What is this, Christmas in July?

Not quite, but this unseasonably chilly midsummer month is about to break cold-weather records throughout the Midwest -- some more than 100 years old.

Meteorologists from Madison, Wis., to Chicago to Toledo, Akron and Columbus -- and dozens of cities in between -- are watching their thermometers as the month winds down.

By the end of the day Friday, they'll likely boast the coldest July on record.

In Toledo, that would fell a mark set back in 1894. In Akron, a record from 1904.

In Milwaukee, the record about to fall is older yet -- a daily average of 66.7 set in 1891.

That's what the Guardian is saying. And, it claims, that will "silence" global warming skeptics.

You mean man's link to warming has finally been proven and we will now reap what we've sown?

Well, not exactly. Here's the reason they give:

[The] [n]ew estimate [is] based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles.

They then trot this out:

The hottest year on record was 1998, and the relatively cool years since have led to some global warming sceptics claiming that temperatures have levelled off or started to decline. But new research firmly rejects that argument.

The research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO2 and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

The cooler than normal July temperatures which have slashed air conditioner bills across much of the Midwest and East Coast appear all but certain to establish a new temperature benchmark by the time the month ends at midnight Friday. With the reading of 86 degrees set back on the 6th likely to stand as the month's warmest since July 1, the month is likely to become the first July in 139 years of official records here which fails to produce a temperature of 87 degrees or warmer. Monday's 84-degree high -- far from an exceptionally warm reading -- was the city's warmest in 12 days.

Several clusters of thunderstorms are likely to sweep the Chicago area Tuesday. Half inch diameter hail accompanied storms in Ogle County Monday evening just northwest of Polo.

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia's best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me -- and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour -- cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks -- can reverse the trend.

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

Climate patterns are not something that we routinely talk about during the weather portion of the news simply because there isn't enough time to go into the details that govern our climate. Scott's World of Weather is an excellent forum to do just that. In this installment, we will go over the drivers of climate that have ultimately affected our weather this summer in northern Ohio.

Talk of global warming aside, there are well-documented natural cycles in the atmosphere and oceans that have a direct impact on our weather from season to season; month to month. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and many others are terms that you probably have never heard of. In fact, most of these cycles have only been coined within the last 15 years and don't get much media attention. Many of these cycles are poorly understood while others have been well-known for centuries. The grand-daddy of them all is the ever-popular El Nino. Back in 1997, El Nino was blamed for everything from horrible weather to the Indians losing the World Series. It became the catch-phrase for everything.

So far, this summer, temperatures have been noticibly cooler than in summers past. Rainfall is down at bit too. Is El Nino the big reason for this? Is its cousin "La Nina?" Is it something entirely different?

A beluga whale saved a drowning diver by hoisting her to the surface, carrying her leg in its mouth.

Terrified Yang Yun thought she was going to die when her legs were paralyzed by crippling cramps in arctic temperatures. Competitors had to sink to the bottom of an aquarium's 20-foot arctic pool and stay there for as long as possible with the beluga whales at Polar Land in Harbin, north east China.

A 400-year warm spell helped the ancient Inca to build the largest empire ever to exist in the Americas, a new study has established.

Beginning around 1100 A.D., the increase in temperature served as a "perfect incubator" for the Inca's expansion, an international team of researchers report in the current issue of the journal Climate of the Past.

"Climate warming does not always have to be a negative issue. Our research shows that it can favor societal development, " lead author Alex Chepstow-Lusty, a palaeoecologist from the French Institute for Andean Studies in Lima, Peru, told Discovery News.

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don't fully understand either the advance or the retreat.

For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century. Supporting the notion that man has not been the cause of this unexceptional change in temperature is the fact that there is a distinct signature to greenhouse warming: surface warming should be accompanied by warming in the tropics around an altitude of about 9km that is about 2.5 times greater than at the surface. Measurements show that warming at these levels is only about 3/4 of what is seen at the surface, implying that only about a third of the surface warming is associated with the greenhouse effect, and, quite possibly, not all of even this really small warming is due to man (Lindzen, 2007, Douglass et al, 2007). This further implies that all models predicting significant warming are greatly overestimating warming. This should not be surprising (though inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data. Thus, Santer, et al (2008), argue that stretching uncertainties in observations and models might marginally eliminate the inconsistency. That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community).

For all of our UK readers, now is the time for all good citizens to come to the aid of their country (and science). The Met Office refuses to release data and methodology for their HadCRUT global temperature dataset after being asked repeatedly. Without the data and procedures there is no possibility of replication, and without replication the Hadley climate data is not scientifically valid. This isn't just a skeptic issue, mind you, others have just a keen an interest in proving the data.

What is so bizarre is this. The FOI request by Steve McIntyre to the Met Office was for a copy of the data sent to Peter Webster. If the restrictions on the data hold for Steve McIntyre, why did they not prevent release of the data to Webster?

When asked by Warwick Hughes for this data, Dr. Jones famously replied:

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

Note: The graph comes from this source and not the paper below. Only the abstract is available.

A new peer-reviewed climate study is presenting a head on challenge to man-made global warming claims. The study by three climate researchers appears in the July 23, 2009 edition of Journal of Geophysical Research. (Link to Abstract)

Full Press Release and Abstract to Study:

July 23, 2009

Three Australasian researchers have shown that natural forces are the dominant influence on climate, in a study just published in the highly-regarded Journal of Geophysical Research. According to this study little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.

The research, by Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University), finds that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a key indicator of global atmospheric temperatures seven months later. As an additional influence, intermittent volcanic activity injects cooling aerosols into the atmosphere and produces significant cooling.

"The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely" says corresponding author de Freitas.

"We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis."