Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 431 Location: North East England
Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2010 12:49 am Post subject:
Shock....Horror! Yet more fabrications and lies have been uncovered about the Climate Change scam. The biggest surprise of all is the Times even publishing this story.........
Quote:
The Sunday Times January 24, 2010
UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters
Jonathan Leake
THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.
The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.
Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 — could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent."
Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen "must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm".
The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.
The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC's 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s".
It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: "One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."
The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.
When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."
Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.
The claim will now be re-examined and could be withdrawn. Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, who is vice-chair of the IPCC, said: "We are reassessing the evidence and will publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings. Despite recent events the IPCC process is still very rigorous and scientific."
The academic paper at the centre of the latest questions was written in 2006 by Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, a London consultancy, who later became a contributing author to the section of the IPCC's 2007 report dealing with climate change impacts. He is widely respected as an expert on disaster impacts.
Muir-Wood wanted to find out if the 8% year-on-year increase in global losses caused by weather-related disasters since the 1960s was larger than could be explained by the impact of social changes like growth in population and infrastructure.
Such an increase, coinciding with rising temperatures, might suggest that global warming was to blame. If proven this would be highly significant, both politically and scientifically, because it would confirm the many predictions that global warming will increase the frequency and severity of natural hazards.
In the research Muir-Wood looked at a wide range of hazards, including tropical cyclones, thunder and hail storms, and wildfires as well as floods and hurricanes.
He found from 1950 to 2005 there was no increase in the impact of disasters once growth was accounted for. For 1970-2005, however, he found a 2% annual increase which "corresponded with a period of rising global temperatures,"
Muir-Wood was, however, careful to point out that almost all this increase could be accounted for by the exceptionally strong hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005. There were also other more technical factors that could cause bias, such as exchange rates which meant that disasters hitting the US would appear to cost proportionately more in insurance payouts.
Despite such caveats, the IPCC report used the study in its section on disasters and hazards, but cited only the 1970-2005 results.
The IPCC report said: "Once the data were normalised, a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% a year." It added: "Once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."
Muir-Wood's paper was originally commissioned by Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, also an expert on disaster impacts, for a workshop on disaster losses in 2006. The researchers who attended that workshop published a statement agreeing that so far there was no evidence to link global warming with any increase in the severity or frequency of disasters. Pielke has also told the IPCC that citing one section of Muir-Wood's paper in preference to the rest of his work, and all the other peer-reviewed literature, was wrong.
He said: "All the literature published before and since the IPCC report shows that rising disaster losses can be explained entirely by social change. People have looked hard for evidence that global warming plays a part but can't find it. Muir-Wood's study actually confirmed that."
Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the Tyndall Centre, which advises the UK government on global warming, said there was no real evidence that natural disasters were already being made worse by climate change. He said: “A proper analysis shows that these claims are usually superficial”
Such warnings may prove uncomfortable for Miliband whose recent speeches have often linked climate change with disasters such as the floods that recently hit Bangladesh and Cumbria. Last month he said: “We must not let the sceptics pass off political opinion as scientific fact. Events in Cumbria give a foretaste of the kind of weather runaway climate change could bring. Abroad, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of South Asia could put hundreds of millions of people at risk of drought. Our security is at stake.”
Muir-Wood himself is more cautious. He said: "The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is completely misleading. "We could not tell if it was just an association or cause and effect. Also, our study included 2004 and 2005 which was when there were some major hurricanes. If you took those years away then the significance of climate change vanished."
Some researchers have argued that it is unfair to attack the IPCC too strongly, pointing out that some errors are inevitable in a report as long and technical as the IPCC's round-up of climate science. "Part of the problem could simply be that expectations are too high," said one researcher. "We have been seen as a scientific gold standard and that's hard to live up to."
Professor Christopher Field,director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution in California, who is the new co-chairman of the IPCC working group overseeing the climate impacts report, said the 2007 report had been broadly accurate at the time it was written.
He said: “The 2007 study should be seen as “a snapshot of what was known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around.” However he confirmed he would be introducing rigorous new review procedures for future reports to ensure errors were kept to a minimum.
Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 431 Location: North East England
Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2010 12:57 am Post subject:
This report in yesterdays Sunday Times gives credence to whats been obvious for a long time.... the scientists are not whiter than white, they will say anything to get extra funding - not too hard as a member of the fully paid up AGW Gravy Train. Thats even before the obvious 'back-handers' they receive...........
Quote:
The Sunday Times January 24, 2010
UN climate panel blunders again over Himalayan glaciers
Claims of melting Himalayan glaciers have been cited in grant applications
Jonathan Leake, Science and Environment Editor
The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.
It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC's 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.
The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 - an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.
Since then, however, The Sunday Times has discovered that the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI.
One of them, announced earlier this month just before the scandal broke, resulted in a £310,000 grant from Carnegie.
An abstract of the grant application published on Carnegie's website said: "The Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate.
"One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region "will vanish within forty years as a result of global warming, resulting in widespread water shortages,"
The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.
The money was initially given to the Global Centre, an Icelandic Foundation which then channelled it, with Carnegie's involvement, to TERI.
The cash was acknowledged by TERI in a press release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt.
It said: ""According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades."
The same release also quoted Dr Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, back in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.
He now heads Pachauri's glaciology unit at TERI which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacier research.
Critics point out that Hasnain, of all people, should have known the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was bogus because he was meant to be a leading glaciologist specialising in the Himalayas.
Any suggestion that TERI has repeated an unchecked scientific claim without checking it, in order to win grants, could prove hugely embarrassing for Pachauri and the IPCC.
The second grant, from the EU, totalled £2.5m and was designed to "to assess the impact of Himalayan glaciers retreat".
It was part of the EU's HighNoon project, launched last May to fund research into how India might adapt to loss of glaciers.
In one presentation at last May's launch, Anastasios Kentarchos, of the European Commission's Climate Change and Environmental Risks Unit, specifically cited the bogus IPCC claims about glacier melt as a reason for pouring EU taxpayers' money into the project.
Pachauri spoke at the same presentation and Hasnain is understood to have been present in the audience.
The EU grant was split between leading European research institutions including Britain's Met Office, with TERI getting a major but unspecified share because it represented the host country.
