US belief in climate science lowest since polling began 13 years ago, with 31% saying the threat is 'definitely' a realityPublic belief in climate science has seen a precipitous slide in the US, according to new polling that suggests fewer Americans are concerned about the threat posed by global warming.Nearly half of Americans – 48% – now believe the threat of global warming has been exaggerated, the highest level since polling began 13 years ago, the poll published today by Gallup said.It directly linked the decline in concern to the controversies about media coverage of stolen emails from the University of East Anglia climate research unit and a mistake about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 in the UN's authoritative report on global warming."These news reports may well have...

EVEN if the sun were to quieten down appreciably for the rest of this century, it would still be business as usual for global warming. The sun goes through an 11-year solar cycle during which its luminosity varies according to the number of sunspots appearing on its face. The normal cycle has a small effect on Earth’s weather. But sometimes lulls in sunspot activity can last several decades, driving down the sun’s luminosity to a “grand minimum”. The Maunder minimum lasted from 1645 to 1715 and may have contributed to the little ice age. Stefan Rahmstorf and Georg Feulner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany modelled what would happen to temperatures on Earth if a grand minimum started now and lasted until 2100. They found that while...

Actually, it's been with us for about a week – light falls, just enough to whiten the ground but not enough to cause any problems. But, this morning, we got at least three inches dumped on the city. Now with clear skies, it is freezing hard.The local paper picked it up but, contrary to the assertions of that idiot David Viner about snow becoming "a very rare and exciting event", it is so common that it has become routine.What has also changed is the terminology. It has undergone a paradigm shift. Quite routinely, people refer to the white stuff as "global warming". It has become part of the everyday language that needs no explanation. It no longer even raises a smile: "global warming" means snow.Needless to say, the paper hypes it up telling us that the weather "created havoc" with...

BBC News - Q&A;: Professor Phil Jones Q. Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical? A... in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other. Q. Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming A. Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level... Q. There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you...

The US's most Republican state passes bill disputing science of climate change, claiming emissions are 'essentially harmless'Carbon dioxide is "essentially harmless" to human beings and good for plants. So now will you stop worrying about global warming?Utah's House of Representatives apparently has at least. Officially the most Republican state in America, its political masters have adopted a resolution condemning "climate alarmists", and disputing any scientific basis for global warming.The measure, which passed by 56-17, has no legal force, though it was predictably claimed by climate change sceptics as a great victory in the wake of the controversy caused by a mistake over Himalayan glaciers in the UN's landmark report on global warming.But it does offer a view of state politicians'...

Here are a couple of pages with background information and video streams on the background to the lack of Global Warming. First is a regional TV station in Sandiego, California, USA called KUSI. Their weatherman, John Coleman, is old enough to know how real meteorology should be done, and he is not afraid to say so. He presented an hour long (bit less without the adverts) TV programme on why this global warming panic is a scam - Global Warming: The Other Side. The Heartland Institute describes their mission as "to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Such solutions include parental choice in education, choice and personal...

It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.Local authorities, however, are cutting back on gritting and many will run out of salt completely within a week – with very little chance of immediate replenishment.It says a great deal for us as a country, and our catastrophically incompetent government that they cannot even keep the roads clear. Refuse collection has been suspended and we have not had our bins emptied since before Christmas. Civil society is gradually seizing up.The warmists are still out in force though, defending their sacred religion and the nation treats them for what they are – a laughing stock. The...

I haven’t had much time in the past few months to update my website due to working and other commitments. However, hopefully this will change in the next few weeks as I free up more time. In the mean time I’ve been keeping tabs on the whole ‘Climategate’ saga which thankfully blew up a few months ago before the Copenhagen Climate talks. Much of the foot work was done by the blogs both in this country and in the United States as the mainstream media sort to bury their heads in the sands and managed to turn a collective blind eye. Today has seen heavy snowfall right across the country causing disruption to traffic networks and business. However, predictably the usual suspects have been quick to claim that what is predicted to be the coldest winter in thirty years is...

