You can almost hear the heads popping… New Scientist, that oh-so-alarmist of publications, is having to face the inconvenient truth at last:

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world’s top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.

“People will say this is global warming disappearing,” he told more than 1500 of the world’s top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN’s World Climate Conference.

“I am not one of the sceptics,” insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. “However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.”
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Another favourite climate nostrum was upturned when [Vicky] Pope [of the UK Met Office] warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming. Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008.

Read it here.

Always an interesting read, despite Bjørn being convinced of the reality of AGW:

OUR present approach to solving global warming will not work. It is flawed economically, because carbon taxes will cost a fortune and do little, and it is flawed politically, because negotiations to reduce CO2 emissions will become ever more fraught and divisive. And even if you disagree on both counts, the present approach is also flawed technologically.

Read it here.

A warmer than average winter in the Eastern states has had the ironic effect of reducing emissions:

Greenhouse gas emissions reportedly fell about 4 per cent across Australia’s eastern states over the winter.

The Climate Group’s Greenhouse Indicator Report has found a drop of more than 3 million tonnes compared with the same period last year.

The figure is the equivalent of taking 3 million cars off the road for the season. [So driving around in Prius is really a pointless gesture – Ed]

However, they can’t resist making the link with global warming:

Climate Group Australian director Rupert Posner said the drop in emissions was mostly due to winter temperatures matching climate change predictions, making people less inclined to turn on their heaters.

Strange, because global temperatures are still steady, or even falling. But hey, who cares about accuracy or truth when we’re talking about “saving the planet”?

Read it here and here.

On Friday I compared the UK’s Daily Telegraph to Hello, and whilst that is generally true, there are a couple of columnists who keep the flag flying. One of whom is Christopher Booker, who regularly takes apart the climate nonsense fed to the public by an ignorant and biased media. This time it’s Ban Ki-moonbat’s trip to the Arctic:

BBC viewers were treated last week to the bizarre spectacle of Mr Ban Ki-moon standing on an Arctic ice-floe making a series of statements so laughable that it was hard to believe such a man can be Secretary-General of the UN. Thanks to global warming, he claimed, “100 billion tons” of polar ice are melting each year, so that within 30 years the Arctic could be “ice-free”. This was supported by a WWF claim that the ice is melting so fast that, by 2100, sea-levels could rise by 1.2 metres (four feet), which would lead to “floods affecting a quarter of the world”.

Everything about this oft-repeated item was propaganda of the silliest kind. Standing 700 miles from the Pole, as near as the stubbornly present ice would allow his ship to go, Mr Ban seemed unaware that, although some 10 million square kilometres (3.8 million square miles) of sea-ice melts each summer, each September the Arctic starts to freeze again. And the extent of the ice now is 500,000 sq km (190,000 sq m) greater than it was this time last year – which was, in turn, 500,000 sq km more than in September 2007, the lowest point recently recorded (see the Cryosphere Today website). By April, after months of darkness, it will be back up to 14 million sq km (5.4 million sq m) or more.

Mr Ban seems equally unaware that, even if all that sea-ice were to melt, this would no more raise sea-levels than a cube of ice melting in a gin and tonic increases the volume of liquid in the glass. If he is relying for his “100 billion tons” on land ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland, he should note that much of their ice sheets are growing rather than shrinking. His “100 billion tons” is fantasy.
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According to Government figures, however, we in Britain are already committed to spending, under the Climate Change Act, £18 billion every year between now and 2050 on this nonsense – daft light bulbs (see below), electricity blackouts and all. In other words, we are only beginning to see some of the nastier consequences of this crazy make-believe, based on nothing more substantial than the kind of gibberish we got last week from Mr “Light Bulb” Ban and the BBC.

Read it here.

One rule for the rulers, another for the ruled. Gross Hypocrisy Alert as a bunch of US pollies spend half a million studying “global warming” – nice work if you can get it, and by the sound of it, pretty tough I think you’ll agree:

The 10 members of Congress dived or snorkelled on the Great Barrier Reef, visited a Queensland rainforest, observed a penguin rookery on the South Pole, watched a New Year fireworks display in Christchurch and finished the trip on Hawaii’s famous Waikiki Beach.

They flew from destination to destination on a specially-equipped $US70 million ($83.38 million) US Air Force C-40 jet, described as the military’s business-class version of a Boeing 737.

The 11-day mission was designed to study climate change, but the globe-trotting politicians are now feeling the heat after the Wall Street Journal exposed the expensive expedition [click here for the full gory details – Ed].

The politicians have been in the firing line of numerous editorials and stinging articles in the US media.

Anyone hazard a guess at the size of this jolly’s carbon footprint?

Read it here.

This time they don’t mean that harmless trace gas, carbon dioxide. They mean real pollution, i.e. particulates and toxins. This looks like it might be another desperate tactic to blackmail governments into tackling CO2 emissions by linking it with reducing pollution.

We’re all in favour of cleaner air, but would we spend billions of dollars on marginal improvements on air quality? Surely we’re spending billions of dollars to “save the planet” from “dangerous climate change”? Be warned – usual Age alarmism alert:

Countries could speed up their action against climate change if they tackled air pollution as well as carbon dioxide emissions, the UN Environment Program says.

UNEP executive director Achim Steiner says there’s strong evidence that the world’s climate is changing faster than initially expected [really? Show me – Ed], adding to the urgency for concrete measures against global warming.

“It is… becoming clear that the world must also deploy all available means to combat climate change,” Steiner said on Friday. [No exaggeration there, clearly – Ed]

“At this critical juncture, every transformative measure and no substance contributing to climate change should be overlooked.”

Troubled negotiations on emissions targets in climate change talks are focusing on carbon dioxide, but scientists estimate that nearly 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions come from other compounds, according to UNEP.

The agency believes that national efforts to control the pollutants – such as black carbon or soot, low level ozone or smog, methane and nitrogen compounds – could simultaneously generate health and economic savings as well, and address other environmental concerns.

Read it here.

And given they are building one humongous coal-fired power station every week for the next god-knows-how-long, it’s only going to get bigger. I wonder how this will affect their enthusiasm for legally binding emissions targets at Copenhagen?

Western governments pushing China to use clean-coal technology may need to lower their expectations for the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases.

Costs will total as much as $US400 billion ($474 billion) over 30 years to install systems to capture carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks in China and bury it underground, said Richard Morse, a Stanford University research associate and author of a study on the technology. China has little incentive to invest because it will raise power prices and it’s unclear if wealthier nations will pick up the bill, Morse said in an interview.
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While China is developing pilot projects for carbon capture, it has balked at throwing full support behind the technology.

“Carbon capture and storage, particularly for China, is not one of the priorities — the cost is an issue,” Su Wei, director-general of the climate-change unit at China’s National Development and Reform Commission, said in an Aug. 4 telephone interview from Beijing.

The cost of adding the devices would undercut China’s “non-negotiable desire for cheap power to fuel economic development,” according to the report.

At least they have their priorities right, unlike most Western governments…

Read it here.

Why would the Daily Telegraph print this utter nonsense? Wait, I know! Maybe it’s because the Tele, which used to be a serious conservative broadsheet, is now the daily version of Hello, whose editors will print any old rubbish if it will sell:

Looks more like a runny nose to me

Marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan captured the pictures while on an annual voyage to observe the largest icecap in Norway Austfonna on July 16.

He said the image looked just like mother nature in tears, “as if she was crying about our inability to reduce global warming”.

Yeah, right.

Read it here.

There has been a flurry of stories recently about the Arctic “reversing a 2000 year cooling trend” and that temperatures are “higher than at any time since 1 BC” – no emotive language there, you will note (source). The WWF has weighed in with a similar report, see here.

Just a taste of what’s to come, when [if – Ed] Penny Wong’s new carbon trading economy kicks off and the ETS is introduced in Australia: