting something as chaotic as the Earth’s climate, but the almost Stalinist way the Green Establishment tries to stifle dissent. There is, for example, the odious term ‘denier’. This is applied to anyone who questions the new orthodoxy about global warming. It doesn’t matter if one states that yes, CO2 does warm the planet, but the critical issues we need to address are how fast and how much: if one doesn’t anticipate catastrophe, one must be vilified, and equated with those who deny the Holocaust. Yet the real deniers are those who don’t just claim that the pause is insignificant, but that it doesn’t exist at all. Such deniers also still insist that the ‘science is settled’. The truth is that the unexpected pause has triggered a new spate of research, in which many supposed ‘consensus’ conclusions are being questioned."

A forecast the Met Office hoped you wouldn’t see

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"It is the graph the Met Office didn’t want you to see, in an episode which, according to one newspaper, represents “a crime against science and the public”.
Some of this story may be familiar – how on Christmas Eve the Met Office sneaked on to its website a revised version of the graph it had posted a year earlier showing its prediction of global temperatures for the next five years.
In 2011, the Met Office’s computer model prediction had shown temperatures over the next five years soaring to a level 0.8 degrees higher than their average between 1971 and 2000, far higher than the previous record year, 1998. Whereas the new graph shows the lack of any significant warming for the past 15 years as likely to continue. Apart from how this was obscured by the BBC, there are several reasons why this is of wider significance for the rest of us.
......A major reason why the Met Office’s forecasts have come such croppers in recent years is that its computer models since 1990 have assumed that by far the most important influence on global temperatures is the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Yet as early as 2008, when temperatures temporarily plummeted by 0.7 degrees, equivalent to their entire net rise in the 20th century, it was already clear that something was fundamentally wrong with this assumption. The models were not taking proper account of all the natural factors governing the climate, such as solar radiation and shifts in the major ocean currents. Even the warmists admitted that it was a freak El Niño event in the Pacific which had made 1998 the hottest year in modern times. ......"

Finally, one of Gore’s trained presenters debates a climate skeptic

WUWT
"Finally … finally! … a person trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project agreed to face off in a public debate on global warming. As WUWT readers may know, trying to get one of these folks to debate a skeptic has been an impossible task…until now. Full video follows, running about 59 minutes. While I don’t know the details, I suspect the video quality has to do with an apparent long standing policy of Gore’s presenters refusing to allow their presentations to be video taped. My impression is that this appears to be a clandestine recording made by an audience member."

Richard Lindzen’s Presentation On The Climate Hysteria

NoTricksZone
"From 2009, a good refresher – especially if you haven’t seen it yet. Yes it’s a scam."

For climateers, it's always the Silly Season

Quadrant Online (Australia)
"God – like climate change - works in many strange ways, especially at this time of the year. But at least God (sometimes) has a sense of – if not humour, then – the absurd, even if the joke’s always on us.
For alarmist disciples of the emerging our-climate-system-is-becoming-unstable cults, however, every atmospheric change is merely another harbinger of anthropogenic Armageddon, not a product of (unpredictable) natural variability, such as the extreme heat in 1896. ....
The mad, manic and mischievous who built their careers on the fear-mongering will prevail for a time, as did Armstrong. But one day, time-out will be called on humankind’s most inflated delusion – that it could comprehend the Earth’s climate with sufficient insight to predict and control its course.
And if your (unproven) premise is that all climate change is driven “primarily” by AGHG emissions, and natural internal variability remains the elephant (or snake) in your room, this is where you will end up: promoting bogus notions – “climate stability”, “weather-weirding” and worse - to an increasingly sceptical public.
Speculation is not fact and assertion is not truth; no matter how insistently some -- especially carbon-capitalists with deep conflicts of interest -- proclaim it to be the case. Magna est veritas, et praevalebit."

Enough to make you shudder! Temperatures set for sudden plunge to minus 10C... as average heating bill for the elderly soars to £1,350

Daily Mail
"Cold snap will put huge pressure on elderly, fearful of turning up heating - Average gas and electricity bill for over-65s reached £1,356 last year - Five of 'Big Six' energy firms put up tariffs as winter began - Experts warn thousands will die from medical conditions worsened by chill
ED: from the comments:
"And there's more on the way - more expense and cost that is. Thanks to the most moronically stupid piece of legislation ever pushed through parliament, (the Climate Change Act 2008, pushed through by a Mr. Ed Milliband, and voted for by all but 3 of our MPs) energy costs are set to double over the next eight years. You cant have all these wind turbines and all the infrastructure to connect them without paying for it you know. And the Climate Change Act means this cost will hit through energy bills, not taxation. If you are a pensioner on a fixed income, you have only one option: grin and bear it for as long as you can.
- martwc, Basingstoke, 11/1/2013 11:00

Aussie Alarmists in a sweat over heat wave

Climate Common Sense (Australia)
"Peter Hannam the Carbon Economy Editor of the near-defunct Sydney Moaning Herald leads the fray of fellow alarmists crying doom and gloom over the Aussie heat wave. Of course as the SMH goes down the gurgler he will have no problem with employment with the tremendous demand for carbon economy editors across the country . The BOM created international interest for alarmists by creating a new temperature color for above 50 deg C to be denoted as purple areas. Of course coloured maps were not available in the pre climate nitwit era of 1923 when temperatures actually did exceed 50 deg C or when Marble Bar set a new world record for 160 days over the 37.8 deg C or 100 deg F level. Stupid people in that era just thought that that was just very hot weather and did not know they could have stopped it by building a few more windmills."

Electric Cars Don’t Sell But Let’s Build More Anyway

Junk Science
“With $1.4 billion in help from American taxpayers, Nissan has begun assembling its electric vehicle in Tennessee. It had better use some of the money to buy a large parking lot to store all those unsold cars.” [Investor's Business Daily]

Crime Against Science

E M Smith
"That point, of putting that prediction of 5 more years onto the end of the present non-rise period, is an interesting one.
Here we have one of the big “pushers” (and they ARE pushers, just like pushers of any drug) of Global Warming admitting that it will be at least 5 more years of cold. Now the present ‘no warming’ period is variously anywhere from 15 to 20 years depending on which cooked temperature data you look at and what is used for the significance test.
So we’re looking not just at 20 years ( 15 + 5 ) but in some cases 25 years of “no warming” being accepted by a key pusher.
A Fifth to a Quarter Century.
Golly."

A Christmas card come to life: Jerusalem hit by worst snowstorm for TWENTY YEARS as eight inches fall across Holy City

Daily Mail
"The Holy City of Jerusalem has been covered in a brilliant white blanket after the worst snowstorm in 20 years. Schools and highways have been closed as more than eight inches of snow piled up in the city centre by this afternoon. Israel and much of the surrounding region has been hit by five days of rain, wind and snow as temperatures have dipped below freezing."

DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Global warming and an inconvenient truth

Daily Mail
"To put it mildly, it is a matter of enormous public interest that the Met Office has revised its predictions of global warming, whispering that new data suggest there will be none for the next five years. After all, the projection implies that by 2017, despite a colossal increase in carbon emissions, there will have been no rise in the planet’s surface temperature for almost two decades. Why, then, did the Met Office choose to sneak out this intriguing information on Christmas Eve, knowing there would be no newspapers the next day? Isn’t the inescapable suspicion that our national forecaster was anxious not to shake confidence in its Messianic belief that we are destroying our own planet?
This paper keeps an open mind on climate change – and accepts that the Met Office’s revised prediction doesn’t prove the scientific establishment and its staunch disciples at the BBC wrong.
At the very least, however, it adds to the debate, lending support to those who argue that the threat to the environment has been greatly exaggerated.Meanwhile, ministers stake gargantuan sums of public money on their faith in the alarmists, scarring the landscape with wind farms, forcing up energy bills and threatening to shut down almost all our fossil fuel-dependent economy. This is why it is so vital that every scrap of scientific data is fully debated and dispassionately analysed. The Met Office’s clumsy attempt to hush up an inconvenient truth was a crime against science and the public.

The crazy climate change obsession that's made the Met Office a menace

Daily Mail
"Was there ever a government quango quite so useless as the Met Office? From its infamous ‘barbecue summer’ washout of 2009 to the snowbound winter it failed to predict in 2010 and the recent forecast-defying floods, our £200 million-a-year official weather forecaster has become a national joke. But of all its recent embarrassments, none come close to matching the Met Office’s latest one. Without fanfare — apparently in the desperate hope no one would notice — it has finally conceded what other scientists have known for ages: there is no evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening."

Met Office Says No Warming Before 2017: How Did The Media Do?

GWPF
"The fact that the UK Met Office had changed its near-term global warming forecast quietly on Christmas Eve was noticed by some Met Office watchers, especially the ever-interesting Tallbloke’s Talkshop website which reported it on January 5th. This piece started a flurry of blog comments. We at the GWPF republished the story the same day on our website.
The next day we internally discussed the Met Offices’ revised forecast. The GWPF published my analysis of the considerable implications of the Met Office revision on the 7th January. The analysis was distributed via CCNet at 11:51 am, including hundreds of journalists.
........Outsourcing Experts And finally, you will have noticed that the climate scientists Myles Allen, Chris Rapley and Richard Allen crop up frequently in the coverage. Could it be due to an ‘expert reaction’ advice note sent out to journalists by the UK Science Media Centre pressure group.
Indeed, the now familiar quotes used by most news outlets originated here. It would appear that in covering this important story very few journalists actually spoke to sceptics and many journalists had their experts cherry-picked for them by a pressure group who also selected the actual quotes to be used! However, no journalist using those quotes mentioned that these experts “told the UK Science Media Centre that…” Instead they gave the impression they had spoken to them themselves."

The other big story today: BBC forced to admit global warming ‘static’

WUWT
"Forecast for warming revised downward." (ED: BBC Style ...hummmm )

UK Rainfall 2012-The Report The Met Office Should Have Produced

WUWT
"According to the Met Office, UK has just had the second wettest year on record, just behind 2000. These claims, however, are based on records dating back to 1910. The Met Office also keep a rainfall series for England & Wales, which date back to 1766, and these cast a slightly different light on the matter. ......
....1) The wettest year was 1872, when there was 1284mm, compared to 1244mm in 2012. It was also wetter in 1768. Clearly the impression given by the Met Office, that the rainfall last year, and in 2000, is somehow “unprecedented” is not true. One is entitled to wonder why they made it.
....Rainfall in Scotland is much higher normally than in England. Scotland usually receives about 1600mm of rain each year, compared to 855mm for England. Last year, England’s total was 1123mm, so it can be seen that Scotland has still been, by far, the wetter of the two."

Blaming climate change for heatwave 'simplistic' by Judith Ireland, Sydney Morning Herald

Climate Realists
"ACTING Opposition Leader Warren Truss says it is ''too simplistic'' to link the current heatwave and fires to climate change. In Brisbane on Wednesday, Mr Truss acknowledged the record heatwave, but said Australia's climate was changeable, with hot times and cold times. ''The reality is, it's being utterly simplistic to suggest that we have these fires because of climate change,'' he said. ''It's too simplistic to link one hot spell to climate change.''

Ocean-Heat-Content-Based Model By German Scientists Shows Continued Global Cooling Ahead

NoTricksZone
“Global Warming Is Taking A Break“ – that was the title of an article at the online Hamburger Abendblatt on 4 January 2013. And that’s hard to miss when you look at the latest global temperature chart: ..."

Secret Santa Leak PDF Full Text Search

Simon Barnett.
"Credit to Donna Laframboise for the Secret Santa Leak.
WattsUpWithThat.com comment thread."

More Are a Third of IPCC Review Editors MIA?

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
"he reports in question may be found on the green data stick. The path is: Buenos Aires Documentaion>c_ExpertReviewFiles>Review Editor FOD Reports. It’s not clear why the IPCC intended to keep them under wraps forever. US presidential records, for example, become accessible to the public five to 12 years after the end of an administration. The big news, however, is that one third of the IPCC personnel who were supposed to write these reports apparently failed to do so."

Leading German Daily Announces: “Global Warming Has Stopped”, Questions IPCC Models

NoTricksZone
"It took them 15 years to notice it: CO2 is not driving the climate."

