On March 14 2010, Sciam (Scientific American) tweeted a report called “Climate Change – State of the Birds 2010 Report”.  A link is in the Reference section at the end of this post.

My wife and I are a lifelong conservationists with a special place in our hearts for birds.  In our home country, New Zealand, we gardened organically, without pesticides or artificial fertilisers, and planted native trees in the garden of every house we have owned, to attract, feed and encourage the NZ and exotic birds back into our lives.  People change landscapes, and we feel strongly that we should provide the means for the native wildlife to survive those changes.  So we do just that, and are rewarded by the tuis, wood pigeons, fantails, wax-eyes, goldfinches, starlings, sparrows and other birds that swarm in our garden.  They are so comfortable with us that they pick for food at our feet when we sit on the garden deck.  They will do so again when we return.

Here during our sojourn in the Netherlands, our greatest delight is the splendid variety of birds that grace the trees in our tiny lane in Haarlem, and fill the polders, reserves and wetlands.  We put out seeds, nuts, fat balls and insect blocks this winter, because it has been the harshest for forty years.  No doubt we have assisted the great tits, blue tits, jays, tree-creepers and robins that are outside the window, ten feet from me, right now.  And now that spring quickens the trees and the temperature is finally back above zero, we shall once more roam the cycle lanes in the reserves, among the swans, ducks, herons and magpies.

So how does a Grumpy Old Conservationist react to the report?  By grumping – it is shameless advocacy.  A load of self-serving twaddle riding the coat-tails of the highly exaggerated predictions of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  Prediction after prediction in the IPCC report is being exposed as nonsense.  Himalayan glaciers, African crop yields, Amazon rain-forest health are three examples.  These are not small errors – they are critical for the IPCC’s advocacy.  It will not be long before their predicted six-degree Celsius global temperature rise for the twenty-first century is similarly nailed, and nailed conclusively.  Already, scientific analyses of the various bases on which that prediction was based are showing them to be doubtful at best, and suggest that some of them have been shamelessly manipulated.  The leaked emails of the Climategate incident add weight to that suggestion.

Audubon and the other conservation agencies have done a great conservation job of maintaining, recovering and protecting wildlife populations, and will continue to do so.  It is important work, mitigating the environmental consequences of the actions of humankind.  It enriches all of life.  They should keep it up.

It saddens me to see that work, and the agencies who perform it, hooked up in the advocacy of the AGW group.  The predictions of the AGW camp will be shown to be about as accurate as the Jehovah’s Witnesses predictions of the end of the world in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994.  IPCC and all of those who have promoted AGW will be utterly discredited.  An angry world may well discredit all conservationist groups along with them.

That would be a very great shame.

References:

2010 State of the Birds:  http://www.stateofthebirds.org/habitats

Postscript: Scientific American is diminished.  It used to be great magazine that reported science.  Now it is an avenue for advocacy.

Francis Moore Lappe’s daughter Anna has written her own book – “Diet for a Hot Planet”.  Her mother wrote “Diet for a Small Planet”, promoting a vegetarian lifestyle, back in 1971.  Now her daughter is doing her own thing and playing off the title of her mother’s book.  And she is pitching her update of her mother’s original ideas as a measure to combat global warming.

This Anna Lappe is a sad case of one of my pet peeves – someone who degrades what could be a real environmental message by climbing on the global warming bandwagon.  Inevitably, AGW will be exposed for what it is – the biggest scientific scam since Piltdown Man.  The perpetrators of the Piltdown hoax sought to discredit the theory of evolution. While they were misguided creationists, at least they had the saving grace of humour.  AGW is far more sinister – it is a con of biblical proportions that will make its promoters extremely rich, and is intended to provide the religious power base of the UN.

Along comes Anna Lappe, preaching sustainable agriculture.  Nothing wrong with that – factory farming over time destroys the land, sooner or later.  The California dustbowl, land slips in hillsides stripped of trees and over-grazed by sheep and cattle, pollution of streams and rivers with run-off from farms, decline in bird populations, increasing reliance on pesticides that destroy not only the pests but also their natural predators.  And so on.  But climate?

