Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

National Post ^ | 2/25/2008 | Lorne Gunter

[Uncledave]

Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

lgunter@shaw.ca

[GOPJ]

ping

[Rick.Donaldson]

(and then point and laugh as necessary)..........

hehehe, there IS that... so satisfying too. LOL

[Myrddin]

Checked the graph from peak to trough is about 50,000 years. You and I will be worm food when the next ice age is here.

You have looked at one plot and made a judgment. Read "Not by Fire, but by Ice". There are hundreds of cycles happening in parallel. Robert Felix does a pretty good job of identifying a large number of cycles that are converging at the current time. An ice age could start at any time. Let's hope we are worm food before it gets underway. Otherwise, it's going to be a very unpleasant experience.

[Myrddin]

"Not by Fire, but by Ice" by Robert Felix is a good resource. Likewise, "Unstoppable Global Warming every 1500 Years" by Singer and Avery. Both are excellent references. The Politically Incorrect Guide To Global Warming spends more time debunking the "follow the money" and political arm twisting side of the argument. The first two references spend more time on the real science.

[alwaysconservative]

Very cute; thanks!

[CedarDave]

Let me guess - the way to avoid an ice age is to reduce our lifestyle and punish capitalism and implement global socialism... Same solution to fix global warming... Same solution offered for ANYTHING...

Check out this thread:

Global warming alarmists knew cooling was coming (hoping to restrict economic activity first)

[William Tell]

texas_mrs said: "Thanks! I will definitely pass that on to her."

Didn't Senator Inhofe read a statement into the Senate record which, among other things, recounted the media driven "scares" from the last century, documenting about three oscillations back and forth from a coming ice age to severe warming?

Assuming that the cover of Time, I think it is from the '70s is legitimate, the students will appreciate the fact that the media has been on both sides of this issue over the years.

Also, at least in the U.S., the globe may have stopped warming around 1998. What happened to the CO2 induced warming over the last decade?

[MrB]

I agree with this:
Because they are not actually concerned about global temperature at all.

But not this:
They are environmental religionists who believe that human economic growth is gobbling up the natural world.

They are simply elitists who don’t want the general population using up THEIR resources.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

Good for your daughter. Let us know what happens. Mighty fine girl you’ve raised there.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Tell her about this website:

Not by Fire but by Ice
THE NEXT ICE AGE - NOW!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Another item:

Steve McIntyre Finds new NASA Hansen World temp errors
Climateaudit.org ^ | 9/4/07 | Steve McIntyre

************************

His Website is very valuable also:

Climate Audit

Hansen started this nonsense with his fudging with the raw data from weather stations.,....McIntyre is taking him apart....

[markman46]

bump for later

[AFreeBird]

Good for your daughter. Looks like she's chosen to take the "Bull" by the horns (pun intended).

It's the Texas way, right?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Here is an example of how McIntyre is casting GREAT DOUBT on Hansen's data manipulation that forms the basis for so much of the Global Warming Crap.....

Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Hansen’s “Rural” Peru
By Steve McIntyre

************************EXCERPT**********************

Hansen’s downward adjustments of Peruvian temperature records by as much as 3 deg C is based on the presumptive quality of Peruvian “rural” sites. If one even spends 40 minutes examining the locations of these sites, any resemblance to rural USHCN sites disappears. In addition, the failure of NOAA and NASA to update their records is notable. In some case, NOAA maintains up-to-the-hour records of sites which GHCN and NASA have not updated in decades. I counted 13 Hansen-rural sites in Peru. Brief comments on each one follow. Online versions at NOAA are mentioned - see this source citing NOAA (I haven’t sourced the data at NOAA directly at present).

********************snip*********************

Hansen’s Population Data
It’s hard to figure out why Hansen would classify (for example) the city of Iquitos (population 400,000) as “rural”. Hansen et al 1999 provided the following definitions for “rural”, “small” and “urban”:

We use the definition of Peterson et al 1997 for these categories: that is, rural areas have a recent population of less than 10,000, small towns between 10,000 and 50,000 and urban areas more than 50,000. These populations refer to approximately 1980.

Peterson et al 1997 is presumably Peterson and Vose (BAMS 1997), An overview of the GHCN temperature database. Here’s how Peterson and Vose 1997 introduced their population data set:

Given the popularity of GHCN, researchers at NCDC, CDIAC, and Arizona State University have prepared an enhanced database to serve the ever increasing demand for these data. This archive, GHCN version 2, breaks considerable new ground in the field of global climate databases. Enhancements include 5) detailed metadata (e.g., population, vegetation, topography) that allow more detailed analyses to be conducted; …

Wherever possible, we used population data from the then-current United Nations Demographic Yearbook (United Nations 1993). Unfortunately, only cities of 100 000 or more inhabitants were listed in the yearbook. For smaller cities we used population data from several recent atlases. Again, although the atlases were recent, we do not know the date of source of the data that went into creating the atlases. Additionally, this represents only one moment in time; an urban station of today may have been on a farm 50 years ago, though it is probably valid to assume that if a station is designated rural now, it was most likely rural 50 years ago. Knowing the importance of avoiding the effect of urban warming by preferring rural stations in climate analysis, these population metadata have been used as one of the criteria in the initial selection of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Surface Network (Peterson et al. 1997a).

