Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 431 Location: North East England
Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 4:10 am Post subject:
Its hard to believe that anyone who reads and examines the subject of AGW with an open mind can still believe its not at least partly a scam.....
Nonetheless, for those that do, or doubters who seek evidence to support their scepticism a hugely impressive new piece of research has been published. Sadly its too large a file to quote here in its entirety, but I'd urge everyone to have a good read.....
SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECORDS: POLICY DRIVEN DECEPTION?
by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts
One thing that particularly struck me was the emphasis on Urban Heat Islands. These were a well established fact long before AGW was ever an issue, ask anyone who studied Geography to an advanced level before the late 1990's. Yet one of the chief tactics of AGW scammers has been to deride UHI as some kind of modern myth, invented by sceptics.
Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 431 Location: North East England
Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 5:04 am Post subject:
Andrew. wrote:
Quick bury the posts
Hmmm, yes I wondered myself just how long the original and scholarly (but sceptical) research by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts will be allowed to remain on the web, before the website is hacked, servers caused to crash, etc.....?
Hmmm, yes I wondered myself just how long the original and scholarly (but sceptical) research by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts will be allowed to remain on the web, before the website is hacked, servers caused to crash, etc.....?
Joined: 30 Nov 2006 Posts: 575 Location: the eyevolution
Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2010 12:27 am Post subject:
Has AGW now become a dangerous cult. It's advocates are killing themselves...
Are you watching Cass Sunstein..?
No 9/11 Truther ever did this did they?
Article from Latin American Herald Tribune
Quote:
Baby Survives 3 Days in Argentina with Bullet Wound in Chest
BUENOS AIRES – A 7-month-old baby survived alone for three days with a bullet wound in its chest beside the bodies of its parents and brother, who died in an apparent suicide pact brought on by the couple’s terror of global warming, the Argentine press said Saturday.
The incident, reported by the daily Clarin, occurred in a modest dwelling in the city of Goya in the northeastern province of Corrientes, where Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 22, lived with their two small children.
According to sources cited by the Buenos Aires morning paper, the couple’s neighbors smelled a strong odor coming from the Lotero’s house on Thursday.
Police entered the home and found a Dantesque scene: the lifeless bodies of the couple, each shot in the chest, and their 2-year-old son, who had been shot in the back.
In another room, police found a 7-month-old baby still alive but covered in blood from a bullet wound in the chest. It was taken to hospital immediately and its condition is improving hourly, according to doctors’ reports.
The cops found a letter on the table alluding to the couple’s worry about global warming and their anger at the government’s lack of interest in the matter.
Senators release Climategate report
By Erin Voegele and Kris Bevill
Posted March 1, 2010
The minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, led by Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., released a report Feb. 23 exploring the controversy surrounding the climate change-related emails and documents leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The report, titled “‘Consensus’ Exposed: The CRU Controversy,” examines the extent to which the CRU documents and emails affected the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as how errors in the IPCC’s science impacted the U.S. EPA’s GHG endangerment finding.
According to the report, some of the scientists involved in the CRU Climategate controversy violated ethical principles and, possibly, federal laws. Information released by the committee states that the minority staff believes the CRU documents and emails “seriously compromise the IPCC-based ‘consensus’ and its central conclusion that anthropogenic emissions are inexorably leading to environmental catastrophes.”
More specifically, the report claims that scientists involved in Climategate obstructed the release of damaging data and information, manipulated data to reach preconceived conclusions, pressured journal editors who published work questioning the consensus on climate change, and assumed activist roles with the goal of influencing the political process.
According to the report, the CRU emails prove that the science surrounding climate change is not settled and illustrates that leading climate scientists continue to debate many issues, question the methods and statistical techniques used by their peers, have concerns over historical periods of warming and cooling, and ultimately doubt whether there is currently and consensus on the cause or extend of climate change.
“The EPA accepted the IPCC’s erroneous claims wholesale without doing its own independent review,” Inhofe said. “So, EPA’s endangerment finding rests on bad science. The EPW minority report provides further proof that the EPA needs to scrap the endangerment finding and start over again.”
Separate independent reviews are being conducted to examine CRU policies and IPCC procedures in response to criticism as a result of Climategate. IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri announced Feb. 27 that an “independent committee of distinguished experts” will be evaluating IPCC procedures and will examine any procedural changes that may be required as a result. Details on the mechanism for setting up the review are expected sometime in early March. In the meantime, Pachauri continues to defend the IPCC’s most critical report - the 4th Assessment Report, which concluded that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal. “We stand firmly behind the rigor and robustness of the 4th Assessment Report’s conclusions and are encouraged by the support demonstrated recently by scientists and governments around the world,” Pachauri stated. “The 4th Assessment Report’s key conclusions are based on an overwhelming body of evidence from thousands of peer-reviewed and independent scientific studies.”
In December, the University of East Anglia began a review of allegations made against the CRU shortly after Climategate was made public. The independent review, led by Sir Muir Russell, consists of an examination of CRU’s policies and practices as related to acquiring, assembling and disseminating data for peer review; a review of CRU’s compliance with the British Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulations, and an examination of CRU’s security structures and leaked email exchanges in an attempt to determine whether evidence exists to suggest manipulation or suppression of data that would call into question any of the research outcomes. The review is expected to be finished this spring and will be made public by the university upon completion.
Professor Phil Jones, embattled head scientist at the CRU, notably took a leave from his position at CRU prior to the start of the investigation. However, prior to exiting CRU, Jones asserted that the leaked emails were taken out of context and apologized for any confusion that erupted as a result. “Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues,” he explained. He specifically addressed the criticism of one email authored by himself in which he mentions a “trick” used to insert temperature data into a diagram. “The first thing to point out is that this refers to one diagram - not a scientific paper - which was used in the World Meteorological Organization’s statement on the status of the global climate in 1999,” he said. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.”
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson testified at the Feb. 23 Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing that while she doesn’t defend the conduct of the scientists who sent the criticized emails, she doesn’t believe that the emails discredit the IPCC findings. She stressed in her comments that the EPA has no plans to review its endangerment finding based on the Climategate emails and will continue to move forward with its intentions to regulate GHG emissions.
Its starting to collapse even OFFICIALLY. Get the tar and feathers ready!!
The emerging errors of the IPCC's 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker, Published: 7:49PM GMT 27 Feb 2010
The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.
The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.
But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.
All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.
Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.
In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC's most shameless stunt of all – the notorious "hockey stick" graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)
In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC's 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world's politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December's Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.
What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by "Climategate", the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC's 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).
Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU's suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.
The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated. The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds. And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
It was in this newspaper that we first revealed how Pachauri has earned millions of pounds for his Delhi-based research institute Teri, and further details are still emerging of how he has parlayed his position into a worldwide business empire, including 17 lucrative contracts from the EU alone. But we should not expect the truth to break in too suddenly on this mass of vested interests. Too many people have too much at stake to allow the faith in man-made global warming, which has sustained them so long and which is today making so many of them rich, to be abandoned. The so-called investigations into Climategate and Dr Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann seem like no more than empty establishment whitewashes. There is little reason to expect that the inquiry into the record of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri that is now being set up by the UN Environment Programme and the world's politicians will be very different.
Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way, hundreds of billions
of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global "carbon trading" market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions. Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd "carbon-saving" energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.
With all this mighty army of gullible politicians, dutiful officials, busy carbon traders, eager "renewables" developers and compliant, funding-hungry academics standing to benefit from the greatest perversion of the principles of true science the world has ever seen, who are we to protest that their emperor has no clothes? (How apt that that fairy tale should have been written in Copenhagen.) Let all that fluffy white "global warming" continue to fall from the skies, while people shiver in homes that, increasingly, they will find they can no longer afford to heat. We have called into being a true Frankenstein's monster. It will take a mighty long time to cut it down to size.
Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust over carbon tax
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: November 26th, 2009
Australia is leading the revolt against Al Gore’s great big AGW conspiracy – just as the Aussie geologist and AGW sceptic Professor Ian Plimer predicted it would.
ABC news reports that five frontbenchers from Australia’s opposition Liberal party have resigned their portfolios rather than follow their leader Malcolm Turnbull in voting with Kevin Rudd’s Government on a new Emissions Trading Scheme.
The Liberal Party is in turmoil with the resignations of five frontbenchers from their portfolios this afternoon in protest against the emissions trading scheme.
Tony Abbott, Sophie Mirabella, Tony Smith and Senators Nick Minchin and Eric Abetz have all quit their portfolios because they cannot vote for the legislation.
Senate whip Stephen Parry has also relinquished his position.
The ETS is Australia’s version of America’s proposed Cap and Trade and the EU’s various carbon reduction schemes: a way of taxing business on its CO2 output. As Professor Plimer pointed out when I interviewed him in the summer, this threatens to cause enormous economic damage in Australia’s industrial and mining heartlands, not least because both are massively dependent on Australia’s vast reserves of coal. It is correspondingly extremely unpopular with Aussie’s outside the pinko, libtard metropolitan fleshpots.
Though the ETS squeaked narrowly through Australia’s House of Representatives, its Senate is proving more robust – thanks not least to the widespread disgust by the many Senators who have read Professor Plimer’s book Heaven And Earth at the dishonesty and corruption of the AGW industry. If the Senate keeps rejecting the scheme, then the Australian government will be forced to dissolve.
For the rapidly increasing number of us who believe that AGW is little more than a scheme by bullying eco-fascists to deprive us of our liberty, by big government to spread its controlling tentacles into every aspect our lives, and scheming industrialists such as Al Gore to enrich themselves through carbon trading, this principled act by Australia’s Carbon Five is fantastic news.
Where they lead, the rest of the world’s politicians will eventually be forced to follow: their appalled electorates will make sure of it.
Inhofe: Climategate Shows There's No Global Warming Consensus Sen. James Inhofe cites flawed data on global warming and the deceit of climategate
By James Inhofe, Posted March 23, 2010
James Inhofe is an Oklahoma Republican and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Call it the global warming crackup, an unfolding process of contradictory claims about glaciers, weather, and scientists asserting a consensus when none exists. Global warming alarmists can't make up their minds because the entire basis for their energy rationing project has collapsed into a mess of errors, exaggerations, and deceit. Let me explain.
Click here to find out more!
The Obama administration said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the "gold standard" for climate science, yet now the Environmental Protection Agency administrator won't defend it. The IPCC and Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now the IPCC has retracted several false claims concerning, among other things, rain forests shrinking, crops dying, and sea levels rising. We've been told weather is not to be confused with climate, except when you have heat waves or blizzards. We've been told cap-and-trade would create thousands of green jobs, yet the Congressional Budget Office, Department of Energy, National Black Chamber of Commerce, and others say it would mean a net loss of jobs.
