Germans Are Catching On to Global Warming Alarmism

In Europe, as in the United States, the climate alarmists’ failed predictions have become an embarrassment. In Germany, warmists have been warning hysterically that Germany and the rest of Central Europe would soon have hardly any winter at all, and little or no snow. Instead, however, winters have been getting colder. P. Gosselin, who translates climate-related papers written in German at No Tricks Zone, writes:

With 11 days remaining, Germany this year is set for its 5th colder-than-normal winter (DJF) in a row (a record), this according to high-profile German meteorologist Dominik Jung….

Jung begins his post with:

Just a few years ago climate experts prophesied that Germany would no longer experience winters with ice and snow in the future. In the 1990s there had been an entire series of milder and stormier winters. […] However, this trend has not been observed over the last years. To the contrary: winters have again gotten considerably colder and the huge storms like those in the 1990s have more or less disappeared. […] Climate experts prophesied in the year 2000 that winters with snow and ice in Germany would cease to exist.

Jung then presents the data for Germany’s last 4 winters and that of the current winter, and compares them to the 1980-2010 mean winter temperature, which was 0.8°C above the 1960-1990 mean.

– 2008/2009: 1.0 °C cooler
– 2009/2010: 2.0 °C cooler
– 2010/2011: 1.3 °C cooler
– 2011/2012: 0.1 °C cooler
– 2012/2013 (so far): 0.4°C. cooler

We should recall that whatever applies for Germany, also applies for much of Central Europe.

This chart, from a second No Tricks Zone post, shows winter temperatures in Germany over the last 25 years:

So have climate scientists admitted they were wrong and gone back to the drawing board? Of course not! Instead, they have come up with a new explanation: global warming causes colder weather! Gosselin again explains:

Currently this 2012/13 winter in Germany and over large parts of Europe we’ve been finding lots of cold, snow and ice – the fifth winter of this type in a row. Who can still recall the prognoses and claims of some alarmists of the established climate science community, like this one?:

“Winter with strong frosts and lots of snow like 20 years ago will cease to exist at our latitudes,’ said scientist Mojib Latif of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.”

This quote comes from an interview with SPIEGEL in the year 2000. The headline: “Good-bye winter: No more snow? In Germany bitter cold winters are now a thing of the past.”

[O]ne could simply dismiss the comment – had that claim by Latif not been repeated by other climate scientists, e.g. [2]:

The very mild winters of the last decades can be attributed mainly to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. As a consequence, we are for example seeing a reduction in snowfall. When every 50-year-old was able to go skating as a kid almost every winter, kids today often have to wait many years for larger amounts of snow.


In the meantime, all these statements have since been contradicted: Nature is doing something completely different…the exact opposite! The first climate warmists to scramble to make a major forecasting adjustment already in 2010 were from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) – and did so through BILD tabloid [5]:

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research sees the hard winters as being the result of global warming: Icy Arctic winds will be triggered by it and reach all the way to Europe unhindered due to climate change in the Arctic.

Gosselin then asks the key question:

Why do scientists always come up with such explanations after the fact? The alarmists used a sleight of hand, and magically and rapidly came up with a rabbit from a hat.[6]:

A new study shows the relationship between Arctic sea ice cover in the summer and winter weather in Central Europe. […] The probability of cold, snowy winters in Central Europe increases when the Arctic summer has little sea ice.

Did they ever have such a climate model before the cold winters of the last years? NO! This is precisely the point that WELTWOCHE magazine couldn’t help but notice[7]:

…are three cold winters…a coincidence? Such winters are inconvenient not only for those who freeze in them, but also for those had announced warmer temperatures because of the CO2 emissions. … “The reality is,” writes American climate scientist JUDAH COHEN, that we are not freezing despite climate change, but because of it.” Such an explanation would be convincing only if it had not come afterwards. Indeed just the opposite had been announced for decades. We can recall DAVID VINER of the British Climate Research Unit. In the year 2000 VINER said that snowfall in Great Britain soon would be rare and a sensation. Children will not know what snow is.

That is exactly right. A theory that has no predictive value and cannot be falsified by experience is not a scientific theory. It may be religion, it may be politics, but it is not science.

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