Global warming is happening, even if it doesn't feel like it - The Independent So if it is the longest cold snap for 29 years, does that prove that the idea of global warming is a non-starter? Funnily enough, it doesn't....while we shivered yesterday, in Madrid the temperature was 10C against a seasonal average of 9C, and in Rome it was 13C, compared to an average of 11C BBC News - Do we need to say our prayers? For millions of people in Africa, climate change is a reality, says Greig Whitehead. However, as he explains in this week's Green Room, in religious nations such as Kenya, many believe that tackling global warming is beyond their control. It is a salutary warning for the more affluent countries in the North that a problem which - in essence - they have created, through...

The recent Copenhagen Conference on global warming has led to renewed claims that we cannot effectively combat global warming without “global governance,” or perhaps even a full-fledged world government. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon recently claimed that “A [climate change] deal must include an equitable global governance structure” and many other political leaders and environmental activists have expressed similar views. Political scientist Campbell Craig summarized the standard argument for global governance to address climate change in this 2008 article: [O]ne of the most evident failures of the nation-state system in recent years has been its inability to deal successfully with problems that endanger much or most of the world’s population. As the world has become more...

Host Denmark dropped plans on Thursday to propose new draft texts to try to break deadlock at a United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen after opposition from many developing nations, says Reuters.Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said negotiators at the 193-nation meeting would consider existing UN texts presented to the meeting on Wednesday that outline possible elements of a deal to combat global warming."The conference is now at a critical juncture and we have now agreed how to proceed," Mr. Rasmussen said. "We now rely on the willingness of all parties to take that extra step to make that deal that is expected of us."Meanwhile, as the picture delightfully shows, the children were outside cleaning off the global warming from giant model of the globe.CLIMATEGATE...

South West MEP Giles Chichester has expressed concern scientists who question global warming weren’t invited to the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change. Now the ‘flat-earth-climate-change-sceptic’ hopes that name calling (oops) be put aside and an honest and open debate is entered into. Over to you, Giles… It appears that, as being something of a climate change sceptic, I am one of the large majority of people in Britain who Gordon Brown describes as ‘flat earth’ followers. This is unsurprising, for over the past decade we have been subject to so much government spin and misinformation that it is impossible to give credence to the integrity of government statements on any significant issue, including climate change. In recent weeks, we have witnessed the...

One major problem with most invocations of the precautionary principle is that people tend to apply it to whatever danger they want to prevent, but largely ignore it in considering the potential dangers created by the policies they advocate. For example, Dick Cheney applied a version of the principle to the threat of terrorism, arguing that even a small chance of a catastrophic terrorist attack justified taking sweeping measures to eliminate it. At the same time, he tended to ignore the potential dangers of the anti-terrorist measures themselves. Similarly, environmentalists apply the precautionary principle to global warming, but not to the risks created by policies intended to alleviate global warming. If we have to take seriously the dangers of a global warming catastrophe, we...

The Met Office has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science after the furore over stolen e-mails, reports The Times.More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the "professional integrity" of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. The initiative is a sign of how worried it is that e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fuelling scepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions.One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.Thus, in concocting...

And The Guardian is proud of it – its initiative in which 56 major newspapers in 45 countries speak with a single voice (albeit in 20 different languages) through a shared editorial on "global warming". A sentence acknowledging the controversy over Climategate was "optional".Global warming – global government – global newspaper ... makes sense.CLIMATEGATE...

Antarctica protected from global warming by hole in ozone layer - Scotsman.com News A HUGE hole in the ozone layer has protected Antarctica from the impacts of global warming, according to scientists. The temperature across Antarctica has not risen over the past 30 years and there has been a 10 per cent increase in the amount of sea ice appearing during winter. Climate change sceptics regularly cite the lack of warming in Antarctica as evidence global warming is not happening. However, researchers have now explained the phenomenon – they believe that a hole in the ozone layer above the continent has altered weather patterns and temperatures... Sea level rise will double due to melting of Antarctica - Telegraph ...new information from satellites, ice cores and innovative studies,...

