Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[Haletown]

excessive "Global Warming"  now impacting Military Skills Competition.

http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/community/mapleleaf/article_e.asp?id=4323

Royal Military College (RMC) of Canada’s Sandhurst team members are putting the finishing touches on their training to defend their title at the Sandhurst military skills competition on May 3 at the US Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.

The Sandhurst military skills competition course is designed to test the limits of human endurance and skill, both mental and physical, through a 12-km course made harder with obstacles. The RMC team held two mini-competitions, replicating the Sandhurst competition, as part of their training. One in Kingston in mid-March focused on teamwork, and one in Petawawa in early April focused on specific skills. The competitions included such obstacles as assault boat movement and water crossing (adapted due to available bodies of water being frozen), marksmanship, wall, leader reaction course, battle casualty evacuation, and force on force.

RMC has participated in the Sandhurst competition since 1997, and has won three years running – 2005, 2006 and 2007.

 

[JBG]

excessive "Global Warming"  now impacting Military Skills Competition.

http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/community/mapleleaf/article_e.asp?id=4323

Royal Military College (RMC) of Canada’s Sandhurst team members are putting the finishing touches on their training to defend their title at the Sandhurst military skills competition on May 3 at the US Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.

The Sandhurst military skills competition course is designed to test the limits of human endurance and skill, both mental and physical, through a 12-km course made harder with obstacles. The RMC team held two mini-competitions, replicating the Sandhurst competition, as part of their training. One in Kingston in mid-March focused on teamwork, and one in Petawawa in early April focused on specific skills. The competitions included such obstacles as assault boat movement and water crossing (adapted due to available bodies of water being frozen), marksmanship, wall, leader reaction course, battle casualty evacuation, and force on force.

RMC has participated in the Sandhurst competition since 1997, and has won three years running – 2005, 2006 and 2007.

I assume that implies year to year variation and not a trend. I am tired of global warming even being assumed as fact, much less blamed on man.

 

[Haletown]

I think this time the water body was frozen, so ironic given all the panic over AGW.

a link to a great summary of all things AGW panic & fear mongering.

"What's irrational? The Green Movement is irrational. Most of it represents feel-good ideas that are hooey: symbolic hooey that is meant to make people feel virtuous while accomplishing nothing. Witness the lightbulb craze, "organic" vegetables, "recycling" plastic bottles (totally energy-inefficient), or hybrid cars (which do nothing "for the planet" but which are great on gas mileage). It's empty vanity and fashion, and nothing more (for an example, see this foolish agonizing piece by Michael Pollan, who has caught a bad case of the vain and guilt-ridden sanctimony of the "I can make a difference" disorder).

Pure organic pixie dust for the latte liberals."

rtr@ http://tinyurl.com/3or52j

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

    Global warming on hiatus, let's call it Apocalypse Postponed. At least temporarily.

New research suggests ocean currents will offset rising temperatures -- cue the hysterics
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

German climate scientists have just published a study in the respected science journal Nature suggesting global warming has stopped and will not resume until at least 2015.

In other words (my words, not theirs) contrary to the received wisdom of Al Gore's simplistic and propagandistic An Inconvenient Truth, global temperatures aren't moving in lockstep with rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the science isn't settled and we don't know everything we need to know.
Based on new, computer-generated climate models that factor in natural ocean currents, the researchers conclude: "Our results suggest that global surface temperatures may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic (man-made) warming."

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said if their calculations are correct, the 0.3 degree Celsius global temperature rise predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change over the next decade won't happen.
"We believe that ocean currents and systems could, in the short term, change global warming patterns, and even mean temperatures," he told National Geographic News.

Since there has actually been no global warming since 1998, that means there would be an almost two-decade span where concentrations of GHG emissions, most notably carbon dioxide, continued to intensify in the atmosphere, without global temperatures following suit.
These researchers aren't climate "deniers." They say their findings -- based on cutting-edge computer modelling techniques still in their infancy -- are a refinement of existing climate models.