The Secret Santa Leak

Donna Laframboise
"(extended blog post) - THE IPCC & CONFIDENTIALITY
All three data sticks contain a copy of an IPCC confidentiality document (also available on the web here). Although it begins with a solemn assertion that the “IPCC places a priority on openness,” the remainder of the text makes it clear that this organization has the same relationship to transparency that vampires have to sunlight.
The IPCC says secrecy leads to a “product of the highest quality.” It says deliberations behind closed doors equal an effective process. It says the IPCC depends on confidentiality while its report is being written.
This is foolishly short-sighted. The IPCC needs to be upfront, open, and honest about every single step by which it arrives at its conclusions. The last thing educated people in the 21st century are going to be convinced by is a group of shadowy experts who smile and tell us to trust them.
Secrecy has nothing to do with science. It is, however, valued by those eager to control the message. Secrecy allows the IPCC to release its reports in an orchestrated manner to great media fanfare. It also permits the leaking of advance copies to sympathetic journalists."

More IPCC AR5: THE SECRET SANTA LEAK

WUWT
"Thanks to a whistleblower, draft versions of most chapters of the IPCC’s upcoming report are now in the public domain. Among the new revelations: the IPCC has learned nothing from the Himalayan glacier debacle, bringing in Greenpeace again.
A week before Christmas, three data sticks containing 661 files and amounting to nearly one gigabyte of material came into my possession. They were created by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN body currently at work on a high-profile report. ......There’s a lot of information here and I’ve only examined a small portion of it so far. But a few things are certain. First, this leak – together with the one that occurred last month – places draft versions of a majority of the IPCC’s upcoming report in the public domain. Forty-four out of 60 chapters – 73% – are now available for examination. The claim, by the IPCC’s chairman, that this is a “totally transparent” organization and that whatever it does is “available for scrutiny at every stage” is closer than ever to being true."

Global warming at a standstill, new Met Office figures show

Telegraph
"The Met Office has downgraded its forecast for global warming to suggest that by 2017 temperatures will have remained about the same for two decades. ....Labour MP Graham Stringer accused the Met Office of “burying bad news” by releasing the data on Christmas Eve and said it should give up climate change forecasts as well as long-term predictions. He said: “They failed completely with their models to predict the flattening out of global warming. I think that they are just trying to bury bad news that their predictions in the medium and long-term have been pretty poor.”

'Global warming is NOT as bad as feared': Met Office under fire as it claims Earth's temperature is rising more slowly than first thought (and could even have stalled)

Daily Mail
" Earlier forecasts predicted a much steeper rise in global temperatures - But latest figures from Met Office show slower rise than previously warned - Figures raise questions about the true danger posed by greenhouse gasses
Dr David Whitehouse science editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which was set up by climate change skeptic Lord Lawson, was scathing about the Met Office u-turn. He said: 'We are at the point where the temperature standstill is becoming the dominant feature of the post-1980 warming, and as such cannot be dismissed as being unimportant even when viewed over 30 years.'It is time that the scientific community in general and the IPCC in particular acknowledged the reality of the global temperature standstill and the very real challenge it implies for our understanding of climate change and estimates of its future effects. 'It is a demonstration that the science is not settled and that there are great uncertainties in our understanding of the real world effects of the greenhouse when effect combined with anthropogenic and natural factors.”

Wrong Prediction, Wrong Science; Unless It’s Government Climate Science.

WUWT
"Everyone knows that regional weather forecasts are notoriously unreliable, especially beyond 48 hours. This fact weakened the credibility of the IPCC predictions with the public from the start. Some supporters of the IPCC position tried to counteract the problem by saying that climate forecasts were different from weather forecasts. It is a false argument. Climate is the average of the weather, so if the weather science is wrong the climate science is wrong."

ARCTIC FREEZE BLASTS BACK...AND IT WILL LAST FOR WEEKS

Daily Express
" WINTER will roar in with a vengeance this week with a savage Arctic freeze likely to last until the middle of next month. Temperatures will plummet by more than 20C as Britain is plunged into weeks of shivering misery, forecasters warned. The UK faces the coldest and iciest spell of winter so far as another “Beast from the East” roars in from Russia and the Arctic, they said. It could be the middle of February before any break from harsh frosts, ice and temperatures as low as -20C."