Political expediency rules the climate debate.
REGULAR readers know State Scene has been stunned that mature and seemingly well-informed and educated individuals, which most of our politicians claim to be, could believe what I, and others, term the ‘Great Climate Heating Hoax’.
Among them, of course, is our prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who is aiming to impose a burdensome anti-carbon tax upon Australians.
Truth, however, is so often stranger than fiction – especially in politics.
To further confirm this, on the day the futile Copenhagen conference wound up, State Scene received an email from someone whose opinions I value.
Headlined, US Weather Bureau Report, it read: “The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
“Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
“Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.
“Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
“Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
“Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.”
However, at the end of this seemingly terrifying news my friend wrote: “I’m sorry, I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2 1922, as reported by the Associated Press and published in The Washington Post.”
This can be verified by logging on to the full article at: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-november-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt/
Several days, later while I was reading the online version of The Washington Post report, another email arrived.
It was headlined: ‘The New York Times Has Been Predicting Polar Ice Melt for 128 Years’ and reported findings of a blogger whose site carried either headlines or paragraphs of articles from that newspaper.
His message began: “Funny – The New York Times has been reporting on the Polar ice melt for over 100 years, and usually blaming it on man.
“The dumbest is the 1959 story of the ice disappearing – which was followed by 20 years of Global Cooling.
“From The New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:
• 1881: ‘This past winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …’
• 1932: ‘Next Great Deluge Forecast by Science: Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents.’
• 1934: ‘New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer.’
• 1937: ‘Continued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.’
• 1954: ‘The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.’
• 1957: ‘US Arctic Station Melting.’
• 1958: ‘At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was 15 years [ago].’
• 1959: ‘Will the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?’
• 1971: ‘Study Says Man Alters Climate; UN Report Links Melting of Polar Ice to His Activities.’
• 1979: ‘A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a by-product of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.’
• 1982: ‘Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …’
• 1999: ‘Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.’
• 2000: ‘The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.’
• 2002: ‘The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.’
• 2004: ‘There is an awful lot of Arctic and glacial ice melting.’
Nor do our climate alarmist brethren ever mention the 1,800-kilometer-long Gakkel Ridge beneath the Arctic Sea that links Greenland and Siberia and is dotted with volcanoes and active superheated water vents.
To top things off when President Barack Obama hot-footed it back to his new home, the White House, he found it covered in more snow than usual because of the biggest downfall Washington has had since the 1880s.
What do climate alarmists make of that?
A few days later, 10 American mid-western states were inundated with snow, with parts of Texas even having sizeable falls for the first time since the 1920s.
By the week ending December 13 2009, 815 new snowfall records were set across America.
By January 6 2010, the press reported a growing number of new records.
One headline read: ‘The frigid hit parade – over 1,200 new cold and snow records set in the last week in the USA with more in progress.’
Nor were snowfalls and temperature slumps limited to North America and Europe.
“The authorities in Beijing have closed schools and mobilised thousands of people to help clear roads after the heaviest snowfall for nearly 60 years,” the BBC reported.
“Up to 30cm (12 inches) of snow fell in China’s capital and its neighbouring port city of Tianjin.
“Thousands of travellers have been left stranded at Beijing’s international airport, and more than 30 highways across northern China are closed.”
Perhaps this suggests Perth scientist, David Archibald, is correct?
Author of the acclaimed book, Solar Cycle 24: Why the World will Continue Cooling and why Carbon Dioxide won’t make a Detectable Difference, he said: “In the near term, the earth will experience a significant cooling due to a quieter sun.
“There are no deleterious consequences of higher carbon dioxide atmospheric levels.
“Higher carbon dioxide atmospheric levels are wholly beneficial.
“Anthropogenic [man-made] global warming is so miniscule that the effect cannot be measured from year to year, and even from generation to generation.
“Our generation has bathed in the warm glow of a benign, giving sun, but the next will suffer a sun that is less giving, and the earth will be less fruitful.”
Australia’s climate alarmists were no doubt buoyed to last week read the Bureau of Meteorology’s claims that the decade 2000-09 was Australia’s warmest on record for the years 1910-2009. What of Perth?
State Scene logged onto the BOM site and searched Perth’s mean temperatures, which are shown to be flat from 1910 until the early 1970s, when it rose by 0.7 degrees Celsius and has remained flat ever since.
The mean temperature for 1910 to 1969 was 17.9 degrees, with the last four decades averaging 18.5, 18.5, 18.7 and 18.6 degrees, respectively.
All Perth’s warming came in the early 1970s, which is consistent with the climate record in that there was an abrupt worldwide warming in 1976 called the Great Pacific Climate Shift.
So if all Perth’s warming – 0.7 degrees – happened nearly 40 years ago, how can anyone claim it’s been warming here during the past decade?
