And who wants Global Warming when you can face avalanches, deep snow, and record cold?
How much fun can you have with 2 meters of snow on your house, and none of that evil coal powered electricity?
What’s happening in Europe and Russia over the last two weeks is not just your average cold-snap. Temperatures reached -28C in Moscow. One point in Russia hit -52.8C (-68F) on Monday.
NASA Earth Observatory. Dark blue areas are -15C below average. White areas are average. Deep Red are 15C above. (See the NASA link below for the proper scale):.
The Danube has frozen over from Austria to the Black Sea, and 224 ships (some delivering fuel) have been stuck in their ports. Schools in Bosnia have been closed for days. Trains in Montenegroare at a standstill, and one train with 50 passengers was stranded in a tunnel for three days before rescuers began evacuating people yesterday.
In Serbia 11,000 villagers are trapped by huge snowfalls as temperatures hit – 26C in one town (Al jazeera puts the figure at 70,000 people), and some Bosnian villages haven’t had electricity for days.
Hundreds of barns are collapsing under the snow, killing the animals below, and prompting Tom Nelson to write “Children won’t know what barns look like”.
For the first time in over 30 years, snow has fallen in the Sahara Desert.
Alan Caruba found a Turkish writer lamenting the waste and misdirection of millions of dollars spent on the Green global warming bureaucracy instead of preparations to save lives.
Writing in a Turkish newspaper, the Hurriyet Daily News, Sophie Quintin Adali, an analyst for a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, said, “As if the debt crisis weren’t bad enough news, the climate freeze sweeping across Europe is wreaking havoc by severely disrupting travel, business and people’s lives. Local authorities, indeed whole countries, are caught poorly prepared.” Turkey is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.
“The lack of readiness should come as no surprise because for decades the sensationalist message of global warming has dominated the public area,” said Ms. Adali.
“Politicians and decades of political environmentalism have a lot to answer for,” said Ms. Adali. “The man-made climate theory…is still supported by a mighty European Union bureaucracy and a green network addicted to public funds.” Even now, the Green Climate Fund “through which millions of taxpayer’s money will still be disbursed” is threatening the lives and the economy of people worldwide.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t recall seeing many headlines over the last week about this phenomenal cold. Now if 600 had died from a heat wave we’d all know that an oil pipeline was to blame.
Time to treat climate research as a science instead of a religion?
The image above comes from the NASA Earth Observatory. Their explanation of the extreme cold is due to Jet Streams:
There is a fabulous photo montage at the National Post
h/t: Sonny. Thanks, I hear you.
How do those isolated red spots, >15 degrees above normal exist alongside cold spots indicating temperatures >15 degrees below normal?
Must be where all the rich geezers live who can afford inflated energy bills.
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Wyoming, United States, has been having a very nice winter. We have only gone < (-15) C once, and that was just overnight. Many media outlets are proclaiming "global warming" is causing our mild winter.
No complaints from me: our heating bills have been running about HALF of what my wife and I budgeted last summer, which, BTW, was also mild, never exceeded 35 C (usually 40 C is the norm), which saved us on cooling costs.
Nice, how media reports are completely agenda driven. My only inkling of the winter in Europe is blogs like Jo, Anthony's, etc …
Regards to all,
Mark H.
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It’s been up and down like a roller coaster here (Minnesota). Got a dusting of snow yesterday, temps past few days in the teens (F not C) so the heating bill hasn’t been a huge improvement over last winter. Not quite as bad but plenty of cold days.
In general, people here don’t complain that it isn’t snowing, that we aren’t hitting below 0 temps, etc.
It makes getting to and from work easier, less salt getting dumped all over the roads, less accidents, etc.
A month or so back the neighbor kids were out in the driveway playing basketball and some of the locals were out for rides on their motorcycles. Not your “typical” winter but judging by the smiles they weren’t bothered by it either.
A friend in Alaska says it’s been pretty brutal up there though.
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“Time to treat climate research as a science instead of a religion?”
Ha! How about if we skeptics put a petition together to have the various environmental-sounding, global-warming-speaking groups labelled religions, so that they could have a tax-excempt basis for raising money?
Get the David Suzuki Foundation and anything touched by Al Gore given the same status as Harold Camping’s old setup. In the petition we could explain, with examples, how the current organizational charts are photocopies of the Mormon and Catholic churches. Romm would be a lay preacher, also deserving of a tax-exempt status.
How tangled would the enviros’ emotions be! Uncomfortable truth on one side, dollar bills on the other! What to do, what to do!
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That is Evil!
…
When do we start?
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It will be interesting to see how the warm-bots explain this. I have said numerous times we have far more to worry about from cooling than warming. Far, far more.
So as we hear the “that’s not climate it’s just weather” or other hogwash from those convinced that CO2 and man is causing all of this per their “overwhelming” evidence (evidence which seems to be getting overwhelmed almost daily by the more unbiased and professional scientists who are actually looking for answers) we have some real evidence here. Evidence in the form of body counts that show beyond doubt that cooling is far more dangerous.
So either they are a just plain stupid refusing to admit their fears of CO2 are unfounded and thus remain silent on matters such as this.
Or…
They knew this would happen and simply didn’t care.
You decide.
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Top Ten Warm-bot responses to the Mini-Ice Age:
1. Weather is not climate. (Unless, of course, weather seems to confirm AGW by being unusually warm.)
2. Therefore cold weather isn’t worth reporting outside of the obligatory weather report.
3. When cold weather gets so in your face it forces itself on to the news headlines, journalists suddenly rediscover their ethical standards and report “just the facts,” with no speculative snarking about what the cause might be or pleas for “social justice”… Cold weather is never grist for editorial opinion.
4. If the cold weather becomes so horrible the topic of AGW is forced upon the media, experts are produced to explain how Warming causes Colding. This usually takes the form of a long explanation about how it only snows when it is warm outside and the increased snow is due to increase water evaporation due to AGW. To believe this requires one to have the memory of a gnat so as not to recall how as recently as 2008 the AGW meme was that children in Britain will grow up without ever having the experience of catching snowflakes or building snowmen.
5. If lying doesn’t work, stage fake debates between Warmist whankers.
6. Tim Blair points out that the media can also simply drop the word “Cold” from its style book and replace it with “extreme.” Thus we get headlines like: “Extreme Weather In Europe.” All extreme weather is evidence for Climate Change.
7. Likewise, warmists long ago foresaw the possibility that Global Warming might be too precise a definition for what they have in mind, so they changed it to the much more vague Climate Change which can accommodate any meteorological events. The best theories are those for which every observation is by definition a confirmation.
8. Then there is the “nothing to see here, folks” approach. The BBC produced this news item teasingly called “Europe’s Cold Weather Explained” but it doesn’t explain a bloody thing. Instead a curious viewer goes away chuckling, aw, well, weather’ funny like that, don’t you know.
9. Compare “Europe’s cold weather explained” with this incisive BBC report “Floods and Deadly Heatwave Connected.” While the BBC is incurious as to the cause of today’s Colding, they were keen on the relationship between heat waves and climate.
10. Google search for Russian heatwave of 2010 compared to Europe’s cold winter, 2012. Notice that Russia’s 2010 heatwave is portrayed as a once in a millennia event that may kill 15,000 people due to CAGW, while this year’s mini-ice-age has little to do with climate and the couple of dozen who froze to death were bums anyway.
Scientific America on Why Did Europe’s Danube Freeze?
The scientific answer is because it’s cold??? Duh. That’s how curious the Warm-bots are. Too hard to look up when the Danube last froze, eh?
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If this winter had happened at the height of the 1970’s ‘new ice age’ global cooling scare, it would have been across every news screen every night, and would have had scientist muffling through their beards that it will only get worse.
Similarly if this was a heat wave of equal and opposite extreme (+15 above normal summertime avg) then the warm-bots would be screaming that this is a sign of global warming.
Since it is neither it just passes as weather. Yet newsreports try and state that shark deaths increased last year because of global warming making sharks swim closer to people, or something.
I would be refreshed if *any* of the usual suspects came out and condemned the usage of heat wave or cold wave events to try and prove any point about a trend, but they don’t.
They don’t because they are more interested in the image and the vibe than the actual data. And that’s why the scientist beating the AGW drum are full of it, to a man. No doubt, no uncertainty, no dismissal of coincidental data that happens to point in the right direction.
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Pierre Gosselin writes about Germany’s War On Skeptics 1: Greenpeace-Germany Labels Vahrenholt “The Ice-Cold Denier”
Gosselin translates Greenpeace’s assertion:
… unlike the people who’ve made it too expensive for people to heat their homes adequately by the wasteful squandering of vast resources in the pursuit of religously-inspired follies.
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Anyone paid attention Pierce Corbyn? Jet streams etc?
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Happens all the time, people just don’t notice.
It is nothing to worry about, just a slight cooling.
Normal warming will resume as soon as possible.
Move along folks, nothing to see here …
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In Canada this southern bulging happens every year. This is Canada’s winter. So this is somehow new for Europe, since when?
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People who know me know that I am not a conspiracy theorist – conspiracies require far too much planning and energy.
But the lack of reporting of this in the Western press is kind of interesting. Global warming I could put down to lazy Journo’s just regurgitating the press releases and statements from the talking heads.
But to not report something that is so obvious to everybody involved, requires an editorial decision to be made, to not cover it.
Still not a conspiracy – more of a case of, “[expletive deleted] what are we supposed to do now? This isn’t in the [beep] song book!”
Take away: Even when the media say nothing, they are still lying through their teeth.
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You could be right there.
Also the pattern of reporting reflects something that is seen in the news media for many stories. The reporting of the freeze was most prominent when it first started, then it fell away; the media has a short attention span (or thinks we do).
Even though the freeze became more terrible and is negatively affecting 100s of millions of people, the reporting slowed. I put this down to the media feeling that they’d already covered the event in their earlier reports and that covering it again would be more of the same. Only when good (sensational) footage becomes available do they make a new report. The Danube freezing sparked a flurry (sorry) of new reports.
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GeeAye, it’s all your fault!!! People are freezing to death, because you & Joanne censored me; when I was constantly warning you that: less ice on Arctic’s waters = much colder Europe / USA. Just proven that even all fake Skeptics are wrong. There best proof was: 1883 the Norwegian explorer got further north, because was warmer… BULL!!! The truth: WARMER = MORE ICE / COLDER = LESS ICE. I was warming everybody that the theories from both camps are rotten – the laws of physics say so – but was ridiculed. 600 people death from cold, are you proud of your cusses? Cheers Gee Aye… it was all on my website 6 months ago – so: up yours too Gee Aye!!!
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Stefan,
You may have the science right or wrong (we cannot tell because you cannot seem to communicate in a language we can understand), but one thing is definitely true – Gee Aye is definitely not responsible for the weather.
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Are you sure?
What is more amazing, and is a little known fact, is that I have the power to censor anyone on any blog anywhere!
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Gee Aye, the only thing being murdered here is the English language by Stefan. If you can “censor anyone on any blog anywhere”, does that make you “Censor-man”? Personally I think you are doing a piss-poor job of it. You cannot have a decent discussion anywhere without running into trolls …
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@ Hi Truthseeker, you told me on EVERY comment of yours, that: my English is not good enough for you. Even first time wasn’t informative for me – second time, boring – third time, annoying – forth time was nuisance. You can keep repeating it on other blogs, I can’t do anything about it. But on my blog I wiped it of, in a hope; to see that your bigotry is too excessive… For 5-6 months I wasn’t on Joanne’s blog – without bothering you – first thing – you are informing me again, about my English… You have proved me correct; that bigot is forever bigot. I’m glad that are not many in this world; most people have some class.My blog is not about Oxford English or poetry. You cannot find anything wrong with my proofs – blaming my English. Same as the 99y old man blaming young lady’s pubic hair for him being important. I have proven that Warmist are 101% wrong – Skeptics are 75% wrong. Other people can understand, so can you; but clashes with your ideology. Time is the best investigator
I’m trying to get the truth on two other languages – they cannot get me on language there but there are two bigots – because they don’t want the truth to be known – they started with: but you are Skeptic because you are Jewish – no, you are Christian, but different Christian religion… Truthseeker, life is too short, I never had time for bigots – they have a grip on something and never let go; as blind to a lamppost. Cannot expect anything positive / assistance from a bigot, they don’t know when enough is enough.
Few months ago, I pointed to you that: Albert Einstein’s English was just as bad as my. Can’t remember details – but was pointing on a occasion that: Al Gore doesn’t speak Japanese, Russian, but people there present it on Japanese / Russian / German. If your intention wasn’t weird; don’t beat yourself in the chest for succeeding to speak your own mother’s tongue, is not a big deal, trust me.
You could have explained it to the other. For me was enough that you prefer my proofs not to be known – no need to keep repeating over and over that my English is not good enough for you. I saw on Russian TV they talk what Al Gore says / it was on German also; they didn’t complain, ridiculed him for not speaking Russian; or waited for him to learn perfect Russian / German. You have being on Joanne’s blog every day – you love carbon tax – you got one; if people on the street know what I have; Gillard would have dropped carbon tax as a hot potato. You must be surrounded in your neighborhood by dumb people, treating them as idiots; not me Truthseeker! Your perversion, use it on the ones that will put-up with that. My motto is: I’m not better than anyone, accept from bigots – nobody is better than me. I don’t know why I’m even replying to y
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Stefan, I like to learn new things and see the world through the eyes of others. However your grasp of the English language is not only preventing you from communicating your message effectively, it also means that you are not understanding what is being said to you. It is clear from your writing that you have some command of the English language, but the problem is that in the medium you are using, the written word, that is not enough. This is compounded by the scientific nature of the subject matter which means a much greater level of precision is required to ensure the content of what you are saying is an accurate reflection of what you mean. Terminology is everything in communicating scientific concepts, and you are not achieving success because your words lack the precision that is required. I have a great respect for your language skills overall, since you can speak in many languages, but it is only the one language being used for communication here and you are not using it well.
Let me try and make this very clear. I think you have something valuable to say in a scientific sense. I think that you have found yet another way to show how the warmists are miss-using science to spout their nonsense.
You are clearly passionate about your message, but you beat your fists (metaphorically speaking) because you think no-one is listening, but what is actually happening is that no-one understands what you are saying.
I have never been a bigot and the only people that I despise are fanatics because they feel they have to impose their view of the world on others. Choice leads to truth. Restrict choice and you deny truth.
I hate the carbon tax because it restricts choice. I hate the carbon tax because it denies a choice made by many not to have it. I hate the carbon tax because it is a fraud based on a lie. Do not attribute beliefs to me that I have not stated. Do not put me in a group because that is the refuge of the weak and the stupid.
As for bigots, I went to your website and tried to engage in a conversation with you. My comments were changed and altered. Other comments were deleted. I have never returned and I never will. You are the bigot here Stefan and I am replying to you so that you can make a choice and choose to listen to what I am saying which is my attempt to help you. I would say this in your native language if I could. Remove the prejudice from your mind and listen to what I am saying.
I think your message should be heard. You just need to do a better job at saying it.
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Seriously, what are you talking about? There are so many wrong statements here that I find it hard to know whether you are having a laugh thus making a response a waste of time, nor can I see what the preceding discourse has to do with your specific comments about censoring. Can you point me to the source of your grievance?
Also, just for your interest, the connection between reduced sea ice and colder winters is the subject of mainstream science. Here is but one example
Because I am a mass murderer, I’ll leave it up to you to hunt down the source.
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@ Gee Aye March 8, 2012 at 3:27 pm
Hi Gee eye; I visited you, to rub your nose / for ‘’I told you so’’ but you haven got yet the information that: they admitted that: Arctic has less ice, but is getting much COLDER.