The "Glaciergate" affair has seen Pachauri come under increasing pressure in India, prompting him to call a press conference yesterday (Saturday) where he dismissed calls for his resignation and said no action would be taken against the authors of the erroneous section of the IPCC report.
He said: "I have no intention of resigning from my position," adding the errors were unintentional and not significant in comparison to the entire report.
However, other questions remain. One of the most important is in connection with Pachauri's earnings.
In an interview with The Sunday Times he said his only income came from his salary at TERI. However TERI does not publish his salary and he refused to divulge it.
In India questions are also being asked about Pachauri's links with GloriOil, a Houston, Texas-based oil technology company that specialises in recovering extra oil from declining oil fields . Pachauri is listed as a founder and scientific advisor.
Critics say it is odd for a man committed to decarbonising energy supplies to be linked to an oil company.
The problems come at a bad time for the IPCC which is recruiting scientists for its fifth report into the science and impacts underlying global warming.
Yesterday, Pachauri said he intended to remain as director of the IPCC to oversee the fifth IPCC assessment report dealing with sea level rise and ice sheets, oceans, clouds and carbon accounting. The report is expected by 2014.
The Indian and Chinese governments have had a rethink on signing the Copenhagen Accord, officials said on Saturday, and the UN has also indefinitely postponed its Jan 31 deadline for countries to accede to the document.
An Indian official said that though the government had been thinking of signing the accord because it “did not have any legal teeth and would be good diplomatically”; it felt irked because of repeated messages from both UN officials and developed countries to accede to it.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has written to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon seeking a number of clarifications on the implications of the accord that India -- with five other countries -- had negotiated in the last moments of the Copenhagen climate summit in December, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“That letter, and the defeat of the Democrats in the Massachusetts bypoll, has forced the UN to postpone the deadline indefinitely,” an official said. “With the Democrats losing in one of their strongholds, the chances of the climate bill going through the US senate have receded dramatically.
“So if the US is not going to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent, which was a very weak target anyway, why should we make any commitment even if it does not have any legal teeth?” the official said.
China also appears in no mood to sign the accord.
“With the deadline postponed, we are not going to sign now,” said a Chinese official now here to take part in the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) meeting to chalk out a climate strategy.
The meeting of the four environment ministers Sunday is likely to end with the announcement of a fund they will set up to help other developing countries cope with the effects of climate change, said an official of the environment ministry.
Only four countries -- Australia, Canada, Papua New Guinea and the Maldives -- have signed the Copenhagen Accord so far, though Brazil, South Africa and South Korea have also indicated their willingness to do so.
Though Australia and Canada have signed, they have not indicated the greenhouse gas emission reductions they are committing under the accord -- something developed countries are supposed to do.
12 more glaciers that haven’t heard the news about global warming
January 25, 2010, 2:00 am
The glaciers are melting! The glaciers are melting! The glaciers are…uhhhhh…never mind.
Turns out the IPCC’s chicken little story that all the Himalayan glaciers are melting is just another exaggeration. Or fraud. Take your choice. You know, like the stats coming out of East Anglia CRU. And its claim that Antarctica is melting. And that Greenland’s ice cap is melting. And that sea levels are rising. And that the polar bears are dying. Fact is, some glaciers are retreating, but many others around the world are growing.
“But how is that possible? How can glaciers be growing when the world is warming up like a package of Jiffy-Pop in a microwave?”
Here are a dozen glaciers (or groups of glaciers) around the world that are growing almost as quickly as global warming skepticism.
1. Himalayan glaciers are growing, not shrinking
Things are not as they seemed to be in the IPCC report. Not only are the Himalayan glaciers not shrinking, they’re growing. Discovery reports:
Perched on the soaring Karakoram mountains in the Western Himalayas, a group of some 230 glaciers are bucking the global warming trend. They’re growing. Throughout much of the Tibetan Plateau, high-altitude glaciers are dwindling in the face of rising temperatures. The situation is potentially dire for the hundreds of millions of people living in China, India and throughout southeast Asia who depend on the glaciers for their water supply.
But in the rugged western corner of the plateau, the story is different, according to a new study. Among legendary peaks of Mt. Everest like K2 and Nanga Parbat, glaciers with a penthouse view of the world are growing, and have been for almost three decades.
“These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world,” John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha said. “And all of them are either holding still, or advancing.”
Source: Discovery
2. Alaska’s Hubbard Glacier. Growing. A lot.
Alaska’s Hubbard Glacier is advancing moving toward Gilbert Point near Yakutat at an average of seven feet per day.
The Army Corp of Engineers’ Hubbard Glacier website for has some great photos of the advancing behemoth.
Source: CDApress.com
3. Norwegian glaciers. Growing again.
IceAgeNow.com reports on the growth of Norwegian glaciers:
“After years of decline, glaciers in Norway are again growing, reports the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate. The actual magnitude of the growth, which appears to have begun over the last two years, has not yet been quantified, says NVE Senior Engineer Hallgeir Elvehøy.”The developments were originally reported by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).
Source: IceAgeNow.com
4. Glaciers growing on Canada’s tallest mountain
Canada.com tells the tale of glaciers growing on Canada’s tallest mountain:
“Canada’s tallest mountain, the Yukon’s towering Mount Logan, may have experienced a growth spurt.
“The University of Alaska aerial survey, conducted last summer with a laser altimeter by Fairbanks-based geoscientist Sandy Zirnheld, pegged Canada’s geographic zenith at 5,966 metres. That’s seven metres (23 feet) higher than the official height of 5,959 metres, determined in 1992 after a celebrated climb to the top by a team of Canadian researchers led by Mike Schmidt of the Geological Survey of Canada.
“Snow and ice accumulation is the most likely explanation,” Chris Larsen, the scientist leading the University of Alaska’s research on the continent’s northwest mountain ranges, said.”
Source: Canada.com
5. North to Alaska and more growing glaciers
Alaska’s glaciers have been in retreat for nearly 200 years. But now they’re advancing again.
MichNews.com reports the cold, hard facts:
“Unusually large amounts of Alaskan snow last winter were followed by unusually chilly temperatures there this summer. “In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years,” says Bruce Molnia of the U.S. Geological Survey, and author of The Glaciers of Alaska. “It’s been a long time on most glaciers where they’ve actually had positive mass balance (added thickness).”
“Overall, Molnia figures Alaska had lost 10–12,000 square kilometers of ice since 1800, the depths of the Little Ice Age. That’s enough ice to cover the state of Connecticut. Climate alarmists claim all the glaciers might disappear soon, but they haven’t looked at the long-term evidence of the 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles. During the Little Ice Age—1400 to 1850—Muir Glacier filled the whole of Glacier Bay. Since then, the glacier has retreated 57 miles.
Source: MichNews.com
6. Glaciers are growing in California. California?
You might be surprised to learn that the Golden State has glaciers. And the Associated Press says they’re growing:
“Global warming is shrinking glaciers all over the world, but the seven tongues of ice creeping down Mount Shasta’s flanks are a rare exception: They are the only known glaciers in the continental U.S. that are growing.”
Source: FoxNews.com
7. A glacier is growing on Washington’s Mt. St. Helens.
Mount Saint Helens has glaciers? But it’s an active volcano. But, but, but…
KATU-TV reports the details:
“On May 18, 1980, the once bucolic ice-cream cone shape that defined Mount St. Helens in Washington state disappeared in monstrous blast of ash, rock, gas, and heat.
“Inside the volcano, which was once a soft dome of snow but is now a gaping, steaming menace with an unpredictable streak, an unexpected phenomenon is taking place: a glacier is growing.
“In these days of global warming concerns and scientists showing alarming then-and-now images of glaciers disappearing from mountainsides, it may be the only growing glacier in America – or maybe the world.
Source: KATU.com
8. Glaciers are growing in France and Switzerland, too
Another continent has reported in. According to an article in the Journal of Geophysical Research, glaciers are growing in France and Switzerland, too:
The research was conducted by six scientists from leading agencies and departments in France and Switzerland that deal with hydrology and glaciology. The research was funded by Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (OSUG), the European Programs ALPCLIM and CARBOSOL, and by the city of Chamonix Mont-Blanc.Vincent et al. collected a variety of datasets that could help them understand how the high-elevation glaciers of Mont Blanc were impacted by variations and trends in climate. Among other findings, they found that the mass balance of the glaciers is strongly controlled by precipitation, not temperature.
Vincent et al. state “The most striking features of these figures are the small thickness changes observed over the 20th century. For both areas, thickness variations do not exceed ±15 m. The average changes are +2.6 m at Dôme du Goûter (please note that this glacier is growing) and -0.3 m (-12 inches) at Mont Blanc.
“Considering the uncertainty interval, i.e., ±5 m, it can be concluded that no significant thickness change is detectable over most of these areas”. “All these results suggest that the SMBDôme du Goûter and Mont Blanc did not experience any significant changes over the 20th century.”
Source: World Climate Report
9. New Zealand’s largest glaciers are growing
Growing may not be a strong enough word. They’re surging. IceAgeNow.com reports the story:
Guides say the Franz Josef and the Fox glaciers continued advancing down their valleys in the past year and may soon be close to positions reached 40 years ago.
That (supposedly) contrasts sharply with the plight of many glaciers elsewhere on the planet, which are (supposedly) shrinking three times faster than they were in the 1980s, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS).
…
Franz Josef Glacier Guides base manager Tom Arnold estimated the Franz Josef and the Fox had advanced hundreds of meters in the past year.
Source: IceAgeNow.com
10. Russia’s glaciers are growing, too
The Russians don’t believe the IPCC forecasts, but they do believe their own eyes.
In 2002, a 22-million ton piece of ice broke off the gigantic Maili Glacier and crashed down a steep gorge into the village of Kami. It killed more than 150 people and injured hundreds more.The 500-foot wall of ice had been growing for six years. The Maili Glacier is just one of several glaciers in the North Caucasus Mountains that have been expanding at an alarming rate.
Other towns in the region have been partially buried by these advancing walls of ice. One local scientist in southern Russia said, “We may be seeing the beginning of a new great ice age!!!”
Source: IceAgeNow.com
11. Argentina’s Perito Moreno glacier is, you guessed it, growing
Is there a continent where glaciers aren’t growing? If so, South America isn’t one of them. Consider Argentina’s Perito Moreno glacier:
Nourished by Andean snowmelt, the glacier constantly grows even as it spawns icebergs the size of apartment buildings into a frigid lake, maintaining a nearly perfect equilibrium since measurements began more than a century ago.
“We’re not sure why this happens,” said Andres Rivera, a glacialist with the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, Chile. “But not all glaciers respond equally to climate change.”
The Daily Mail UK ran a story on July 31, 2009 about the horrors of global warming. It was accompanied, for some inexplicable reason, by contradictory photos that showed the remarkable growth of Iceland’s Breidamerkurjokull glacier.
Their headline screamed, “How global warming is changing the face of the northern hemisphere.” The photos and caption told a story that was, you’ll pardon the expression, the polar opposite of what the article described.
Hoaxes: Climate researchers and the Weather Channel's founder accuse NASA of the same data manipulation as Britain's Climate Research Unit. Were weather stations cherry-picked to hide the temperature drop?
We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.
In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.
As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA's two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of "creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based."
Joseph D'Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NASA "systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations." The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35.
E. Michael Smith, a computer programming expert who worked with D'Aleo, said he found "patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked liked dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations." The more he looked, the more he found "patterns of deletion that could not be accidental."
Stations in places such as the Andes and Bolivia have virtually vanished, meaning, according to D'Aleo, temperatures from these areas are now "determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon." He says it's as if Minneapolis stopped reporting and its average temperature was extrapolated from readings in St. Louis and Kansas City.
Smith argues that the decrease in stations used and the selectivity of locations make NASA's data and conclusions suspect. D'Aleo goes further, saying such cherry-picking and data manipulation are a "scientific travesty" committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.
To us, it looks like just another example of ideologically driven climate deceit following the Climate Research Unit scandal and the fraudulent claim by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers would soon vanish.
Joined: 01 Feb 2009 Posts: 413 Location: South Essex
Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 9:06 pm Post subject:
chek may have been reassigned to prop up the failing myth of AGW on other mainstream forums, where there is thankfully much dissent occurring. _________________ The poster previously known as "Newspeak International"
Thats a refreshing change to see those comentators tell it like they did.
I thought they were well balanced with it and said somethings got to be done.
Even the 'Monkton Purple' quote; 'club of rome' came to mind.
Thats a refreshing change to see those comentators tell it like they did.
I thought they were well balanced with it and said somethings got to be done.
Even the 'Monkton Purple' quote; 'club of rome' came to mind.
Yes "fair and balanced",leaving the viewer with what was last said "he's not qualified to have an opinion" unlike the UN's guru Hanson! _________________ The poster previously known as "Newspeak International"
Thats a refreshing change to see those comentators tell it like they did.
I thought they were well balanced with it and said somethings got to be done.
Even the 'Monkton Purple' quote; 'club of rome' came to mind.
Yes "fair and balanced",leaving the viewer with what was last said "he's not qualified to have an opinion" unlike the UN's guru Hanson!
Some would see the scam of the taxes (I think those comentators may see it) and one said both sides clearly at the end (not the Hanson part) were as bad as each other.
If Monkton was that concerned about taxes (money distribution, fairly and justly) he would be for monetary reform ect and not scare monger people to carry on regardless. He could have also said if the Banks want to make change, they could do it without any taxes. They issue money to what they want done.
Andrew Bolt, From: Herald Sun, * January 27, 2010 12:00AM
ONCE global warming was the "great moral challenge of our generation". Or so claimed the Prime Minister.
But suddenly it's the great con that's falling to bits around Kevin Rudd's ears.
In fact, so fast is global warming theory collapsing that in his flurry of recent speeches to outline his policies for the new decade, Rudd has barely mentioned his "moral challenge" at all.
Take his long Australia Day reception speech on Sunday. Rudd talked of our ageing population and of building stuff, of taxes, hospitals and schools - but dared not say one word about the booga booga he used to claim could destroy our economy, Kakadu, the Great Barrier Reef and 750,000 coastal homes.
What's happened?
Answer: in just the past few months has come a cascade of evidence that the global warming scare is based on often dodgy science and even outright fraud.
Here are just the top 10 new signs that catastrophic man-made warming may be just another beat-up, like swine flu, SARS, and the Y2K bug.
1. Climategate
THE rot for Rudd started last November with the leaking of emails from the Climatic Research Unit of Britain's University of East Anglia.
Those emails from many of the world's top climate scientists showed them conspiring to sack sceptical scientists from magazines, hide data from sceptics, and cover up errors.
One of the scientists, CRU boss Phil Jones, even boasted of having found a "trick" to "hide the decline" in recent temperature records.
Jones was also on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so influential in convincing us our gasses are heating the planet that it won the Nobel Prize.
But he showed how political the IPCC actually is by promising in yet another email that he and another colleague would do almost anything to keep sceptical studies out of IPCC reports.
Just as damning was the admission by IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth that the world isn't warming as the IPCC said it must: "We cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
2. The Copenhagen farce
MORE than 40,000 politicians, scientists and activists flew to Copenhagen last month - in clouds of greenhouse gasses - to get all nations to agree to make the rest of us cut our own emissions to "stop" global warming.
This circus ended in total failure. China, the world's biggest emitter, refused to choke its growth. So did India. Now the United States is unlikely to make cuts, either, with Barack Obama's presidency badly wounded and the economy so sick.
Not only did this show that Rudd's planned tax on our emissions will now be even more suicidally useless. It also suggested world leaders can't really think global warming is so bad.
3. The Himalayan scare
RUDD has quoted the IPCC as his authority on global warming, claiming it's a group of "guys in white coats" who "just measure things". But the IPCC also just makes things up.
Take this claim from its 2007 report: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."
In fact, we now know this bizarre claim was first made by a little-known Indian scientist in an interview for an online magazine, and then copied into a report by the green group WWF.
From there, the IPCC lifted it almost word for word for its own 2007 report, without checking if it was true.
It wasn't, of course, as the IPCC last week conceded. The glaciers will be around for at least centuries more.
But why did the IPCC run this mad claim in the first place?
The IPCC's Dr Murari Lal, the co-ordinating lead author responsible, says he knew all along there was no peer-reviewed research to back it up.
"(But) we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians ... "
Note: you are told not the truth, but what will scare you best.
4. Pachauri's response
BUT what smells just as much is how IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, a former railway engineer, first tried to defend this "mistake" by accusing sceptical scientists of practising "voodoo science".
Deny and abuse. That's the IPCC way.
Even more suspiciously, Syed Hasnain, the scientist who first made the false claim, then turned out to be now employed by The Energy Research Institute, headed by ... er, Pachauri.
More astonishing still, only two weeks ago TERI won up to $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation to study exactly Hasnain's bogus claim. See how cash follows a good scare?
5. Pachauri's conflicts
IN fact, Pachauri and TERI do amazingly well from his IPCC job.
Britain's Sunday Telegraph this month revealed TERI had created a global business network since Pachauri became IPCC chairman in 2002.
Its recent donors include Deutsche Bank, Toyota, Yale University - and, sadly, Rudd, who last year handed over $1 million, hoping to win influence with such a big UN honcho.
Pachauri himself is now a director or adviser to a score of banks, investment institutions and carbon traders, many involved in areas directly affected by IPCC policies.
He denies any wrongdoing, and is not paid by the IPCC. But see again how cash follows a scare, and ask if the IPCC chief has a conflict of interest.
6. The green hand revealed
WE'VE seen how the IPCC just copied its false claims about the Himalayas from a report by WWF, a green activist group which earn donations by preaching such doom.
In fact, the IPCC's 2007 report cites WWF documents as "evidence" at least another 15 times.
Elsewhere it cites a non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed paper from another activist body, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, as its sole proof that global warming could devastate African agriculture.
Whose agenda is the IPCC pushing?
7. More fake IPCC claims
THIS week came more evidence that the IPCC sexed up its 2007 report, this time when it claimed the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s", thanks to global warming.
In fact, the claim was picked out of an unpublished report by a London risk consultant, who later changed his mind and said "the idea that catastrophes are rising in cost because of climate change is completely misleading".
8. New research on our gasses
AT least four new papers by top scientists cast doubt on the IPCC claim that our carbon dioxide emissions are strongly linked to global warming.
One, published in Nature, shows the world had ice age activity even when atmospheric CO2 was four times the level of our pre-industrial times.
Another, by NASA medallist John Christy and David Douglass, shows global temperatures did not go up as much as expected from man-made emissions over the past three decades.
9. New Australian research
JAMES Cook University researcher Peter Ridd says Australian scientists have cried wolf over the threat to the Great Barrier Reef from global warming, and the reef was actually in "bloody brilliant shape". The alarmist CSIRO this month also backed away from blaming global warming for a drought in Tasmania and in the Murray-Darling basin, saying "the jury is still out". A new paper by another Australian academic, Assoc Prof Stewart Franks, says the Murray-Darling drought is natural, and has nothing to do with man-made warming.
10. The world still won't warm
AND still the world hasn't warmed since 2001, even though we pump out more emissions than ever.
Even professional alarmist Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers, admits "we haven't seen a continuation of that (warming) trend" and "the computer modelling and the real world data disagree".
And with Europe, the United States and China hit with record cold and snow this winter, no wonder Kevin Rudd has suddenly gone cold on global warming, the mad faith that has cost us so many futile billions already.
The edifice crumbles: top climatologist openly breaks with Climategate conspirators
January 26, 2010
Further damning revelations are pouring in from the gaping wound that has inflicted the fast unraveling theory of the green monster that is man made global warming. As reported today by By Marc Morano of Climate Depot, Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has split ranks with other members of the discredited “hockey team” of climatologists exposed for fraudulently hiding and destroying data in the Climategate scandal that broke on November 19, 2009.
Christy served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 for the 3rd assessment report and detailed in these new revelations he explains how he personally witnessed UN scientists attempting to distort the science for political purposes. But he fell from favour for proposing that the IPCC allow for well-credentialed climate scientists to craft a chapter on an alternative view presenting evidence for low climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases.
“I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol,” Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007.
Christy’s statements carry even more weight when we examine the considerable pressure also being applied to him to keep quiet about the cracks appearing in the dodgy science dossiers being churned out for the IPCC. We get an insight into the conspiracy of secrecy Christy was opposing as he is one of the climatologists whose leaked emails are part of the Climategate scandal.
In the leaked CRU email dated Thu, 24 May 2001 11:33, Michael Mann was critical of Christy and scolded him for publicly showing dissent for not agreeing with Mann that 20th century temperatures were higher than the Medieval warm period:
“So do I [Mann] understand correctly that you are referring to the results of Dahl-Jensen et al as conflicting with what we say in the chapter? At the face of it, this argument has no merit whatsoever. I think we should all use a better explanation from you, since you seem to be arguing publically that the Dahl-Jensen et al record undermines what we’ve said in the chapter.”
Professor Phil Jones again tries to indicate the peer pressure they are all under not to make public admissions damaging to their ever more flawed theory in an email sent to Christy dated Tue Jul 5, 2005;
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”
The unrelenting peer pressure being applied to Christy continues, this time coming from Michael Mann. Climatologists, Neville Nichols and Phil Jones discuss the issue in another leaked CRU email dated Wed Jul 6 15:07:45 2005.
“I know I [Nichols] could have asked John [Christy] about all of this, but I suspect he feels a bit over-burdened and harassed at the moment, and I didn’t want to add to the pressure on him, so thanks for passing this stuff on to me.”
Further emails substantiate that the “hockey team” were systematically applying peer pressure to convince Christy that recent weather balloon data (out of kilt with dodgy ground thermometer readings) was, itself in error.
Phil Jones admits, “the sondes [weather balloons] clearly show too much cooling in the stratosphere.”
The fact weather balloons were detecting cooling rather than warming in the tropical stratosphere was a key signal that the whole theory of anthropogenic global warming was probably wrong. Thus, to avoid embarrassment the “hockey team” rounded on Christy to conspire to suppress these facts.
Professor Christy has since proposed major reforms and changes to the way the UN IPCC report is produced. Christy has rejected the UN approach that produces “a document designed for uniformity and consensus.” Christy presented his views at a UN meeting in 2009. “An alternative view section written by well-credentialed climate scientists is needed,” Christy said. “If not, why not? What is there to fear? In a scientific area as uncertain as climate, the opinions of all are required,” he added. ‘The reception to my comments was especially cold’
Defamatory? So sue me, Gavin. I triple dog dare you.
January 26, 2010, contributed by John O’Sullivan
Earlier this month we brought you the story regarding the outrageous dropping of 806 ‘cold’ weather stations in one year. Now we bring you a follow up story that shows this controversy is not going to go away. We’ve now learned that there has been more shameful cherry picking of temperature stations in Canada where, since the 1970s, the number of local stations included in the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database has dropped from 600 stations to only 35 stations today. And, the really shocking statistic is that the now discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is taking data from only one of 100 reliable weather stations for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle, to be used by climatologists to calculate global average temperatures.
That solitary station — Eureka, on Ellesmere Island — has been entered in the 2009 (NOAA) database to measure the temperature for the Canadian portion of the Arctic between 60°W and 141°W longitude, a vast area larger than the size of the whole of Western Europe.
NOAA is responsible for compiling an important database of historical surface temperatures used by the world’s climate scientists. NOAA is sent readings from thousands of local weather stations across the planet by the World Meteorological Organization, which receives temperatures from national governments around the world.
But what is even more embarrassing for the IPCC, after a week where embarrassments haven’t stopped snowing them under, is that by ignoring the other 99 temperature measuring stations kept in good order by the Canadian government, the IPPC is depriving itself of essential data in the one key area of the planet that they need to study most carefully to find proof of man made global warming.
The Vancouver Sun quotes Sujata Raisinghani, a spokesperson for Environment Canada, in an e-mail to Canwest News Service on Friday, who said:
“Missing observations in an area where the climate is expected to respond more quickly to external influences, such as the Arctic, may, however, result in underestimates of the amount of climatic change. The Arctic is expected to warm more quickly than other parts of the globe as a result of human induced greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, if stations are missing in the Arctic, the Arctic contribution to warming will be underestimated.”
As reported in climategate.com weeks before the story hit the mainstream news, two American researchers, Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith (‘Chiefio’), a computer programmer, proved that scientists at NOAA and at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies are deliberately dropping weather stations from the data, particularly stations in colder locations such as northern Canada.
As shocking as this seems, it’s stories like this that are being brought to you by Internet blogs such as climategate.com and a few British newspapers. It seems that foreign journalists and web users find a way to get the scoops that the American news media can’t or won’t report.
As our previous story shows, this “trick” is one way that alarmist climatologists have been hyping up climate anxiety to world politicians. This story substantiates claims of cherry-picking records to produce warmer-than-actual mean temperature trends. Ironically, it also means that world governments are being deprived of important data that could help, rather than hinder their quest to prove man made climate change (AGW).
On Friday, Gavin Schmidt, a senior alarmist climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, denied that he and other scientists had cherry-picked the data to manipulate the outcome.
“The idea that we’re fraudulently cutting out stations is appallingly defamatory and ignorant,” he said.
Well, Gavin, you would say that, wouldn’t you? So, I say back to you, if you feel my reporting is “defamatory and ignorant,” then put up or shut up; please feel free to file suit, but make sure you spell my name right: there’s an apostrophe in O’Sullivan.
The full story, by the Vancouver Sun, can be found here.
From Obama's "State of the Union" address a few days ago is this few seconds of reality. Man-made Climate Change is now reduced to an "in" joke. Still the nonsense rumbles on.
Even the BBC (YES!! even the BBC!!) had someone telling the truth on radio4 last night. Watered down truth about the liars at the University of East Anglia but they are starting to embrace reality as their options are seriously impaired now.
Its LOCAL I tell you! The Gulf Stream has gone on holiday causing China to freeze. You know it makes sense. We need to tax cow farts before we all boil/freeze/drown. Does the question that is the name of this thread need to be asked any more, or have the fraudsters finally been laughed into defeat?
CHINA PORTS FREAK WEATHER ALERT
By David Hughes
Published: Tue, 26 January 2010
Freak weather conditions and/or abnormal weather patterns have been reported in several parts of the world during recent months warns the American P&I Club. One of the latest examples is a significant build-up of sea ice in some major northern Chinese ports, the volume exceeding, it says, anything experienced in more than 30 years.
In an alert to its members, the club says the problem is centred around Bohai on the northern Yellow Sea coast, affecting ports such as Bayuquan and Dalian. At Bayuquan, patches of ice 500-600mm thick have formed in some places, while lesser patches have been seen in the immediate vicinity of the port.
Three icebreakers are working to avoid delays to ships, while the local Maritime Safety Authority is strictly supervising inbound and outbound vessel traffic.
Other northern ports – such as Jingtang, Caofeidian and Xingang – are said to be not so seriously affected. On January 17, the Chinese National Sea Weather Forecast Station reported that floating ice around Liaodong Gulf extended as far as some 60 nautical miles from shore, at Bohai Gulf around 22 miles, Northern Yellow Sea around 14 miles, and Laizhou Gulf around 33 miles.
However, with more cold weather fronts expected later, ice coverage around the Bohai coast could expand, according to the club’s correspondents in China, Huatai Agency & Consultant Services Ltd.
The club advises that vessels scheduled to call at northern ports, especially Bayuquan, should be ready for extreme temperatures and ensure Port State Control requirements are strictly followed to avoid unnecessary delay.
By James Delingpole Environment Last updated: January 30th, 2010
A mighty outpouring of rage today from Philip Stott, foaming with righteous indignation, on the life and imminent death of the AGW scam.
Part of him is naturally enthralled:
… as an independent academic, it has been fascinating to witness the classical collapse of a Grand Narrative, in which social and philosophical theories are being played out before our gaze. It is like watching the Berlin Wall being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face – political, economic, and scientific.
He recognises that this an era of massive geopolitical power shifts:
The humiliating exclusion of Britain and the EU at the end of the Copenhagen débâcle was partially to be expected, but it was brutal in its final execution. The swing of power to the BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) had likewise been signified for some time, but, again, it came with precipitate ease, leaving even the American President, Barack Obama, with no doubts as to where the political agenda on climate change was now heading, namely to the developing world, but especially to the East, and to the Pacific Rim. The dirigiste tropes of ‘Old Europe’, with its love of meaningless targets and carbon capping, will no longer carry weight, while Obama himself has been straitjacketed by the voters of Massachusetts, by the rust-belt Democrats, by a truculent Congress, by an increasingly-sceptical and disillusioned American public, but, above all, by the financial crisis. Nothing will now be effected that for a single moment curbs economic development, from China to Connecticut, from Africa to Alaska.
But his overwhelming mood is one of white-hot fury at the way so many of his fellow scientists have colluded in this nauseating conspiracy:
And what can one say about ‘the science’? ‘The ‘science’ is already paying dearly for its abuse of freedom of information, for unacceptable cronyism, for unwonted arrogance, and for the disgraceful misuse of data at every level, from temperature measurements to glaciers to the Amazon rain forest. What is worse, the usurping of the scientific method, and of justified scientific scepticism, by political policies and political propaganda could well damage science sensu lato – never mind just climate science – in the public eye for decades. The appalling pre-Copenhagen attacks by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and his climate-change henchman, Ed Miliband, on those who dared to be critical of the science of climate change were some of the most unforgivable I can recall.
I first met Professor Stott a couple of years ago. He’s emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London, and I tracked him down because in those days he was pretty much the ONLY senior scientific academic anywhere in Britain brave enough publicly to dispute the AGW ‘consensus.”
We had lunch. “There are many more scientists who think the way I do,” he told me. “But they don’t want to stick their heads above the parapet. They don’t want to lose their jobs.” We talked a bit about the loneliness of our position, how impossible it was to place dissenting articles anywhere in the media, how people who thought like us were treated like pariahs.
Now suddenly it has all changed utterly. And you know what? I’m in no mood for being magnanimous in victory. I want the lying, cheating, fraudulent scientists prosecuted and fined or imprisoned. I want warmist politicians like Brown and disgusting Milibands booted out and I want Conservative fellow-travellers who are still pushing this green con trick – that’ll be you, David Cameron, you Greg Clark, you Tim Yeo, you John Gummer, to name but four – to be punished at the polls for their culpable idiocy.
For years I’ve been made to feel a pariah for my views on AGW. Chris Booker has had the same experience, as has Richard North, Benny Peiser, Lord Lawson, Philip Stott and those few others of us who recognised early on that the AGW thing stank. Now it’s payback time and I take small satisfaction from seeing so many rats deserting their sinking ship. I don’t want them on my side. I want to see them in hell, reliving scenes from Hieronymus Bosch.
Yeah, maybe it isn’t the Christian way. But screw ‘em. It’s not as though they haven’t all been screwing us for long enough.
Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 431 Location: North East England
Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2010 8:49 pm Post subject:
There's definitely a change in tack, the new emphasis seems to be on damage limitation, whilst not admitting the wholesale dishonesty that seems to permeate the AGW movement. I thought this was one of the most appalling articles I've read for years, but on the other hands it shows the AGWer's are running scared that their gravy train is about to be derailed. Reading the comments at the end of the actual articale was clear evidence of this.........
Quote:
From The Times January 25, 2010
Don’t let glacier howler cloud bigger picture
Climate change is not a religion: that’s why we can admit error
Mark Lynas
Warning: I am about to make a damaging and embarrassing admission on climate change. Here goes. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is not the Bible. Its statements are not gospel. They are subject to revision in the light of new evidence or the discovery of inaccuracies.
That is why climate change is science, not religion. Nothing is settled and sacred; all is subject to constant revision.
The IPCC’s mistake on the Himalayan glaciers is embarrassing, not just because it is wrong, but because it is so obviously wrong. The warning that these immense ice-fields could be gone by 2035 always struck me as absurd — the Himalayas contain the highest peaks in the world, and the ice that clads their upper slopes is the greatest mass of frozen water outside of the poles. The glaciers may be in rapid decline, but they aren’t going to disappear in 30, or even a hundred, years.
That doesn’t mean that this is a non-issue, merely that the likely rates of glacial retreat are improperly understood. There is a desperate need for quality research on Himalayan glaciers, given their vital importance to major rivers that sustain millions of people in Asia. The IPCC included the erroneous 2035 figure probably because there was no serious research to rely on.
So what lessons can be learnt? No one has a monopoly on truth, not even earnest environmentalists. But nor does one mistake invalidate an enormous body of knowledge, gathered over many years by hundreds of experts, which paints a picture of a planet endangered by continuing emissions of greenhouse gases. The IPCC process is rare evidence that our species really is intelligent; that it can marshal and assess vast quantities of data — and act on the results.
We learn from mistakes, not successes; in science this is especially true. The politicised debate around climate science, while it can be poisonous, should at least keep researchers on their toes. Nothing is worse for scientific progress than lots of experts sitting around constantly agreeing with one another.
The sceptics would be more useful though if they were truly sceptical, challenging evidence and examining it rigorously. Instead, most believe any new theory, however implausible, that allows them to ignore the reality of climate change. This is denial, not scepticism. Challenge the “facts” presented by the green lobby; but don’t reject the overall conclusions of the IPCC — the most important joint scientific body ever established — just because they are ideologically inconvenient.
Mark Lynas is the author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
The most galling part was this - "The warning that these immense ice-fields could be gone by 2035 always struck me as absurd". Maybe so, but this prominent propagandist/liar chose to say nothing as long as this particular lie served his cause, only when those claims have been proven as false did he choose to speak out......
Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 431 Location: North East England
Posted: Tue Feb 02, 2010 4:36 am Post subject:
That was a very interesting link, thanks for posting it. The various interviews and often evasive answering of the environmentalists lent further credence to suspicions of what AGWer's really want.
Is it about the environment or is it a quasi-religion? How much is truly about the environment as opposed to preaching their views of how people should behave? The real conservationists I know, who are out in the countryside every day whether they're paid workers or volunteers, and actually look after the natural environment have very little time for 'environmentalism - the cause' as constantly pushed at us by the media.......
It was broadcast on the same night,so needless to say the BBC are relentlessly pushing this subject with no dissenters allowed.
Shame all this hot air about stopping climate change is based on a series rather large lies isn't it! _________________ The poster previously known as "Newspeak International"
There's no doubt that we should desist from purchasing the overpriced Duchy Original products
What a complete organic surplus quaint _________________ http://www.exopolitics-leeds.co.uk/introduction
I've been contributing to a forum for a couple of years that deals solely with global warming and my personal opinion is that it's an overrated sham.
Earth is in a Holocene phase that began after the last ice age and to the best of good science's knowledge, the 1º F global temperature rise over the last 100 years is quite normal and acceptable.
That 1º F rise coincides with two occurrences, the Industrial Revolution and the end of the LIA (Little Ice Age).
Alarmists insist that CO2 is the main climate change culprit, but IMO, the warming is quite natural and we humans are much better off now than those who lived during the LIA, when times were cold and desparate.
My belief is that natural climate cycles, both the long and short term variety, of which there are many, are the only cause of warming and cooling, with maybe a gram or two of human emissions as a contributing factor.
CO2 alone doesn't have the power to alter climate, the Sun is our only heat source and water vapour is the most powerful GHG.
Add the PDO, El Niño and La Niña, SST, Earth's tilt and a few other factors and that's all we need.
Reducing a tiny trace gas like CO2 by a tiny amount is futile in the extreme and can only be described as a global con.
Introduction
Supporters of the glacial theory have yet to solve the problem of its cause. A.P. Coleman referred to this as a "terrifying question," but most geologists have apparently become immune to the terror and accept the glacial theory as something beyond question, some even saying it is a "proven fact." Typical is the following statement [Bird, 1972, p. 22, 23]:
Although the mid-twentieth century accepts the Great Ice Age as a proven fact, in the early 1900's there were still some who rejected it. ... In North America, the new ideas caught men's minds very early. In 1846, Agassiz came to Harvard. His advocacy stimulated tremendous interest, but made few converts for two decades. Today the debate is over. We know as surely as we know anything about the earth's past that repeated cold periods have buried the northern continents in ice during the last million years.
Perhaps this level of confidence about the Ice Age is temporary. At any rate, the problem of a cause has been a vexing one, and on this page some of the failed theories are briefly described.
http://www.sentex.net/~tcc/iceage.html
Daily Mangle
Filed under: Climate Science Instrumental Record Paleoclimate Reporting on climate— group @ 15 February 2010
Yesterday, the Daily Mail of the UK published a predictably inaccurate article entitled “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995″.
The title itself is a distortion of what Jones actually said in an interview with the BBC. What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate. It is also worth noting that the CRU record indicates slightly less warming than other global temperature estimates such as the GISS record.
The article also incorrectly equates instrumental surface temperature data that Jones and CRU have assembled to estimate the modern surface temperature trends with paleoclimate data used to estimate temperatures in past centuries, falsely asserting that the former “has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’”.
Finally, the article intentionally distorts comments that Jones made about the so-called “Medieval Warm Period”. Jones stated in his BBC interview that “There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia” and that “For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.”
These are statements with which we entirely agree, and they are moreover fully consistent with the conclusions of the most recent IPCC report, and the numerous peer-reviewed publications on this issue since. Those conclusions are that recent Northern Hemisphere warming is likely unprecedented in at least a millennium (at least 1300 years, in fact), and that evidence in the Southern Hemisphere is currently too sparse for confident conclusions. Mann et al in fact drew those same conclusions in their most recent work on this problem (PNAS, 2008).
Unfortunately, these kinds of distortions are all too common in the press nowadays and so we must all be prepared to respond to those journalists and editors who confuse the public with such inaccuracies.
Update 2/16/10. Phil Jones has confirmed to us that our interpretations of his comments in the BBC interview are indeed the correct ones, and that he agrees with the statements in our piece above. He and his CRU colleagues have also put up an response to some of the false allegations in a previous piece in the UK Guardian. We’ll report further such developments as they happen.
Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 431 Location: North East England
Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 3:48 am Post subject:
Quote:
From The Times February 16, 2010
Science blogger finds errors in Met Office climate change records
Hannah Devlin
A science blogger has uncovered a catalogue of errors in Met Office records that form a central part of the scientific evidence for global warming.
The mistakes, which led to the data from a large number of weather stations being discarded or misused, had been overlooked by professional scientists and were only discovered when the Met Office’s Hadley Centre made data publicly available in December after the “climategate” e-mail row.
Although the errors do not alter the bigger picture on climate change, they have been seized upon as a further sign that scientific institutions have not been sufficiently transparent. “It makes you wonder how many other problems there are in the data,” said John Graham-Cumming, the programmer who spotted the mistakes. “The whole idea of doing science without releasing your data is quite worrying.”
Since being alerted of the problems last month the Met Office has issued a corrected version of its land-based temperature record on its website.
“We are grateful to Dr Graham- Cumming, but they are quite minor changes,” said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office. “It shows how open we are. We have put an exhaustive amount of information out there to show people exactly what we do.”
The errors relate to the calculation of the average global temperature trend since 1850, based on measurements from land-based thermometers. The record is regarded as one of the most robust pieces of empirical evidence for global warming during the past century.
After trying to reproduce figures shown in scientific publications and on the Met Office website, Dr Graham-Cumming identified a number of problems with the way measurements from Australian weather stations were being averaged. He found that data from seven stations were being accidentally discarded. Data from a further 112 Australian stations, 28 per cent of the total, were not being fully included in calculations of year-on-year temperature differences.
“I’m not a climate sceptic, I think it’s pretty sure that the world is warming up, but this does show why the raw data and not just the results should be available,” said Dr Graham-Cumming.
During the checking procedure Met Office officials discovered further problems with US temperature calculations. They realised that 121 of the US stations did not have unique identifier codes, meaning that data for these stations was either being overwritten or assigned to the wrong location.
When all of the errors identified were corrected, the temperature trend remained well within the 95 per cent confidence range of the original plot, meaning that the difference would not be considered scientifically significant. There was also no suggestion that the errors had led to an exaggeration of the amount of warming.
Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said that it was vital for the credibility of the climate science community that people took seriously freedom of information requests and access to data. “Some people have been slow to recognise the demand for this kind of openness. You can’t pick and choose to whom you make the data available,” he said. However, he warned against creating an environment in which scientists were vilified for coming out with a view that was later shown to be wrong.
Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 431 Location: North East England
Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 3:56 am Post subject:
Quote:
From The Times February 15, 2010
UN must investigate warming ‘bias’, says former climate chief ‘Every error exaggerated the impact of change’
Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor
The UN body that advises world leaders on climate change must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, according to its former chairman.
In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem.
Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.
The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report.
The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.
The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.
Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”
He said that the IPCC should employ graduate science students to check the sources of each claim made in its next report, due in 2013. “Graduate students would love to be involved and they could really dig into the references and see if they really do support what is being said.”
He said that the next report should acknowledge that some scientists believed the planet was warming at a much slower rate than has been claimed by the majority of scientists.
“We should always be challenged by sceptics,” he said. “The IPCC’s job is to weigh up the evidence. If it can’t be dismissed, it should be included in the report. Point out it’s in the minority and, if you can’t say why it’s wrong, just say it’s a different view.”
Dr Pachauri has not responded to questions put to him by The Times, despite sending a text message saying that he would do so.
Professor Watson has held discussions with Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, about creating a new climate research group to supplement the work of the IPCC and to help restore the credibility of climate science.
He said that the scheme to create what he called a “Wikipedia for climate change” was at an early stage but the intention was to establish an online network of climate science research available to anyone with access to the internet and subject to permanent peer review by other scientists.
He said that the project would allow scientists to “synthesise all of the observational record in real-time, not every 5-7 years like the IPCC”.
He rejected concerns that the project would undermine the IPCC’s authority. “It would have to be done so it was complimentary and not a challenge to the IPCC,” he said.
A spokesman for Mr Gore’s office in Nashville, Tennessee, declined to comment on the project.
Meanwhile, a member of the inquiry team investigating allegations of misconduct by climate scientists has admitted that he holds strong views on climate change and that this contradicts a founding principle of the inquiry. Geoffrey Boulton, who was appointed last week by the inquiry chairman, Sir Muir Russell, said he believed that human activities were causing global warming.
Sir Muir issued a statement last week claiming that the inquiry members, who are investigating leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia, did not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.
Professor Boulton told The Times: “I may be rapped over the knuckles by Sir Muir for saying this, but I think that statement needs to be clarified. I think the committee needs someone like me who is close to the field of climate change and it would be quite amazing if that person didn’t have a view on one side or the other.”
Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 431 Location: North East England
Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 3:59 am Post subject:
Quote:
From The Sunday Times February 14, 2010
World may not be warming, say scientists
Jonathan Leake
The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.
In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.
It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.
The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.
“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.
His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.
Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.
Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.
In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.
Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.
“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.
Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report.
“It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,” he said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.”
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.
Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”
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