Cold deaths in India
www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=126&art_id=nw20100101113458666C113855USA Hundreds more new cold and snow records set in last week
wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/02/record-cold-weather-roundup-hundreds-of-new-cold-and-snow-records-set-in-the-last-week/#more-14748Dublin airport suspends flights in cold weather
DUBLIN, Jan 1 (Reuters) - All flights to and from Dublin were suspended on Friday after heavy snowfall on New Year's Eve which also disrupted bus and rail services in the Irish capital.
www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE60002120100101?type=marketsNewsRecent global cool-down challenges validity of climate change modelsJanuary 1, 2010, 10:49 AM Seminole County Environmental News Examiner
Kirk Myers
“Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there,” boomed the disc jockey in the movie “Groundhog Day.”
He could have been describing this winter. Much to the chagrin of global warming doomsayers, the planet is getting colder, and there is no warming in sight. This winter season has seen a major East Coast blizzard, record snowfall in Oklahoma and Texas, the Midwest digging out from a pre-Christmas storm and record-low temperatures in the Dakotas.
In Europe, Great Britain’s highways have been snarled by unseasonably heavy snow and ice, and flights have been disrupted or canceled at airports thoughout Europe because of extreme wintry weather. And President Obama and Rep. Nancy Pelosi were forced to retreat early from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conference in Copenhagen earlier last month to avoid an East Coast blizzard that eventually deposited a foot of snow on Washington, D.C.
This follows 2008's bitterly cold weather in which China was hit by its coldest winter in 100 years and Britain, pounded by hail and snow, shivered through its coldest April in decades.
In Chicago, unseasonably cool summer temperatures in 2008 set new records.
As the Chicago Tribune reported, “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.”
In December 2008, 3.6 inches of snow fell on Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport, the highest December snowfall recorded in the area since it began keeping records 70 years ago. The freakishly cold weather even produced a light dusting of snow in Malibu, along Southern California’s coast.
These and other weather anomalies are further evidence of global cooling, warn global warming skeptics.
As a growing number of scientists (those not beholden to grant money or peer pressure) have observed, global temperatures have stopped rising and are now falling. In fact, the planet has experienced an eight-year downward trend in global temperatures, a decline that none of the current climate models predicted.
“Between 1940 and 1975, and again between 2001 and the present, global temperatures have exhibited a downtrend,” says global warming skeptic Christopher Monckton. “Not one of the climate models relied upon by the IPCC had predicted this downturn.”
Richard S. Courtney, an IPCC expert reviewer and Britain-based climate and atmospheric science consultant, has dismissed claims of dangerous global heating as “rubbish.”
“Global warming is not 'accelerating.' Global warming has stopped. There has been no statistically significant rise in [mean global temperature or MGT] since 1995 and MGT has fallen since 1998,” he said.
He is not alone in his criticism of climate change alarmism. James A. Peden, an atmospheric physicist formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, calls today’s global warming hyperbole “a collaborative effort between the world’s incompetent scientists and the world’s scientifically illiterate journalists.”
Many reporters are “science illiterates . . . the Chicken Littles of the 21st Century, spreading climate change poppycock like bread crumbs in the forest,” he laments. “The crumbs, hopefully, will lead them to a paycheck at the end of the week from their similarly science-illiterate employers. . . .”
Growing evidence of global cooling has forced the alarmist community to shift its focus from global warming to “climate change.” As PropagandaMatrix.com reports:
“Global temperatures have remained reasonably flat since a decline in 1998, and cooling trends are now being observed despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels have increased in the atmosphere . . . On the whole, the world is getting colder . . . which is why ‘global warming’ suddenly became ‘climate change’ when temperature levels since 2003 started to prove the alarmists wrong.”
Is another big freeze just around the corner? Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, seems to think so. In an interview with Mexico's Melenio Diario, he said the earth is on the brink of a big chill similar to the Little Ice Age, a cold period that lasted from 1650 until the mid-1800s.
"At present, the world is experiencing a transition phase where solar activity diminishes considerably, and . . . we will soon begin to see signs of ‘a small ice age that lasts from 60 to 80 years.'" He said the IPCC models and forecasts are “incorrect” because they focus solely on mathematical models and scenarios that “do not include, for example, solar activity."
Another outspoken global warming skeptic is Professor Kunihiko Takeda, vice chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Japan’s Chubu University, who has challenged the prevailing theory that rising levels of CO2 are driving climate change.
“Global warming has nothing to do with how much CO2 is produced or what we do here on Earth,” he told The Japan Times. “For millions of years, solar activity has been controlling temperatures on Earth and even now, the sun controls how high the mercury goes. CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another.”
Takeda then took aim at the many CO2 alarmists in the scientific community:
“Soon it [the earth] will cool down anyhow, once again, regardless of what we do. Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so.”
As evidence of global cooling mounts, climate scientists of the man-warming-the-earth variety are performing semantic somersaults to deny the obvious. The public is now instructed to ignore the man behind the curtain.
Defending the global warming camp, Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., asserts that "a cool phase does not mean the overall theory of dangerous human-driven warming is flawed. Too many think global warming means monotonic relentless warming everywhere year after year. It does not happen that way.”
Joining Trenberth on the global warming defense team is Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, who reassures shivering doubters that the catastrophic human-induced warming phase is merely on temporary hold.
“We’re learning that internal climate variability is important and can mask the effects of human-induced global change. In the end this gives more confidence in the long-term projections,” he says. Translation: “The climate models are garbage, but we don't want to admit it.”
Another member of the global-cooling-denial squad is Richard Wood from Britain’s Hadley Centre. "We expect man-made global warming to be superimposed on . . . natural variations,” he told the BBC, while urging snow-bound skeptics to "make sure we don't get distracted from the longer term changes that will happen in the climate [as a result of greenhouse gas emissions]."
Why is there such a concerted effort by prominent members of the scientific community to deny the now undeniable downtrend in global temperatures? The answer is “money,” says Don J. Easterbrook, Ph.D., emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University.
“The U.S. spends about two-billion dollars a year on research. Right now, if you submit anything that says CO2 is not the bad guy, you won’t have a chance of getting funding. It all goes to the CO2 people who build little fiefdoms; they have grant money coming out of their ears.”
www.examiner.com/x-32936-Seminole-County-Environmental-News-Examiner~y2010m1d1-Recent-global-cooldown-challenges-validity-of-climate-change-models
