If you're reading this from anywhere in the United States right now, there's a pretty good chance it's cold outside. We're in the middle of a massive freeze that could last until March, the breadth of which NASA's Terra satellite just captured in the remarkable view you see above. See all that territory blanketed in white? That's snow. It's not cloud patterns, or a representation of wind currents, just a bunch of frozen water atop even colder ground. NASA supplemented the photo with some harrowing, record-breaking numbers:
•1ºF in Baltimore, MD
•-6ºF in Louisville, KY
•7ºF in Charlotte, NC
•4ºF in Asheville, NC
•18ºF in Macon, GA
•14ºF in Athens, GA
DoD Releases 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap
Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) released its 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, which focuses on various actions and planning the DoD is taking to increase its resilience to the impacts of climate change.
"Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change," said Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. "Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. By taking a proactive, flexible approach to assessment, analysis, and adaptation, the Defense Department will keep pace with a changing climate, minimize its impacts on our missions, and continue to protect our national security."
IN April this year, the papers were full of warnings the Arctic ice could all melt.
“We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time,” claimed Dr David Barber, of Manitoba University, ignoring the many earlier times the Pole has been ice free.
“It’s hard to see how the system may bounce back (this year),” fretted Dr Ignatius Rigor, of Washington University’s polar science centre.
Tim Flannery also warned “this may be the Arctic’s first ice-free year”, and the ABC and Age got reporter Marian Wilkinson to go stare at the ice and wail: “Here you can see climate change happening before your eyes.”
In fact,*the Arctic’s ice cover this year was almost 10 per cent above last year’s great low, and has refrozen rapidly since. Meanwhile, sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing. Been told either cool fact?
Yet Barber is again in the news this month, predicting an ice-free Arctic now in six years. Did anyone ask him how he got his last prediction wrong?
Lesson:*The media prefers hot scares to cool truths. And it rarely holds its pet scaremongers to account.
A BAD ski season three years ago - right after a great one - had The Age and other alarmists blaming global warming. The CSIRO, once our top science body, fanned the fear by claiming resorts such as Mt Hotham and Mt Buller could lose a quarter of their snow by 2020.
In fact,*this year was another boom one for skiing, with Mt Hotham and Mt Buller covered in snow five weeks before the season started.
What’s more, a study this year in the Hydrological Sciences Journal checked six climate models, including one used by the CSIRO.
It found they couldn’t even predict the regional climate we’d had already: “Local model projections cannot be credible . . .”
It also confirmed the finding of a study last year in the International Journal of Climatology that the 22 most cited global warming models could not “accurately explain the (global) climate from the recent past”.
As for predicting the future. . .
Lesson:*The CSIRO’s scary predictions are near worthless.*
THE seas will rise up to 100m by 2100, claims ABC Science Show host Robyn Williams. Six metres, suggests Al Gore. So let’s take in “climate refugees” from low-lying Tuvalu, says federal Labor. And ban coastal development, says the Brumby Government.
In fact,*while the seas have slowly risen since the last ice age, before man got gassy, they’ve stopped rising for the last two, according to data from the Jason-1 satellite.
“There is no evidence for accelerated sea-level rises,” the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute declared last month.
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