Investors.com notes that Europe is gripped in a winter blast that has closed airports and trapped travelers. According to the last decade of “inevitable” global warming, this should be impossible:

Since at least 1998, however, no significant warming trend has been noticeable. Unfortunately, none of the 24 models used by the IPCC views that as possible. They are at odds with reality.

Here in the States a winter storm has grounded flights across the north east and ground travel is so bad in Philadelphia that the NFL postponed a nationally-televised game until Tuesday night, after the storm passes and the roads are again safe.

Doesn’t feel like global warming to me. Sounds like the return of an ice age.

The Union of Concerned Scientists says that the EPA is misrepresenting facts when it comes to the case for labeling corn-based ethanol as a “renewable resource”:

According to Jeremy Martin, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicles Program, EPA’s decision to focus on anticipated biofuel emissions as of 2022 “distorts the picture of today’s biofuels.”  By 2022, the theory goes, corn crop yields will have increased and biorefining technology will be more efficient and green than it is today.  But for now, according to Joe Fargione, a scientist with the Nature Conservancy, “in the near term, natural-gas-powered, dry-milled corn ethanol production results in an increase of greenhouse gas emissions of 12 to 33 percent compared to gasoline.”  Worse yet, EPA’s analysis recognizes this.  However, ethanol has been redesignated, despite such indicators that it does not meet the renewable fuels criteria.

Critics point out that support for ethanol is more politically motivated than arising out of any concern for the environment:

EPA, meanwhile, has been under sustained pressure from pro-ethanol groups such as Growth Energy to approve an increase in the fuel blend ceiling from 10 percent ethanol to 15 percent ethanol—a move that observers say would constitute a massive giveaway to the ethanol industry that could prove helpful in shoring up support for the President and endangered Democrats in ethanol-producing “swing” areas, such as some Midwestern districts and states.

Focusing on turning corn into fuel has driven up the price of everything from milk to tequila. Yet once again, politicians use junk science to protect their jobs.

And Congress wonders why people don’t trust them.

Technorati Tags: Democrat Culture of Corruption, The Great Ethanol Giveaway, Going Green, Energy, Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice

Schools closed, roads shut down, stalled trains evacuated, power outages, flights canceled, border crossings closed. All as a result of the heaviest snowfall in Barcelona in a quarter century, with as much as 20 inches forecast for parts of Catalonia. As many as 10,000 clients were left without power.

Given the highly extraordinary situation, the Barcelona government activated its municipal emergency plan. Authorities also shut down the AP-7 highway and the national N-II. The border with France was also completely shut down leaving 4,000 trucks and around 1,000 vehicles stuck at the frontier.

The intense snowfall also meant that 142,000 children couldn’t get to school. A collapse of various high-voltage cables also meant that around 200,000 Fecsa-Endesa clients were left without electricity.

Southern France was struck with exceptionally heavy snow, with up to 16 inches falling overnight in Languedoc-Roussillon, Provence, the Rhône valley and Mid-Pyrénées.

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe points out that Gore still hot on his doomsday rhetoric:

To climate alarmists like Gore, everything proves their point. For years they argued that global warming would mean a decline in snow cover and shorter ski seasons. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’’ one climate scientist lamented to reporters in 2000. The IPCC itself was clear that climate change was resulting in more rain and less snow.

Undaunted, Gore now claims that the blizzards that have walloped the Northeast in recent weeks are also proof of global warming. “Climate change causes more frequent and severe snowstorms,’’ he posted on his blog last month. . . .

But while Gore prays for redemption, the pews in the Church of Climate Catastrophe are gradually emptying. The public’s skeptical common sense, it turns out, is pretty robust. Just like those Himalayan glaciers.

HT to the Drudge Report.

