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:

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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:

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Crazed CNBC guy, interrupting all the time.

Milankovitch Theory describes the collective effects of changes in the Earth’s movements upon its climate, named after Serbian civil engineer and mathematician Milutin Milanković. Milanković mathematically theorised that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth’s orbit determined climatic patterns on Earth, resulting in 100,000-year ice age cycles of the Quaternary glaciation over the last few million years. The Earth’s axis completes one full cycle of precession approximately every 26,000 years. At the same time, the elliptical orbit rotates, more slowly, leading to a 23,000-year cycle between the seasons and the orbit. In addition, the angle between Earth’s rotational axis and the normal to the plane of its orbit moves from 22.1 degrees to 24.5 degrees and back again on a 41,000-year cycle. Currently, this angle is 23.44 degrees and is decreasing.

As the Earth spins around its axis and orbits around the Sun, several quasi-periodic variations occur. Milankovitch studied changes in the orbital eccentricity, obliquity, and precession of Earth’s movements. Such changes in movement and orientation change the amount and location of solar radiation reaching the Earth. This is known as solar forcing. Changes near the north polar area are considered important due to the large amount of land, which reacts to such changes more quickly than the oceans do.

Orbital forcing is the effect on climate of slow changes in the tilt of the Earth’s axis and shape of the orbit. These orbital changes change the total amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by up to 25% at mid-latitudes. In this context, the term “forcing” signifies a physical process that affects the Earth’s climate.

This mechanism is believed to be responsible for the timing of the ice age cycles.

Today, northern hemisphere summer is 4.66 days longer than winter and spring is 2.9 days longer than autumn. As axial precession changes the place in the Earth’s orbit where the solstices and equinoxes occur, Northern hemisphere winters will get longer and summers will get shorter, eventually creating conditions believed to be favorable for triggering the next glacial period.

Precession is the change in the direction of the Earth’s axis of rotation relative to the fixed stars, with a period of roughly 26,000 years. This gyroscopic motion is due to the tidal forces exerted by the sun and the moon on the solid Earth, associated with the fact that the Earth is an oblate spheroid shape and not a perfect sphere.

The arrangements of land masses on the Earth’s surface are believed to reinforce the orbital forcing effects. Comparisons of plate tectonic continent reconstructions and paleoclimatic studies show that the Milankovitch cycles have the greatest effect during geologic eras when landmasses have been concentrated in polar regions, as is the case today. Greenland, Antarctica, and the northern portions of Europe, Asia, and North America are situated such that a minor change in solar energy will tip the balance between year-round snow/ice preservation and complete summer melting.

So I have been harping on about this for almost as long as I have had a blog, but now it has been exposed that there has been clear manipulation of the Data presented to support the man made global warming climate change argument.

Climate change is (obviously!!) as natural to this planet as day and night. The period we are in is even called an interglacial period for goodness sake. The earth gets very cold and enters an ice age, and then warms up again, and then gets cold again, and then gets warm again, etc. etc. Nothing strange here, it has been happening for eons. Recent times included, such as the medieval warming period which was followed by the Little Ice Age in around 1650. I posted it before a couple of years ago, but in light of this scandal it bears re-posting for some perspective:

To think that we can control the temperature of this enormous planet is incredibly arrogant. There are much larger forces at work here, such as the Milankovitch cycles, precession of the equinoxes, axial tilt and Precession, sun spot cycles and most likely a load of other forces we know nothing about as we all fly through space as the Sun orbits around the galaxy. Will taxing people change any of that??? Of course it wont!

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A solar wind stream is buffeting Earth’s magnetic field and causing geomagnetic storms around the Arctic Circle. Last night in Lofoten, Norway, geoscientist Rob Stammes says the needle on his magnetograph spent the whole evening swinging wildly and he could see auroras beaming through the clouds. Not far away in Kvaløya, the sky was filled with green:

“The Northern Lights were everywhere–north, south, east and west,” says photographer Fredrik Broms. “It was a magical sight.”

Polar sky watchers should remain alert for auroras tonight as the solar wind continues to blow.

From spaceweather.com…