With a bit of luck the Global Warming Hysterics may just have scored a massive own goal. They've made an announcement so blatant, so obviously designed to appeal to the sentimental and weak of intellect that even their most servile disciples are likely to sense that everything in Algoreland is not what it seems.
With delightful coincidence, this 21st Century version of the story of the Emperor's clothes does actually feature emperors … Emperor Penguins, that is.
Here is the Daily Mail's version …
An iconic penguin species made famous by Hollywood is heading towards extinction, scientists warned today. Emperor penguins could be on the verge of being wiped out before the end of the century, according to researchers in America.
Emperor penguins were the stars of the hit documentary 'March of the Penguins.' Experts believe they could be extinct within 100 years. If rising temperatures continue to melt sea ice at current rates, the population size of a large emperor penguin colony in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, will shrink from 3,000 to only 400 breeding pairs, a paper by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) claims.
The grim predictions were based on evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Co-author Hal Caswell added: 'The key to the analysis was deciding to focus not on average climate conditions, but on fluctuations that occasionally reduce the amount of available sea ice. This analysis focuses on a single population because of the excellent data available for it. But patterns of climate change and sea ice in the Antarctic are an area of intense research interest now. It remains to be seen how these changes will affect the entire species throughout Antarctica.'
The paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, used mathematical models to predict the effect on penguins of climate change and the resulting loss of sea ice.
Sea ice plays a critical role in the Antarctic ecosystem - not only as a platform for penguins to breed and feed - but as a grazing ground for krill, tiny crustaceans that thrive on algae on the underside of the ice. Krill, in turn, are a food source for fish, seals, whales, and penguins.
So, they based this prediction on evidence for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - that's the UK-government-funded body based in Brussels which has been driving the man-made global warming hysteria, and is now rapidly becoming discredited as more and more of its scientific contributors come out of the woodwork and reveal that their work had been "cherry-picked" and misinterpreted by officials with a mission.
And the prediction relied on "mathematical models" - the one method that most scientists have singled out as being unreliable. It sounds impressive, of course, because most of us don't understand it, but it seems perfectly obvious that any computer model is only as good as the data fed into it to start with, and that any tiny error might become magnified into a perceived threat of world-shattering importance.
Most people recognise that the alternative to computer modelling is to base your predictions on what's actually happening on the ground, in the air and in the oceans. For instance, meteorologist Joe D'Aleo rejects the hype surrounding the recent Wilkins Ice Shelf collapse in Western Antarctica. "The shattered part of the Wilkins ice sheet was 160 square miles in area, which is just 0.01% of the total current Antarctic ice cover, like an icicle falling from a snow and ice covered roof," D'Aleo wrote last March. "We are very likely going to exceed last year's record [for Southern Hemisphere ice extent]. Yet the world is left with the false impression Antarctica's ice sheet is starting to disappear."
Climate scientist Dr. Ben Herman, past director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and former Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona, stated, "It is interesting that all of the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) stories concerning Antarctica are always about what's happening around the [western] peninsula, which seems to be the only place on Antarctica that has shown warming. How about the net 'no change' or 'cooling' over the rest of the continent, which is probably about 95% of the land mass, not to mention the record sea ice coverage recently?"
David Bromwich, professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, reported recently to the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "It's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now. Only a small amount of detailed data is available - there are perhaps only 100 weather stations on that continent compared to the thousands spread across the U.S. and Europe . And the records that we have only date back a half-century.
"The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica. We're looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment," he said.
But the alarmists have learned only too well that facts can be picked over till the cows come home, but a good bold lie will always have impact. A new study "went back further than earlier work and filled in a massive gap in data" according to a recent issue of the scientific journal "Nature". The study showed, it was claimed, that Antarctica, the only place that had oddly seemed immune from climate change, is warming after all.
"Contrarians have sometimes grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming," said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. "Now we can say: no, it's not true ... it is not bucking the trend."
The researchers used satellite data and mathematical formulas to fill in missing information, which made outside scientists wary of drawing large conclusions from such sparse information.
What makes us wary is the knowledge that Michael Mann is notorious as the scientist who quietly deleted the entire medieval warm period from the scientific record when he perpetrated his famous and now-discredited "hockey stick" hoax. And his co-author Professor Steig is no better, it seems. Here he is, writing last December: "We use statistical climate field reconstruction techniques to determine monthly temperature anomalies for the near-surface of the Antarctic ice sheet since 1957. Two independent data sets are used to provide estimates of the spatial covariance patterns of temperature: automatic weather stations and thermal infrared satellite observations. Quality-controlled data from occupied instrumental weather stations are used to determine the amplitude of changes in those covariance patterns through time. We use a modified principal component analysis technique" (our underlining) "to optimize the combination of spatial and temporal information. Verification statistics obtained from subsets of the data demonstrate the resulting reconstructions represent improvements relative to climatological mean values."
A "modified principal component analysis technique"? So, there you have it. Either this is a lot of gobbledegook being used to deliberately obfuscate the issue, or they didn't like the results so they "modified" the "principal component" until they got the results they wanted. They did it before with the hockey-stick, and now they're at it again.
Bastards.
Antarctic sea-ice grows a little year by year …
… but the temperatures don't
The GOS says: Remarkable creature, the Emperor Penguin. It lives in the middle of Antarctica, a hundred miles or more from the sea where its food is found. The female lays one egg on her feet, then transfers it to the male's feet. Then she buggers off to lunch and leaves him there for months, huddled together with his mates in howling gales and sub-zero temperatures, with no food and not a lot to do except shuffle round and take it in turns to be on the slightly warmer inside of the crowd. She doesn't come back until the egg's hatched.
And this bird deserves to survive?
"Just run that past us again … you woke up
and found this sitting on your feet …?"
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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