“We hear little about how food affects climate,” she said.  No surprise – because it does not significantly affect global climate (although it clearly can affect local climate – for example, deforestation and excess draw-off from rivers both powerfully affect local climate).

Every human being has a religious standpoint, and vegetarianism, like atheism, monotheism, polytheism, agnosticism, animism, communism, capitalism or any other ism (or AGWarmism), is a form of religion.  Anna Lappe has every right to believe in vegetarianism – and every right to talk about it.  But to claim that meat-eaters contribute to global warming is twaddle.  Even Realclimate says that methane is not a threat to the planet.  And it is becoming more and more evident that CO2 is not the pollutant that the AGW believers say it is.

All the CO2 and methane from farming or any other source has a negligible effect globally.  And contrary to Lappe’s beliefs, livestock rotated through cropping fields enhance the fertility and sustainability of the land with their manure.  Want to destroy land?  Just crop it year after year.  Want to sustain it?  Put everything you don’t eat back into the land as compost.  Plant it in grass every so often, then graze it with cattle or sheep, then let the pigs in, and then the chickens.  Then crop it again.  Small-holding real organic farmers have known that for centuries.

The pity is, when the world backlash rejects AGW, it may also reject all environmental and conservationist theories and initiatives, even the ones that are soundly scientifically based.  They will be tainted by association.

Reference: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/03/AR2010030302065.html

A new study shows that the extinction of Monteverde golden toads in the Andes in the 1980s was not caused by global warming.  Earlier widely publicised studies said global warming was the cause.  The authors of the new study, however, are careful to warn us that global warming may cause ecosystem stresses that may cause extinctions.  This is what happened, and why they give that warning in spite of their study’s conclusions.

The Monteverde golden toad disappeared from Costa Rica Pacific coastal forest in the late 1980s, killed by the chytrid fungus.   Many researchers have linked outbreaks of the deadly fungus to climate change.

In a 2006 paper in Nature, a team of U.S. and Latin American scientists linked rising tropical temperatures to the disappearance of 64 amphibian species in Central and South America.  “Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger,” the lead author of the Nature study and a research scientist at the Monteverde reserve, J. Alan Pounds, said at the time.

A new study by Kevin J Anchukaitis of Columbia University and Michael N Evans of the University of Maryland, says it was El Nino, not climate change or global warming, that caused the fungus to thrive, killing the golden toad. “El Niño pulled the trigger,” said Anchukaitis.  El Nino always dries up the area in which the toads lived, which maked them congregate closely together in the few pools that remain.  So all were exposed to the fungus, which wiped them out completely.

This latest study shows that El Nino is the cause of the extinction of the golden toads.  It shows conclusively that there was no discernible long-term trend visible in the circumstances of that event.  At a time when the IPCC is making dire predictions of mass extinctions caused by global warming, and cites events like the extinction of the golden toad as evidence that it is already happening, that is refreshing.  And that should be that.  The earlier study was yet another of the many climate change studies that have blamed global warming for every possible disaster, and predicted more catastrophes to come if we don’t take firm action to stop it.

But wait.  Anchukaitis and Evans then talk about what their study definitely did not show.

In their Q&A section of the study, the authors say “Both the rate and magnitude of ongoing and future climate change are very likely to put additional stresses on ecosystems. In combination with land use change, introduced pathogens, pollution, and other related ecological changes, anthropogenic climate change will undoubtedly play a role in future extinctions.”  And Evans says “extinctions happen for reasons that are independent of human-caused climate change, but that does not mean human-caused climate change can’t cause extinctions”.

No part of their study supports those statements.  So why do they depart from the legitimate findings of their study when they are supposedly discussing the study?

Because their sources of present or future funding expect warnings about global warming to be communicated with the findings.  Even when the study conclusions in no way support those warnings.  Them’s the rules.  That’s the tune the men with the money expect the pipers to play.

