UW Study: No Evidence Global Warming Affecting Cascades Snowpack

First, Mark Albright. Now this. The PC Police at the University of Washington are not doing a very good job of having their meteorologists drink the Kool-Aid.

Despite previous studies suggesting a warmer climate is already taking a bite out of Washington's snowpack, there's no clear evidence that human-induced climate change has caused a drop in 20th century snow levels, according to a new study by University of Washington scientists.

Predictably, the same people who went after Albright (who is a co-author of this new study) are ranting.

"They're trying to forecast the next 20 years or so, and I don't think they can do it," said Alan Hamlet, a UW hydrologist who has written papers about historic Cascade Mountain snowpacks.

Huh? Isn't that what the Goracle has been doing?

Hamlet also criticizes some of the statistical analysis in the new study, saying it could exaggerate the role of decade-to-decade changes in ocean conditions while understating other potential influences, including global warming.

"I just don't think the science is there," Hamlet said.

And yet global warming alarmists have passed off this year's record cold and snowy winter in the Northwest as being a result of an unusually strong La Nina and not a reversal in planetary warming trends.

"Settled" science? Uh huh. Room for reasonable doubt? You bet.

Tyana Kelley Doesn't Think Your Truck is Sexy

Spokane urban transplant Tyana Kelley and Democratic candidate for the Washington state legislature has a lot to learn about the 9th District. Heck, she's only been here since last August.

For example, Kelley wrote on her blog about the Johnson and Albion 4th of July Parades:

The Republican candidates were out in force at both parades. Each candidate had their own vehicle: either a gas-guzzling truck, or car with an equally big engine. In Albion we were put in the line to walk right in between all these vehicles. It was a bit intimidating. My opponent, Joe Schmick, had the biggest truck, a Ford F-350.

I wonder if Tyana realizes that Joe is a farmer and needs that truck to farm? I wonder if she realizes that many of her potential voters also drive similar rigs for similar reasons?

She stated in an interview with the Moscow-Pullman Daily News that "We need someone in Olympia to work with the Democratic majority." God forbid. Do 9th District voters want a Democrat supermajority to hit us with the 2009 version of SB6900?

You remember SB6900. It was the bill proposed by a Seattle area liberal senator earlier this year that would have engine displacement and emission fees for motor vehicles according to a schedule tied to engine size in liters and CO2 emissions in grams per mile. That's just what area farmers need when the price of diesel is already at record levels.

Just tell Tyana, "No thanks." She can move out of the area when her husband finishes up at WSU. We don't need any more carpetbaggers around here.

Kill Your Television

For the eco-chic who have been watching the new "Planet Green" channel, I hope you haven't been doing it on a flat-screen TV:

Booming demand for flat-screen televisions could have a greater impact on global warming than the world's largest coal-fired power stations, scientists warn.

A greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride, used to make the TVs, is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, said Michael Prather, director of the environment institute at the University of California, Irvine.

So does that mean those of us without flat-screen TVs can sell carbon credits? Oh brother.

Global Warming Story of the Day

Chilly spring delays strawberries, other local produce; The calendar may say summer, but it's still spring to crops confused by this year's unusually cold temperatures and rainy weather

And yet the Governor of Washington wants our farmers to grow food to burn as gas to reduce "global warming."

Quote of the Day

In a campaign stop in Oregon, Obama called for the U.S. to "lead by example" on global warming. "We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say 'OK.' … That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen," he said.

A President Obama apparently would decide how to regulate the pantries, thermostats and modes of personal transportation of his fellow Americans based on the emotional temperature of every non-American who happens to harbor an opinion on how we should live.

Steven Milloy, "Global Warming's New 'Consensus'", May 23, 2008

Sarah Palin for President

Sandpoint native and University of Idaho graduate Sarah Palin, the Republican Governor of Alaska, has been mentioned as a possible VP candidate.

The thought goes that the young (44), snowmobiling, socially conservative, pro-life, former beauty queen would balance out McCain's stuffy, staid, grumpy old RINO image.

It turns out Palin may be too much of a maverick for Maverick.

Palin announced yesterday that Alaska will sue to challenge the recent listing of polar bears as a threatened species. Palin fears the listing will cripple Alaska's oil and gas industry, the bread and butter of the 49th State. She stated:

The listing of a currently healthy species based entirely on highly speculative and uncertain climate and ice modeling and equally uncertain and speculative modeling of possible impacts on a species would be unprecedented.

Predictably, the environmentalist wackos started an immediate ad hominem smear campaign as they do to all global warming heretics:

She's either grossly misinformed or intentionally misleading, and both are unbecoming," said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. "Alaska deserves better."

Siegel said it was unconscionable for Palin to ignore overwhelming evidence of global warming's threat to sea ice, the polar bear's habitat.

"Even the Bush administration can't deny the reality of global warming," she said. "The governor is aligning herself and the state of Alaska with the most discredited, fringe, extreme viewpoints by denying this."

On a side note, Palin participated last October in the grand opening ceremony for a Wal-Mart Supercenter in her former hometown of Wasilla, where she said:

But we are hard working, very unpretentious, just good, salt of the earth people that live here and are working in this store.

Forget about VP. An elected official gutsy enough to publicly buck the Global Warming Hysteria Express AND support Wal-Mart deserves to be President.

Wake Up and Schuss the Powder

From today's Seattle Times:

The last time Seattle-area residents contended with snow this late in the season was more than three decades ago, when Seattle-Tacoma International Airport reported snow on April 17, 1972, said Johnny Burg, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

[...]