We are told that increasing levels of CO2 will increase temperature, yet the key scientist in the climategate scandal says there's been "no statistically significant warming" in the past 15 years—all while CO2 levels have increased. We've been told that there is an "indisputable consensus" that human-caused global warming is happening and pushing the planet to certain disaster. Yet that same scientist—Phil Jones, former director of Britain's Climatic Research Unit, the foremost such center—now says that the vast majority of climate scientists don't agree on what the data are telling us.
What's going on here? When thousands of E-mails were released from the Climatic Research Unit in November, we finally were able to pull back the veil of the so-called climate consensus. As ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, I have released a minority staff report that uses these E-mails to show that the world's leading climate scientists apparently discussed manipulating data to fit preconceived conclusions and pressuring journal editors not to publish scientific work contrary to their own. This would violate fundamental ethical principles guiding scientific (and taxpayer-funded) research and, our report points out, may violate federal laws.
The E-mail controversy has been airily dismissed by the Obama administration as nothing more than scientists "lacking interpersonal skills." One Democratic senator called it a "little E-mail squabble." The evidence proves otherwise. At the center of the controversy were the same scientists who wrote and edited the IPCC's reports—the reports alarmists claim form the climate science "consensus." Moreover, those reports provide the critical basis for cap-and-trade legislation and the EPA's endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases. Yet climategate shows what I've asserted all along: The basis for those disastrous policies is flawed and should be thrown out.
Unfortunately, that's not what EPA is doing. It wants $43.5 million in new funding to regulate greenhouse gases. This is seed money for the most economically destructive regulatory initiative in this nation's history.
Back in 2005, I gave a speech urging reforms at the IPCC, trying to get the United Nations body to produce reliable, objective science. But the IPCC ignored my recommendations. And now, after several embarrassing gaffes—for example, stating falsely that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035—the calls for reform are deafening.
My minority report shows the world's leading climate scientists acting like political scientists, with an agenda disconnected from the principles of good science. And it shows that there is no consensus—except agreement there are significant gaps in what scientists know about the climate system. It's time for the administration to recognize this. Its endangerment finding rests on bad science. It should throw out that finding and abandon greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act—a policy that will mean fewer jobs, higher taxes, and economic decline.
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: March 25th, 2010
Climategate exposed the greatest scandal in the history of modern science but you’re never going to hear this from any of the official investigations. Andrew Orlowski at The Register has uncovered why.
Turns out, that there’s this well-funded SPECTRE-like advocacy group called GLOBE (Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment) International which has co-opted leading parliamentarians from the main parties in both the Commons and the Lords into advancing the AGW agenda.
One of those is Lord Oxburgh, recently appointed – on the Royal Society’s recommendation – to lead one of the two official enquiries into Climategate. Mysteriously, Lord Oxburgh has failed to mention GLOBE in his register of interests.
Orlowski reports:
GLOBE may be too obscure to merit its own Wikipedia entry, but that belies its wealth and influence. It funds meetings for parliamentarians worldwide with an interest in climate change, and prior to the Copenhagen Summit GLOBE issued guidelines (pdf) for legislators. Little expense is spared: in one year alone, one peer – Lord Michael Jay of Ewelme – enjoyed seven club class flights and hotel accommodation, at GLOBE’s expense. There’s no greater love a Parliamentarian can give to the global warming cause. And in return, Globe lists Oxburgh as one of 23 key legislators.
One insider has described Oxburgh’s appointment to lead this supposedly neutral investigation into Climategate as “like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.” Here are just a few more of this scrupulously unbiased fellow’s interests, revealed by Orlowski:
In the House of Lords Register of Lords’ Interests, Oxburgh lists under remunerated directorships his chairmanship of Falck Renewables, and chairmanship of Blue NG, a renewable power company. (Oxburgh holds no shares in Falck Renewables, and serves as a non-exec chairman.) He also declares that he is an advisor to Climate Change Capital, to the Low Carbon Initiative, Evo-Electric, Fujitsu, and an environmental advisor to Deutsche Bank. For a year he was non-exec chairman of Shell.
GLOBE seems especially drawn to the kind of MP who likes sailing close to the wind. Its president is none other than Stephen Byers, recently exposed in the “cash for influence” scandal as offering his services as a lobbyist like a “cab for hire” for a small consideration of just £5,000 a day. And its leading lights have also included Elliott Morley, one of the MPs more heavily implicated in the Telegraph’s parliamentary expenses scandal.
As Bishop Hill notes its UK parliamentary group officers also include the redoubtable and incorruptible Labour MP Eric Joyce – “the first MP to claim more than £1m in expenses and on more than one occasion the most expensive MP in the house. He once famously claimed for three oil paintings on expenses “because they looked nice”.”
But then, to judge from the research done by Cumbrian Lad at Bishop Hill, GLOBE is very much the kind of body that likes to do things on the sly. Its Memorandum of Incorporation includes this revealing snippet about its purposes:
“To provide a forum for ideas and proposals to be floated in confidence and without the attention of an international spotlight“
Bishop Hill reports:
GLOBE’s corporate structure and funding are not clear from its website, but Cumbrian Lad has discovered that it is a private limited company. Interesting that – an organisation of legislators, run as a private company. He has also obtained copies of its accounts and other information from Companies House.
GLOBE was incorporated in 2006, the founding directors all being British legislators – Malcolm Bruce MP (LibDem), Joan Ruddock MP (Lab) and Nick Hurd (Con), with the last directorship being held by Lord Hunt. Since that time, Joan Ruddock has stood down and Lord Oxburgh and Eliot Morley MP (Lab) have been appointed to the board.
The current accounts are all abbreviated, which means there is very little detail about the income and expenditure of the company, but for some reason 2007 was filed in full, revealing an income of £820k, almost double that of the previous year, and all of which was spent on administrative expenses.
And where does this money come from? Its 2008 accounts note:
The Directors acknowledge the support of International Organisations, Governments, Parliamentary Bodies and Industry, both financially and politically, with paticular acknowledgement to United Nations, The Global Environment Facility, The World Bank, European Commission, the Governments of Canada and Great Britain, the Senate of Brazil and Globe Japan.
Bishop Hill smells a rat:
My reading of all this would be that GLOBE is a vehicle to enable legislators to avoid the scrutiny of their electorates – the date of incorporation is probably instructive, coming just after the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act.
It’s no wonder Lord Oxburgh didn’t want to mention it on his CV.
Here is the link listing the names of all the MPs in its parliamentary group. The ones I find particularly interesting are the Tories on the list. They are:
Gregory Barker
Kenneth Clarke
Lord Fowler
Charles Hendry
Nick Hurd
Graham Stuart
Tim Yeo
If any of these represent your constituency, I urge you not to vote for them. A Conservative who indulges in this kind of slippery green activism is no conservative at all.
Top Scientists Assess Climate Change Emails Full Analysis of Global Warming Scandal
Mar 28, 2010 John O'Sullivan
Dr. John P. Costella examined 1079 leaked emails and 72 other documents from the computers of the UK's Climatic Reseach Unit to reveal 'shocking misconduct and fraud.'
Dr. Costella’s study has been widely accepted by all sides of the global warming debate as a faultless assessment. Climategate publicly began on November 19, 2009 allegedly pointing to a conspiracy to fraudulently bolster greenhouse gas theory. The British mainstream media, more than any other nation, have widely reported on the scandal.
The Australian physicist documents, step by step, flawed scientific procedure, over-arching concerns with personal and professional interests and how an elite of climatologists discussed immorally securing ‘research’ funding and evading tax payments. The emails cover correspondence between international climatologists over a 13-year period up to November 2009.
Does the evidence point to climate crimes?
Yes, as reported in The Times of London 'University tried to mislead MPs on climate change e-mails’ (February 27, 2010) referring to the decision of the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). Only the statute of limitations thwarted criminal charges on breaches of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), while further issues of serious fraud are yet to be decided. Examples of specific quotations most often referred to from those leaked emails include evidence supportive of:
(1.) Manipulation of evidence:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” [Jones: CRU email 942777075.txt, Nov. 16 1999]
(2.) Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.” [Trenberth: CRU email 1255352257.txt, October 12, 2009]
(3.) Intentional conspiracy to destroy evidence:
“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.” [Jones: CRU email1212073451.txt May 29, 2008]
(4.) Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
“I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.” [Briffa: CRU email 938018124.txt (Sep. 22, 1999)]
“I do find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event to be grossly premature and probably wrong.” [Cook: CRU email 988831541.txt (May 2, 2001)]
(5.) Suppression of dissent from the peer review process:
“ I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.” [Jones: CRU email 1047388489.txt March 11, 2003]
Who Has Been Implicated in the Global Warming Scandal?
A clique of climate scientists central to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are implicated: Professor Phil Jones, ‘lead conspirator’ in the United Kingdom; Professor Michael Mann, the ‘lead conspirator’ in the United States; Tom Wigley, older ‘conspirator’ who becomes increasingly worried about the unfolding scandal; Keith Briffa, an older conspirator whose ‘blunders lead the others to all but abandon him.’
Among others also included is Ben Santer, a ‘dangerously arrogant and naive young conspirator’ in the U.S. as well as other experts of varying degrees of complicity and integrity.
What Fallout Has Occurred Since the Climategate Scandal Broke?
Dr. Costella concluded that the “climate science” community was a façade and that “their vitriolic rebuffs of sensible arguments of mathematics, statistics, and indeed scientific common sense were not the product of scientific rigor at all, but merely self-protection at any cost.”
There has been worldwide condemnation for the unethical conduct of the discredited researchers. In the United States a raft of civil lawsuits opposing federal policy based on the alleged fraudulent results of these researchers has ensued. Climate sceptics have called for a moratorium on implemention of any further expensive ecological policies until the courts resolve the matter.
The IPCC has admitted errors have been made after subsequent revelations known as Glaciergate, Amazongate, Australiagate, Africate, Inquirygate, etc.
In the United States 16 lawsuits have been filed in opposition to the federal government’s (EPA) environmental regulations premised on the discredited climate science, the most notable by the Peabody Energy Company (PEC). Peabody is the world’s largest private sector coal company and is, in effect, challenging the right of the current federal government to introduce cap and trade regulations by the ‘back door.’ The PEC petition argues,
“The CRU information reveals that many of the principal scientists who authored key chapters of the IPCC scientific assessments were driven by a policy agenda that caused them to cross the line from neutral science to advocacy.”
