Posted on 01/12/2003 5:20:04 AM PST by Number_Cruncher
Predictions fall foul of reality By Robert Matthews (Filed: 12/01/2003)
Commuters shivering in last week's bitterly cold weather could be forgiven for wondering whatever happened to global warming. The whole northern hemisphere, from Florida to Finland, Germany to Japan, was in the grip of a cold snap that seemed more in line with a new Ice Age.
Aid agencies in Bangladesh handed out blankets to stem the toll of cold-related deaths, which has already topped 100. In Vietnam, baffled villagers came out to study the inch-thick layer of odd, cold white stuff that was blanketing the countryside. In China, a 700-mile stretch of the Yellow River turned to ice.
Advocates of global warming last week insisted that the recent cold weather is just a blip that says nothing about long-term climate change. Instead, they pointed to the recent announcement that on a global scale 2002 was the second-hottest year ever recorded.
Yet in recent weeks information has emerged that is sending an icy blast through the climate research establishment. It shows that the Earth is refusing to follow the script climatologists have written for it. For more than a decade, scientists have been developing sophisticated computer models of the Earth's climate, in an attempt to forecast the impact of alleged global warming. While these models differ in their fine details, they all agree on one thing: that global warming caused by man-made pollution should strike the polar regions first.
Typically, the models predict that the level of warming around the Poles should be about twice the global average, causing large-scale melting of snow and ice - with potentially devastating consequences for the planet. With temperature records suggesting that the warming began a century ago, the big melt-down should now be well under way. Yet the latest research not only fails to give any evidence for it, but points to the exact opposite: a deepening of the polar freeze.
Last month a team led by Professor Igor Polyakov, of the University of Alaska, published its study of recently released weather records kept by Russian scientists based in the Arctic from the 1870s onwards. The results flatly contradict the computer models. They show that - far from warming up faster than the rest of the Earth - the Arctic has actually been cooling since the 1920s. Put simply, say the researchers, "The air temperature and ice data do not support the proposed polar amplification of global warming."
In a report of their findings in the leading climate research journal Eos, they conclude: "The Arctic poses severe challenges to generating credible model-based projections of climate change."
It is not only their temperature predictions that are falling foul of reality. The 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - regarded as the scientific consensus on global warming - predicts that snowfall levels in the Northern Hemisphere should decline as the planet warms up.
Yet new research by Canadian scientists shows that the opposite is happening. Ice-core measurements made by a team led by Dr Kent Moore, of the University of Toronto, reveal that the amount of snow falling in the Yukon region has not only failed to decline over the past century as global warming theorists predict - it has actually increased. In the journal Nature, the team concludes: "We find a positive, accelerating trend in snow accumulation after the middle of the nineteenth century."
Other supposed signs of global warming are also failing to fall into line with the computer predictions. Recent studies of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, frequently cited in scares about melting ice and global floods, now suggest man-made global warming has had little impact on it, and that it may actually be getting thicker in some places.
A similar picture has emerged with icebergs, whose increasing numbers have been taken as proof that global warming is melting polar ice-sheets. New research suggests that the trend is largely due to changes in counting methods, and provides no good evidence of global warming.
Despite these latest findings, most climate scientists insist that man-made pollution must eventually make its presence felt. Yet the repeated failure of their computer models to match reality is becoming ever harder to ignore - and raises grave doubts about the wisdom of basing government policy on their predictions.
Reminds me of the rulers in the old days basing decisions on the court astrologers and such....
What a funny thing to call them. Somehow I don't picture them carrying signs saying, "Global warming NOW!!!"
last week insisted that the recent cold weather is just a blip that says nothing about long-term climate change.
They're right.
Instead, they pointed to the recent announcement that on a global scale 2002 was the second-hottest year ever recorded.
But that's also just a blip that says nothing about long-term climate change.
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