Back in November, we reported that climate coverage had dropped sharply at the New York Times after the paper closed its environmental desk.

The final numbers for the year are in and NY Times climate coverage — stories in which the words “global warming” or “climate change” appeared — has plummeted more than 40 percent. That is a bigger drop than any of the other newspapers monitored by the University of Colorado, though the Washington Post’s coverage dropped by a third, no doubt driven in part by its mind-boggling decision to take its lead climate reporter, Juliet Eilperin, off the environment beat.

And remember, this drop happened from levels of climate coverage that were already near a historical low and in a year that was HUGE on climate news. We’ve had devastating extreme weather around the planet. In May, CO2 levels in the air passed the 400 parts per million threshold for the first time in millions of years. In June, President Obama announced his Climate Action Plan. And in September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest alarming review of the scientific literature.

As the chart above shows, when the IPCC released its previous reports (2001, 2007), media coverage spiked at the major newspapers. These days, the media herd is not to be heard from.

Had enough of your treadmill, weightlifting, and similar exercise activities? Then you will happily embrace the latest technology: flexible smart and/or not phones and television screens. To make it easy for you at least the TVs are said to come with “power assist.”

Flexible Glass

“Flexible glass” is the true technology breakthrough required for your new exercise system. It came with Apple’s patent for “sapphire,” a conductive film on a flexible substrate.  That patent claim was filed in 2010 and awarded in December 2013. While the patent is not exactly for a type of ”flexible glass,” the end result is nearly the same, a flexible mobile phone or TV screen.

Apart from Apple, also the South Korean behemoth Samsung was quick to apply the new technology to their products. And now you have it: a new way to watch TV and exercise at the same time. At this time, it’s too early to say which is more important, flexing your TV or your muscles, but rest assured someone will figure it out in due course.

Dr Judy Ryan is proving to be remorseless in her battle on behalf of Aussie climate realists. Once again she’s turning up the heat via official bureaucratic channels over government misrepresentation in official literature over carbon dioxide (CO2).

The cause of her ire are those discredited alarmist professors Steffen, Karoly and Flannery who seem to be the instigators of a blatant misrepresentation; science fraud, if you like. We’ve provided coverage of Dr Ryan’s ongoing saga here, here,  here, and here.

By either deceit or plain ignorance, Australian officialdom has for long been portraying CO2 as a pollutant in taxpayer-funded literature. This is graphically potrayed in misleading campaigns depicting an industrial chimney stack belching black smoke (see right). But the emotive image is utterly false. CO2 emissions are colorless. But, more crucially, this benign atmopsheric trace gas (< 0.04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}) is non-toxic, being the very stuff we exhale as we breath and plants require as food.

As a scientist, Dr Ryan, forthrightly put such facts across in her correspondence berating the dunderheaded professors. But the Ombudsman’s apparent continued disregard of her Formal Complaint, originally lodged against the then Department for Climate Change (DCC) on 29th August 2013, won’t deter Dr. Ryan. She reports:

“The DCC had 28 days to respond before we could exercise our right to take it to the Ombudsman. The elections intervened and DCC became the Department of the Environment (DOE). Nobody from DOE contacted us so we took the formal complaint to the Ombudsman on the 10th October 2013.”

Nothing happened for a while, but Judy was assured over the phone that her complaint was waiting to be attended to.

“Time passed, and passed, and passed, until on the afternoon of the 26th November 2013, I left a message on the Ombudsman’s answering machine, stating that If the matter was not dealt with within the next 48 hours we would lodge it again by public email. The following morning 27th of November an officer from the Ombudsman’s office contacted me, deeply apologetic because evidently even  though they had received it, the original formal complaint to DCC had somehow got lost in the change over.” Sounds like “Yes Minister” doesn’t it.

Sometimes it’s the silliest statements that tell you the most interesting things. Take, for instance, this Financial Times report into Britain’s latest floods.

Here are some quotes.

Professor Corinne Le Quere, director for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia [said of the floods], “Even though we can’t blame the current weather in the UK on climate change, we expect heavy rains like this to occur as a result of climate change”.

