Global Warming Business Insurance

[Aflak]

Satellite data shows that concerns over the levels of sea ice may have been premature.

It was feared that the polar caps were vanishing because of the effects of global warming.

But figures from the respected US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that almost all the “lost” ice has come back.



Ice levels which had shrunk from 13million sq km in January 2007 to just four million in October, are almost back to their original levels.

Figures show that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than is usual for the time of year.

The data flies in the face of many current thinkers and will be seized on by climate change sceptics who deny that the world is undergoing global warming.

A photograph of polar bears clinging on to a melting iceberg has become one of the most enduring images in the campaign against climate change.

It was used by former US Vice President Al Gore during his Inconvenient Truth lectures about mankind’s impact on the world. But scientists say the northern hemisphere has endured its coldest winter in decades.

They add that snow cover across the area is at its greatest since 1966.

The one exception is Western Europe, which has – until the weekend when temperatures plunged to as low as -10C in some places – been basking in unseasonably warm weather. The UK has reported one of its warmest winters on record.

However, vast swathes of the world have suffered chaos because of some of the heaviest snowfalls in decades.

Central and southern China, the USA and Canada were hit hard by snowstorms.

Even the Middle East saw snow, with Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman and northern Saudi Arabia reporting the heaviest falls in years and below-zero temperatures. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan snow and freezing weather killed 120 people.

In Britain the barmy February weather came to an abrupt halt at the weekend as temperatures plunged to -10C in central England.

Experts believe that this month could end up as one of the coldest Februaries in Britain in the past 10 years.

The freezing night-time conditions look set to stay around -8C until at least the middle of the week.

A Met Office spokesman explained: “There has been little or no cloud cover across England and Wales. So there is a capacity for a fair bit of heat to be able to escape at night.

“It has been warmer in Scotland but that’s because it has been cloudy there.

“Until the weekend the temperatures were in the 14s and 15s, and we will see a return to that later this week, though it will look grey and overcast when the clouds return.”

But he added that there was little chance of snow. He said: “When the rain comes it will get warmer.”

[ZiBoTzU]

We got about 24" of "Global Warming" in the last week along with 1/4" of ice. It's been below zero for so many nights and days that don't hit +10F I lost tract.

The next SOB that says out loud, any where near me, that the USA has to stop its industrial growth as the USA is responsible for this "Global Warming" I am going to choke...

For one thing 'Global Warming' is an outright LIE. For another the USA has sent much of it's industrial capability to China or Mexico. So if anybody needs to "downsize" it sure as hell isn't US.

[Uncle Fester]

WARMED-OVER IPCC ERRORS

With much fanfare, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. It predicted that global warming will lead to widespread catastrophe if it is left unmitigated. Yet, the report failed to provide the most basic requirement for effective climate policy: accurate temperature statistics, says H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).

The IPCC measures global temperature by averaging readings from thermometers at ground stations throughout the world. There are a number of potential errors in these readings, says Burnett:

• Temperature-recording stations are absent from large areas of the Earth's surface.
• Weather stations that were once in undeveloped areas are now surrounded by buildings, parking lots and other heat-trapping structures -- and due to the urban-heat-island effect, give high and inaccurate temperature data.
• Temperature data has been further distorted as the locations and number of measuring stations have changed, contributing to inconsistent measurements over time.

Even using accurate, consistent temperature data, sound forecasting methods are required to predict climate change. Over time, forecasting researchers have compiled 140 principles that can be applied to a broad range of disciplines, including science, sociology, economics and politics. In a recent NCPA study, Kesten Green and J. Scott Armstrong used these principles to audit the climate forecasts in the Fourth Assessment Report:

• They found that 127 principles were relevant in assessing the process the IPCC used to project climate change.
• The IPCC clearly violated 60 of the 127 principles.
• Twelve additional principles appeared to be violated.
• Another 38 could not be assessed because there was insufficient information.

The IPCC's policy recommendations are based on flawed statistical analyses and unscientific expert opinions that violate general forecasting principles. Policymakers should take this into account before attempting to counter global warming by enacting laws that could have severe economic consequences, says Burnett.

Source: H. Sterling Burnett, "Climate Change Forecasters on the Hot Seat," National Center for Policy Analysis, Brief Analysis No. 609, February 18, 2008.

Source

[gage]

A meteorologist performing a comprehensive study of temperature-monitoring stations that provide data about global warming says the official facility at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport is riddled with problems that render it useless to scientists.

But the data collected there is being used nonetheless.

Anthony Watts concludes in his investigation that the station at O'Hare is affected by an urban heat effect that would make temperature readings inaccurate as an indicator of what is actually occurring regionally.

"The community around O'Hare was much smaller during World War II, when the airport was built, than it is now," says Watts. "The area had a significantly less-urban population and lacked the acres of concrete and asphalt that exist there today."




The problems at O'Hare are similar to those found by Watts around the country in his study of temperature stations used by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration..

What he has found elsewhere are temperature stations with sensors on the roofs of buildings, near air-conditioning exhaust vents, in parking lots near hot automobiles, barbecues, chimneys and on pavement and concrete surfaces – all of which would lead to higher temperature recordings than properly established conditions.

To qualify as a properly maintained temperature station, sensors must be placed in elevated, slatted boxes on flat ground surrounded by a clear surface on a slope of less than 19 degrees with surrounding grass and vegetations ground cover of less than 10 centimeters high. The sensors must be located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces and parking lots.

Watts' concerns about the temperatures being used to gauge whether global warming is actually taking place began when he read a 1997 study by the U.S. National Research Council that concluded the consistency and quality of temperature stations was "inadequate and deteriorating." Meanwhile, he learned, the U.S. Historical Climatological Network, responsible for maintaining the stations, was doing nothing to address the problems.

So Watts decided to take up the challenge himself. After surveying a few randomly chosen temperature stations and being shocked at the shortcomings, he set forth on a plan to survey all 1,221 stations, taking photographs along the way. With the help of volunteers, Watts has systematically surveyed one-third of the official weather stations.

The vast majority of the stations surveyed to date fail to meet the prescribed standards. Using a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 reflecting proper maintenance and standards and 5 representing facilities that are severely compromised, Watts says 70 percent of those stations surveyed received a 4 or 5 rating, while only 4 percent received a grade of 1.

All of the most egregious violations he has observed in the study would result in artificially higher temperatures being recorded.

Source

[Aflak]

"If you tell a lie enough times, it becomes the truth."

-Al Gore

[gold staR]

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ice is back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[SteveJ]

8 years ago it was already apparent to the "A" students that the sun has more to do with earth's climate than anything the short bus riders ("F" students) could envisage.

[remmy123]

Originally Posted by Aflak

"If you tell a lie enough times, it becomes the truth."

-Al Gore

Al Gore? Isn't that the guy who invented the interweb? LOL