Now it's CowGate: expert report says claims of livestock causing global warming are false
By Gerald Warner Environment Last updated: March 25th, 2010
It is becoming difficult to keep pace with the speed at which the global warming scam is now unravelling. The latest reversal of scientific “consensus” is on livestock and the meat trade as a major cause of global warming – one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to eco-vegetarian cranks. Now a scientific report delivered to the American Chemical Society says it is nonsense. The Washington Times has called it “Cowgate”.
The cow-burp hysteria reached a crescendo in 2006 when a United Nations report ominously entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” claimed: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.” This led to demands in America for a “cow tax” and a campaign in Europe at the time of the Copenhagen car crash last December called Less Meat=Less Heat.
Now a report to the American Chemical Society by Frank Mitloehner, an air quality expert at the University of California at Davis, has denounced such scare-mongering as “scientifically inaccurate”. He reveals that the UN report lumped together digestive emissions from livestock, gases produced by growing animal feed and meat and milk processing, to get the highest possible result, whereas the traffic comparison only covered fossil fuel emissions from cars. The true ratio, he concludes, is just 3 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in America are attributable to rearing of cattle and pigs, compared with 26 per cent from transport.
Mitloehner also makes the deadly serious point: “Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.” Precisely. The demonising of cows and pigs is just another example of global warmists’ callous indifference to starvation in the developing world, as in the case of the unbelievably immoral and reckless drive for biofuels – pouring Third World resources for subsistence into Western liberals’ fuel tanks – and, notoriously, carbon trading.
Week by week the AGW collapse intensifies. Himalayan glaciers, polar bears, Arctic ice, Amazon rainforests, all discredited. Now it turns out the great cow-burp scare is bovine excrement too. The global warming scam is, to the majority of people, an object of derision. The scientific community has also at last wakened up. They are smelling the coffee in more and more institutions these days.
This week the Science Museum in London announced it is revising its stance so that its Climate Change Gallery will now be renamed the Climate Science Gallery, to reflect its new position of neutrality in the climate debate. Chris Rapley, the director, said the museum was taking a different approach after observing how the debate had been affected by leaked e-mails and overstatements of the dangers of global warming. He said: “We have come to realise, given the way this subject has become so polarised over the past three to four months, that we need to be respectful and welcoming of all views on it.”
When did you ever hear that sort of thing before? But that is fair enough: neutrality, a level playing field and an equal voice is all global warming sceptics have ever asked for. Given those reasonable conditions, the truth will out and we will win. The signs are that a lot of scientists have been moved to assert their integrity, encouraged by the increasingly huge breaches sceptics have made in the defences of the AGW camp. Others may simply have calculated they may have backed a loser and it is time to take out some insurance.
Whatever the case, it is a different world now in the war against the AGW scam. Zac Goldsmith, warmist fanatic and Tory candidate, is telling environmentalists that green issues are vote losers. He should tell Dave that and stop him making an even bigger fool of himself. We are experiencing a tipping point in the climate war and the advantage is slowly but irresistibly moving towards the sceptics.
Brilliantly Exposing Climategate
By Alan Caruba Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Over the years, I have read dozens of books by eminent scientists, climatologists and meteorologists, that exposed the lies that support the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in the modern era, “global warming.” I have always wanted to read one that anyone could understand without having sufficient knowledge of the rather complex science involved.
I finally found that book and, would you believe it, the author is a friend! Every month I put aside time to talk with Brian Sussman, a former award-winning television meteorologist turned conservative talk show host on KSFO, San Francisco.
Like myself, Brian has long known that “global warming” is a bunch of horse hockey and, bless him, after the November 2009 revelations contained in several thousand leaked emails among the handful of perpetrators supplying the phony data to support “global warming”, Brian sat down and wrote “Climategate”, published by WND Books and the best $24.95 you will ever spend because it is the best book on the topic I have ever read.
Its official publication date is Earth Day, April 22.
To put it plainly, Brian got it right and he does so on every page as he walks the reader through what is often a complex topic. He does this by drawing on more than twenty years as a meteorologist and science reporter. In 2001, he shocked San Francisco viewers with a career change to become a conservative talk radio host.
What all the “global warming” fear-mongering is about is not climate science because “global warming” has nothing to do with climate and everything to do with a political agenda conjured up by Karl Marx and set in motion by Lenin and Stalin.
Brian initially takes the reader through the history of communism-socialism in order to put the environmental agenda in context. “It’s all a lie. The earth is not warming, and climate always changes—and they know it.”
“Global warming is the grandest of all tyrannical schemes”, says Brian and he has the credentials and knowledge to back it up. The first chapter of “Climategate” is worth the price of the book, but it just keeps getting better after that as he identifies the key players in a succession of environmental hoaxes that include, for example, the banning of DDT. Without this chemical miracle, an estimated 96 million people have needlessly died from malaria since 1973.
The most difficult thing to comprehend about the environmental movement is its fundamental hatred of mankind.
Environmentalism is a spawn of communism. The book will help you make the connection between the millions who died under the regimes that embraced it and the tsunami of lies that maintains environmentalism to this day.
It is no accident that Earth Day, April 22, is also the birth date of Vladimir Lenin, the Marxist who led the Russian revolution that led to the establishment of communism in 1917. The Soviet Union, a nation Ronald Reagan called “the evil empire”, finally collapsed in 1991 from its inherent oppression and inability to produce real jobs, real goods, and a life free of an all-powerful state.
“Earth Day,” writes Brian, “has never been a celebration of God’s wonderful creation; instead it’s always been an assault on man.” That is why the central message of environmentalism is that man is a “cancer” on the earth and responsible for climate change. That is why its leading advocates want to reduce the earth’s population by any means possible.
Neither mankind, nor the bogyman of carbon dioxide has anything to do with climate change. Right now the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is moving to regulate CO2 as “a pollutant” and it has the authority under the Clean Air Act as the result of one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in modern times.
Regulating CO2 would make about the same sense as regulating oxygen on the grounds that it produces rust or that it is a component of fire. Regulating Co2 is crazy!
“Climategate” is the best book to date about this massive fraud, those who have lined their pockets advancing it, and the political agenda behind it; masterminded out of the bowels of the United Nations.
Order it! Read it! You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free!
Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2010 11:08 am Post subject: 'No malpractice' by climate unit .
Well we should have guessed this would happen
There was no scientific malpractice at the research unit at the centre of the "Climategate" affair, an independent panel has concluded.
The panel, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, was convened to examine the conclusions of research published by the unit.
It began its review after hacked e-mails from CRU scientists were published on the web.
The panel said it might be helpful if researchers worked more closely with professional statisticians.
This would ensure the best methods were used, the report said.
The panel found that the work carried out by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich relied heavily on statistical methods.
"We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians," the panel remarked in its conclusions.
The e-mails issue came to light in November last year, when hundreds of messages between scientists at the University of East Anglia's (UEA) Climate Research Unit (CRU) and their peers around the world were posted on the world wide web, along with other documents.
Critics said that the e-mail exchanges reveal an attempt by the researchers involved to manipulate data.
But a recent House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report into the e-mails concluded that the scientists involved had no intention to deceive.
The chair has also been challenged over his other interests. Lord Oxburgh is currently president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and chairman of wind energy firm Falck Renewables.
Critics say clean energy companies would benefit from policies to tackle climate change. But Lord Oxburgh insists the panel did not have a pre-conceived view.
The panel included Professor David Hand, president of the Royal Statistical Society, who had been examining the way CRU used statistical methodology to develop an average annual global temperature.
It is straightforward to get a measurement precise in space and time from an individual weather station - albeit with uncertainties attached.
But some countries have many weather stations, while others have very few, and there are sizeable areas of the Earth with no surface measurements at all.
Climate sceptics have argued CRU's statistical methods were inadequate.
Global warming alarmists were wrong about Gulf Stream, too
By: Barbara Hollingsworth, Local Opinion Editor, 03/30/10 12:55 AM EDT
Another addition to the non-events predicted by the global warming crowd: The Gulf Stream is not, repeat NOT, slowing down.
Between 2002 and 2009, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have seen no, repeat NO, discernible long-term trend in the major oceanic circulation that affects major weather systems worldwide.
In an article published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the JPL’s Josh Willis cited satellite altimeters and floating probes that measure water temperatures across the Atlantic Ocean that refute the computer-concocted figures typically used to predict warming by the now discredited Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their attempt to force developed nations to give up everything that made them developed in the name of global warming.
Professor Harry Bryden of Britain’s National Oceanography Center confirmed the JPL findings, noting that despite lots of short-term variability in Gulf Stream temperatures, a long-term change in flow caused by a sudden slowdown of the current has just not happened as predicted.
It's amazing how all those supposedly brilliant scientists have been so embarrassing wrong on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, on how rising temperatures would supposedly cause massive crop failure in Africa, on livestock creating more greenhouse gases than vehicles, and even on whether the Earth is warming at all.
For over a month now, since the farcical conclusion of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, I have been silent, partly through family commitments abroad in the USA, but also because, in this noisy world, in ‘The Clamour Of The Times’, it is on occasion better to be quiet and contemplative, to observe rather than to comment. And, 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 [pictured] being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face - political, economic, and scientific. Likewise, the bloggers have been swift to cover the crumbling edifice with colourful graffiti, sometimes bitter, at others caustic and witty.
My silence since mid-February has not meant that I have taken my eye off the climate-change scene. Far from it, although I have to confess that I have become increasingly wearied and bored by the fatuous lack of reality exhibited on this topic by many UK politicians. It is so glaringly obvious that, since the debacle in Copenhagen, ‘global warming’ is dying as a major political trope that I find it less and less exercising as an issue. Indeed, I do not want to waste too much energy in flogging a fundamentally dead corpse.
This last week, however, the nails in the global warming coffin have been driven in so thick and so fast that I thought it might be worth bringing attention once again to what is happening around the world - “You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Global Warming is as dead as a door-nail,” although I suspect that the Global Warming Ghost will hang around moaning and wailing for quite a while yet.
Germany Gets Cold Feet
First, in that paragon of so-called Green virtues, Germany, Spiegel Online reports that the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, ‘Abandons Aim of Binding Climate Agreement’:
“Frustrated by the climate change conference in December, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is quietly moving away from her goal of a binding agreement on limiting climate change to 2 degrees Celsius. She has also sent out signals at the EU level that she no longer supports the idea of Europe going it alone.”