What exactly is Professor Le Quere trying to tell us here, with her eerie and echoing syntax? My inner psychotherapist translates it as: “Even though I mustn’t directly blame individual weather events on climate change, I am desperate to do exactly that, because it’s what I believe.” It therefore resembles a statement of faith. Right down to the repeated mantra: like a prayer.

As more citizens protest to local planners against unwanted and unneeded wind farms, Hans Schreuder shares with readers his submission to one foolhardy authority.

Dear Planning Department,

Re: Proposed Wind Farm

As a retired analytical scientist, having studied the issues surrounding so-called “man-made global warming” for the past eight years and living within the visual range of the proposed wind turbines, I feel it is my duty to inform you of the following scientific facts, government policy based on government scientists notwithstanding.

Chancellor George Osborn MP made this statement last week – “We’ve got to make more cuts. That’s why 2014 is the year of hard truths – the year when Britain faces a choice” – and one hard truth is that “man-made climate change” does not exist other than in computer programmes and the corridors of power in academia and politics.

These are but a small selection of hard truths:

1. In the absence of any discernible global warming since 1998, despite a continued increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, the name of the issue was changed to “man-made climate change”, which then got even further distorted to “man-made climate variation” or any number of variants along those lines. The mass-hypnosis by most of the mainstream media has now got the public so far that the mention of just the word “climate change” insidiously implies “man-made climate change”.

2. Since the first mention of “man-made global warming” and despite billions of dollars and Pounds having been spent on the issue, there is not one single scientifically acceptable item of evidence to link any temperature change or any climate change to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. What is scientific fact is that natural changes in earth’s climate, driven mostly by solar events coupled with earth’s position within our solar system, have an effect upon the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but never ever the other way around! Horse pulls cart; cart does not push horse.

3. The entire so-called “scientific basis” for CO2 driven temperatures and or climate change is 100{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} false; it’s like looking in a mirror: the truth is the exact opposite of what governmental climate scientists will have you believe. Let anyone prove beyond a shadow of doubt that CO2 in the open atmosphere causes warming! They can’t because it’s impossible! An experiment in a bottle to prove that CO2 is a “warming gas” is a criminal distortion of the truth! Out in the open atmosphere, CO2 acts in exactly the opposite way: a coolant! It has to, based on it very physical properties of radiating.

A letter published by Chris Turney in the journal Nature under the title “This was no Antarctic pleasure cruise” tries to defend the scientific basis of the expedition and its abandonment. He is talking about the “The Spirit of Mawson,” the “Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 2013-2014.”

What happened?

Purpose

Margot O’Neill, reporter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, interviewed the expedition leader and filed a transcript on Nov. 25. 2013. The headline says “Professor Chris Turney from the University of New South Wales is mounting the largest Australian science expedition to the Antarctic with an 85-person team to try to answer questions about how climate change in the frozen continent might be already shifting weather patterns in Australia.”

Turney himself describes the purpose of the study as “The aim was to study various aspects of this vast, remote region to better understand its role in the Earth system, and communicate these results directly to the public.”

Trying to understand what the weather will be like for the rest of the month is like putting pieces of a puzzle together. Most of the pieces are sitting out there on the table with a few missing, and I’m the one left putting the pieces together. That’s where I’m at right now, and as I fit these pieces together, I will continue to get a clearer picture of what is going to take place over the coming days. Let me share with you what I foresee taking place.

The forecast period from now going into February will be very active and is actually going to get somewhat complicated. It was pretty straightforward to me back 2 or 3 weeks ago that a part of the polar vortex was going to split off and give us the recent bitter cold that we recently experienced across the United States. First off, we have two systems that we are going to have to keep an eye on for next week, but I do not think either of these systems will be huge. Some areas will get snow from this, and at some point, I’ll specify those areas in a later article or on the Facebook page.

Is global warming unfalsifiable? A blogger on Qurora.com recently said so.

Definition of UNFALSIFIABLE: not capable of being proved false.