By the way, their results in the new study are only the latest challenge to the theory that climate change is driving the deadly chytrid outbreaks in the Americas. In a 2008 paper in the journal PLoS Biology, University of Maryland biologist Karen Lips mapped the loss of harlequin frogs from Costa Rica to Panama.  She found that their decline followed the step-by-step pattern of an emerging infectious disease, affecting frogs in the mountains but not the lowlands.  Had the outbreak been climate-induced, she said, the decline should have moved up and down the mountains over time.

References:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/25/0908572107

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~kja/monteverde/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/06/global-warming-not-blamed-for-toad-extinction/

The UK Met has led a new study into Global Warming, a review led by Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter.  The review was conducted by six IPCC scientists.  Their arguments and conclusions remind me of a desperate-looking Colin Powell on TV, showing pictures of suspicious-looking Iraqi buildings and claiming that they were strong evidence that Saddam Hussein was concealing Weapons of Mass Destruction.  This is the NZ Herald report of the study’s conclusion:

“The researchers found that no other possible natural phenomenon, such as volcanic eruptions or variations in the activity of the sun, could explain the significant warming of the planet over the past half century as recorded on every continent including Antarctica.”  It goes on:  “It is only when the warming effect of emitting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human activity is considered that it is possible to explain why global average temperatures have risen so significantly since the middle of the 20th century.”

How did they arrive at this conclusion?  Well, they matched computer models of possible causes of climate change, both human-led and otherwise, to measured changes in factors such as air and sea temperature, Arctic sea ice cover and global rainfall patterns.  They call the technique “optimal detection”, and claim that it showed clear fingerprints of human-induced global warming.  Richard Lindzen has this to say about their application of “optimal detection”:

“they take models that can not reasonably simulate known patterns (such as ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation), claim that such models accurately depict natural internal climate variability, and use the fact that the models could not replicate the warming episodes… to argue that forcing was necessary and that the forcing must have been due to man”.

Well put.  As Lindzen also points out, their argument constitutes a rejection of scientific logic that makes arguments for Intelligent Design seem rigorous by comparison.  It boils down to argument from ignorance.  They have created models that include only the possible causes they know about and are capable of modelling, with all of their weightings tuned to enable reasonable hind-casting, applied it to a warming world, and shouted “Eureka!” when it sort-of matched expectations (nothing is said about the fifteen-year hiatus in warming from 1995).

To return to Dr Peter Stott, in his review: “”What we see here are observations consistent with a warming world. This wealth of evidence we have now shows there is an increasingly remote possibility of climate change being dominated by natural factors rather than human factors.”

Bunkum.  Stott’s “wealth of evidence” has no more significance than the Iraqi buildings.  There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.  And the endless list of the consequences of Global Warming does not show that we humans are causing it, or that it is catastrophic.  There is no need to go to war.

References:

NZ Herald Article on the Review:  http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10630087

Aust Age Article on Guardian report:  http://www.theage.com.au/world/climate-change-review-stresses-human-factor-20100305-pouc.html

Richard Lindzen on AGW  http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/02/dr-richard-lindzens-talk-at-fermilab.html

Scientific American reports a study of Methane bubbling up from the sea floor off the coast of Siberia.  The study was conducted by a team of scientists from the United States, Russia and Sweden, who published their findings in the Science journal on March 4 2010.  The study is titled Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf

This is the very first sentence of the abstract of the paper in Science:  “Remobilization to the atmosphere of only a small fraction of the methane held in East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming.”

Not bad as an attention-getter.  They go on to say that the methane leaking into the atmosphere from the East Siberian Arctic shelf is on par with previous estimates of methane venting from the entire world ocean.  They estimate that the region is producing 8 to ten million tons of methane into the atmosphere every year, because warming ocean water is thawing permafrost, allowing methane trapped underneath to escape.

The Scientific American article notes that “Methane is regarded as 20 to 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.”  It also points out that it’s “a relatively small slice of the 440 million metric tons of methane emitted worldwide each year from a combination of human activities and natural sources like rotting plants in wetlands, termites and wildfires.”