Colorado university and Arizona researcher on Arctic are realizing that I was 101% correct / less ice = colder. (by the way, on my website had 23 clicks from Alaska for the last week) Two days ago Russian data arrived for Arctic also. All my contacts know that is COLDER, it’s public. Anyway, how are you; you are spoilt for argument – egomania is a debilitating disease; I will pray for you, don’t worry; you are a good sport / entertaining.
In your comment, you are overdoing it on justification for too much snow in central Europe. I had a call from there, a friend say: they cannot open the front door – even from the roof – the snow has dropped in front of the door. It’s not only snow; ‘’His father is 78, he has never seen so cold in his life. He said to me: TV box says minus -29C, but is -31C just outside our door!’’
Which means’ is not BECAUSE of ‘’extra moisture, crap’’ but extra coldness from arctic, by winds called Sirocco. Get your nose off the monitor and see what’s happening in the rest of the world! Same as on ‘’Arctic white ice’’ I’m correct on every other subject – time is the best investigator. I will win, Gee Eye, things are rolling in the right direction
I hope life is bringing you lots of happiness in the hew year, cheers
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It must have been reported, because here in Oz I know all about it, mainly from TV. Heatwaves in Europe are reported slightly better because you can always use a shot of a good looking girl (or guy) at the beach…
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“”a shot of a good looking girl (or guy) at the beach…””
&%# (&%!#*
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You’re dead right Rereke,
Conspiracy is a plot planned and executed by a small group of people.
Climategate exposes a conspiracy at the East Anglia CRU, although it didn’t start out as a conspiracy but as comedy of errors by inept 3rd rate academics in a backwater discipline that snowballed into a massive CYA damage control campaign.
Gillard and her faceless men executing Kevin Rudd…Now that’s an example of a true hardcore conspiracy, right down to composing her first prime ministerial speech weeks before hand. A small, ruthless and closed network of thugs got together for a short period to do something dirty and quick. The same pack of hacks are as likely to have a go at each other as they are at Gillard now. Conspiracy are like that… small, short and brutal.
Conspiracies are never global in scale because you can’t defy human nature. Maybe you can scare a few people to keep a dirty secret, but thousands? No way, someone will always defect out of spite, toxo infection or for the glory or money. Wikileaks’ business model is based upon this fact of life.
Take for instance, the Journolist, which was a conspiracy by a small mob of Lefty American journalists to form a private listserv where they could share notes on how to spin the news in favour of Obama. They exchanged talking points and created ‘narratives’ which they would all peddle as a group in dozens of seemingly unrelated media outlets across America. In fact, they were so full of themselves they hardly thought what they were doing was a conspiracy to manipulate the news. They kept inviting more and more of their daft mates join the listserv, until one guy reckoned he could make a big name for himself by exposing the Journolisters to the conservative US media. BUSTED.
That’s how all conspiracies end, if they’re not figments of fevered imagination or political beat ups.
But the global media misreporting on Global Warming or lack thereof isn’t orchestrated by any central scheme… It’s a cultural thing.
When you have a whole sub-culture of people who believe the same sorts of things you don’t need no stinking conspiracy. Enforced cultural homogeneity is a million times more efficient than conspiracy, plus there is no risk of exposure. Those accepted into the culture will naturally, with no outside manipulation, express sentiments more or less in line with whatever the cultural orthodoxy is. It’s a totally different phenomena than a conspiracy.
That’s why the majority of geologists and geophysicists are climate skeptics.
No need for a Big Oil conspiracy, geologists simply partook of the same Earth Science curriculum as the climate and eco mob, but then they got real jobs where their methodological execution determined their career success rate. So they all started with the same pool of facts, but geologists insist on putting it all together in a way that most accurately represents observational evidence, because that’s their bloody culture. It’s the way they survived in the real marketplace of ideas, skills and services. Academic earth scientists have no such pressure to conform to observational evidence, their culture is about kowtowing to administrators, government agencies and institutions which award tenure and grants. Ironically the same technocratic culture buttonholes into the media which also operates largely unmoderated by direct feedback from empirical reality.
No clunky conspiracy theory is necessary because the principle of parsimony suggests most human behaviour can be explained by understanding the cultural milieu and the natural selection processes which occur therewith in.
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Well said Wes. The law of large numbers and human nature also proves that the Americans really did send someone to the moon, because if they can’t keep a lid on some servicemen misbehaving on a battlefield, they certainly couldn’t keep a lid on the grandest conspiracy of them all.
Thus you can disprove most conspiracies without examining a shred of physical evidence, simply by examining the number of people involved, and the size of the reward for breaking the conspiracy as a story. If either are large, the conspiracy will be outed. If either are large, and no conspiracy has been outed, then there is no conspiracy.
The global warming groupthink isn’t a conspiracy – it’s just a bandwagon effect that becomes popular culture like bellbottom jeans or particular hairstyles. Those that don’t think for themselves (or take a hard look in the mirror – same thing) aren’t really even aware of what they are doing until they get a dose of hindsight.
I think we’re starting to see the beginnings of hindsight now, with the collapse of green schemes and the failure of the earth to stick to the model script.
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brc.. Global warming IS a conspiracy AND was planned well in advance in the 80s. Look for the evidence, I don’t think it hard to find. Its is not science gone wrong it was planned it gullable science been hoodwinked!
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Looks almost like you feel yourself implicated. Now where is KM?
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Also conspiracy doesn’t mean “plot that’s a fantasy in the minds of idiots” as insinuated. Yes AGW was “planned” since the 70s and they changed “global cooling ice age threat” (maybe they’ll revisit that now!) with “global warming”. See names like Maurice Strong, Margret Mead and others that became members of the IPCC of course funded by the globalist banksters and the corrupt UN to install World Gov as has been admitted.
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Juliar claims we are ” taking action on CC” and then I read this.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-14/indian-group-plans-qlds-biggest-coal-mine/3828486
So we suffer super expensive and useless solar and wind power but India can start up this new monster coal mine with our coal and it’s okay. WHAT a CON and FRAUD.
I just wish Tony from OZ could give us OZs total coal use and how this compares to the above monster.
The other interesting comparison would be our reduction of 5% BS. What a clueless mob of whackos.
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Neville,
while this is not related to the European Freeze, it is in fact of interest.
Currently, Australia burns around 90 million tons of coal just to produce electrical power. That figure could even be closer to 100 million tons, but gee, in the last two years or so, nearly every coal fired plant in Australia has removed how much coal they burn from their sites, and I, er, wonder why that has happened. Nearly half of that total is burned just in Victoria, so that gives some indication how much more efficient the black steaming coal is when compared to the Lignite burned in Victoria.
The black steaming coal found in most areas in Queensland is some of the best steaming coal on Planet Earth, and it’s not surprising that India, and China also are seeking to purchase that coal, and in fact to open their own mines here in Australia. China is ramping up construction of coal fired power plants, in fact something it has been doing for more than 5 years now, bringing on line one new large scale plant (think Bayswater) every seven days, and it’s almost the same position in India. Those new plants are the new generation coal fired plants, vastly more efficient than the currently existing plants in Australia, most of them now more than 30 to 40 years old. Those Chinese and Indian new coal fired plants generate more power, burn less coal, burn it more efficiently, and emit less CO2. That’s why they are screaming for our coal, and can use more than we can dig up, hence the plans to open their own mines here, eliminating (part of ) the middleman so to speak.
I have a Post of my own with a chart in it that does a ‘one place comparison’ for electrical power from coal fired means. It looks like I might be ‘shilling’ for my own Posts, but if I already have some info, it’s easier to link to that than explain it all in full.
Life Without (Electrical) Power (Part Two)
Tony.
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Thanks very much for that Tony. I think I’d better spend a bit more time at your site and educate myself some more.
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So is 600 alot?
I’m curious to know the number of people who normally die every year due to cold weather in Europe.
For comparison the European Center for Disease Control says that an average 38,000 people die every year from the flu.
So is 600 alot?
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If you consider the time frames.
38,000 over a year compared to 600 in what, a week? Two weeks?
