In what organizers said was a rarity, Gore took half a dozen questions from journalists, including one from Phelim McAleer, an Irish filmmaker who asked Gore to address nine errors in his film identified by a British court in 2007.
Gore responded that the court ruling supported the showing of his film in British schools. When McAleer tried to debate further, his microphone was cut off by the moderators.
Al Gore’s environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth contains nine key scientific errors, a High Court judge ruled yesterday.
The judge declined to ban the Academy Award-winning film from British schools, but ruled that it can only be shown with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.
In the documentary, directed by Davis Guggenheim, the former US vice president and environmental activist calls on people to fight global warming because “humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb”.
But Judge Michael Burton ruled yesterday that errors had arisen “in the context of alarmism and exaggeration” in order to support Mr Gore’s thesis on global warming.
His criticism followed an unsuccessful attempt by Stewart Dimmock, a Kent school governor, to block the Government’s plan to screen the documentary in more than 3,500 secondary schools in England and Wales.
The father of two claimed An Inconvenient Truth included “serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush”.
The film’s distributor, Paramount, warns in its synopsis of the film: “If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.”
But the judge ruled that the “apocalyptic vision” presented in the film was politically partisan and thus not an impartial scientific analysis of climate change.
It is, he ruled, a “political film”.
The nine alleged errors in the film
1. Mr Gore claims that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”. The judge said: “This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore’s “wake-up call”. He agreed that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water – “but only after, and over, millennia”.”The Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.”
2. The film claims that low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming” but the judge ruled there was no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.
3. The documentary speaks of global warming “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor” – the process by which the Gulf Stream is carried over the North Atlantic to western Europe. Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the judge said that it was “very unlikely” that the Ocean Conveyor, also known as the Meridional Overturning Circulation, would shut down in the future, though it might slow down.
4. Mr Gore claims that two graphs, one plotting a rise in C02 and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years, showed “an exact fit”. The judge said that, although there was general scientific agreement that there was a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts”.
5. Mr Gore says the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was directly attributable to global warming, but the judge ruled that it scientists have not established that the recession of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro is primarily attributable to human-induced climate change.
6. The film contends that the drying up of Lake Chad is a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming but the judge said there was insufficient evidence, and that “it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability.”
7. Mr Gore blames Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans on global warming, but the judge ruled there was “insufficient evidence to show that”.
8. Mr Gore cites a scientific study that shows, for the first time, that polar bears were being found after drowning from “swimming long distances – up to 60 miles – to find the ice” The judge said: “The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm.”That was not to say there might not in future be drowning-related deaths of bears if the trend of regression of pack ice continued – “but it plainly does not support Mr Gore’s description”.
9. Mr Gore said that coral reefs all over the world were being bleached because of global warming and other factors. Again citing the IPCC, the judge agreed that, if temperatures were to rise by 1-3 degrees centigrade, there would be increased coral bleaching and mortality, unless the coral could adapt. However, he ruled that separating the impacts of stresses due to climate change from other stresses, such as over-fishing, and pollution was difficult.
A Government spokesman said he would not make any further comment on the case today.
In the peer reviewed book “Global Warming—Global Cooling, Natural Cause Found”, meteorologist and climate researcher David Dilley utilizes nearly a half million years of data linking long term gravitational cycles of the moon explain the recent global warming, rises in carbon dioxide levels, and for 2200 global warming cycles during the past half million years.
The gravitational cycles are called the Primary Forcing Mechanism for Climate (PFM), and act like a magnet by pulling the atmosphere’s high pressure systems northward or southward by as much as 3 or 4 degrees of latitude from their normal seasonal positions, and thus causing long-term shifts in the location of atmospheric high pressure systems.
Research by Mr. Dilley shows a near 100 percent correlation between the PFM gravitational cycles to the beginning and ending of global warming cycles. Global warming cycles began right on time with each PFM cycle during the past half million years, as did the current warming which began 100 years ago, and it will end right on time as the current gravitational cycle begins its cyclical decline.
Global temperatures have cooled during the past 12 months. During 2008 and 2009 the first stage of global cooling will cool the world’s temperatures to those observed during the years from the 1940s through the 1970s. By the year 2023 global climate will become similar to the colder temperatures experienced during the 1800s.