Spiegel goes on to comment:
“... now it’s time for realpolitik. Merkel and Röttgen [have] had to admit that countries like China and India will not submit to a mandatory target that others have contrived.”
Precisely so.
The Emissions Billycan Waltzes Off Indefinitely
Meanwhile, ‘Down Under’, The Sydney Morning Herald reports: ‘Emissions put on back burner’:
“A Senate vote on the trading scheme legislation, which was due next month, has now been dropped by the government for the May and June sittings of Parliament.
A government source said yesterday the fate of the Senate vote on the legislation beyond June was unclear.
The source said the decision to park the legislation indefinitely reflected the political reality that the opposition, under leader Tony Abbott, and the Greens had vowed to reject the scheme in the Senate.
Unless the Coalition or the Greens change their positions the government will now have to wait until July 1 next year for the Senate to change over after this year's federal election to negotiate with a potentially less hostile Parliament - unless a double-dissolution election is called.
The government will now concentrate on passing other matters in the Senate including its national health reform package and the national broadband network. ‘Obviously there are a lot of pressures in the Senate, so the government has to prioritise the reforms that are most likely to be passed,’ the source said.”
Indeed. Most wise. “Good On Yer, Mate!”
Different Priorities In US Too
Then, in the US, as The New York Times reports: “The Senate climate bill sits on the brink of collapse today after the lead Republican ally threatened to abandon negotiations because of a White House push to simultaneously overhaul the nation's immigration policies.”
Moreover, President Obama has far more pressing worries and priorities as ‘US Republicans block debate of finance rules reform’ - Mr Obama has made reining in Wall Street a cornerstone of his Presidency.
Quite so.
Finally, Elusive Pay-Offs And Not Such A Green-Blue
Further, somewhat unsurprisingly given all of the above, the monies so happily and so readily promised to help developing nations to fight ‘global warming’ are proving remarkably elusive. Only the most politically- and economically-naive of souls could have expected otherwise.
Lastly, even in our ever-Utopian UK, ‘global warming’ has, thank goodness, hardly featured in the election to date, being confined to brief comments hidden in the deepest inner recesses of a few newspapers, although it is worth stating that the energy policies of the newly-resurgent Liberal Democrats would probably do for Britain as a serious economic power.
By contrast, as The Times points out this morning about the Conservatives:
“Despite Mr Cameron’s slogan of ‘vote blue go green’, a recent survey found that only 22 per cent of Conservative candidates in winnable seats strongly supported Britain’s target of generating 15 per cent of Britain’s energy from renewable sources by 2020.
David Davis, the former Shadow Home Secretary, recently warned that the policy of tough targets to cut carbon emissions, supported by Mr Cameron, was ‘destined to collapse’.”
Just so.
Indeed, the complete collapse of the Great Global Warming Grand Narrative continues apace.
It will surely be fascinating to observe precisely the moment when UK politicians begin to stop mouthing pious platitudes about the political significance of ‘global warming’.
That moment cannot come too soon - but a nice lunch in the garden first, of course. “Cucumber sarnies anyone?”
Posted: April 27, 2010, 8:17 AM by Lawrence Solomon
Seeing countries around the world back away from their climate change commitments, and seeing his own electoral support crumble, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced today that Australia will be shelving its cap and trade program for at least three years, until after the next election. “That will provide the Australian government at the time with a better position to assess the level of global action on climate change," he told the Australian press.
In recent weeks, Rudd has been embarrassed by decisions by the US and Japanese governments to put climate change on the back burner and alarmed by the growing opposition at home to climate change legislation. His once popular plans to cut back emissions by 5% by 2020, which were scheduled to begin next year, have been twice rejected by Australia’s Senate faced certain defeat in a third vote that was expected in several weeks.
Once the darling of the environmental movement, Rudd is now widely seen as ineffectual. A poll commissioned by the Climate Institute and the Conservation Foundation found that just 36% of voters saw Rudd as the best person to handle climate issues, and that 40% found no difference between his Labour government and opposition conservatives. Other polling shows the opposition gaining in the public opinion polls, as an increasingly skeptical public turns against the climate change orthodoxy.
By scrapping next year’s cap and trade plan, the Rudd government – and the Australian public – will see benefits in the upcoming budget, expected May 11. With Australians no longer needing to finance the cap and trade program, budget watchers predict a saving of some $2.32 billion.
According to Spiegel, German Chancellor Angela Merkel gives up the possibility of future binding "climate agreements",
Merkel Abandons Aim of Binding Climate Agreement, because she was too frustrated in Copenhagen. She only wants to look for non-binding solutions of the climate Armageddon.
That's bad news for German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen who gave a talk about his three children last week. "The global mean temperature is 14.5 °C right now but when the global mean temperature increases to 16.5 °C, the life of my children and the life as we know it becomes impossible," Röttgen explained the universal evaporation of all compounds that apparently occurs near 16.49999 °C.
When we already talk about lunatics, the Huffington Post just informed us (via WUWT) that
Climate Deniers are Polluting the Blogosphere.
Mike Sandler explains that just like the atmosphere is polluted by the "many greenhouse gases", the blogosphere is polluted by the "toxic deniers" that prevent the blogosphere from becoming sustainable (i.e. fully controlled by the eco-Nazis). We learn that for decades, people would think that there was a "debate" but Al Gore's movie has shown that there was no debate.
This author also thinks that the comments about the value of the freedom of speech and the skepticism as a pillar of science are "more sophisticated denier methods". Well, quite many important people have been using "sophisticated denier methods" in their life. That includes all good scientists and the U.S. founding fathers. Aside from the freedom of speech and scientific skepticism, there's another big enemy of the life on Earth: humor.
Sandler enumerates seven enemies of the life on Earth (i.e. allies of the "deniers") - humor is just the first one - and you must feel compassionate when you read that the AGW movement has so many powerful enemies. These people's previous ideology, communism, only had four enemies: spring, summer, fall, and winter.
And if Mr Sandler were not insane enough for you, check another blog. An Arthur P. Smith urges the MIT to launch a Night of Broken Glass - an investigation - against Richard Lindzen, mainly because he wrote four excellent WSJ op-ed pieces. Smith would also like to read some Lindzen's e-mails.
Well, because your humble correspondent was lucky to have read dozens of Richard's e-mails, I can assure Mr Smith that he would learn that Prof Lindzen is de facto a saint. After all, Lindzen has repeatedly offered to publish all of his e-mails. I guess that if the alarmists could see how innocent and pure a soul Richard Lindzen is, they would become deniers, too.
Brooke Shields
Actress Brooke Shields has provided us with an insight into the psychology of AGW-worshiping Hollywood stars:
Brooke Shields Upset With Reports That Global Warming Doesn't Exist
She said:
“It all upsets me because I feel like we keep losing sight of simpler, smaller things,” Shields told Pop Tarts. “I don’t know what is true or not, I only know what I can do on a daily basis because I believe in it. Whether I am turning the water off in between brushing my teeth, which my little daughter is the police of, or I am recycling, or switching my products or using an energy saving washing machine.... I just have to do the best that I can do and keep doing more.”
She doesn't know what is true but she needs something to believe.
Sorry if this has been posted before, but just look at the clarity of the Interviewers working to an ulterior motive!
Instead of offering science they launch into a dastardly smear campaign!
Quote:
David Bellamy is interviewed on New Zealands 3 news and offers his opinions on the hypothesis of man made CO2 emissions causing dangerous global warming.
by John O'Sullivan, Thursday, April 29th 2010, 1:46 PM EDT
The infamous Madoff Ponzi scheme cost $50 billion. Now put this into context with what the U.S. government has blown on policies related to climate change - over $79 billion since 1989. Madoff is in jail, Michael Mann isn’t-yet. So let's look at the latest legal hullabaloo.
The Climategate scandal is a Ponzi scheme with far greater global ramifications for us all. But how are we dealing with the willfully corrupt acts of a few key individuals in the most senior posts?
The two lead scientists in this most grotesque scam, Michael Mann of Penn. State University and British Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research (CRU), discussed manipulation of data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures. Both men and their employers benefited to the tune of tens of millions of dollars for their complicity in this scam.
Jones, rather than be convicted of fraud, stymied Freedom of Information requests then destroyed his data. He avoided criminal prosecution on a mere technicality- the British government conceded the statute of limitations had expired.
Jones is remorseful, broken and discredited; Mann stubbornly refuses to quit his shenanigans. His hubris remains intact. An expedient American government, just like the British, has stalled in implementing the most serious of fraud charges. Their likely embarrassment is just too great to even contemplate action.
The facts are well documented: according to Mann’s fudged graph, the hottest period in modern history was NOT the generally balmy era between 900 and 1300 but the late 20th century. The world’s skeptical community diligently sought access to Mann’s calculations to check how he came to his incongruous conclusions. His conclusions were swallowed whole by world leaders intent on pursuing an international cap and trade strategy. Almost overnight he had succeeded in re-writing a wealth of historical peer-reviewed studies.
Thus Mann was instrumental in getting the fear-machine cranked up so that pro-green political advocates were able to ‘Create A Crisis, Alert the people, Offer a Solution.’
In 2008 Mann published another paper to bolster his 'hockey stick' claims in response to all the controversy surrounding his first graph. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of CRU) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, acclaimed climate analyst, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data.
On his Climate Audit website Mcintyre broke the story that Mann’s graph was bogus.
The graph portrayed an ominous scary red line shooting upwards. The black one, heading downwards, represents the less worrisome scientific reality.
Because of these facts, I say in my own words, not anyone else’s, Michael Mann is a crooked junk scientist and is rightly derided as a charlatan.
Mann, full of bitterness and frustration laments the failure of that Grand Plan to conspire in the dismantling of western economies. Now constantly taunted by ridicule, he has threatened to sue the makers of a video mocking him.
Any supposed civil lawsuit brought by Mann against the Minnesotan makers of the YouTube ‘Hide the Decline’ video would prove most disadvantageous to our puffed up plaintiff.
In fact, such a foolhardy venture is perhaps the best way of publicly exposing Mann’s alleged data fraud.
If Mann takes a punt in the courts then his meta data and source codes used in his graphs are germane. The rules of discovery are clear; the respondents will be entitled to full disclosure of any and all evidence pertaining to the issues so that the trier of fact may determine the credibility of the allegations. But Mann is ever so touchy about who sees his dubious tree ring numbers. In response to his critics he has stated:
“I have made available all of the research data that I am required to under United States policy as set by the National Science Foundation…. I maintain the right to decline to release any computer codes, which are my intellectual property...”
