Sunday, January 12, 2003

If you need flannel sheets, it must be global warming
The Telegraph (UK) notices that the emperor is sans duds in Predictions fall foul of reality:
Commuters shivering in last week's bitterly cold weather could be forgiven for wondering whatever happened to global warming. The whole northern hemisphere, from Florida to Finland, Germany to Japan, was in the grip of a cold snap that seemed more in line with a new Ice Age.

Aid agencies in Bangladesh handed out blankets to stem the toll of cold-related deaths, which has already topped 100. In Vietnam, baffled villagers came out to study the inch-thick layer of odd, cold white stuff that was blanketing the countryside. In China, a 700-mile stretch of the Yellow River turned to ice.

Advocates of global warming last week insisted that the recent cold weather is just a blip that says nothing about long-term climate change. Instead, they pointed to the recent announcement that on a global scale 2002 was the second-hottest year ever recorded.

Yet in recent weeks information has emerged that is sending an icy blast through the climate research establishment. It shows that the Earth is refusing to follow the script climatologists have written for it.
Funny how that works out.

Details by following the link, but here's a sample:
Last month a team led by Professor Igor Polyakov, of the University of Alaska, published its study of recently released weather records kept by Russian scientists based in the Arctic from the 1870s onwards. The results flatly contradict the computer models. They show that - far from warming up faster than the rest of the Earth - the Arctic has actually been cooling since the 1920s. Put simply, say the researchers, "The air temperature and ice data do not support the proposed polar amplification of global warming."

In a report of their findings in the leading climate research journal Eos, they conclude: "The Arctic poses severe challenges to generating credible model-based projections of climate change."