Ignoring The Clamour of the Herd

RIP Clive James

Poet, Broadcaster And, More Importantly, Climate Sceptic




James Delingpole
Breitbart London


Clive James, the Australian wit, critic, journalist, broadcaster and poet has died. His artistic virtues will, I’m sure, be widely celebrated and memorialised in the mainstream media. But of more interest here is the fact that he was an outspoken climate sceptic.

In an essay for the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2017, he ripped into the hysterical exaggeration and scaremongering which constitutes ‘climate science.’

They came out of the grant-hungry fringe of semi-science to infect the heart of the mass media, where a whole generation of commentators taught each other to speak andwriteahyperbolicdoomlanguage(‘unprecedented’,‘irreversible’,etcetera),which you might have thought was sure to doom them in their turn. After all, nobody with an intact pair of ears really listens for long to anyone who talks about ‘the planet’ or ‘carbon’ or ‘climate denial’ or ‘the science’. But for now – and it could be a long now – the advocates of drastic action are still armed with a theory that no fact doesn’t fit.

and

Alarmists have always profited from their insistence that climate change is such a complex issue that no ‘science denier’ can have an opinion about it worth hearing. For most areas of science such an insistence would be true. But this particular area has a knack of raising questions that get more and more complicated in the absence of an answer to the elementary ones. One of those elementary questions is about how man-made carbon dioxide can be a driver of climate change if the global temperature has not gone up by much over the last twenty years but the amount of man-made carbon dioxide has. If we go on to ask a supplementary question – say, how could carbon dioxide raise temperature when the evidence of the ice cores indicates that temperature has always raised carbon dioxide – we will be given complicated answers, but we still haven’t had an answer to the first question, except for the suggestion that the temperature, despite the observations, really has gone up, but that the extra heat is hiding in the ocean. It is not necessarily science denial to propose that this long professional habit of postponing an answer to the first and most elementary question is bizarre. Richard Feynman said that if a fact doesn’t fit the theory, the theory has to go. Feynman was a scientist.

He once wrote a poem on the subject for the Times (of London)

Winter Forecasts In the North

Britain Braces for ‘Coldest Winter in 30 Years’

"Global Warming" Likely To Be Exposed Yet Again as a False Narrative


Thomas D. Williams PhD
Breitbart London


Researchers from University College London are forecasting an average temperature in the UK of just 3.9ºC (39ºF) for January to February in what is expected to be “the coldest weather in 30 years.”
Yahoo News reported Saturday that temperatures in Great Britain could reach as low as -14C with “snow event after snow event” expected to hit various parts of the territory.

Forecasters expect the lasting cold spell to begin sometime this month and to continue at least through March.  “October is now looking like it will turn out to be colder than average with more of a chance of something wintery setting in through the second half of the month,” according to Exacta Weather forecaster James Madden.

“There is a strong chance of widespread frosts and the chance of snowfall which will set the scene for November,” Madden said. ““This will pave the way for what is shaping up to be a colder than average winter with some extreme cold weather events.  Snow events have been few and far between in recent years, but this winter is looking favourable to bring snow event after snow event as weather systems from the Atlantic clash with cold stagnated air over the UK,” he said.

A New Maunder Minimum Beckons

UN IPCC Scientist Blows Whistle

Exposing the Lies About Climate, Sea Level

Written by  Alex Newman
The New American


STOCKHOLM, Sweden — The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) is misleading humanity about climate change and sea levels, a leading expert on sea levels who served on the UN IPCC told The New American. In fact, it is more likely that sea levels will decline, not rise, explained Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, the retired head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University. A new solar-driven cooling period is not far off, he said. But when Mörner tried to warn the UN IPCC that it was publishing false information that would inevitably be discredited, they simply ignored him. And so, dismayed, he resigned in disgust and decided to blow the whistle. 

Asked if coastal cities such as Miami would be flooding due to sea-level rise caused by alleged man-made global warming, Mörner was unequivocal: “Absolutely not.” “There is no rapid sea-level rise going on today, and there will not be,” he said, citing observable data. “On the contrary, if anything happens, the sea will go down a little.” The widely respected scientist, who has been tracking sea levels in various parts of the globe for some 50 years, blasted those who use incorrect “correction factors” in their data to make it appear that seas are rising worldwide. That is just wrong, he said.