Technorati Tags: Barcelona Snow, France Snow, Spain Snow, Global Warming and Other Myths, Al Gore Snake Oil Salesman

MasterResource posts an incredibly detailed analysis that disproves yet another IPCC claim, that the increase in sea ice around Antarctica from 1979 through 2005 has been slight and not statistically significant. MasterResource not only disproves this claim, but shows the statistical tricks that the IPCC employed to get away with such a claim.

HT to Climate Change Fraud, who notes:

The computer models on which so much of the concern regarding global warming is based have always predicted that ice would melt quickly in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Indeed, ice did melt quickly in the Arctic, reaching a low in 2007. The ice there has recovered dramatically, however, and it looks like we’re going to have to stay tuned for further developments regarding it.

But ice in the Antarctic has been increasing, not decreasing. A lot of different ways of looking at this have come to the same conclusion. The ice is increasing. . . .

The only real question is, as we dispose of these manufactured worries one by one, what new ones will they come up with to continue trying to scare us?

Technorati Tags: Antarctic Sea Ice, IPCC Lies, Artic Ice, Global Warming and Other Myths

Steven Hayward reviews the current state of the global warming theory, from Climategate to the actual facts that contradict they alarmists. It is a good read, but I couldn’t resist pointing out this passage:

The rout has opened up serious divisions within the formerly closed ranks of the climate campaign. Before Climategate, expressing skepticism about catastrophic global warming typically got the hefty IPCC report thrown in your face along with the mantra that “2,500 of the world’s top scientists all agree” about climate change. Now the IPCC is being disavowed like a Mission Impossible team with its cover blown.

Hayward also covers some of the alternative theories for melting glaciers and receding ice caps, albeit only briefly:

The IPCC downplays theories of variations in solar activity, such as sunspot activity and gamma ray bursts, and although there is robust scientific literature on the issue, even the skeptic community is divided about whether solar activity is a primary cause of recent climate variation. Several studies of Arctic warming conclude that changes in ocean currents, cloud formation, and wind patterns in the upper atmosphere may explain the retreat of glaciers and sea ice better than greenhouse gases. Another factor in the Arctic is “black carbon”—essentially fine soot particles from coal-fired power plants and forest fires, imperceptible to the naked eye but reducing the albedo (solar reflectivity) of Arctic ice masses enough to cause increased summertime ice melt. Above all, if the medieval warm period was indeed as warm or warmer than today, we cannot rule out the possibility that the changes of recent decades are part of a natural rebound from the “Little Ice Age” that followed the medieval warm period and ended in the 19th century.

The last is my favorite theory, although I, unlike the man-made global warming alarmists, am open to consider others.

HT to newly-discovered Climate Realists.

Technorati Tags: Global Warming and Other Myths

According to Dr. Dubey, Director of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WITG), there are no signs that global warming is having any effect on the Himalayan glaciers. In fact, data gathered from a British weather observatory in Mukteshwar over the past 140 years shows that the temperature has actually declined .4 degrees.

Dr. Dubey says that the conditions of the Himalayas are tied to winter snowfall. Furthermore, predictions made about glaciers in the Alps or Alaska, some of which are at sea level, cannot be applied to Himalayan glaciers which are above 4 kilometers in altitude and which have a permanent temperature below 20 degrees Celsius.

HT to Climate Realists

Technorati Tags: Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, WITG, Himalayan Glaciers, Global Warming and Other Myths

The mass loss of Alaskan glaciers have been significantly overestimated in previous studies, says a team of international scientists.

The research team, led by Étienne Berthier of the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography at the Université de Toulouse in France, says that glacier melt in Alaska between 1962 and 2006 contributed about one-third less to sea-level rise than previously estimated.

30 percent. Yeah, I’d call that statistically significant.

Technorati Tags: Alaskan Glaciers, Scientific Method, Climate Change Lies, Global Warming and Other Myths

Dozens of ships, including the ship pictured which has almost 1,000 people on board, are trapped in ice in the Baltic Sea. Ice breakers are attempting to free the ships in spite of gale-force winds, but according to a sea rescue spokesman, “As soon as they break the ice, it freezes over again.”

