Global Cooling Deniers

The Portland area just set a new cold record on Monday. Now we have a rare pre-Christmas significant snow.

Looks like the problem is now with Global Cooling Deniers.

From Andrew Bolt's list of 10 Worst Warming Predictions for 2008:

3. GOODBYE, NORTH POLE

IN April this year, the papers were full of warnings the Arctic ice could all melt.

“We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time,” claimed Dr David Barber, of Manitoba University, ignoring the many earlier times the Pole has been ice free.

“It’s hard to see how the system may bounce back (this year),” fretted Dr Ignatius Rigor, of Washington University’s polar science centre.

Tim Flannery also warned “this may be the Arctic’s first ice-free year”, and the ABC and Age got reporter Marian Wilkinson to go stare at the ice and wail: “Here you can see climate change happening before your eyes.”

In fact, the Arctic’s ice cover this year was almost 10 per cent above last year’s great low, and has refrozen rapidly since. Meanwhile, sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing. Been told either cool fact?

Yet Barber is again in the news this month, predicting an ice-free Arctic now in six years. Did anyone ask him how he got his last prediction wrong?

Lesson: The media prefers hot scares to cool truths. And it rarely holds its pet scaremongers to account.
. . .

9. BRITAIN WILL SWELTER

The British Met Office is home to the Hadley Centre, one of the top centres of the man-made global warming faith.

In April it predicted: “The coming summer is expected to be a ‘typical British summer’. . .”

In fact, in August it admitted: “(This) summer . . . has been one of the wettest on record across the UK.”

In September it predicted: “The coming winter (is) likely to be milder than average.”

In fact, winter has been so cold that London had its first October snow in 74 years—and on the very day Parliament voted to fight “global warming”.

Lesson: If the Met can’t predict the weather three months out, what can it know of the climate 100 years hence?

10. WE’LL BE HOTTER

SPEAKING of the Met, it has so far predicted 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2007 would be the world’s hottest or second-hottest year on record, but nine of the past 10 years it predicted temperatures too high.

In fact, the Met this month conceded 2008 would be the coldest year this century.

That makes 1998 still the hottest year on record since the Medieval Warm Period some 1000 years ago. Indeed, temperatures have slowly fallen since around 2002.

As Roger Pielke Sr, Professor Emeritus of Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science, declared this month: “Global warming has stopped for the last few years.”

Lesson: Something is wrong with warming models that predict warming in a cooling world, especially when we’re each year pumping out even more greenhouse gases. Be sceptical.

Hat Tip: Tim Blair