With Canadians increasingly anxious over the looming threat of year-round gardening, and entrenched in a foreign policy viewpoint premised on a seething hatred of George Bush, Stephane Dion’s stars were aligning.
And then this had to happen;

“Iraq has formally ratified the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on climate change, according to a government statement…”

Dead jihadis as carbon credits – the Global War On Terror and Global War On Warming could join forces and save the word together!
(“Elizabeth May, Canada’s Ambassador to Iraq” has a nice ring to it.)
Related – At this rate, Al Gore may end up killing more islamists than Bush ever hoped to.

Joe Bastardi, Meteorologist(PDF);

The maturation of the La Nina to its classic major cold look, both in the equatorial Pacific waters and the amazing amount of the Northern Hemisphere troposphere that is covered by colder than normal temperatures, is not only a major driving force in the every day weather picture of earth, but is a sign, that in the end, it is nature, not man, that will have its way with the weather.
Why?
It is straight out of the book of climate. The pattern is so much like the 1949-1950 La Nina, which was signaling the start of the reversal of the warming of the earth’s climate in the 1930s, ‘40s and early 50s. Only someone choosing to ignore it, or not wanting to see it, would not be cognizant of it. But because such a pattern leads to warmer than normal conditions in areas where the greatest centers of human induced global warming information comes out of, western Europe and the eastern part of North America, no attention is being called to the fact that the winter this year does have outstandingly large areas of colder than normal temperatures and in areas, the vast expanses of the tropical Pacific, and the vast expanse of the air above us.”
[…]
Why the model bust? It is because most of these climate models have little or no ability to foresee regime changes in the oceans short and long term. It should be a warning shot to climate modelers that their longer term climate models are clueless as to the parameters predicted. In the end, it may be ice, not fire, that is the problem. As this powerful La Nina could be the sign of the regime change back to cool like the one in 1949/50.

Graphs here.

Given the engineers and geologists* who frequent this site, the following may spark some discussion…

In a fairly dense article entitled “Abiogenic Hydrocarbon Production at Lost City Hydrothermal Field,” researchers Proskurowski et al., find evidence of the abiogenic formation of short-hydrocarbon chains in an area where hydrocarbons would not otherwise be able to form by the biogenic theory. What Proskurowski et al. identified was the formation of carbon chains 1 to 4 carbon atoms in length, with shorter chains forming deeper, and with isotopic signatures ruling out biogenic origins. The conclusion of the article is as follows: “Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water, and moderate amounts of heat.”

More here

Saving the planet one tropical vacation at a time;

Leaders talk climate change at Hawaii conference [….] Delegates met behind closed doors for a two-day global climate change conference in Hawaii but were not expected to make major progress on setting limits for greenhouse gases.

And not a moment too soon…

The Mauna Kea Weather Center forecast snow flurries and possibly heavy snow today and into tomorrow night on the 13,796-foot mountain. […] Haleakala National Park officials said snow reached much lower elevations than normal, down to the 7,000-foot level in the general area where the park headquarters is located.

As global warming continues to strike around the globe…
In Tehran…

In China…

Tokyo…

Saudi Arabia…

Baghdad…

And hardest hit of all – the northern hemisphere…

When will it all end?
Addendum: Members of the Church of Kyoto are advised to read this comment before posting.

Official NOAA thermometer, Cordova, AK.

Gorman,

…. who has spent 25 years observing and predicting ice patterns in the Arctic, and now does the same remotely from Ottawa for shipping company Fednav, said that it is important to consider differences between climate change and decadal oscillations.
“Climate change is really slow, long-term creeping change over centuries,” he said. Decadal oscillations, on the other hand, are changes in energy patterns around the world that come and go at cyclical intervals, leading to hurricanes, causing various shifts in sea-level pressure and ice formation.
He said that scientists are still figuring out the relationship between climate change and decadal oscillations. “It’s not really well understood,” he added. Despite this, some media mistakenly report the effects of decadal oscillations as caused by climate change.