They also calculate that after 2015, global warming will resume, as the warming caused by man-made GHG emissions is no longer masked by the cooling effect of ocean currents. They aren't suggesting man-made global warming has permanently stopped.
And that's all fair enough. But let's not kid the troops.

Prior to this study, anyone impertinent enough to point out, contrary to the Al Gore Nation, there hasn't been any global warming for a decade was apt to have their head shot off by climate hysterics.
As astrophysicist and award-winning former BBC science correspondent David Whitehouse -- who made exactly that point in the British magazine New Statesman last Dec. 19 in an essay titled "Has Global Warming Stopped?" observed in the wake of this new research:

"Not long ago, anyone who looked at the global annual temperature data and disrespectfully pointed out that it might actually be significant that the world hasn't become warmer since 1998, was dismissed as foolish and accused of seeing what they wanted to see ... Then, if they had the effrontery to point out that even the U.K.'s MET (British Meteorological Office) agreed that the annual data between 2001-7 was an impeccable flat line, they were told they were completely wrong as such things were obviously only year-on-year variability (as an unscientific environmental 'activist' damned my speculations in the New Statesman about the same topic, whilst at the same time implying I was lying)".


Indeed, Whitehouse got hit from all sides, including a brutal follow-up essay in New Statesman by its "environmental correspondent" who wrote: "I'll be blunt. Whitehouse got it wrong -- completely wrong ... readers of my column will know that I give contrarians, or skeptics or deniers (call them what you will) short shrift ... So a mistaken article reached a flawed conclusion. Intentionally, or not, readers were misled, and the good name of the New Statesman has been used all over the Internet by climate contrarians seeking to support their entrenched positions."

There's only one problem. Whitehouse isn't a denier.

As he wrote in his original essay, "Certainly the working hypotheses of CO2-induced global warming is a good one that stands on good physical principles, but let us not pretend our understanding extends too far, or that the working hypotheses is a sufficient explanation for what is going on ... we are fools if we think we have a sufficient understanding of such a complicated system as the Earth's atmosphere's interaction with sunlight ... We know far less than many think we do, or would like you to think we do."

Indeed.

 

[Kirkhill]

The New Statesman:  Voice of the Original Social Engineers - The Fabians.

There is a Truth.  Their Truth.

 

[vonGarvin]

Suzuki slams NDP, Tories, backs Dion's carbon tax

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080518/carbontax_liberals_080518/20080518?hub=TopStories

Where's the yawning smiley?  What on Earth is a "carbon tax" going to do?  Forgive me for being naive, but I don't think that taxing pollution is going to stop it...

 

[Kirkhill]

If raising the price of oil from $13 dollars a barrel to $130 dollars a barrel in the past decade hasn't produced the "millenium" in terms of CO2 decrease I shudder to think what level of tax Suzuki thinks WOULD be effective.

 

[Michael OLeary]

If raising the price of oil from $13 dollars a barrel to $130 dollars a barrel in the past decade hasn't produced the "millenium" in terms of CO2 decrease I shudder to think what level of tax Suzuki thinks WOULD be effective.

Now all we need is a North American auto manufacturer to wake the fuck up and make a domestic $5-8K equivalent to the Smart car.  They corner the market on small cars, we get something affordable to drive for an inner-city runabout.

 

[Cdn Blackshirt]

If raising the price of oil from $13 dollars a barrel to $130 dollars a barrel in the past decade hasn't produced the "millenium" in terms of CO2 decrease I shudder to think what level of tax Suzuki thinks WOULD be effective.

I'd like to see Suzuki choke on a tofu burger.....

My biggest problem with him (and his ilk) is he (they) actually end up being incredibly counterproductive.  I consider myself pretty environmentally friendly and these guys just piss me off because they promote the wasting of huge sums of taxpayer dollars on horribly low ROI expenditures (ethanol subsidies, CO2 sequestration, huge $$$ for public transportation, etc, etc, etc.)

Dear David, you want to be environmentally friendly you jerkoff, how about promoting things we can manage and that we're certain of the science:
1)  National Greenbox Program so compostables don't go into landfill sites.
2)  National initiative to measure, then reduce heavy metals in airborne emissions by 50%.
3)  National initiative to measure, then reduce heavy metals in drinking water to near 0. 
4)  National initiative to invest in our water management systems so that never again will there be a sign at a beach that says "Closed due to e-coli contamination"
5)  National Economic Plan to begin serial production of nuclear plants to i) eliminate our reliance on coal, ii) provide a new energy source to eventually power plug-in automobiles.
6)  National Tax Incentive on R&D and Manufacturing on Plug-In vehicle technology that takes place within Canada.
7)  National initiative to redefine urban planning so that all new development is focused upon creating collective communities where residential, commercial and industrial are all within walking distance of one another, even in snow.  (Of note, that's my biggest problem with the whole Public Transportation debate.  It's a solution to the wrong problem.  The question shouldn't be "How do we move people from where they shouldn't live to where they work using taxpayer infrasture?"  The question should be "How do we modify our cities and towns so that we can maximize the number of citizens thow can walk to their place of employment?"

And that's just to name a few of the things we could if we stopped discussion this Kyoto/AGW horse....pucky.

Bottom Line:  These idiots are so stupid and incompetent, they're unfit to carry my friggin' golf clubs, much less try to influence public policy and taxpayer expenditures.  May they all allergies to chickpeas.


Matthew. 

 

[Flip]

Blackshirt, nice list you forgot a few things.......

Sulfur emissions,  have scrubbers put on coal power plants in Ontario instead of declaring that they shouldn't exist anyway and that scrubbers wouldn't do anything about GW.

Mercury, instead of legally mandating a guranteed market for those little spiral bulbs - find something better like LEDs.

We could get rid of market incentives to destroying Indonesian rainforest for the purpose of starting bio-diesel plantations.

We could stop building wind farms that kill birds and destroy the view.

We could get rid of ethanol subsidies that deprive people of food.

Just a few idle thoughts..... I think some have already been mentioned.

This AGW noise has displaced nearly all legitimate environmental coverage in the press and media. You can't get through a single day without someone bringing up the mythic AGW monster.  It's actually been reported that the global downward trend in temperature is consistant with Global Warming theory......!

 

[a_majoor]

7)  National initiative to redefine urban planning so that all new development is focused upon creating collective communities where residential, commercial and industrial are all within walking distance of one another, even in snow.  (Of note, that's my biggest problem with the whole Public Transportation debate.  It's a solution to the wrong problem.  The question shouldn't be "How do we move people from where they shouldn't live to where they work using taxpayer infrasture?"  The question should be "How do we modify our cities and towns so that we can maximize the number of citizens thow can walk to their place of employment?"

There is no need for a national initiative; most municipalities could start this by simply relaxing their zoning regulations, since they promote highly segregated land use. Don't write the PM and wait decades for this to happen, write your mayor!

BTW, highly regulated and nationally planned mixed use neighbourhoods do exist; most were build under the communist regime of the USSR and the PRC. I would rather see thousands of locally developed neighbourhoods than a thousand planned by some office in Ottawa......

 

[Cdn Blackshirt]

There is no need for a national initiative; most municipalities could start this by simply relaxing their zoning regulations, since they promote highly segregated land use. Don't write the PM and wait decades for this to happen, write your mayor!

BTW, highly regulated and nationally planned mixed use neighbourhoods do exist; most were build under the communist regime of the USSR and the PRC. I would rather see thousands of locally developed neighbourhoods than a thousand planned by some office in Ottawa......

I know the municipalities "could" do it.  The problem is the municipalities are generally run by shrubs and haven't had an original idea ever.

