Source:  UK Daily Mail

By Niall Firth, UK Daily Mail

The UK’s leading scientific body has been forced to rewrite its guide on climate change and admit that it is not known how much warmer the Earth will become.

The Royal Society has updated its guide after 43 of its members complained that the previous version failed to take into account the opinion of climate change sceptics.

Now the new guide, called ‘Climate change: a summary of the science’, admits that there are some ‘uncertainties’ regarding the science behind climate change. And it says that it impossible to know for sure how the Earth’s climate will change in the future nor what the possible effects may be.

The 19-page guide says: ‘It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future, but careful estimates of potential changes and associated uncertainties have been made. Scientists continue to work to narrow these areas of uncertainty. Uncertainty can work both ways, since the changes and their impacts may be either smaller or larger than those projected.’ (more…)

Source:  WUWT

by Steve Goddard

Every city has its good side and bad side. Eric Cartman compared East Denver to Afghanistan.

For James Hansen, the safe side of the tracks is 350 ppm CO2 – i.e. 1988 (aka the year Tim Wirth turned off the Congressional air conditioner to make it hot for Hansen’s testimony.)

So how safe was the climate before 350 ppm?

All seven continents set their high temperature records prior to 1988.

The biggest Atlantic hurricane occurred prior to 1988.

The deadliest Atlantic hurricane occurred prior to 1988.

The deadliest tornado occurred prior to 1988.

The worst decade for hurricanes occurred prior to 1988. (more…)

Cap-and-trade is dead because the public finally caught on that it is a stealth energy tax, a big reason being that it makes coal – the most economic electricity fuel in many markets – uncompetitive. (more…)

by Gordon Fulks

I finally had a chance to watch the movie about Svensmark’s work on “The Cloud Mystery” and found it fascinating.  Both Svensmark from Denmark and Nir Shaviv from Hebrew University in Israel make a strong case for a galactic cosmic ray origin for climate change over periods as short as a decade to as long as 150 million years:

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4XYxL66O_s&feature=related

The short term variations in the galactic cosmic rays and therefore the cloud cover are caused by variations in the solar magnetic field frozen into the solar wind.  This large spiral magnetic field is carried out to about 100 AU in roughly a year by the supersonic solar wind traveling at 400 km/sec.  It modulates incoming galactic cosmic rays by convecting them out of the solar system as they attempt to diffuse inward.  Sunspots are the visual manifestation of the Sun’s magnetic activity.  We have records of them going back to Galileo in 1610.

Very long term variations in the cosmic rays reaching the earth are caused by the solar system’s orbit about the center of our Milky Way galaxy.  When we enter one of the major spiral arms of the galaxy, the galactic cosmic ray intensity increases which increases our cloud cover and cools the earth.  The data show periodic cooling of the earth over periods of 150 million years corresponding to entry into the spiral arms. (more…)

Source:  SPPI

by James Macdonald

Re: Article in the August issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, “The Psychology of Global Warming. By Ben Newell and Andrew Pittman

The whole premise of your article is built on the credibility of the IPCC reports and consensus of the global warming community. There is no mention of the hundreds of respected scientists who totally disagree with their findings. “Climategate” shows just how incestuous the process can be by trying to exclude the work of those who don’t agree. In an attempt to stifle dissent, the phrase “the science is settled” did great harm to the science of discovering the causes of the great temperature variations throughout geologic history.

The basic raw temperature data used by the scientific community has been “adjusted” or in some cases lost. As a sample of this, in a paper by Edward R. Long, Ph.D. “ New England’s Temperature History and Trends (1911-2009)”, he shows that “The protocol developed by the NCDC for massaging raw temperature observations into adjusted values is responsible for a significant portion of the United States temperature increase of +0.6C reported over the past century. NCDC erred in adjusting temperature data for 1980-2000 so as to show temperatures higher than those previously reported.” Temperatures at rural observing stations, which showed little or no upward trend were changed to match temperatures at urban stations, which increased as population increased. Much the same procedure was used on the GISS data. To further exasperate the situation, in the 1980’s about half the rural stations, especially in Russia were disbanded, resulting in a further warming bias. (more…)

Source:  World Climate Report

We conducted a web search for “Global Warming and Maple Syrup” and found over 150,000 sites – almost all proclaim that the maple syrup industry is in deep peril given the threat of global warming. This must surely be seen as bad news for all those who enjoy maple syrup on waffles, pancakes, oatmeal, crumpets, and French toast (and in any number of desserts as well). Before you think this threat is less than serious, be aware that maple syrup is big business in New England and in Canada.

But, as with most things you read about on the majority of websites, the fate of maple syrup turns out to be not nearly as bad as portrayed. In fact, the future may be even better for maple syrup production than the past.

In case you do not know, maple syrup is a sweetener made from the sap of sugar maple or black maple trees. In cold climate areas, these trees store starch in their stems and roots before the winter, which when converted to sugar, rises in the sap in the spring. Maple trees can be tapped and the sap is collected and concentrated.

Vermont is the biggest U.S. producer, with nearly a million gallons of syrup produced annually. Maine produces about a third of that amount annually; New York, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Hampshire, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Connecticut all produced marketable quantities of maple syrup as well. While the U.S. production of maple syrup is significant, Canada produces 80% of the world’s maple syrup with most production occurring in Quebec.