Do the math, 38000 / 52 = 730.769 deaths per week for the flu. If you want to average it out that way. Now consider are they talking about all of Europe in that 38000? Are we talking about all of Europe in the 600 deaths referred to here? If the answer to the former is yes, and the answer to the latter is no, then that number of 600 becomes more significant in comparison.
Depending on who you talk to with regards to preventable deaths, even 1 is too many. In that perspective 600 is a lot.
Remember, we aren’t talking about every year, we aren’t talking about over the course of a year, we are talking about this year and very recently.
If any of those deaths could have been prevented through cheap, reliable energy sources to provide heat that were denied the residents in preference for some renewable scheme then questions of criminal negligence on the part of the governments comes up.
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It is really hard to play with numbers like this. The numbers of deaths are likely those directly related to the cold or flu, there are likely to be many more than this and not all of them will occur during the cold/flu period. Second is that both agents will kill people who are vulnerable to dying. We can prevent cold related deaths much more easily than we could help an immunosuppressed person dying once they caught the flu.
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the hills are alive with the sound of …denial
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Hi Mark
Not denial – “spacing”
Method
Take a comment about cold related deaths.
Add a new factor eg aids, whooping cough? – no best to use the FLEW.
So you get:
“The numbers of deaths are likely those directly related to the cold or flu”
AHA – dilution of effect – someone will get a bonus for this one – very good!
On Ground Reality: it is easy to differentiate death from freezing from death by the
“flue”. Those who die of the flue are still warm jsut after death.
Those who die of “cold” need to be thawed out.
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KK, I say if one dies from a FLUE they’re going to be warm for as long as the flue is in use.
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My comment was in support of the one by Robert. If that is spacing (and nice to see these new fangled terms being applied to something I wrote), then so be it.
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No, 600 is not Alot.
Alot is a town in India.
600 is a lot of people to freeze to death in a week however. You can’t compare to the number of deaths from flu, as it is separate and on top of that number, which we probably won’t know until the middle of next NH summer.
I would not be surprised if deaths from flu end up exceeding 50,000 for Europe this winter.
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I don’t think flu deaths are considered cold deaths – they would be considered an inefectious disease death, I would think.
Cold deaths are generally from exposure, but I don’t really know how they calculate it. But as long as the calculations are consistent, it’s not hard to tell if a particular period shows more or less.
I’m guessing that the fact it is being reported means it is higher than normal.
I remember reading some analysis a while back, and it talked of ‘excess’ cold deaths. The statistics gatherers must have a baseline for death in a particular season, and can talk of higher than normal death rates.
All a bit morbid for me, personally. I worry about the UK – so many homes are heated by electricity, and if they have a brownout shortage in a cold period caused by excessive demand and insufficient supply, a lot of innocent people are going to perish, and they are going to be generally very young or very old people. Hardly anyone has a wood burning heater anymore, and even if they do rarely more than a couple of days worth of fuel. I think a lot more of mainland europe is gas heated, but even still gas shortages take effect.
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Someone should tell the genius soothsayers that warm is much better than cold.
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Some months ago I was very pleased to return to NZ’s Auckland area, which is subtropical, after almost a decade in the UK, as some of the more successful long-range weather forecasters, other than the official bodies who use truckloads of taxpayer funds to promote warming, were predicting the current European cold snap, but even they were predicting some cold weather.
I read a couple of Brit newspapers on-line every morning and the cold snap is fully reported, including the numbers of those who have been killed our isolated by the extreme cold, plus lots of excellent pics to illustrate this.
Newspapers in this part of the world seem almost determined not to report the extreme Northern cold. Perhaps they have been ordered to support the mad reasoning behind Julia’s carbon tax and the even sillier Kiwi ETS.
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AK this is really barking madness and yet could help to wreck both our economies.
NZ emits just 0.1% of the planet’s emissions and Australia emits about 1.3%.
We can make zero difference to the climate or temp because China alone replaces our savings easily with their increases in a matter of months.
It is indeed an expensive barking mad CON and a FRAUD.
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Some of the news that did make it out(If you look hard for it!):
http://www.youtube.com/embed/YhjnabaaWmg
http://www.youtube.com/embed/Ugf8r59nTj0
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7398470n
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This european cold spell has been focused on central europe and was well forecast by JoeB last year. The cold has retreated eastward now leaving behind a spell of cold last seen in france about 1987. This last spell of cold was not as intense as in 85 and 87 and 91. Although we saw temps during the day around -3 to -4 and nights at -15C it did not approach the temps of 56 (-24c) or the 80s.
Gfs sees the return of severe cold in about 384 hrs. Central europe may not the see the end until well into march. It is sad to see the lives lost and the damage done but more sad is the lunies in Brussels refuse to lift their carbon trading scheme even though it’s value is €7.50 when it should be about €17.
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klem
February 15, 2012 at 6:19 am · Reply
So is 600 alot?
I’m curious to know the number of people who normally die every year due to cold weather in Europe.
For comparison the European Center for Disease Control says that an average 38,000 people die every year from the flu.
So is 600 alot?
Yes Klem, 600 is a lot. It’s whole of my village plus another 50%. It’s half the population of a medium size town in france.
It’s the whole of your family, your friend’s family, their friend’s families, etc. It’s a lot because it is not necessary. With our current technology and affluence it should not happen. Death by desease is different.
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I just heard from a credible source that this cold snap is just a PR excersise funded by the deerdy poluters who want to weaken our belief in Man Made Global Warming.
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I’m sure there are people out there who see the hundreds of deaths as a good beginning on reducing CO2… brooksie? trystie? Hello?
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Yup, a monster was predicted, a monster we got!
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/monster2012.gif
And for many parts of Europe its not really over yet!
I have collected a row of stories in pages 5-7 of
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/koldere-vejr-i-sigte-d6-e1190-s240.php#post_28509
Sorry its in Danish, but many links.
-> Especially CHECK OUT THE RUMANIA LINKS 12/2! 4 -5 meters of snow in some villages, people has to enter their houses from the roof! Really Stunning, and prognoses says more snow…
K.R. Frank
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Why isn’t this making the news columns of the AGE and the Herald Sun? Could it be that the cold bitter reality contradicts the climate change narrative of our politicians and media outlets?
What if 600 people died In a summer heatwave? We’d have all the climatoligists of the CSIRO and Melbourne University making public statements blaming it all on global warming. Where are they at the moment? Hiding behind coral calcification studies perhaps?
But wait I forgot, Global warming can CAUSE Freezing temperatures across a massive continent like Europe – just ask the people who are making their living from demonizing CO2. They will put this all into the correct context.
Black is white, wrong is right, up is down, cold is hot, wet is dry.
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Just be grateful that CSIRO etc aren’t saying that the extreme cold is a result of global warming.
Incidentally, that Russian heatwave, it would have been the hottest ever, wouldn’t it?
I’m betting that once the month of February is over, it won’t have been the coldest February ever, but just the coldest February since .
Oh, and for the smarty pants out there, by “ever” I mean since we started to keep records.
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@John Brookes
February 15, 2012 at 4:01 pm:
Unfortunately JB, the CSIRO are saying just that:
@John Brookes
February 15, 2012 at 4:01 pm:
NOAA finds”climate change” blameless in 2010 Russian heat wave
NOAA: Natural Variability Main Culprit of Deadly Russian Heat Wave
JB can ‘bing’ or ‘google’ whether it was ‘the hottest’.
Or you can ‘bet’ on the never-never…
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Add another 400+ deaths.
The cause:
Stupid Peruvians. Don’t they understand warm means cold in ‘settled climate science’?
Much like in Oz, where more extreme droughts means floods.
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Another reason why this barking mad theory of AGW could be wrong, the atmosphere has been drying slightly for 10+ years.
Also methane is not increasing as some scientists predicted.
So where is that increase in Water vapour that is so critical to the AGW theory?
