The tone of the article bugs me somewhat (as does the whole argument in fact!) with the use of these stupid names thrown around in the global warming debate. Warmists, alarmists, believers, skeptics, deniers, bla, bla, bla, (im all of the above) but he does make some good points and brings up some important information. Yes, the climate of the earth is probably changing (although I have yet to see any thorough, worldwide non ‘corrected’ data-sets saying there is anything to get worried about), it always will change and there is nothing we can do about it. Up, and down, down and up. Unequally from one place to the next. The cycles of time, the Milankovitch cycles, the glacial cycles, the solar cycles and all the other cycles we do and don’t know about are far bigger and more powerful than we are. I’m just amazed they are still trying to implement more taxes based on this completely ridiculous idea it will change the temperature of the earth (what do they want anyway, warmer or colder??) or even stop the temperature changing. Hahah, Bollox it will!

Warmists may be winning the big grants, but they’re not winning the argument, says Christopher Booker.

Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future “such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent”. He didn’t explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.  Meanwhile, notably little attention has been paid to the disastrous chill which has been sweeping South America thanks to an inrush of air from the Antarctic, killing hundreds in the continent’s coldest winter for years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7908604/Desperate-days-for-the-warmists.html

Currently the Earth is tilted at 23.44 degrees from its orbital plane, roughly half way between its extreme values. The tilt is in the decreasing phase of its cycle, and will reach its minimum value around the year 10,000 C.E.. This trend, by itself, would tend to make winters warmer and summers colder.

[6/16/10 11:24:12 AM] yann: well it doesn’t get much clearer about peak oil!

…a larger lesson is that no matter how much we improve our regulation of the industry, drilling for oil these days entails greater risk.  After all, oil is a finite resource.  We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.  And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered.  For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight.  Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.  Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil.  And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.

We cannot consign our children to this future.  The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.  Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny.

This is not some distant vision for America.  The transition away from fossil fuels is going to take some time, but over the last year and a half, we’ve already taken unprecedented action to jumpstart the clean energy industry.  As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses are making solar panels.  Consumers are buying more efficient cars and trucks, and families are making their homes more energy-efficient.  Scientists and researchers are discovering clean energy technologies that someday will lead to entire new industries.

Each of us has a part to play in a new future that will benefit all of us.  As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs -– but only if we accelerate that transition.  Only if we seize the moment.  And only if we rally together and act as one nation –- workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.
When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence.  Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill –- a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.

Now, there are costs associated with this transition.  And there are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now.  I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy -– because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

So I’m happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party -– as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels.  Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks.  Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power.  Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development -– and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.

All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead.  But the one approach I will not accept is inaction.  The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is somehow too big and too difficult to meet.  You know, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II.  The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.  And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom.  Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny -– our determination to fight for the America we want for our children.  Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like.  Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there.  We know we’ll get there.

What I took out of it, is that basically there is no plan for the future yet, but don’t panic because you should have faith/hope even though nobody has any ideas how we can move away from the something like 6000 products which petroleum is used for. He says steps have been made, but when you look at the numbers, oil consumption in the US is UP since he entered the white house, from 21.5 Million barrels a day, to around 23 Million barrels a day. The few things he mentions to tackle the oil dependency are so small as to be almost not even worth mentioning, but I guess he has to mention something.

Still, it’s a bold step to hear such an acknowledgment from someone in such an important position.

As a side note, the amount of oil leaking into the gulf, if we take the higher estimate of around 50,000 barrels a day, is equivalent to just over 3 MINUTES of Americas total oil use each day.

Full speech you can watch here…

Eyjafjallajokull at the crater 4 days ago. Mesmerizing..

Apparently the ash is now safe for planes to fly through and although they were wrong about it being dangerous before, this time they are right about it being safe:

The new “Time Limited Zone” will be put in place over UK and Irish airspace from midday on Tuesday, allowing airlines to fly through areas of medium ash density that were previously off limits, it said in a statement.