This gambit won’t fly for Mann in a defamation suit. The gravamen of this controversy is that Mann has persisted in refusing any other scientists to validate his computer codes. Insofar as Mann, a supposed scientist, refuses to permit other scientists to verify his results via independent analysis of such codes, he has thereby fueled public doubt about his integrity. He is thus the architect of his own misfortune.
As legal scholar Susan Kuzma (1992) tells us:
“In the long run, the more corrosive force [of scientific misconduct] is the undermining of public confidence in an important public institution and the engendering of a cynical perception that the reporting and the funding of scientific research is a rigged game. Criminal prosecution plays a valuable role in demonstrating a commitment to absolute integrity in this important arena.” (1.)
Unless the dodgy Penn. State professor divulges his computer codes that underpin his junk science no civil court will entertain him. Barking out his toothless threats scares no one. This fraudster is now a figure of ridicule and is set to go down in history is one of science’s worst abominations.
I’ll call Mann a climate crook all day long: let him sue me, I’m game.
(1.) Sovacool, B. K., ‘Criminalization and Due Process to Reduce Scientific Misconduct,’ The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 5, Issue 5 September 2005
Short bio: John O'Sullivan is a legal advocate and writer who for several years has litigated against government corruption and conspiracy cases in both the US and Britain. Website: http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/johnosullivan
Virginia Attorney General goes after Mann and UVA
Posted on April 29, 2010 by Anthony Watts
Cites nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while [Dr. Michael ] Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
From The Hook, it seems satirical YouTube videos will be the least of Dr. Mann’s worries now.
No one can accuse Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of shying from controversy. In his first four months in office, Cuccinelli directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform. Now, it appears, he may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.
“Since it’s public money, there’s enough controversy to look in to the possible manipulation of data,” says Dr. Charles Battig, president of the nonprofit Piedmont Chapter Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, a group that doubts the underpinnings of climate change theory.
…
The Attorney General has the right to make such demands for documents under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a 2002 law designed to keep government workers honest.
Deutsche Bank, RWE Raided in German Probe of CO2 Tax (Update2)
By Mathew Carr and Karin Matussek
April 28 (Bloomberg) -- German prosecutors searched Deutsche Bank AG and RWE AG in a raid on 230 offices and homes nationwide to investigate 180 million euros ($238 million) of tax evasion linked to emissions trading.
The Frankfurt Chief Prosecutor’s Office said it targeted 150 suspects at 50 companies and has frozen assets. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, and RWE, the country’s second- biggest utility, said they are cooperating with the probe and aren’t the focus of the investigations.
The U.K., France and Netherlands are among nations that started investigations last year of “carousel fraud,” where carbon traders collect tax and disappear before turning it in to authorities. Today’s raid was the biggest related to a fraud that may have tainted an estimated 7 percent of carbon trades in last year’s $125 billion market.
“We are glad to see that German authorities are taking the necessary steps to deal with a fraud that has affected, however unfairly, foreign perceptions of the EU emission trading system,” Henry Derwent, chief executive officer of the Geneva- based International Emissions Trading Association, said in a phone interview. The lobby group speaks for CO2 trading firms.
Europe lost about 5 billion euros in revenue for the 18 months ending in 2009 because of value-added tax fraud in the CO2 market, according to Europol, the law enforcement agency.
“We’re supporting similar investigations in other EU member states,” said Soren Pedersen, spokesman for Europol in the Hague. He declined to elaborate.
Cooperating With Investigators
EU carbon allowances for December fell 1.5 percent to 14.97 euros a metric ton on London’s European Climate Exchange as of 5:30 p.m. They have gained 19 percent so far this year
Deutsche Bank is cooperating with investigators and isn’t the focus of the probe, spokesman Ronald Weichert said by phone.
RWE’s Supply & Trading offices were searched, spokesman Michael Rosen said today. RWE is cooperating and the company “hasn’t been charged and is not under suspicion,” he said today in an e-mailed statement. The investigation concerns one company that had business relations with RWE Supply & Trading in 2009, Rosen said.
About 400 million metric tons of emission trades may have been fraudulent last year, or about 7 percent of the total market, including futures transactions, according to estimates from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. BNEF is a unit of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.
Fraud Estimates
Europol’s estimate would indicate about 27 percent of the market was fraudulent for 18 months ended in 2009, or 1.9 billion tons. The comparison of the BNEF and Europol estimates is based on a value-added tax of 17 percent, an average CO2- permit price of 15.80 euros a ton and 7 billion tons traded in the period.
The EU approved measures last month to fight fraud in its emissions market, the world’s largest, by shifting the levy to customers. The law eliminates the need for the supplier to submit the payment to the treasury.
German prosecutors declined to name the 50 companies involved in the raids. Claudia Bresgen, a spokeswoman in Munich for HVB Group, said she couldn’t immediately comment on whether the unit of Italian bank UniCredit SpA was searched. Commerzbank AG offices weren’t involved in the probe, company spokesman Maximilian Bicker in Frankfurt said by telephone today.
Offices of E.ON AG’s energy trading arm weren’t raided, said Jamee Majid, a spokesman for the unit. EnBW Energie Baden- Wuerttemberg AG spokesman Dirk Ommeln said the utility wasn’t targeted. Vattenfall AB’s German unit isn’t involved in the investigation, Berlin-based spokeswoman Sandra Kuehberger.
Tax Evasion
The Frankfurt Chief Prosecutor is investigating allegations that carbon traders evaded the tax, Guenter Wittig, the prosecutor’s spokesman, said today in a statement. Prosecutors suspect “that emission rights were bought from foreign companies and were sold via a chain of corporations for the purpose to evade value-added tax,” he said.
The “VAT-carousel” led to the loss of 180 million euros in tax revenue and prosecutors froze money in accounts that may be linked to wrongdoings, Wittig said. He declined to name the account holders or say how much was frozen.
To contact the reporters on this story: Mathew Carr in London at m.carr@bloomberg.net; Karin Matussek in Berlin at kmatussek@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: April 28, 2010 13:31 EDT
Climate Change Has No Scientific Consensus
How Peer-reviewed Studies Trash the Myth
"Surveys by Oreskes [2004] and then Kendall Zimmerman [2008] are the most eminent studies carried out to date to gauge the strength of opinion among climate experts about the hypothesis that human fossil fuel emissions (e.g.CO2), are causing global warming.
Claims of Oreskes Study Questioned
Oreskes reviewed 928 abstracts from peer-reviewed research papers and determined that more than 75 per cent of scientists either explicitly or implicitly accept that Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities. Thus the ‘scientific consensus’ claim was born.
However, according to a peer-reviewed analysis of Oreskes by Dr. Benny Peiser, a world-renowned expert on ‘neo-catastrophism,’ it appears the claims by Oreskes are false. Dr. Peiser uncovered from the 928 abstracts that; “just over a dozen explicitly endorse the ‘consensus’ while the vast majority of abstracts do not mention anthropogenic global warming.” Moreover, the term ‘catastrophic warming’ appears nowhere in any of the papers.
Interestingly, by reference to the respected ISI Web of Science database inputting the keywords "climate change" there exists over 12,000 relevant science papers that Oreskes conveniently ignored.
Apart from Peiser’s [2005] debunking of Oreskes, another eminent climate researcher [Pielke 2005] was prompt to expose Oreskes for cynically twisting the full diversity of scientific opinion
Monday, May 17, 2010
Kiwi Temperature Fraud Exposed!
New Zealand is to press ahead with an ETS in July despite vigorous opposition and the dropping of a similar system by Australia .Quadrant Online reports on the scandalous state of the NZ temperature records which have been used to buttress unprecedented warming claims in Kiwiland. It seems that records dating back over a century show no appreciable warming until seven stations were cherry picked and then "corrected' by Jim Salinger- instant warming!
Welcome to the press room for the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, to be held May 16-18, 2010 in Chicago, Illinois, DC. The theme of the conference is: “Science vs. Alarmism.”
If you are a journalist seeking more information about the conference, speakers or co-sponsors, please contact Dan Miller (dmiller@heartland.org) or Tammy Nash (tnash@heartland.org) (312) 377-4000.
Fourth International Climate Change Conference
to Be Held in Chicago in May 2010
CHICAGO -- More than 500 of the world's leading climatologists, economists, and public policy leaders will convene in Chicago May 16-18, 2010 at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, organized by The Heartland Institute.
Keynote speakers and panelists will focus on new data and research that contradicts claims by global warming alarmists that global temperatures have reached crisis levels and that human activity is the primary cause of that "crisis."
The conference will be held as the ranks are growing of world scientists whose research shows global warming is not a crisis, and that the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by human activity played an insignificant role in the moderate warming experienced in the twentieth century.
Most recently, more than 60 prominent German scientists last month publicly dissented from man-made global warming fears in an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The signers included several whose names appeared on the 2007 United Nations report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the scientific basis for world governments' efforts to restrict carbon emissions and slow the pace of economic growth.
Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, said, "Since Heartland and its allies produced the first international conference of global warming skeptics in March 2008 in New York City, the science has grown ever more persuasive that global warming is not a crisis. Legislative attempts such as the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that squeaked out of the U.S. House last June would cause great harm to the economy and the world's social fabric."
Hundreds of domestic and international federal and state legislators, scientists, economists, business people, and policy activists attended the three previous conferences in New York City and Washington D.C. Coverage in print and new-media outlets was extensive, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, and leading newspapers and online sites from dozens of countries.
Names of confirmed speakers for the Chicago conference will be released later this year.
The two-and-a-half day conference will be held at the Marriott Hotel, 540 North Michigan Avenue, opening with a keynote presentation Sunday, May 16, 2010 and concluding with a plenary session on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 18.
The Heartland Institute released the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), Climate Change Reconsidered, at the third international conference in Washington. The 880-page book of peer-reviewed science contradicts the claims of global warming alarmists and brings together into a single authoritative document a point-by-point challenge to the latest reports of the United Nations' IPCC.
Bast said, "None of the IPCC's principal claims is left standing. No objective reader can walk away from the NIPCC report without realizing how weak the case is for alarm over global warming. Global warming simply is not the crisis so many politicians and activists claim it is. It never was."
The Heartland Institute is a 25-year-old national nonprofit research and education organization based in Chicago and devoted to discovering, developing, and promoting free-market solutions to social and economic problems.