BTW Mike Stopa is a physicist from Harvard Uni.
http://www.mikestopa.com/2012/02/sixteen-concerned-scientists/
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I would tell you Neville, but I was one of the 4.5 billion that died last year as a result of those pesky methan clathrates melting and emitting methane which triggered runaway warming that took half the human population.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/over-4-5-billion-people-could-die-from-global-warming-related-causes-by-2012/
This is my ghost typing, I had to watch that Patrick Swayze movie like 4 times before I could work out how to press keys. Curse those clathrates for heating the atmosphere so! At least there was room for the 50 million climate refugees once all the corpses had been buried. Some of them found work as undertakers, luckily.
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Robert Felix at his Ice Age Now site has a raft of Posts on this, er, cold snap, in Europe. This one Post has a number of related links in it.
Tragedy Unfolding In Europe – Is U.S. Media Trying To Ignore It?
Tony.
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Having read the first comment in the link I can only say, Bless you Tony
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What never ceases to amaze me is that no matter how rationally you try to explain something, people will always prefer to believe the wildest conspiracy theories over the fact.
Some think this European freeze was caused (directly) by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico.
Others think it’s a direct result of HAARP.
Others quote the Bible.
Others even quote good old Nostradamus, and hey, have you ever noticed that with Nostradamus, all the prophecies seem to surface after the actual event, making the Quatrain fit the disaster if you like.
Offer a rational explanation, people just scoff at you.
Tony.
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I got one useful term from the comments – “Mediot”. Love it!
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Having read the rest of the comments I wonder what world those people are inhabiting. Actually they are parallel worlds as none of them seem to be conversing with another. So many conspiracy theories and so much CAPS.
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An entirely expected side effect of an uncensored comments section on an American based website is You will get those wince worthy comments from both sides of the peanut gallery . One of the things I love about America/Americans is the diversity of opinion , one of the things I dislike about America/Americans are the extremes of opinion , Ya can`t have the first without the second one popping up tho`
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It was diverse but is am struck by the low level of discussion and the fact that apparent contradictory posts exist side-by-side without one of the posters commenting on the contradictory post. It is almost like they read (at least read the heading) the post then commented without reading any other comments.
I’ve seen worse though…
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Come on now Tony, if the US appears to be ignoring the cold snap in Europe, its only because they can’t find out which state Europe is in;-)
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Nyuk nyuk nyuk John!
Nice one.
Say, I hear that when President Obama was scheduled to come to Australia, he asked his advisers if he should pack the Skis, and maybe they could get a couple of hours on the slopes at Innsbruck!
Tony.
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Unfortunately you cannot win with AGW because the cold throughout Europe is being blamed on AGW warming in the Arctic!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/science-behind-the-big-freeze-is-climate-change-bringing-the-arctic-to-europe-6358928.html
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But it isn’t more than 30 years of data! ? !
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Your climate model has crashed.
Game over
Please insert more money to continue
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True, weather is not climate and the media is biased in its reporting.
That being said, we are 18,000 years into this interglacial, the Holocene. Recent interglacials usually lasted 15,000 to 20,000 years and we are 18,000 years into this one. Temperatures peaked over 5,000 years ago and it has been, on the average, downhill since. CO2 levels were lower then and yet temperatures were much warmer.
(Interesting can you post a source for the numbers?) CTS
Weathermen and climatologists are similar in that they can both be wrong and continue to get paid. The difference between them is that the weatherman actually looks at what effects the weather. That is why the weatherman is right most of the time but the climatologist never is!
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(Can you provide sources? Your comment is interesting) CTS
Come on, Eddie.
Use your google to get those dates right, man. The Holocene began 12,000 years ago (or about 10,000 BC) I’ve noticed you often use questionable geo-dates in your comments….just saying. 😉
The maximum extent of glaciation during the last glacial period was about 18,000 ka, but we don’t say that the apogee of ice extent marks the beginning of the next interglacial any more than the peak of the Holocene interglacial — which might have been the Holocene “climatic optimum” from 9,000 to 4,000 BP — is the beginning of the next glacial period.
The Holocene might have cranked up interglacial warming just after the Pleistocene ended about 14,000 ka (the Bølling-Allerød interstadial) but was mysteriously interrupted by the Younger Dryas which flipped the Earth back into a glacial dip for about another 1370 years. It wasn’t until the Preboreal Holocene that the modern long term warming trends of the current interglacial period really got going.
Oh, and don’t get too carried away with predicting the Holocene interglacial is all downhill from here…. The last interglacial, the Eemian lasted about 17,000 years (from 130,000 to 114,000 years ago.) So our current interglacial might well have a good 4,000 to 8,000 years left, there could easily be another climatic optimum. Who knows? Moreover, at the current rate of human cultural and technological evolution it’s conceivable that in the next few hundred years we’ll have developed to the point where we’ll practice terraforming and be quite literally in control of the Earth’s climate. At that point we’ll have left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene.
And correct me if I am wrong, but I think geologists talk about us currently being in one huge ice age since the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica never melt during the interglacials.
The Ice Age, or more properly “Glacial Age,” fluctuates back and forth between “glacial” cold periods and “interglacials” warm periods with “interstadials” being shorter mild (not necessarily warm) periods that mysteriously occur during glacials.
The current Glacial Age started at the beginning of the Pleistocene about 2.59 million years ago and is called Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation . No one has a clue when it will end, but it might be a very, very long time indeed since the position of continents and mountain ranges are likely to be a major factor and plate tectonic movement is measured in millions and tens of millions of years.
Then again give the monkeys another couple of hundred years of technological evolution and all bets are off.
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I have never been asked to reply to myself. Here are the links requested.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2001Q1/211/Group_projects/group_D_F00/index.html
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2390530
It doesn’t matter how you slice it (e.g. The point at which we started warming our way out of the last ice age (18,000 years ago, the younger dryas http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html which occurred 11,500 years ago) we are nearing the end of the current interglacial. We are most likely headed into another ice age. It could start tomorrow or within the next 2,000 years. Then again, there is no guarantee of anything except death and taxes.
As long as there is absence of free flowing ocean waters due to continental plate alignment and a land mass at one of the poles, we will be in an ice age with interglacial periods such as the one we currently enjoy.
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REPLY: Watch as someone who thinks he can reason resorts to one sided ad homs. As if funding can change the climate? As if there is not more funding for the “believer side”. As if they have found the evidence that matters. Ross, all those papers you keep listing are irrelevant. Just because they mention climate change doesn’t mean they show the climate models are right about their assumptions of positive feedback. — Jo
—————————————-
Heartland Whistle-blower Exposes Institute’s Budget and Strategy
An anonymous donor calling him (or her)self “Heartland Insider” has released the Heartland Institute’s budget, fundraising plan, its Climate Strategy for 2012 and sundry other documents (all attached) that prove all of the worst allegations that have been levelled against the organization.
It is clear from the documents that Heartland advocates against responsible climate mitigation and then uses that advocacy to raise money from oil companies and “other corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies.” Heartland particularly celebrates the funding that it receives from the fossil fuel fortune being the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
Heartland also continues to collect money from Philip Morris parent company Altria as well as from the tobacco giant Reynolds American, while maintaining ongoing advocacy against policies related to smoking and health.
Heartland’s policy positions, strategies and budget distinguish it clear as a lobby firm that is misrepresenting itself as a “think tank” – it budgets $4.1 million of its $6.4 million in projected expenditures for Editorial, Government Relations, Communications, Fundraising, and Publications, and the only activity it plans that could vaguely be considered policy development is the writing of a curriculum package for use in confusing high schoolers about climate change.
This battle is going to intensify over the disinformation machinery – it will be coming out loud and strong over the coming months.
As an insider to the AOG firsthand, (Family Churches – Australia) and the Family First Party demise, former Senator Steve Fielding and a whole bunch of them were duped by this organisation. It is a hard call to label AGW a religion – Top and Down, White is Black, Right is Left in the wonderful world of an alternative climate in a universe far away.
As I’m alerted Jo to just a few of these, you cannot afford for one second to continue ignore the outpouring of climate findings (from non-skeptics). These papers are ignored at your peril and decoupling from the reality of MAINSTREAM science findings (Government? Universities?) is not a healthy alternative to truth that maybe found. All good Skeptics everywhere should join with me and agree. So what are you you going to do – shut down every University that disagrees with you? 60 Science Papers in the last three months lend support to Global Warming. These are very hard to refute as many are not only based on trends but empirical field studies. The most astounding of these papers from the research of thousands of proxies across the United States prove that almost the entirety of the USA was cooler in the MVP period then now. We are now in the Anthropocene* era.