For example, though a recent report by CBC suggested that a huge ice fracture in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea area may be attributed to climate change, Gorman dismissed the claim. “I see this every year,” he said.

(Photo source)

Temperatures reached their lowest point in 30 years, plunging to -2C in the capital, Riyadh, and to -6C in mountainous regions blanketed by snow.
At least 10 people have died in the country as a weather system driven South from Siberia sent temperatures plummeting.

h/t reader James.
More

And a million Saskatchewanians breathe a sigh of relief.

Update – Anthony Watts advises that temperatures this low may spawn rare Nacreous clouds. Watch for them nearer sunset. (Photo at the link)

That didn’t come true.

Data collection has begun in the Stevenson Screen Paint Test.

And “unsettling” climate model results;

Steve, here’s my conjecture about what this means. The references to Senior and Mitchell in the TAR were written by person A who had read them a while back and thought they fit into the big picture in such-and-such a way. The portion of TAR text you quoted was written by Person A late one tiring day, rushing to meet a deadline before he had to finish grading some term papers then pick up his son from track and field. He never figured what he was writing was the last word on anything in particular. Whether or not the text was commented on by busy reviewers, they ended up in the final text more or less in the form they were first jotted down.
The portion quoted from the AR4 was written by Person B late one tiring day, rushing to meet a deadline before he had to finish grading some term papers then pick up his daughter from volleyball. He never figured what he was writing was the last word on anything in particular. Whether or not they were commented on by busy reviewers, they ended up in the final text more or less in the form they were first jotted down.
The problem in each case is that text originating as the current opinions of Persons A and B, and therefore subject not only to revision but simple error, gets promoted by the IPCC as if it were the Last Word, the Authoritative, the Most-Stringently-Peer-Reviewed-In-History Dictation of the Angels. The fact that parts contradict each other within the same report, let alone across different reports, is only a problem for those naive enough to believe the hype from the IPCC leaders about the nature of the assessment reports.

(click for original image)
And the Official Start of Solar Cycle 24.
I have no idea what this means, but the pic is too cool to pass up.
More – Read The Sunspots
h/t to reader Rod.

Continued…

The [Migraine Action Association] is calling on the Government to avoid a complete ban on old-style bulbs, by providing an opt-out for people with health problems.
[…]
Several versions use a technology similar to fluorescent strip lights and some migraine sufferers say they produce a flickering effect that triggers their condition.
Karen Manning, from the MAA, said: “When the Government announced that traditional light bulbs would be phased out, we were inundated with over 200 calls and emails from members who said the flickering had caused migraines.
“This is a debilitating condition which can often leave people bed-ridden for days.

*

Answer: They already have one.

It is a red-letter rule in business that transactions between a company and its insiders or employees must be disclosed. Some of the most egregious breaches by Enron were its attempts to avoid disclosure of writeoffs by selling worthless assets to the infamous limited partnerships organized by company insiders for equally worthless paper issued by the partnerships. Company insiders cannot evade securities laws by pretending to be be acting in a “personal capacity”.
The U.S. federal government has a detailed set of regulations requiring scientific information to be peer reviewed before it is disseminated by the federal government. NASA, which says that it has “employs the world’s largest concentration of climate scientists”, has carried out an interesting manouevre that has the effect of evading the federal Data Quality Act, OMB Guidelines and NASA’s own stated policies. Once again, the system involves an employee purporting to be acting in a “personal capacity”.
[…]
NASA has carried out an interesting manouevre that has the effect of evading the federal Data Quality Act, OMB Guidelines and NASA’s own stated policies.
NASA says that it “employs the world’s largest concentration of climate scientists”. It has plenty of opportunity to use product from those scientists that has been produced in accordance with NASA quality procedures and subject to the Data Quality Act. Instead of doing so, NASA’s webpage on global warming relies on non-peer reviewed material, including material produced by one of its own employees as a “private citizen” at a “personal” website where his contributions have not been subject to mandatory NASA quality control procedures.

