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Seventeen Year ‘Pause’ in Global Warming May Last 20 More Years; Arctic Sea Ice Recovering

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Photo Credit: Daily Mail The 17-year pause in global warming is likely to last into the 2030s and the Arctic sea ice has already started to recover, according to new research.

A paper in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics – by Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr Marcia Wyatt – amounts to a stunning challenge to climate science orthodoxy.

Not only does it explain the unexpected pause, it suggests that the scientific majority – whose views are represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – have underestimated the role of natural cycles and exaggerated that of greenhouse gases.

The research comes amid mounting evidence that the computer models on which the IPCC based the gloomy forecasts of a rapidly warming planet in its latest report, published in September, are diverging widely from reality.

The graph shown above, based on a version published by Dr Ed Hawkins of Reading University on his blog, Climate Lab Book, reveals that actual temperatures are now below the predictions made by almost all the 138 models on which the IPCC relies.

Read more from this story HERE.

Critics Dispute Global Warming Assertions Made by IPCC

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Critics of a new United Nations report on global warming say their skepticism is based on discrepancies between the UN’s climate models and actual, observable conditions.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release its full report on Monday. It expresses 95% certainty that human activity is primarily responsibly for an observed rise in global temperatures over the past century. Environmentalists have said that even mild criticism of such reports on global warming as science “denial.”

Skeptics have already pointed to what they say are flaws in the report’s methodology and resulting problems with its findings.

Past discrepancies between the IPCC’s models and either subsequent environmental conditions or contradictory scientific work at the time demonstrate why those models should not be taken at face value, the critics say.

The IPCC predicted in 1995 that global sea levels would rise by up to 55 centimeters by 2100 “for the range of emissions scenarios.”

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Obama Takes on Coal with First-Ever Carbon Limits

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The Obama administration will press ahead Friday with tough requirements for new coal-fired power plants, moving to impose for the first time strict limits on the pollution blamed for global warming.

The proposal would help reshape where Americans get electricity, away from a coal-dependent past into a future fired by cleaner sources of energy. It’s also a key step in President Barack Obama’s global warming plans, because it would help end what he called “the limitless dumping of carbon pollution” from power plants.

Although the proposed rule won’t immediatedly affect plants already operating, it eventually would force the government to limit emissions from the existing power plant fleet, which accounts for a third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Obama has given the Environmental Protection Agency until next summer to propose those regulations.

The EPA provided The Associated Press with details of the proposal prior to the official announcement, which was expected Friday morning. The public will have a chance to comment on the rule before it becomes final.

Despite some tweaks, the rule packs the same punch as one announced last year, which was widely criticized by industry and Republicans as effectively banning any new coal projects in the U.S.

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Arctic Sea Ice Up 60 Percent in 2013

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Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

An unusually cold Arctic summer has resulted in almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice compared to the same time last year, bucking predictions that global warming would result in the disappearance of the ice cap by 2013.

According to the MailOnline, Arctic sea ice averaged 2.35 million square miles in August 2013 compared to the low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded in September 2012.

“We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped,” Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin told the Mail.

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$5.7M NSF Grant For Card Games, Videos To Teach Public About Global Warming

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Photo Credit: CNS News

Photo Credit: CNS News

A multi-million dollar project funded by the National Science Foundation is developing card games, videos and other educational programs “to engage adult learners and inform public understanding and response to climate change.”

The $5.7 million Polar Learning and Responding (PoLAR) project is just the latest in a series of federally-funded climate change efforts since Congress established the Climate Change Educational Partnership (CCEP) in 2009.

CCEP has already spent $46 million on taxpayer-funded research projects around the country designed to find the most effective ways to convince Americans that the federal government should confront what researchers claim is the threat of global warming.

Stephanie Pfirman, principal investigator and professor of environmental science at Barnard College, told CNSNews.com that one of the games under development by PoLAR is “EcoChains” – a card game in which “players learn the components of an Arctic marine food chain, the reliance of some species on sea ice, and potential impacts of future changes.”

Other games include “Future Coast” – described as “a community-based activity where participants consider the implications of sea level rise coupled with a storm surge, as happened with [Hurricane] Sandy.”

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Al Gore’s Global Warming Desperation

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Photo Credit: FrontPageMag

Photo Credit: FrontPageMag

Those who are wondering why Al Gore chose to publicly resurface in a Washington Post interview last Thursday with that paper’s ever-pliable Journalist founder Ezra Klein only need to look in three places.

First, there’s the recently revealed empirical evidence that the “global warming” movement’s claim that climate change is causing increased extreme weather events isn’t true. Second, there’s a new summary of historical research which blows up the movement’s infamous core “hockey stick” chart forecasting unprecedented, accelerating warming. Finally, there’s a new report due to arrive in a month from an increasingly desperate United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In late September, the IPCC, laughably described by the wire service AFP as “an expert body set up in 1988 to provide neutral advice on global warming and its impacts,” will release its next set of “scientific data” to advocate for a worldwide carbon-tax regime. Gore’s mission is clearly to start greasing the skids for the IPCC’s next round of hysteria.