"We've had powdery snow practically the whole season," said Duncan Howat, general manager at Mount Baker. "This is a great end for what's already been a record season for us."

[...]

Years ago, Mount Baker used to operate well into May — and even went until July 4 once during the 1970s, Howat said. But now its season concludes in late April, ending this year on April 27.

Eastern Washington will also be faced with snowy conditions this weekend.

It's interesting to note that the last time we had a winter this bad was in the Seventies. It was almost 33 years ago exactly, April 28, 1975, that Newsweek ran a story titled "The Cooling World."

Notice the graph in the Newsweek article of average temperature change from 1880 to 1970. It's a classic sine wave. Since then, the average temperature change swung back up again, peaking in 1998. It has remained stable since then, declining slightly. Could we be at the beginning of another downturn in temperature like in the Seventies? Who knows? The weather and climate are constantly changing. The only thing that is consistent is man's alarm and overreaction at the various trends.


One thing that does not exhibit sinusoid behavior is the amount of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fules. It is steadily increasing. The level of atmospheric CO2 is now nearly twice that in the Seventies. But we still have a winter like this one? I'm skeptical that one climatological phenomenon (La Nina) could override all that CO2 if that truly was causing the planet to warm so dramatically.

Snow Job

The Seattle Times does have a way with the words. First, they refer to terrorists as "ecosaboteurs."

Now, in keeping with the precepts of the Holy Gospel of the Boiling Planet, the Slimes calls our recent winter (which is still not over) "unusual" with an "extraordinary amount of snow." In fact,

Because of the unusual winter, the Legislature appropriated another $5.25 million over the $35 million budget. That leaves a $3 million deficit that will be carried into next winter. State officials are hoping a lighter-than-normal winter could make up some of those costs.

Huh.

Meanwhile,

In Washington state, a new climate change law calls for reducing vehicle miles by 18 percent by 2020, 30 percent by 2035 and 50 percent by 2050, starting from a statewide baseline of 75 billion miles per year.

Go figure.

Second Snowiest March Ever Makes 2007-2008 Third Snowiest On Record

Spokane is now within 6 inches of breaking its all-time record for seasonal snowfall.


Meanwhile, James Taranto points out that environmental alarmism has always been with us and will always be with us.

Mary Ann Lindley is an editor at the Tallahassee Democrat, the main newspaper in Florida's capital. In a blog entry on the paper's Web site, she writes that a friend recently gave her a copy of the Democrat dated Jan. 21, 1981--the day after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated and the mad mullahs who ran Iran released the American diplomats they had taken prisoner, a crime that has gone unpunished in the 27 subsequent years.

"But the thing that caught my attention in that 27 year old newspaper," Lindley writes, "was a letter to the editor from a Darrell E. Levi":

In 1981, Mr. Levi's concern was the "accelerating devastation of the world's tropical forests and with that the possibility of major changes in the world's climate."

He went on to write that "over the past 20 years, it has become clearer that the main, most inexorable threat humans face is not political or ideological conflict, social disintegration or economic chaos--as real and important as these things are--but destruction of the very biolgoical [sic] basis of life."

That was long ago, and yet the warnings he issued are almost precisely the ones we hear today: that we run great risk if we ignore our interdependency with soil, air, water, plants and animals and that a global ecological crisis is upon us and will destroy us without an informed citizenry prepared to respond and help steer a new course for "Spaceship Earth."

Now, we're not exactly sure what kind of "changes in the world's climate" Levi meant to warn about. Back in the 1970s, people worried about a new Ice Age, but at some point between then and 1988, the concern shifted to global warming. It's possible that in the interim, an informed citizenry did steer a new course for Spaceship Earth, one that took the craft dangerously close to the sun.

Possible, but--let's be honest--not probable. We like to think we're pretty informed, and we don't remember anything like this happening. Anyway, the Earth isn't really a spaceship. Its course is fixed by nature, God or some combination thereof.

The lesson of Darrell E. Levi would seem to be that doomsayers will always be with us. They were with us in 1981, they are with us in 2008, and we feel confident predicting that they will be with us in 2035.

Incredibly, though, Lindley draws the opposite conclusion--that Levi's predictions were prescient not because they came true but because people are making similar predictions now:

It's easy to dismiss today's "alarmists" who speak of the dire consequences of our various policy choices and personal decisions. But Mr. Levi's letter is riveting. He was--and is--right on the money. Everything he said then still applies, squared.

The good news is that some of today's citizenry is more informed and some leaders, such as Governor Crist, are aiming their sites [sic] on solutions, however incremental, to save the ship known as Spaceship Earth.

LiveScience.com, meanwhile, reports that the climate was changing millennia before the Industrial Age:

Humans may have struck the final blow that killed the woolly-mammoth, but climate change seems to have played a major part in setting up the end-game, according to a new study. . . .

Scientists have long debated what finally drove the furry beasts over the edge. Researchers led by David Nogues-Bravo of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain used models of the climate, as well as models of woolly-mammoth and human populations, to study the relative importance of various factors leading to the mammals' demise. . . .

The team found that the brunt of the damage done to mammoths was due to Earth's warming weather around 8,000 to 6,000 years ago. Since Earth was coming out of a glacial period at that time, temperatures were climbing and recasting the planet's landscape, and the mammoth's preferred habitat, steppe tundra, was vastly reduced.

As far as we know, no one worried about climate change back then. They were too busy worrying about getting trampled by mammoths.

Of course, as we've all learned, any departure from average in either direction is proof of global warming, so don't expect that we'll get off the hook if April brings another half foot of the miserable white stuff.