Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Global Cooling and Food Shortages

Are we prepared with energy and food for the current global cooling?

For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis........None of this has given much cheer to farmers. In Canada and northern America summer planting of corn and soybeans has been way behind schedule, with the prospect of reduced yields and lower quality........In China, the world's largest wheat grower, they have been battling against the atrocious weather
In Europe, the weather has been a factor in well-below average predicted crop yields in eastern Europe and Ukraine.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5525933/Crops-under-stress-as-temperatures-fall.html

Canada’s wheat production may fall 18 percent this year as dry, cool conditions in the western Prairies slow crop development........Cooler temperatures for the past four to six months may curb yields to 33.4 bushels an acre, the lowest initial projection in seven years
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=aLrrq268WnQQ

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

IPCC Report

From the NIPCC report June 2009, titled Climate Change Reconsidered

Excerpted a few background notes on the IPCC:
"The IPCC is, first and foremost, a political organization and not a scientific one. It’s findings therefore should be understood to be political and not scientific findings.

we are often told about the “2,500 scientists” who contributed to the latest IPCC report, the vast majority of these contributors had no influence on the conclusions expressed by the IPCC and were not asked if they endorsed those conclusions

IPCC’s key personnel and lead authors are appointed by governments, not by scientific organizations.

The full reports of the IPCC are then revised after their executive summaries were written in order to agree with the political documents.

The scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all in careers that rely on government contracts and rely on government grants to support their IPCC activities

The IPCC’s agenda is ...... not to discover the truth about how the world’s incredibly complex and ever-changing climate operates. It is, instead, to justify control of the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide.

IPCC arrives at this conclusion only by ignoring scientific data that were available but were inconsistent with the authors’ pre-conceived conclusions, and has already been contradicted in important parts by research published since May 2006

IPCC fails to consider important scientific issues

It violates the established rules and procedures that should be used when making scientific forecasts

It uses surface-based temperature records known to be inaccurate, and ignores satellite data showing patterns of warming in the atmosphere that are different from what models predict would occur if greenhouse gases were the cause of warming.

The IPCC continues to undervalue the overwhelming evidence that, on decadal and century-long time scales, the Sun and associated atmospheric cloud effects are responsible for much of past climate change.

IPCC’s shortcomings have been hidden from the public and policymakers, leading to an uncritical acceptance of its reports and conclusions"

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Feeling More Like April Than June

AccuWeather June 9, 2009
Feeling More Like April Than June
unseasonably chilly air to linger across Montana, the Dakotas and Minnesota. Many locations, including the Canadian Prairies, will have temperatures 10-20 degrees below normal on Tuesday.

Afternoon highs will only reach the upper 50s and lower 60s across much of the region, normal for the end of April. Normal highs across the Dakotas are in the mid-70s. In addition to the continuing cool spell, an area of low pressure coming from the Rockies will bring more wet weather, in the form of a few showers.

Today is likely to be the fourth day in a row in which the temperatures were at least 10 degrees below normal in Minneapolis, Pierre and Billings. Across much of North Dakota, temperatures have remained 10-20 degrees below normal for five consecutive days.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Cooling

North Dakota - KXMC.com
N.D. (AP) Snow has fallen in Dickinson in June, the first time in nearly 60 years the city has seen snow past May.

Wisconsin - Greenbay Press
If it seemed cold to you in Green Bay on Saturday, it was. The high temperature for the day, reached at 9:50 a.m., was 52. That set a record for the lowest high temperature for June 6, according to the National Weather Service.

Similar records were set across Wisconsin today. Manitowoc's high was 54, breaking the record of 56 set in 1935. In central Wisconsin, records were set in Stevens Point, Wisconsin Rapids, Marshfield and Merrill, all breaking marks set in 1935.

Better get used to it. There are showers and thunderstorms in the forecast for Green Bay through Monday night, with highs of 55 on Sunday and 59 on Monday. Things look better for Tuesday, when it’s expected to be partly sunny and 66.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Chapter 1,2,3 of Climate Change Reconsidered

Excerpts from From NIPCC June 2, 2009

Chapter 1
• Today’s state-of-the-art climate models fail to accurately simulate the physics of earth’s radiative energy balance, resulting in uncertainties “as large as, or larger than, the doubled CO2 forcing.”

Chapter 2
• Scientists may have discovered a connection between cloud creation and sea surface temperature in the tropics that creates a “thermostat-like control” that automatically vents excess heat into space.
• Iodocompounds—created by marine algae— function as cloud condensation nuclei, which help create new clouds that reflect more incoming solar radiation back to space and thereby cool the planet.

Chapter 3
• The IPCC ......evidence it cites, including the “hockey-stick” representation of earth’s temperature record by Mann et al., has been discredited and contradicted by many independent scholars.
• A corrected temperature record shows temperatures around the world were warmer
during the Medieval Warm Period of approximately 1,000 years ago than they are
today, and have averaged 2-3ºF warmer than today’s temperatures over the past 10,000 years.
• The IPCC cites as evidence of modern global warming data from surface-based recording stations yielding a 1905-2005 temperature increase of 0.74ºC +/- 0.18ºC. But this temperature record is known to be positively biased by insufficient corrections for the nongreenhouse- gas-induced urban heat island (UHI) effect. It may be impossible to make proper corrections for this deficiency, as the UHI of even
small towns dwarfs any concomitant augmented greenhouse effect that may be present.
• Highly accurate satellite data, adjusted for orbit drift and other factors, show a much more modest warming trend in the last two decades of the twentieth century and a dramatic decline in the warming trend in the first decade of the twentyfirst
century.
• The “fingerprint” or pattern of warming observed in the twentieth century differs from the pattern predicted by global climate models designed to simulate CO2-induced global warming.
All greenhouse models show an increasing warming trend with altitude in the tropics, peaking around 10 km at roughly twice the surface value. However, the temperature data from balloons give the opposite result: no increasing warming, but rather a slight cooling with altitude.
• The average temperature history of Antarctica provides no evidence of twentieth century warming. While the Antarctic peninsula shows recent warming, several research teams have documented a cooling trend for the interior of the continent since the 1970s.

Climate Change Reconsidered

Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) has released an 880-page book challenging the scientific basis of concerns that global warming is either man-made or would have harmful effects.

Climate Change Reconsidered
June 2, 2009

Coauthors Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso and 35 contributors and reviewers present an authoritative and detailed rebuttal of the findings of the IPCC.

A couple highlights include:
"We regret that many advocates in the debate have
chosen to give up debating the science and focus
almost exclusively on questioning the motives of
“skeptics,” name-calling, and ad hominem attacks."

"The IPCC continues to undervalue the
overwhelming evidence that, on decadal and centurylong
time scales, the Sun and associated atmospheric cloud effects are responsible for much of past climate
change. It is therefore highly likely that the Sun is
also a major cause of twentieth-century warming,"

"The scholarship in this book demonstrates overwhelming scientific support for the position that the warming of the twentieth century was moderate and not unprecedented, that its impact on human health and wildlife was positive, and that carbon dioxide probably is not the driving factor behind climate change."

"the contributors and reviewers of NIPCC donated their time and best efforts to produce this report out of concern that the IPCC was provoking an irrational fear of anthropogenic global warming based on incomplete and faulty science."

"Seeing science clearly misused to shape public policies that have the potential to inflict severe economic harm, particularly on low-income groups, NIPCC’s team of scientists chose to speak up for science at a time when too few people outside the scientific community know what is happening, and too few scientists who know the truth have the will or the platforms to speak out against the IPCC."

Chapter 1 describes the limitations of the IPCC’s
attempt to forecast future climate conditions by using
computer climate models.

Chapter 2 describes feedback factors that reduce
the earth’s temperature sensitivity to changes in
atmospheric CO2.

Chapter 3 reviews empirical data on past
temperatures. We find no support for the IPCC’s
claim that climate observations during the twentieth
century are either unprecedented or provide evidence
of an anthropogenic effect on climate.

Chapter 4 reviews observational data on glacier
melting, sea ice area, variation in precipitation, and
sea level rise. We find no evidence of trends that
could be attributed to the supposedly anthropogenic
global warming of the twentieth century.

Chapter 5 summarizes the research of a growing
number of scientists who say variations in solar
activity, not greenhouse gases, are the true driver of
climate change.

Chapter 6 investigates and debunks the
widespread fears that global warming might cause
more extreme weather.

Chapter 7 examines the biological effects of
rising CO2 concentrations and warmer temperatures.

Chapter 8 examines the IPCC’s claim that CO2-
induced increases in air temperature will cause
unprecedented plant and animal extinctions, both on
land and in the world’s oceans. We find there little
real-world evidence in support of such claims and an
abundance of counter evidence that suggests
ecosystem biodiversity will increase in a warmer and
CO2-enriched world.

Chapter 9 challenges the IPCC’s claim that CO2-
induced global warming is harmful to human health.............
However, a thorough examination of the
peer-reviewed scientific literature reveals that further
global warming would likely do just the opposite and
actually reduce the number of lives lost to extreme
thermal conditions.............