Gore told WaPo’s Klein that the earth is already suffering the negative consequences of failing to act against “global warming.” He claims that “every extreme weather event now has a component of global warming in it,” and that “the appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world.”

There’s no doubt that the worldwide press’s emphasis on “extreme weather events” has been greater. Virtually every such occurrence will cause one or more journalists, politicians or both to claim it as definitive or presumptive “proof” of the existence of “global warming” and the urgent need to combat it.

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Al Gore Explains Why he’s Optimistic about Stopping Global Warming

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Photo Credit: Recyclebank

Photo Credit: Recyclebank

Ezra Klein: In 2005, when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, I remember that the hope was we could keep the carbon load in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, and the fear was we would hit 400ppm. Now we’ve hit 400ppm and people are hoping to avoid 450ppm. This seems to be getting out of hand, and fast.

Al Gore: We have already crossed the 400 parts per million mark. We crossed it earlier this year. The question now is how high it will go before we begin bending the curve. But in spite of the continued released of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.

The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world. You mentioned my movie back in the day. The single most common criticism from skeptics when the film came out focused on the animation showing ocean water flowing into the World Trade Center memorial site. Skeptics called that demagogic and absurd and irresponsible. It happened last October 29th, years ahead of schedule, and the impact of that and many, many other similar events here and around the world has really begun to create a profound shift.

A second factor is the sharp and unexpectedly steep decrease in prices for electricity produced from wind and solar and the demand destruction for fossil fuel energy from new efficiency improvements. The difference between 32 degrees fahrenheit and 33 degrees fahrenheit seems larger than just one degree. It’s the difference between water and ice. And by analogy there’s a similar difference between renewable electricity that’s more expensive than electricity from coal and renewable electricity that’s less expensive. And in quite a few countries in the world and some parts of the United States we’ve crossed that threshold and in the next few years we’re going to see that crossed in nations and regions containing most of the world’s population.

Another way to think about this is that back when mobile telephones first appeared, the market projections for how quickly they would increase market share turned out to be not just wrong but way wrong. This is a point made by Dave Roberts at Grist, but the projections made 5-10 years ago for the installation of solar and wind technologies were, similarly, not just wrong but way wrong. We’ve seen a dramatic increase that’s far more rapid than anybody projected and it’s accelerating — not just in the United States but even more rapidly in developing countries.

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Climate Change ‘Experts’: You Should be Dead by Now

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Photo Credit: MDGovpicsAny thinking person (that leaves out Al Gore) knows that science is never “settled.” Further, as Galileo taught us, there is no such thing as science by “consensus.” Famed physicist Richard Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” This is a great truism to keep in mind when encountering climate alarmists who promote themselves as “experts.”

According to a theory proposed by climate scientists known as the “hydrate hypothesis,” global warming will melt the permafrost in the polar regions, suddenly releasing massive amounts of methane hydrate into the atmosphere. Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, climate Armageddon will ensue.

An article compiled by John Stokes in the “socially progressive” newspaper and blog The Canadian, contends that the resulting climate devastation will kill an estimated 4.5 billion people in five years. The only problem with this prediction is that the article was written in 2007. What was our fate to be?…

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Uh oh: Study Now Says Earthquakes are Causing Global Warming

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Photo Credit: AlamyEarthquakes may contribute to global warming by releasing greenhouse gas from the ocean floor, a study suggests.

Scientists uncovered evidence that a large earthquake in 1945 released more than seven million cubic metres of methane into the North Arabian Sea.

The discovery exposes a natural source of greenhouse gas emissions that has not been considered before, they claim.

As a greenhouse gas, methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, but less abundant in the atmosphere.

Enormous quantities of methane are locked in icy structures called hydrates on the floors of the continental shelves surrounding the Earth’s land masses.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Lake at the North Pole, How Bad Really Is It?

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Photo Credit: NSF’s North Pole Environmental ObservatoryThe pictures are dramatic — a camera at the North Pole Environmental Observatory, sitting in the middle of what appears to be either a lake or open ocean, at the height of the summer sea ice melt season. Set against the backdrop of the precipitous decline in sea ice cover in recent decades due in large part to global warming, this would seem to be yet another alarming sign of Arctic climate change.

These images have attracted media attention, such as this AtlanticWire post and this Daily Mail story, both of which portray the images as potential signs of an intensifying Arctic meltdown.

But before concluding that Arctic climate change has entered an even more ominous phase, it’s important to examine the context behind these images.

First, the cameras in question, which are attached to instruments that scientists have deposited on the sea ice at the start of each spring since 2002, may have “North Pole” in their name, but they are no longer located at the North Pole. In fact, as this map below shows, they have drifted well south of the North Pole, since they sit atop sea ice floes that move along with ocean currents. Currently, the waterlogged camera is near the prime meridian, at 85 degrees north latitude.

“It’s moved away from the North Pole region and it will eventually exit Fram Strait,” said Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., in an interview. Fram Strait lies between Greenland and Canada, and is one of the main routes for sea ice to get flushed out of the Arctic Ocean.

Read more from this story HERE.