Since 2000, atmospheric global warming, AGW, promoters and green house gas theory, GHGT, theorists have claimed their theories were undeniable and anyone who denied them was a denier, an intended derogatory term. In January 2014 one went further and claimed AGW was unfalsifiable.

Logic. Unfalsifiable is a legitimate conclusion from mathematics. Once a math theorem is proved, it is automatically unfalsifiable. 3 + 3 = 6, always and everywhere. If Y > X and Z > Y, then Z > X. The area of a circle in a plane of radius r is Pi*r*r. Nobody will ever falsify those truisms. That is what math does for us.

The claim that AGW is unfalsifiable is merely a claim, assertion, postulate, proposal, theory. Its proponents must provide evidence to prove and verify it before rational people can accept it as true. Unsupported claims are to be summarily dismissed.

There is no consensus on a commonly accepted mathematical description and quantification for the GHGT and associated AGW model to determine the effect of increased CO₂ on atmospheric temperatures. This is why the UN IPCC continues to operate and GHGT modelers resort to empirical data fitting correlations that fail to predict. Since the math model does not exist, it has no predictive power. It is impossible to prove it is unfalsifiable and therefore it should not be accepted as scientific theory, let alone a correct one. This proves the assertion on Quora is false.

An unfalsifiable law of nature is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which Sadi Carnot used to falsify the possibility of building a perpetual motion machine that created energy. Engineers routinely use it to avoid attempting to build impossible heat engines because it is always valid, always works and is unfalsifiable.

Is global warming unfalsifiable? A blogger on Qurora.com recently said so.

Definition of UNFALSIFIABLE: not capable of being proved false.

Since 2000, atmospheric global warming, AGW, promoters and green house gas theory, GHGT, theorists have claimed their theories were undeniable and anyone who denied them was a denier, an intended derogatory term. In January 2014 one went further and claimed AGW was unfalsifiable.

Logic. Unfalsifiable is a legitimate conclusion from mathematics. Once a math theorem is proved, it is automatically unfalsifiable. 3 + 3 = 6, always and everywhere. If Y > X and Z > Y, then Z > X. The area of a circle in a plane of radius r is Pi*r*r. Nobody will ever falsify those truisms. That is what math does for us.

The claim that AGW is unfalsifiable is merely a claim, assertion, postulate, proposal, theory. Its proponents must provide evidence to prove and verify it before rational people can accept it as true. Unsupported claims are to be summarily dismissed.

There is no consensus on a commonly accepted mathematical description and quantification for the GHGT and associated AGW model to determine the effect of increased CO₂ on atmospheric temperatures. This is why the UN IPCC continues to operate and GHGT modelers resort to empirical data fitting correlations that fail to predict. Since the math model does not exist, it has no predictive power. It is impossible to prove it is unfalsifiable and therefore it should not be accepted as scientific theory, let alone a correct one. This proves the assertion on Quora is false.

An unfalsifiable law of nature is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which Sadi Carnot used to falsify the possibility of building a perpetual motion machine that created energy. Engineers routinely use it to avoid attempting to build impossible heat engines because it is always valid, always works and is unfalsifiable.

Back radiation. A basic tenant of GHGT is radiant energy transfers from colder atmospheric CO₂ molecules to the warmer surface by a new mechanism, back radiation from cold to hot. It is described in the well-known K-T diagram for Earth’s global energy flows (1) showing an average back-radiation rate of 333 w/m² from the atmosphere absorbed by Earth’s surface. Note this value exceeds the 161 absorbed from the sun! And surface radiates at 396! (The error is confusing radiation intensity, which depends on body temperature and emissivity, with radiant heat transfer between two bodies which depends on the difference in their intensities. Confusion may have arisen because they share the same engineering units, w/m². The diagram (right) should show one up arrow with value 396 – 333 = 63.)

Is global warming unfalsifiable? A blogger on Qurora.com recently said so.

Definition of UNFALSIFIABLE: not capable of being proved false.