Indeed, even speaking of something called “global sea level” is highly misleading, the expert explained. “It is different in different parts of the world,” Mörner said, noting that sea levels can rise in one part of the world and decline in another depending on a variety of factors. For instance, the interview took place right next to an 18th-century Baltic sea-level marker in Saltsjöbaden near Stockholm that showed the Baltic sea level at the time it was made. Because the ground is rising, the marking is now higher up from sea level than it was when it was made. Mörner has personally been measuring and tracking sea levels in equatorial regions of the world — Bangladesh, the Maldives, Southern India, New Caledonia, Fiji, and beyond.

Mörner's conclusion is that solar activity and its effects on the globe have been the “dominant factor” in what happens to both the climate and the seas. Meanwhile, the UN claims the current changes in climate and sea level are attributable to human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). Man’s emissions of this essential gas, required by plants and exhaled by people, makes up a fraction of one percent of all so-called greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere. “Absolutely not,” Mörner said about the CO2 argument, noting there was “something basically sick” in the blame-CO2 hypothesis. “CO2, if it has any effect, it is minute — it does not matter. What has a big effect is the sun.”

Weather is NOT Climate

Anomalous Weather: Both a Weapon and Scourge of Climate Hysterics

James Murphy
New American


Weather is different from climate. There, I said it.

When late season blizzards and an unusually large amount of rain fell this spring in parts of the Upper Midwest and the Mississippi River Valley — weather events — causing widespread flooding, adherents of the climate-change religion tore their garments, put on sackcloth, and loudly lamented that global warming was to blame.

A high priestess of Climate Hysterianism, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, said in Congress recently, “Iowa, Nebraska, broad swaths of the Midwest are drowning right now, under water. Farms, towns that will never be recovered and never come back and we’re here and people are more concerned about helping oil companies than their own families? I don’t think so! I don’t think so!”

While tragic for those involved, this year’s floods along the Mississippi are hardly unprecedented. The list of major floods on the Mississippi is long. It is a giant river, and the residents who live adjacent to it understand that it floods frequently. 

Unfortunately, for climate hysterics, weather and its cousin climate don’t always cooperate with their beliefs. Consider for instance, the recent springtime weather in Minnesota.

Nothing To See Here. Move Along.

When Hot and Cold Are the Same

New Zealand has enjoyed a very balmy autumn.  It was a delight to walk in warm sunshine presented through clear, blue skies.  Some were beginning to argue, if this is "Climate Change" or "Global Warming" bring it on! 

The climate change hucksters are always careful about their language.  If things get cold, really cold, unseasonably cold then we are experiencing Climate Change.  But when things get warm, unseasonably warm we are experiencing an affliction known as Global Warming.  Of course those who are more trained in formal argument, if Climate Change and Global Warming were to mean the same thing, then the propositions and arguments prognosticating and predicting Climate Change and/or Global Warming are worthless. 

Nevertheless, the charade continues because it is "marketing" which is the important "thing".  And every student of Marketing 101 is taught that perception is reality.

Climate Change Update, Part I

Time to Invest in Freezing Weather Clothing Companies?

We are going to run a couple of updates on the climate change/global warming scam.  The first comes from the US, but focuses upon the authorities in Australia making up temperature data.



This is not isolated.  We will shortly republish and refer to some research completed in the US which demonstrates convincingly that a substantial conspiracy has been underway to "modify" actual temperature data so as to "prove" rising temperatures.  Government institutions are complicit.

"I See Nothing . . . "

Moscow Sees Its Coldest Christmas in 120 Years

Australia and South America also had cold-weather records. Why is nobody talking about it?

Jon Basil Utley
The American Conservative

Novoandreevsky bridge in the Moscow winter. (Igor Zhilyakov / Shutterstock)

With all the talk about Fake News, little is mentioned about No-News.

Moscow has had a record-busting winter, including the coldest Christmas in 120 years according to Russian reports. Yet there is nothing on CNN. Poland and much of Eastern Europe also are having a record cold winter. It is not reported. Also in the Southern Hemisphere were record cold winters in 2016 and cool following summers in Perth, Australia and New Zealand, which had the coldest winter in a hundred years. Similarly, in 2016 Brazil had the coldest winter in 22 years.

Although everyone can agree that there is “climate change,” the measures most visible for modifying it are all those promoted by the partisans of global warming—namely cutting back carbon dioxide emissions, particularly burning fossil fuels. But should we copy Germany with measures that raised electricity bills to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, nearly three times what it costs in America?