Plastic Polypropylene sheets to blanket Earth from Global Warming
An eccentric team of glaciologists headed by Dr. Jason Box (Ohio State University) have put forward a new solution to fight global warming by literally blanketing the Earth using polypropylene blankets on the rapidly melting Arctic ice shelf in Greenland. These blankets will cover a total surface area of 10,000 square meters, and are designed to reflect sunlight and block out Greenland’s immense winds.
The bulk of their cargo is 31 giant rolls of uniquely designed white polypropylene blankets which are treated with UV stabilizers. The team will blanket over glacial well that carries meltwater from the surface to the base of the ice and try conserving ice up to 2 m deep.
The team will be head to a remote glacier, 90 km east of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland and the major part of their cargo comprise of 31 giant rolls of uniquely designed white polypropylene blankets. Showing immense strength, PP blankets which weighs 340 gms/sq.m. will stretch to more than 55% of their original length prior to failing. Apart from being tear resistant, the PP blankets fail at a force of 3,800N (equivalent to placing a 380-kg weight), according to one puncture test carried.
As evidence builds of the earth entering a dramatic cooling trend, another scientist has gone public with his conviction that we are about to enter a new ice age, rendering warnings about global warming fraudulent and irrelevant.
Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera of the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Mexico states that “In about ten years the Earth will enter a “little ice age” which will last from 60 to 80 years and may be caused by the decrease in solar activity,” according to a report in the major Mexican newspaper Milenio Diario.
Herrera slammed the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) stance on global warming as “erroneous” because of their failure to factor in the impact of solar activity.
The models and forecasts of the IPCC “is incorrect because only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity,” said Herrera.
Herrera states that the earth is entering a natural phase of climate transition during which solar activity will diminish considerably, “so that in two years or so, there will be a small ice age that lasts from 60 to 80 years.”
Herrera cited the growth in glaciers observed at the Andes, Perito Moreno, Logan, the highest mountain in Canada, and Franz-Josef Glacier, New Zealand.
A dramatic cooling trend is being observed across the planet even as people like Al Gore continue to claim that the threat of global warming mandates the poor and middle class be hit with CO2 taxes in order to prevent climate change.
Both anecdotal evidence and hard data indicates that the planet is in the beginning stages of a significant downturn in global temperatures.
China recently experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis. The British summer has also left many yearning for global warming, with temperatures in June and July rarely struggling to get over 16 degrees and on one occasion even dropping as low as 9 degrees in the middle of the afternoon.
“Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.”
The reason? Sunspot activity has dwindled. There have only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle.
“The sun’s surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun’s 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century,” reports one science blog.
Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze.
Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015.
As we reported last week, the Armagh observatory, which has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years. predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next 20 years as solar activity grinds to a halt and the planet drastically cools down, potentially heralding the onset of a new ice age.
“Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C — that is, to a level lower than any we have seen in the last 100 years….”Temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern,” concludes David Watt.
Arctic Ice Grows 30 Per Cent In a Year Predictions of “ice free” summer for first time in history completely debunked
Alarmist scientists who predicted that the North Pole could be “ice free” this summer as a result of global warming have been embarrassed after it was revealed that Arctic ice has actually grown by around 30 per cent in the year since August 2007.
Back in June, numerous prominent voices in the scientific community expressed fears of a mass melting of the polar ice caps, including David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, who told National Geographic Magazine, “We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history].”
“This summer’s forecast—and unusual early melting events all around the Arctic—serve as a dire warning of how quickly the polar regions are being affected by climate change,” adds the article.
In February, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, told Xinhua, “If Norway’s average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away, which is highly possible judging from current conditions.”
As per usual, the reality has failed to match the hype of the climate doomsayers.
According to collated data from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Illinois, Arctic ice extent was 30 per cent greater on August 11, 2008 than it was on the August 12, 2007. This is a conservative estimate based on the map projection.
Blue pixels represent increased ice coverage over the North Pole in the year since August 2007.
The video below highlights the differences between those two dates,” reports The Register. “As you can see, ice has grown in nearly every direction since last summer – with a large increase in the area north of Siberia. Also note that the area around the Northwest Passage (west of Greenland) has seen a significant increase in ice. Some of the islands in the Canadian Archipelago are surrounded by more ice than they were during the summer of 1980.”
But what of the Antarctic down south? Figures tell us that ice coverage in the year since August 2007 has grown by nearly one million square kilometers.