The lead author of the study, Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska, says that scientists had not thought subsea permafrost would begin to thaw and release the gas. She said more research is needed to figure out whether the methane leaking from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is an ongoing, steady phenomenon, or whether it suggests a new source of the gas is emerging as seafloor permafrost thaws.  It seems that every piece of climate related research carries a recommendation for more research.

Here’s what neither the article nor the study tell us about the atmospheric content of greenhouse gases:

• Water Vapour, 40,000 parts per million.  Water vapour is the most powerful greenhouse gas.
• CO2,  360 parts per million
• Methane, 1.7 parts per million.

Yes, that’s right.  1.7 parts per million!

But then, why would they point that out?  They want to do more research, and for that they need funding.  The billions available from the IPCC and its affiliates can best be assured by showing that your work supports Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.

References:

Scientific American Article:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=methane-siberia-climate-change

Science Publication: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5970/1246

Table of Atmospheric Gases:  http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7a.html

In the wake of “”Climategate”, a British House of Commons panel has held an enquiry into the CRU unit.  Right there before the eyes of the world, they heard what Dr Phil Jones had to say:

• “I have obviously written some very awful e-mails.”
• “I don’t think anything in those e-mails supports any view that I’m trying to, or CRU has been trying to, pervert the peer review process in any way.”
• CRU’s practice, he said, was to release “gridded data” (raw information that had been processed for analysis).
• CRU withheld raw data in part because “most scientists don’t want to deal with raw station data, they want to deal with the derived product.”

Jones is the man at the very centre of Climategate – the man whose emails caused the fuss.  The man who sent an email urging all other associated climate scientists to destroy their data.  The man who, in an email to McIntyre, asked why he should provide data, when McIntyre would try to find something wrong with it.  The man who withheld data from McIntyre on the grounds of confidentiality while at the same time supplying the requested data to a scientist who supports AGW.

After his refreshing honesty in the interview with the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin, I felt some sympathy for Dr Jones, and said so, in an earlier blog entry.  But Jones has now lost that sympathy.  His answers at the parliamentary enquiry show that he has reverted to obfuscation.  Destroying data perverts the peer review process because it prevents other scientists from testing scientific conclusions. – Jones knows that.  Withholding raw data when it is requested by another scientists cannot be justified on the grounds that most others ask for the derived product -  Jones knows that.  All scientists, when reviewing the work of other scientists, try to find something wrong with it – that’s the scientific method, and Jones knows that, too.

But Jones was not the only witness at the enquiry to apply spin.

UK chief scientific adviser John Beddington said: “I think the general issue that global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activities is also correct.  I think this is unchallenged.”

Julia Slingo, head of the Met Office, said: “We know that (climate change) is unequivocal and that as the IPCC report said, over 90 percent, it’s very likely due to human activities.”  She said that the uncertainty is in projections of future warming, not in the cause.  She at least is right about the uncertainty of the projections.

The cause also is uncertain.  That climate change is caused by human activities is certainly challenged by scientists – by Lindzen, Watts, McIntyre, Woon, and others.  The data gathered so far do not show with any degree of certainty that human activities cause global warming, or that the warming is catastrophic.  We do not know that human activities cause global warming – that is no more than theory.

The parliamentary enquiry and more importantly, Joe Public the voter represented by parliament, deserve rather more than spin and red herrings.  Science itself demands more than that.

References:

NY Times Article on UK Enquiry: http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/03/02/02climatewire-climategate-scientist-admits-awful-e-mails-b-66224.html?pagewanted=1

BBC Interview with Phil Jones: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

Jim Hansen of GISS has put out “An Essay on Regional Cold Anomalies within Near‐Record Global Temperature”.  (Here it is)

Hansen appears to be attempting to confuse the issues here, by ascribing wrong motives to skeptics and telling them what they already know.  Here are my major grumps about some of the salient points of his essay:

“Scientists reporting global warming are under attack for a supposed conspiracy”.  Maybe from the politically motivated, Jim, but not from skeptics.  No need for conspiracy theories when the science is compromised by the funding model.  If one pays a piper and wants to hear an Irish jig, will the piper play Mozart’s “Magic Flute”?  No, the piper will play a jig.  He has to eat.  So does everyone else, including scientists.  Including you, Jim Hansen.  Scientists depending on funding will tailor their research to support whatever the funder is paying for.  The moment they become advocates they compromise their objectivity.  Every piece of AGW-funded climate research I have seen quoted in climate blogs assesses impacts in the most extreme terms and couches the conclusions in terms of calls for urgent action to avoid disaster.  Funny that.