Only morons, cheats and liars still believe in Man-Made Global Warming
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: May 19th, 2010
Well of course I would write a headline like that having just spent the last three days in Chicago at the Heartland Institute’s 4th International Conference on Climate Change. This is the event the cackling, cloak-wearing, befanged AGW-denying community attends every year to glorify in their own evil. And naturally, in the wake of Climategate, a mood of uproarious triumphalism has prevailed as distinguished skeptical scientists, economists, and policymakers from around the world – Pat Michaels, Richard Lindzen, Ian Plimer, Bob Carter, Fred Singer.. you name them, they’re here – have gathered to dance on the smouldering ashes of the mythical beast ManBearPig.
Except we shouldn’t use that word “sceptic” any more. Richard Lindzen – Godfather of Climate Realism – told us so in one of the keynote addresses.
“Scepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition,” he said. “Current global warming alarmism hardly represents a plausible proposition.” Not least, he pointed out, because the various activist scientists, greenies and government institutions pushing AGW theory have failed to “improve their case over 20 years.” So paper thin are the AGW movement’s arguments that pretty much the only defences left to them are desperate techniques like the appeal to authority (“the Royal Society believes in AGW and the Royal Society is, like, really old and distinguished, so AGW must be true”) and cheap slurs.
Consider, as examples of the latter technique, how this conference has been reported in the liberal media. Both the BBC and the Huffington Post have decided to write off the expertise of the dozens of PhDs and professors speaking at this event to concentrate on the issue that really matters: it was funded by Big Oil. (Except it isn’t. Unfortunately Big Oil stopped funding the skeptical side of the argument a long time ago. The Heartland Institute is a conservative leaning think tank funded by a number of business donors, and the main funder of the conference is a local libertarian millionaire who just happens to want a bit of openness and honesty in the debate on AGW. But hey, never let the facts get in the way of a libtard story).
The other main objection I heard – from the BBC’s Roger Harrabin – is how utterly ridiculous it was that a total know-nothing like James Delingpole was speaking on a “Science” panel with meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, climate expert Fred Singer, and economist Ross McKitrick (co-destroyer – with Steve McIntyre – of Michael Mann’s hockey stick). Indeed, when I introduced myself to him, he snapped back “I’m not sure whether I should shake your hand. I want to punch you.” He sounded jolly cross indeed – and ranted that I was utterly irresponsible and had disseminated lots of lies – though he later apologized to me saying he was jet-lagged and had confused me with Christopher Booker. Hmm.
Anyway, I agree with him. As I said when I gave my speech, it was entirely inappropriate that a humble hack like me should be on a panel with such great men – like a lowly swineherd suddenly finding himself translated to Mount Olympus. Then again, I said, it wasn’t such a bad idea that I was there to inject a note of reality to the proceedings. The truth is, I said, that the scientific debate is over. The scientists on our side of the argument have won (which is why no Warmist will dare debate Richard Lindzen, and while Al Gore won’t debate anyone at all: they know they’d lose). Problem is, I went on, this debate was never really about science anyway. AGW is and always have been a political process. It’s the political war that we’re fighting now and it’s going to be much much harder to win.
Especially when you look at the results of our recent General Election which I still find so monumentally depressing I’m not altogether sure I can bring myself to fly home.
Global Cooling Is Coming -- and Beware the Big Chill, Scientist Warns
By Gene J. Koprowski
- FOXNews.com
Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, a scientist who has written more than 150 peer-reviewed papers has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.
The hottest new trend in climate change may be global cooling, some researchers say.
Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University and author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.
“Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 F per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook, speaking on a scientific panel discussion with other climatologists. This, he says, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell from 2060 to 2090.
Easterbrook spoke before a group of about 700 scientists and government officials at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change. The conference is presented annually in Chicago by the Heartland Institute, a conservative nonprofit think tank that actively questions the theory of man's role in global warming. Last year the Institute published Climate Change Reconsidered, a comprehensive reply to the United Nations' latest report on climate change.
"Global warming is over -- at least for a few decades," Easterbrook told conference attendees. "However, the bad news is that global cooling is even more harmful to humans than global warming, and a cause for even greater concern."
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Easterbrook made several stunning claims about the effects of the coming cold. There will be twice as many people killed by extreme cold than by extreme heat, he predicted, and global food production will suffer because of the shorter, cooler growing seasons and bad weather during harvest seasons.
But not everyone is breaking out the overcoat and mittens.
“It's absurd to talk of global cooling when global heating is with us now and accelerating," said Dan Miller, managing director of the Roda Group, and an expert on climate change. "According to NASA, this past April was the hottest since temperature measurements began. And 2010 is on track to be the hottest year since temperature records began.
“North America was relatively cool last year, but the Earth as a whole was much warmer than average,” he said.
Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) also points to a warming trend. The agency recently reported that global land and ocean surface temperatures for the first four months of 2010 were the warmest it had on record.
Easterbrook, one of 75 climate and policy experts presenting at the conference, uncovered sudden climate fluctuations of warming and cooling -- all of which occurred before 1945, when carbon dioxide levels began to rise sharply -- through geologic evidence.
Ten big climate changes occurred over the past 15,000 years, and another 60 smaller changes occurred in the past 5,000 years.
Based on new analysis of ice cores from Greenland to Antarctica, Easterbrook said global temperatures rose and fell from 9 to 15 degrees in a century or less -- swings that he said were "astonishing."
In addition, he explained that energy consumption will rise -- and consumer prices will rise along with it -- and political and social instability could result as the world population grows 50 percent in the next 40 years while food and energy demand soars.
Another presenter at the conference, James M. Taylor, an environmental policy expert and a fellow at the Heartland Institute, said that global cooling is already happening. Based on figures provided by the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, he noted that snow records from the last 10 years exceeded the records set in the 1960s and 1970s.
A sign of global cooling? This past “decade set a record for largest average global snow extent,” Taylor said.
Lord Monckton wins global warming debate at Oxford Union
Posted on May 24, 2010 by Anthony Watts
I’m waiting for actual photos of the event from the official photographer, but for now I’ll make do with what can be found on the Internet. For those who don’t know, the Oxford Union is the top of the food chain for scholarly debate. This is a significant win.
Oxford Union Debate on Climate Catastrophe
Source: SPPI
Army of Light and Truth 135, Forces of Darkness 110
For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that “global warming” is or could become a global crisis. The only previous defeat for climate extremism among an undergraduate audience was at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, in the spring of 2009, when the climate extremists were defeated by three votes.
Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world’s premier debating society, carried the motion “That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change” by 135 votes to 110. The debate was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC.
Serious observers are interpreting this shock result as a sign that students are now impatiently rejecting the relentless extremist propaganda taught under the guise of compulsory environmental-studies classes in British schools, confirming opinion-poll findings that the voters are no longer frightened by “global warming” scare stories, if they ever were.
When the Union’s president, Laura Winwood, announced the result in the Victorian-Gothich Gladstone Room, three peers cheered with the undergraduates, and one peer drowned his sorrows in beer.
Lord Lawson of Blaby, Margaret Thatcher’s former finance minister, opened the case for the proposition by saying that the economic proposals put forward by the UN’s climate panel and its supporters did not add up. It would be better to wait and see whether the scientists had gotten it right. It was not sensible to make expensive spending commitments, particularly at a time of great economic hardship, when the effectiveness of the spending was gravely in doubt and when it might do more harm than good.
At one point, Lord Lawson was interrupted by a US student, who demanded to know what was his connection with the Science and Public Policy Institute, and what were the Institute’s sources of funding. Lord Lawson was cheered when he said he neither knew nor cared who funded the Institute.
Ms. Zara McGlone, Secretary of the Oxford Union, opposed the motion, saying that greenhouse gases had an effect [they do, but it is very small]; that the precautionary principle required immediate action, just in case and regardless of expense [but one must also bear in mind the cost of the precautions themselves, which can and often do easily exceed the cost of inaction]; that Bangladesh was sinking beneath the waves [a recent study by Prof. Niklas Moerner shows that sea level in Bangladesh has actually fallen]; that the majority of scientists believed “global warming” was a problem [she offered no evidence for this]; and that “irreversible natural destruction” would occur if we did nothing [but she did not offer any evidence].
Mr. James Delingpole, a blogger for the leading British conservative national newspaper The Daily Telegraph, seconded the proposition, saying that – politically speaking – the climate extremists had long since lost the argument. The general public simply did not buy the scare stories any more. The endless tales of Biblical disasters peddled by the alarmist faction were an unwelcome and now fortunately failed recrudescence of dull, gray Puritanism. Instead of hand-wringing and bed-wetting, we should celebrate the considerable achievements of the human race and start having fun.
Lord Whitty, a Labor peer from the trades union movement and, until recently, Labor’s Environment Minister in the Upper House, said that the world’s oil supplies were rapidly running out [in fact, record new finds have been made in the past five years]; that we needed to change our definition of economic growth to take into account the value lost when we damaged the environment [it is artificial accounting of this kind that has left Britain as bankrupt as Greece after 13 years of Labor government]; that green jobs created by governments would help to end unemployment [but Milton Friedman won his Nobel Prize for economics by demonstrating that every artificial job created at taxpayers’ expense destroys two real jobs in the wealth-producing private sector]; that humans were the cause of most of the past century’s warming [there is no evidence for that: the case is built on speculation by programmers of computer models]; that temperature today was at its highest in at least 40 million years [in fact, it was higher than today by at least 12.5 F° for most of the past 550 million years]; and that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic [no one has asked them].
Lord Monckton repeatedly interrupted Lord Whitty to ask him to give a reference in the scientific literature for his suggestion that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic. Lord Whitty was unable to provide the source for his figure, but said that everyone knew it was true. Under further pressure from Lord Monckton, Lord Whitty conceded that the figure should perhaps be 92%. Lord Monckton asked: “And your reference is?” Lord Whitty was unable to reply. Hon. Members began to join in, jeering “Your reference? Your reference?” Lord Whitty sat down looking baffled.
Lord Leach of Fairford, whom Margaret Thatcher appointed a Life Peer for his educational work, spoke third for the proposition. He said that we no longer knew whether or not there had been much “global warming” over the 20th century, because the Climategate emails had exposed the terrestrial temperature records as defective. In any event, he said, throwing good money after bad on various alternative-energy boondoggles was unlikely to prove profitable in the long term and would ultimately do harm.
Mr. Rajesh Makwana, executive director of “Share The World’s Resources”, speaking third for the opposition, said that climate change was manmade [but he did not produce any evidence for that assertion]; that CO2 emissions were growing at 3% a year [but it is concentrations, not emissions, that may in theory affect climate, and concentrations are rising at a harmless 0.5% a year]; that the UN’s climate panel had forecast a 7 F° “global warming” for the 21st century [it’s gotten off to a bad start, with a cooling of 0.2 F° so far]; and that the consequences of “global warming” would be dire [yet, in the audience, sat Mr. Klaus-Martin Schulte, whose landmark paper of 2008 had established that not one of 539 scientific papers on “global climate change” provided any evidence whatsoever that “global warming” would be catastrophic].
