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Posted on February 13, 2012 by Anthony Watts Foreword: Dr Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, authors of a new controversial skeptic book now hitting German bookstores, have asked me to post their response to comments made by climate scientist Georg Feulner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in an interview by NTV television. Feulner insists that CO2 plays the major role in climate change and that the sun has little impact.You can read about the new book just published in Germany that is causing an uproar in the German green establishment here. The response is so vitriolic...

Do Latest Solar Studies Confirm Upcoming Global Cooling? Posted on February 13, 2012 by Anthony Watts Guest post by Matti VooroImage via Wikipedia I fully support the findings of  Jan –Erik Solheim , Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum and their very recent paper called The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24  dated February 2012. The abstract reads: Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend...

Global warming: Been there, done that. Forward-looking folks are adjusting their fretting machinery now to something called Cycle 25. Button up your overcoats. Ice is on the way. Global warming, which was mostly a scam invented by researchers looking for government grants, is over. The great warming phenomenon, which was supposed to have sent polar bears to vacation in Miami Beach by now, ended in 1997. Britain’s Met Office, which tracks weather and makes forecasts, and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the source of much global warming research (some of it faked, some of it not), agree,...

“THE CO2 LIES … pure fear-mongering … should we blindly trust the experts?” That’s what Germany’s leading daily Bild (see photo) wrote in its print and online editions today, on the very day that renowned publisher Hoffmann & Campe officially released a skeptic book – one written by a prominent socialist and environmental figure.This is huge. More than I ever could have possibly imagined. And more is coming in the days ahead! The Bild piece was just the first of a series.Mark this as the date that Germany’s global warming movement took a massive body blow.Today, not one, but two of...

... A new mini-report from the environmental group Climate Nexus points out that climate change is poised to wreck Valentine’s Day, or at least change it significantly, by threatening chocolate production. That’s right. Global warming is very bad for chocolate. Research from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture found last year that as temperatures rise, the principal growing regions for cocoa could shrink. Other elements of the Climate Nexus report say similar changes are already affecting the best sugar cane areas of the world, and are partially responsible for a 30% decrease in sugar production in Indonesia in 2011. Also,...

Skeptics are winning: “The carbon market is dead” The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus...

Three West Virginia coal plants just announced they will close this year. Metro News reported: Ohio based FirstEnergy Corporation announces it will close three coal fired power plants in West Virginia by this fall. The closings come directly from the impact of new federal EPA regulations. The plants to close are Albright Power Station, Willow Island Power Station, and the Rivesville Power Station. The company says 105 employees will be directly impacted. The three plants produce 660 megawatts and about 3-percent of FirstEnergy’s total generation. In recent years, the plants served as “peaking facilities” and generated power during times of...

N. Korea's largest port frozen for 2 straight winters SEOUL, Feb. 10 (Yonhap) -- North Korea's largest port of Nampo has frozen for the second winter in a row due to a severe cold spell, an environmental research institute said Friday. The trade port, the marine gateway of the country's capital Pyongyang, is believed to have been frozen since Jan. 6, according to the Korea Center for Atmospheric Environment Research, citing satellite images. Chung Yong-seung, head of the research institute, said it is rare for the port to freeze two winters in a row, a development he said could have...

As presidential candidates go, Rick Santorum is quite an excitable guy. More so than most, the former senator is prone to delve into all kinds of bizarre, almost hysterical, ideas that he's only too eager to share with the public. Just over the past couple of days, Santorum argued that evidence from climate scientists are an elaborate "hoax"; he said President Obama may force Roman Catholic churches to hire women priests; and he argued gas prices "caused the housing bubble to burst." ....here's what Santorum had to say during a town-hall meeting in Texas last night: "They are taking faith...

In the final days of Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s tenure, the state Department of Energy, Labor & Economic Growth trumpeted the success of green jobs created in the solar industry. “Total job creation projected of 21,592” the April 12, 2010, DELEG presentation claimed. Almost two years later, the large majority of those jobs never saw the light of day. Even if they had come to fruition, they would just be a small part of the entire Michigan economy, says James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. For example, the state of Michigan created 218,137...

An overview: Understanding the Global Warming Debate Posted on February 9, 2012 by Anthony Watts Guest post by Warren MeyerLikely you have heard the sound bite that “97% of climate scientists” accept the global warming “consensus”. Which is what gives global warming advocates the confidence to call climate skeptics “deniers,” hoping to evoke a parallel with “Holocaust Deniers,” a case where most of us would agree that a small group are denying a well-accepted reality. So why do these “deniers” stand athwart of the 97%? Is it just politics? Oil money? Perversity? Ignorance?We are going to cover a lot of...

STOCKTON - The city has a tentative plan to combat climate change, more than three years after reaching a legal settlement with the Sierra Club and then-Attorney General Jerry Brown. It wouldn't be cheap. If adopted by the Stockton City Council later this year, the plan could cost the city $28.5 million and could cost the private sector $240 million, the document says. The plan itself acknowledges it would require "substantial effort on the part of the entire Stockton community" at a time when people are struggling to pay their bills and keep businesses open.

The red line in this image shows the long-term increase in global sea level since satellite altimeters began measuring it in the early 1990s. Since then, sea level has risen by a little more than an inch each decade, or about 3 millimeters per year. While most years have recorded a rise in global sea level, the recent drop of nearly a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter, is attributable to the switch from El Niño to La Niña conditions in the Pacific. The insets show sea level changes in the Pacific Ocean caused by the recent...

Professor Ross McKitrick has just released a new paper on UHI, after reading it, it reminds me of this video from the space station. Weather stations exist in the points of light that define humanity at night, even in rural out of the way places, like the Arctic, where there’s a point of light, indicating humanity and energy use, you’ll likely find a weather station used to monitor climate. Like the dark, humans don’t like the cold either, so where there’s light, there’s heat.Video Link Ross McKitrick writes: I have released a new discussion paper addressing some ongoing issues in...

From the Weather is not climate unless we say it is department: Over at Climate Progress, paid propagandist Joe Romm wails about “journalistic malpractice” from Michael Mann’s words in a tweet: The wailing (Jan 31st and again Feb 4th) was because the LA Times didn’t use the words “global warming” or “climate change” in a story about the mild winter in the USA. But Romm and Mann both ignore the much bigger story of a bitterly cold winter in Europe with snow reaching into northern Africa which has caused nearly three hundred deaths. Conversely, there doesn’t seem to be any...

Cold, snow headed to Greece, Germany and Belgium, forecasters sayReuters Vehicles drive through blizzards near the Lehliu railway station, 45 miles east of Bucharest.The storm, which swept in from Siberia, has killed more than 200 people.. NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Unusually cold weather, plunging temperatures to 31 degrees below zero in some areas, is expected to continue sweeping across Europe in coming days after causing hundreds of deaths in Eastern Europe and air-traffic delays in London and elsewhere. January has been the ninth-snowiest month since 1966 for Europe and Asia, though for the entire northern hemisphere, it’s been about average...

From Tom NelsonEmail 600, Sept 2007: Watts expose makes NOAA want to change entire USA method Email 600 [Tom Karl, Director of the National Climatic Data Center] We are getting blogged all over for a cover-up of poor global station and US stations we use. They claim NCDC is in a scandal by not providing observer’s addresses. In any case Anthony Watts has photographed about 350 stations and finds using our criteria that about 15% are acceptable. I am trying to get some our folks to develop a method to switchover to using the CRN sites, at least in the...

Environmentalists are torn over the high cost of breaking reliance on fossil fuels. Industrial-scale solar development is well underway in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The federal government has furnished more public property to this cause than it has for oil and gas exploration over the last decade — 21 million acres. In the fight against climate change, the Mojave Desert is about to take one for the team. "I have spent my entire career thinking of myself as an advocate on behalf of public lands and acting for their protection," said Johanna Wald, a veteran environmental...

A recent study suggests that the arrival of primitive moss-like plants 470 million years ago could have triggered a series of mini ice ages on Earth. Researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Oxford tried to explain how the first land plants could affect the climate about 450 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. During the Ordovician Period, the planet witnessed a gradually cooling climate that led to a series of mini ice ages. Scientists believe that the global cooling was a result of a reduction in carbon levels in the atmosphere. The findings published in Nature Geoscience show...

Cooking the booksBy Christopher Monckton of BrenchleyMr. John Cook, who runs a website puzzlingly entitled Skeptical Science” (for he is not in the least sceptical of the “official” position) seems annoyed that I won the 2011 televised debate with Dr. Denniss of the Australia Institute, and has published a commentary on what I said. It has been suggested that I should reply to the commentary. So, seriatim, I shall consider the points made. Mr. Cook’s comments are in Roman face: my replies are in bold face. Since Mr. Cook accuses me of lying, I have asked him to be good...