Since 2000, atmospheric global warming, AGW, promoters and green house gas theory, GHGT, theorists have claimed their theories were undeniable and anyone who denied them was a denier, an intended derogatory term. In January 2014 one went further and claimed AGW was unfalsifiable.

Logic. Unfalsifiable is a legitimate conclusion from mathematics. Once a math theorem is proved, it is automatically unfalsifiable. 3 + 3 = 6, always and everywhere. If Y > X and Z > Y, then Z > X. The area of a circle in a plane of radius r is Pi*r*r. Nobody will ever falsify those truisms. That is what math does for us.

The claim that AGW is unfalsifiable is merely a claim, assertion, postulate, proposal, theory. Its proponents must provide evidence to prove and verify it before rational people can accept it as true. Unsupported claims are to be summarily dismissed.

Will global warming alarmists ever set aside their hypotheses, hyperbole, models and ideologies long enough to acknowledge what is actually happening in the real world outside their windows? Will they at least do so before setting off on another risky, misguided adventure? Before persuading like-minded or naïve people to join them? Before forcing others to risk life and limb to transport – and rescue – them? If history is any guide, the answer is: Not likely.

The absurd misadventures of University of New South Wales climate professor Chris Turney is but the latest example. He and 51 co-believers set out to prove manmade global warming is destroying the East Antarctic ice sheet. Perhaps they’d been reading Dr. Turney’s website, which claims “an increasing body of evidence” shows “melting and collapse” across the area. They and the captain and 22 crewmen of the (diesel-powered) Russian charter ship Akademik Shokalskiy should have gotten a second opinion.

Instead of finding open water, they wound up trapped in record volumes of unforgiving ice, from Christmas Eve until January 2 – ensnared by Mother Nature’s sense of humor and their own hubris. The 52 climate tourists were finally rescued by a helicopter sent from Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, which itself became locked in the ice. The misadventurers were transferred to Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis, but the Shokalskiy remains entombed, awaiting the arrival of US Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star. (Meanwhile, Tourney hopes to get more grants to study manmade global warming, to help him make more money from his Carbonscape company, which makes “green” products from CO2 recovered from the atmosphere.)

As to his expertise, Dr. Tourney couldn’t even gauge the ice conditions the 74 crewmen and passengers were about to sail into. And yet we are supposed to believe his alarmist forecasts about Earth’s climate.

NASA reports that Antarctic sea ice is now the largest expanse since scientists began measuring its extent in 1979: 19.5 million square miles (12,461,000,000 acres) – 5.5 times the size of the entire United States. Another report says ocean melting of western Antarctica’s huge Pine Island Glacier ice shelf is at the lowest level ever recorded, and less than half of what it was in 2010. Reminding us of Monty Python’s pet store clerk, Turney nonetheless insists that the sea ice is actually melting, and his communications director says the record sea ice is due to … global warming! (As they say, fiction has to make sense.)

Let me just go ahead and get this out there for anyone who may be wondering. We are about to set up for what looks like to be one of the coldest winters in decades for the central and eastern United States. We have been studying this upcoming winter since this summer and are highly confident that parts of the United States will experience temperatures well below average and potentially record breaking in many areas. Not only will many have to battle the bitter cold, but there will be many regions that will get copious amounts of snow causing hazardous road conditions, loss of electricity, and flight delays.

January has already started out very cold for many in the United States, and once we get into the first full week of January, we are going to be dealing with what could end up being a potentially record-breaking Arctic outbreak. This will feature about 3 to 5 days of bitter cold from the Plains to the Ohio River Valley to the Northeast and extend into areas of the Deep South. Although the United States has already had several Arctic outbreaks so far this season, this will be the strongest and most newsworthy outbreak yet. Many areas will get temperatures that they have not had in decades, and some areas will get record low temperatures.