Seriously, I've met about 10 of Ontario's mayors and most of them are knobs....

RE:  Central Planning - I don't mean that Ottawa brings the hand of God down and says "You must do this" as per the communist model. 

Instead they pay to bring together a bunch of great minds and centrally pay for the brainstorming instead of the municipalities paying individually 15,000 times for the exact same brainstorming.  The objective of the study is develop several models of various sizes for urban, suburb and rural development/redevelopment (based on project sizes of 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 & 25,000).  The central study including those completed models are then released to the municipalities along with some type of incentive fund.  Let's say $2.5 billion per annum in infrastructure expense reimbursement for any municipal costs associated with a project of more than a 1,000 housing units that meet certain benchmarks.  In short, if the municipalities start planning better, the Feds step up and pick-up some of the costs associated with water, sewer, road, infrastructure.


Matthew. 

P.S.  To Flip - Totally agree.  The mercury one to me is particularly galling as there's so much evidence of that substance being causal in numerous brain and nervous system conditions.  [I'm not sure I've told this story here but a friend of my uncle who is a orthodontist was diagnosed with Alzheimers as his memory and facilities started to decline.  My uncle had been reading some stuff on mercury in amalgum fillings and the impact on nerve transmission.  On his own he pulled all his friend's amalgum fillings and dental work and replaced it with composite caps and I believe tungsten bases.  My uncle's friend has subsequently made a full recovery and is back to old self.]  RE:  LED technology - Totally agree.  Again if it were my call, that would be another federally funded R&D and manufactuing investment I'd make.  On the Indonesian Rain Forest Issue - Again I agree, but that's more of European issue as they're the ones who are importing all the Palm Oil for "environmentally friendly" biodeisel.  I was just trying to target "Canadian" issues as I think the more personal we make it, the more successful we'll be.  One add-on:  I'd ban plastic bags at retail outlets within 2-years.  I've been carrying cloth shopping bags in my car for 2-years.  It's not hard.  And if disposable bags are necessary, then use paper....which then fits into the Green Box program.

 

[a_majoor]

Reality is intruding on the Climate alarmists, and common sense is finally winning out. Any guess as to the next "crisis" requiring massive government intervention (I will place my bet on water, but I'm sure there are a lot of psudo crisis out there)

http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2008/06/day-music-died.html

07 June 2008
The Day the Music Died

I predict that May and June 2008 will be the "tipping" point in the Global Warming debate ... the tipping point that killed Global Warming. Oh, the hoax will struggle and thrash for some time to come, like some giant lizard that refuses to die, but by and large ... it's dead.

There are any number of reasons for the colossal failure of Soros, Gore, and Strong to push through their poison, but several stand out. The first being of course, the utter failure of Warm-mongers to predict the current and coming cooling of the planet ... at this point only a moron would continue to support the Global Warming hoax without reservation ... how could anyone trust a "climate scientist" who says one thing, while the planet does another. The second reason is simply that the sexiness has gone out of the movement. Now that limousine liberals and middle class slobs the world over are starting to get a taste of the costs of fighting AGW, they are getting cold feet. AGW was fun ... and long as nobody lost an eye.

Jennifer gives us a delicious roundup of the death knell:


1. Wall Street Journal – Climate Change Collapse – June 06, 2008.Excerpt: Environmentalists are stunned that their global warming agenda is in collapse. Senator Harry Reid has all but conceded he lacks the vote for passage in the Senate and that it's time to move on. Backers of the Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill always knew they would face a veto from President Bush, but they wanted to flex their political muscle and build momentum for 2009. That strategy backfired. The green groups now look as politically intimidating as the skinny kid on the beach who gets sand kicked in his face. Those groups spent millions advertising and lobbying to push the cap-and-trade bill through the Senate. But it would appear the political consensus on global warming was as exaggerated as the alleged scientific consensus. "With gasoline selling at $4 a gallon, the Democrats picked the worst possible time to bring up cap and trade," says Dan Clifton, a political analyst for Strategas Research Partners. "This issue is starting to feel like the Hillary health care plan."