Fetid Corruption in the Swamp

Draining the Great Grimpen Mire


Scandal Gives Perfect Pretext To Drain The Climate Swamp

James Delingpole
Breitbart London

So NOAA deliberately fiddled the climate data to hide the “pause” in global warming in time for the UN’s COP21 Paris talks.  Really, this whistleblowing revelation couldn’t have come at a better time for Donald Trump.

In the field of energy and climate, President Trump has said that there is a massive swamp that needs draining.  But his efforts are being resisted at every turn by all those lying scientists, bent politicians, rent-seeking businessmen, and Soros-funded activist groups who  insist: “What swamp? What crocodiles? What leeches? Nothing to see here!”

What the whistleblowing NOAA insider John Bates has just done is prove beyond reasonable doubt what some of us have long claimed: that from NASA GISS and NOAA across the pond to the UEA and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, the world’s leading temperature data sets have been hijacked by climate activists and abused to advance a political agenda.

Here at Breitbart we smelt a rat from the moment NOAA released its dodgy, “Pause-busting” study two years ago.

When Evidence Does Not "Fit", Shout Louder

Climate Zealots Cool-Shamed

As an icy winter spreads over the continental United States and Antarctic sea ice is growing, a deep chill has settled over the climate "scientists".  The only shred of credibility to which they still cling is "climate change".

Since global warming is far too tendentious to maintain in the face of data like this, the cognoscenti created a new term to describe global warming--a term deliberately intended to put the global warming theory beyond any possibility of being proven false.  Since every climate changes and varies all the time, any--we repeat, any climatic conditions now "prove" global warming.  They "prove" climate change, and climate change is aka global warming.  Ergo, the science is settled.  The world is definitely warming up.

There are at least two lines of argument that potentially falsify global warming ideology.  The first is to research temperatures one hundred or more years ago.  If these can be shown to be as warm, or higher, than today's temperatures, then the hypothesis that temperatures are rising (due to man's rape and pillage of the earth's environment) would be falsified, or proven wrong.

The second line of argument falsifying the man-caused global warming hypothesis is to prove or establish that the climate has not been warming in recent times when compared to older records.  Hence, record cold temperatures in the United States this year are a pain in the proverbial for global warming ideologues.  According to their pet theory, this should not be happening.

In this great debate, historical temperature records are significant and important data.

Record Non Sequitur

Record Global Cooling Over The Last Eight Months

November 13, 2016
Tony Heller


Over the last eight months, global temperatures over land have cooled a record 1.2 C. November is seeing record cold in Russia and South Australia, so we should see the record cooling trend continue.



As temperatures cool at a record pace, experts say global warming is now unstoppable.

It is a vision of a future so apocalyptic that it is hard to even imagine.  But, if leading scientists writing in one of the most respected academic journals are right, planet Earth could be on course for global warming of more than seven degrees Celsius within a lifetime.  [Independent]

Note the most egregious non sequitur of our time:

Global cooling, means climate change, which means global warming.

Bare Faced Perversity

Global Warming Means Colder Weather, Don't You Know

Thomas D. Williams
Breitbart News

A new international study on climate change predicts that Europe and North America will be experiencing bouts of very cold weather, while insisting that the freezing temperatures will be the result of global warming.

In its “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” moment, the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Climate Change asks readers to suspend disbelief and continue to have faith in global warming even as they pile more wood on the fire this winter.

While acknowledging that the “chaotic nature of atmospheric circulation precludes easy answers,” the authors suggest that continuing changes in the Arctic are influencing wind patterns and the occurrence of extreme weather events in northern mid-latitudes.

A related study, published in the same journal earlier this week, claimed that the Arctic “polar vortex” has been shifting from North America toward Europe over the course of several decades. This means that winters in Europe and North America have been getting colder and should continue to do so.

Cherished Poster Child Soiled

The Doggerel It Deserves

 The warming that models projected,
Was flawed, as the skeptics expected,
With Antarctica cooling,
The warmists were fooling,
With data which must be corrected.

– Ruairi

[James Delingpole reviews the latest global warming embarrassment.  The West Antarctic is cooling, not warming.  However, a slight, temporary increase in global temperatures was recorded--which consensus puts down to red faces in Global Warming Glory Land and the slew of articles published in staccato machine-gun fashion to explain what should not be happening. Ed.]