The *Anthropocene is a recent and informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. The term was coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer but has been widely popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth’s atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological era for its lithosphere.
In 2008 a proposal was presented to the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London to make the Anthropocene a formal unit of geological time. A large majority of that Stratigraphy Commission decided the proposal had merit and should therefore be examined further. Steps are being taken by independent working groups of scientists from various geological societies to determine if the Anthropocene will be formally accepted into the Geological Time Scale.
Many scientists are now using the term and the Geological Society of America titled its 2011 annual meeting: Archean to Anthropocene: The past is the key to the future. The Anthropocene has no precise start date, but based on atmospheric evidence may be considered to start with the Industrial Revolution (late 18th century). Other scientists link it to earlier events, such as the rise of agriculture. Evidence of relative human impact such as the growing human influence on land use, ecosystems, biodiversity and species extinction is controversial, some scientists believe the human impact has significantly changed (or halted) the growth of biodiversity. The Anthropocene may have begun as early as 14,000 to 15,000 years before present, based on lithospheric evidence; this has led other scientists to suggest that “the onset of the Anthropocene should be extended back many thousand years” ; this would be closely synchronous with the current term, Holocene.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
As we all agree Climate Change has always changed and as the world’s population increases to Six Billion of course humans interplay and overlay how our earth behaves with its climate. We will continue to alter our climate for better or worse.
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Gosh ross, that was really, uhm, pathetic dude
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Ross, I’d love to call it Heartlandgate, but even the most rabid “skeptic” knows that Heartland is just a lobby group for coal, oil & tobacco.
No one here, or anywhere, would dare accuse Heartland of actually being interested in research, data, or facts.
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Says John demonstrating his ignorance for all to see.
You must have either a very large mouth or very small feet John because you keep jamming the latter in to the former.
I have in my hand the 415 page volume
CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED. 2011 Interim Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.
Chapter 1: Climate Models and their limitations
Chapter 2: Forcings and Feedbacks
Chapter 3: Paleoclimate and recent Temperature
Chapters 4, and 5: Observations and projections
Chapter 6: Terrestrial Animals
Chapter 7: Terrestrial Plants and Soils
Chapter 8: Aquatic Life
Chapter 9: Human Health Effects
Chapter 10: Economic and Other Policy Implications
Every section in every chapter fully backed with references to peer reviewed papers INCLUDING PRO AGW VIEWS.
All this research, all the data, all the facts John. And all produced professionally WITHOUT UN or GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS
Would you like a copy John? Are you open to alternative views?
You can get one HERE
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I bet you would, John! How in the hell do you “know” what a skeptic knows? That would require a legerdemain beyond your feeble abilities! The rest is your usual ad hominem BS!
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Ross,
you’re lobbying in the wrong place, man.
With your ‘clout’, you need to be seriously lobbying the Government to close down all the CO2 emitting power plants if the problem is as dire as you make out, and to do it right now.
Say, maybe there’s a Government grant in there somewhere for you. They give them away for anything these days, provided that is you include the words ‘Climate Change’ somewhere in the submission.
Tony.
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Ross,
More cut and pasted plagiarised crap?
If you MUST continue to plant these glaring signposts to your ignorance, could you at least use stuff that’s less than a decade old?
World population passed six billion back in 1999.
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The only part of a “Ross comment” worth reading is the warnings provided us by the moderators.
(He and Glenn have no idea what the meaning of being on topic means) CTS
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“”As we all agree Climate Change has always changed and as the world’s population increases to Six Billion of course humans interplay and overlay how our earth behaves with its climate. We will continue to alter our climate for better or worse.””
Oh come on Ross James, it’s over mate. What a pathetic cry of desperation your diatribe was. Give it up mate, it’s over. There is a little secret the AGW believers aren’t telling you “there was a climate before humans, and it changes. We, as humans cannot change our climate as much as you would like to think but, we can evolve with it. It’s over mate.
It’s just not acceptable any more to claim the dogma in those 60 papers, you would like us to consider, is acceptable under the philosophy principles or the learned history and of science. It’s over mate.
Recently there has been a plethora of scientific papers with universal applications about planetary climate, articles in opposition to the theory and unattainable energy policys. The IPCC cohort is disintegrating, leading authors in Europe have resigned, AR5 is looking for a place to hide. It’s over mate.
You have the responsibility to undertake a good appraisal of the sceptical scientific position, most sceptics have appraised AGW. You cannot close your eyes to the likes of Scrafetta, Nikolov & Zeller, Jelbring, Kramm & Dlugi, and many more. Co2 reradiating is finished, Macroclimatology is here to stay. It’s over mate.
And we are going to have enlightenment in education for our kids as well. Ross, nothing could be better for education than to return to learning free of rhetoric. The blur between formal treatise and ideology is growing. I’m agreeable with most are educated beyond their ability for rational thought, and end up mimicking like parrots the rhetoric that is dished up to them. Where is the structure of logic in discourse taught?
Now that we are into a second generation of mimickers, they have become lost and unable to think conceptually, there is a reliance on producing factual nonsense, derived from a lazy intellect, masters at spinning data into ideology, not theory.
Partial thought is rampant, the presentation of predictions with copious amounts is just an excuse, cutting, pasting and interpreting data is not a practice of good scientists, or teaching.
Univocalness is the principle that gives good theory. Certainly, under determination should be used for general exploration of a physical phenomenon, but if there is not one definitive theory amongst a cohort of physics disciplines that provide a representation of nature by determining for itself an isomorphic set of models, then it should not be accepted without scepticism.
When concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens, then they might come to be stamped as “necessities of thought,” “a priori givens,” etc. The path of scientific progress is often made impassable for a long time by such errors.
Methodology is artisan, you can see variations of interpretations over plots, trends and multivariate data. Methodology should not take a deterministic stand; it must be supported by the history and philosophy of science. So many people today – and even professional scientists – seem to me like they have seen thousands of trees but have never seen a forest.
“Knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is – in my opinion – the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”
Albert Einstein to Robert A. Thornton, 7 December 1944)
The times they are a-changing.
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Since I’ve never smoked I can feel no gratitude toward Big Tobacco. What has that industry ever given me? Still, legal product, and the New Puritans gladly accept massive tax revenues from it.
But since I, and my civilisation, owe so much to fossil fuels, I am heartened by the support given by that industry to the skeptic cause.
I am a serial appreciator. I can’t get over the fact that I press a button and I can get light, heat, cooling and power generation to do so many things. This all occurs without smoke, flame, smell, dung or most other hazards.
Forget Bolivar, Lincoln, Mandela. The greatest liberator in human history is the modern automatic washing machine. The New Puritans want to rename our era, as part of eliminating or distorting the past and establishing greater thought control over the masses. I suggest we name our era the AWM era, after the automatic washing machine. (And, yes, you can run a washing machine on toy power technologies, but, unless you can manufacture them, the poorest women on the planet will still be rubbing cloth on stone. Ross and the posh people may find it quaint and sustainable, but impoverished women don’t.)
I know this talk of washing machines etc sounds absurd to Ross and his posh kind, but that is because such people are victims of a terrible intellectual and spiritual plague: Global Ingratitude.
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$4.1 million! Why, that’s almost enough to stage the opening ceremony of a climate conference in an exotic locale?
Is *that* your smoking gun? A group looking for funds targets the people who are most likely to supply it?
No – say it isn’t so! Next thing you’ll tell me that green groups get funding from windmill companies that stand to benefit from laws passed!
/sarc (in case you missed it)
Honestly – this who got funding from whom is pretty old. Both sides of this debate are up to their ears in donations from people who will have their interests furthered by success in policy debates. It changes the actual facts not one jot.
And here are the facts!