2. The Politico: Dems yank global warming bill – June 6, 2008. Excerpt: Apparently three days of debate was enough for what many senators called "the most important issue facing the planet." With little chance of winning passage of a sweeping 500-page global warming bill, the Senate Democratic leadership is planning to yank the legislation after failing to achieve the 60-vote threshold needed to move the bill to the next stage. After a 48-36 vote on the climate change bill, the Senate is likely to move on to a separate energy debate next week. The legislation collapsed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the poor timing of debating a bill predicted to increase energy costs while much of the country is focused on $4-a-gallon gas. On top of that, a number of industrial state Democrats like Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio were uncomfortable with the strong emissions caps that would have created a new regime of regulations for coal, auto and other manufacturing industries. Republicans, for the most part, held firm against a bill they said would cost billions in regulations while pushing the cost of gas higher. Seven Republicans, mostly moderates, voted for the procedural motion on the legislation while four Democrats voted against it.



There's a lot lot more.

... and none of what Jennifer posts even touches on the continuous erosion of the science itself, which, now that it's finally under scrutiny, is gradually failing the test.

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Perhaps someone could mention that to Dion?  He seems to be a bit off the mark these days.  ???

 

[Flip]

Funny you should say that.......
Friday night I had dinner witha former Liberal Candidate and lifetime Liberal.
Even HE acknowledges that Dion is no leader........And then we talked about AGW.
I've read ALOT about it lately.

My favorite blog on the subject is; http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/

Usually about a dozen good posts a day.

 

[JBG]

Perhaps someone could mention that to Dion?  He seems to be a bit off the mark these days.   ???

In the US the Senate, in rejecting this nonesense, focused on the cost, as they ddi in 1997 when they instructed Gore, 95-1, not to present any Kyoto treaty for ratification if it did not bind India and China.The costs, for absolutely no environmental gain, are horrific.

 

[Kirkhill]

More reality intrusion

Who'da thunkit.  The Earth is self-regulating.

Cirrus Disappearance: Warming Might Thin Heat-trapping Clouds

ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2007) — The widely accepted (albeit unproven) theory that manmade global warming will accelerate itself by creating more heat-trapping clouds is challenged this month in new research from The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Instead of creating more clouds, individual tropical warming cycles that served as proxies for global warming saw a decrease in the coverage of heat-trapping cirrus clouds, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville's Earth System Science Center.

That was not what he expected to find.

"All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases," he said. "That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space."

"While low clouds have a predominantly cooling effect due to their shading of sunlight, most cirrus clouds have a net warming effect on the Earth," Spencer said. With high altitude ice clouds their infrared heat trapping exceeds their solar shading effect.

In the tropics most cirrus-type clouds flow out of the upper reaches of thunderstorm clouds. As the Earth's surface warms - due to either manmade greenhouse gases or natural fluctuations in the climate system - more water evaporates from the surface. Since more evaporation leads to more precipitation, most climate researchers expected increased cirrus cloudiness to follow warming.

"To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Spencer said. "The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming."

The only way to see how these new findings impact global warming forecasts is to include them in computerized climate models.

"The role of clouds in global warming is widely agreed to be pretty uncertain," Spencer said. "Right now, all climate models predict that clouds will amplify warming. I'm betting that if the climate models' 'clouds' were made to behave the way we see these clouds behave in nature, it would substantially reduce the amount of climate change the models predict for the coming decades."
The UAHuntsville research team used 30- to 60-day tropical temperature fluctuations - known as "intraseasonal oscillations" - as proxies for global warming.

"Fifteen years ago, when we first started monitoring global temperatures with satellites, we noticed these big temperature fluctuations in the tropics," Spencer said. "What amounts to a decade of global warming routinely occurs in just a few weeks in the tropical atmosphere. Then, as if by flipping a switch, the rapid warming is replaced by strong cooling. It now looks like the change in cirrus cloud coverage is the major reason for this switch from warming to cooling."

The team analyzed six years of data from four instruments aboard three NASA and NOAA satellites. The researchers tracked precipitation amounts, air and sea surface temperatures, high and low altitude cloud cover, reflected sunlight, and infrared energy escaping out to space.

When they tracked the daily evolution of a composite of fifteen of the strongest intraseasonal oscillations they found that although rainfall and air temperatures would be rising, the amount of infrared energy being trapped by the cloudy areas would start to decrease rapidly as the air warmed. This unexpected behavior was traced to the decrease in cirrus cloud cover.

The new results raise questions about some current theories regarding precipitation, clouds and the efficiency with which weather systems convert water vapor into rainfall. These are significant issues in the global warming debate.

"Global warming theory says warming will generally be accompanied by more rainfall," Spencer said. "Everyone just
There are significant gaps in the scientific understanding of precipitation systems and their interactions with the climate, he said. "At least 80 percent of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems.

"Until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming, I don't believe we can know how much of our current warming is manmade. Without that knowledge, we can't predict future climate change with any degree of certainty."

Spencer and his colleagues expect these new findings to be controversial.

"I know some climate modelers will say that these results are interesting but that they probably don't apply to long-term global warming," he said. "But this represents a fundamental natural cooling process in the atmosphere. Let's see if climate models can get this part right before we rely on their long term projections."

The results of this research were published recently  in the American Geophysical Union's "Geophysical Research Letters" on-line edition. The paper was co-authored by UAHuntsville's Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. W. Danny Braswell, and Dr. Justin Hnilo of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071102152636.htm


So when things get too hot, the skies open up and release heat.....


Also 80% of Greenhouse Gas generation is based on snow, rain and clouds and nobody understands that.....

Also the Settled Science is based on an unproven hypothesis that in turn is based on the "(assumption) that more rainfall means more high altitude clouds. That would be your first guess and, since we didn't have any data to suggest otherwise ..."


You know what you call a hypothesis based on a guess? A guess.  Jaysus Murphy Wept. :'(

 

[YZT580]

And finally, Aspen is opening up for the weekend.  They have over 3 feet on the upper slopes.  Best spring skiing in years.

 

[Kirkhill]

And just to make sure we don't run out of snow:

It is the latest Spokane has seen snow since records started being kept in 1881.

KHQ.com

Washington state sees record cold and snow in June.
KHQ.com reported:


The Spokane area saw record low temperatures and even a little bit of snow Tuesday morning, and all just 11 days before the official start of summer.

Much of the Inland Northwest remained under a snow warning from the National Weather Service Tuesday morning. KHQ received calls from people in Reardan, Moscow, Pullman, Loon Lake, Airway Heights, Deary, Spokane's South Hill, and Deer Park who all say they saw snow Tuesday morning.

...Forecasters expected 5 to 10 inches of wet snow above the 3,500-foot level Tuesday morning in the Cascades with lesser amounts down to 2,500 feet. A Transportation Department spokesman said it's been about 30 years since a snowplow has had to clear Stevens Pass in June.
Palousitics has more photos of the record snow.
Hat Tip Joshua

Also this week, John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, again lashed out at global warming religionists saying:


There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future.
Coleman also blamed Al Gore for high energy prices.

Courtesy of Gateway Pundit

 

[Cdn Blackshirt]

And once again, if you look at theweathernetwork.com, Ontario is going to continue to remain 3 or 4 degrees celsuis below average for another two weeks (which continues a trend that's been at least 4-6 months in duration). 

It's amazing to note how painstaking the effort is by the Weather Network (who loves to trumpet the Climate Change mantra because it drives ratings and makes their 'climatologists' more valuable) not to mention the fact.



Matthew.  :