Les Jones

Media losing faith in global warming?

Thursday, October 15th, 2009 | Environment, Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | 1 Comment |

So says Tim Blair, quoting Marc Marano. “We have reached the ‘tipping point.’ 2009 can now be officially declared the year the media lost their faith in man-made global warming fears.”

And from The Daily Mail, Whatever happened to global warming? How freezing temperatures are starting to shatter climate change theory:

Closer to home, Austria is today seeing its earliest snowfall in history with 30 to 40 centimetres already predicted in the mountains. Such dramatic falls in temperatures provide superficial evidence for those who doubt that the world is threatened by climate change.

But most pertinent of all, of course, are the growing volume of statistics. According to the National Climatic Data Centre, Earth’s hottest recorded year was 1998. If you put the same question to NASA, scientists will say it was 1934, followed by 1998. The next three runner-ups are 1921, 2006 and 1931. Which all blows a rather large hole in the argument that the earth is hurtling towards an inescapable heat death prompted by man’s abuse of the environment

Warming advocates always liked comparing the 80s and 90s to the 50s and 60s, but the mid-century was remarkably cooler than the early part of the century. That fact never really fit with the idea of greenhouse gas-induced global warming.

And, yeah, record cold temperatures this year are shattering some people’s faith in global warming. If the temperature continues to drop then global warming advocates will be forced to defend theories and computer models that failed to predict the temperature drop. If that happens during this time of reduced solar activity then the solar theory of global warming and cooling is going to start taking hold in the media.

Tags: global warming

“What happened to global warming?”

Sunday, October 11th, 2009 | Environment, Science | Permalink | 8 Comments |

BBC - What happened to global warming?:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on? Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

Tags: global warming

North Pole ice was completely melted March 17

Monday, September 14th, 2009 | Environment | Permalink | No Comments |

March 17, 1954, that is. “Bastardi used this photograph of a U.S. submarine at the North Pole on March 17, 1954 to illustrate his point that Arctic ice can be highly variable.”

Tags: global warming

More evidence backing solar-based global warming/cooling

Friday, August 28th, 2009 | Environment | Permalink | 6 Comments |

Reason - Sunspots Do Really Affect Weather Patterns, Say Scientists:

A new study in the journal Science by a team of international of researchers led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research have found that the sunspot cycle has a big effect on the earth’s weather. The puzzle has been how fluctuations in the sun’s energy of about 0.1 percent over the course of the 11-year sunspot cycle could affect the weather?

Follow the link for the answer. While greenhouse gases continue to increase there hasn’t been significant warming since 1998. There seems to be little doubt that 2009 will be a record cold year.

The greenhouse theory of global warming was based on correlation: greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were increasing and global temperatures were increasing. As everyone knows, you can have correlation without causation.

What you can’t have is causation with correlation. If the greenhouse theory is correct then temperatures should continue to rise as greenhouse gas concentrations rise. That correlation has been broken for more than a decade. In fact, the correlation now seems to be reversing, with low temperature records being shattered all over the planet. That spells disgrace for the greenhouse gas theory.

Tags: global warming