Lord Monckton, a former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the UK, concluded the case for the proposition. He drew immediate laughter and cheers when he described himself as “Christopher Walter, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, scholar, philanthropist, wit, man about town, and former chairman of the Wines and Spirits Committee of this honourable Society”. At that point his cummerbund came undone. He held it up to the audience and said, “If I asked this House how long this cummerbund is, you might telephone around all the manufacturers and ask them how many cummerbunds they made, and how long each type of cummerbund was, and put the data into a computer model run by a zitty teenager eating too many doughnuts, and the computer would make an expensive guess. Or you could take a tape-measure and” – glaring at the opposition across the despatch-box – “measure it!” [cheers].
Lord Monckton said that real-world measurements, as opposed to models, showed that the warming effect of CO2 was a tiny fraction of the estimates peddled by the UN’s climate panel. He said that he would take his lead from Lord Lawson, however, in concentrating on the economics rather than the science. He glared at the opposition again and demanded whether, since they had declared themselves to be so worried about “global warming”, they would care to tell him – to two places of decimals and one standard deviation – the UN’s central estimate of the “global warming” that might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. The opposition were unable to reply. Lord Monckton told them the answer was 3.26 plus or minus 0.69 Kelvin or Celsius degrees. An Hon. Member interrupted: “And your reference is?” Lord Monckton replied: “IPCC, 2007, chapter 10, box 10.2.” [cheers]. He concluded that shutting down the entire global economy for a whole year, with all the death, destruction, disaster, disease and distress that that would cause, would forestall just 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.024 Kelvin or Celsius degrees of “global warming”, so that total economic shutdown for 41 years would prevent just 1 K of warming. Adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective.
Mr. Mike Mason, founder and managing director of “Climate Care”, concluded for the opposition. He said that the proposition were peculiar people, and that Lord Monckton was more peculiar than most, in that he was not a real Lord. Lord Monckton, on a point of order, told Mr. Mason that the proposition had avoided personalities and that if Mr. Mason were unable to argue other than ad hominem he should “get out”. [cheers] Mr. Mason then said that we had to prepare for climate risks [yes, in both directions, towards cooler as well as warmer]; and that there was a “scientific consensus” [but he offered no evidence for the existence of any such consensus, still less for the notion that science is done by consensus].
The President thanked the speakers and expressed the Society’s gratitude to the Science and Public Policy Institute for sponsoring the debate. Hon. Members filed out of the Debating Chamber, built to resemble the interior of the House of Commons, and passed either side of the brass division-pole at the main door – Ayes to the right 135, Noes to the left 110. Motion carried.
Where Has the Magic Gone?
The New York Times plaintively ponders global warmism's loss of credibility.
By JAMES TARANTO
This lead paragraph from the New York Times is just priceless:
Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?
Imagine popular children's fables retold by Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal: Anguished weavers gathered to ponder the sudden shift in fashion by subjects who only recently thought the emperor was wearing a splendid suit of clothes. If the boy still says there is a wolf, why have so many farmers turned away from the idea that the sheep are in danger?
Rosenthal reports from London, because the "shift in public opinion" has been especially "striking" in Britain, where "climate change" was once a "popular priority":
But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.
The Times story could be titled "What's the Matter With Many?" Not only do opinion polls in Britain and elsewhere show a significant drop in public credulity about climate alarmism, but newly elected Prime Minister David Cameron "was 'strangely muted' on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions." And then there's this:
London's Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery--not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.
Why Man-Made Global Warming is a load of cobblers; Pt 1
By James Delingpole
Just been reading Climate: The Counter Consensus (Stacey International) the new book by Bob Carter – that’s New Zealand’s Professor Robert M Carter to you, mate: he’s one of the world’s leading palaeoclimatologists – and it’s a cracker. By the end, you’re left feeling rather as I did after the Heartland Conference, that the scientific case against AGW is so overwhelming that you wonder how anyone can still speak up for so discredited a theory without dying of embarrassment.
All the same, it’s good to be reminded now and again why the “consensus” thinking on AGW simply doesn’t stand up. There are so many excellent examples from Prof Carter’s book, I might be forced to spread them out over several blogs.
Take his chapter on the oceans. The other day some troll or other was brandishing a figure he’d got from NOAA, showing that the sea was warming. Well bully for you troll, but if you understand at all how climate works that fact does precisely zilch to support the case for AGW. Why?
The good Prof explains:
The ocean covers more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and over much of its area it is 3-5km deep. Comprising water, which is one thousand times denser than air the ocean has far more mass than the atmosphere – notwithstanding that the atmosphere covers the entire planet and is 50 km high to the top of the stratosphere. The result of this is that the ocean has a much greater heat capacity than the atmosphere, specifically 3,300 times more. Put another way, all the heat energy contained in the atmosphere is matched by the heat content of only the upper 3.2 metres of the worldwide ocean.
Another consequence is that water requires much more energy to heat it up than does air. On a volume/volume basis, the ratio of heat capacities is, of course, 3,300 to 1. One practical result of this is that it is almost impossible for the atmosphere to exert a significant heating effect on the ocean, as is often asserted to by promoters of global warming alarm. For to heat one litre of water by 1 degree C will take 3,300 litres of air that was 2 degrees hotter, or one litre of air that was 3,300 degrees hotter, neither of which is a very common scenario in our every day weather system. Instead it is the ocean that controls the warmth of the lower atmosphere, in three main ways: namely, through direct contact, by infrared radiation from the ocean surface and by the removal of latent heat by evaporation.
Prof Carter goes on to explain that the time scales in which the oceans absorb, recirculate and re-emit heat are often much larger than is dreamt of in the Warmists’ philosophy.
….Major time lags are built into the climate system such that a warming or cooling event that occurs today (say the Great Pacific Climate Shift in 1976/1977 which corresponded to a worldwide step increase in temperature of about 0.2 degrees C) may be reflecting a change in heat energy that was stored in the ocean hundreds of years ago…
Indeed, he says, some scientists suggest that the rise in atmospheric CO2 in the Twentieth Century may represent ocean outgassing caused as long ago as the Medieval Warm Period.
And if you think his disquisition on the oceans drives a coach and horses through the Warmists’ AGW doom religion, wait till you hear what he has to say in his chapter on Computer Modeling.
May 27, 2010
More on the ‘Climate Change’ Racket
Posted by Butler Shaffer on May 27, 2010 09:25 AM
According to the London Evening Standard, America’s favorite English Lapdog, Tony Blair, will receive 700,000 Pounds per year to be a “strategic adviser” to a California company seeking to “profit from technology that helps reduce global warming and carbon emissions.” Tony is quoted as saying: “Solving the climate crisis is more than just a political agenda item; it’s an urgent priority that requires innovation, creativity and ambition.” It is also a priority to Blair’s reported need for an income of 5,000,000 Pounds per year to maintain his lifestyle!
May 27th, 2010
Global Warming Update: NASA Accused of 'Climategate' Stalling
Written by: Barry Secrest
Published on May 27th, 2010 @ 08:50:19 am , using 943 words
Posted in Events and Issues: Credible Resources
Washington Times
By: Stephen Dinan
The man battling NASA for access to potential "Climategate" e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.
Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.
Will Elites Ever Stop Pushing Global Warming Hype? Nope, The Desire To Enrich Themselves Is Too Great
Read here. Despite the complete failure of empirical evidence and the actual climate supporting the hypothesis of IPCC Climategate science and its climate models, the world's "elites" have a very personal, vested interest in maintaining the fear about climate change.
Why's that? Hey, comrade, the gig is good!
"Tony Blair is set to earn millions of pounds advising an American businessman on how to make money from tackling climate change...The former prime minister will be paid at least £700,000 a year to act as a “strategic adviser” to Khosla Ventures, a venture capitalist firm... the Californian company bankrolls businesses hoping to profit from technology that helps reduce global warming and carbon emissions...Mr Blair secured the job thanks to his “influence” and high level international contacts, whom he will be expected to lean on to open doors...He has told friends he needs £5 million a year to fund his lifestyle."
Why's that (number two)? The AGW gig is easier than shooting-fish-in-a-barrel.
"The couple [Al Gore and his wife] spent $8,875,000 on an ocean-view villa on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa and fountains, a real estate source familiar with the deal confirms. The Italian-style house has six fireplaces, five bedrooms and nine bathrooms."
As it is obvious to any person possessing an IQ north of double digits, elites are very concerned...just not about the climate or warming/cooling. It's all about money, material goods, fame and power. It's as simple as that.
Bickering and defensive, climate researchers have lost the public’s trust.
Blame economic worries, another freezing winter, or the cascade of scandals emerging from the world’s leading climate-research body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But concern over global warming has cooled down dramatically. In über-green Germany, only 42 percent of citizens worry about global warming now, down from 62 percent in 2006. In Britain, just 26 percent believe climate change is man-made, down from 41 percent as recently as November 2009. And Americans rank global warming dead last in a list of 21 problems that concern them, according to a January Pew poll.
“Consensus” crumbles. But why did these scientists not say so earlier?
Andrew Bolt, Sunday, May 30, 2010 at 06:32am
Very, very belatedly we see scientific bodies now endorsing what sceptical non-scientists have tried to warn of for years.
In Australia:
Australia’s former chief scientist, Professor Robin Batterham, is embroiled in a bitter dispute over climate change within one of the nation’s elite science academies.
As president of the peer-elected Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Professor Batterham faces demands by members to drop plans for the academy to issue a policy statement supporting climate sceptics… A two-page draft, posted on a password-protected section of the academy’s website, said the academy ‘’does not believe the science is settled’’ regarding climate change.
In Britain:
The most prestigious group of scientists in the country was forced to act after fellows complained that doubts over man made global warming were not being communicated to the public…
Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, admitted that the case for man-made global warming has been exaggerated in the past.
He emphasised that the basic science remains sound but agreed to issue guidance so that it better reflects the uncertainties.
“Climate change is a hugely important issue but the public debate has all too often been clouded by exaggeration and misleading information,” he said…
The Royal Society will look again at the public communications on climate change after 43 fellows complained that so far the message has not reflected the uncertainty in the debate.
(Thanks to reader elsie.)
UPDATE
The (Royal Society) appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect — there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.” ...