How’s this for a contradiction in the same article too:

The volcano, under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland, has been erupting for weeks and shows no sign of weakening.

and a few lines below:

British Airways Chief Executive Willie Walsh said “The rate of ash eruption and the height that it reaches have both decreased over time, though now and then they temporarily re-intensify”.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64G3E820100517

It’s dangerous, it’s not dangerous, it’s weakening, it’s not weakening. Talk about a mixed message. Me thinks the consequences of not flying are seen as more dangerous (economically) than the volcano and the possibility of a plane going down.

Volcanologists have warned that previous Eyjafjallajökull eruptions have triggered eruptions of neighbouring Katla, one of the largest volcanoes in Iceland. Katla erupted every 40 to 80 years in the thousand years before the last eruption in 1918.

“The eruption is long overdue at Katla and there is quite a bit of anxiety in Iceland about the potential size of eruption,” says Dave McGarvie of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK.

The three eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in the last 1100 years – in 920, 1612 and 1821 – have all triggered larger Katla eruptions.

The larger volcano, beneath the larger Mýrdalsjökull glacier, has a reputation for triggering huge jökulhlaup – the Icelandic term for the sudden release of meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets. Its last eruption generated a peak discharge of 1.6 million cubic metres per second within 4 to 5 hours and moved so much debris that Iceland’s coastline was extended by 4 kilometres.

A quarter of the island’s population died from the famine that resulted from the 1783 eruption of the Laki volcano, the worst in modern times in high latitudes. It sent a huge cloud of haze across Europe and parts of North America, triggering dramatic climatic changes, from the largest recorded snowfall in New Jersey to one of the longest droughts seen in Egypt.

From New Scientist..

We have a flight back to the UK this weekend, but after reading this, I am feeling less sure about it:

Iceland volcano: RAF suspends Typhoon flights after finding ash deposits

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/7619858/Iceland-volcano-RAF-suspends-Typhoon-flights-after-finding-ash-deposits.html

Update and graph showing the spread of the current eruption in Iceland. Looks like the bigger volcano Katla is starting to tremor too.

Photo of eyjafjallajökull from here… There is a webcam on the volcano here..

Why does a volcanic eruption sometimes create lightning? Pictured above, the Sakurajima volcano in southern Japan was caught erupting early last month. Magma bubbles so hot they glow shoot away as liquid rock bursts through the Earth’s surface from below. The above image is particularly notable, however, for the lightning bolts caught near the volcano’s summit. Why lightning occurs even in common thunderstorms remains a topic of research, and the cause of volcanic lightning is even less clear. Surely, lightning bolts help quench areas of opposite but separated electric charges. One hypothesis holds that catapulting magma bubbles or volcanic ash are themselves electrically charged, and by their motion create these separated areas. Other volcanic lightning episodes may be facilitated by charge-inducing collisions in volcanic dust. Lightning is usually occurring somewhere on Earth, typically over 40 times each second.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100210.html

A continuing cold snap across parts of Europe over the weekend and into Monday caused the deaths of more than 40 people in Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. It’s a cold spell that also stretched across much of Germany, leaving people here shivering as temperatures plunged as low as -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) early on Monday morning.

This January has been colder than usual in Germany — at least 1.5 degrees Celsius lower than average according to the German Weather Service (DWD). Sunshine has also been unusually sparse. Although winter has already passed the half-way mark, Germans have enjoyed only 40 percent of the sunlight that is normal for January.

Germany’s cold spell, however, has been minor compared to temperatures being experienced in Eastern Europe. A government spokesperson in Bucharest reported that ice cold temperatures of -34 degrees Celsius caused the deaths of 11 people in Romania in just 24 hours, with a total of 22 deaths registered in the last five days as a result of the cold.

More here…

The economy aint looking so hot either, although one country in the EU did grow it’s economy last year, the only one to do so in fact, and the Eurozone winner is….. Poland!

Photo snagged from my Bro Luke who who is on the other side of the world in warm Sydney.

Me skiing in Flachau Winkl last week. Cold and snowy over here too.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1237235/ANALYSIS-Saved–trillion-pound-trade-carbon.html#ixzz0aQ9ptTQ7

The city of Copenhagen ‘is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport’. So said John Sauven of Greenpeace UK after the climate summit broke up. And he is right.

This is the biggest heist in history. As they poured carbon over snow-covered Denmark from their gas-guzzling jets, world leaders were congratulating themselves on securing a deal which will make their backers and financiers a trillion pounds a year. These riches will come from buying and selling permits, the so-called ‘carbon credits’ which allow industry and electricity generators in developed countries to emit carbon dioxide.

The frenzied negotiations we have just seen were never about ‘saving the planet’. They were always about money. At stake was this new ‘climate change industry’ which last year ripped off £129billion from the global economy and is heading for that trillion-pound bonanza by 2020 – but only if the key parts of the Kyoto treaty could be renewed.

The actual emissions don’t change, it’s merely a matter of how much you have to pay for them. For example, in 2006, the NHS spent £6million on carbon permits to keep patients warm.

Much recent attention has been paid to the email about the “trick” and the effort to “hide the decline”. Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context”. In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to a meeting of IPCC authors in Tanzania, raising serious questions about the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction.

The emails show that the late 20th century decline in the Briffa reconstruction was perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, that “everyone in the room at IPCC” thought that the Briffa decline was a “problem” and a “potential distraction/detraction”, that this was then the “most important issue” in chapter 2 of the IPCC report and that there was “pressure” on Briffa and other authors to show a “nice tidy story” of “unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.

Continued…

Climate problem, what problem? Jokers!

Millions of hysterical people, expensive ads paid for with taxpayer money which make children cry and billions on the line to fix a non problem, which even if it was a problem we could do nothing about. Warmer times in the past have always benefited mankind, nothing to worry about. Slightly more trouble ahead if the world continues cooling like it has for the last 8 years, but thats another issue. So what is it all about then? Peak oil mitigation plan? Blatant scam? Consolidation of power? Mass stupidity/hysteria? Short sightedness? Mix of all of the above? Something else? Really I dont know, but I do know the whole thing is completely ridiculous. The EPA just classified CO₂ as a danger to public health for goodness sake! CO₂, One of the building blocks of life, needed by plants to make oxygen, exhaled from YOUR body, every time you breath out, is now deemed a toxic chemical. Sounds to me like those making these kinds of laws are the problem. Do they realise, they also breathe out CO₂?

Few more graphs I have come across to show you the bigger picture:

Where did IPCC 1990 Figure 7c Come From?

In a way, the use of this graphic by Crowley in 1996 and by Bradley and Eddy in 1991 is even more interesting than its use by IPCC in 1990. It shows that this schematic represented the view of the most senior people in the field as late as 1996, right up to the MBH hockey stick – in which Mann introduced the Graybill bristlecone chronologies – previously avoided in temperature reconstructions.

The left triptych image is from Crispin Tickell (British Antarctic Survey) compared to the corresponding triptych used until 1996 by the IPCC.

To say that the sun is no more than one suburban star in a galaxy of one hundred thousand million stars and that this galaxy is no more than one among a hundred thousand million galaxies is to speak in abstractions. But we can have a sense of distance in our own backyard. If the sun is reduced to the size of an orange, the earth is a grain of sand at thirty feet, and the nearest star – another orange – is a thousand miles away.

The scale of time is even harder to grasp. When in the last century a poet described the desert ruins of Petra as “rose-red city half as old as time”, he meant it literally. For him, absolute time began 4,000 years before Christ. For us, relative time began with the universe we can see, around 15,000 million years ago; and according to our calculations the earth was formed about 4,600 million years ago.

Suppose we knock off the zeros and reduce 4,600 million years to 46 years (a good life span in most human history), then the dinosaurs died just over 6 months ago, the present human breed emerged about a week ago, our counting system before and after Christ began less than a quarter of an hour ago, and the Industrial Revolution has lasted just over a minute.