When a Chinese helicopter rescued 52 passengers from a Russian climate-science cruise ship trapped in ice off Antarctica, it was a skilfully managed end to an ordeal that had begun on Christmas Eve. It was also a debacle for climate change activists. The 233-foot Akademik Shokalskiy, a Russian meteorological ship leased by the Australian tour outfit Aurora Expeditions, had been on a mission called the “Spirit of Mawson”. It aimed to replicate part of a gruelling voyage the explorer Douglas Mawson had made in 1912. The ship carried 22 scientists looking to perform various experiments, led by Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales. They were joined by 26 tourists paying for the adventure, along with journalists for The Guardian, BBC and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Amid the worldwide relief that the passengers are now en route to Tasmania on the Australian supply ship Aurora Australis, another note is audible. Many websites where readers normally take climate change for granted have been inundated by posts from gloating disbelievers. The Australian group belittled the winter that nearly killed them and got a comeuppance, say the detractors. Such posts appear on the many YouTube videos uploaded by passengers (“For all your self-aggrandising bluster, you will go down in history as Turney’s turkeys . . . You are an international laughing stock”), on the Spirit of Mawson Twitter feed (“If the #spiritofmawson has taught us anything it’s the low level of intellect among those who have ‘settled’ the science”) and even on the New York Times’s Dot Earth blog, where the writer Andrew Revkin notes that the incident has “energised climate change contrarians”.

Of course, a scientific dispute cannot be settled by one near-tragedy on the high seas and a week’s worth of online invective. But the episode is a setback for those making the case for what used to be called global warming – probably the largest such setback since emails stolen from the University of East Anglia in 2009 cast doubt on the scientific neutrality of several climate researchers.

A beset ship is like a skint bank, and we can draw certain parallels to the financial crisis of 2008. The voyage of the Akademik Shokalskiy mixed public and private purposes, and all such enterprises nowadays invite scepticism. Those who stood to reap the benefits of the voyage were able, when things went sour, to pass on many of the costs.

Turns out we may get very little warning before big bang

European scientists think they’ve found the trigger mechanism for the eruption of supervolcanoes, the most violent and dangerous natural disasters on Earth.

Unlike traditional volcanoes, which are easily identifiable by their mountainous shape, supervolcanoes lurk far underneath the Earth’s surface. They contain huge bulbs of molten magma, some over 100km long, which periodically explode, covering huge areas with ash hundreds of meters deep which scars the lungs of any animal breathing it in.

Around 20 supervolcanoes have been discovered under the Earth’s surface (and at least one suspected site on Mars), and when they blow the results can be catastrophic. The Lake Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted around 74,000 years ago and is estimated to have wiped out over two thirds of the human population at the time and dropped global temperatures by 10 degrees Celsius for a decade or more.

It had been thought that you’d need a large earthquake to set a supervolcano off, but according to new research from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility this may not be the case. According to its paper, published in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience, that they can erupt spontaneously under their own internal pressure.

America could actually use some global warming right about now.  It is being projected that low temperatures across the Midwest could be 30 to 50 degrees below average on Monday morning.  On Sunday, fans that attempted to tailgate before the playoff game between the 49ers and the Packers at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin were discovering that their beers were actually turning to ice before they could drink them.  That is cold. 

But things are going to get really chilly when nightfall arrives.  In fact, it is being projected that much of the nation will experience wind chill temperatures of more than 40 degrees below zero, and wind chill temperatures of more than 50 degrees below zero are expected in parts of North Dakota and Minnesota.  The weather is expected to be so cold that the governor of Minnesota has actually decided to close public schools statewide on Monday. 

The last time that happened was back in 1997.  The reason why the governor of Minnesota did this is because when temperatures get this low they can literally be life threatening.  When wind chill temperatures get down to about 50 below zero, if your skin is exposed you can literally develop frostbite in about five minutes.  This is being called the coldest day in America in 20 years, and these cold temperatures have many Americans wondering what ever happened to all of that “global warming” that Al Gore and other “climate scientists” have been warning us about for so many years.

A Tribute To Freeman Dyson On His 90th Birthday

Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most eminent theoretical physicists, recently celebrated his 90th birthday. Born in England on 15 December 1923, Freeman Dyson graduated from Cambridge University in 1945 with a BA in mathematics.  In 1947, he moved to the USA where he went to work at Cornell University and, later, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Professor Dyson is a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, we republish an CCNet-interview he gave Benny Peiser in March 2007.