– correlation between co2 and atmospheric temperature doesn’t exist
– the models are wrong
– the IPCC are a political advocacy organisation uninterested in the facts, just the narrative
– you’re flogging a dead horse!
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ROTFL.
Riiight…. Normally it takes a few dozen million years to recognise the shift from one geological era to another. But not if you’re a Nobel Prize winner, all you need is a good heatwave and a peer-reviewed soapbox.
The last hundred years has had about maybe 25 mm average sedimentary impact on the lithosphere which is 12,756.2 kilometres across and 24.99mm of that sediment had nothing to do with the Anthropoidal activity.
At that rate the Anthropocene is going to be very, very long and boring indeed.
Btw, explain to me why an atmospheric chemist’s opinions about the lithosphere count for crap when geologists are forbidden to have opinions about climate?
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Hey Ross,
Just because you connect a whole lot of words together into a paragraph, doesn’t mean that any of it makes any sense. “disinformation machinery”???
Perhaps it’s time to adopt the old maxim:
“Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
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Here in Canada we hardly had a winter at all this year, at least in the portion I call home (north-central Ontario). We had a couple of cold snaps and one night we hit minus 40C, but in general it has been very mild, near 0C, which is 10 degrees above normal. Anyone could say this ‘proves’ global warming, just like you can say the European cold snap proves there is no warming at all. In both cases they’d be wrong. You need decades of data to identify the trends.
The ‘cold snap’ in Europe is something we routinely experience in Canada in a typical winter.
The difference of course is here, cold and snow are expected, and people are ready for it. Our homes have proper insulation, proper heating, we have snow tires on our cars, the municipalities have snowplows, sanders and salters at the ready, etc. In Europe you don’t have that level of readiness (except in Scandinavia and northern Russia, I suppose), hence the disaster and the death toll.
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I just tried posting a couple of comments over at WUWT, wondering what theur response might be to DenialGate. Instead of the usual awaiting moderation message nothing appeared at all. So I thought something had gone wrong and resubmitted the comments. And got a ‘you have already posted that comment’ reply. So they have them but they aren’t coming up. Very queer. I wonder if they have gone into lock-down.
You know Anthony Watts, any chance you could forward these comments on to him and perhaps get WUWT up and running again so we can all discuss this. Any way, these were my comments
Anyway, these were the comments I posted to no avail – maybe Anthony might get around to responding when he is a little less busy:
===============================================================
Since you don’t have a post up yet about Denialgate, I will comment here and you can then transfer comments across when WUWT does comment.
One important comment that struck me from Heartlands little treasure trove was this this juicy little gem:
[SNIP – Glenn is cut and pasting from a fake document. The rest of this is still not confirmed as unaltered. Where is your skeptical attitude Glenn? –JN]
Cant have teachers teaching now can we.
And pay a lot of attention to the ‘Anonymous Donor’ We will no doubt hear more about them, whoever they are. And generous to a fault:
2006 – $1,559,703
2007 – $3,277,000
2008 – $4,610,000
2009 – $2,170,590
2010 – $1,664,150
2011 – $979,000
Nearly 15 Million ponied up so far to fund the denial machine in just one ‘dont think tank’. Wouldn’t we love to see similar accounts from all the other dont think tanks.
In the best of American traditions. You can always get what you want if you are willing to pay enough for it. And so the dumbing down of America continues….
===============================================================
Anthony, when will the new Temperature website be up and running? I’m sure Heartland and their Anonymous Donor would like to know their $88K is being well spent.
And nearly $400K for the NIPCC Report. A bit pricy don’t you think when the scientists who work on the IPCC report do it Pro Bono.
Still $144K for Craig Idso, $60K for Fred Singer, even $20K for Bob Carter down in Australia. One only needs a few nice gigs like that and you have yourself a ‘nice little earner’ as they say.
=============================================================
——————————————————
REPLY: Look I’m sure you all are wet with excitement that you can repeat the words “money” “tobacco” and name those you hate, but as per usual, you pay nothing to Anthony Watts, his moderators are volunteers, and yet you think you can complain about the service you receive? And it’s 3am or so his time. He’s asleep you know? Typical freeloader manners. And frankly, the ad homs are a bore, the numbers are tin-tacks compared to the billions tossed towards believers, we’ve tried to explain how to reason to you so many times, yet you still think if any conservative donor is caught funding people who write about evidence you don’t like, then it’s proof that the Earth is warming due to man-made CO2? Bonkers.
Not to mention that you still can’t find any evidence we deny yet you insist on calling us deniers. It shows a childish inability to think. Jo
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What a shame I have to go off to work. I’d like to have played around with this mouse for a while.
Hey Glenn, how is it the hypocrisy of this is not evident to you?
Heaven forbid some sceptics should be receiving some funding at all. I mean, shouldn’t they be funding themselves from the family budget just as AL GORE DOES and just as JAMES “HANDCUFFS” HANSON DOES.
And JOHN C(R)OOK didn’t receive a lazy $100,000 for pushing junk science did he?
Nor have governments the world over spent billions upon billions backing the pseudo science of environazi alarmists and activists like Phil Jones Kevin Trenberth et al
Pseudo science site Real Climate exists on Michael Manns home budget doesn’t it Tamblyn?
And your mate John C(r)ook has a prominent post detailing all the funding the alarmists receive and you’re about to provide us with a link aren’t you Tamblyn?
Deary me, I see that Prof Bob Carter received a sum total of $1667 PER MONTH. That amount wouldn’t even pay Al Gores electricity bill.
Seems to me WUWT may have ignored you because you are a first class rolled gold HYPOCRITE.
p.s. Use a little White King Glenn, that should get the stain out of your jocks.
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You’re paranoid dude. Happens to me every once in awhile at WUWT too. Relax, smoke another cone have a go at some online porn while waiting for your witless snark to appear.
Trust me, your comments are most welcome… we love to eat troll for breakfast. (Cooked well done to avoid toxo.)
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You probably posted your WUWT comment in the wrong spot. I suggest you put it here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/23/highnoon-for-pachauri/
Keep all the dirty laundry in the one basket.
I’m all for transparency, if people want to have a political position, they should be using their own money to support that, not government money, not charity money and not corporate money. Let’s get all the political parties to reveal their donations, and Greenpeace and while we are at it, equal research funding for skeptics as there is for AGW believers.
By the way, Heartland is partisan and does not pretend otherwise, first off their website:
No mystery that they are against various environmental movements leveraging government influence.
Maybe “Anonymous Donor” will turn out to be the DOE, then you will have a story on your hands. At least Heartland has one principle, better than none at all I guess.
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Wow Glenn,
Thanks for that. To think, SOME of the people opposed to the preaching of the gospel of the Goracle, aka “climastrology”, actually get paid for it. I really and honestly did not know that. I thought we were all unpaid volunteers. It’s encouraging to know some people are actually able to carry on the good fight against a dangerous, murderous death cult, and feed their families at the same time.
Anyway, Glenn, your momentous news got me to wondering if our “white knights” were at least getting paid “award rates” as established by payments to your side’s “black knights”. Unfortunately your post wasn’t much good for that – long on rhetoric, short on details – as always.
So I googled “denialgate” (really original and snappy name, by the way – wish our side had thought of it), which led me, would you believe it, to that font of really, really good information, John
Crook’sCook’s “Septic Science”.Now, as it turns out, your post and John
Crook’sCook’s post were both basically cut and pastes of yet another article, but at least at Septic Science I was able to learn that the highest paid evil, denialist, acolyte of the evil, denialist, fossil fuel industry, was one Craig Idso, who is paid $11,600.00 a month as the principal research person for the evil, denialist Heartland Institute.You know what Glenn, I think that’s disgusting. Do you realise that’s only $45,000.00 a year less than your own legendary Professor Tim Flannery gets as our part-time, three day a week Climate Commissioner?
Can you believe that Glenn? That evil, denialist Idso who spreads lies like “maybe climate is cyclical” is being paid over three quarters as much as true hero Professor Flannery gets for telling us it will never rain here in OZ again and we need to build desalination plants – which we did.