Emphasis mine. This comment lays things out in plainer language.

Just in time for Canada’s top weather story of 2007…

Alexandre Aguiar, MetSul Weather Center, Brazil; “In the Northern Hemisphere, the ice and snow cover have recovered to within 1% (one snowstorm) of normal with the official start of winter still more than 12 days away.”

Today’s image.

Who are these people?

For the uninitiated, here is the lowdown: Andrew Dessler is a professor at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University. He is complaining about a US senate report which listed hundreds of individuals who have been reported in the media during 2007 as speaking against the “scientific consensus” on climate change, claiming that they are scientists. The report naturally challenges the very principle of the consensus, which has given climate policies the authority they have needed to be carried forward. The global warming camp have sought to undermine the value of this new list, by claiming that the scientists lack scientific qualifications, expertise, or moral integrity.
[…]
But Dessler doesn’t tell us exactly how we are to measure the qualifications, we just have to take his word for it that the 400 sceptics aren’t qualified, but the IPCC scientists are. So it’s not simply a consensus, it’s a qualified consensus, and he gets to call the qualification. So much for science. So, apparently, the IPCC scientists who represent the consensus are more qualified than their counterparts.

Or, maybe not.

We decided to test Dessler’s claim. So we downloaded IPCC WGII’s latest report on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. There were 380 contributors to the report […] we focused on the contributors who operate in the UK. Of the 51 UK contributors to the report, there were 5 economists, 3 epidemiologists, 5 who were either zoologists, entomologists, or biologists. 5 worked in civil engineering or risk management / insurance. 7 had specialisms in physical geography (we gave the benefit of the doubt to some academics whose profiles weren’t clear about whether they are physical or human geographers). And just 10 have specialisms in geophysics, climate science or modelling, or hydrology. But there were 15 who could only be described as social scientists. If we take the view that economics is a social science, that makes 20 social scientists.
[…]
There were a few professors, but few of them had the profile Dessler gives them. Many of them were in fact, hard to locate to establish just how much better than their counterparts they were. […]
Among the remainder – most of whom are not professors, but research associates at best, are an assorted bunch, many of whom are better known for their alarmist statements in the mainstream press than they are for their contributions to scientific knowledge – activists in other words, with their own political motivation. And in spite of being reported as “climate scientists”, involved in scientific research, also seem to be working within the social sciences, albeit for “climate research” institutions, such as Tyndall. Johanna Wolf, for example, is an IPCC contributor from the University of East Anglia, who works in the department for “development studies”. Does that make her a climate scientist? Anna Taylor, of the Stockholm Environment Institute in Oxford has no PhD at all, her research focuses on “stakeholder engagement in adapting to multiple stresses, including climate variability and change, water scarcity, food insecurity and health concerns” – not climate science, and has simply not been alive long enough to join the ranks of the specialists of specialisms that Dessler demands of sceptics. Similarly, Susanne Rupp-Armstrong, listed as a member of Southampton University only appears to have ever contributed to one academic paper. Research Associate at the University of East Anglia, Maureen Agnew does not focus her research on climate science, but on such things as “Public perceptions of unusually warm weather in the UK: impacts, responses and adaptations”, and “Potential impacts of climate change on international tourism.” Katherine Vincent specialising in “Social Capital and Climate change” at the UEA, only began her PhD thesis in October 2003. How can she be cited as a specialist in climate science?
Then there are the contributors whose involvement we cannot explain.

The things CBC Fruit Fly Guy doesn’t tell you. Oh wait – he’s not a climate scientist, either.
h/t Maz 2. This is one to bookmark.

The Toronto Humane Society struggles as global warming results in more hours of daylight.

They’re all made in China;

The growth in China’s emissions from 2006-2010 is equivalent to adding the 2004 emissions of Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia to China’s 2006 total (source). The emissions growth in China at these rates is like adding another Germany every year, or a UK and Australia together, to global emissions.