This is taking place off the coast of Sweden, where one would think they would be used to the cold. Which they are, just not this cold:

A total of about 50 ships were stuck in ice along Sweden’s eastern seaboard, said Johny Lindvall, who manages the maritime administration’s ice breaker service. Heavy ice cover is not uncommon further north, but the ice rarely gets thick enough in the Stockholm archipelago to trap powerful passenger ferries like the Amorella.

This winter has seen the earliest snowfall in Houston on record, snow in Miami, record snowfalls in Dallas, Baltimore, Philidelphia and Washington, and Snowpocolypse covering the eastern seaboard not once, but twice. The New York Times tells us that this is the warmest winter on record. Let’s see if the Swedes believe that. I’m sure that after Copenhagen more than a few Danes are questioning it.

Somebody find Al Gore and slap him with a frozen cod.

Technorati Tags: Amorella, Swedish Ships Trapped in Ice, Baltic Sea Freeze, Al Gore Snake Oil Salesman, Global Warming and Other Myths

The researcher at the center of the Climategate scandal testified before the House of Commons’ Science and Technology committee, admitting that he had written “some pretty awful emails” – but denied trying to suppress data.

But yesterday Professor Jones – in his first public appearance since the scandal broke – denied manipulating the figures.

Looking pale and clasping his shaking hands in front of him, he told MPs: ‘I have obviously written some pretty awful emails.’

He admitted withholding data about global temperatures but said the information was publicly available from American websites.

That’s right. The professor admits that he defied authorities by refusing to turn over data in response to Freedom of Information requests, but rationalizes that this act couldn’t have been to suppress data because the authorities could have gotten it off of the internet. After all, we all know that if it is on the internet then it must be true!

But wait, there’s more!

And he claimed it was not ‘standard practice’ to release data and computer models so other scientists could check and challenge research.

‘I don’t think there is anything in those emails that really supports any view that I, or the CRU, have been trying to pervert the peer review process in any way,’ he said.

This is what modern scientific processes have come to? Peer review is a thing of the past? If so, then (to paraphrase Dickens) science is an ass.

Or perhaps that only applies to Professor Phil Jones.

Technorati Tags: Professor Phil Jones, Climategate, Global Warming and Other Myths

Chalk up three more scientists in the “wait a minute” column of the global warming scoresheet.

Working on 22,000 years of fossil data, the scientists constructed a climate model of their own. Mark Siddall, Thomas F. Stocker and Peter U. Clark authored a paper called Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change in July of 2009 in which they not only claimed to confirm the IPCC’s estimations of sea level increases, but actually projected a slightly higher increase.

Here we present a simple mode^l of the integrated sea-level response to temperature change that implicitly includes contributions from the thermal expansion and the reduction of continental ice. Our model explains much of the centennial-scale variability observed over the past 22,000?years, and estimates 4–24?cm of sea-level rise during the twentieth century, in agreement with the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change¹ (IPCC). In response to the minimum (1.1?°C) and maximum (6.4?°C) warming projected for AD?2100 by the IPCC models, our model predicts 7 and 82?cm of sea-level rise by the end of the twenty-first century, respectively. The range of sea-level rise is slightly larger than the estimates from the IPCC models of 18–76?cm, but is sufficiently similar to increase confidence in the projections.

The three scientists have now formally retracted their findings. In the announcement, Siddall said that there were two separate mistakes in the paper, eliciting a retraction rather than a correction because the errors undermined the study’s conclusion.

One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes.

When given a chance additional eyes are able to turn up mistakes. There was a time when all scientists followed research procedure, which includes submitting papers for peer review. Perhaps the recent rash of bad data collection procedures (recording next to incinerators and jet exhaust, really?), falsified data, miscalculations, ignoring conflicting views, propaganda and outright lies.

Technorati Tags: Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change, Mark Siddall, Thomas F. Stocker, Peter U. Clark, IPCC and Other Liars, Global Warming and Other Myths