Recent evidence that prominent climate scientists have tried to intimidate academic journals into not publishing papers submitted by “climate change” skeptics have caused a major brouhaha in the ongoing political battle over global warming. At least some of the scientists in question certainly seem to have put ideology above the search for truth. The effort to keep skeptical articles out of academic journals also raises the issue of whether the academic “consensus” supporting global warming theory is genuine, or a product of systematic exclusion of dissenting voices. I lack relevant scientific expertise on global warming, so I don’t have anything useful to say about the scientific issues involved. The question I want to address is what impact these revelations should have on...

Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too | Nigel Lawson - Times Online .... I have no idea whether the majority scientific view (and it is far from a consensus) is correct. Certainly, it is curious that, whereas their models predicted an acceleration in global warming this century as the growth in emissions accelerated, so far this century there has been no further warming at all. But the current majority view may still be right. Even if it is, however, that cannot determine the right policy choice. For a warmer climate brings benefits as well as disadvantages. Even if there is a net disadvantage, which is uncertain, it is far less than the economic cost (let alone the human cost) of decarbonisation. Moreover, the greatest single attribute of mankind is our capacity to adapt to...

The Global Warming Policy Foundation logo…EU Referendum's round-up makes it clear that the MSM are just starting to pay attention to the CRU documents and coincidentally, Professor Philip Stott points me towards a new think-tank…Today, Nigel Lawson, Lord Lawson of Blaby, will launch a new, high-powered, all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which he hopes, as he writes in this morning’s Times, “may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy.” And so do I; we have long-needed such a body to fight for common sense about climate change in the UK. At last, as the Times headline reads, there is a senior politician in the UK brave enough to state that “Copenhagen will fail - and quite...

“Global warming and a woman’s right to decide whether and when to have a child are inextricably linked.” That was the message of Prof. David Malcolm Potts in his talk titled “Linkage between Population, Environment, Resource Consumption, Climate Change and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights” at the 5th Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights held in Beijing recently. Malcolm is a human reproductive scientist. Born in Cambridge, UK, since 1993, he has been the holder of the Fred H. Bixby exchange chair in Population and Family Planning in the School of Public Health, University of California, and Berkeley. He premised his talk with the observation that climate change is “driven primarily by high per capital consumption in the North.” The...

Only 57% of Americans feel that the planet's atmosphere is warming, a fall from 77% two years agoThe number of Americans who believe in global warming has plummeted, falling 20% in two years, a survey said today.Only 57% of Americans believe there is solid scientific evidence that the Earth's atmosphere is warming, said the poll of 1,500 people by the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press.That is a fall of 77% from 2007. The number of people who believe that human activity is causing global warming also fell to just 36%.The public uncertainty about the evidence behind global warming comes as the Senate prepares to begin debate next week on climate change legislation. Yesterday, 18 scientific organisations wrote Congress to reaffirm the consensus behind global warming.Michael...

Sandwalk: Average Annual Global Temperatures and IDiots Larry Moran Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. Here's a chart of the average annual global temperature change over the past 150 years. I don't know about you, but to me there seems to be a bit of a trend. The highest recorded temperature was in 1998 and last year the temperature was 0.08ｰ lower than the year before. Nobody with an IQ over 50 thinks that the temperature has to increase every single year in order to demonstrate global warming. Speaking of IQ, the BBC "climate correspondent" just wrote an article for BBC News: What happened to global warming?. .... It's actually not quite as bad an article as it sounds. There's some interesting discussion about short-term trends and how to...

Up to 25 million more children will be malnourished in the next 40 years due to climate change, with sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia the worst affected, according to a new report issued on Wednesday. The report, released by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and detailing the impact of climate change on agriculture, says without climate change about 113 million children under five years of age will be malnourished by 2050. But that number is expected to rise dramatically due to the ravaging effects of global warming on food production around the world, IFPRI said. “Crop yields will decline, production will be affected, crop and meat prices will increase and consumption of cereals will fall, leading to reduced calorie intake and increased child...

Global warming may have spawned a new type of El Nino in the central Pacific and this could worsen the droughts in Australia and India, a new study by researchers in South Korea and the United States has found. While the conventional El Nino is a warm body of water stretching across the tropical Eastern Pacific, this new El Nino is a horseshoe-shaped region of warm ocean in the central Pacific flanked by unusually cooler waters, they wrote in a paper published in the latest issue of Nature. “This new type of El Nino appeared in the recent decade and from our analysis, it may be due to global warming,” lead researcher Sang-Wook Yeh of the Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute told Reuters by telephone. Yeh and his colleagues applied Pacific Ocean sea surface...

Thinning cloud cover could speed global warming, new research has found. Photograph: First/zefa/Corbis Thinning clouds over the ocean exacerbate global warming by leading to more rapid temperature increases, according to the results of a new study, published today. The research combined data, collected by observers on ships and satellites, going back over a century. The effect clouds have on climate has been something of a mystery to atmospheric scientists, with some researchers hoping they would provide a silver lining by acting as a brake on climate change. One possibility was that higher temperatures would mean more clouds, which in turn would bounce more of the sun’s radiation back into space, but this theory has not been reflected in the study’s findings. Instead,...

Daily Green : Global Warming and Other Bollocks Book Among their claims: Polar bears are not going to go extinct. The pair of scientists claim that polar bear populations are not declining, but in fact growing in spite of their loss of habitat. Humans are not to blame for global warming. Feldman and Marks point to the sun being the CO2 culprit, arguing that the sun's heat has simply intensified. Global warming might be good for us. The duo say a warmer climate and an increase in CO2 could be good for farming and agriculture. Organic food is not better for you. The anti-organic pair say plant nutrients comes from the air in the form of CO2, and from water-soluble chemicals in the soil. By the time organic foods reach your plate, it is all the same. There is no need to cut back on...

For three years running, the met office have been forecasting warmer than average summers. The last two have been wet and miserable and despite the current forecast, this summer so far has seen snow on the Pennines in Scotland. Twice this week, we have had the central heating on, it has been so cold.That has not stopped The Sunday Times publishing a puff for the Met Office on its front page, with the forecast for 2080. The Met Office is predicting Mediterranean-style summers for Devon, a steamy 41°C in London and the southeast, followed by winter storms and floods in northeastern towns such as Hull.With that sort of garbage polluting the media, it is not surprising that Booker's main piece today is headed "Global warming and a tale of two planets".For openers, he takes on board the...

Global warming of 7C 'could kill billions this century' - Telegraph The study, carried out in unprecedented detail, projected that without "rapid and massive action" temperatures worldwide will increase by as much as 7.4C (13.3F) by 2100, from levels seen in 2000. Previous estimates have concluded that the likely increase this century would probably be 2.4C (4.3F). The study uses the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change since the early 1990s. The new research involved 400 runs of the model with each run using slight variations in input parameters, selected so that each run has about an equal probability of...

Ice in the Arctic is often twice as thick as expected, report surprised scientists who returned last week from a major scientific expedition. The scientists - a 20-member contingent from Canada, the U.S., Germany, and Italy - spent one month exploring the North Pole as well as never-before measured regions of the Arctic.Among their findings: Rather than finding newly formed ice to be two metres thick, "we measured ice thickness up to four metres," stated a spokesperson for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research of the Helmholtz Association, Germany's largest scientific organisation.Then we get this from the United States: "Sorry, Al Gore, but Public Cares About the Economy, Not Global Warming".Gallup Poll Editor Frank Newport says he sees no evidence that Al Gore's...

Global warming 'slowed by pollution' - Telegraph The first study found that the hole in the ozone layer, caused by the use of CFCs, has prevented the melting of Antarctica even as the rest of the world warms. A separate study found that plants absorb more carbon dioxide under polluted skies, therefore slowing global warming. Scientists said the findings made it even more important to cut carbon emissions in the future... Get ready for more "The dog ate my homework"...