As The Register article notes, “The Arctic did not experience the meltdowns forecast by NSIDC and the Norwegian Polar Year Secretariat. It didn’t even come close. Additionally, some current graphs and press releases from NSIDC seem less than conservative. There appears to be a consistent pattern of overstatement related to Arctic ice loss.”
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is set to sign a deal in Warsaw Wednesday on deploying a controversial American missile shield in Poland, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski announced.
Sikorski confirmed the timing in an interview published Monday in the daily newspaper Dziennik.
“The programme is being finalised, but it’s likely that the (Polish) prime minister (Donald Tusk) and the secretary of state will make a political declaration, and the ministers will sign the technical deal on the base,” Sikorski added.
Polish government officials were not immediately available for comment.
On Sunday, Rice had told the US network Fox News that she was “going to Poland to sign a missile defence agreement in the next couple of days”.
Moscow is deeply opposed to the missile plan, and the deal signing comes amid a spike in tensions between Washington and its allies over Russia’s conflict with pro-Western Georgia.
Washington plans to base 10 interceptor missiles in Poland plus a radar facility in the neighbouring Czech Republic by 2011-2013 to complete a system already in place in the United States, Greenland and Britain.
US and Polish negotiators inked a preliminary deal in Warsaw last Thursday, capping 15 months of grinding negotiations. Washington and Prague had already sealed the radar deal in July.
Washington insists the shield — endorsed by all 26 NATO member states earlier this year — is to fend off potential missile attacks by what it calls “rogue states”, a phrase regarded as including Iran.
The plan, however, has become a major source of tension with Moscow, which considers it a security threat designed to undermine Russia’s nuclear deterrent. Moscow has warned of retaliation against the Poles and Czechs.
Warsaw and Prague have had rocky relations with Moscow since they broke free from the crumbling communist bloc in 1989, and ties have worsened since they joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”
In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”
The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors”
In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, “I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central ’climate sensitivity’ question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.”
According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, “in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low.”
Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain’s Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth’s recent warming. “In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years … Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth.”
Global Warming Conclusively Debunked As Gore Calls For CO2 Tax The seven graphs that dispel alarmist claims about climate change
The world is cooling, sea levels are falling, ice is spreading, there are fewer extreme weather events, and it was hotter 1000 years ago, yet the myth of global warming is providing governments the excuse to micromanage every aspect of our lives, with Al Gore now openly calling for a carbon tax on the energy we use.
Following the end of the Sun’s most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now plummeting.
But such figures won’t deter the agenda of control freaks like Al Gore, who last night publicly called for a carbon tax to be imposed on the use of fossil fuels at a time when even middle class families are struggling to pay the bills as a result of a crippled economy, soaring oil prices and inflation.
Andrew Bolt of the Australian Sun-Herald has put together a series of graphs based on numbers from a plethora of scientific bodies to prove that the most alarmist claims about climate change are not only unproven, but in fact the complete opposite of what man-made global warming advocates proclaim is now being observed.
“That’s why 31,000 other scientists, including world figures such as physicist Prof Freeman Dyson, atmospheric physicist Prof Richard Lindzen and climate scientist Prof Fred Singer, issued a joint letter last month warning governments not to jump on board the global warming bandwagon,” writes Bolt.
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate.”
That’s why Ivar Glaever, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics, this month declared “I am a sceptic”, because “we don’t really know what the actual effect on the climate is”.
And it’s why the American Physical Society this month said “there is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”
The first graph, obtained from the Hadley Centre of Britain’s Meteorological Office, shows how temperatures dropped, leveled off, and are now displaying a clear cooling trend, since their 1998 peak which was caused by the “El Nino” weather phenomenon, which is completely natural and has nothing to do with CO2 emissions.
The figures mesh with anecdotal evidence of a cooling pattern – China recently experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis. The British summer has also left many yearning for global warming, with temperatures in June and July rarely struggling to get over 16 degrees and on one occasion even dropping as low as 9 degrees in the middle of the afternoon.
A common claim of behalf of Al Gore and the Church of Environmentalism, and one vividly portrayed in the Hollywood movie The Day After Tomorrow, is a predicted catastrophic rise in sea levels as a result of global warming.
In actual fact, figures from the Colorado Centre For Astrodynamics Research show that global sea levels, after having risen since 2000, have been falling significantly over the last 2 years.
