What Is This World Coming To?

Madison Wisconsin is forecast to have the coldest July high temperature recorded in more than 100 years.

In North Dakota KYFR’s lead-in sentence on the weather was, “With a summer like this, you can`t tell my Dad there`s global warming.”

WCVB complained; If you think you’ve never seen such a cool start to the summer, you are right: It’s been more than 100 years since Boston has been this cold in June.

And Accuweather explains why the North East may be experiencing ‘a year without summer’.

“While many factors play in to periods of warmer and cooler-than-normal weather, it is possible that a recent solar minimum in the sun’s cycle has been playing a role.”

So, it seems that global warming is caused by man-made pollution, whereas when it gets cooler, its because of reduced solar output.   If’I am understanding the ’settled’ science correctly,  man is responsible for warming the earth and the sun is responsible for cooling it.

The sky is falling.  I must go tell the king!

According to this report from Accuweather,  one of the results of global warming is that it is getting colder.  This counterintuitive conclusion is reached because of the billions and billions of dollars that have been invested to combat global warming.

According to Long Range Expert Joe Bastardi, areas from the northern Plains into the Northeast will have a “year without a summer.” The jet stream, which is suppressed abnormally south this spring, is also suppressing the number of thunderstorms that can form. The ones that do form in areas of the Ohio Valley and West are forming in places with very cold temperatures, which can lead to more electrified thunderstorms than normal this year.

Nice job, Al.  Now can we stop playing with the global thermostat?

UK’s Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington.

Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday.

The House Democrats don’t want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.”

According to Monckton, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), Ranking Member on the Energy & Commerce Committee, had invited him to go head to head with Gore and testify at the hearing on Capitol Hill Friday. But Monckton now says that when his airplane from London landed in the U.S. on Thursday, he was informed that the former Vice-President had “chickened out” and there would be no joint appearance. Gore is scheduled to testify on Friday to the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment’s fourth day of hearings on the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The hearing will be held in 2123 Rayburn House Office Building.

According to Monckton, House Democrats told the Republican committee staff earlier this week that they would be putting forward an unnamed ‘celebrity’ as their star witness Friday at a multi-panel climate hearing examining the House global warming bill. The “celebrity” witness turned out to be Gore. Monckton said the GOP replied they would respond to the Democrats’ “celebrity” with an unnamed “celebrity” of their own. But Monckton claims that when the Democrats were told who the GOP witness would be, they refused to allow him to testify alongside Gore.

“The Democrats have a lot to learn about the right of free speech under the US Constitution. Congress Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) refusal to expose Al Gore’s sci-fi comedy-horror testimony to proper, independent scrutiny by the House minority reeks of naked fear,” Monckton said from the airport Thursday evening.

“Waxman knows there has been no ‘global warming’ for at least a decade. Waxman knows there has been seven and a half years’ global cooling. Waxman knows that, in the words of the UK High Court judge who condemned Gore’s mawkish movie as materially, seriously, serially inaccurate, ‘the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view,’” Monckton explained. Monckton has previously testified before the House Committee in March.

(See: Monckton: Have the courage to do nothing…US Congress told climate change is not real ) Monckton has also publicly challenged Gore to a debate. (See: Al Gore Challenged to International TV Debate on Global Warming By Lord Monckton - March 19, 2007 )

Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.

Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.

via Increased Number Think Global Warming Is “Exaggerated”.

Alaska is suffering a statewide cold snap so frigid that temperatures have grounded planes, disabled cars, frozen water pipes and even canceled several championship cross country ski races. 

The government of Canada has issued extreme cold weather warnings for Manitoba after temperatures dropped to -40 degrees — (the only temperature that reads the same in both Celsius and Fahrenheit so everybody can tell how cold it really is.)

Meanwhile, the Toronto Globe and Mail is obsessing about unprecedented heat triggering a global food crisis sometime around 2040 while Greenpeace holds Obama’s feet to fire on his promises to combat global warming hopefully, before we all freeze to death.

Confused?  Good.  (I thought it was me.)

Shamelessly leeched from the Heritage Foundation’s Blog:

Good news, Mr. Gore. You no longer have to worry about polar bears arduously attempt to settle on a piece of breaking ice as portrayed in your documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. (The animated version Gore used in his movie can be seen at the 4-minute mark, to the tune of some strange Latin music, here.)

In any event, according to data compiled by Illinois’s Arctic Climate Research Center,

Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago. Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.”

Is there any good reason for the polar bear to be listed under the Endangered Species Act? Senior Policy Analyst Ben Lieberman writes,

Its global numbers have increased substantially, from an estimated 8,000–10,000 in 1965–1970 to 20,000–25,000 today. Clearly, any warming that has occurred has not had an adverse impact on polar bear numbers. This is true of the polar bear populations in Alaska, Canada, Russia, and other nations.

