Polar bears pay a friendly visit to the Rock. Are polar bears disappearing or just getting used to warmer climes?

Russian Academy Of Sciences Experts Warn Of Imminent Cold Period: “Global Warming Is A Marketing Trick”

When it comes to warming and the man-made CO2 greenhouse gas effect, the Voice of Russia writes that “Russian scientist Vladimir Bashkin is categorically in disagreement. He claims that the climatic changes are characterized by cycles and have nothing to do in any way with the activities of man.”

The Voice of Russia continues:

Together with his colleague Rauf Galiullin from the Institute for Fundamental Problems of Biology of the Russian Academy Of Science, he demonstrates that the current warming is a reverberation of the planet coming out of the ‘Little Ice Age’ and that in the near future, of course measured on geological timescales, we are at the threshold of an ice age.”

The Voice of Russia quotes Bashkin:

The periods of a cooling and a warming follow each other at 30-40 year intervals. In Russia for example there was a warming in the 1930s, a time when seafaring at the Northern Sea Route was possible, then a cooling followed during the wartime years, and then warming followed in the 1970s, etc.. The current warming period ended at the end of the millennium.“

Note here that the Russian scientists confirm that the Arctic sea ice extent was also low in the 1930s. This tells us that nothing is really so unusual in the Arctic today.

The Voice of Russia then explains that the cooling is related to ”a change in solar activity” and that this “also has an impact on our climate“. Bashkin adds:

The scientific research of the climate of the past geological epoch causes us to doubt the motives behind the demands of the IPCC. [...] “The greenhouse effect that is connected with the anthropogenic factor is about 4 or 5 percent of that from natural emissions. The eruption of a volcano produces more. A real contribution to the greenhouse effect is made by normal water vapor. Thank God nobody has gotten the idea that this too needs to be regulated.“

The Voice of Russia continues: “The world’s oceans contain 60 times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere. When the temperature of the planet rises, it begins to be quickly released. This leads to an increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, and not vice versa. A global warming that so many are talking about is not so much a scientific problem, rather it is much more a marketing trick. [...] We do not have global warming ahead of us, rather we have global cooling, the Russian scientist claims. However, we do not need to fear the cooling because it will take place gradually and won’t be noticeable until the middle of the 21st century.”

The scientists add that part of the motive behind the “marketing trick” is to manipulate the market for fossil fuels.

Copied with thanks from No Tricks Zone, The author is Pierre Gosselin.

While I have not lost any skepticism towards the Putin regime, I am frequently pleasantly surprized by how often writing coming out of Russia is on point, sensibly conservative, and at variance with Western hysterias.

Or so says Jo Nova, reporting on how the AGW cheerleaders are lowering their alarms.

Meantime, Kevin Trenberth, Apostle of AGW, is now saying that global warming is being hidden because heat is being transferred to ocean currents which, contrary to all scientific understanding of what warmer water does, is sinking out of reach of our instruments.

Once you depart from the True Faith of AGW, there is no limit to how absurd these claims of AGW fanatics appear.

Freeman Dyson, the physicist, speaks of the fudge factors in computer modelling of climate. No scientific-mathematical model of the effects of clouds, for instance, has yet been produced. Yet cloud formation is the essence of how increases in atmospheric  CO2 is supposed to generate warming. If clouds do not form as predicted, then increases of atmospheric CO2 do not have the catastrophic effects which have been predicted. The core of  the assertions about CO2′s effects on climate are arbitrary insertions into the data, multiplying weak effects into stronger ones by policy choice of the modeller.

As the lack of increase of temperatures becomes undeniable, will there be a deluge of recantations and “I never really believed it”  in the media? Or will the AGW pandemic be like the decline of belief in cholesterol as a cause of heart disease, which is dragging out for decades?

I have no sense of timing. I thought climate catastrophists would have been turned into zombies by the revelations of Climategate 1 several years ago, but the quasi-religious impulse behind global warming catastrophism is so strong that years of scientifc refutation and embarassment must lie ahead before the juggernaut is stopped. There are signs, nevertheless, that even in politically correct company it is now possible to say that the actual temperatures recorded are lower than what the IPCC has been predicting.

This from Stephen Hayward in Powerline:

“The problem for the climateers is increasingly dire.  As The Economist shows in its first chart (Figure 1 here), the recent temperature record is now falling distinctly to the very low end of its predicted range and may soon fall out of it, which means the models are wrong, or, at the very least, that there’s something going on that supposedly “settled” science hasn’t been able to settle.  Equally problematic for the theory, one place where the warmth might be hiding—the oceans—is not cooperating with the story line. ”

Recent data show that ocean warming has noticeably slowed, too, as shown in Figure 2 here.

So the zombies lurch forward, calling for more windmills, fewer pipelines and the end of oil fuels, but they are losing the argument about facts, to the extrent that facts ever had anything to do with global warming catastrophism.

The Daily Mail is savaging the “settled science”.

The Daily Mail is carrying on a  frontal assault on eco-catastrophist idiocy in the UK. Carry on, brethren!

Councils across the UK are spending millions and employing hundreds of ‘low carbon’ officers to fight global warming – which now appears not to pose an imminent threat – at the same time as making sweeping cuts to children’s  services, the arts and the elderly.

The councils have increased their spending on salaries of climate change staff by 34 per cent since the 2008 crash, almost three times the rate of inflation, while grants from central government were slashed by 12 per cent.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294602/The-Great-Green-Con-2-How-councils-duped-bad-science-hire-eco-snoopers–slash-OAPs-benefits.html#ixzz2Nnkw99Od

James Delingpole blogs the confession of the guy who released the emails that constituted “climategate”, who will accept your donations. Monuments in public parks ought to be erected in his honour, for saving us all from the extravagant folly of the global warming catastrophists.

For your attention:

http://www.globalclimatescam.com/

So reads the headline in today’s Ottawa Citizen. 3.5 million years ago, before the current ice age, during the Pliocene Warming, forests reached as far north as Ellesmere Island. Forest-dwelling camels, 30% larger than today’s hot-climate camels, chewed their cuds at latitude 70 degrees.

Wikipedia informs us that:

The global average temperature in the mid-Pliocene (3.3 mya – 3 mya) was 2-3°C higher than today,^[6] global sea level 25 m higher ^[7] and Northern hemisphere ice sheet ephemeral before the onset of extensive glaciation over Greenland that occurred in the late Pliocene around 3 Ma

Further reading into Ellesmere Island shows that, 55 million years ago, the place was covered in part with large sequoia-like conifers more than 3 feet across at the base.

It cannot be said often enough. Global warming – if indeed it is actually occurring – is bringing us back to the climate the world has known for 80% of its history. Global warming is getting us out of our current lingering ice-age.

Hence I have come to believe people who complain of global warming are about on par with people who claim the French are sending abuse at them through toasters. Only their paranoia is socially approved of, whereas the poor fellow who thinks devices are beaming abuse at him, well, he is a nut case .

More lunacy. A Washington policy outfit proposes that Americans work less to slow the progress of climate change.

A number of studies (e.g. Knight et al. 2012, Rosnick and Weisbrot 2006) have found that shorter work hours are associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions and therefore less global climate change. The relationship between these two variables is complex and not clearly understood, but it is understandable that lowering levels of consumption, holding everything else constant, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
This paper estimates the impact on climate change of reducing work hours over the rest of the century by an annual average of 0.5 percent. It finds that such a change in work hours would eliminate about one-quarter to one-half of the global warming that is not already locked in (i.e. warming that would be caused by 1990 levels of greenhouse gas concentrations already in the atmosphere).
It is worth noting that the pursuit of reduced work hours as a policy alternative would be much more difficult in an economy where inequality is high and/or growing. In the United States, for example, just under two-thirds of all income gains from 1973–2007 went to the top 1 percent of households. In this type of economy, the majority of workers would have to take an absolute reduction in their living standards in order to work less. The analysis in this paper assumes that the gains from productivity growth will be more broadly shared in the future, as they have been in the past.
The analysis uses four “illustrative scenarios” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and software from the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change to estimate the impact of a reduction in work hours. As would be expected, the amount of global warming that could be mitigated by reducing work hours depends on the baseline scenario, as well as the range of sensitivity of global temperatures to greenhouse gas emissions.
Introduction
The world will have to cope with some amount of climate change. Already, humans have released sufficient greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to raise the average surface temperature of the planet. Atmospheric concentrations will be high enough as to induce further warming for some time—even if emissions of greenhouse gases return to 1990 levels.

And so on. The zombie staggers on, everywhere you look.