Norway study says future warming likely only 1.9C, within CO2 alarmists' target. Good news also on Greenland from Nature study, melting fears put to rest. Greens job now over, congrats. No need for Sierra Club and 350 to waste CO2 marching on Washington in Feb.!

1/28/13, "Climatologists Retrench As Climate Refuses To Warm," The Resilient Earth, Doug L. Hoffman

"A newly released study from the Research Council of Norway has climate change alarmists abuzz. One of the things the alarmists have been pushing for is to halt warming at a 2°C increase at any cost (and they mean that literally). In the Norwegian study, much to the alarmists' dismay, researchers have arrived at an estimate of 1.9°C as the most likely level of future warming. 

The report also recognizes that temperatures have stabilized at 2000 levels for the past decade even though CO₂ levels have continued to rise. Meanwhile, a reconstruction of the Eemian interglacial from the new NEEM ice core, published in the journal Nature, shows that in spite of a climate 8°C warmer than that of the past millennium, the ice in Northern Greenland was only a few hundred meters lower than its present level. 

This finding casts doubt on the projected melting of ice sheets and resulting sea-level rise.

After rising sharply through the 1990s, Earth’s mean surface temperature has leveled off nearly completely at its 2000 level. Ocean warming also appears to have stabilized, despite the fact that CO₂ emissions and other anthropogenic factors claimed to contribute to global warming are still on the rise. Clearly, a number of factors affect climate development, not just the usual suspects cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)....

 
Those who point to Greenland's melting ice and predict massive sea-level rise are in for some disappointment. And need I point out that those higher Eemian temperatures occurred when what few humans existed had only campfires to contribute to their carbon footprints....

These results are truly sensational,” says Dr Caroline Leck, an internationally renowned climate researcher at Stockholm University. “If confirmed by other studies, this could have far-reaching impacts on efforts to achieve the political targets for climate.”

As heartening as the Norwegian study is, there was more good news on the climate catastrophe front. Previous efforts to extract a Greenland ice core with a complete record of the Eemian interglacial have been unsuccessful. Now, in an article published in Nature, “Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core,” by researchers known collectively as the NEEM community, new information has come to light regarding Greenland ice melt during the previous interglacial....

The bottom line on this report is that Greenland's ice sheet, even when subjected to significantly warmer temperatures than today, did not melt rapidly and disappear as some alarmists would have us believe....

From all indications, the Eemian interglacial (130,000 to 115,000 years ago) was significantly warmer than our own Holocene. A new North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (‘NEEM’) ice core shows just how warm, and surprisingly indicates only modest ice-sheet melting in response to the strong warming. On the basis of water stable isotopes, NEEM surface temperatures after the onset of the Eemian (126,000 years ago) peaked at 8 ± 4 degrees Celsius above the present-day annual average of roughly −25 °C. This early peak was followed by a gradual cooling that was probably driven by decreasing summer insolation. These findings are summarized in the figure below, which is followed by a description from the article."...via Climate Depot