Unfortunately, the requirements for listing have never been particularly rigorous. In the case of polar bears, it may only require speculation that continued global warming will reduce the amount of summer ice in the Arctic that the bears rely upon.”

It appears that the polar bears are in good shape. Maybe Gore should shift his full attention to whales.

CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers had never bought into the notion that man can alter the climate and the Vegas snowstorm didn’t impact his opinion. Myers, an American Meteorological Society certified meteorologist, explained on CNN’s Dec. 18 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the whole idea is arrogant and mankind was in danger of dying from other natural events more so than global warming.

Myers is the second CNN meteorologist to challenge the global warming conventions common in the media. He also said trying to determine patterns occurring in the climate would be difficult based on such a short span.

“But this is like, you know you said – in your career – my career has been 22 years long,” Myers said. “That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate – it’s like having a car for three days and saying, ‘This is a great car.’ Well, yeah – it was for three days, but maybe in days five, six and seven it won’t be so good. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

“We have 100 years worth of data, not millions of years that the world’s been around,” Myers continued.

What?  You didn’t know?  I received an email of the South African Advisory Board Company’s Daily Briefing: from a doctor friend in Johannesburg.  (Thanks, Anton) It’s a member’s-only professional website, but the blurb that caught my friends attention, (and now yours) was this one:

“New research suggests that the rising temperatures and increased dehydration associated with global warming will lead to higher rates of kidney stone disease in the United States, particularly among residents of southern states, according to a study published in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”

Melting polar caps,  starving polar bears,  tornadoes, floods, Sudanese genocidal mania and now, kidney stones!

According to a report in National Geographic Magazine, “Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer, report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field.”

“We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history],” David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker.”

Global warming proponents love to say things like “first time in history” as if ‘history’ only goes back as far as the earliest climate records. That is generally considered to be around 1850. Earlier records exist, but they are generally unreliable.

Over the course the reliable historical record, there have been two recorded warming periods: 1910-1945 and 1976 - 2000. The UN’s International Panel on Climate Change reported that, over the past 100 years, the global temperature has increased 0.74 degrees C (or just over 1 degree F)

However, there is a level of uncertainty regarding global temperature statistics estimated at about .05 degrees since 1950 and as much as 0.15 degrees before that. And the UN IPCC itself concluded in 1997 that; ” that the ability to monitor the global climate was inadequate and deteriorating.”

However, even if the Arctic were to completely thaw in September, it would not raise sea levels. And Antarctica is cooling, not warming. So the only way Al Gore’s cataclysmic flooding can take place is for Greenland’s glaciers to melt and for the runoff to make it to the North Atlantic.

However, a new study has concluded that Greenland’s rate of melting is not accelerating, and in fact may actually be decreasing when viewed over a longer timescale. The study, which used 17 years of satellite measurements to reach its conclusions, determined the overall yearly movement of ice to the sea is not increasing, and is actually decreasing in some places.

The researchers noted the speedup observed by past studies was strictly a short-term transient phenomena, occurring primarily in the summer months.

So, if you are among those who has invested in a piece of the Arizona desert, hoping to leave their heirs beach-front property in fifty years, maybe you should rethink that investment strategy. It isn’t gonna happen.

Global warming is a business, not a science. There is money to be made in selling the disease and power to be had by offering the cure. If the symptoms fail to cooperate with the diagnosis, then the only alternative is to invent new symptoms.

So the Arctic is melting. Maybe. We’ll revisit this again in September. It will interesting to hear the explanation for why it didn’t.

Last year it was revealed that Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for climate change (I thought climate change was ’science’) was among the nation’s worst energy hogs. Al’s carbon footprint was twenty times that of the average American household.

Gore countered by claiming that he buys ‘carbon offset credits’ (which is really nothing more than buying stock in ‘green’ companies. Even after it was revealed that Gore has a majority stake in Global Management, which sells the ‘offsets’. So in essence, Al Gore offsets his carbon footprints by buying stock from himself.)

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

This year, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research conducted another study of Al Gore’s domestic carbon footprint. Although Gore claimed to have invested a little cash since to make his home more energy efficient, it seems that the problem isn’t that his home is an energy hog. It’s the people who live in it.

Since taking steps to make his home more environmentally-friendly last June, Gore devours an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations – at a cost of $16,533. By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

By contrast, President Bush has been criticized harshly by environmentalists for his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and its mandatory cuts on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.

An April 2001 article in USA Today described the president’s 4,000-square-foot single-story limestone house in Crawford as an “eco-friendly haven.”

“Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into purifying tanks underground — one tank for water from showers and bathroom sinks, which is so-called ‘gray water,’ and one tank for ‘black water’ from the kitchen sink and toilets,” it said. “The purified water is funneled to the cistern with the rainwater.”

In addition, “the Bushes installed a geothermal heating and cooling system, which uses about 25 percent of the electricity that traditional heating and air-conditioning systems consume.”