In addition, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sea ice has grown rapidly in that same time frame and there is now more ice in the world than usually observed.
Another common cry from the alarmists is the contention that global warming is causing extreme weather events. Despite there having been far more violent and devastating weather events before the post World War 2 rise in CO2 levels, every flood, hurricane, tornado or cyclone is blamed on human-induced climate change.
The facts tell a different story. According to the American Meteorological Society, global warming hasn’t given us more cyclones, hurricanes, or tornados.
Furthermore, scaremongering about droughts attributed the global warming is disproved by the fact that levels of rainfall have increased.
Hysterical phony environmentalists like to imagine that the world has never been hotter, despite the fact that the planet has violently swung between extremes of temperature for eons.
New figures from the US National Council for Air and Stream Improvement debunk the IPCC’s notoriously controversial “hockey stick” graph and illustrate that the earth was a warmer place 1000 years ago. During such times, farmers in Greenland grew crops and even cultivated vineyards on a land mass that is now over 80% ice covered.
Despite evidence pouring in that the planet has naturally turned course and now embarked on a cooling trend, wild rhetoric, fearmongering, lecturing and bullying about the necessity for us to accept intrusions into our rights of mobility, privacy and behavior in the interests of saving the earth is at an all time high.
Global corporations and governments have joined forces to launch a united propaganda assault about how we must turn “green” while all the real environmental crises – deforestation, GM crops, chemtrails, genetic splicing, and cancer-causing cellphone tower radiation – are completely ignored.
Top Rocket Scientist: No Evidence CO2 Causes Global Warming
The campaign to force people to accept that “the debate is over” and that man-made CO2 emissions are driving climate change is in deep trouble, with another top global warming advocate – rocket scientist and carbon accounting expert Dr. Richard Evans – completely reversing his position.
Evans was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005 and he wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol.
In an article for The Australian newspaper, Evans highlights why he was so keen to jump on board the man-made explanation without there being any clear conclusion as to what was driving temperature increases in the period from the end of the 70’s to 1998.
“The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly?” writes Evans. “Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.”
“But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming,” he concludes.
Evans points out that the “greenhouse signature” that would indicate CO2 emissions are driving temperature increases – “a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics” – which would be evident if climate change was man-made, is simply non-existent.
“If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming,” he writes.
Evans highlights data collected from satellites positioned around the globe that indicates temperatures have dropped about 0.6C in the past year – back to 1980 levels. Such figures are complimented by anecdotal evidence of a cooling pattern – China recently experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis.
Evans also cites historical climate change and the fact that CO2 does not cause, but in fact lags behind temperature increase by as much as 800 years.
“The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect,” he writes.
“The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician’s assertion,” writes Evans.
Three top scientists have once again contradicted the claim that a “consensus” exists about man-made global warming with research that indicates CO2 emissions actually cool the atmosphere, in addition to another peer-reviewed paper that documents how the IPCC overstated CO2’s effect on temperature by as much as 2000 per cent.
Professor George Chilingar and Leonid Khilyuk of the University of Southern California, and Oleg Sorokhtin of the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have released a study that they claim completely contradicts the link between CO2 and global temperature increases.
“The writers investigated the effect of CO2 emission on the temperature of atmosphere. Computations based on the adiabatic theory of greenhouse effect show that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere results in cooling rather than warming of the Earth’s atmosphere,” states the preamble to the paper.
The full study, which appears in the Energy Sources journal, is sure to cause ire amongst climate cult adherants.
According to the paper, “Computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.”
The paper also outlines evidence to confirm that Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed, a factor attributed to the Sun having been more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.
The paper concludes, “CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100.”
A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia is warning of upcoming global cooling due to lessened solar activity. The study, written by three Australian researchers, has identified what is known as a “spin-orbit coupling” affecting the rotation rate of the sun. That rotation, in turn, is linked to the intensity of the solar cycle and climate changes here on Earth.
The study’s lead author, Ian Wilson, explains further, “[The paper] supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 – 30 years.”
According to Wilson, the result is a strong, rapid pulse of global cooling, “On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 – 2 C.”
A 2 C drop would be twice as large as all the warming the earth has experienced since the start of the industrial era, and would be significant enough to impact global agriculture output.
Earlier this year, astronomers from around the world noted solar activity was suspiciously low; some began predicting global cooling at that time. Since then, activity has remained far below average, with it now being over two months since a single sunspot has appeared on the surface of the sun.
