ALERT: The Arctic is Melting! in November 1922

We hear often on the tube and read in the press that we need to worry about the weather because man made global warming is causing “unprecedented” changes such as melting ice in the arctic. I have written before here and here about precedents in the 20th and even 19th centuries where scientists were worried about global cooling, warming, cooling and back to warming again and each time the global thermometer swung down or up and the doomsdayers were predicting ... well, doomsday.

From WUWT and getting a lot of main stream press at the moment in the USA is a copy of an article (below) on the melting ice in the arctic. Only problem is that the article is from the Monthly Weather Review dated November, 1922.

The melting was extensive enough that tours were organised for the wealthy to see this “unprecedented” event.

There are thousands of examples of this if you care to look and I will be posting a few more for your entertainment. It is interesting that you could change the date on that article to 2009 and no one would bat an eyelid. Let’s dispense with this unscientific misstatement of the facts that the current climate is “unprecedented”. It is an “argument” used either by fools or liars when the scientific evidence is that such events are not unprecedented. We’ve seen this nonsense being promulgated with respect to droughts and heat waves here in Australia, with respect to shipping through the arctic and with respect to hurricanes and flooding as if this is somehow unusual. If you think it is unusual please do the gene pool a favour and abstain from having children.

UK MET Director Pawned in BBC Interview

This is a link to a BBC program absolutely slamming the head of the MET in the UK. The so called climatologist is ridiculed in the interview. I was surprised by the video for three reasons:

1. It was the climate doomsdayist BBC that showed it! Even the BBC seems to be jumping ship or at least entertaining the idea of a smidgen of balance.
2. The MET director is being held accountable for past alarmist predictions that were inaccurate – this is a first for main stream media such as the BBC.
3. The interview was brutal without the kid gloves and free rein normally given to alarmists.

The MET director then changed tack and lied about the MET predictions saying that he had predicted cooling when of course the only “prediction” the MET made of any cooling was after the snow started to fall. It seemed to this observer that the TV host knew more about the weather than the director of the MET! It would be a good thing if alarmist climatologists responsible for the massive misallocation of community resources were held responsible and purged from the climate industry populated by politicians and scientists expert in dodgy excel spreadsheets and leave the field to the boring, less glamorous but more valuable qualified practitioners of the good old scientific method.

R 2.10.1 Statistical Suite

I have been busy teaching myself R scripts for the last 24 hours. R is a suite of statistical software that offers almost limitless capabilities. Instead of a limited point and click interface like excel it uses a scripting language known as "R". Excel is fine for its intended purpose but it is limited in its capacity for automation, presentation and repeatability. I therefore decided to take the plung and learn R and have been pleasantly surprised how easy it is to learn enough in a day to do something useful. I was prompted to do this when I realised the presentation shortcomings of excel were preventing me from developing the sort of graphs I wanted to display on this blog to review some of the data. I also wanted to be able to use a tool that would automatically download new data as it was released on FTP sites and graph it without having to manually do this each time. After reading a few scripts I decided to download R and teach myself and after a day I feel I have made good progress.

Once I get the basics sorted out to my satisfaction I will write a PERL script to automatically call my R scripts on a regular basis so the computer can do all the work and produce the graphs once I have developed the scripts - "look mum no hands!"

Exciting stuff.

You can follow me along as I get this little project up and running if you are interested in R or merely look at the graphs and stats.

The first graph I have produced is the Australian Mean Temperature Anomaly from the adjusted data available on the BOM server for the period 1 January 1910 to 31 December 2009. Unfortunately there is no raw data available so it is not much use by itself for investigating however as there are other data sets available it will be useful for comparative purposes. We will be drilling down to individual station data sets and seeing what we find concerning local conditions. I will also be posting a detailed series of Satellite data which is the only data I trust for reasons I will discuss as we go on over a period of time.

The chart I developed is a step graph of the average yearly anomaly based on BOM adjusted temperature data. I have applied a LOESS smoothing function which is the blue line you can see. I applied a LOESS smoothing parameter of q = 0.10 as it retained just enough of the randomness to prove of interest.

We will reserve any discussion of the graph for another post as I beg your indulgence to let me enjoy a self satisfied glow at having achieved some small mastery over R scripts today. The actual script is posted under the Read More link if you want to have a good laugh at my first script.

This is the script I knocked up tonight. There are many improvements to be made but as a quick hack I am pleased to say it works and produced the graph above. I also want to use the Cairo package to get the graphic output antialiased and prettied up.

Update: Well it looks like my blog trashes the formatting on my script so I will put an image of it up tomorrow instead to replace the mess below.