Production is concentrated in February, March, and April, depending on local weather conditions. Freezing nights and warm days are needed to induce sap flows. The change in temperature from above to below freezing causes water uptake from the soil, and temperatures above freezing cause a stem pressure to develop, which, along with gravity, causes sap to flow out of tapholes or other wounds in the stem or branches. You immediately see that sap is dependent on climate conditions, predicted changes in local and regional climate can be linked to the production of maple syrup, and according to thousands of websites—and U.S. government climate impact reports—climate change will surely be bad for syrup production, at least in New England. (more…)

Source:  SPPI

A recent paper at SPPI looks at the history of extreme weather events.

The on-going claims of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have been ramped up again lately because of the opportunities presented by the heat wave in Russia and the floods in Pakistan, which are also being claimed as attributable to anthropogenic CO2. If the amount spent on global warming were to be diverted to mitigating and preventing the worst effects of natural disasters, then the desperate plight of the people of Pakistan would be relieved more quickly.

The paper can be downloaded here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/extreme_weather_extreme_claims.html

Author, Dennis Ambler, concludes:

Extreme Weather – The Blame Game

The Aztecs had sophisticated irrigation systems and “astrolonomical” observatories, (apparently a mix of astrology and astronomy), to attempt to predict the weather and reservoirs. But the unseasonal frosts and cold, followed by severe, prolonged drought, may have taken them to the brink of collapse. Once the climate became more benign again, they praised their gods with human sacrifice.

“When rainfall and agriculture had resumed, the Aztecs responded by massively increasing the number of human sacrifices to their rain god Tlaloc. It is thought that hundreds of thousands of people were sacrificed.” (more…)

Guest Post by Greg Fegel

Psychology is a science which is particularly vulnerable to biases, to quack ideas that run amok, and to cynical manipulation by vested interests.

In the “cynical manipulation by vested interests” department, look at the role that Freud’s brother-in-law Edward Bernays played in using propaganda and mass psychology to indocrinate the public into accepting various products and ideas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

I like the “AGW Left Exhume Joseph Goebbels” article, except that I disagree that the AGW hoax is solely a ‘leftist’ agenda. [Title changed to AGW Activists...]

I believe that the top-level proponents of AGW (including the faux- liberals Gore, Clinton, Obama, and Bill Gates) are mainly wealthy tycoons who have created the AGW scam to preserve their own power and wealth, just like they did with the ‘banker bailout’. (more…)

Source:  American Spectator

By Paul Chesser

From this morning’s edition of the Washington Examiner‘s weeklong series on Big Green:

The median salary among all 15 of the highest-paid Big Green environmental officials (the nonprofits like Environmental Defense Fund, Nature Conservancy, etc.) is $261,295, while the median total compensation for the 15 is $308,465….

You know — these are the leaders of the groups who constantly wail that nature is under unrelenting assault by Big Oil, whose money and influence they say is the Goliath to the enviros’ David.

Meanwhile:

[Big Green] opposition nonprofits analyzed by The Examiner included the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Concerned Women for America, Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Citizens Against Government Waste, National Taxpayers Union, and the American Conservative Union.

An Examiner analysis found a median salary of $228,703 among the opposition groups, or nearly $33,000 less than that received by the environmental executives. The gap is even wider when media total compensation figures are compared, with top executives at environmental opponents receiving $254,605, or nearly $54,000 less than the top 15 environmental executives. (more…)

Source:  American Thinker

by Christopher J. Alleva

[SPPI Note: This essay is highly relevant because the radical environmental movement is filled with elites pushing all the scares toward a statist, collectivist political response.

Also see:  Codevilla's recent essay on the ruling class: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/ruling_class.html?Itemid=0]

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

Source:  Rasmussen Report

by Tony Blankley

Not long after the tea party sprang into being in the spring of 2009, America’s elites started vilifying the movement. In an article worthy of a class-action libel suit, The New York Review of Books depicted the tea party’s first march on Washington as a parade of bigots.

Ex-president Jimmy Carter spit venom at tea partiers by saying they resented an African-American president — a baseless charge of racism willingly echoed by the media.

When they weren’t being defamed as racists, tea party supporters were described as irrational, enraged, seething, and livid. Constituents at town hall meetings who rejected the superficial Democratic Party talking points and demanded answers instead of political spin were portrayed as mobs on the verge of riot. At the very time that real Muslim terrorists were planning a record number of attacks inside the U.S. right under their noses, political apparatchiks in the Department of Homeland Security warned ominously of imaginary right-wing violence as the nation’s newest terrorist threat. (more…)

Source: SPPI

by Dennis Ambler

We are not thinking the wrong thoughts, we just don’t know how to think the right thoughts.

In a just published paper for SPPI, We Are Thinking The Wrong Thoughts, I highlighted the intensive efforts by government funded research groups, to categorise and explain away the non-acceptance by ever-increasing numbers of the general public, of the IPCC and UN creed on global warming, It is obviously very galling to some of the Lead Authors at IPCC that not everyone, including very many scientists more qualified than they, accepts their modelling claims.

One such IPCC Lead Author is Professor Andy Pitman, from the University of New South Wales, who has joined forces with psychologist Ben Newell from the School of Psychology, also at the University of New South Wales, in producing a paper which suggests that “Insights from the psychology of judgment and decision making might help the climate community communicate global warming science to an often skeptical public.”

You would of course expect a paper on cognition to appear in a psychology journal. Wrong! Failure of cognitive thinking. It actually appears in the journal of the  American Meteorological Society with the title “The Psychology of Global Warming – Improving the Fit between the Science and the Message”

Here is the abstract: (more…)