The West Antarctic has become yet another victim of global cooling.  According to the latest study, in Nature, it has experienced

“an absence of regional warming since the late 1990s”

while

“The annual mean temperature has decreased at a statistically significant rate, with the most rapid cooling during the Austral summer. Temperatures have decreased as a consequence of a greater frequency of cold, east-to-southeasterly winds, resulting from more cyclonic conditions in the northern Weddell Sea associated with a strengthening mid-latitude jet. These circulation changes have also increased the advection of sea ice towards the east coast of the peninsula, amplifying their effects.”

What all this means, in plain English, is that the climate alarmists have just gone and lost one of their most cherished poster children.

Biting Winters

Global Warming Shamanism

It's been a remarkably warm winter in NZ so far.  Records have been broken, we are told--in a data-set stretching back to 1919.  Dark mutterings have been heard again about the horror of global warming about to descend upon us all.  The buzzings of the global warming doomsters have just begun to rise up again--and then this:

Winter is finally starting to bite. The whole country froze yesterday morning, and this morning again will be chilly.  MetService meteorologist Emma Blades said it wouldn't be quite as cold tonight but would still be bitter, particularly in the central and upper North Island.  In many parts of the country, temperatures are expected to slip below zero.  Blades said: "The North Island's looking very cold. In the South Island it's not as cold because there is more cloud around today."

Unusually, New Zealand's holiday hot-spot of the Coromandel was expected to be the coldest part of the country overnight with -2C.  Plenty of frost is forecast for Whitianga. Waikato is forecast to be cold and frosty. Hamiltonians are in for morning temperatures of -1C.  Much of Northland was expected to drop to 3 or 4C and Auckland would drop to 6C before dawn this morning.  [NZ Herald]

 Then overnight, like a smooth, hissing serpent, the meme changes from the threats of global warming, to the horrors of climate change.  All of a sssssudden, cold temperatures "demonstrate" global warming, only this time in the guise of climate change.  Cold temperatures really mean global warming, don't you know.

But, then, from left field comes another message.  The quiescence of the sun.

 You may not have noticed but our sun has gone as blank as a cue ball. As in, it's lost its spots. Meteorologist and sun-watcher Paul Dorian's latest report said the sun had gone "completely blank" for the second time in a month.  "The blank sun is a sign that the next solar minimum is approaching and there will be an increasing number of spotless days over the next few years.  Here is the blank sun:

Here is the "normal" sun:



Then we read this:

There are consequences of a sun without spots, not least for astronauts who face the risk of having their DNA "shattered" by cosmic rays, whose potency surges during periods of solar weakness.  According to Mr Dorian, cosmic rays surge into the inner solar system "with relative ease" during periods of solar minimum.  "Solar wind decreases and sun's magnetic field weakens during solar minimums making it easier for cosmic rays to reach the Earth," he explains.

"This is a more dangerous time for astronauts as the increase in potent cosmic rays can easily shatter a strand of human DNA. Also, during years of lower sunspot number, the sun's extreme ultraviolet radiation (EUV) drops and the Earth's upper atmosphere cools and contracts. [Emphasis, ours.]

We wonder if the Thames will freeze over once again?

Echoes From Paris

Unscientific Nonsense

Now that the Paris confabulation is over and rapidly disappearing in the rear-vision mirror we thought it may be useful to recapitulate some of the fatal flaws in global warmism.  The reasons listed below are in no particular order, but they provide a useful summary of why we at this blog mock the whole enterprise of anthropogenic global warming and its alleged threats.

Global warming of the man-caused variety has become a political cause masquerading as science.  For this, scientists the world over are responsible.  That is not to say that all scientists support the hoax.  We are sure that the vast majority of them have not given it much thought.  They ought to have.  Provocateurs are undermining the credibility of science itself.  Things are being said, done, and claimed to be science which are not scientific in any sense of the word.

Science is a limited heuristic enterprise.  It can focus only upon the empirical.

More Carbon Dioxide, Please

Ill Winds Blowing No Good

Global cooling is upon us.  The latest from Denver, breaks a snowfall record that has stood since December 15, 1897!  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the Party.  Go forth and burn as much fossil fuel as you can find.  The salvation of the planet needs you.

Monster Snowstorm in Denver Breaks Daily Snowfall Record

AP Photo/David ZalubowskiAP Photo/David Zalubowski
by WARNER TODD HUSTON
15 Dec 2015
Denver, CO239

A massive snowstorm that hit Denver has broken the daily snowfall record, dumping over three inches of snow overnight on the mountain city.

As of 5PM on Tuesday evening, December 15, Denver was beset with 7.7″ of snow, shattering the record of 2.8″ set on December 15, 1897.

This record is both the biggest one-day snowfall this year as well as the most snow seen on any December 15 on record.