Sir Alan Rudge, a society Fellow and former member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee, is one of the leaders of the rebellion who gathered signatures on a petition sent to Lord Rees, the society president.
He told The Times that the society had adopted an “unnecessarily alarmist position” on climate change.
Meet the green who doubts ‘The Science’
The author of Chill explains why he’s sceptical about manmade global warming — and why greens are so intolerant.
Peter Taylor
The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. I used to think it was, until about 2003 – and then, feeling that the remedies being proposed for climate change would be more damaging to the environment than climate change itself, I took it upon myself to look at the science.
In my book on biodiversity, Beyond Conservation, I had mentioned in one of the chapters that perhaps the man-made global warming theory was not all it was being cracked up to be. The changes we are seeing now, I wrote, suggested that some other processes were at work. I then took time out, visited the science libraries, and checked the original science upon which today’s models are based.
I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there’s no real consensus among the scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example is presented as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas, therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn’t settled. There’s a huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted that carbon dioxide on its own is not a problem. So, you can double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50 years from now at the current rate of emissions.
The role of water vapour in planetary warming is also open to questioning. While it is presented as being a heat amplifier, in fact because it can turn into cloud it could actually regulate temperature instead. As it turned out, at the very beginning of the UN discussions, Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, and a leading expert appointed to the committee because of his meteorological expertise, was saying precisely that: the amplification effect asserted cannot be relied upon to increase warming because the vapour could turn into cloud. This needed to be proved before basing assumptions on it. But Lindzen was overruled. Despite still being a key part of the IPPC process, he is now vilified by the press and by the environmental movement. So even on the most basic science of the atmospherics, there is doubt.
Or take oceanography. Most of the heat of the planet is not contained in the atmosphere; it is in the oceans. And what happens in the oceans is absolutely vital to the dynamics of heat moving around the planet. So while of course it is possible to warm up the planet to an additional extent as a result of human activity, if the planet then lets more heat out than it would normally do, then it will balance out. That is to say, you have only to produce less cloud over the oceans and the oceans will release heat to space. Like CO2 itself, the atmosphere doesn’t actually hold heat – it simply delays its transmission to space.
The real dynamic of the planet is to do with clouds, yet this area of science – oceanography and cloud cover – is incredibly uncertain. When I first looked at the basic science, the findings were surprising. Over the global warming period – which I limit to the past 50 or so years – the globe didn’t warm at all between 1950 and 1980, even though carbon dioxide emissions were going through the roof due to the postwar expansion of industry; global temperatures stayed pretty much flat.
The real global warming took off in the 1980s and 90s, through to about 2005. (In the last 10 years it’s actually plateaued.) That period of 25 years, from around 1980 to 2005, coincided with changes in the ocean and cloud cover – that is, there was less cloud and more sunlight getting through to the ocean. And this can be seen in the satellite data on the kind of energy that’s coming through (short-wave energy, which is the only energy that heats water – infra-red energy coming from CO2 cannot heat water). So when you look at the real-world data, the warming of that entire period seems to be due to additional sunlight reaching the oceans.
In 2007, I put out a report on this, in the hope of getting feedback before I published my book, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory. Since then, top scientists at NASA have agreed that this period of warming over the past 25 years is entirely due to the short-wave radiation from sunlight, with the ocean transferring that heat to the land.
So the crucial question is: has the cloud thinning been due to carbon dioxide? Or is it part of a cycle? If you ask some of the top people at NASA – that is, the people who interpret all the satellite data – they will say it’s 50-50. So you could say the greenhouse effect has warmed the oceans and the warmer oceans have thinned the clouds. But that is still just a hypothesis, it is not a proven scientific fact. That means you could assert with equal validity that thinning clouds have warmed the oceans, which has led to global warming – meaning the effect of carbon dioxide is minimal.
There is a fairly easy way of deciding between the two viewpoints: you look at the history of climate to find out whether there has been warming and cooling in the past, before carbon dioxide became such an issue. And of course there have been cycles of warming and cooling, with the longest of the cycles lasting about a thousand years and the shortest cycle – El Nino – about four-to-eight years.
So, right now, we are at the peak of a thousand-year cycle. We also had a peak for all the other cycles between 1995 and 2005. Given that these cycles have peaked, temperature-wise, before, one can look at what happened back then. A thousand years ago, for instance, the Vikings were growing crops on Greenland, which assumes that the summer ice would have been more limited than it is now. The Arctic melted down a thousand years ago, just as it did 2,000 years ago. What’s astonishing is that you can see all of that in the ice-core record in Greenland. And in each cycle of a thousand years, the peak is getting lower. So overall the planet is actually cooling, from a peak about 8,000 years ago.
Now the only way in which you can get cycles of warming and cooling on such a scale is through the oceans. And the only way that can happen is in relation to cloud cover. So the crucial question then is, how do the oceans vary their cloud cover? What creates these cycles? There is a major scientific controversy over how the sun’s magnetic field influences the different types of energy that reach the planet, and how they, in turn, influence cloud cover. There are several different scientific teams working on it, including one from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). What this shows is that it is still an unresolved question. Nobody knows what the mechanisms are.
So why is the UN saying what it is saying? Well, if you actually look at the wording of what this so-called consensus of scientists has produced, then you will see that they believe that ‘global warming is not due to known natural causes acting alone’. This is clever wording. It means that the door is open to an unknown mechanism driving the warming. So although it is well known that the warming is naturally driven, the mechanism is not.
Why would the UN suppress all of this debate happening within its working groups? The problem is that the secretariat within the UN tasked with processing this debate is already committed – financially – to focusing upon carbon dioxide as the climate-change driver. It is very hard for them to backtrack.
It is only recently that the scientific world has bought into this consensus. In 2001, America, Russia and China did not accept the UN’s analysis. But by 2004, America had signed up to it. And this was all down to a certain team in the US which produced an analysis that ironed out the past cycles of warming and cooling. Although it has since been discredited, this report had a tremendous effect in bringing scientific institutions around to the idea of man-made global warming.
So behind the appearance of consensus and settled science, there is now this tremendous battle going on. The dissenting scientists are described by certain journalists and environmentalists as ‘denialists’ and ‘sceptics’ funded by the oil industry. This is simply not the case. There are top-level atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree that the case is proven for global warming. Nobody is seriously saying that carbon dioxide has no effect whatsoever, but the defenders of the faith, as it were, set up a straw man. ‘These people’, they say, ‘think carbon dioxide has no effect’. Only a lunatic fringe thinks that.
The critical scientists are simply saying that carbon dioxide’s effect is small, at most 20 per cent. This means that even a 50 per cent reduction by 2050 in manmade greenhouse gas emissions would only reduce the driving force of climate change by 10 per cent. That’s because the natural driving force will determine the climate. As I argue in Chill, if you look at all the past cycles, the temperature declines after a peak. And this decline will bring with it wholly different problems – ones which, so far, we are woefully underprepared for.
What’s really disconcerting for me is that I am a longstanding environmentalist. As part of environmental groups I’ve helped to prevent nuclear waste from being dumped in the ocean, I’ve helped change emergency planning for nuclear reactors, and I’ve also helped develop biodiversity strategy. I’m as green as you can get. But what I am faced with now is environmental groups and major NGOs – Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – which have allied themselves with the state. They talk about so-called denialists allying themselves with ‘Big Oil’, but they have fallen into the arms of big government. They’ve allied with disreputable prime ministers; they’ve allied with chief policy advisers who have never got anything right in their lives; they’ve allied themselves with scientific institutions that have never led on any of these environmental issues.
If you write something, as I have done with Chill, which is a rational, critical appraisal of the whole situation, you would at least expect to have some dialogue. But there has been nothing. I haven’t had a single invitation to speak to any of these groups. Even universities have been reticent. I have been invited to speak at Leeds University, which has quite a strong climate community, and the Energy Institute. But the environmental community has been absolutely silent towards me. I would challenge them to bring all of their experts to the table and hammer it out.
We’re seeing the dangerous development here of a very intolerant political ideology. It is a very strange political and scientific situation, in which vast sums of money are underwriting a bureaucracy of climate accountants and auditors, and in which academic funding is easier to obtain if you put man-made climate change at the top of your research proposal. I have never seen anything like it in the 40 years of my scientific and environmental career.
Peter Taylor was talking to Tim Black.
_________________ Free your Self and Free the World
Slow progress is being made at little-noticed Copenhagen follow-up
By Geoffrey Lean World Last updated: June 8th, 2010
Geoffrey Lean is Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago.
Hardly anyone has noticed, but international climate negotiations have resumed in formal session for the first time since the Copenhagen summit last December. Six months after failing to seal a deal in the Danish capital, despite much optimism when the summit opened, the negotiators are trying to get the process back on track in time for the next major conference in Cancun, Mexico, at the end of the year.
The good news is that the atmosphere is much better than in Copenhagen. Mind you, it could hardly be worse, than at that rancorous, chaotic, atrociously organised and disastrously chaired occasion. But even so there is a remarkable amount of goodwill around, especially given where things broke off just before Christmas. One sign of that is that much of the Copenhagen Accord, the last-minute agreement personally hammered out by the leaders on the summit’s last day, is being quietly merged with the formal UN negotiating text: a clash between the proponents of the two dragged on into extra time through the night after summit was supposed to have ended, threatening to turn admitted disappointment into indisputable disaster. Meanwhile, most of the negotiating countries – representing 80 per cent of world carbon dioxide emissions – have signed up to it.
The bad news is that there are still deep differences between developed and developing countries. The Third World wants industrialised nations to pledge to make bigger emissions cuts faster. They, and particularly the United States, have responded by demanding better monitoring and verification of developing country measures to fulfill the often impressive promises they have made to tackle their own emissions. On the other hand, good progress has been made on working out ways of rewarding tropical rainforest countries for keeping their trees standing, and on transferring clean, green technologies from rich to poor.
But the main issue is money – most immediately the $30 billion promised by the leaders at Copenhagen to help the poorest adapt to the effects of global warming. Some $28 million of this has now been pledged – chiefly from Japan ($11 billion), the European Union ($9.6 billion), the US ($5.1 billion), Norway ($1.8 billion) and Australia ($500 million). $25 billion of this looks like being grants, rather than loans, but – critically – how much of it is new money rather than funds switched from existing aid budgets is unclear. And when will it start to flow?
There look like being two more negotiating meetings – in August and September/October – before everyone assembles again in Mexico. No-one is expecting a treaty to be concluded then; most would settle for steady, if slow progress, without the dramas of Copenhagen. Whether that will be enough to get global warming under control in time, is another, if unknown, matter.
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