“Regional cold snaps are expected”. And your point, Jim Hansen, is what, exactly?  Skeptics already know that – we are not ignorant.  It’s not the cold winter that makes us skeptical of global warming.  It’s the fact that you claim that the rise in temperature since the 19th century is due to anthropogenic causes, but offer nothing but a model-based argument from ignorance as scientific proof.  It’s the exaggeration of the magnitude of that rise and the clumsy attempts to preserve the illusory hockey-stick.  It’s your insistence that the rise has continued unabated through the first decade of the 21st century (even Phil Jones has denied that)!  It’s the incessant cries of “wolf” that you issue in every “study” and every possible forum.  Cries which more and more are being shown to be bogus – especially those from the definitive IPCC 2007 report.

Skeptics display “honest, wishful thinking that climate change is not really happening.” Wrong again, Jim.  Skeptics know full well that climate change is happening, that the temperature of the earth has risen since the 19th century and may even rise further.  What they are skeptical about is your version of why this is so, and your insistence that the warming is disastrous.

“Our data show that 2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the 130 years of near‐global instrumental measurements”.  Your data as homogenised by whom, Jim?  UAH satellite data contradicts it.  Surprisingly, so does the revised GISS dataset, which now has 1934 as the warmest year!

“If we look back a century, we find cold anomalies that dwarf current ones.  Figure 1 shows photos of people walking on Niagara Falls in 1911.  Such an extreme cold snap is unimaginable today.” Thanks for the great photos,  Jim.   Now, we emerged from the Little Ice Age in the nineteenth century and the earth has unsurprisingly warmed up since then, so I suppose you are confident Niagara won’t freeze again any time soon.  But remember your supercilious “Regional cold snaps are expected”?  Careful – you may again be as embarrassed as you have obviously been by this winter.  A winter of a harshness which the meteorologists who oppose your agenda predicted last year.  And your people failed to predict – in fact, they predicted the opposite.

Still, I suppose if Niagara freezes over or the Mississippi freezes all the way to the Gulf, you will once again talk about the regional cold snaps we already know about.

Reference:

Hansen’s Essay (It has great pictures of Niagara Falls): http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20100127_TemperatureFinal.pdf

Phil Jones is director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA).  The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin interviewed Professor Jones recently.  Professor Jones’ answers to the first two questions reveal that there is nothing unusual about the rate of warming in the twentieth century.  They also reveal strength of character.

Here’s the question about latest rates of warming compared with other known rates:

Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

Here is Phil Jones’ answer:

The warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

.

Here’s the question about global temperature change since 1995:

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Here is Phil Jones’ answer:

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.

Jones is obviously uncomfortable about the implications of the questions (“Yes (I agree), but only just..”).  But he has the integrity to answer truthfully, knowing that the answers cast yet more doubt on the AGW cause, and especially on the IPCC, the CRU and the other organisations that promote AGW.

Because the first proves that there is nothing unusual about the rates of warming we have observed, even though there are now much higher levels of atmospheric CO2 that there were in 1880.  And the second confirms what skeptics have been saying for years – there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.  This is in spite of increased atmospheric CO2, and contrary to the exaggerated, repeated claims of accelerated global warming by NASA, the CRU and the IPCC.  So much for the need for urgent action.  We do have time to investigate properly the climatic effects of CO2, methane and whatever other demons are conjured up.

Now, if we could show that the Medieval Warm Period was as warm or warmer than present-day temperatures, and that it was global in extent, we could finally establish that the present global temperature is nothing out of the ordinary.  And that would mean that there is no need for any action at all – at least, not in respect of climate change.  Refreshingly, Phil Jones does not deny the MWP, and is aware of its impact on the debate.  See “References” section below for another blog on Phil Jones answers to the MWP question in the same interview, and how we can test the its extent and temperature during that period.