More relevant to our present purposes, on the same time scale there were major ice ages on the earth nine and one-half years, seven and three-quarter years, six and one-quarter years, four and one-half years, and around three years ago. The most recent series of glaciations began less than a week ago, and the last glaciers retreated about an hour ago.

In this perspective, we live in a tiny, damp, curved space at a pleasantly warm moment.

Climate is constant only in its variability.

Crispin Tickell

If you care about knowing the truth behind the great anthropogenic global warming lie being perpetrated, explained through empirical facts and data (after all, how else can you know the truth?), you need to watch this. He also has a brilliant sense of humor, so it’s not as dry as it might sound.

As a point of note, In March 2007, Lord Monckton ran a series of advertisements in The New York Times and Washington Post challenging Al Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change. The former U.S. Vice President did not respond.

After watching this, any sentient being will know he speaks the truth.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” – Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay.

Let’s hope (although I am not particularly hopeful in this case) that Climategate can help bring some integrity back to science and remove all political interference, and help to dissipate the now religious mania people feel towards Climate change. All it takes is to be at the top of a mountain or deep in a jungle to realise how inconsequential people are, and how the climate has been changing for eons (studying any data except the manipulated IPCC’s will do the same). You realise how any time this planet or the sun wants to do something, be it a new ice age, super volcano, hurricane, tsunami, solar flare, warm up, cool down, or an infinity of other possibilities, it will and there is not a dam thing anyone can do. Stop voting for delusional/lying politicians who tell you they can control everything on this planet, as well as the sun, moon and stars, and use this illusion (and madness in those who believe it) for political purposes.

We need someone who can tell it straight, (well, it would be a refreshing start!) and say that amongst many other things, yes we do need to reduce oil dependency, and yes pollution is bad and needs to be dealt with, and yes a shift to renewable energy would be a good idea, but sorry there are things we cant control.

Here is a rhetorical question for all the politicians attending the Copenhagen treaty and trying to push the world a step closer to one-world government:

Why, in light of the Climategate scandal which has emerged in the past weeks, and the now empirical evidence of data manipulation, and only showing one side of the argument in order to hide the decline in temperatures over the last 8 years, as many scientists have been saying has been happening all along, are you still pushing an agenda to tax citizens and propagate the Global warming alarmism? Temperatures have been much hotter than they are now in the recent past, such as during the medieval warming period 1100 years ago, and much colder, such as in the Little ice age ending in about 1650. Why when temperature fluctuations are as natural a part of this planets history as day and night, summer and winter do you think that Taxing people will have any effect on orbital eccentricity, obliquity, and precession of Earth’s movements? How about the Sun?

Before the climategate scandal which emerged in the last few weeks, there were over 700 hundred scientists disagreeing with Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory. Here is a good interview with one of them:

There are obvious problems inherant in looking at a short period of time out of context and thinking you can base any concrete future projections on it (in the same way as an insect born and dying on one rainy summer day might think all days are the same), so lets look at the recent global temperatures within the longer term perspective. Did man contribute to global warming from the year 200 until the years 850AD – 900AD, which were the hottest over the last 2000 years? Significantly hotter than now in fact, ending in the medieval warm period. Did we contribute to the following temperature decline after that over the next 800 years which ended in the Little ice age?  How about the runup starting in 1700?

No. Temperature fluctuations are completely normal.

How many ‘Hockey sticks’ can you see, both up and down? Can you with any degree of certainty make any conclusions about what the temperature might be in 500 years from this chart below? How about 100 years? If you think you know, did you take into account orbital eccentricity, obliquity, and precession of Earth’s movements? How about the Sun? How about the thousands of other factors we know about? How about the almost infinite number of unseen or unknown variables, the things you (and yes, even scientists) dont know? How did you weigh the importance of each of these things?

More below the fold: