The UN’s big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancún, with claims of modest victory. "The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine," said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “Not as rancorous as last year’s train wreck in Copenhagen,” wrote the Guardian. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister who brokered the final compromise, described it as "the best we could achieve at this point in a long process."
The conference did indeed make progress on a few important issues: the outlines of financial aid for developing countries to help them deal with climate change, and some ideas on how to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in China and India. But it basically ignored the two crucial questions: How much carbon will we cut, and how fast?
Read More at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/
Stumble It!
The answer is: none.
Therefore, "how fast" is moot.
A Blizzard of Lies in The New York Times
By Alan Caruba
“Bundle Up. It’s Global Warming” – December 26, 2010, New York Times opinion article by Judah Cohen.
It’s Orwellian when cold is declared warmth. It’s deceitful and insulting when it occurs in the midst of a huge blizzard shutting down much of the northeast.
I would not even trust the date on the front page of The New York Times because the newspaper long ago lost touch with reality, with sanity, and, one can only assume, readers fleeing to other sources for the news.
When the oft-called “newspaper of record” chooses a day on which Mother Nature is demonstrating what tons of snow and chill air can do to a huge swath of the nation’s northeast with effects reaching Tallahassee, they are either trying to see just how stupid their readers are or doubling down on the global warming hoax they have disseminated since Jim Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute declared we’re all doomed back in 1988.
If you want a lesson in Orwell’s “doublethink”, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts or ideas at the same time, you need only read the first line of Cohen’s article: “The earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside.” In other words, who are you going to believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?
Judah Cohen is identified as “the director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.” No further details are offered such as the name of the firm or Cohen’s academic credentials. Is he a meteorologist? If so, he is one of the worst I have ever encountered.
It happens that I know quite a few meteorologists and climate scientists. One of them is Joseph D’Aleo, an American Meteorological Society Fellow, and editor of a science-based Internet site, Ice Cap. Suffice to say, D’Aleo has been one of a hardy band of skeptics that have countered the global warming hoax with hard science, frequently dissecting the bogus “science” put forth by government agencies including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and other such sources.
In an article titled “Why We Need a New Global Data Set”, D’Aleo wrote the following:
“As I showed in the first analysis, the long term global temperature trends in their data bases have been shown by numerous peer review papers to be exaggerated by 30% to 50% and in some cases much more by issues such as uncorrected urbanization (urban heat island), land use changes, bad siting, bad instrumentation, and ocean measurement techniques that changed over time.”
“NOAA made matters worse by removing the satellite ocean temperature measurement which provide more complete coverage and was not subject to the local issues except near the coastlines and islands.”
‘The result has been the absurd and bogus claims by NOAA and the alarmists that we are in the warmest decade in 100 or even a 1000 years or more and our oceans are warmest ever.”
While Cohen is parroting the World Meteorological Organization’s latest claim that “2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record” in England, the Daily Mail was reporting on December 5 that “Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.”
This parallels the weather occurring now in the U.S. where new low temperature records are being set while cities like Columbia, S.C., had its first significant Christmas snow since weather records were first kept in 1887!
Suffice to say that Cohen’s article repeats the usual blather about melting Artic sea ice while waiting until the very end to admit that “the Eastern United States, North Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinary snowy and cold winters since the turn of the century.”
A word to all who did not study meteorology; the World Meteorological Organization, a creature of the United Nations is also the mother ship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC, responsible for the Kyoto Protocols that called for limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, was totally discredited in 2009 when the exchange of thousands of emails revealed its chief perpetrators of the global warming hoax were manipulating the climate data it reported.
To trust the WMO or IPCC at this point in time is futile and dangerous. To trust the garbage coming out of NOAA, GISS and other government entities purporting to predict the climate is also to trust the Environmental Protection Agency that will announce in January 2011 its plans to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, claiming they are “causing” a global warming that is not happening.
Americans are being deliberately misled by rogue government agencies with no scientific justification for their continued existence.
As for The New York Times, it is unfit to line the bottom of a canary’s birdcage.
The permafrost is melting.
Sure signs of global cooling.
The temperature right now is -31 degrees C in Alert. When did you say the permafrost started melting. Shouldn't the Alaska pipeline have sunk by now if the permafrost was melting?
As for -31 in Alert, well it IS winter, isn't it (like Dr. C. says)?
Rain in New Brunswick in December.
Shouldn't the Alaska pipeline have sunk by now if the permafrost was melting?
http://www.google.ca/search?source=ig&h ... h&aq=f&oq=
http://www.grc.k12.nf.ca/climatecanada/alert.htm
Iqualuit is looking at a heatwave, being a high of -9, mean highs of -17! It's usually -22 historically today, and before Christmas they had single digit highs below zero. At 92% humidity too!
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/canu0014
Perth, Australia is seeing the worst heat since . . . last year when it killed 37 people. And flooding, that's bad too.
http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western ... 5978806936
And Toronto could see double digit highs tomorrow.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/ ... ar523.html
That the trouble with picking a single data point as a 'trend' Milton. There will be multiple other points that show a different trend. And none of them matter. It's the year over year, decade over decade trends that show the real pattern. Averages are built up this way, and they are what matters - how the average changes.
Dec 27, 2010
2010 - where does it fit in the warmest year list?
By Dr. Don Easterbrook
The last phases of the strong 2009-2010 El Nino in early 2010 made this year another possible contender for the warmest year of the century. However, December 2010 has been one of the coldest Decembers in a century in many parts of the world, so 2010 probably won’t be warmer than 1998. But does it really matter?
Regardless of which year wins the temperature adjustment battle, how significant will that be? To answer that question, we need to look at a much longer time frame-centuries and millennia.
One of the best ways to look at long-term temperatures is with isotope data from the GISP2 Greenland ice core, from which temperatures for thousands of years can be determined. The ice core isotope data were obtained by Minze Stuiver and Peter Grootes from nuclear accelerator measurements of thousands of oxygen isotope ratios (16O/18O), which are a measure of paleo-temperatures at the time snow fell that was later converted to glacial ice. The age of such temperatures can be accurately measured from annual layers of accumulation of rock debris marking each summer's melting of ice and concentration of rock debris on the glacier.
Two episodes of global warming and two episodes of global cooling occurred during the past century:
"
Figure 5. Temperatures over the past 10,000 years recorded in the GISP2 Greenland ice core.
The past 500 years
Temperature oscillations recorded in Greenland ice cores over the past 500 years (Fig. 2) are truly remarkable. At least 40 periods of warming and cooling have occurred since 1480 AD, all well before CO2 emissions could have been a factor.
Figure 2. Warming and cooling periods from 1480 to 1960 AD
The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before. Diary entries of a sailor named Roald Amundson confirm clear passage in 1903, as do those of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Arctic patrol crew that made regular trips through there in the early 1940s. And in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand). The errors were attributed to faulty sensors on the ice.
But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.
Right now we have -3 C.
Milton, are you by any chance a supporter of Harper ?
Ed Deak.
Iqaluit experiences its warmest December
Do you guys know the difference between climate and weather? We can trade this years highs and lows all day long, that is not climate that is weather.
If there is such a strong case for AGW why do they not publish their data. They got caught cherry picking data and falsifying data. Now they refuse to publish. They don't have a case and they know it. Their solution, even if carbon was the problem, won't fix anything but it will drain our wallets and give the money to rich people in poor countries.
They continuously , almost a 24/7 basis, spray aerosols at cirrus cloud levels and higher and at those altitudes they cause warming by reflecting the heat portion of the EM spectrum back to ground or sea level. Yea, I know, some of you manage not to observe what is going on in front of your faces. If you don't know what to look for, download "Don't talk about the weather", it will clue you in. It is available on youtube as well.
Ed, you live in BC, take a trip to Vancouver island and talk to Bill and Celia Abram, Bill is into real economics too so it will be doubly worth while for you.