There are other real environmental issues with which we should deal, and other concerns about depending on diminishing commodities for our energy.  We don’t need global warming baloney to help us recognise those real issues – on the contrary, all the AGW noise has obscured them.

References:

Phil Jones on the MWP: http://www.herkinderkin.com/2010/02/phil-jones-on-the-medieval-warm-period/

BBC Interview with Phil Jones: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

Phil Jones is director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), which has been at the centre of the row over hacked e-mails.

The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate sceptics.

Here’s the question about the MWP:

There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

Here’s Phil Jones’ reply:

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few paleoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

Thanks, Phil.  Now, let me help you.  There may indeed be very few paleoclimatic records for the tropics and the Southern hemisphere, but there are data.  Plenty of data.

In Antarctica, there are very old glaciers, and cores samples have been extracted.  Would it not make sense to have core samples analysed to see what could be calculated about temperatures and CO2 content from, say 1 AD to the present?  So far, researchers have concentrated on the great ice ages, but nothing has been published about the last two millennia.

We know that in the northern hemisphere, temperatures declined markedly during the fourteenth century.  The Maori people, indigenous in NZ, were established by the beginning of the fourteenth century and were settled in both the North Island and the South Island.  Archaeological records of the population distribution of Maori at the beginning and end of that century could be very revealing.  It has been suggested that there was a large-scale shift in the Maori population from the South Island to the warmer North Island during that century.  If that can be confirmed, the most probable reason would be climate.  The Maori at the time had no tailored clothing and no shoes.  Without those, the snow and ice in the South Island would be very uncomfortable.

Core sample from the New Zealand glaciers might also give us some idea of climate changes in NZ between 1000 AD and 1500 AD.

There are kauri trees in New Zealand that are more than two thousand years old.  It is now illegal to fell them, but there are still plenty of stumps.  Tree-ring proxy data just waiting to be collected.

If Climate Change science claims that the twentieth-century warming is unprecedented, then it must rigorously test the claim.  The science is well-resourced and well-funded.  Why has it not gone looking for evidence of the climate in the Southern Hemisphere during and after the MWP?  Given Phil Jones statement highlighted above, it would seem to be very important.

References:

BBC Interview with Phil Jones: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

The satellite temperature record shows that January 2010 was the warmest January since satellite temperature measurements began in 1979.

Yep. The data don’t lie.

They didn’t lie about the cooling from 1998 to last year, when the published global temperatures by the AGW lobby said the earth was still warming.

And they didn’t lie about the extra warm January in 2007.  And they don’t lie about January 2010.  It’s warm – very warm.

The Grumpy Old Man is in the mood for sooth-saying.

First prediction:  Many of the AGW lobby will now temporarily forget their distrust of satellite-measured temperatures and insist that this result supports their belief that the earth is warming as a result of man-made CO2.  They will forget that distrust, that is, until the satellite-measured temperatures fall, just as they did from 1998 to last year.  If the data don’t support their beliefs, then the data will be obviously wrong, and will be supplanted by carefully homogenised temperatures from an AGW-friendly source.

Second prediction:  Some of the responses to the Accuweather Global Warming blog post that reported the January record temperature will provide supporting evidence of the truth of the first prediction.

First Speculation:  The warmer Arctic temperatures caused by the negative Arctic Oscillation will result in thinner than usual sea-ice.  Spring and Summer will therefore bring a collapse of Arctic sea-ice, similar to the one that occurred in 2007.  Which will be cited as further evidence of AGW.

Second Speculation:  Global temperatures will drop dramatically in 2010, just as they did in 2007 after the record January temperatures of that year.  And the AGW lobby will suddenly mistrust the satellite record once more.  NASA will publish their own terrestrial records, homogenised and averaged beyond all recognition, which will diametrically contradict the satellite record.

We’ll be able to assess the two predictions after reading all the responses to the Accuweather post.  The speculations will take the rest of 2010 to assess.