With massive floods in Australia and Brazil, and bitter winter weather across the Northern Hemisphere, climate change alarmists have been quick to blame the severe weather on global warming. The fact that such weather is well within normal variation has not stopped the catastrophists from claiming vindication. No matter that those who study the Pacific and Atlantic decadal scale oscillations predicted a cold and snowy winter for Europe and North America, the recent blizzards are being offered up as “proof” that Earth's climate is changing for the worse. And what of the reports of widespread natural disaster from Rio, Brisbane and elsewhere? Even more global warming, of course. When it comes to wicked weather, the climate change cabal's misinformation machine is running at full tilt.

This week we have a crank duet, provided by Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne and US EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. The shakiest of America's three domestic car companies, Chrysler, and the US Government are teaming up to bring the world something nobody asked for—a non-electric hybrid mini-van. The company announced that it would partner with the US Environmental Protection Agency to build and test prototypes of a hybrid vehicle that accumulates energy not in a battery pack but by compressing a gas hydraulically. This could be final proof that both Chrysler and the EPA should be disbanded.

An increase in tropical storm activity has long been predicted as a harmful side-effect of human induced global warming. Hurricanes are to become more frequent and more deadly. All of this is predicated on the notion that a hotter climate will result in more moisture in the atmosphere and more frequent tropical storms. As it turns out, this is only half true. There may be more precipitation in the temperate zone, but an increase in tropical storms is not predicted—even by the IPCC models.

Climate alarmists have been slow to learn that their over-reliance on computer models and unproven theories has harmed their public credibility. In an attempt to counter the richly deserved bad press that climate science has been garnering these days, a number of global warming true believers are trying a different, more fact based approach to scaring the public. One such attempt recently appeared in the journal Science—not as a paper describing original research but as a perspective article. In it, a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, attempts to “weave together” some carefully selected “threads in the discussion of climate” to arrive at a very familiar and unconvincing conclusion.

Scientists believe that carbon released from the ocean floor played a key role in past episodes of climate change. Around 55 million years ago, the break-up of the northeast Atlantic continents was associated with the injection of large amounts of molten magma into seafloor sediments. Formation of the North Atlantic basalts heated the carbon-rich sediments, triggering the release of large quantities of methane and carbon dioxide into the ocean and atmosphere. It has been suggested that this release of previously sequestered carbon was responsible for a 100,000 year period of rapid temperature rise known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM. Three letters published in Nature Geoscience suggest that carbon trapped beneath the seabed continues to influence carbon dynamics, at least in the deep ocean.

After coming to the realization that the doom & gloom approach to fighting global warming has become counterproductive, many global warming promoters are now taking a more upbeat “we can fix it” approach. This has riled some of the old guard climate alarmists and led to a backlash. An indication of this can be found in a recent Nature Geoscience editorial that represents a new kind of skepticism—not skepticism of global warming but skepticism that it can be stopped or even blunted. Dismissing the notion that a range of available methods—such as efficiency gains, replacing fossil fuels by nuclear power or renewable energy, land-use changes, etc—can make fighting climate change more tractable, the editorial basically says that the world is going to hell and there is no way around it. If that is true, perhaps we should simply ignore the climate cranks and go on a petrochemical burning binge until the stuff runs out.

Denis Dutton, philosopher, academic, author, web entrepreneur and libertarian media commentator/activist, died on December 28, 2010. A professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, he died in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he lived. He was 66. Described by the New York Times as “an impassioned polymath, genial contrarian and native Californian,” Professor Dutton had taught at Canterbury since 1984. Blake Eskin, web editor for The New Yorker, wrote: “Denis helped prove that the Web could be a platform not only for fast-paced celebrity gossip and pictures of cute animals but for long and serious writing and the exchange of complex ideas.” We at The Resilient Earth morn the passing of an internet visionary, fellow skeptic and friend.

Time after time, the public has been harangued by climate change “experts” predicting all form of devastation due to anthropogenic global warming. The Greenland and Antarctic glaciers will melt, as will the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean. Temperatures will rise by 2-6°C, perhaps more in higher latitudes. Weather patterns will shift, there will be droughts and torrential monsoon rains, cyclones will increase in intensity—where will it all end? Here's a thought, we might find the world a nicer place after a bit of global warming. In fact, given the general cooling trend seen over the Holocene (the period since the last glacial period ended around 14,000 years ago) and the Cenozoic (the time since the dinosaurs died, around 65 million years ago) human CO₂ may be, in some small way, the only thing delaying another devastating ice age.

Carbon monoxide, CO, is a trace gas that is important in atmospheric chemistry. It indirectly influences climate and has significant effects on methane and ozone levels. CO is a byproduct of combustion—particularly the incomplete burning of fossil fuels and biomass—and conventional wisdom says that humans, with their tendency to set things on fire, should be responsible for releasing much of the gas into the atmosphere. Little is known about the abundance and sources of CO prior to the industrial age, or about the importance of anthropogenic activities have had. A new study in the journal Science presents a 650-year-long record of CO atmospheric concentration using samples from Antarctic ice cores. Reconstructed past CO variability and its causes have come up with a shocking fact: CO levels are at a 2,000 year low. Apparently, humans actually prevent wildfire, reducing the release of carbon monoxide and, consequently, CO₂.

To ring in the new year, The Resilient Earth presents a collection of recent journal and news articles regarding climate science. Some are about actual science and others are more in the way of commentary on the state of global warming. New discoveries continue to be made, though the climate change faithful stubbornly refuse to abandon the party line: Earth's temperature is going to rise dangerously and humanity is to blame. Perhaps the most interesting development is that a number of green advocates have given up on avoiding global warming, deciding instead to stress the unfair social impacts that climate change will supposedly cause. At the end of 2010, here is a snapshot of the state of the climate change debate.

The influence of the Sun on Earth’s climate over time scales of centuries and millennia is all but ignored by current climate change dogma, with many climate scientists dismissing solar variation as too feeble to have much of an impact. Though it was recently discovered that variation at ultraviolet wavelengths is considerably greater than at lower frequencies, the change in total solar irradiance over recent 11-year sunspot cycles amounts to <0.1%. New research on longer time scales finds the change in total irradiance sufficient to affect the dynamics of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Detailed model studies of the Little Ice Age (~1400 to 1850 AD) conclude that the Sun controls an “ocean dynamical thermostat” that affects climate variability over large regions of the globe. It was also found that fully coupled general circulation models (GCMs), the kind used by the IPCC to make predictions of future global warming, lack a robust thermostat response. This means that the sensitivity of the climate system to solar forcing is underestimated by current GCMs—the climate models are proven wrong again.

For a second time, a letter has appeared in the journal Science urging scientists to action regarding climate change. “Because of the physics of the climate system, we must ensure that global emissions of greenhouse gases peak and start to decline rapidly within a decade in order to have a reasonable chance of meeting the 2°C goal,” urge the authors, noting that “humankind has waffled and delayed for decades; further delay risks serious consequences for people and the ecosystems on which we rely.” What is not immediately obvious is who these correspondents are. While some are legitimate scientists, a number turn out to be from somewhat nebulous organizations and institutions. They are philosophers, ethicists and “decision scientists” who have turned shilling for climate disaster into a career. They grow like a tapeworm within the bowels of science—they are climate science parasites.

Much has be written and even more said about stopping climate change. The total foolishness of such a quest is obvious to anyone with even the most cursory understanding of Earth's climate over the Past 65 million years. The more science learns about the ever changing nature of climate the more capricious nature appears and the less significant the labors of H. sapiens are revealed to be. To place the ludicrous arguments and unsubstantiated fears of climate catastrophists in perspective, it is instructive to survey Earth's climate since the demise of the dinosaurs—the geological time period called the Cenozoic Era. During this long span of time, Earth's climate has undergone a significant and complex evolution. If one truth has been discovered by human science it is that Earth's climate is always changing, driven, as one set of researchers put it, by trends, rhythms and aberrations—the mechanisms of climate change.

The Alpha Ventus Wind Park is the first of its kind: a deep water wind farm in the stormy North Sea. It is composed of 12 turbines that together will generate 60MW of electrical power. When fully operational, the farm will be able to power 50,000 households. But barely two months after the ceremony opening Germany’s first deep water wind farm, six of the newly installed wind turbines were idle. This was not due to a lack of wind but because of gearbox damage: two turbines had to be replaced entirely, the other four repaired on site. Problems with Alpha Ventus highlight a series of poor decisions—a precipitous move to shut down working nuclear plants, rampant installation of solar cells, and a headlong rush into offshore wind generation among them—that could well have Germany facing blackouts in the not too distant future.

As you may know, the parasitic bureaucrats and scheming NGO representatives that comprise the dying but still twitching climate change cabal are holding a fun filled, two week blow out in Cancun, Mexico. They have gathered to preach the gospel of global warming and attack those who would thwart their plans for remaking the world according to their own slanted social views. They are keeping a low profile, after the disastrous meeting they had in Copenhagen this past December. For many, the Cancun meeting is basically a time for AGW true believers to lick their wounds and lounge about in the sun with like minded fanatics. For others it is yet another roll of the dice, a gamble that something meaningful will come from the conference. Here are some of the highlights from the bungle on the beach.