As is all too often the case, in certain matters affecting things here in the United States, if we didn't have news from Britain, we wouldn't have any real news at all.
Take "climate change" aka "global warming." At the Associated Press, Seth Borenstein on Thursday hyped the idea that man-made global warming increased the likelihood of about half," or six of 12, of "2012's wildest weather events." His "evidence"? Computer simulations. But on Friday, the UK Telegraph and Daily Mail took note of the cold, hard fact of growing Arctic ice cover, as well as its possible implications.
First, the UK Telly broached the idea that we're heading towards global cooling, not warming, and stuck a sharp needle into a six-year old hysterical prediction at the BBC (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Global warming? No, actually we're cooling, claim scientists
A cold Arctic summer has led to a record increase in the ice cap, leading experts to predict a period of global cooling.There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, they equivalent of almost a million square miles.
In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.
A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.
If correct, it would contradict computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming. The news comes several years after the BBC predicted that the arctic would be ice-free by 2013.
The Daily Mail also took a shot at the Beeb and added an interesting anecdote:
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.
Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.
... The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter climate change.
Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.
... Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, was one of the first to investigate the ocean cycles. He said: ‘We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.
Meanwhile in the U.S., Obama's permanent campaign at Organizing for Action devoted much of its fortunately impotent "Auction August" efforts to protesting at the offices of congresspersons and senators who have dared to stray from the human-caused global warming orthodoxy.
At the AP, Borenstein still likes pathetic computer models, especially ones which supposedly show that global warming really, really made some of last year's major storms more intense:
STUDY LINKS WARMING TO SOME 2012 WILD WEATHER
A study of a dozen of 2012's wildest weather events found that man-made global warming increased the likelihood of about half of them, including Superstorm Sandy's devastating surge and the blistering U.S. summer heat.
The other half - including a record wet British summer and the U.S. drought last year - simply reflected the random freakiness of weather, researchers with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British meteorological office concluded in a report issued Thursday.
The scientists conducted thousands of runs of different computer simulations that looked at various factors, such as moisture in the air, atmospheric flow, and sea temperature and level.
The approach represents an evolution in the field. Scientists used to say that individual weather events - a specific hurricane or flood, for example - cannot be attributed to climate change. But recently, researchers have used computer simulations to look at extreme events in a more nuanced way and measure the influence of climate change on their likelihood and magnitude.
... The researchers said climate change had made these 2012 events more likely: U.S. heat waves, Superstorm Sandy flooding, shrinking Arctic sea ice, drought in Europe's Iberian peninsula, and extreme rainfall in Australia and New Zealand.
... Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, said the study provides "compelling evidence that human-caused change was a factor contributing to the extreme events."
Sure, guys.
What do those great simulations which partially blamed "climate change," aka human-caused global warming, for "shrinking Arctic sea ice" have to say about this year's record ice sheet growth?
We don't know. Borenstein doesn't mention it.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