In May, a team of German climatologists published research stating that, due to “natural effects”, global warming would halt for up to 15 years.
The headlines last week brought us terrifying news: The North Pole will be ice-free this summer “for the first time in human history,” wrote Steve Connor in The Independent. Or so the experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado predict. This sounds very frightening, so let’s look at the facts about polar sea ice.
As usual, there are a couple of huge problems with the reports.
Firstly, the story is neither alarming nor unique.
In the August 29, 2000 edition of the New York Times, the same NSIDC expert, Mark Serreze, said:
“There’s nothing to be necessarily alarmed about. There’s been open water at the pole before. We have no clear evidence at this point that this is related to global climate change.”
During the summer of 2000 there was “a large body of ice-free water about 10 miles long and 3 miles wide near the pole”. Also in 2000, Dr Claire Parkinson at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center was quoted as saying: “The fact of having no ice at the pole is not so stunning.”
Secondly, the likelihood of the North Pole being ice free this summer is actually quite slim. There are only a few weeks left where the sun is high enough to melt ice at the North Pole. The sun is less than 23 degrees above the horizon, and by mid-August will be less than 15 degrees above it. Temperatures in Greenland have been cold this summer, and winds are not favorable for a repeat. Currently, there is about one million km2 more ice than there was on this date last summer.
So what is really going on at the poles?
The Tipping Point that wouldn’t tip
Satellite records have been kept for polar sea ice over the last thirty years by the University Of Illinois. In 2007 2008, two very different records were set. The Arctic broke the previous record for the least sea ice area ever recorded, while the Antarctic broke the record for the most sea ice area ever recorded. Summed up over the entire earth, polar ice has remained constant. As seen below, there has been no net gain or loss of polar sea ice since records began.
Last week, Dr James Hansen from NASA spoke about how CO2 is affecting the polar ice caps.
“We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes… The Arctic is the first tipping point and it’s occurring exactly the way we said it would,” he said.
Well, not exactly.
Hansen is only telling half the story. In the 1980s the same Dr Hansen wrote a paper titled Climate Sensitivity to Increasing Greenhouse Gases, in which he explained how CO2 causes “polar amplification.” He predicted nearly symmetrical warming at both poles. As shown in Figure 2-2 from the article, Hansen calculated that both the Arctic and Antarctic would warm by 5-6 degrees Centigrade. His predictions were largely incorrect, as most of Antarctica has cooled and sea ice has rapidly expanded. The evidence does not support the theory.
Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.
Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today’s sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why.
“It continues to be dead,” said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission, noting that it is at least a little bit worrisome for scientists.
Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening.
“It’s a dead face,” Tsuneta said of the sun’s appearance.
Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t weather forecasters and they can’t predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.
Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.
“This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,” Dr Chapman noted in The Australian recently.
If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning. Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder. Could something like this happen again? There’s no way to tell, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.
The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state. The unexplained phenomenon has been the topic of much intense scientific debate, as well as other millennial scale events.
Now this 11-year low in Sunspot activity has raised fears among a small but growing number of scientists that rather than getting warmer, the Earth could possibly be about to return to another cooling period. The idea is especially intriguing considering that most of the world is in preparation for global warming.
Canadian scientist Kenneth Tapping of the National Research Council has also noted that solar activity has entered into an unusually inactive phase, but what that means—if anything—is still anyone’s guess. Another solar scientist, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, however, is certain that it’s an indication of a coming cooling period.
Sorokhtin believes that a lack of sunspots does indicate a coming cooling period based on certain past trends and early records. In fact, he calls manmade climate change “a drop in the bucket” compared to the fierce and abrupt cold that can potentially be brought on by inactive solar phases.
Sorokhtin’s advice: “Stock up on fur coats”…just in case.
Australian’s cost of living up under carbon trading
Al Gore’s environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth contains nine key scientific errors, a High Court judge ruled yesterday.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is set to sign a deal in Warsaw Wednesday on deploying a controversial American missile shield in Poland, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski announced.
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”
A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia is warning of upcoming global cooling due to lessened solar activity. The study, written by three Australian researchers, has identified what is known as a “spin-orbit coupling” affecting the rotation rate of the sun. That rotation, in turn, is linked to the intensity of the solar cycle and climate changes here on Earth.
Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.
noworldsystem.com 