Benny Peiser: Let me start with your essay, “Sir Phillip Robert’s Erolunar Collision,” that you wrote in 1933, aged 9. Your first ever piece of science fiction, a story about asteroid Eros, is very charming from a historical perspective. Eros plays a significant role in the history of modern astronomy. It was the first discovered near Earth asteroid and, with a size of circa 13 x 13 x 30 km, is the second largest known NEO. Evidently, your narrative about the asteroid’s close approach was written in the aftermath of the Eros fly by in 1930/31.

What I find intriguing in your account is the conspicuous cheerfulness of the astronomers. When the fictitious president of the astronomical society, Sir Phillip Roberts, announced that Eros may one day collide with the Earth, the reaction of his fellow astronomers is enthusiastic: “Three cheers for Eros!” and “Hip, Hip! Hurrah! They all shouted.” After more calculations revealed that Eros would collide with the Moon in as little as 11 years, the astronomical society decided to organise an expedition to the Moon so that they would witness the collision in situ, “instead of through a telescope.”

It would appear that the perception of a collision by a large asteroid with the Earth was still regarded as something of a challenge rather than a global catastrophe. Today, we know that the impact of an asteroid the size of Eros would wipe out more than 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of all terrestrial forms of life. This, then, raises the following questions: Why was the potentially existential threat at the time of your writing greatly underestimated? Looking back at your own intellectual development, when did you yourself begin to realise the severity of the threat posed by asteroids and comets?

Freeman Dyson: Certainly as a nine-year-old I considered the Erolunar collision as a great lark and did not worry about the dangers. That is the normal reaction of nine-year-olds to adventures of all kinds. I remember an excellent film called Hope and Glory‘ portraying World War Two as seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old kid in England. For the kid, the war was a great lark. That was true. That film gave the most accurate picture of the war that I have seen.

To me it came as a complete and wonderful surprise when Luis Alvarez discovered the iridium layer that showed a connection between the dinosaur extinction and an extraterrestrial impact. There was no doubt that the two events occurred at the same time, and that many species of plankton in the ocean became extinct at the same time too. And still, I was always skeptical of Alvarez’s theory explaining how the impact caused the extinctions. And I am still skeptical. We now know that the other major extinctions do not have iridium layers associated with them, and we know that the dinosaur extinction has a major volcanic eruption (Deccan Traps) associated with it. So it is plausible that volcanic eruptions are the main cause of extinctions, with extraterrestrial impacts giving an additional push if they happen to occur at the same time.

After looking at the evidence, I do not agree with your statement, “we know that an impact of an asteroid the size of Eros would wipe out more than 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of all terrestrial forms of life”. I would say that this statement is an exaggeration, similar to statements of the same kind that are made about global warming. Certainly the danger from asteroid impacts is real, and certainly it makes sense to study ways of deflecting asteroids when the opportunity arises. But I find much of the rhetoric about asteroid impacts to be exaggerated. It seems likely that the real dangers to the survival of the biosphere come more from inside the earth than from outside.

This is just in case you are wondering about the current state of “negative global warming.” Relax; it’s just the polar vortex creating some mayhem; everything else is just fine.

The temperatures plunging throughout this continent, the Arctic, and the Antarctic are unforeseen thermometer excursions into minus territory. Relax, everything else is just fine.

The global warming / climate models could not have possibly predicted a severe winter. After all, the current stream of cold air and snow is just one of nature’s aberrations. Relax; everything else is just fine.

Polar Vortex

The polar vortexes (PVs), also known as Arctic cyclones are persistent, large-scale cyclones located near one or both of a planet’s geographical poles. They occur quite frequently, especially over Antarctica, but are rarely noticed in mid latitudes of North America. However, this year is different – as you may have noticed by now.

Some research has linked the appearance of the PVs to the regularly appearing and disappearing “ozone holes” in the troposphere. Now, what’s that?