#################################################################
#################################################################
##                                                             ##
## Step chart of NASA GISS annual temperature anomaly (C) data ##
##                                                             ##
#################################################################
#################################################################

###############################
#  Step 1: SETUP SOURCE FILE  #
###############################

rm(list=ls()) 
link <- "C:\\Rdata\\Bom_Yrly_Anom_1910_2009.csv"
   script<- " C:/Rdata/Australian_Data_Script_V3.r"

#############################################################
#  Step 2: READ DATA FROM CSV FILE WITH FIRST ROW HEADINGS  #
#############################################################

   my_Data <- read.table(link,
  sep = ",", dec=".", skip=0,
  row.names = NULL, header = T,
  colClasses = rep("numeric", 2),
  na.strings = c("", "*", "-", -99.99, 99.9, 999.9))

#############################
#  STEP 3: MANIPULATE DATA  #
#############################

  # Construct chart title - nothing to manipulate this time
  Title <- paste("Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Anomaly - Australia (1910 - 2009) \nBOM - High Quality Annual T Network (adjusted data)" )

#########################
#  STEP 4: CREATE PLOT  #
#########################

## GRAPHIC PARAMETERS
   win.graph(width = 10.5, height = 7, pointsize = 12) ### Sets size of graphics window ###
   par(bg = "white"); # sets background colour, default = transparent
   par(las = 1)       # Sets Y axis label orientation to vertical, set text font sizes
   par(cex.main=0.8); par(cex.sub=0.7); par(cex.lab = 0.8); par(cex.axis =.75);
   
## HIGH LEVEL GRAPHIC FUNCTION CALL
#usr <- par("usr") ,
#rect(usr[1], usr[3], usr[2], usr[4], col="cornsilk", border="black"), 
   
   plot(Anomaly ~ Year, my_Data,
         ylim = c(-1.25,1.25),
         type=c("s"),
         col = "dark grey",
         lwd = 2, #line width
         xlab = "Year",
         asp = "FULL",
         bty ="o",
         ylab = expression(paste("Annual Temperature Anomaly - ",degree, "C (Baseline: 1961-1990)")),
         main = Title,
         sub = "Source: BOM - @ http://reg.bom.gov.au/climate/change/hqsites/data/temp/meanT.040842.annual.anom.txt")

## LOW LEVEL GRAPHIC FUNCTION CALL
   lines(lowess(my_Data$Anomaly ~ my_Data$Year, f=0.1),col = "blue", lwd = 3)
   arrows(1961,-1.0, 1990, -1.0, code = 3, angle = 20, col = "dark grey")
   abline(h=0, col = "grey")          # o.o horizontal line
   text(1965, -.990, "Baseline\n Period\n1961-1990", cex = 0.6, pos=3)
   text(1931, -1.20, "LOESS smoothing, q = 0.10", cex =0.65, pos =1)
   points(c(1910,1921), c(-1.3,-1.3), col="blue",  type = "l", lwd = 2)
   text(2005, -1.2, "The Dog Ate My Data", cex=0.65, pos=1)
## Add script name &  print date to chart
   my_date <- format(Sys.time(),"%d/%m/%y ")
   mtext(script, side=1, line = -1, outer = T, adj = 0, cex = 0.65)
   mtext(my_date, side = 1, line = -1, outer = T, adj = 1, cex = 0.7)

###################
#  STEP 5: CLOSE  #
###################

#  todo

World Cycle Tour to Promote Awareness of Global Warming Cut Short Due to Freeze

It keeps getting better. The Global Delusionists are providing enough material for 3 generations of comedians. It could lead to the catastrophic global hilarity in less than 5 years if present trends continue.

Mr Khandekar from India planned to pedal around the world to promote awareness of Global Warming but his plans came unstuck due to record freezing conditions in Europe as reported in the Hundustan Times.

Though Khandekar had planned a 282-day trip, he had to cut short his trip due to record cold conditions.

“While I was in Europe, there was heavy snowfall due to which I cancelled part of my trip. Though I had warm clothes on, there were times when my feet would be frozen,” he said.

Not to be outdone Mr Khandekar plans to look for sponsors and do another trip next year.

“No one was ready to sponsor my tour this time. I hope I get sponsors next time so that I can spread more awareness among the people,” Khandekar said.

That’s either a brilliant idea or ... not.

In my next scoop tomorrow I will show catetrophic alarmist scientists blaming Global Warming for freezing weather killing Peruvians (I kid you not). Do these scientists have the right to vote? That is a cause for concern.