These cities have been growing quickly, but it’s hard to believe that atlases in use in 1997 would have classified Iquitos as rural. It’s questionable whether any of these stations are actually “rural” within the proposed definition of Hansen et al 1999. Most of the sites even seem to be “urban” (rather than “small town”) under the definitions of Hansen et al 1999.

If the supposedly “rural” comparanda are actually “urban” or “small” within the Hansen definitions, then the GISS “adjustment” ends up being an almost completely meaningless adjustment of one set of urban values by another set of urban values. No wonder these adjustments seem so random.

Yeah, yeah, Hansen et al 1999 was written 8 years ago, but the same crappy population database is used in adjustments being done as we speak.

And by the way, I didn’t search through the database and pick out Peru as a lurid example. I’ve been to Peru though I haven’t traveled extensively through Peru and it didn’t have too many stations to look at so I could do a quick first cut analysis. So it’s not like I examined Ecuador and it was great and I’m only showing Peru because it’s bad. It just happened to be what I looked at. Maybe Hansen’s done a terrific job on every other country.

This entry is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

****************************snip*********************

Comments at the web site......

[rollin]

And they used to grow crops in Greenland. Ask not why the colonies were abandoned, though, it was not PC

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

You are getting a boatload of advice for your daughter here....but one more ....the weather stations are a HUGE DEAL....and I see you are in TEXAS....so:

Here is discussion on a weather station in Lampasas, Texas:

Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Lampasas, Texas
By Anthony Watts

********************EXCERPTS**********************

The www.surfacestations.org project continues to collect new stations, though we could certainly use more help in the midwest, particularly Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.

This NOAA USHCN climate station of record #415018 in Lampasas, TX was found to be tucked between a building, and two parking lots, one with nearby vehicles. According to the surveyor, it is right next to the ACE Hardware store on the main street of town. While likely representative of the temperature for downtown Lampasas, one wonders how well it measures the climate of the region.

View looking NE

In her survey, volunteer surveyor Julie K. Stacy noted the proximity to the building and parking, which will certainly affect Tmin at night due to IR radiance. Daytime Tmax is likely affected by the large amount of asphalt and concrete in the area around the sensor. The main street of the town (28 ft from US 183) and the ACE Hardware parking lot are visible in this photo below:

View looking south

Google Earth shows just how much asphalt and buildings there are around the sensor.

According to NCDC’s MMS database, the Lampasas climate station has been at this location since 10-01-2000. Previous location was an observer residence, which appears to have been a park-like location according to MMS location map. The sensor was apparently converted to the MMTS style seen in the photo in 1986, so the move did not include an equipment change. See the complete survey album here.

But the big surprise of just how bad this location is came from the GISS plot of temperature. It clearly showed the results of the move to this location, causing a jump in temperature almost off the current graph scale. Note that before the move, the temperature trend of Lampasas was nearly flat from 1980-2000.

Click to see the full sized GISS record

Given the entropy of the current measurement environment, I have sincere doubts that anyone can create an adjustment that will ascertain an accurate trend from temperature data as badly polluted as this. In my opinion, this station’s post 2000 data needs to be removed from the climate record.

Since there has been some discussion about how well “adjustments” take care of such problems, I thought I’d show you just how well the GISS homogeneity adjustment works with this station.

Here is the GISS plot for Lampasas, TX with the GISS homogeneity applied, I’ve changed the color to red and labeled it to keep them visually separate from the raw data shown in the plot above.

click the plot to see the original plot from GISS

Now here is the GISS raw data plot with the homogeneity plot overlaid on it:

The effect is quite clear. The recent “spurious” measurement remains unchanged, and the past gets colder.

The result? An artificial warming trend for this station that is created by GISTEMP adjustments.

This entry is filed under NASA (Hansen), Surface Record. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

97 Responses to “Lampasas, Texas”

1

Joe Black says:

February 15th, 2008 at 11:29 am

Say it ain’t so. Joe.

2

Steve McIntyre says:

February 15th, 2008 at 11:38 am

Given that this relocation took place after NOAA had clearly identified the importance of homogeneity in the USHCN network, this is pretty annoying.

It’s hard to figure out what the active ingredients in the adjustment are. This site is classified as “bright” so the adjustment would be based on the history at non-bright sites in the area. It will be interesting to see what they look like.

Readers also need to keep firmly in mind that CRU and NOAA do not carry out the GISS homogeneity adjustments.

3

Steve McIntyre says:

February 15th, 2008 at 11:49 am

Here’s a plot for nearby Blanco TX - the first nearby rural site that I plotted. It looks like there is some similarity in the two plots. It doesn’t look impossible to estimate an adjustment, so it’s interesting that the NASA adjustment is so inadequate. The various USHCN versions also need to be plotted to verify what they’ve done.

[libertarian27]

Please add me to the report contact list too.

~This article would be good for her and you too to fight the school on showing the movie:

Schools must warn of Gore climate film bias
3rd October 2007

Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has been called unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and ‘sentimental mush’.
Schools will have to issue a warning before they show pupils Al Gore’s controversial film about global warming, a judge indicated yesterday.

The move follows a High Court action by a father who accused the Government of ‘brainwashing’ children with propaganda by showing it in the classroom.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=485336&in_page_id=1811

[DallasDeb]

Great! Maybe we’ll get more snow in North Texas!

[colorado tanker]

Ack, you can’t win, they keep changing the story.

Yep, no matter what the weather is, they always claim it is "consistent" with their "models." The thing is, they have so many models they're right.

[steelyourfaith]

 

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