In light of data being released that confirmed 2008 was the 15th coldest year in the past thirty years, many people have begun questioning not just climate change, but much of the "science based" policy being generated by world governments, as discussed in this Daily Telegraph column on Dec. 31, 2008...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/colu ... roved.html
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
...but moving into the meat and potatoes course of this topic, more than a few scientists, researchers, academics, and authors have begun questioning WHY these fear and hysteria-driven pseudo-science pandemics have developed...a topic framed by the late author Michael Crichton...Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.
The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.
Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.
As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.
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BTW, if you don't think the "urbanization" adjustments Crichton referred to are a serious problem in the data set, here's some interesting links...
Gives overview of ongoing study detailing the errors being generated by "urbanized" data...
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/MSU_Sat ... _Bases.pdf
...and details of the project in .doc format (will open up with Wordpad, or convert to an .rtf file)...if you have participated in a research project, you'll find this "chronicle" fascinating. Develops many questions not being addressed.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DataIntegrity.doc
Finally, one of the major urbanization of data problems pertains to the exceptionally large number of rural weather stations that have been eliminated, or their data dropped from the Hadley datasets. U. of Delaware researcher David Legate created a simple .mpg Global Chart displaying every weather station included in the datasets, and a month-by-month visual record of the "active" sites, noting the HUGE number of rural stations that have been dropped from the data collection since 1990...takes a min. to load, and a couple of minutes to run through...but notice the "overnite" elimination of most rural stations immediately after 1989. One of those "in your face" disparities that the Alarmists won't acknowledge, much less discuss.
http://climate.geog.udel.edu/~climate/h ... ir_loc.mpg
), and to think something as complex as global climate can be defined and converted into a rational function with a few decades of a few data types, AND the variables defined and controlled via computer models prepared by a few scientists who have since demonstrated an utter lack of respect for scientific process and discipline, is beyond defense. 
Might I suggest an airline executive mounted "bent over" at a ticket counter to more easily insert my rolled up "donation".)