Climategate Helping Scientists Speak Out

In an insightful article noted American commentator Robert Bradley Jr examines the way Climategate has emboldened many professional people including scientists to “come out” and challenge the catastrophic alarmism of the main stream global warming crowd such as professors Mann, Hansen, Barrett and others who predict catastrophic consequences within 90 years up to and including the extinction of the human race.

Climategate: Here Comes Courage! (Is climate catastrophism losing its ‘politically correct’ grip?)

by Robert Bradley Jr

The times are changing in the wake of Climategate. And more is to come as the polluted science embedded in the email exchanges gets reviewed by talented amateurs and pros alike on the blogosphere (see Climate Audit, Roger Pielke Jr., and WattsUpWithThat, in particular).

Given time, the rethink will go mainstream. Scientists are truth seekers at heart, but an entrenched mainstream of climate scientists–so many of them friends and political allies–will need to be nudged out of their denialism.
Old voices are challenging their ‘mainstream’ colleagues, and new voices are coming forth. I have seen this clearly here in Houston (examples below), and I expect it is happening elsewhere.

The full article can be found on Master Resource which is a very high end blog by leaders in their fields that deserves careful attention.

I also get the feeling that the tide has turned. I do not fool myself into believing that the statist green-red appropriators will not rgroup quickly as after all they have much of the UN behind them and billions of our dollars in their war chest. The catestrophic alarmist scientists are really the small fish. The big fish are the mechanisms already in place in the UN. Institutionalised mechanisms and he money that goes with them are extremely difficult to defeat and it will take nothing short of a massive upwelling of public opinion to retain what little is left of private property and economic freedom and the wealth that it creates.

Monckton Australian Tour

The SPPI blog has announced that Christopher Monkcton is doing an Australian tour in January/February this year.

Apocalypse? NO! ‘Global Warming’ is Not a Global Crisis

Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has accepted an invitation to visit Australia for a major lecture tour on the theme Apocalypse? NO! ‘Global Warming’ is Not a Global Crisis in late January to early February 2010. He will be accompanied by his wife Juliet, Viscountess Monckton of Brenchley.

Professor Ian Plimer, who will also accompany Lord Monckton on his whirlwind tour of the mainland’s capital cities starting in Sydney on January 26 and finishing in Perth on February 8, says: “Although I modestly state that I am a good performer, Lord Monckton is superb. I have seen him fielding a very hostile BBC and other networks. He has the ability to change thinking.”

Lord Monckton's Brisbane presentation will be in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel, at 2pm Friday 29 January 2010 with admission by $20 donation at the door. Full details for other cities can be obtained by going to the SPPI article linked above and emailing the organisers who appear on that page.

Kyoto Land Grab: No Compensation Payable

The appalling story about Peter Spencer, an Australian farmer who has had his land locked up to provide free “carbon sinks” (as a result of Kyoto) for the government without any form of compensation is bad enough. Peter still pays rates and has spent millions on the property and now watches it turn to weeds. Get the whole story here from Jo Nova. There appears however to be a vicious and very nasty twist to the story so read on.

As if the main story was not bad enough there appears to be a very nasty and insidious last minute twist. I received this email from Leon Ashby on Saturday 2 Jan 2010. American readers might find it hard to believe that property rights can be taken without compensation in Australia but I assure you it is true and I personally know other people in a similar situation. Peter has only days left until the bank seizes the property (which cannot earn an income any longer) and Peter is into his 43 day of a hunger strike having chained himself atop an enormous pole. It is amazing he has survived this long. It appears that the government is using technical measures to stop buses moving people down to Canberra to protest in the Coooeee March for Peter.

Here is the text of the email.

Attempts by NSW Govt to stop Coooeee March

Hi Everyone,

Just in is the news from Steve Truman.

What is happening is people are planning to get to Canberra behind Old Parliament House on Monday at 10.30am to march in support of Peter Spencers protest saying Australia is not a free country any more and we want a royal commission into the injustices concerning the Kyoto protocol & property rights.

Land can now be taken from anyone without Just terms and the fact that Peter Spencer cannot get heard in court despite 200 days attempting to do so is ample evidence the system is not working.

Now we have a NSW state government conspiring to subvert the plans of many people to attend the march by sending out road traffic inspectors to inspect the buses going to the march and thereby either delaying them or putting them off the road altogether. (we are yet to find out what the instructions were precisely)
=================

Steve Truman writes,

I have spoken to COOEE Bus Drive coordinator Bob Jones and he has confirmed that two of the buses that were booked to go - the one from Coffs Harbour and the one from Qirindi have been cancelled due to RTA (Road Transport Authority)harassment.

People who were booked on those buses have now made private travel arrangements and will still be attending the March.

Bob said that he'd received a call from an RTA inspector who was in a motel at Coffs Harbour. Bob was not prepared to release the RTA officers name and number, but he has handed the details on State National party member for Barwon Kevin Humphries who is following the matter up with the minister.

The RTA officer told Bob that 5 inspectors had been dispatched to the North and the West of the state to target the buses heading to Canberra for the COOEE March.

Buses can be held for up to 6 hours in the road side inspection places whilst being assessed for mechanical defects and and driving breaches. It is an outrageous action and as the RTA officer told Bob, they were just following orders from above. Bob told me that Kevin Humphries was also outraged by this and was talking about taking it to the highest possible authorities.

I was under the impression that we lived in a free and democratic country. This is an outrageous Sate Government sponsored attempt to intimidate and disrupt a peaceful demonstration of grass-roots Australian citizens.

If you are not as mad as hell about Peter's situation, than you should be now. It is time for the ordinary citizens of this great country to band together to end this excessive Sate & Federal control of our lives.

Leon Ashby
President The Climate Sceptics
PO, Box 721, Mt Gambier SA 5290
Ph 0887259561 or 0887235550
info@climatesceptics.com.au
http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/

This story is getting almost no MSM coverage at all. Although I have seen this happen to others it is a shocking indictment on the Australian system of government. Please read Jo Nova’s article on this that I linked to above for more information.

This can apply to any Australian not only farmers. It has happened to residential land owners thorugh council vegetation protection orders and it WILL become more common as the government makes you pay with your land for the international promises it makes. Contact your MP today if you value your future. This is very serious for all property owners. You will receive NO COMPENSATION for your loss - a life's work wiped out by a government at the stroke of a pen. In ten years time when this becomes much more common it will be very hard to address so the time to address it is now. Theft of assets by government is not something we expect in a democracy but it is now something we in fact have - I urge you to act now by phoning your parliamentary representative and asking how this can happen and what he or she intends to do to adddress the matter for Peter and for all Asutralians who are facing the problem now or will be facing it in the future.

USA readers watch out – this is coming your way. Google “The Little REDD Book” by the UN and Agenda 21. Once in place, and the REDD scheme is already in the Copenhagen Accord which you can read for yourself in an early post on this site, you too will be liable to suffer a similar fate. Spread the word while you still have time. I will update this article with direct links to the REDD book (cute name isn’t it – no doubt in memory of Mao, the killer of tens of millions of his own people) and Agenda 21 in case you have difficulty finding them.

Further updates to come as I link this article to resources.

Update: See also the Freedom Graffiti report.

The ABC has it on their website here as well.

Apocalyptic Syndrome

And from Professor Denis Dutton, professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand we have more clarifying good sense percolating to the top of the cesspool that is climate science in the New York Times on 31 December 2009; a fitting and thoughtful commentary for the end of the decade published in the New York Times.

“It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It

... Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems — poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems — needing intelligent attention. Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at moments to be less about testing our health care system and its emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the “twinkling of an eye” — that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions.

This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, and that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment. As that headline put it for Y2K, predictions of the end of the world are often intertwined with condemnations of human “folly, greed and denial.” Repent and recycle!”

Self loathing seems to be a symptom of modern ecokookism which must be why its proponents seem so drawn to one Armageddon scenario after another with each being more ludicrous than the previous. The absurdity of discussing the immanent species extinction of home sapien species whilst dining in elegant surroundings at exotic locations seems to escape them. After returning to Bali in October 2009 (it was last there in December 2007), the IPCC circus would have barely had time to unpack before they all flew off to Copenhagen in December 2009.

Scientists Gone Wild! End of Human Race Within 90 Years.

It's hard to drink coffee at the same time as reading the prediction of this top scientist without laughing and choking as the liquid goes down the wrong way. I stumbled upon this little gem all the way back from late 2004.

A top NZ scientist believes that there will be no human race left inside 90 years. That means there are people being born today that will probably see the last day of human beings on planet Earth.

Scary thought isn't it? Only of course if you smoked too much weed during your youth. For the rest of us it is just more petrol on the fire that has become the global warming scam.

Stand back while I toss a match.

(See the original article here.)

A top New Zealand researcher is using a prestigious award ceremony in Christchurch to warn that humans face extinction by the end of the century.

Professor Peter Barrett will be presented with the Marsden Medal tonight for his 40-year contribution to Antarctic research, latterly focusing on climate change.

The director of Victoria University's Antarctic Research Centre expects to use his acceptance speech to warn climate change was a major threat to the planet.

"After 40 years, I'm part of a huge community of scientists who have become alarmed with our discovery, that we know from our knowledge of the ancient past, that if we continue our present growth path, we are facing extinction," Barrett said. "Not in millions of years, or even millennia, but by the end of this century."

Barrett won the award – designed to mark lifetime achievement in the sciences – for his research into Antarctica, which began with helping prove New Zealand was once part of the Gondwanaland supercontinent.

He then changed disciplines, to predicting the impact of climate change. The result was a body of research on Antarctic ice sheets "which to our surprise is becoming increasingly relevant to the world as a consequence of global warming".

In a way this might be good news. I am going to ask politicians to stop wasting money funding long term infrastructure like roads, railways, universities etc. In fact education funding can be cut to zero right now. What's the point of spending money on education when it's only got a less than 90 year time frame for pay back. Space research and medical research should likewise be stopped.

Is there anyone else besides Kevin Parker of Deutsche Bank that actually believes this nonsense? If you do believe it please contact me and I will arrange medical assistance for you.

Update: I almost forgot, UN chief Ban Ki-moon also believes the human race will be driven to extinction. He announced his prophecy in 2007 at yet another climate conference in Bali. Kevin Rudd was there and didn't criticize that statement. It would be a good question to ask him if he agrees with Ban Ki-moon and Barrett that we are going to become extinct due to AGW. I wonder if Ban Ki-moon also believes in the tooth fairy. You have to be a little worried when the leader of the UN makes absurd statements.

The good Dr Barrett appears to have spent far too long down in Antartica with his head buried in cold snow.

I wonder when we are going to see the billions of humans die that Barrett predicts. Will we see it beginning in the next 30 years? 70 years? or will they all die in the last decade leading up to 2100.

As a member of an endangered species I am going to have myself listed in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and try to get my own world heritage reserve to live in. I hope they can make the reserve somewhere around Port Douglas up on the Barrier Reef - that would be nice. I am sure Dr Barrett would support such a IUCN Red listing - he really has no choice.

Prof Paltridge On Possible Illegal Climate Scientists Activities

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and was a Chief Research Scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research before taking up positions in Tasmania as Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies and CEO of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. He retired in 2002 and continues to live in Hobart. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He is author of The Climate Caper.

In an article published today in the Australian Prof Paltridge comments on Climategate and the Hockey Team at the CRU.

Boffins may be illegal

THE Climategate scandal continues to unfold. The thousands of emails leaked to the internet from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal a tight-knit, influential group of scientists whose attitude to their profession is, to say the least, distorted.

It seems that a religious belief in disastrous climate change has destroyed their common sense and their appreciation of what is the appropriate way to carry out research.

See Read More link for further details

Prof Paltridge continues,

Climategate may at least demonstrate that the concept of a scientific consensus with regard to global warming is nonsense. There may indeed be thousands of scientists contributing to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but on any particular aspect of the overall story all have to rely on the word of the few scientists who are directly involved. And when the particular aspect concerns experimental data on which the whole story rests, the data purporting to show the world is getting warmer, then the consensus argument is indeed on shaky ground.

On the evidence so far, there is not much doubt that the group of scientists linked to the CRU has behaved fairly badly. Any individual email from the Climategate pile may be explained and excused as a stupid mistake of the time, but when all are taken together it seems obvious enough that there have been lots of violations of what might be called the scientific code. The most glaring examples concern efforts to keep basic sets of data out of the hands of people who may not be sympathetic to the official story about the disastrous nature of global warming. This, when the CRU is specifically paid to collate the data gathered by national meteorological services across the world, and to make the data available to outside scientists to check and to use.

In any event, the CRU information is covered by environmental information regulations that specifically require public bodies in Britain to make their data progressively available to the public by electronic means that are easily accessible.

So the ducking and weaving in the face of reasonable requests for CRU data by outside scientists and indeed in the face of Freedom of Information requests by those same outside scientists may not be just bad scientific form. It may be illegal. Which makes the lukewarm reaction to Climategate by the great and powerful of the scientific establishment even more difficult to swallow. The journal Nature, for instance, has this to say: "If there are benefits to the email theft, one [of those benefits] is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. ..."

The full article is available in the Australian here.

Prof Paltridge certianly is not the first scientist speaking out about Climategate and the activities of the Climatic Research Unit of the East Anglia University of which Prof Phil Jones was the director of until he stepped down recently following publication of the Climategate emails.

Prof Paltridge does a service to the Australian public by keeping this conduct squarely in the public eye.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010

Happy New Year to all climate protaganists. All the best for 2010.