Where’s the justice in that? And to make it even more unfair, Flannery is being paid from strictly limited taxpayer’s funds, while the evil fossil fuel industry funds Idso from “profits” which we all know are limitless.
Of course, we have to take into account the fact that Professor Flannery is quite rightly also paid as a full-time professor at Sydney’s MacQuarie University. But since such positions are largely taken on as a commitment to the future of Australia rather than as a money spinner, I’m quite happy to accept that Professor Flannery probably earns less from this position as he does in his capacity of “Climate Commissioner”. Again, these payments come from strictly limited taxpayer’s contributions.
As an aside, its interesting to note that Professor Flannery is at least not burdened with having to actually do much actual lecturing at his university. Actually, none, as far as I could ascertain. Which is just as well, given all his other commitments saving the planet.
First, of course, is his position as founding member and Director of the Wentworth Group of Scientists, which is mostly funded by The Robert Purves Foundation. Fascinating guy this Robert Purves. Must be one of your side’s heroes. Doesn’t seem to actually “do” anything in the real world, just head up taxpayer-funded quangos. The list seems to be endless, starting with his position as President of the Australian branch of the WWF.
It also turns out Flannery is a major wheeler and dealer in the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, which has so unfairly been limited to only $50 million plus in various government grants from taxpayer-funded departments like the Department of Environment and Wildlife over the last seven years.
Finally (at least for now) poor old Tim has to devote time and energy to his position as Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, which appears to be limited to funds from just about every taxpayer-funded organisation from the United Nations, down to the Outer Woop-Woop Shire Council. No wonder he doesn’t get to do much actual lecturing.
So the evil Craig Idso earns $139,200.00 a year, all from profits donated freely from private profits from private organisations, compared to heroic Professor Flannery’s mere half a million or so, most of which comes from taxpayers who don’t even they are paying it.
How unfair.
The government should pass laws to make sure the obviously biased opinions of the evil denialist Craig Idso are forever banned from Australian media and web-sites.
I mean, otherwise how on earth can “good guys” like Flannery possibly compete?
PS: Since I know your only interest is in spreading truth, Glenn, I will repost this over at WUWT for you.
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Glenn, why don’t you try to defend your lame, falsified hypothesis rather than engaging in a fallacious red herring rapped in an ad hominem attack? Where the funding comes from is not relevant unless you can prove a quid pro quo. Can you?
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[…] Jo Nova has posted this interesting link-filled piece ranging from reports of European and Russian cold to Turkish lamentations over Green policy misdirection. Share this:PrintEmailMoreStumbleUponTwitterFacebookDiggRedditLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in Climate Change, Green hell. Bookmark the permalink. ← Bitter Sweet: How Big Sugar Robs You […]
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fijidave
Those red spots jumped out at me too, but before I said anything, I looked on a map and noticed they are large lakes where water temperatures change much slower than land and air. So far this is a cold snap versus a long, grinding, miserable seige of cold which, given enough time, will ‘get the red out’ (sorry couldn’t help myself).
Dave
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Thanks, Dave. Well spotted. I should have looked myself.
But…
Perhaps it’s just an unfortunate choice of words used to describe the graphic. “Deep red are 15C above” …what? If it is above the average for this time of the year, then what caused that?
Another thought, if the Rhine is frozen over, wouldn’t those lakes also be frozen over and be opaque to the IR sensors aloft?
Questions, questions.
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A similar weather pattern froze Europe in 1956: http://www.meteopassion.com/fevrier-1956.php
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could hardly believe my ears when i heard this on radio this morning:
15 Feb: Herald Sun: AAP: SBS should dump ads, say Greens
SBS could fix its financial woes if it dumps advertising and returns to being fully government funded, the Greens say.
Special Broadcasting Service managing director Michael Ebeid told a Senate hearing yesterday the broadcaster is increasingly running repeated programs and radio output is also in decline…
Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam said the broadcaster needed government help.
“The Government needs to step in and reverse the decision of a few years ago to let the station rely on advertising,” he told ABC Radio.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/sbs-should-dump-ads-say-greens/story-e6frf7jx-1226271332845
SBS is so intolerable these days, mostly Hitler and Primetime Porn from what i see on their schedule, and never a hint about CAGW scepticism, so why would the taxpayer bail them out?
funny how SBS and ABC both use Roger Coleman of CCZ Statton Equities to smear Rinehart:
1 Feb: SBS: Roger Coleman on Rinehart’s Fairfax raid
VIDEO: Roger Coleman, a media analyst at CCZ Equities told me that it’s a political play…
http://www.sbs.com.au/blogarticle/125632/Roger-Coleman-on-Rinehart’s-Fairfax-raid
2 Feb: ABC: Reinhart takes 13pc of Fairfax
ROGER COLEMAN, MEDIA ANALYST, CCZ EQUITIES: The October 2013 Federal election is coming up and how to get Abbott in, the Liberals in, to get rid of the mining and resource rental tax and keep some control over state royalties…
ROGER COLEMAN: Fairfax is from newspapers all the way from Queensland down to Tasmania, South Australia. Metro newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne. Talk stations everywhere round Australia and the national Australian Financial Review. This is an agenda-setting company…
CHRISTINE MILNE, ACTING GREENS LEADER: Let’s talk to the community about what it thinks about very rich Australians with vested interests buying into the media at this level. That’s the conversation the nation needs to have…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-01/reinhart-takes-13pc-of-fairfax/3806104?section=entertainment
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(Can you explain why you think this unsupported claim is on topic?) CTS
This expose on how Heartland operates exposes them to laws unique to the USA – something we know very little of here.
We find now there are Heartland funding links to Dr Carter whom on his web site states he takes no funding.
Mashey’s report, on its own, made a devastating case that Heartland and several other purported “think tanks” are taking an unfair subsidy from the American taxpayer, while lobbying for some of the world’s most profitable industries. Mashey also demonstrates that Heartland, Singer’s SEPP, Craig Idso’s Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and its subsidiary front group, Robert Ferguson’s Science and Public Policy Institute, are not primarily research institutions, but rather advocacy organizations. As “think tanks” they sponsor very little “thinking” (in the form of scientific or even social research) and instead serve as weapons in a communications war against policy on issues such as climate change.
It is welcome change – that such organisations are exposed as never have been really interested in the core science – it’s all about POLICY influence because of political policy agendas. These think tanks in the context of climate change attacks use core ‘Paradigmatic relations’ from the narrative texts of what scientists are really saying. They create beachheads of contrary documents in opposition and contrasts directed to the public and lobby central governments.
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REPLY: Your delusional bias is showing. It’s OK for mr-failed-predictions-Flannery to earn 10 times as much as Carter (assuming that those numbers were not faked too). Flannery gets the science wrong, and the money paid to him is forcibly removed from the people, under threat of jail if they don’t pay. Carter does a public service, and might be paid a pittance from people who earnt the money legally and voluntarily give it in the hope of improving the world. The fact you attack the messenger so rabidly only shows how weak your science arguments are. — Jo
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And here is a piece of irrelevant gossip for you, down-under windpower lovers, from a quasi bankrupt territory.
Our electrical power corporation is struggling to keep up with demand with gas supplies tight and electricity imports difficult. We typically have 5-7GW capacity. We also are prowd owners of 1,620 wind MW, at over US$1,5 million per pop. Guess what their contribution is in all this mess. Negligible. Keep it in mind in case the aeolian thieves come your way. They will lie about tonnes of CO2 saved and zillions of homes powered. All nonsense.
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You apparently know so little that you can’t even name the laws.
Heartland accepts no government money — any taxpayers funding them are doing so completely voluntarily; Unlike my funding of James Hansen, which is removed from me under threat of force.
OMG, they disagree with the official government line! How dare they publicize research that is not government approved? Big Brother must be told at once!
If you can’t come up with an actual argument, Ross, you should go back to your pen with the other sheep. It’s getting old hearing you berate us for not slavishly accepting anything the Allmighty Government tells us.
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[…] Please read the whole post here. […]
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