The Real Threat

Our Doom Is Sure

Catastrophism is a peculiar state of mind which sees the end of life as we know it drawing near.  Whilst the phobia is certain that the end is coming, the precise form of the threat can change.

In the 1970's Paul Ehrlich was warning us that overpopulation was going to destroy the planet.  The decade before that, Rachel Carson was solemnly declaring in Silent Spring that DDT was going to poison us all.  Nevil Shute was sketching out nuclear Armageddon in his dystopian novel, On the Beach. And then, in the eighties, there was the threat looming of a new Ice Age which would devastate the planet and see us all off to frozen graves.  But by the end of the next decade in the nineties the end of life as we knew it would come about through global warming.  The planet was going to cook to death.  And, of course, there was the multi-decadal threat from space asteroids hitting earth.

Now a new catastrophic threat is emerging.

Watch "The Science is Settled" Evaporate Like Pixie Dust

Delicious Ironies

As a bunch of self-deluded utopians gather in Paris in an irrelevant effort to "stop" global warming, the world is now said to be descending into a mini-ice age.  The only qualification that deserves to be made is that this prediction is being made by some of the very same people who, until a few months ago, were chicken-littling over global warming.

World is on brink of 50 year ICE AGE and BRITAIN will bear the brunt

BRITAIN faces DECADES of savage winters driven by freak changes in global ocean conditions and a weakening of the sun.

By Nathan Rao

Daily Express

Crippling blizzards, snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures threaten a yearly dose of Arctic misery for the next FIFTY YEARS at least - and possibly decades more.  Climate experts warn a rare pattern of water cooling in the north Atlantic will trigger a chain reaction of events leading to a “fully-blown ice age”.  They say the UK is on alert for a “serious climate situation” with regular winter whiteouts pushing emergency services to the limit.

The UK Met Office, long a cheerleader for the reality of anthropogenic global warming, was more tempered.

Pesky German Scientists

German Physicists: Late 20th Century Warming “Nothing Unusual”

Posted by John Hinderaker in Climate

Powerline

As regular readers know, a battle over global warming hysteria is raging among scientists, and the alarmists are consistently getting the worst of it. German scientists Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Alexander Hempelmann and Carl Otto Weiss have published two influential studies in the European Geophysical Union journal. The first, published in 2013, examined the past 250 years of climate history. The second, published earlier this year, extended the research through the past 2,500 years.

Their findings are consistent with the main currents of modern climate science (as opposed to climate politics):

Discomfort In the Hive

Love the Cold

The coldest temperature ever recorded in New Zealand was one which transpired in 1905.  In Ranfurly the temperature dropped to -25.6 degrees Celsius in 1903.  Now, that's not to claim that the temperature had never been as cold or substantially colder in the centuries before 1905.  It's just that, as far as we know, there was no-one around to measure such things.

But since that time way back in 1903 we have had regular records (albeit adjusted in recent years by meteorologists with axes to grind).  Moreover, we have had an alleged century of global warming.  All that carbon dioxide spilling out into the atmosphere, warming up the planet.

Consequently, it came as some surprise to read that yesterday we came mighty close to that record low of 1905.

Letter From the UK (About Tons of Polar Ice)

What The BBC Doesn’t Want You To Know About Polar Ice

The Associated Press

by James Delingpole 

13 May 2015

Global Warming? Global Sea Ice Levels Defy Alarmist Predictions

Daily Caller

The BBC’s Science Editor David Shukman recently got back from an expedition to the high Arctic. Amazingly, despite having gone all that way, he seems completely to have missed the big story: that contrary to the doomsday predictions we’ve been hearing from all the experts over the last few years the ice up there seems to be getting thicker and thicker.

Here, courtesy of Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat is the evidence.

Multi-year ice in the Arctic Ocean is now at its highest levels since the winter of 2007.



Volume too has been growing rapidly – and is now back at 2006 levels


But this wasn’t what Shukman told BBC viewers in his report. On the contrary, Shukman’s version of events could scarcely have been more different.

Changes in the Arctic Ocean are so profound that the region is entering what amounts to “a new era”, according to Norwegian scientists.  A switch from a permanent cover of thick ice to a new state where thinner ice vanishes in the summer will have far-reaching implications, they say.

Ooh. Scary.  But you wait for the killer evidence that backs up these extravagant claims. And instead what you get is flannel like this, from the Norwegian Polar Institute’s Jan-Gunnar Winther: