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Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Alaskan Glacier Melt Overestimated for Last 40 years
But now they have got it right, they tell us. But didn't they tell us that before?
Glaciologists at the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography (LEGOS -- CNRS/CNES/IRD/Université Toulouse 3) and their US and Canadian colleagues (1) have shown that previous studies have largely overestimated mass loss from Alaskan glaciers over the past 40 years. Recent data from the SPOT 5 and ASTER satellites have enabled researchers to extensively map mass loss in these glaciers, which contributed 0.12 mm/year to sea-level rise between 1962 and 2006, rather than 0.17 mm/year as previously estimated.
Mountain glaciers cover between 500 000 and 600 000 km2 of the Earth's surface (around the size of France), which is little compared to the area of the Greenland (1.6 million km2) and Antarctic (12.3 million km2) ice sheets. Despite their small size, mountain glaciers have played a major role in recent sea-level rise due to their rapid melting in response to global climate warming.
Of all the ice-covered regions of the planet, ice loss has been the greatest in Alaska and northwestern Canada, where glaciers cover 90 000 km2. Results from the LEGOS glaciologists and their US and Canadian colleagues, published in the February issue of Nature Geoscience, lead them to conclude that these glaciers have contributed 0.12 mm/year to sea-level rise over the period 1962-2006, rather than 0.17 mm/year as previously estimated by a team at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska (Fairbanks). The new estimate was obtained by comparing recent topographies, derived from Spot 5-HRS (SPIRIT project (2) funded by CNES) and ASTER (GLIMS/NASA project), with maps from the 1950-60s, which enabled loss from three quarters of the Alaskan glaciers to be measured.
How did the team from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska estimate that the contribution of these glaciers to sea-level rise was 0.17 mm/year? In 1995, and then again in 2001, the researchers used an airborne laser to measure the surface elevation of 67 glaciers along longitudinal profiles. These elevations were then compared with those mapped in the 1950s and 1960s. From this, the researchers inferred elevation changes and then extrapolated this to other glaciers. Their results, published in Science (3), pointed to a major contribution to sea-level rise for the 1950-1995 period (0.14 mm/year sea-level rise), which then doubled in the recent period (after 1995).
Why did they overestimate ice loss from these glaciers by 50%? The impact of rock debris that covers certain glacier tongues (4) and protects them from solar radiation (and thus from melting) was not taken into account in the previous work. Moreover, their sampling was limited to longitudinal profiles along the center of a few glaciers, which geometrically led to overestimation of ice loss. This new study confirms that the thinning of Alaskan glaciers is very uneven, and shows that it is difficult to sample such complex spatial variability on the basis of a few field measurements or altimetry profiles. Thanks to their regional coverage, satellite data make it possible to improve observations of glacial response to climate change and to specify the contribution of glaciers to sea-level rise.
Ice loss from Alaskan glaciers since 1962 is evidently smaller than previously thought. However, thinning (sometimes over 10 m/year, as in the Columbia glacier) and glacial retreat remain considerable. Moreover, the spectacular acceleration in mass loss since the mid-1990s, corresponding to a contribution of 0.25 to 0.30 mm/year to sea-level rise, is not in question and proves to be a worrying indication of future sea-level rise.
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The Great IPCC Meltdown Continues
It’s not just the threat of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035. Now another headline grabbing IPCC scare story is melting away. A report in Sunday’s London Times highlights new humiliations for the IPCC: "The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general."
There is however one teensy-weensy little problem. As Professor Chris Field, the lead author of the IPCC’s climate impact team has now told reporters that he can find “no evidence” to support the claim in the IPCC’s 2007 report.
There’s more. When the glacier story broke, IPCC apologists returned over and over again to a saving grace. The bogus glacier report appeared in the body of the IPCC document, but not in the much more carefully vetted Synthesis Report, in which the IPCC’s senior leadership made its specific recommendations to world leaders. So it didn’t matter that much, the apologists told us, and we can still trust the rigorously checked and reviewed Synthesis Report.
But that’s where the African rain crisis prediction is found — in the supposedly sacrosanct Synthesis Report. So: the Synthesis Report contains a major scare prediction — 50% shortfall in North African food production just ten years from now — and there is no serious, peer-reviewed evidence that the prediction is true.
But there’s more. Much, much more. Readers of the Times and the Telegraph are watching the IPCC’s credibility disappear before their eyes. The former head of IPCC has publicly said the IPCC risks losing all credibility if it can’t clean up its act. The head of the largest British funder of environmental research has joined the head of Greenpeace UK in criticizing the IPCC. (At Greenpeace, they want Pachauri to resign.) The Dutch government has demanded that the IPCC correct its erroneous assertion that half of the Netherlands is below sea level. Actually, it’s only about a quarter. A prediction about the impact of sea level increases on people living in the Nile Delta was taken from an unpublished student dissertation. The report contained inaccurate data about generating energy from waves and about the cost of nuclear power (this information was apparently taken without being checked directly from a website supported by the nuclear power industry). The deeply environmentalist Guardian carries a story documenting the decline in both public and Conservative Party confidence in need to address global warming.
More significantly, there’s an editorial in today’s Guardian that criticizes shortcomings at the IPCC and calls for a wholesale change in the way climate scientists do their work and communicate with the public.
In my February 1 post on The Death of Global Warming, I said that the movement had been killed by two things: bad science and bad politics. The Guardian hopes that the parrot isn’t dead yet, but it seems to agree with my basic diagnosis: “It is bad science and bad politics to counter scepticism with righteous indignation. In the long run, public confidence will be inspired more by frankness about what science cannot explain,” write the editors.
The editors pick up another theme that is familiar to readers of this blog: "In trying to avert dangerous climate change, governments are aiming for something extraordinary. They want to transform the global economy because of a hypothesis for which the evidence is mostly inaccessible to the layman. It is the biggest pre-emption in history, and it relies on collective trust in science."
When the IPCC has its former chief, the Guardian newspaper and the Dutch government demanding change, something has got to give.
I just wish all these stories were a little easier to find in the US press. These stories have been and continue to be on the front pages of UK newspapers; American newspapers by and large aren’t, yet, taking them as seriously and the growing numbers of Americans who are following the scandals are mostly tracking them from internet reports like this one or directly in the British press. This too needs to change, and the sooner the better.
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Climate scepticism grows among Britain's Conservative politicians
Most Conservative MPs, including at least six members of the shadow cabinet, are sceptical about their party's continued focus on climate change policies, it has been claimed. The recent furore around "Climategate" has hardened the views of Tory MPs, many of whom were already unconvinced by the scientific consensus, and has led to increasing calls for the issue to be pushed down the priority list.
Tim Montgomerie, founder and editor of the ConservativeHome website, said climate change had the potential to be as divisive for the party as Europe once was. "You have got 80% or 90% of the party just not signed up to this. No one minded at the beginning, but people are starting to realise this could be quite expensive, so opinion is hardening."
Montgomerie said that while some MPs simply did not believe the science, others felt it would harm the economy too much to focus on policies to reduce emissions. "Some think, 'What is the point in taking all these decisions if India and China and others row ahead?' Nigel Lawson makes the point that 30% of Indian people have no electricity and the Indian government has to give that to them. The cheapest way to do that is fossil fuels."
Lord Lawson chairs the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a thinktank that claims the climate debate has been distorted by exaggeration. On pages 28 and 29, Benny Peiser, director of the foundation, debates the issue with the Observer's science editor, Robin McKie. A recent BBC poll found that 25% of people did not think global warming was happening – compared with 15% in November – and a similar trend is taking place among Conservative MPs. "You scratch almost any backbencher and you find they are sceptical and I know of six shadow cabinet ministers who are sceptical about the economic consequences of a low-carbon policy," said Montgomerie. He said the leadership was "recalibrating" its message.
Last week, representatives of 50 Tory councils gathered in London for a "Lean and Green" conference where Nick Herbert and Greg Clark – the shadow environment and energy secretaries – argued that green policies could save money and improve Britain's energy security. Clark rejected the notion that it was a change in direction. "There is a real threat to our energy security and there is a risk of a black-out," he said. Green policies that developed alternatives to fossil fuels and persuaded people to reduce energy consumption were "win-win" because they saved money, provided energy security and reduced carbon emissions.
One MP said the party was much more likely to respond to economic arguments: "There is a large group in the party – probably the majority – who are sceptical. That ranges from those who don't believe any of it to those that think the climate is changing but are not sure how much it is down to human beings, to those who accept the science but think we could act, but then in one year China and India could wipe out that effort. "
There are fears that the issue could flare up after the election if the Conservatives win power – particularly around plans for a third runway at Heathrow, which the party has said it will scrap.
Tim Yeo, the Tory MP who chairs the environmental audit select committee, said the shift had come about because of scientific mistakes, and a "backwash" from Copenhagen. "That has created a context in which it is easy for sceptics to build momentum and that is influencing a good number of politicians. "What people have lost sight of is that serious climate-change scientists have always argued that the climate is changing gradually, that temperatures are rising and that one factor – and probably the main one – is the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But they have never argued that it is easy to know how quickly that is happening.
The scientist at the centre of "Climategate" last night revealed he was so traumatised by the scandal that he considered killing himself. Professor Phil Jones told the Sunday Times the support of his family, especially the love of his five-year-old granddaughter, had helped him to shake off suicidal thoughts.
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Why "The Observer" is Wrong
By Prof. Philip Stott
Today, The Observer hosts a vitriolic ‘Debate’ [pp.28 - 29] between its long-standing Science Editor, Robin McKie, and Dr. Benny Peiser, Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The fact that this newspaper is now holding a debate is in itself indicative of the media change with respect to ‘global warming’, and I congratulate Dr. Peiser on being willing to enter the lion’s den. However, and perhaps inevitably, the debate is then followed by a highly-predictable Observer ‘Comment’ [p.34].
Nevertheless, this ‘Comment’ is more intriguing than Robin McKie’s aggressive debating stance, because, unfortunately for The Observer, it inadvertently reveals precisely why its arguments are fallacious: “But deniers deal not in the balance of risk but the exposure of uncertainty. Tiny doubts on the periphery of the case, they say, undermine the whole story, banishing the threat.”
This could not be farther from the truth. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that The Observer should claim this when Dr. Peiser, Mr. McKie’s nemesis, is, in part, a social anthropologist of risk, who wisely responds in one of his exchanges as follows: “You ask whether I doubt that global warming poses a potential risk. Of course it does. So do asteroid impacts, nuclear warfare and ice ages, to name just a few. What these potential risks have in common is that they have a low probability but a high impact. Just because we cannot rule out any of these risks doesn't mean that there is a need for panic measures.”
The Attempt To Make Global Warming A Cost-Benefit Zero Has Failed
Part of the visceral anger of people like Robin McKie is that their goose has been cooked. For some 20 years now, there has been a ruthless, and at times disgraceful, attempt to make ‘global warming’ a zero in any cost-benefit analysis with regards to political and economic actions relating to climate change, which would mean that there is no balancing of risks at all, but simply the one risk of ‘global warming’. This fundamental flaw was first brilliantly exposed by none other than Bjørn Lomborg [right] in his devastating The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, which appeared as early as 2001. The fury heaped on Lomborg was inevitably proportional to the threat that his arguments posed to the ‘Green’ agenda over this key issue. He had exposed the true agenda for what it was.
Today, many more people are fully aware of this fatal weakness, and newspapers like The Observer, despite their continued bluster, can no longer hide the fact that the ‘global warming’ risk has to be balanced against many other competing risks, not to mention against the serious risk to the world economy, and to the poor, posed by precipitate and ill-judged political and economic actions. This is why Robin McKie, The Observer, and their ilk are growing increasingly desperate to maintain a zero status for ‘global warming’. It is also precisely why Dr. Peiser - “the sceptic” - presents a far more reasoned and nuanced analysis of risk: “I am not advocating political inaction. Far from it. While I reject economically damaging and, for that reason, politically unattainable climate policies, I am in favour of adapting to a changing climate and making our societies more resilient, as mankind has throughout its existence.”
Risk And Science
The Observer and Robin McKie are just plain wrong. They are also wrong with respect to risk when we specifically address the science. There can be no predictable outcomes for fiddling at the margins with one single human factor in a system such as climate, the most complex, coupled, non-linear, semi-chaotic known. What climate will Mr. McKie and The Observer produce for us? And, won’t it change when we get there, in any case? They can have no idea.
No, The Observer and Robin McKie are deeply, even naively, misguided. Scepticism and risk assessment go together naturally; faith, by contrast, is an absolute definition of risk, and one appropriate in neither science nor economics.
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The Hottest Hoax in the World
The climate change fraud that is now unravelling is unprecedented in its deceit, unmatched in scope—and for the liberal elite, akin to 9 on the Richter scale. Never have so few fooled so many for so long, ever.
The entire world was being asked to change the way it lives on the basis of pure hyperbole. Propriety, probity and transparency were routinely sacrificed.
The truth is: the world is not heating up in any significant way. Neither are the Himalayan glaciers going to melt as claimed by 2035. Nor is there any link at all between natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and global warming. All that was pure nonsense, or if you like, ‘no-science’!
The climate change mafia, led by Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), almost pulled off the heist of the century through fraudulent data and suppression of procedure. All the while, they were cornering millions of dollars in research grants that heaped one convenient untruth upon another. And as if the money wasn’t enough, the Nobel Committee decided they should have the coveted Peace Prize.
But let’s begin at the beginning. Mr Pachauri has no training whatsoever in climate science. This was known all the time, yet he heads the pontification panel which proliferates the new gospel of a hotter world. How come? Why did the United Nations not choose someone who was competent? After all, this man is presumably incapable of differentiating between ocean sediments and coral terrestrial deposits, nor can he go about analysing tree ring records and so on. That’s not jargon; these are essential elements of a syllabus in any basic course on climatology.
You cannot blame him. His degree and training is in railroad engineering. You read it right. This man was educated to make railroads from point A to point B.
THE GATHERING STORM
There are many casualties in this sad story of greed and hubris. The big victim is the scientific method. This was pointed out in great detail by John P Costella of the Virginia-based Science and Public Policy Institute. Science is based on three fundamental pillars. The first is fallibility. The fact that you can be wrong, and if so proven by experimental input, any hypothesis can be—indeed, must be—corrected.
This was systematically stymied as early as 2004 by the scientific in-charge of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit. This university was at the epicentre of the ‘research’ on global warming. It is here that Professor Phil Jones kept inconvenient details that contradicted climate change claims out of reports.
The second pillar of science is that by its very nature, science is impersonal. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘them’. There is only the quest. However, in the entire murky non-scientific global warming episode, if anyone was a sceptic he was labelled as one of ‘them’. At the very apex, before his humiliating retraction, Pachauri had dismissed a report by Indian scientists on glaciers as “voodoo science”.
The third pillar of science is peer group assessment. This allows for validation of your thesis by fellow scientists and is usually done in confidence. However, the entire process was set aside by the IPCC while preparing the report. Thus, it has zero scientific value.
The fact that there was dissent within the climate science teams, that some people objected to the very basis of the grand claims of global warming, did not come out through the due process. It came to light when emails at the Climate Research Centre at East Anglia were hacked in November 2009. It is from the hacked conversations that a pattern of conspiracy and deceit emerge. It is a peek into the world of global warming scaremongering—amplify the impact of CO2, stick to dramatic timelines on destruction of forests, and never ask for a referral or raise a contrary point. You were either a believer in a hotter world or not welcome in this ‘scientific fold’.
HOUSE OF CARDS AND COLOUR OF CASH
So we have the fact that a non-expert heads the IPCC. We have the fact that glaciers are not melting by 2035; this major scaremongering is now being defended as a minor error (it was originally meant to be 2350, some have clarified). The date was spouted first by Syed Hasnain, an Indian glacier expert, in an interview to a magazine. It had no scientific validity, and, as Hasnain has himself said, was speculative.
On the basis of that assertion, The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) that Pachauri heads and where Hasnain works in the glaciology team, got two massive chunks of funding. The first was estimated to be a $300,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation and the second was a part of the $2 million funding from the European Union. So you write a report that is false on glaciers melting and get millions to study the impact of a meltdown which will not be happening in the first place. Now if this is not a neat one, what is?
The same goes for dire predictions on Amazon rain forests. The IPCC maintained that there would be a huge depletion in Amazon rain forests because of lack of precipitation. Needless to add, no Amazon rain forest expert could be trusted to back this claim. They depended on a report by a freelance journalist and activist, instead, and now it has blown up in their faces.
There’s plenty more in this sordid tale. For one thing, there is no scientific consensus at all that man-made CO2 emissions cause global warming, as claimed by the IPCC. In a recent paper, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who has worked extensively on climate change models, argues: ‘There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps—if any—we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.’
An investigation by Dr Benny Peiser, director, Global Warming Policy Foundation, has revealed that only 13 of the 1,117, or a mere 1 per cent of the scientific papers crosschecked by him, explicitly endorse the consensus as defined by the IPCC. Thus the very basis of the claim of consensus on global warming is false. And so deeply entrenched is the global warming lobby, the prestigious journal Science did not publish a letter that Dr Peiser wrote pointing out the lack of consensus.
Speaking to Open, says Dr Peiser, “The IPCC process by which it arrives at its conclusions lacks balance, transparency and due diligence. It is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer-reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC reports. Not surprisingly, the IPCC has lost a lot of credibility in recent years. It is also losing the trust of more and more governments who are no longer following its advice. Until it agrees to undergo a root and branch reform, it will continue to haemorrhage credibility and trust. The time has come for a complete overhaul of its structure and workings.”
Another fraud is in the very chart central to Pachauri’s speech at the Copenhagen summit. As Lord Monckton has pointed out, ‘The graph is bogus not only because it relies on made-up data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, but also because it is overlain by four separate trendlines, each with a start-date carefully selected to give the entirely false impression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however—neatly obscured by an ingenious rescaling of the graph and the superimposition of the four bogus trend lines on it—is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940 the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.’
PACHAURI’S WRONG NUMBERS
This chart, tracking mean global temperature over the past 150 years, was central to the presentation that IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri made at the Copenhagen environment summit. Many scientists believe that the graph is fraudulent. First, there are strong allegations that the data, collected from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, is a tissue of lies. Plus, as British climate change expert Lord Christopher Monckton puts it: “(The main graph, in darker blue) is overlain by four separate lines, each carefully selected to give the entirely false im•pression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however... is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940, the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.” In other words, the graph has been drawn with a motive to prove one’s point, and not to show the truth.
Thus the earth has warmed at this rate at least twice in the last 100 years and no major catastrophe has occurred. What is more, the earth has cooled after that warming. Why is the IPCC not willing to explore this startling point?
Another total lie has been that the Sunderbans in Bangladesh are sinking on account of the rise in sea level. The IPCC claimed that one-fifth of Bangladesh will be under water by 2050. Well, it turns out this is an absurd, unscientific and outrageous claim. According to scientists at the Centre for Environmental and Geographical Information Services (Cegis) in Dhaka, its surface area appears to be growing by 20 sq km annually. Cegis has based its results on more than 30 years of satellite imagery. IPCC has not retracted this claim. As far as they are concerned, Bangladesh is a goner by 2050, submerged forever in the Bay of Bengal.
THE COOKIE CRUMBLES
The fallout of Climategate is slowly but surely unfolding right where it hurts a large number of special interests—in the field of business. Yes, the carbon trading business is now in the line of fire. Under a cap-and-trade system, a government authority first sets a limit on emissions, deciding how much pollution will be allowed in all. Next, companies are issued credits, essentially licences to pollute, based on how large they are, and what industries they work in. If a company comes in below its cap, it has extra credits which it may trade with other companies, globally.
Post Climategate, this worldwide trade, estimated at about $30 billion in 2006, is finding few takers. It is under attack following the renewed uncertainty over the role of human-generated CO2 in global warming. In the US, which never adopted any of this to begin with, there is a serious move now to finish off the cap-and-trade regime globally. It’s a revolt of sorts. Six leading Democrats in the US Congress have joined hands with many Republicans to urge the Obama Administration to back off from the regime.
The collapse of the international market for carbon credits, a direct fallout of Climategate, has already sent shudders down many spines in parts of the world that were looking forward to making gains from it. It was big business, after all, and Indian businesses were eyeing it as well. In fact, Indian firms were expected to trade some $1 billion worth of carbon credits this year, and with the market going poof, they stand to lose quite some money (notional or otherwise).
Besides the commercial aspect, there is also the issue of wider public credibility. There have been signs of scepticism all along. In a 2009 Gallup poll, a record number of people—41 per cent—elected to say that global warming was an exaggerated threat. This slackening of public support is in sync with a coordinated political movement that is seeking to re-examine the entire issue of global warming from scratch. The movement is led by increasingly vocal Republicans in the US Senate and packs considerable political power.
Pachauri’s position is also becoming increasingly untenable with demands for his resignation becoming louder by the day. In an interview to Open, Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute, a noted US think-tank, who has followed the debate for years, says, “Dr Pachauri should resign because he has a consistent record of mixing his political views with climate science, because of his intolerance of legitimate scientific views that he does not agree with, because of his disparagement of India’s glacier scientists as practising ‘voodoo science’, and because of his incomprehension of the serious nature of what was in the East Anglia emails.”
Richard North, the professor who brought to light the financial irregularities in a write-up co-authored with Christopher Booker, has also said in a TV interview that, “If Dr Pachauri does not resign voluntarily, he will be forced to do so.”
GLOBAL STORMING AHEAD
The world awaits answers, based not on writings of sundry freelance journalists and non-experts, but on actual verifiable data on whether the globe is warming at all, and if so by how much. Only then can policy options be calibrated. As things stand, there is little doubt that the IPCC will need to be reconstituted with a limited mandate. This mess needs investigation and questions need to be answered as to why absurd claims were taken as gospel truth. The future of everything we know as ‘normal’ depends on this. The real danger is that the general public is now weary of the whole thing, a little tired of the debate, and may not really care for the truth, convenient or otherwise.
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Understanding the futile Australian climate scheme
The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the Emissions Trading Scheme proposed for Australia and now before the Australian Parliament was far more than “A Great Big New Tax”. The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that PM Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme combined a Big New Tax with a War-Time Rationing scheme and an Income redistributing compensation scheme, all to be run by a regulatory army probably bigger than our real army.
He continued: “Let’s try to understand this Ruddy ETS. “To simplify things, let’s look at just the electricity industry.
“If Rudd’s ETS ever rules Australia, companies producing electricity from carbon fuels must beg, buy or borrow a permit to burn coal, gas or diesel. “They can beg a free permit from some mate in Canberra; they can buy a permit from some lucky sod who managed to get more permits than he needs; they can borrow a permit by entering into some tricky derivative trade with a speculator in Chicago; or they can pay carbon credit penance to a shifty land owner in some foreign land who promises solemnly not to clear his trees. “No matter which option is chosen, power costs will go up and companies must pass the extra cost (plus GST) onto their customers or go broke. “There will be no effect on climate.
“Now look at consumers. “The ETS must push up the cost of all goods and services using carbon fuel. It will boost the cost of electricity, food, transport and travel. When this happens, consumers will suddenly understand the ETS Tax and politicians who voted for it will feel their anger.
“But there is a plan: “Let’s compensate all those likely to vote for us”. “If these subsidies work properly, the lucky consumers will be in the same position as they were before ETS, except for the extra bureaucracy. For these consumers, there is no signal to reduce their consumption of carbon fuels. The ETS will do nothing except create a tangle of red tape which consumes and redistributes wealth.
“But for the un-subsidised consumers, the ETS is an extra tax on everything. “And for the power companies, the ETS will produce nothing except a heap of angry customers, and lots of red tape.
Mr Forbes claimed that Tony Abbott was wrong about the ETS. “It is not just a Great Big Tax. “It’s a Great Big Tax PLUS a mountain of Red Tape. “And it will have absolutely no effect on world climate.”
Press release from Carbon Sense above
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But now they have got it right, they tell us. But didn't they tell us that before?
Glaciologists at the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography (LEGOS -- CNRS/CNES/IRD/Université Toulouse 3) and their US and Canadian colleagues (1) have shown that previous studies have largely overestimated mass loss from Alaskan glaciers over the past 40 years. Recent data from the SPOT 5 and ASTER satellites have enabled researchers to extensively map mass loss in these glaciers, which contributed 0.12 mm/year to sea-level rise between 1962 and 2006, rather than 0.17 mm/year as previously estimated.
Mountain glaciers cover between 500 000 and 600 000 km2 of the Earth's surface (around the size of France), which is little compared to the area of the Greenland (1.6 million km2) and Antarctic (12.3 million km2) ice sheets. Despite their small size, mountain glaciers have played a major role in recent sea-level rise due to their rapid melting in response to global climate warming.
Of all the ice-covered regions of the planet, ice loss has been the greatest in Alaska and northwestern Canada, where glaciers cover 90 000 km2. Results from the LEGOS glaciologists and their US and Canadian colleagues, published in the February issue of Nature Geoscience, lead them to conclude that these glaciers have contributed 0.12 mm/year to sea-level rise over the period 1962-2006, rather than 0.17 mm/year as previously estimated by a team at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska (Fairbanks). The new estimate was obtained by comparing recent topographies, derived from Spot 5-HRS (SPIRIT project (2) funded by CNES) and ASTER (GLIMS/NASA project), with maps from the 1950-60s, which enabled loss from three quarters of the Alaskan glaciers to be measured.
How did the team from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska estimate that the contribution of these glaciers to sea-level rise was 0.17 mm/year? In 1995, and then again in 2001, the researchers used an airborne laser to measure the surface elevation of 67 glaciers along longitudinal profiles. These elevations were then compared with those mapped in the 1950s and 1960s. From this, the researchers inferred elevation changes and then extrapolated this to other glaciers. Their results, published in Science (3), pointed to a major contribution to sea-level rise for the 1950-1995 period (0.14 mm/year sea-level rise), which then doubled in the recent period (after 1995).
Why did they overestimate ice loss from these glaciers by 50%? The impact of rock debris that covers certain glacier tongues (4) and protects them from solar radiation (and thus from melting) was not taken into account in the previous work. Moreover, their sampling was limited to longitudinal profiles along the center of a few glaciers, which geometrically led to overestimation of ice loss. This new study confirms that the thinning of Alaskan glaciers is very uneven, and shows that it is difficult to sample such complex spatial variability on the basis of a few field measurements or altimetry profiles. Thanks to their regional coverage, satellite data make it possible to improve observations of glacial response to climate change and to specify the contribution of glaciers to sea-level rise.
Ice loss from Alaskan glaciers since 1962 is evidently smaller than previously thought. However, thinning (sometimes over 10 m/year, as in the Columbia glacier) and glacial retreat remain considerable. Moreover, the spectacular acceleration in mass loss since the mid-1990s, corresponding to a contribution of 0.25 to 0.30 mm/year to sea-level rise, is not in question and proves to be a worrying indication of future sea-level rise.
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The Great IPCC Meltdown Continues
It’s not just the threat of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035. Now another headline grabbing IPCC scare story is melting away. A report in Sunday’s London Times highlights new humiliations for the IPCC: "The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general."
There is however one teensy-weensy little problem. As Professor Chris Field, the lead author of the IPCC’s climate impact team has now told reporters that he can find “no evidence” to support the claim in the IPCC’s 2007 report.
There’s more. When the glacier story broke, IPCC apologists returned over and over again to a saving grace. The bogus glacier report appeared in the body of the IPCC document, but not in the much more carefully vetted Synthesis Report, in which the IPCC’s senior leadership made its specific recommendations to world leaders. So it didn’t matter that much, the apologists told us, and we can still trust the rigorously checked and reviewed Synthesis Report.
But that’s where the African rain crisis prediction is found — in the supposedly sacrosanct Synthesis Report. So: the Synthesis Report contains a major scare prediction — 50% shortfall in North African food production just ten years from now — and there is no serious, peer-reviewed evidence that the prediction is true.
But there’s more. Much, much more. Readers of the Times and the Telegraph are watching the IPCC’s credibility disappear before their eyes. The former head of IPCC has publicly said the IPCC risks losing all credibility if it can’t clean up its act. The head of the largest British funder of environmental research has joined the head of Greenpeace UK in criticizing the IPCC. (At Greenpeace, they want Pachauri to resign.) The Dutch government has demanded that the IPCC correct its erroneous assertion that half of the Netherlands is below sea level. Actually, it’s only about a quarter. A prediction about the impact of sea level increases on people living in the Nile Delta was taken from an unpublished student dissertation. The report contained inaccurate data about generating energy from waves and about the cost of nuclear power (this information was apparently taken without being checked directly from a website supported by the nuclear power industry). The deeply environmentalist Guardian carries a story documenting the decline in both public and Conservative Party confidence in need to address global warming.
More significantly, there’s an editorial in today’s Guardian that criticizes shortcomings at the IPCC and calls for a wholesale change in the way climate scientists do their work and communicate with the public.
In my February 1 post on The Death of Global Warming, I said that the movement had been killed by two things: bad science and bad politics. The Guardian hopes that the parrot isn’t dead yet, but it seems to agree with my basic diagnosis: “It is bad science and bad politics to counter scepticism with righteous indignation. In the long run, public confidence will be inspired more by frankness about what science cannot explain,” write the editors.
The editors pick up another theme that is familiar to readers of this blog: "In trying to avert dangerous climate change, governments are aiming for something extraordinary. They want to transform the global economy because of a hypothesis for which the evidence is mostly inaccessible to the layman. It is the biggest pre-emption in history, and it relies on collective trust in science."
When the IPCC has its former chief, the Guardian newspaper and the Dutch government demanding change, something has got to give.
I just wish all these stories were a little easier to find in the US press. These stories have been and continue to be on the front pages of UK newspapers; American newspapers by and large aren’t, yet, taking them as seriously and the growing numbers of Americans who are following the scandals are mostly tracking them from internet reports like this one or directly in the British press. This too needs to change, and the sooner the better.
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Climate scepticism grows among Britain's Conservative politicians
Most Conservative MPs, including at least six members of the shadow cabinet, are sceptical about their party's continued focus on climate change policies, it has been claimed. The recent furore around "Climategate" has hardened the views of Tory MPs, many of whom were already unconvinced by the scientific consensus, and has led to increasing calls for the issue to be pushed down the priority list.
Tim Montgomerie, founder and editor of the ConservativeHome website, said climate change had the potential to be as divisive for the party as Europe once was. "You have got 80% or 90% of the party just not signed up to this. No one minded at the beginning, but people are starting to realise this could be quite expensive, so opinion is hardening."
Montgomerie said that while some MPs simply did not believe the science, others felt it would harm the economy too much to focus on policies to reduce emissions. "Some think, 'What is the point in taking all these decisions if India and China and others row ahead?' Nigel Lawson makes the point that 30% of Indian people have no electricity and the Indian government has to give that to them. The cheapest way to do that is fossil fuels."
Lord Lawson chairs the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a thinktank that claims the climate debate has been distorted by exaggeration. On pages 28 and 29, Benny Peiser, director of the foundation, debates the issue with the Observer's science editor, Robin McKie. A recent BBC poll found that 25% of people did not think global warming was happening – compared with 15% in November – and a similar trend is taking place among Conservative MPs. "You scratch almost any backbencher and you find they are sceptical and I know of six shadow cabinet ministers who are sceptical about the economic consequences of a low-carbon policy," said Montgomerie. He said the leadership was "recalibrating" its message.
Last week, representatives of 50 Tory councils gathered in London for a "Lean and Green" conference where Nick Herbert and Greg Clark – the shadow environment and energy secretaries – argued that green policies could save money and improve Britain's energy security. Clark rejected the notion that it was a change in direction. "There is a real threat to our energy security and there is a risk of a black-out," he said. Green policies that developed alternatives to fossil fuels and persuaded people to reduce energy consumption were "win-win" because they saved money, provided energy security and reduced carbon emissions.
One MP said the party was much more likely to respond to economic arguments: "There is a large group in the party – probably the majority – who are sceptical. That ranges from those who don't believe any of it to those that think the climate is changing but are not sure how much it is down to human beings, to those who accept the science but think we could act, but then in one year China and India could wipe out that effort. "
There are fears that the issue could flare up after the election if the Conservatives win power – particularly around plans for a third runway at Heathrow, which the party has said it will scrap.
Tim Yeo, the Tory MP who chairs the environmental audit select committee, said the shift had come about because of scientific mistakes, and a "backwash" from Copenhagen. "That has created a context in which it is easy for sceptics to build momentum and that is influencing a good number of politicians. "What people have lost sight of is that serious climate-change scientists have always argued that the climate is changing gradually, that temperatures are rising and that one factor – and probably the main one – is the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But they have never argued that it is easy to know how quickly that is happening.
The scientist at the centre of "Climategate" last night revealed he was so traumatised by the scandal that he considered killing himself. Professor Phil Jones told the Sunday Times the support of his family, especially the love of his five-year-old granddaughter, had helped him to shake off suicidal thoughts.
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Why "The Observer" is Wrong
By Prof. Philip Stott
Today, The Observer hosts a vitriolic ‘Debate’ [pp.28 - 29] between its long-standing Science Editor, Robin McKie, and Dr. Benny Peiser, Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The fact that this newspaper is now holding a debate is in itself indicative of the media change with respect to ‘global warming’, and I congratulate Dr. Peiser on being willing to enter the lion’s den. However, and perhaps inevitably, the debate is then followed by a highly-predictable Observer ‘Comment’ [p.34].
Nevertheless, this ‘Comment’ is more intriguing than Robin McKie’s aggressive debating stance, because, unfortunately for The Observer, it inadvertently reveals precisely why its arguments are fallacious: “But deniers deal not in the balance of risk but the exposure of uncertainty. Tiny doubts on the periphery of the case, they say, undermine the whole story, banishing the threat.”
This could not be farther from the truth. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that The Observer should claim this when Dr. Peiser, Mr. McKie’s nemesis, is, in part, a social anthropologist of risk, who wisely responds in one of his exchanges as follows: “You ask whether I doubt that global warming poses a potential risk. Of course it does. So do asteroid impacts, nuclear warfare and ice ages, to name just a few. What these potential risks have in common is that they have a low probability but a high impact. Just because we cannot rule out any of these risks doesn't mean that there is a need for panic measures.”
The Attempt To Make Global Warming A Cost-Benefit Zero Has Failed
Part of the visceral anger of people like Robin McKie is that their goose has been cooked. For some 20 years now, there has been a ruthless, and at times disgraceful, attempt to make ‘global warming’ a zero in any cost-benefit analysis with regards to political and economic actions relating to climate change, which would mean that there is no balancing of risks at all, but simply the one risk of ‘global warming’. This fundamental flaw was first brilliantly exposed by none other than Bjørn Lomborg [right] in his devastating The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, which appeared as early as 2001. The fury heaped on Lomborg was inevitably proportional to the threat that his arguments posed to the ‘Green’ agenda over this key issue. He had exposed the true agenda for what it was.
Today, many more people are fully aware of this fatal weakness, and newspapers like The Observer, despite their continued bluster, can no longer hide the fact that the ‘global warming’ risk has to be balanced against many other competing risks, not to mention against the serious risk to the world economy, and to the poor, posed by precipitate and ill-judged political and economic actions. This is why Robin McKie, The Observer, and their ilk are growing increasingly desperate to maintain a zero status for ‘global warming’. It is also precisely why Dr. Peiser - “the sceptic” - presents a far more reasoned and nuanced analysis of risk: “I am not advocating political inaction. Far from it. While I reject economically damaging and, for that reason, politically unattainable climate policies, I am in favour of adapting to a changing climate and making our societies more resilient, as mankind has throughout its existence.”
Risk And Science
The Observer and Robin McKie are just plain wrong. They are also wrong with respect to risk when we specifically address the science. There can be no predictable outcomes for fiddling at the margins with one single human factor in a system such as climate, the most complex, coupled, non-linear, semi-chaotic known. What climate will Mr. McKie and The Observer produce for us? And, won’t it change when we get there, in any case? They can have no idea.
No, The Observer and Robin McKie are deeply, even naively, misguided. Scepticism and risk assessment go together naturally; faith, by contrast, is an absolute definition of risk, and one appropriate in neither science nor economics.
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The Hottest Hoax in the World
The climate change fraud that is now unravelling is unprecedented in its deceit, unmatched in scope—and for the liberal elite, akin to 9 on the Richter scale. Never have so few fooled so many for so long, ever.
The entire world was being asked to change the way it lives on the basis of pure hyperbole. Propriety, probity and transparency were routinely sacrificed.
The truth is: the world is not heating up in any significant way. Neither are the Himalayan glaciers going to melt as claimed by 2035. Nor is there any link at all between natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and global warming. All that was pure nonsense, or if you like, ‘no-science’!
The climate change mafia, led by Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), almost pulled off the heist of the century through fraudulent data and suppression of procedure. All the while, they were cornering millions of dollars in research grants that heaped one convenient untruth upon another. And as if the money wasn’t enough, the Nobel Committee decided they should have the coveted Peace Prize.
But let’s begin at the beginning. Mr Pachauri has no training whatsoever in climate science. This was known all the time, yet he heads the pontification panel which proliferates the new gospel of a hotter world. How come? Why did the United Nations not choose someone who was competent? After all, this man is presumably incapable of differentiating between ocean sediments and coral terrestrial deposits, nor can he go about analysing tree ring records and so on. That’s not jargon; these are essential elements of a syllabus in any basic course on climatology.
You cannot blame him. His degree and training is in railroad engineering. You read it right. This man was educated to make railroads from point A to point B.
THE GATHERING STORM
There are many casualties in this sad story of greed and hubris. The big victim is the scientific method. This was pointed out in great detail by John P Costella of the Virginia-based Science and Public Policy Institute. Science is based on three fundamental pillars. The first is fallibility. The fact that you can be wrong, and if so proven by experimental input, any hypothesis can be—indeed, must be—corrected.
This was systematically stymied as early as 2004 by the scientific in-charge of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit. This university was at the epicentre of the ‘research’ on global warming. It is here that Professor Phil Jones kept inconvenient details that contradicted climate change claims out of reports.
The second pillar of science is that by its very nature, science is impersonal. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘them’. There is only the quest. However, in the entire murky non-scientific global warming episode, if anyone was a sceptic he was labelled as one of ‘them’. At the very apex, before his humiliating retraction, Pachauri had dismissed a report by Indian scientists on glaciers as “voodoo science”.
The third pillar of science is peer group assessment. This allows for validation of your thesis by fellow scientists and is usually done in confidence. However, the entire process was set aside by the IPCC while preparing the report. Thus, it has zero scientific value.
The fact that there was dissent within the climate science teams, that some people objected to the very basis of the grand claims of global warming, did not come out through the due process. It came to light when emails at the Climate Research Centre at East Anglia were hacked in November 2009. It is from the hacked conversations that a pattern of conspiracy and deceit emerge. It is a peek into the world of global warming scaremongering—amplify the impact of CO2, stick to dramatic timelines on destruction of forests, and never ask for a referral or raise a contrary point. You were either a believer in a hotter world or not welcome in this ‘scientific fold’.
HOUSE OF CARDS AND COLOUR OF CASH
So we have the fact that a non-expert heads the IPCC. We have the fact that glaciers are not melting by 2035; this major scaremongering is now being defended as a minor error (it was originally meant to be 2350, some have clarified). The date was spouted first by Syed Hasnain, an Indian glacier expert, in an interview to a magazine. It had no scientific validity, and, as Hasnain has himself said, was speculative.
On the basis of that assertion, The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) that Pachauri heads and where Hasnain works in the glaciology team, got two massive chunks of funding. The first was estimated to be a $300,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation and the second was a part of the $2 million funding from the European Union. So you write a report that is false on glaciers melting and get millions to study the impact of a meltdown which will not be happening in the first place. Now if this is not a neat one, what is?
The same goes for dire predictions on Amazon rain forests. The IPCC maintained that there would be a huge depletion in Amazon rain forests because of lack of precipitation. Needless to add, no Amazon rain forest expert could be trusted to back this claim. They depended on a report by a freelance journalist and activist, instead, and now it has blown up in their faces.
There’s plenty more in this sordid tale. For one thing, there is no scientific consensus at all that man-made CO2 emissions cause global warming, as claimed by the IPCC. In a recent paper, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who has worked extensively on climate change models, argues: ‘There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps—if any—we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.’
An investigation by Dr Benny Peiser, director, Global Warming Policy Foundation, has revealed that only 13 of the 1,117, or a mere 1 per cent of the scientific papers crosschecked by him, explicitly endorse the consensus as defined by the IPCC. Thus the very basis of the claim of consensus on global warming is false. And so deeply entrenched is the global warming lobby, the prestigious journal Science did not publish a letter that Dr Peiser wrote pointing out the lack of consensus.
Speaking to Open, says Dr Peiser, “The IPCC process by which it arrives at its conclusions lacks balance, transparency and due diligence. It is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer-reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC reports. Not surprisingly, the IPCC has lost a lot of credibility in recent years. It is also losing the trust of more and more governments who are no longer following its advice. Until it agrees to undergo a root and branch reform, it will continue to haemorrhage credibility and trust. The time has come for a complete overhaul of its structure and workings.”
Another fraud is in the very chart central to Pachauri’s speech at the Copenhagen summit. As Lord Monckton has pointed out, ‘The graph is bogus not only because it relies on made-up data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, but also because it is overlain by four separate trendlines, each with a start-date carefully selected to give the entirely false impression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however—neatly obscured by an ingenious rescaling of the graph and the superimposition of the four bogus trend lines on it—is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940 the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.’
PACHAURI’S WRONG NUMBERS
This chart, tracking mean global temperature over the past 150 years, was central to the presentation that IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri made at the Copenhagen environment summit. Many scientists believe that the graph is fraudulent. First, there are strong allegations that the data, collected from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, is a tissue of lies. Plus, as British climate change expert Lord Christopher Monckton puts it: “(The main graph, in darker blue) is overlain by four separate lines, each carefully selected to give the entirely false im•pression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however... is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940, the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.” In other words, the graph has been drawn with a motive to prove one’s point, and not to show the truth.
Thus the earth has warmed at this rate at least twice in the last 100 years and no major catastrophe has occurred. What is more, the earth has cooled after that warming. Why is the IPCC not willing to explore this startling point?
Another total lie has been that the Sunderbans in Bangladesh are sinking on account of the rise in sea level. The IPCC claimed that one-fifth of Bangladesh will be under water by 2050. Well, it turns out this is an absurd, unscientific and outrageous claim. According to scientists at the Centre for Environmental and Geographical Information Services (Cegis) in Dhaka, its surface area appears to be growing by 20 sq km annually. Cegis has based its results on more than 30 years of satellite imagery. IPCC has not retracted this claim. As far as they are concerned, Bangladesh is a goner by 2050, submerged forever in the Bay of Bengal.
THE COOKIE CRUMBLES
The fallout of Climategate is slowly but surely unfolding right where it hurts a large number of special interests—in the field of business. Yes, the carbon trading business is now in the line of fire. Under a cap-and-trade system, a government authority first sets a limit on emissions, deciding how much pollution will be allowed in all. Next, companies are issued credits, essentially licences to pollute, based on how large they are, and what industries they work in. If a company comes in below its cap, it has extra credits which it may trade with other companies, globally.
Post Climategate, this worldwide trade, estimated at about $30 billion in 2006, is finding few takers. It is under attack following the renewed uncertainty over the role of human-generated CO2 in global warming. In the US, which never adopted any of this to begin with, there is a serious move now to finish off the cap-and-trade regime globally. It’s a revolt of sorts. Six leading Democrats in the US Congress have joined hands with many Republicans to urge the Obama Administration to back off from the regime.
The collapse of the international market for carbon credits, a direct fallout of Climategate, has already sent shudders down many spines in parts of the world that were looking forward to making gains from it. It was big business, after all, and Indian businesses were eyeing it as well. In fact, Indian firms were expected to trade some $1 billion worth of carbon credits this year, and with the market going poof, they stand to lose quite some money (notional or otherwise).
Besides the commercial aspect, there is also the issue of wider public credibility. There have been signs of scepticism all along. In a 2009 Gallup poll, a record number of people—41 per cent—elected to say that global warming was an exaggerated threat. This slackening of public support is in sync with a coordinated political movement that is seeking to re-examine the entire issue of global warming from scratch. The movement is led by increasingly vocal Republicans in the US Senate and packs considerable political power.
Pachauri’s position is also becoming increasingly untenable with demands for his resignation becoming louder by the day. In an interview to Open, Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute, a noted US think-tank, who has followed the debate for years, says, “Dr Pachauri should resign because he has a consistent record of mixing his political views with climate science, because of his intolerance of legitimate scientific views that he does not agree with, because of his disparagement of India’s glacier scientists as practising ‘voodoo science’, and because of his incomprehension of the serious nature of what was in the East Anglia emails.”
Richard North, the professor who brought to light the financial irregularities in a write-up co-authored with Christopher Booker, has also said in a TV interview that, “If Dr Pachauri does not resign voluntarily, he will be forced to do so.”
GLOBAL STORMING AHEAD
The world awaits answers, based not on writings of sundry freelance journalists and non-experts, but on actual verifiable data on whether the globe is warming at all, and if so by how much. Only then can policy options be calibrated. As things stand, there is little doubt that the IPCC will need to be reconstituted with a limited mandate. This mess needs investigation and questions need to be answered as to why absurd claims were taken as gospel truth. The future of everything we know as ‘normal’ depends on this. The real danger is that the general public is now weary of the whole thing, a little tired of the debate, and may not really care for the truth, convenient or otherwise.
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Understanding the futile Australian climate scheme
The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the Emissions Trading Scheme proposed for Australia and now before the Australian Parliament was far more than “A Great Big New Tax”. The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that PM Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme combined a Big New Tax with a War-Time Rationing scheme and an Income redistributing compensation scheme, all to be run by a regulatory army probably bigger than our real army.
He continued: “Let’s try to understand this Ruddy ETS. “To simplify things, let’s look at just the electricity industry.
“If Rudd’s ETS ever rules Australia, companies producing electricity from carbon fuels must beg, buy or borrow a permit to burn coal, gas or diesel. “They can beg a free permit from some mate in Canberra; they can buy a permit from some lucky sod who managed to get more permits than he needs; they can borrow a permit by entering into some tricky derivative trade with a speculator in Chicago; or they can pay carbon credit penance to a shifty land owner in some foreign land who promises solemnly not to clear his trees. “No matter which option is chosen, power costs will go up and companies must pass the extra cost (plus GST) onto their customers or go broke. “There will be no effect on climate.
“Now look at consumers. “The ETS must push up the cost of all goods and services using carbon fuel. It will boost the cost of electricity, food, transport and travel. When this happens, consumers will suddenly understand the ETS Tax and politicians who voted for it will feel their anger.
“But there is a plan: “Let’s compensate all those likely to vote for us”. “If these subsidies work properly, the lucky consumers will be in the same position as they were before ETS, except for the extra bureaucracy. For these consumers, there is no signal to reduce their consumption of carbon fuels. The ETS will do nothing except create a tangle of red tape which consumes and redistributes wealth.
“But for the un-subsidised consumers, the ETS is an extra tax on everything. “And for the power companies, the ETS will produce nothing except a heap of angry customers, and lots of red tape.
Mr Forbes claimed that Tony Abbott was wrong about the ETS. “It is not just a Great Big Tax. “It’s a Great Big Tax PLUS a mountain of Red Tape. “And it will have absolutely no effect on world climate.”
Press release from Carbon Sense above
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Monday, February 08, 2010
BBC's billions that fund a green agenda
How amusing! This has made my day. The BBC is betting its employees' retirement money on global warming being right. It's literally putting its money where its mouth is -- but it is backing the wrong horse. Its employees will be frothing mad about it in the not too distant future. Those responsible will undoubtedly answer for it in court one day. What right have they got to gamble with other people's money? Most racegoers think their horse is a "cert" when they back it. The BBC has gambled on such a prophecy too. The money should have gone into blue chip stocks -- real present-day assets. As for ethics, what ethics? But skeptics will be laughing about it for years. "He laughs loudest ...."
STRIKING parallels between the BBC’s coverage of the global warming debate and the activities of its pension fund can be revealed today. The corporation is under investigation after being inundated with complaints that its editorial coverage of climate change is biased in favour of those who say it is a man-made phenomenon.
The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit.
Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted. The fund, which has 58,744 members, accounts for about £8 of the £142.50 licence fee and the proportion looks likely to rise while programme budgets may have to be cut to help reduce the deficit.
The BBC is the only media organisation in Britain whose pension fund is a member of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which has more than 50 members across Europe. Its chairman is Peter Dunscombe, also the BBC’s Head of Pensions Investment.
Prominent among its recent campaigns was a call for a “strong and binding” global agreement on climate change – one that fell on deaf ears after the UN climate summit in Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets and a cut in greenhouse gases.
Veteran journalist and former BBC newsreader Peter Sissons is unhappy with the corporation’s coverage. He said recently: “The corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that ‘the science is settled’ when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t. It is, in effect, BBC policy, enthusiastically carried out by the BBC’s environment correspondents, that those views should not be heard. “I was not proud to be working for an organisation with a corporate mind so closed on such an important issue.”
Official BBC editorial policy governing how its correspondents should cover global warming was revealed after a member of the public wrote in: “I have heard reports that the BBC has decided not to broadcast any news or reports which disprove, disagree, or cast doubt on global warming theory. Could you provide some form of justification for this?”
In a reply dated October 26 last year, Stephanie Harris, Head of Accountability at BBC News, said: “BBC News takes the view that our reporting needs to be calibrated to take into account the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made.” She went on to quote from a BBC-commissioned report published in June 2007, which said: “There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening and that it is at least predominantly man-made. The weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to opponents of the consensus.”
Last month the BBC Trust announced an investigation after a string of complaints that the corporation was promoting the theory that climate change was a man-made phenomenon.
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Some wisdom from the year 2002
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Official coverup! How Britain's Met Office blocked questions on its own man's role in 'hockey stick' climate row
The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years. And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.
By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland. In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today. Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate. But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.
Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act. The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth – whose department has responsibility for the Met Office.
Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders. Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled that scientists from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – the source of the leaked ‘Warmergate’ emails – acted unlawfully in refusing FOI requests to share their data.
Some of the FOI requests made to them came from the same person who has made requests to the Met Office. He is David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming. The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers. Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job. Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings. The Met Office had even boasted of his role in a Press release when the report first came out.
But disclosure, they added, was still rejected on the grounds it would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank provision of views’. It would also ‘prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation’ and thus be contrary to UK interests. In a written response justifying the refusal dated August 20, 2008, Mr Ainsworth – then MoD Minister of State – used exactly the same language.
Mr Holland also filed a request for the papers kept by Sir Brian Hoskins of Reading University, who was the review editor of a different chapter of the IPCC report. When this too was refused, Mr Holland used the Data Protection Act to obtain a copy of an email from Sir Brian to the university’s information officer. The email, dated July 17, 2008 – when Mr Holland was also trying to get material from the Met Office and the CRU – provides clear evidence of a co-ordinated effort to hide data. Sir Brian wrote: ‘I have made enquiries and found that both the Met Office/MOD and UEA are resisting the FOI requests made by Holland. The latter are very relevant to us, as UK universities should speak with the same voice on this. I gather that they are using academic freedom as their reason.’
At the CRU, as the Warmergate emails reveal, its director, Dr Phil Jones (who is currently suspended), wrote to an American colleague: ‘[We are] still getting FOI requests as well as Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions – not to respond.’
Last night Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the affair further undermined the credibility of the IPCC and those associated with it. He said: ‘It’s of critical importance that data such as this should be open. More importantly, the questions being raised about the hockey stick mean that we may have to reassess the climate history of the past 2,000 years. ‘The attempt to make the medieval warm period disappear is being seriously weakened, and the claim that now is the warmest time for 1,300 years is no longer based on reliable evidence.’
Despite repeated requests, the MoD and Met Office failed to comment.
SOURCE
New errors in IPCC climate change report
The United Nations panel on climate change is facing fresh criticism today as The Sunday Telegraph reveals new factual errors and poor sources of evidence in its influential report to government leaders. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming. But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:
* The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.
* Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.
* New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.
* More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.
They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007. Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate. Last weekend, this paper revealed that the panel had based claims about disappearing mountain ice on anecdotal evidence in a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine. And on Friday, it emerged that the IPCC’s panel had wrongly reported that more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level because it had failed to check information supplied by a Dutch government agency.
Researchers insist the errors are minor and do not impact on the overall conclusions about climate change. However, senior scientists are now expressing concern at the way the IPCC compiles its reports and have hit out at the panel’s use of so-called “grey literature” — evidence from sources that have not been subjected to scientific scrutiny.
A new poll has revealed that public belief in climate change is weakening. The panel’s controversial chair, Rajendra Pachauri, pictured right, is facing pressure to resign over the affair.
The IPCC attempted to counter growing criticism by releasing a statement insisting that authors who contribute to its 3,000-page report are required to “critically assess and review the quality and validity of each source” when they use material from unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources. Drafts of the reports are checked by scientific reviewers before they are subjected to line-by-line approval by the 130 member countries of the IPCC.
Despite these checks, a diagram used to demonstrate the potential for generating electricity from wave power has been found to contain numerous errors. The source of information for the diagram was cited as the website of UK-based wave-energy company Wavegen. Yet the diagram on Wavegen’s website contains dramatically different figures for energy potential off Britain and Alaska and in the Bering Sea. When contacted by The Sunday Telegraph, Wavegen insisted that the diagram on its website had not been changed. It added that it was not the original source of the data and had simply reproduced it on its website.
The diagram is widely cited in other literature as having come from a paper on wave energy produced by the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in 1991 along with data from the European Directory of Renewable Energy. Experts claim that, had the IPCC checked the citation properly, it would have spotted the discrepancies.
It can also be revealed that claims made by the IPCC about the effects of global warming, and suggestions about ways it could be avoided, were partly based on information from ten dissertations by Masters students. One unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on people living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development.
The IPCC also made use of a report by US conservation group Defenders of Wildlife to state that salmon in US streams have been affected by rising temperatures. The panel has already come under fire for using information in reports by conservation charity the WWF.
Estimates of carbon-dioxide emissions from nuclear power stations and claims that suggested they were cheaper than coal or gas power stations were also taken from the website of the World Nuclear Association, rather than using independent scientific calculations.
Such revelations are creating growing public confusion over climate change. A poll by Ipsos on behalf of environmental consultancy firm Euro RSCG revealed that the proportion of the public who believe in the reality of climate change has dropped from 44 per cent to 31per cent in the past year. The proportion of people who believe that climate change is a bit over-exaggerated rose from 22 per cent to 31per cent.
Climate scientists have expressed frustration with the IPCC’s use of unreliable evidence. Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, the biggest funder of climate science in the UK, said: “We should only be dealing with peer-reviewed literature. We open ourselves up to trouble if we start getting into hearsay and grey literature. We have enough research that has been peer-reviewed to provide evidence for climate change, so it is concerning that the IPCC has strayed from that.”
Professor Bob Watson, who chaired the IPCC before Dr Pachauri and is now chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, insisted that despite the errors there was little doubt that human-induced climate change was a reality. But he called for changes in the way the IPCC compiles future reports. “It is concerning that these mistakes have appeared in the IPCC report, but there is no doubt the earth’s climate is changing and the only way we can explain those changes is primarily human activity,” he said.
Mr Watson said that Dr Pachauri “cannot be personally blamed for one or two incorrect sentences in the IPCC report”, but stressed that the chairman must take responsibility for correcting errors.
Another row over the IPCC report emerged last night after Professor Roger Pielke Jnr, from Colorado University’s Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research, claimed its authors deliberately ignored a paper he wrote that contradicted the panel’s claims about the cost of climate-related natural disasters. A document included a statement from an anonymous IPCC author saying that they believed Dr Pielke had changed his mind on the matter, when he had not.
SOURCE
Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility
Now it's "Africa-gate"!
A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility. Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.
The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general. This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.
The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.
This report is the IPCC’s most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers. Its lead authors include Pachauri himself. In it he wrote: “By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised.” The same claims have since been cited in speeches to world leaders by Pachauri and Ban. Speaking at the 2008 global climate talks in Poznan, Poland, Pachauri said: “In some countries of Africa, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by 50% by 2020.” In a speech last July, Ban said: “Yields from rain-fed agriculture could fall by half in some African countries over the next 10 years.”
Speaking this weekend, Field said: “I was not an author on the Synthesis Report but on reading it I cannot find support for the statement about African crop yield declines.”
Watson said such claims should be based on hard evidence. “Any such projection should be based on peer-reviewed literature from computer modelling of how agricultural yields would respond to climate change. I can see no such data supporting the IPCC report,” he said.
The claims in the Synthesis Report go back to the IPCC’s report on the global impacts of climate change. It warns that all Africa faces a long-term threat from farmland turning to desert and then says of north Africa, “additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-20 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003)”. “Agoumi” refers to a 2003 policy paper written for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank. The paper was not peer-reviewed.
Its author was Professor Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan climate expert who looked at the potential impacts of climate change on Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. His report refers to the risk of “deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000–20 period”. These claims refer to other reports prepared by civil servants in each of the three countries as submissions to the UN. These do not appear to have been peer-reviewed either.
The IPCC is also facing criticism over its reports on how sea level rise might affect Holland. Dutch ministers have demanded that it correct a claim that more than half of the Netherlands lies below sea level when, in reality, it is about a quarter.
The errors seem likely to bring about change at the IPCC. Field said: “The IPCC needs to investigate a more sophisticated approach for dealing with emerging errors.”
SOURCE
Virginia storm may set records
A historic winter storm left some parts of Virginia under nearly 3 feet of snow Saturday, knocking out power to 175,000 utility customers and collapsing buildings. "The accumulations that have been reported now have been historic," Gov. Bob McDonnell said during a teleconference with state emergency officials. He cited a high snowfall of 33 inches in Loudoun County, in northern Virginia, and 2 feet along the Interstate 81 corridor in western Virginia.
Snow depths are "fast approaching the highest accumulations in the 103 years that these statistics have been kept," said McDonnell, who declared a snow emergency on Wednesday.
Virginia State Police, which had 75 percent of its uniformed officers on duty, had responded to 1,323 traffic accidents in the last 36 hours. Two crash deaths Friday in southwest Virginia were blamed on the weather.
The power outages were down from a high of 200,000, with the majority being customers of Dominion Virginia Power, the state's largest utility. Most of the outages were in northern Virginia.
Appalachian Power reported nearly 40,000 customers without power, primarily in the southwest corner of the state, and small electric cooperatives were reporting power failures in the northern and western portions of the state....
The Virginia National Guard put 500 troops on active duty and positioned them in the hardest-hit areas, such as Fredericksburg, Waynesboro, Charlottesville and in northern Virginia. They were assisting local emergency crews.
The National Weather Service said runoff from snow and rain had caused a rapid rise of the Dan River near South Boston. Residents were advised to monitor local conditions.
The Virginia Department of Transportation said crews worked through the night to clear Interstates 81, 77 and 581. While clear of snow, road surfaces remain slick, VDOT said. Along some roads, plows were piling snow so high, trucks had to be called in to haul the snow away so plowing could continue.
Heavy snow had brought down trees and limbs on roads in Henry, Patrick, Roanoke and Bedford counties. Crews are working to remove them.
SOURCE
Time to scrap the Australian government's climate plan - academics
A COALITION of academics who doubt the science on the causes of climate change has called on the Rudd Government to dump plans for an emissions trading scheme and consider alternatives.
Their call comes as a Nielsen poll, published in Fairfax newspapers today, shows Australians prefer the federal coalition's climate action policy. Of those polled, 45 per cent favoured the Opposition's direct action emissions fund over the 39 per cent who backed Labor's carbon pollution reduction scheme.
The Australian Climate Science Coalition believes the Government is losing the political high ground on global warming. "The debacle in Copenhagen demonstrated the futility of Australia adopting a go-it-alone strategy,'' executive director Max Rheese said in a statement. Public faith in the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been shaken following revelations about some of its information-gathering processes, he said.
SOURCE
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How amusing! This has made my day. The BBC is betting its employees' retirement money on global warming being right. It's literally putting its money where its mouth is -- but it is backing the wrong horse. Its employees will be frothing mad about it in the not too distant future. Those responsible will undoubtedly answer for it in court one day. What right have they got to gamble with other people's money? Most racegoers think their horse is a "cert" when they back it. The BBC has gambled on such a prophecy too. The money should have gone into blue chip stocks -- real present-day assets. As for ethics, what ethics? But skeptics will be laughing about it for years. "He laughs loudest ...."
STRIKING parallels between the BBC’s coverage of the global warming debate and the activities of its pension fund can be revealed today. The corporation is under investigation after being inundated with complaints that its editorial coverage of climate change is biased in favour of those who say it is a man-made phenomenon.
The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit.
Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted. The fund, which has 58,744 members, accounts for about £8 of the £142.50 licence fee and the proportion looks likely to rise while programme budgets may have to be cut to help reduce the deficit.
The BBC is the only media organisation in Britain whose pension fund is a member of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which has more than 50 members across Europe. Its chairman is Peter Dunscombe, also the BBC’s Head of Pensions Investment.
Prominent among its recent campaigns was a call for a “strong and binding” global agreement on climate change – one that fell on deaf ears after the UN climate summit in Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets and a cut in greenhouse gases.
Veteran journalist and former BBC newsreader Peter Sissons is unhappy with the corporation’s coverage. He said recently: “The corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that ‘the science is settled’ when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t. It is, in effect, BBC policy, enthusiastically carried out by the BBC’s environment correspondents, that those views should not be heard. “I was not proud to be working for an organisation with a corporate mind so closed on such an important issue.”
Official BBC editorial policy governing how its correspondents should cover global warming was revealed after a member of the public wrote in: “I have heard reports that the BBC has decided not to broadcast any news or reports which disprove, disagree, or cast doubt on global warming theory. Could you provide some form of justification for this?”
In a reply dated October 26 last year, Stephanie Harris, Head of Accountability at BBC News, said: “BBC News takes the view that our reporting needs to be calibrated to take into account the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made.” She went on to quote from a BBC-commissioned report published in June 2007, which said: “There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening and that it is at least predominantly man-made. The weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to opponents of the consensus.”
Last month the BBC Trust announced an investigation after a string of complaints that the corporation was promoting the theory that climate change was a man-made phenomenon.
SOURCE
Some wisdom from the year 2002
SOURCE
Official coverup! How Britain's Met Office blocked questions on its own man's role in 'hockey stick' climate row
The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years. And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.
By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland. In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today. Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate. But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.
Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act. The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth – whose department has responsibility for the Met Office.
Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders. Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled that scientists from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – the source of the leaked ‘Warmergate’ emails – acted unlawfully in refusing FOI requests to share their data.
Some of the FOI requests made to them came from the same person who has made requests to the Met Office. He is David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming. The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers. Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job. Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings. The Met Office had even boasted of his role in a Press release when the report first came out.
But disclosure, they added, was still rejected on the grounds it would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank provision of views’. It would also ‘prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation’ and thus be contrary to UK interests. In a written response justifying the refusal dated August 20, 2008, Mr Ainsworth – then MoD Minister of State – used exactly the same language.
Mr Holland also filed a request for the papers kept by Sir Brian Hoskins of Reading University, who was the review editor of a different chapter of the IPCC report. When this too was refused, Mr Holland used the Data Protection Act to obtain a copy of an email from Sir Brian to the university’s information officer. The email, dated July 17, 2008 – when Mr Holland was also trying to get material from the Met Office and the CRU – provides clear evidence of a co-ordinated effort to hide data. Sir Brian wrote: ‘I have made enquiries and found that both the Met Office/MOD and UEA are resisting the FOI requests made by Holland. The latter are very relevant to us, as UK universities should speak with the same voice on this. I gather that they are using academic freedom as their reason.’
At the CRU, as the Warmergate emails reveal, its director, Dr Phil Jones (who is currently suspended), wrote to an American colleague: ‘[We are] still getting FOI requests as well as Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions – not to respond.’
Last night Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the affair further undermined the credibility of the IPCC and those associated with it. He said: ‘It’s of critical importance that data such as this should be open. More importantly, the questions being raised about the hockey stick mean that we may have to reassess the climate history of the past 2,000 years. ‘The attempt to make the medieval warm period disappear is being seriously weakened, and the claim that now is the warmest time for 1,300 years is no longer based on reliable evidence.’
Despite repeated requests, the MoD and Met Office failed to comment.
SOURCE
New errors in IPCC climate change report
The United Nations panel on climate change is facing fresh criticism today as The Sunday Telegraph reveals new factual errors and poor sources of evidence in its influential report to government leaders. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming. But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:
* The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.
* Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.
* New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.
* More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.
They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007. Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate. Last weekend, this paper revealed that the panel had based claims about disappearing mountain ice on anecdotal evidence in a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine. And on Friday, it emerged that the IPCC’s panel had wrongly reported that more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level because it had failed to check information supplied by a Dutch government agency.
Researchers insist the errors are minor and do not impact on the overall conclusions about climate change. However, senior scientists are now expressing concern at the way the IPCC compiles its reports and have hit out at the panel’s use of so-called “grey literature” — evidence from sources that have not been subjected to scientific scrutiny.
A new poll has revealed that public belief in climate change is weakening. The panel’s controversial chair, Rajendra Pachauri, pictured right, is facing pressure to resign over the affair.
The IPCC attempted to counter growing criticism by releasing a statement insisting that authors who contribute to its 3,000-page report are required to “critically assess and review the quality and validity of each source” when they use material from unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources. Drafts of the reports are checked by scientific reviewers before they are subjected to line-by-line approval by the 130 member countries of the IPCC.
Despite these checks, a diagram used to demonstrate the potential for generating electricity from wave power has been found to contain numerous errors. The source of information for the diagram was cited as the website of UK-based wave-energy company Wavegen. Yet the diagram on Wavegen’s website contains dramatically different figures for energy potential off Britain and Alaska and in the Bering Sea. When contacted by The Sunday Telegraph, Wavegen insisted that the diagram on its website had not been changed. It added that it was not the original source of the data and had simply reproduced it on its website.
The diagram is widely cited in other literature as having come from a paper on wave energy produced by the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in 1991 along with data from the European Directory of Renewable Energy. Experts claim that, had the IPCC checked the citation properly, it would have spotted the discrepancies.
It can also be revealed that claims made by the IPCC about the effects of global warming, and suggestions about ways it could be avoided, were partly based on information from ten dissertations by Masters students. One unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on people living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development.
The IPCC also made use of a report by US conservation group Defenders of Wildlife to state that salmon in US streams have been affected by rising temperatures. The panel has already come under fire for using information in reports by conservation charity the WWF.
Estimates of carbon-dioxide emissions from nuclear power stations and claims that suggested they were cheaper than coal or gas power stations were also taken from the website of the World Nuclear Association, rather than using independent scientific calculations.
Such revelations are creating growing public confusion over climate change. A poll by Ipsos on behalf of environmental consultancy firm Euro RSCG revealed that the proportion of the public who believe in the reality of climate change has dropped from 44 per cent to 31per cent in the past year. The proportion of people who believe that climate change is a bit over-exaggerated rose from 22 per cent to 31per cent.
Climate scientists have expressed frustration with the IPCC’s use of unreliable evidence. Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, the biggest funder of climate science in the UK, said: “We should only be dealing with peer-reviewed literature. We open ourselves up to trouble if we start getting into hearsay and grey literature. We have enough research that has been peer-reviewed to provide evidence for climate change, so it is concerning that the IPCC has strayed from that.”
Professor Bob Watson, who chaired the IPCC before Dr Pachauri and is now chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, insisted that despite the errors there was little doubt that human-induced climate change was a reality. But he called for changes in the way the IPCC compiles future reports. “It is concerning that these mistakes have appeared in the IPCC report, but there is no doubt the earth’s climate is changing and the only way we can explain those changes is primarily human activity,” he said.
Mr Watson said that Dr Pachauri “cannot be personally blamed for one or two incorrect sentences in the IPCC report”, but stressed that the chairman must take responsibility for correcting errors.
Another row over the IPCC report emerged last night after Professor Roger Pielke Jnr, from Colorado University’s Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research, claimed its authors deliberately ignored a paper he wrote that contradicted the panel’s claims about the cost of climate-related natural disasters. A document included a statement from an anonymous IPCC author saying that they believed Dr Pielke had changed his mind on the matter, when he had not.
SOURCE
Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility
Now it's "Africa-gate"!
A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility. Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.
The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general. This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.
The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.
This report is the IPCC’s most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers. Its lead authors include Pachauri himself. In it he wrote: “By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised.” The same claims have since been cited in speeches to world leaders by Pachauri and Ban. Speaking at the 2008 global climate talks in Poznan, Poland, Pachauri said: “In some countries of Africa, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by 50% by 2020.” In a speech last July, Ban said: “Yields from rain-fed agriculture could fall by half in some African countries over the next 10 years.”
Speaking this weekend, Field said: “I was not an author on the Synthesis Report but on reading it I cannot find support for the statement about African crop yield declines.”
Watson said such claims should be based on hard evidence. “Any such projection should be based on peer-reviewed literature from computer modelling of how agricultural yields would respond to climate change. I can see no such data supporting the IPCC report,” he said.
The claims in the Synthesis Report go back to the IPCC’s report on the global impacts of climate change. It warns that all Africa faces a long-term threat from farmland turning to desert and then says of north Africa, “additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-20 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003)”. “Agoumi” refers to a 2003 policy paper written for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank. The paper was not peer-reviewed.
Its author was Professor Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan climate expert who looked at the potential impacts of climate change on Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. His report refers to the risk of “deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000–20 period”. These claims refer to other reports prepared by civil servants in each of the three countries as submissions to the UN. These do not appear to have been peer-reviewed either.
The IPCC is also facing criticism over its reports on how sea level rise might affect Holland. Dutch ministers have demanded that it correct a claim that more than half of the Netherlands lies below sea level when, in reality, it is about a quarter.
The errors seem likely to bring about change at the IPCC. Field said: “The IPCC needs to investigate a more sophisticated approach for dealing with emerging errors.”
SOURCE
Virginia storm may set records
A historic winter storm left some parts of Virginia under nearly 3 feet of snow Saturday, knocking out power to 175,000 utility customers and collapsing buildings. "The accumulations that have been reported now have been historic," Gov. Bob McDonnell said during a teleconference with state emergency officials. He cited a high snowfall of 33 inches in Loudoun County, in northern Virginia, and 2 feet along the Interstate 81 corridor in western Virginia.
Snow depths are "fast approaching the highest accumulations in the 103 years that these statistics have been kept," said McDonnell, who declared a snow emergency on Wednesday.
Virginia State Police, which had 75 percent of its uniformed officers on duty, had responded to 1,323 traffic accidents in the last 36 hours. Two crash deaths Friday in southwest Virginia were blamed on the weather.
The power outages were down from a high of 200,000, with the majority being customers of Dominion Virginia Power, the state's largest utility. Most of the outages were in northern Virginia.
Appalachian Power reported nearly 40,000 customers without power, primarily in the southwest corner of the state, and small electric cooperatives were reporting power failures in the northern and western portions of the state....
The Virginia National Guard put 500 troops on active duty and positioned them in the hardest-hit areas, such as Fredericksburg, Waynesboro, Charlottesville and in northern Virginia. They were assisting local emergency crews.
The National Weather Service said runoff from snow and rain had caused a rapid rise of the Dan River near South Boston. Residents were advised to monitor local conditions.
The Virginia Department of Transportation said crews worked through the night to clear Interstates 81, 77 and 581. While clear of snow, road surfaces remain slick, VDOT said. Along some roads, plows were piling snow so high, trucks had to be called in to haul the snow away so plowing could continue.
Heavy snow had brought down trees and limbs on roads in Henry, Patrick, Roanoke and Bedford counties. Crews are working to remove them.
SOURCE
Time to scrap the Australian government's climate plan - academics
A COALITION of academics who doubt the science on the causes of climate change has called on the Rudd Government to dump plans for an emissions trading scheme and consider alternatives.
Their call comes as a Nielsen poll, published in Fairfax newspapers today, shows Australians prefer the federal coalition's climate action policy. Of those polled, 45 per cent favoured the Opposition's direct action emissions fund over the 39 per cent who backed Labor's carbon pollution reduction scheme.
The Australian Climate Science Coalition believes the Government is losing the political high ground on global warming. "The debacle in Copenhagen demonstrated the futility of Australia adopting a go-it-alone strategy,'' executive director Max Rheese said in a statement. Public faith in the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been shaken following revelations about some of its information-gathering processes, he said.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Sunday, February 07, 2010
Global cooling paralyses US East coast
A RECORD-breaking blizzard dumped thick snow across the US east coast overnight, paralysing the region and snapping power to hundreds of thousands of people, as two people were killed on the roads. The monster storm, dubbed "Snowpocalypse" and "Snowmageddon," stretched hundreds of miles from eastern Indiana across into Pennsylvania and then down through Maryland as far south as North Carolina. With winds gusting at almost 90 kilometers an hour, meteorologists said they had recorded snowfall as high as 96 centimeters in parts of northern Maryland - a historic high for the state.
The heavy, sticky snow toppled trees and sagged power lines, leaving more than 350,000 people without electricity in Maryland and neighboring Virginia, officials said. "Snowmageddon here in DC," President Barack Obama told Democrats in a speech, only a year after chiding the capital city for its cautious response to small snowfalls.
Forecasters warned residents to hunker down, with no let-up in the weather for most of the day, and said chilly temperatures on Sunday would mean the wet snow would swiftly turn icy. "It's hanging on, and hanging on," Paul Kochin, an expert in northeast weather systems with the National Weather Service, said. "Officially this won't break records in DC, but unofficially, you bet it will. It's very rare to have two such big storms in one season," he said, after the capital region was already crippled by a smaller storm in December.
Maryland, followed by neighboring Virginia, were bearing the brunt of the storm and seeing the highest snowfalls, he said. "It's pretty rough out there," agreed Ed McDonough from the Maryland Emergency Management Agency. "The roads are very difficult to travel... and we are seeing a spike in power outages. We are telling local residents to stay home, enjoy the time with their families and let the highway crews do their work."
Emergency crews struggled to repair the power outages hampered by the miserable weather. "We have a lot of scattered outages and the road conditions are not really working with us," admitted Pepco spokesman Andre Francis, pleading for patience as some customers were told the blackouts could last days.
Some 200 National Guardsmen had been deployed across Maryland, while in Virginia police confirmed that a father and son were killed Friday when they stopped to help a stranded car. Police in the state had responded to some 3167 calls for help, more than two-thirds of which were due to car accidents or stranded vehicles. Three state troopers were also injured in storm-related accidents. Virginia was also opening up public shelters in local schools for those without power.
In the normally bustling capital, sight-seers were walking thigh-deep in the snow along the famous national mall. Alix Lawe, who works with the US Air Force, was out for a run in the snow, and said: "It's so fun. I'm from Florida, I've never seen so much snow."
Snow plows were out trying to keep emergency routes and main highways clear, but most officials said it would take days to reach the smaller streets, and warned of a difficult Monday morning commute. The National Weather Service (NWS) has put the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area under a rare 24-hour blizzard warning until 10pm (local time).
All flights out of the capital's Reagan National airport were canceled, along with most flights out of Dulles International Airport in Virginia, while there was a limited service at Baltimore. A hangar roof collapsed at the Dulles Jet Center early Saturday according to Rob Yengling, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority spokesman. Five people spending the night inside to shelter from the storm escaped without injuries.
The capital's subway system has shut down 40 above ground stations, meaning transport links between Washington and its heavily-populated suburbs were snapped with most major roads impassable, knocking out bus services.
But some people were determined to enjoy the winter's second biggest storm in the area, with 5000 turning out for a mass snowball fight in central Washington.
SOURCE
Disclosing the Real Risks on Climate Change
We are not weighing in on the climate debate. We are not opining on whether the world’s climate is changing, at what pace or due to what causes, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Shapiro insisted on announcing the SEC’s new “interpretive guidance” on climate change.
The Commission’s two Republican members objected that the Obama Administration was using the Commission to promote its global warming and renewable energy agenda (along with the EPA, NASA, Defense and Interior Departments and others). It’s true, but irrelevant.
Environmentalists and “ethical investing” groups had pressured the Commission for years to require corporate disclosure on climate matters. Now, as the SEC steps in, the Copenhagen treaty negotiations have collapsed in disarray. Cap-and-trade has bogged down over senators’ fears of further damage to the economy and their reelection chances. The Environmental Protection Agency has decreed that plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is a “dangerous pollutant,” because senators are increasingly reluctant to micromanage the economy, companies and families, but the regs are likely to go nowhere.
Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph and ClimateGate email scandals have metastasized into a tsunami of revelations that have besmirched the IPCC’s credibility and its role as dominant arbiter on matters of energy and climate. Manipulated and missing temperature data. Doctored computer models and disaster scenarios. Alarmist scientists rejecting any studies that dissent from climate catastrophe claims. Headline-grabbing disaster “studies” about melting glaciers and parched rainforests based on rank speculation or written by World Wildlife Fund activists. “Mann-made” climate change, indeed.
Investors certainly do have a “fundamental right to know” which companies are well positioned to address future crises and opportunities, and which are not – as we are frequently reminded by activist investor groups like Institutional Shareholder Services and CALPERS. However, these groups want to use the SEC decision to drive cap-and-trade laws and “endangerment” rulings forward, and drive hydrocarbon use and users into oblivion.
Many companies have been cowed into going along with this agenda. They seek to gain “a seat at the negotiating table,” curry favorable PR through “greenwashing” and “green-nosing,” protect themselves against lawsuits over CO2 emissions and global warming, or profit from renewable energy mandates, subsidies and stimulus grants.
But the “right to know” extends far beyond the activists’ narrow agenda. Indeed the lesson may be that this SEC guidance offers a tremendous opportunity for any company or investor wise enough to seize it. For the new guidance does not say companies must disclose only alleged risks from climate change.
It says they should also address impacts from legislation, regulation, international accords and their effects on business trends. This creates valuable opportunities for educating investors, customers, employees and voters about climate change issues.
Some 2,400 lobbyists are working on energy and climate issues in Washington. General Electric alone spent $7.6 million lobbying in the second quarter 2009, to secure stimulus, climate change and renewable energy dollars from US taxpayers. GE hopes to garner up to $192 billion over the next several years from projects funded by governments worldwide, including renewables and electricity grid modernization.
Wind turbine and solar panel sales are high on GE’s list, and will play a growing role. However, their electricity is 3-5 times more expensive than coal-based power, which translates into big taxpayer subsidies and more factory layoffs. Moreover, generating just 20% of US electricity with wind power would require some 186,000 turbines, 19,000 miles of new transmission lines, 18,000,000 acres of land (half of Illinois), and 270,000,000 tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass and rare earth minerals (the equivalent of 180,000,000 Toyota Priuses). Even worse, a West Texas wind farm now under construction created 2,800 jobs – but 2,400 of them are in China. Solar power issues are similar.
Insurance companies and reinsurers may want to “disclose” alleged 20-foot higher sea levels and more violent hurricanes conjured up by computer models. These Gore and IPCC scare stories can translate into “increased risk,” higher premiums and additional profits. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand says carbon permits could be a “boon” for the Big Apple’s financial sector, creating a commodities market of “as much as $3 trillion by 2020.”
Other members of the climate-industrial-government-activist-scientist complex likewise have a big stake in global warming disasters and massive government spending to “prevent a cataclysm” and terminate our “perilous dependence on fossil fuels.” Exelon, Duke Energy, Penn State (Mike Mann again), NASA and other institutions all see huge potential returns on “investments” in climate alarmism and lobbying.
But 38 states depend on coal for 35-98% of their electricity and a sizable portion of their jobs and tax revenues. While others get rich, they will pay dearly. While a few members left the US Chamber, because it opposes cap-and-trade legislation – most recognize the risks in laws and regs that will send energy costs skyrocketing, ship millions of jobs overseas, and shackle living standards and civil rights across America.
Carbon emissions trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange began at $1 per metric ton in January 2004. Prices then fluctuated wildly, reaching a $7 peak value in May 2008, before crashing to $0.10 in October 2009. Speculators who entered the carbon market on 5/30/08 lost 98.6% of their investment.
Imagine how they might have fared if SEC rules had compelled utility companies, the Chicago Climate Exchange, and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management firm to truthfully disclose what was going on in the IPCC, Climate Research Unit and NASA. Imagine the roller coaster ride that GE, Exelon and Munich RE investors could take, as more sordid details come out of the IPCC, concerns soar about US deficits and credit ratings, and taxpayer anger rises over climate fraud, subsidies, and sweetheart deals that corporate lobbyists have negotiated with Congress and the Administration.
(Pfizer and Big Pharma’s recent experience with Congress over Obamacare should serve as a cautionary tale. See Kimberly Strassel, “Pfizer’s bad political bet,” Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2009.)
Investors have right to know all of this. That’s where the SEC guidance offers vital opportunities for intelligent investors and socially responsible companies. They should carefully consider how to comply with the Commission’s ruling in the areas it has identified.
Physical impacts of climate change: Are the impacts real, or generated by computers and activists? What is the current state of climate science and its integrity, transparency and accountability?
Impacts of legislation, regulation and international accords: Are purported future profits based on current and reliable vote counts? Realistic assessments that a binding climate treaty will be agreed to? As Climategate unfolds and 2010 elections approach, will wind turbine makers and carbon traders benefit – or will it be hydrocarbon-based industries like chemicals, manufacturing, airlines and tourism?
Indirect impacts on business trends: Are profit projections based on melting glaciers and other Climategate fraud, greenwashing, backroom lobbyist deals, or wishful carbon trading? How will new laws affect demand for goods in industries that have recently been extolled – or vilified?
It is becoming increasingly clear that the real risks to businesses, investors, employees, and low-income, minority and elderly families are not due to climate change. They are the result of policies enacted in the name of preventing climate change. The SEC guidance can help identify risks and opportunities – and advise people about them in a timely, accurate, responsible manner. Socially responsible companies will seize the opportunity.
SOURCE
Warming advocates feel the heat
The beware-of-warming crowd is starting to feel the heat. And it isn’t because of a warming planet either. It almost seems as if everything that could go wrong for them, is going wrong.
Now, I would never be one to claim that weather anomaly is proof that anthropogenic warming is wrong. I know that particular weather disproves climate change. We all know that such things can only prove that warming exists. In the realm of warming activism weather is a one way street. So Katrina was proof of warming. That 1998 was a particularly warm year was proof of warming. That California experiences droughts is all part of warming. Ditto for droughts in the UK, or floods, either will do. But still those nasty cold winters that seem worse than usual are never proof of anything but they do cause the public to wonder.
And this winter has been another very nasty one. Consider the poor people on Hiddensee, an island just off the German mainland. This resort island is completely ice bound. The German military has been flying in to rescue tourists on the island. Resident of the island rely on trade with the mainland for their food supplies and so shelves were getting bare. The military also flew in food. According to Spiegel the sea between Hiddensee and the island of Rügen “is now an ice sheet around 30 centimeters (12 inches) thick. An icebreaker failed to make it through to Hiddensee on Monday forcing the authorities to use helicopters to supply the island and pick up trapped vacationers.” Spiegel says that the ice “is not expected to melt until the end of February” which seems to imply that regular helicopter food deliveries will be required. Some tourists, trapped on the island when ferry service as shut down due to the ice, didn't heed the advice of authorities and walked across the Baltic Sea in order to get home.
Like the awful cold that gripped North American and the UK, this weather front is bringing record snows as well. Roofs have collapsed due to the weight of snow and “hundreds of drivers were forced to spend the night in their cars and truces on the A45 and A5 highways due to heavy snowfall.”
Floridians might also be wondering where the warming went. The L.A. Times reports “January’s bitter cold may have wiped out many of the shallow-water corals in the Florida Keys.” The paper reports that “given the depth and duration of the frigid weather” some damage was expected. But Meaghan Johnson of Nature Conservancy reported widespread, severe damage. “Star and brain corals, large species that can take hundreds of years to grow, were as white and lifeless as bones, frozen to death, she said. Dead sea turtles, eels and parrotfish also littered the bottom.”
The paper says that Florida Fish and Wildlife reported “that a record number of endangered manatees had succumbed to the cold this year—77, according to a preliminary review. The previous record, 56, was set last year.”
Meanwhile the scientists who have led the campaign to convince the world of the dangers of warming are under scrutiny as never before. Major media sources, for the first time in memory, are starting to investigate the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change and the tiny band of warming advocates who make up the elite in that field. The New Zealand Herald, the largest newspaper in the country, recently editorialized about the need for “facts, not anecdotes” from the IPCC.
The editors at the Herald, previously staunch warmers themselves, noted that they way to discredit a report is to find one mistake. But when it comes to the IPCC: “more than one mistake had been found” and the errors (if unintentional) “are hardly peripheral.” The editors listed claims regarding the Himalayan glaciers as one example and said that the IPCC was “notified of this [error] in 2006 and yet the claim appeared in the 2007 report.” They also lament the IPCC using “a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine” as evidence for “disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps and Africa.”
The Herald editors then refer to the IPCC claims about “extreme weather” which “turns out to have been based on a paper that had not been peer-reviewed or published at the time.” The paper even “included a caveat that the evidence was insufficient” but the IPCC deleted all such caveats from their report. The Herald, while not yet ready to abandon the comforting fear of warming, says:
The editors note that “the consensus has been wrong, or at least careless on several points” and that the IPCC “urgently needs new leadership and a return to strict scientific rigour if it hopes to be taken seriously again.”
Even one the staunchest media allies of the warmers, the left-wing Guardian newspaper in the UK, has started investigating claims of the warmers and finds them wanting. They report the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the home of climategate “’hid’ data flaws.” The report says:
The Guardian, of course, is not willing to question warming orthodoxy itself, but they do say their investigation does “call into question the probity of some climate change science.” To be precise it doesn’t call climate change science into question, but climate change theory.
In particular the Guardian investigate the date used to show warming in China and says there were “apparent attempts to cover up problems with data from Chinese weather stations…” The Guardian explains the problem:
Already London’s Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph have been exposing IPCC errors and distortions fairly regularly. But it isn’t a small feat to have shaken the confidence the editors at the New Zealand Herald had previously shown for the IPCC. And it is a huge step when the very left Guardian starts exposing some of the antics of leading warming advocates.
It’s bad enough that nature is not cooperating with warming theory. But, if more main steam media outlets starting turning a critical eye on the IPCC and its core group of scientist/activists, the whole political agenda at work here could unravel.
SOURCE
Environmentalism as self-glorification for airheads
These days when I hear the words “ethical” and “sustainable” applied to objects as unaffordable or bizarre as £1,000 designer bark chairs or frocks made of milk — a fibre from an industrial process of dubious eco-merit — I feel like knitting a scarf from endangered butterflies or buying some conflict-diamond bling. While the ethical fashion cause is undeniably sound — it is a disgrace that developing-world sweatshops make one-season wonders for jaded Western trollops — it is not enhanced by rich celebrities using it as a means to buy indulgences and entry into eco-Heaven.
Yet celebrities who purport to be “ethical” can never see how funny they are. Or how likely we are to point out the shortfall between their noble intent and personal practice. And when we do they get huffy, like Sting did when Jeremy Paxman queried how owning several homes could be helping the rainforest.
Gwyneth Paltrow, creator of the Goop website, which encourages you to “nourish your inner aspect” with organic seeds and ayurvedic unguents, seems to believe — as many stars do — that the worst thing about pollution or global warming is that it frizzes her hair, clogs her complexion and toxes up her temple-like bod. Ecological change can be achieved, she suggests, through the sheer force of her vanity.
And, meanwhile, Gwynnie has bought half her London street and, to the horror of her neighbours, wants to enclose it in a huge metal fence. She drives her children to school in a monster 4x4. Can she not see this is hysterical? And Livia, jetting between Venice, New York, London and LA on her “green-carpet” quest: unless the plane is also fuelled with milk, how sustainable is that?
In a largely secular society, we are still trying to figure out the practicalities of our ethical code. Too often, what is done in the name of our new god, The Planet, is steeped in self-glorification. At Christmas, when someone announces that, instead of buying you a present, he has given money to Oxfam to buy Africans a goat, what should one say? “Oh you shouldn’t have! Yes, if you want to make a charitable donation, do it with money you planned to spend on yourself, not on me.” Instead, the goat-giver enjoys both a virtuous glow and the lovely gift you bought for him. You, meanwhile, have nothing.
Similarly, the stars who can afford to wear organic cotton, eat lavishly raised poultry or buy a wood in Pembrokeshire as offset penance for their transatlantic commutes, lord it on the green high ground. Meanwhile, the poor wander far below, clad in unsustainable clothing, surviving on cheap factory protein, taking budget flights to the sun. Green celebrities have so much, we so little. Yet somehow they are saintly and we the damned.
Ethical fashion is, anyway, almost an oxymoron. The very nature of the industry is to instill a cycle of perpetual dissatisfaction and consumption. Buying less is the only way to confound its purpose, and the eco-WAGs certainly won’t do that. Like Livia, they just ditch Gucci for dresses made of “sasawashi, bamboo, sea cell and soya”. And next season they will be bored, just as Peta-supporting supermodels stopped caring about critters once fur was back in style. The dogged, unglamorous work of groups such as Behind the Label, who have championed garment workers, hassled greedy high street stores into paying a living wage and guilt-tripped brands such as Nike and Gap into weeding out child labour, have made a difference. Not the shopping fancies of the rich.
Fashion itself has no soul; cares only about surfaces and stuff. Tom Ford, the designer who directs the Oscar-nominated A Single Man, styles it into sterility. The camera lingers on the gorgeous Frank Lloyd Wright house and exquisite clothes, and a bathroom drawer opens to show toiletries prissily arranged like a magazine still life. It is a movie of cold edges and empty silences: thankfully, Ford chose Julianne Moore and Firth to fill them.
SOURCE
ANOTHER BIG GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Four current articles below:
Reality dawns: The Greenest of the Greenies suddenly want factories -- but nice ones, of course
A factory owner would need to have a lot of heart to risk locating himself among such intolerant loonies
It's the Queensland town renowned for a postcard setting, caring community and laidback lifestyle ... but has Maleny become too green for its own good? As the children of a generation of tree-changers begin their working lives, Maleny is discovering that being green is no protection against that scourge of rural communities: youth unemployment. While other towns can rely on mining or agriculture to provide job opportunities, Maleny's young people are increasingly forced to desert the Sunshine Coast hinterland to find work, leaving behind an ageing population.
Community concern has become so acute that even local greenies are calling for drastic action and putting out the welcome mat for new industry. In the town that famously opposed Woolworths, business leaders, families and greenies are now united in their calls for a light industrial precinct to boost employment. Such a precinct could attract anything from brick making to glass fabrication but would have to meet local environmental guidelines. However, under existing council plans, there is no land set aside for industrial growth in Maleny.
Young job seekers currently have to compete for the few jobs at the town's biggest employers, Supa IGA and Woolworths, which both have workforces of about 100.
Latest census figures show Maleny has a median age of 42, compared to 36 for the whole of Queensland.
Hinterland Employment Service owner Jenny Jones said families who moved to Maleny in search of an idyllic lifestyle were often disappointed. "It's a great place to live and bring up children but when the kids leave school, there's just not a lot up here," she said.
Maleny Commerce president Stephen Dittmann said green activists had traditionally held sway in the town but there was now recognition that some development was necessary. "We need measured growth, we can't stand still," Mr Dittmann said.
Paul Gilmour-Walsh, president of local environmental group Green Hills, said even so-called greenies could see the need to grow the town. "There's definitely a need for an area, to put aside land for something like that up here," Mr Gilmour-Walsh said. "We need a balanced community so kids leaving school have somewhere to work; it's as simple as that."
David Schaumberg, 19, loves Maleny, his home since the family left Brisbane for a better lifestyle 16 years ago, but he cannot find a steady job. David recently worked for four months as a jackaroo in Kingaroy to earn some cash but is back in Maleny looking for a job. His friends are in the same situation, with many leaving town. "I actually think an industry precinct would be good for variety . . . as long as they do it the right way and not impact on the environment," he said.
Mother of five Maria Dodd said her eldest son Andrew, 19, held little hope of attaining his goal of a local electrical apprenticeship. The family moved from Brisbane about 10 years ago. "He keeps getting bit jobs. He's a hard worker but there's not much around," she said.
SOURCE
Costs of the greenhouse gas scheme remain a mystery to the party behind it
The Rudd government has failed its first GST-style test over the details of its emissions trading scheme and the compensation being offered to Australians for rising prices. Lulled into a sense of false security through Coalition support for an ETS last year and a largely sympathetic media, Kevin Rudd and his ministers have found themselves ill-equipped and under-prepared to answer basic questions people want answered, whether they are climate change believers or sceptics. After three years of Labor being formally committed to an ETS, ministers can't answer simple questions. The Prime Minister himself has conceded the government has failed to address the "complexity" of the ETS.
In parliamentary question time and in interviews, ministers, including Rudd, have blathered and blustered, dissembled and distracted when asked simple questions. Tony Abbott, once an adviser to John Hewson in his failed campaign to introduce a GST, knows how to run an aggressive retail political campaign on rising food and energy prices and to exploit complexity in policy.
As the treasurer who introduced a GST, Peter Costello rehearsed offsets and compensation for almost three years. He declared later it "scarred my life". But that drab work equipped Costello to answer the thousands of questions he received about the price of Coca-Cola and even the Hockey Bear pyjamas from Korea that Labor's Simon Crean produced in parliament one day, without falter.
This week in parliament, Rudd was unable to answer questions about what compensation a single person earning $45,000 a year would get or what a double-income couple on $65,000 each -- a NSW policeman and teacher -- would get.
Small Business Minister Craig Emerson blustered about the "most stupid question" he had heard when a dairy farmer's concerns were raised about electricity price rises from the introduction of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme being added to price rises everyone was already feeling now.
Aged Care Minister Justine Elliott could not address a concern that had been raised for months about pensioners in nursing homes facing increased living costs because of higher energy bills and not getting compensation. Some opposition frontbenchers actually won a bet that Elliott would read her set- piece answer to everything that didn't mention the ETS.
Yesterday, Assistant Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said "low- and middle-income earners are fully compensated" for prices rises passed on by power stations. In fact, half of all households will be "fully compensated".
When a government has not laid the groundwork for a major policy, when it can't explain it and makes mistakes about the costs to families it's on the back foot and in the wrong argument.
SOURCE
More Greenie-inflicted costs on the whole Australian community
ALL Australian homes will soon have to undergo a mandatory energy-efficiency assessment costing up to $1500 per property. The assessment has to be done before any property can be sold or rented under new laws to tackle carbon emissions.
The mandatory assessment - being drafted into law by the federal and state governments - will rate homes by an energy efficiency star system, similar to the ratings given to fridges and washing machines. It will apply to all commercial properties from later this year and to all residential properties from May 2011, Adelaide Now reports.
A spokesman for State Energy Minister Pat Conlon said the ratings would inform prospective owners or tenants of a building's energy use, so they could factor it in to their buying or rental decision. The spokesman said details of the "Mandatory Disclosure" scheme - including who would carry out the assessments and how much they would cost - were yet to be decided.
Energy efficiency expert Arthur Grammatopoulos, of Helica Architecture, said rating properties could cost up to $1500 per house. "I think this is a positive move for the industry but the question has to be asked, will there be enough experts to cope with demand when the law is introduced?" he said. A similar scheme with a six-star rating has been operating in the Australian Capital Territory's property market for several years.
Queensland's State Government introduced a mandatory Sustainability Declaration form on January 1, requiring homeowners to declare their property's green credentials to prospective buyers or risk a $2000 fine.
Mandatory disclosure has been criticised by property experts as an unwarranted expense that will not influence purchasing decisions or cut household pollution. The Real Estate Institute of SA said governments were playing environmentally "popular politics" by introducing a law that they say will simply add to the cost of selling and renting a home. "I think they are patronising people who are making the biggest purchase decision of their life by thinking a rating system will influence that decision," REISA chief executive Greg Troughton said. "It's already hard enough to buy and sell a home and this is just another financial impost that also has the potential to delay the sale of a property."
While Mr Troughton said vendors would bear the cost of having their home rated by a licensed expert, independent SA MLC and former Valuer-General John Darley said landlords would look to pass the cost on to tenants. "This will be an extra cost to working families who have to rent because they can't afford a mortgage," he said. "And we need this like a hole in the head unless the governments can convince us there is a definite benefit, like a reduction in household pollution."
The Council of Australian Government's National Strategy on Energy Efficiency says Mandatory Disclosure will "help households and businesses prepare for the introduction of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme".
SOURCE
A professor of baseless insults
(Professor Andrew Pitman is Co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) at the University of NSW)
Last week a paid public servant spoke untruths, but instead of being exposed by the media, he was aided by our taxpayer-funded public broadcast network. Andy Pitman spoke about the socio-economic position of a group he avoids, and let down UNSW, abused the title “Professor”, and misled the public.
The journalists allowed the baseless smears to be broadcast without question, not just once, but twice. Professor Andy Pitman on ABC Radio: Sarah Clark interviews Andy Pitman on glaciers. Robin Williams thought it was so “useful” he rebroadcast the same factually incorrect, irrelevant material on his “science” show. Oops. It’s hard to cram more anti-truths into one declaration:
Let’s correct thesix seven-delusion paragraph
1. Skeptics are well funded?
Let’s put a perspective on just how spectacularly wrong these claims on ABC radio are. ExxonMobil paid all of $23 million to skeptics worldwide in total, over ten years. In the same period, the US government alone was spending around $2 billion a year on climate scientists. And if you include other climate industry players, from 1989-2009, the total funding is $79 billion dollars. Hence believers of the big-scare could dip into a pot that was at least 3,500 times as large as anything the skeptics of the same scare could draw from. (All this info comes from my Climate Money paper).
If there was any equivalent funding for skeptics, Greenpeace would have found that paper trail and the scare-friendly press would have told you all about it. Big-Oil could hardly hide $79 billion now could they?
Andy Pitman earns far more from his beliefs than this skeptical advocate and infinitely more than most skeptics (who earn nothing) while he postulates on things he has done no research on and misleads the public. (Take me to court Andy. I don’t mind discovery of documents, but I don’t pander to bullies’ requests in public.) Most skeptical scientists are those no longer in the pay of government or other alarmist organizations, free to speak up without losing their jobs. They are mainly retired.
In reality it can cost money to be an active skeptic. To print out handouts, to organize speeches at local community halls, to do mail outs to our representatives, or to pay for transcripts of interviews that misrepresent the science. It says a lot that there are so many people willing to put themselves out, money and time-wise, in order to save us from the scare with no evidence.
Pitman has received over $6 million in grants – obviously not paid to him personally, but paid into accounts he controls–for research he directs. Presumably he also earns at least the base salary of a UNSW Professor, I gather, $190,000 a year. For a science PhD that’s not bad, especially if you throw in multiple overseas trips with all expenses paid, and the odd-rock-star-radio interview with no hard questions. It’s a wicket worth defending.
2. Skeptics are “well” organized?
Organized how exactly? With no PR department, no union, no association, no office, no UN agency, usually no budget, and … though you can see how we fund national multi-million dollar televised Ad campaigns like “Think Climate, Think Fraud”, oh that’s right … that was Kevin Rudd: “Think Climate, Think Change” (give us your money). That cost Australian taxpayers $13.9 million dollars.
Pitman cries poor while his scare campaign team includes the major western governments, the UN, the banks, big oil (they always funded alarmism more, and now don’t fund skeptics), the green movement, the alternative energy suppliers, the reinsurance industry, and many businesses. About all the skeptics have is donors on blogs and a few dedicated organizations of like minded people, such as the indefatigable Heartland (which is in turn funded mostly by private donations, with no more than 5% from any single corporation). Skeptics are tiny voices against vast machines.
Pitman wouldn’t recognize a genuine grassroots movement if it mowed him down.
3. Skeptics are misleading the public?
Misleading? You mean like climate scientists who are using tricks to “hide the decline”, removing data from 75% of worldwide temperature stations, ignoring the best ocean temperature network data, colluding to keep contrary papers out of publication, avoiding FOI requests, abusing statistics to make scary hockey sticks no matter what data you feed them, and ignoring the masses of data and analysis (much of it peer-reviewed) that undermines the carbon dioxide theory of global warming? Or, how about putting most “official” thermometers next to airport-tarmac or air conditioner outlets, or pretending that one tree in far north Russia can measure global temperatures?
Strangely, it’s not skeptics who howl that “only peer review counts” while at the same time pretending that speculative information from the WWF, Greenpeace and a student’s paper of mountaineering anecdotes were peer-reviewed research by hundreds of experts.
4. “Explaining science is not my job”.
According to the UNSW Guidelines, it is. It’s what Professors are paid to do: to foster leadership and excellence in their academic area within the university and the community. As it happens, over the last 18 months, I’ve asked Pitman in writing to publicly name any misleading points from the Skeptics Handbook. He has refused.
5. I, Andy Pitman, volunteer to help the IPCC
As Andrew Bolt so aptly pointed out, Andy Pitman’s grants list includes around $60,000 in funding “for costs incurred as lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”. That’s not most people’s idea of volunteer work.
6. Skeptics don’t have day jobs
Pitman, contradicting himself suddenly, claims many “fully funded” climate skeptics don’t have day jobs, and for once he’s half-right, but scores an own goal by using the truth. Most active skeptics don’t have day jobs, precisely because there aren’t any paid climate skeptic positions to have. Many skeptics are retired, because no one else has time to audit the IPCC “for fun”.
As far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong), total ARC grants specifically available for research aiming to disprove the theory of AGW in 2010 are exactly $0.00, as has been the case since time began. (That’s another scandal, for another day.)
Who should be protecting Australia from paying reparations based on bogus science? When the bogus science is climate science, Andy Pitman ought be high on that list. Instead, he helps to sell out the nation that supports him to a corrupt unaudited foreign committee whose recommendations will mainly end up profiting large financial houses.
7. An ad hominem attack is “scientific”?
Notice how we’re not talking about climate science? Why, on a planet that goes around the sun, is a professor of science launching ad hominem attacks? A science undergraduate should grovel with embarrassment for making this mistake. High school debaters have stronger reasoning skills. Yet, the science reporters on the ABC don’t even blink.
So what if I was paid, oh, let’s say, $190,000 a year, by… an oil sheik (I’m not). But if I was, how would that change the satellite recordings that I write about from Universities on the other side of the world from me? What kind of conspiracy theory do you have to hold in your head to nullify the evidence with any information about funding? I’m a commentator forgoodnesssake, I don’t even collect, hold or publish results from the sediments, corals, ice cores, pollen, diatoms, boreholes, or tree rings that I talk about.
Aren’t we all grown up enough now to attack the ball and not the man? (Which goes for Penny Sackett too, our Chief Scientist, who said that exact thing tonight on The 7.30 Report. Where was Sackett last week? Did she miss the chance to admonish Pitman for attacking skeptical scientists?)
Look Mum. No logical errors here: Lest anyone think I’m committing the same logical error as Pitman by pointing at his vested interests, let’s put a razor fine point on it. He claims we are winning the debate because we have so much funding. We claim he’s losing because he has no evidence. At no point have I ever said his science is wrong because he is paid. So why post about his funding?
One: To show that he’s not only illogical, but spectacularly wrong as well. It’s a baseless smear campaign.
Two: The $6 million in research grants vs the $0 in skeptical grants tells us nothing about the atmospheric climate, but shows that there is a Gravy Train, and he is on it. And he’s the one who suggested that people’s opinions were affected by funding. Go soak in that irony.
Three: If people are going to try to bully and smear us, it helps to make it painful for them, by pouring the truth right back at them.
Since he effectively said “follow the money”, I just said, “ok”. And did I mention that the carbon market was worth $130 billion last year?
Speaking of money, who is paid to audit the IPCC? Officially, no one is. No agency, no institution, no government department. Information from that UN conglomerate committee controls global markets, and yet answers to no elected government, no ASIC, no SEC, no ACCC. Nothing. There ought to be teams of skeptical scientists paid to check on the alarmists, but no one at all is checking, except a few unpaid scientists and bloggers.
The bottom line: Pitman peddles misinformation about science and misinformation about skeptics. He could start by apologizing to the Australian people who pay his salary. Then he could say thanks to the Australian scientists working pro bono to do part of his job for him.
What a sad week for Australian science, a dismal day for Australian universities, and a low point for the ABC. It’s not so hot for taxpayers either, we’re funding someone who throws baseless speculation and insults back at the same Australian citizens he’s supposed to serve.
SOURCE (See the original for links)
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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A RECORD-breaking blizzard dumped thick snow across the US east coast overnight, paralysing the region and snapping power to hundreds of thousands of people, as two people were killed on the roads. The monster storm, dubbed "Snowpocalypse" and "Snowmageddon," stretched hundreds of miles from eastern Indiana across into Pennsylvania and then down through Maryland as far south as North Carolina. With winds gusting at almost 90 kilometers an hour, meteorologists said they had recorded snowfall as high as 96 centimeters in parts of northern Maryland - a historic high for the state.
The heavy, sticky snow toppled trees and sagged power lines, leaving more than 350,000 people without electricity in Maryland and neighboring Virginia, officials said. "Snowmageddon here in DC," President Barack Obama told Democrats in a speech, only a year after chiding the capital city for its cautious response to small snowfalls.
Forecasters warned residents to hunker down, with no let-up in the weather for most of the day, and said chilly temperatures on Sunday would mean the wet snow would swiftly turn icy. "It's hanging on, and hanging on," Paul Kochin, an expert in northeast weather systems with the National Weather Service, said. "Officially this won't break records in DC, but unofficially, you bet it will. It's very rare to have two such big storms in one season," he said, after the capital region was already crippled by a smaller storm in December.
Maryland, followed by neighboring Virginia, were bearing the brunt of the storm and seeing the highest snowfalls, he said. "It's pretty rough out there," agreed Ed McDonough from the Maryland Emergency Management Agency. "The roads are very difficult to travel... and we are seeing a spike in power outages. We are telling local residents to stay home, enjoy the time with their families and let the highway crews do their work."
Emergency crews struggled to repair the power outages hampered by the miserable weather. "We have a lot of scattered outages and the road conditions are not really working with us," admitted Pepco spokesman Andre Francis, pleading for patience as some customers were told the blackouts could last days.
Some 200 National Guardsmen had been deployed across Maryland, while in Virginia police confirmed that a father and son were killed Friday when they stopped to help a stranded car. Police in the state had responded to some 3167 calls for help, more than two-thirds of which were due to car accidents or stranded vehicles. Three state troopers were also injured in storm-related accidents. Virginia was also opening up public shelters in local schools for those without power.
In the normally bustling capital, sight-seers were walking thigh-deep in the snow along the famous national mall. Alix Lawe, who works with the US Air Force, was out for a run in the snow, and said: "It's so fun. I'm from Florida, I've never seen so much snow."
Snow plows were out trying to keep emergency routes and main highways clear, but most officials said it would take days to reach the smaller streets, and warned of a difficult Monday morning commute. The National Weather Service (NWS) has put the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area under a rare 24-hour blizzard warning until 10pm (local time).
All flights out of the capital's Reagan National airport were canceled, along with most flights out of Dulles International Airport in Virginia, while there was a limited service at Baltimore. A hangar roof collapsed at the Dulles Jet Center early Saturday according to Rob Yengling, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority spokesman. Five people spending the night inside to shelter from the storm escaped without injuries.
The capital's subway system has shut down 40 above ground stations, meaning transport links between Washington and its heavily-populated suburbs were snapped with most major roads impassable, knocking out bus services.
But some people were determined to enjoy the winter's second biggest storm in the area, with 5000 turning out for a mass snowball fight in central Washington.
SOURCE
Disclosing the Real Risks on Climate Change
We are not weighing in on the climate debate. We are not opining on whether the world’s climate is changing, at what pace or due to what causes, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Shapiro insisted on announcing the SEC’s new “interpretive guidance” on climate change.
The Commission’s two Republican members objected that the Obama Administration was using the Commission to promote its global warming and renewable energy agenda (along with the EPA, NASA, Defense and Interior Departments and others). It’s true, but irrelevant.
Environmentalists and “ethical investing” groups had pressured the Commission for years to require corporate disclosure on climate matters. Now, as the SEC steps in, the Copenhagen treaty negotiations have collapsed in disarray. Cap-and-trade has bogged down over senators’ fears of further damage to the economy and their reelection chances. The Environmental Protection Agency has decreed that plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is a “dangerous pollutant,” because senators are increasingly reluctant to micromanage the economy, companies and families, but the regs are likely to go nowhere.
Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph and ClimateGate email scandals have metastasized into a tsunami of revelations that have besmirched the IPCC’s credibility and its role as dominant arbiter on matters of energy and climate. Manipulated and missing temperature data. Doctored computer models and disaster scenarios. Alarmist scientists rejecting any studies that dissent from climate catastrophe claims. Headline-grabbing disaster “studies” about melting glaciers and parched rainforests based on rank speculation or written by World Wildlife Fund activists. “Mann-made” climate change, indeed.
Investors certainly do have a “fundamental right to know” which companies are well positioned to address future crises and opportunities, and which are not – as we are frequently reminded by activist investor groups like Institutional Shareholder Services and CALPERS. However, these groups want to use the SEC decision to drive cap-and-trade laws and “endangerment” rulings forward, and drive hydrocarbon use and users into oblivion.
Many companies have been cowed into going along with this agenda. They seek to gain “a seat at the negotiating table,” curry favorable PR through “greenwashing” and “green-nosing,” protect themselves against lawsuits over CO2 emissions and global warming, or profit from renewable energy mandates, subsidies and stimulus grants.
But the “right to know” extends far beyond the activists’ narrow agenda. Indeed the lesson may be that this SEC guidance offers a tremendous opportunity for any company or investor wise enough to seize it. For the new guidance does not say companies must disclose only alleged risks from climate change.
It says they should also address impacts from legislation, regulation, international accords and their effects on business trends. This creates valuable opportunities for educating investors, customers, employees and voters about climate change issues.
Some 2,400 lobbyists are working on energy and climate issues in Washington. General Electric alone spent $7.6 million lobbying in the second quarter 2009, to secure stimulus, climate change and renewable energy dollars from US taxpayers. GE hopes to garner up to $192 billion over the next several years from projects funded by governments worldwide, including renewables and electricity grid modernization.
Wind turbine and solar panel sales are high on GE’s list, and will play a growing role. However, their electricity is 3-5 times more expensive than coal-based power, which translates into big taxpayer subsidies and more factory layoffs. Moreover, generating just 20% of US electricity with wind power would require some 186,000 turbines, 19,000 miles of new transmission lines, 18,000,000 acres of land (half of Illinois), and 270,000,000 tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass and rare earth minerals (the equivalent of 180,000,000 Toyota Priuses). Even worse, a West Texas wind farm now under construction created 2,800 jobs – but 2,400 of them are in China. Solar power issues are similar.
Insurance companies and reinsurers may want to “disclose” alleged 20-foot higher sea levels and more violent hurricanes conjured up by computer models. These Gore and IPCC scare stories can translate into “increased risk,” higher premiums and additional profits. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand says carbon permits could be a “boon” for the Big Apple’s financial sector, creating a commodities market of “as much as $3 trillion by 2020.”
Other members of the climate-industrial-government-activist-scientist complex likewise have a big stake in global warming disasters and massive government spending to “prevent a cataclysm” and terminate our “perilous dependence on fossil fuels.” Exelon, Duke Energy, Penn State (Mike Mann again), NASA and other institutions all see huge potential returns on “investments” in climate alarmism and lobbying.
But 38 states depend on coal for 35-98% of their electricity and a sizable portion of their jobs and tax revenues. While others get rich, they will pay dearly. While a few members left the US Chamber, because it opposes cap-and-trade legislation – most recognize the risks in laws and regs that will send energy costs skyrocketing, ship millions of jobs overseas, and shackle living standards and civil rights across America.
Carbon emissions trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange began at $1 per metric ton in January 2004. Prices then fluctuated wildly, reaching a $7 peak value in May 2008, before crashing to $0.10 in October 2009. Speculators who entered the carbon market on 5/30/08 lost 98.6% of their investment.
Imagine how they might have fared if SEC rules had compelled utility companies, the Chicago Climate Exchange, and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management firm to truthfully disclose what was going on in the IPCC, Climate Research Unit and NASA. Imagine the roller coaster ride that GE, Exelon and Munich RE investors could take, as more sordid details come out of the IPCC, concerns soar about US deficits and credit ratings, and taxpayer anger rises over climate fraud, subsidies, and sweetheart deals that corporate lobbyists have negotiated with Congress and the Administration.
(Pfizer and Big Pharma’s recent experience with Congress over Obamacare should serve as a cautionary tale. See Kimberly Strassel, “Pfizer’s bad political bet,” Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2009.)
Investors have right to know all of this. That’s where the SEC guidance offers vital opportunities for intelligent investors and socially responsible companies. They should carefully consider how to comply with the Commission’s ruling in the areas it has identified.
Physical impacts of climate change: Are the impacts real, or generated by computers and activists? What is the current state of climate science and its integrity, transparency and accountability?
Impacts of legislation, regulation and international accords: Are purported future profits based on current and reliable vote counts? Realistic assessments that a binding climate treaty will be agreed to? As Climategate unfolds and 2010 elections approach, will wind turbine makers and carbon traders benefit – or will it be hydrocarbon-based industries like chemicals, manufacturing, airlines and tourism?
Indirect impacts on business trends: Are profit projections based on melting glaciers and other Climategate fraud, greenwashing, backroom lobbyist deals, or wishful carbon trading? How will new laws affect demand for goods in industries that have recently been extolled – or vilified?
It is becoming increasingly clear that the real risks to businesses, investors, employees, and low-income, minority and elderly families are not due to climate change. They are the result of policies enacted in the name of preventing climate change. The SEC guidance can help identify risks and opportunities – and advise people about them in a timely, accurate, responsible manner. Socially responsible companies will seize the opportunity.
SOURCE
Warming advocates feel the heat
The beware-of-warming crowd is starting to feel the heat. And it isn’t because of a warming planet either. It almost seems as if everything that could go wrong for them, is going wrong.
Now, I would never be one to claim that weather anomaly is proof that anthropogenic warming is wrong. I know that particular weather disproves climate change. We all know that such things can only prove that warming exists. In the realm of warming activism weather is a one way street. So Katrina was proof of warming. That 1998 was a particularly warm year was proof of warming. That California experiences droughts is all part of warming. Ditto for droughts in the UK, or floods, either will do. But still those nasty cold winters that seem worse than usual are never proof of anything but they do cause the public to wonder.
And this winter has been another very nasty one. Consider the poor people on Hiddensee, an island just off the German mainland. This resort island is completely ice bound. The German military has been flying in to rescue tourists on the island. Resident of the island rely on trade with the mainland for their food supplies and so shelves were getting bare. The military also flew in food. According to Spiegel the sea between Hiddensee and the island of Rügen “is now an ice sheet around 30 centimeters (12 inches) thick. An icebreaker failed to make it through to Hiddensee on Monday forcing the authorities to use helicopters to supply the island and pick up trapped vacationers.” Spiegel says that the ice “is not expected to melt until the end of February” which seems to imply that regular helicopter food deliveries will be required. Some tourists, trapped on the island when ferry service as shut down due to the ice, didn't heed the advice of authorities and walked across the Baltic Sea in order to get home.
Like the awful cold that gripped North American and the UK, this weather front is bringing record snows as well. Roofs have collapsed due to the weight of snow and “hundreds of drivers were forced to spend the night in their cars and truces on the A45 and A5 highways due to heavy snowfall.”
Floridians might also be wondering where the warming went. The L.A. Times reports “January’s bitter cold may have wiped out many of the shallow-water corals in the Florida Keys.” The paper reports that “given the depth and duration of the frigid weather” some damage was expected. But Meaghan Johnson of Nature Conservancy reported widespread, severe damage. “Star and brain corals, large species that can take hundreds of years to grow, were as white and lifeless as bones, frozen to death, she said. Dead sea turtles, eels and parrotfish also littered the bottom.”
The paper says that Florida Fish and Wildlife reported “that a record number of endangered manatees had succumbed to the cold this year—77, according to a preliminary review. The previous record, 56, was set last year.”
Meanwhile the scientists who have led the campaign to convince the world of the dangers of warming are under scrutiny as never before. Major media sources, for the first time in memory, are starting to investigate the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change and the tiny band of warming advocates who make up the elite in that field. The New Zealand Herald, the largest newspaper in the country, recently editorialized about the need for “facts, not anecdotes” from the IPCC.
The editors at the Herald, previously staunch warmers themselves, noted that they way to discredit a report is to find one mistake. But when it comes to the IPCC: “more than one mistake had been found” and the errors (if unintentional) “are hardly peripheral.” The editors listed claims regarding the Himalayan glaciers as one example and said that the IPCC was “notified of this [error] in 2006 and yet the claim appeared in the 2007 report.” They also lament the IPCC using “a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine” as evidence for “disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps and Africa.”
The Herald editors then refer to the IPCC claims about “extreme weather” which “turns out to have been based on a paper that had not been peer-reviewed or published at the time.” The paper even “included a caveat that the evidence was insufficient” but the IPCC deleted all such caveats from their report. The Herald, while not yet ready to abandon the comforting fear of warming, says:
The IPCC's reputation is not helped now by the argument of authority its supporters have employed for so long. Criticism was dismissed as conceit in the face of a "scientific consensus" that by implication could not be wrong.
The editors note that “the consensus has been wrong, or at least careless on several points” and that the IPCC “urgently needs new leadership and a return to strict scientific rigour if it hopes to be taken seriously again.”
Even one the staunchest media allies of the warmers, the left-wing Guardian newspaper in the UK, has started investigating claims of the warmers and finds them wanting. They report the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the home of climategate “’hid’ data flaws.” The report says:
Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.
A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.
Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei- Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up."
The Guardian, of course, is not willing to question warming orthodoxy itself, but they do say their investigation does “call into question the probity of some climate change science.” To be precise it doesn’t call climate change science into question, but climate change theory.
In particular the Guardian investigate the date used to show warming in China and says there were “apparent attempts to cover up problems with data from Chinese weather stations…” The Guardian explains the problem:
The history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones and Wang's 1990 study, as it concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather the warming effects of expanding cities.
The IPCC's 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that "any urban-related trend" in global temperatures was small. Jones was one of two "coordinating lead authors" for the relevant chapter.
The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang's work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. "Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?" he asked Jones. He continued: "Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?"
Already London’s Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph have been exposing IPCC errors and distortions fairly regularly. But it isn’t a small feat to have shaken the confidence the editors at the New Zealand Herald had previously shown for the IPCC. And it is a huge step when the very left Guardian starts exposing some of the antics of leading warming advocates.
It’s bad enough that nature is not cooperating with warming theory. But, if more main steam media outlets starting turning a critical eye on the IPCC and its core group of scientist/activists, the whole political agenda at work here could unravel.
SOURCE
Environmentalism as self-glorification for airheads
These days when I hear the words “ethical” and “sustainable” applied to objects as unaffordable or bizarre as £1,000 designer bark chairs or frocks made of milk — a fibre from an industrial process of dubious eco-merit — I feel like knitting a scarf from endangered butterflies or buying some conflict-diamond bling. While the ethical fashion cause is undeniably sound — it is a disgrace that developing-world sweatshops make one-season wonders for jaded Western trollops — it is not enhanced by rich celebrities using it as a means to buy indulgences and entry into eco-Heaven.
Yet celebrities who purport to be “ethical” can never see how funny they are. Or how likely we are to point out the shortfall between their noble intent and personal practice. And when we do they get huffy, like Sting did when Jeremy Paxman queried how owning several homes could be helping the rainforest.
Gwyneth Paltrow, creator of the Goop website, which encourages you to “nourish your inner aspect” with organic seeds and ayurvedic unguents, seems to believe — as many stars do — that the worst thing about pollution or global warming is that it frizzes her hair, clogs her complexion and toxes up her temple-like bod. Ecological change can be achieved, she suggests, through the sheer force of her vanity.
And, meanwhile, Gwynnie has bought half her London street and, to the horror of her neighbours, wants to enclose it in a huge metal fence. She drives her children to school in a monster 4x4. Can she not see this is hysterical? And Livia, jetting between Venice, New York, London and LA on her “green-carpet” quest: unless the plane is also fuelled with milk, how sustainable is that?
In a largely secular society, we are still trying to figure out the practicalities of our ethical code. Too often, what is done in the name of our new god, The Planet, is steeped in self-glorification. At Christmas, when someone announces that, instead of buying you a present, he has given money to Oxfam to buy Africans a goat, what should one say? “Oh you shouldn’t have! Yes, if you want to make a charitable donation, do it with money you planned to spend on yourself, not on me.” Instead, the goat-giver enjoys both a virtuous glow and the lovely gift you bought for him. You, meanwhile, have nothing.
Similarly, the stars who can afford to wear organic cotton, eat lavishly raised poultry or buy a wood in Pembrokeshire as offset penance for their transatlantic commutes, lord it on the green high ground. Meanwhile, the poor wander far below, clad in unsustainable clothing, surviving on cheap factory protein, taking budget flights to the sun. Green celebrities have so much, we so little. Yet somehow they are saintly and we the damned.
Ethical fashion is, anyway, almost an oxymoron. The very nature of the industry is to instill a cycle of perpetual dissatisfaction and consumption. Buying less is the only way to confound its purpose, and the eco-WAGs certainly won’t do that. Like Livia, they just ditch Gucci for dresses made of “sasawashi, bamboo, sea cell and soya”. And next season they will be bored, just as Peta-supporting supermodels stopped caring about critters once fur was back in style. The dogged, unglamorous work of groups such as Behind the Label, who have championed garment workers, hassled greedy high street stores into paying a living wage and guilt-tripped brands such as Nike and Gap into weeding out child labour, have made a difference. Not the shopping fancies of the rich.
Fashion itself has no soul; cares only about surfaces and stuff. Tom Ford, the designer who directs the Oscar-nominated A Single Man, styles it into sterility. The camera lingers on the gorgeous Frank Lloyd Wright house and exquisite clothes, and a bathroom drawer opens to show toiletries prissily arranged like a magazine still life. It is a movie of cold edges and empty silences: thankfully, Ford chose Julianne Moore and Firth to fill them.
SOURCE
ANOTHER BIG GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Four current articles below:
Reality dawns: The Greenest of the Greenies suddenly want factories -- but nice ones, of course
A factory owner would need to have a lot of heart to risk locating himself among such intolerant loonies
It's the Queensland town renowned for a postcard setting, caring community and laidback lifestyle ... but has Maleny become too green for its own good? As the children of a generation of tree-changers begin their working lives, Maleny is discovering that being green is no protection against that scourge of rural communities: youth unemployment. While other towns can rely on mining or agriculture to provide job opportunities, Maleny's young people are increasingly forced to desert the Sunshine Coast hinterland to find work, leaving behind an ageing population.
Community concern has become so acute that even local greenies are calling for drastic action and putting out the welcome mat for new industry. In the town that famously opposed Woolworths, business leaders, families and greenies are now united in their calls for a light industrial precinct to boost employment. Such a precinct could attract anything from brick making to glass fabrication but would have to meet local environmental guidelines. However, under existing council plans, there is no land set aside for industrial growth in Maleny.
Young job seekers currently have to compete for the few jobs at the town's biggest employers, Supa IGA and Woolworths, which both have workforces of about 100.
Latest census figures show Maleny has a median age of 42, compared to 36 for the whole of Queensland.
Hinterland Employment Service owner Jenny Jones said families who moved to Maleny in search of an idyllic lifestyle were often disappointed. "It's a great place to live and bring up children but when the kids leave school, there's just not a lot up here," she said.
Maleny Commerce president Stephen Dittmann said green activists had traditionally held sway in the town but there was now recognition that some development was necessary. "We need measured growth, we can't stand still," Mr Dittmann said.
Paul Gilmour-Walsh, president of local environmental group Green Hills, said even so-called greenies could see the need to grow the town. "There's definitely a need for an area, to put aside land for something like that up here," Mr Gilmour-Walsh said. "We need a balanced community so kids leaving school have somewhere to work; it's as simple as that."
David Schaumberg, 19, loves Maleny, his home since the family left Brisbane for a better lifestyle 16 years ago, but he cannot find a steady job. David recently worked for four months as a jackaroo in Kingaroy to earn some cash but is back in Maleny looking for a job. His friends are in the same situation, with many leaving town. "I actually think an industry precinct would be good for variety . . . as long as they do it the right way and not impact on the environment," he said.
Mother of five Maria Dodd said her eldest son Andrew, 19, held little hope of attaining his goal of a local electrical apprenticeship. The family moved from Brisbane about 10 years ago. "He keeps getting bit jobs. He's a hard worker but there's not much around," she said.
SOURCE
Costs of the greenhouse gas scheme remain a mystery to the party behind it
The Rudd government has failed its first GST-style test over the details of its emissions trading scheme and the compensation being offered to Australians for rising prices. Lulled into a sense of false security through Coalition support for an ETS last year and a largely sympathetic media, Kevin Rudd and his ministers have found themselves ill-equipped and under-prepared to answer basic questions people want answered, whether they are climate change believers or sceptics. After three years of Labor being formally committed to an ETS, ministers can't answer simple questions. The Prime Minister himself has conceded the government has failed to address the "complexity" of the ETS.
In parliamentary question time and in interviews, ministers, including Rudd, have blathered and blustered, dissembled and distracted when asked simple questions. Tony Abbott, once an adviser to John Hewson in his failed campaign to introduce a GST, knows how to run an aggressive retail political campaign on rising food and energy prices and to exploit complexity in policy.
As the treasurer who introduced a GST, Peter Costello rehearsed offsets and compensation for almost three years. He declared later it "scarred my life". But that drab work equipped Costello to answer the thousands of questions he received about the price of Coca-Cola and even the Hockey Bear pyjamas from Korea that Labor's Simon Crean produced in parliament one day, without falter.
This week in parliament, Rudd was unable to answer questions about what compensation a single person earning $45,000 a year would get or what a double-income couple on $65,000 each -- a NSW policeman and teacher -- would get.
Small Business Minister Craig Emerson blustered about the "most stupid question" he had heard when a dairy farmer's concerns were raised about electricity price rises from the introduction of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme being added to price rises everyone was already feeling now.
Aged Care Minister Justine Elliott could not address a concern that had been raised for months about pensioners in nursing homes facing increased living costs because of higher energy bills and not getting compensation. Some opposition frontbenchers actually won a bet that Elliott would read her set- piece answer to everything that didn't mention the ETS.
Yesterday, Assistant Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said "low- and middle-income earners are fully compensated" for prices rises passed on by power stations. In fact, half of all households will be "fully compensated".
When a government has not laid the groundwork for a major policy, when it can't explain it and makes mistakes about the costs to families it's on the back foot and in the wrong argument.
SOURCE
More Greenie-inflicted costs on the whole Australian community
ALL Australian homes will soon have to undergo a mandatory energy-efficiency assessment costing up to $1500 per property. The assessment has to be done before any property can be sold or rented under new laws to tackle carbon emissions.
The mandatory assessment - being drafted into law by the federal and state governments - will rate homes by an energy efficiency star system, similar to the ratings given to fridges and washing machines. It will apply to all commercial properties from later this year and to all residential properties from May 2011, Adelaide Now reports.
A spokesman for State Energy Minister Pat Conlon said the ratings would inform prospective owners or tenants of a building's energy use, so they could factor it in to their buying or rental decision. The spokesman said details of the "Mandatory Disclosure" scheme - including who would carry out the assessments and how much they would cost - were yet to be decided.
Energy efficiency expert Arthur Grammatopoulos, of Helica Architecture, said rating properties could cost up to $1500 per house. "I think this is a positive move for the industry but the question has to be asked, will there be enough experts to cope with demand when the law is introduced?" he said. A similar scheme with a six-star rating has been operating in the Australian Capital Territory's property market for several years.
Queensland's State Government introduced a mandatory Sustainability Declaration form on January 1, requiring homeowners to declare their property's green credentials to prospective buyers or risk a $2000 fine.
Mandatory disclosure has been criticised by property experts as an unwarranted expense that will not influence purchasing decisions or cut household pollution. The Real Estate Institute of SA said governments were playing environmentally "popular politics" by introducing a law that they say will simply add to the cost of selling and renting a home. "I think they are patronising people who are making the biggest purchase decision of their life by thinking a rating system will influence that decision," REISA chief executive Greg Troughton said. "It's already hard enough to buy and sell a home and this is just another financial impost that also has the potential to delay the sale of a property."
While Mr Troughton said vendors would bear the cost of having their home rated by a licensed expert, independent SA MLC and former Valuer-General John Darley said landlords would look to pass the cost on to tenants. "This will be an extra cost to working families who have to rent because they can't afford a mortgage," he said. "And we need this like a hole in the head unless the governments can convince us there is a definite benefit, like a reduction in household pollution."
The Council of Australian Government's National Strategy on Energy Efficiency says Mandatory Disclosure will "help households and businesses prepare for the introduction of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme".
SOURCE
A professor of baseless insults
(Professor Andrew Pitman is Co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) at the University of NSW)
Last week a paid public servant spoke untruths, but instead of being exposed by the media, he was aided by our taxpayer-funded public broadcast network. Andy Pitman spoke about the socio-economic position of a group he avoids, and let down UNSW, abused the title “Professor”, and misled the public.
The journalists allowed the baseless smears to be broadcast without question, not just once, but twice. Professor Andy Pitman on ABC Radio: Sarah Clark interviews Andy Pitman on glaciers. Robin Williams thought it was so “useful” he rebroadcast the same factually incorrect, irrelevant material on his “science” show. Oops. It’s hard to cram more anti-truths into one declaration:
“My personal view is that climate scientists are losing the fight with climate sceptics. That the sceptics are so well funded, so well organized, have nothing else to do, they kind of don’t have day jobs, they can put all of their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science to the public, whereas the climate scientists have day jobs and this isn’t one of them. All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily, for no funding and no pay, whereas the sceptics are being funded to put out full scale misinformation campaigns…”
Let’s correct the
1. Skeptics are well funded?
Let’s put a perspective on just how spectacularly wrong these claims on ABC radio are. ExxonMobil paid all of $23 million to skeptics worldwide in total, over ten years. In the same period, the US government alone was spending around $2 billion a year on climate scientists. And if you include other climate industry players, from 1989-2009, the total funding is $79 billion dollars. Hence believers of the big-scare could dip into a pot that was at least 3,500 times as large as anything the skeptics of the same scare could draw from. (All this info comes from my Climate Money paper).
If there was any equivalent funding for skeptics, Greenpeace would have found that paper trail and the scare-friendly press would have told you all about it. Big-Oil could hardly hide $79 billion now could they?
Andy Pitman earns far more from his beliefs than this skeptical advocate and infinitely more than most skeptics (who earn nothing) while he postulates on things he has done no research on and misleads the public. (Take me to court Andy. I don’t mind discovery of documents, but I don’t pander to bullies’ requests in public.) Most skeptical scientists are those no longer in the pay of government or other alarmist organizations, free to speak up without losing their jobs. They are mainly retired.
In reality it can cost money to be an active skeptic. To print out handouts, to organize speeches at local community halls, to do mail outs to our representatives, or to pay for transcripts of interviews that misrepresent the science. It says a lot that there are so many people willing to put themselves out, money and time-wise, in order to save us from the scare with no evidence.
Pitman has received over $6 million in grants – obviously not paid to him personally, but paid into accounts he controls–for research he directs. Presumably he also earns at least the base salary of a UNSW Professor, I gather, $190,000 a year. For a science PhD that’s not bad, especially if you throw in multiple overseas trips with all expenses paid, and the odd-rock-star-radio interview with no hard questions. It’s a wicket worth defending.
2. Skeptics are “well” organized?
Organized how exactly? With no PR department, no union, no association, no office, no UN agency, usually no budget, and … though you can see how we fund national multi-million dollar televised Ad campaigns like “Think Climate, Think Fraud”, oh that’s right … that was Kevin Rudd: “Think Climate, Think Change” (give us your money). That cost Australian taxpayers $13.9 million dollars.
Pitman cries poor while his scare campaign team includes the major western governments, the UN, the banks, big oil (they always funded alarmism more, and now don’t fund skeptics), the green movement, the alternative energy suppliers, the reinsurance industry, and many businesses. About all the skeptics have is donors on blogs and a few dedicated organizations of like minded people, such as the indefatigable Heartland (which is in turn funded mostly by private donations, with no more than 5% from any single corporation). Skeptics are tiny voices against vast machines.
Pitman wouldn’t recognize a genuine grassroots movement if it mowed him down.
3. Skeptics are misleading the public?
Misleading? You mean like climate scientists who are using tricks to “hide the decline”, removing data from 75% of worldwide temperature stations, ignoring the best ocean temperature network data, colluding to keep contrary papers out of publication, avoiding FOI requests, abusing statistics to make scary hockey sticks no matter what data you feed them, and ignoring the masses of data and analysis (much of it peer-reviewed) that undermines the carbon dioxide theory of global warming? Or, how about putting most “official” thermometers next to airport-tarmac or air conditioner outlets, or pretending that one tree in far north Russia can measure global temperatures?
Strangely, it’s not skeptics who howl that “only peer review counts” while at the same time pretending that speculative information from the WWF, Greenpeace and a student’s paper of mountaineering anecdotes were peer-reviewed research by hundreds of experts.
4. “Explaining science is not my job”.
According to the UNSW Guidelines, it is. It’s what Professors are paid to do: to foster leadership and excellence in their academic area within the university and the community. As it happens, over the last 18 months, I’ve asked Pitman in writing to publicly name any misleading points from the Skeptics Handbook. He has refused.
5. I, Andy Pitman, volunteer to help the IPCC
As Andrew Bolt so aptly pointed out, Andy Pitman’s grants list includes around $60,000 in funding “for costs incurred as lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”. That’s not most people’s idea of volunteer work.
6. Skeptics don’t have day jobs
Pitman, contradicting himself suddenly, claims many “fully funded” climate skeptics don’t have day jobs, and for once he’s half-right, but scores an own goal by using the truth. Most active skeptics don’t have day jobs, precisely because there aren’t any paid climate skeptic positions to have. Many skeptics are retired, because no one else has time to audit the IPCC “for fun”.
As far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong), total ARC grants specifically available for research aiming to disprove the theory of AGW in 2010 are exactly $0.00, as has been the case since time began. (That’s another scandal, for another day.)
Who should be protecting Australia from paying reparations based on bogus science? When the bogus science is climate science, Andy Pitman ought be high on that list. Instead, he helps to sell out the nation that supports him to a corrupt unaudited foreign committee whose recommendations will mainly end up profiting large financial houses.
7. An ad hominem attack is “scientific”?
Notice how we’re not talking about climate science? Why, on a planet that goes around the sun, is a professor of science launching ad hominem attacks? A science undergraduate should grovel with embarrassment for making this mistake. High school debaters have stronger reasoning skills. Yet, the science reporters on the ABC don’t even blink.
So what if I was paid, oh, let’s say, $190,000 a year, by… an oil sheik (I’m not). But if I was, how would that change the satellite recordings that I write about from Universities on the other side of the world from me? What kind of conspiracy theory do you have to hold in your head to nullify the evidence with any information about funding? I’m a commentator forgoodnesssake, I don’t even collect, hold or publish results from the sediments, corals, ice cores, pollen, diatoms, boreholes, or tree rings that I talk about.
Aren’t we all grown up enough now to attack the ball and not the man? (Which goes for Penny Sackett too, our Chief Scientist, who said that exact thing tonight on The 7.30 Report. Where was Sackett last week? Did she miss the chance to admonish Pitman for attacking skeptical scientists?)
Look Mum. No logical errors here: Lest anyone think I’m committing the same logical error as Pitman by pointing at his vested interests, let’s put a razor fine point on it. He claims we are winning the debate because we have so much funding. We claim he’s losing because he has no evidence. At no point have I ever said his science is wrong because he is paid. So why post about his funding?
One: To show that he’s not only illogical, but spectacularly wrong as well. It’s a baseless smear campaign.
Two: The $6 million in research grants vs the $0 in skeptical grants tells us nothing about the atmospheric climate, but shows that there is a Gravy Train, and he is on it. And he’s the one who suggested that people’s opinions were affected by funding. Go soak in that irony.
Three: If people are going to try to bully and smear us, it helps to make it painful for them, by pouring the truth right back at them.
Since he effectively said “follow the money”, I just said, “ok”. And did I mention that the carbon market was worth $130 billion last year?
Speaking of money, who is paid to audit the IPCC? Officially, no one is. No agency, no institution, no government department. Information from that UN conglomerate committee controls global markets, and yet answers to no elected government, no ASIC, no SEC, no ACCC. Nothing. There ought to be teams of skeptical scientists paid to check on the alarmists, but no one at all is checking, except a few unpaid scientists and bloggers.
The bottom line: Pitman peddles misinformation about science and misinformation about skeptics. He could start by apologizing to the Australian people who pay his salary. Then he could say thanks to the Australian scientists working pro bono to do part of his job for him.
What a sad week for Australian science, a dismal day for Australian universities, and a low point for the ABC. It’s not so hot for taxpayers either, we’re funding someone who throws baseless speculation and insults back at the same Australian citizens he’s supposed to serve.
SOURCE (See the original for links)
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Saturday, February 06, 2010
BBC: 'Dramatic shift' -- Climate skepticism 'on the rise' -- AGW believers in minority
The number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising, a poll for BBC News suggests. The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, a rise of 8% since a similar poll was conducted in November. The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75% this month. And only 26% of those asked believed climate change was happening and "now established as largely man-made". The findings are based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February.
In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus - commissioned by the Times newspaper - showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities. "It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period," Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News. "The British public are sceptical about man's contribution to climate change - and becoming more so," he added. "More people are now doubters than firm believers."
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (Defra) chief scientific adviser, Professor Bob Watson, called the findings "very disappointing". "The fact that there has been a very significant drop in the number of people that believe that we humans are changing the Earth's climate is serious," he told BBC News. "Action is urgently needed," Professor Watson warned. "We need the public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move towards a low carbon economy."
Of the 75% of respondents who agreed that climate change was happening, one-in-three people felt that the potential consequences of living in a warming world had been exaggerated, up from one-in-five people in November. The number of people who felt the risks of climate change had been understated dropped from 38% in November to 25% in the latest poll.
During the intervening period between the two polls, there was a series of high profile climate-related stories, some of which made grim reading for climate scientists and policymakers. In November, the contents of emails stolen from a leading climate science unit led to accusations that a number of researchers had manipulated data. And in January, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted that it had made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.
All of this happened against the backdrop of many parts of the northern hemisphere being gripped by a prolonged period of sub-zero temperatures.
However, 73% of the people who said that they were aware of the "science flaws" stories stated that the media coverage had not changed their views about the risks of climate change. "People tend to make judgements over time based on a whole range of different sources," Mr Simmonds explained. He added that it was very unusual for single events to have a dramatic impact on public opinion. "Normally, people make their minds up over a longer period and are influenced by all the voices they hear, what they read and what people they know are talking about."
SOURCE (See the original for graphics)
Former IPCC Leader Says Climategate Scientists “Manipulated data.”
Dr. William Sprigg is research professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona and was head of the International Technical Review Panel for IPCC’s first report. The distinguished doctor slams the conduct of some of his global warming colleagues and accuses fellow IPCC scientists of “too much hubris.” He also told the Arizona conference, “climate data has been withheld and manipulated ”and that it is clear that “someone took out information.”
Here is a newly released video from the Heartland Institute, of Sprigg’s presentation to a packed audience of scientists at the 13th Annual Energy and Environment Conference, Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday February 2, 2010
Although a non-skeptic, the esteemed former IPCC man is now on the campaign trail to restore the credibility of his profession. Still adamant that human carbon dioxide emissions are impacting the climate, the professor is deeply disturbed by what he has read in the leaked Climategate emails and calls for more respect to be shown to scientists who hold sceptical viewpoints.
Sprigg bemoans the fact that the IPCC has scorned any further reviews, and is unimpressed with the computer forecasts of climatologists calling their scenarios “tentative models.”
All scientists should applaud Sprigg for a clear show of honest principles so wanting of late at the IPCC. We commend Professor Sprigg’s honorable example and we hope that this leads to open sharing of data that needs to be placed in the public domain.
SOURCE (See the original for video)
Climategate Necessary to Cover Incorrect Climate Basics of IPCC
By Dr. Tim Ball
Canada and the US announced new targets for carbon reduction that are completely unnecessary. It is madness and ultimately destructive to western society but what the perpetrators want. Despite exposure of the complete corruption of the science they continue to assume CO2 is a problem. UN Climate chief Yves De Boer said, “what’s happened, it’s unfortunate, it’s bad, it’s wrong, but I don’t think it has damaged the basic science.”
British Climate Secretary Ed Miliband said, “It’s right that there’s rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that’s there,” It’s not one mistake but a complete fabrication of every aspect of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports. In addition, science is only correct when accurate predictions are made and the IPCC have been wrong in every single one. Miliband’s thinking helps explain why the UK is on the brink of economic disaster and needs a diversion. It is said, despite the disclosures, because the objective of eliminating fossil fuels and destroying industrial economies is still pursued.
What they don’t understand or choose to ignore is that the basic science was wrong from the start.
The corruption disclosed was necessary because the science and the evidence didn’t fit what they wanted. They made the science fit the political goals and stopped at nothing to achieve the end. They succeeded, because beyond manipulations that duped politicians, media and most of the public, they knew many scientists who participated did not understand climate science. Blinded by career ambitions and large funding they ignored what was going on or lacked the expertise to know. Now some scientists incorrectly claim the basic evidence is still valid.
Politicians and political leaders worldwide accepted and adopted these reports as their political Bible. Most of them still don’t understand what went on and therefore failed to react properly. Scientists in political positions support them in their chosen ignorance manifest in inappropriate reactions.
John Beddington, science advisor to the UK government and professor of applied population biology demonstrates his lack of understanding of climate science. He says, “It’s unchallengeable that CO2 traps heat and warms the Earth and that burning fossil fuels shoves billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where you can get challenges is on the speed of change.”
There are serious questions about the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. For example, the IPCC claimed CO2 stays in the atmosphere for up to 100 years but we know that this residency time is wrong. It is between five and six years. The duration was an essential part of the political game to increase pressure for action: even if we stopped CO2 production right now the impact would be felt for decades. There’s also the troubling fact that in every record of any duration for any time in the Earth’s history temperature change precedes CO2 change. We have little idea of the greenhouse effect when we have no understanding of the role of water vapor. His argument about the speed of change is not an issue either. They made it one by claiming current change is faster than in the past. It isn’t.
Beddington’s comments show he doesn’t understand the scientific method. He said, “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper skepticism.” How does he distinguish between skepticisms? What is “proper”? All scientists are skeptics and all of their questions and inputs are healthy. The CRU gang and government agencies actively excluded skeptics and skepticism. The use of the term is dismissive and in a backhanded way acknowledges their behavior.
Complaints about the control, typified by CRU Director Phil Jones’s statement he would keep certain papers out even if it meant changing the peer-reviewed process, led to an external review process. It was a sham, a public relations exercise allowing them to say they were inclusive of skeptics, when they changed virtually nothing. I could never discover who chose the reviewers. Virtually none of the corrections amendments and additions proposed by the external reviewers were included. One review editor claimed he had eliminated files when pushed for an accounting.
Recently a paper published in Science announces, “climate scientists have overlooked a major cause of global warming and cooling, a new study reveals today.” No they haven’t, only the scientists involved in the IPCC have overlooked it. We then have a quote from Dr. Susan Solomon of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “current climate models do a remarkable job on water vapor near the surface but this is different it’s a thin wedge of the upper atmosphere that packs a wallop from one decade to the next in a way we didn’t expect.”
No, the current climate models do not do a remarkable job. In fact the entire issue of water vapor as a greenhouse gas is essentially ignored and badly handled. Dr. Solomon was a co-chair of the Working Group 1, the Scientific Group of the IPCC. This means responsibility for the content of their report. Solomon was in direct communication with the people at CRU. Dr. Solomon failed to identify the serious problems now being disclosed. How does the certainty of the Reports and especially the Summary for Policymakers fit with this statement by Solomon? “We call this the 10/10/10 paper, 10 miles above your head, there is 10% less water vapor than there was 10 years ago. Why did the water vapor decrease? We really don’t know, we don’t have enough information yet.”
Despite this Solomon must play down the limitations the findings imply saying, “this isn’t an indication that predictions on global warming are overstated”. Yes it is, and the cooling trend since 2002 while CO2 levels increased is another. “This doesn’t mean there isn’t global warming.” “There’s no significant debate that it is warmer now than it was 100 years ago, due to anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gases.”
The only place were that statement is true is in the computer models of the IPCC and we know they are useless. As CRU and IPCC member Trenberth said on October 12 2009, “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.” Solomon apparently found an answer by claiming the upper level water vapor, “very likely made substantial contributions to the flattening of the global warming trend since about 2000.” And that is probably what the research is all about.
Dr. Solomon was also involved in the claim that CFCs were destroying the ozone when there was never any evidence. In fact, UV interacting with oxygen creates ozone but they incorrectly assumed UV was constant. We now know it varies by up to 200%.
The hypothesis that CO2 was causing warming was accepted as fact before scientific testing began. They blocked most testing and challenges, but it never was the cause. As the evidence accumulated this was the case Climategate became necessary to corrupt and falsify. Now dismissal of Climategate ignores how the fundamental science is wrong. Climategate became necessary to achieve the political objective. Politicians and scientists who bought into the objectives don’t want to believe Climategate or abandon the benefits of appearing green, advancing careers, making money, or imposing taxes and political control on everybody to destroy western economies and democracy.
SOURCE
The IPCC, a would-be Vatican
THE recent climate science scandals have been revealing. For those of us who have had the experience of environmentalists accusing us of being "deniers" and "doubters of The Science", as if science is a gospel truth that you question or ignore at your peril, they have also been enjoyable.
Take the revelations that academics at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia bent over backwards to keep "deniers" out of respected journals, and tried desperately to wriggle out of Freedom of Information demands on their work, or the expose of the bizarre story of the Himalayan glaciers melting by the year 2035, which turned out to be the flighty speculation of a single scientist.
The scandals have revealed that leading lights in the climate change story sought to suppress debate and demonise their opponents, and allowed their moral conviction about humanity's hubris bringing about the end of the world to sprint ahead of the "scientific facts".
The scandals reveal that many climate change alarmists are intolerant and censorious. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has attacked the sceptics who are asking entirely rational questions about some of the IPCC's claims, accusing them of indulging in "skulduggery of the worst kind".
Behaving more like a secular Vatican than a genuinely enlightened, open-minded, inquisitive gathering of investigative scientists, the IPCC's overlords treat dissent as something disgusting.
Of course it is a serious problem when wrong or skewed or speculative science is promoted as "the truth" to the public. And what the recent climate-science scandals reveal is that such dodgy science becomes more likely as science is politicised and used to motor social policy and social-control initiatives.
The elite flattering of scientists as oracles of wisdom whose work can help both to illuminate and possibly offset what is allegedly the worst crisis mankind has ever faced - global warming - must inevitably pollute and distort the scientific process.
Some now claim, disingenuously, that the melting glacier thing was just one little claim in the IPCC's 3000-page report. This slyly overlooks how that one little claim became one of the most widely cited pieces of climate-change evidence among both green-leaning journalists and world leaders.
Why did that happen? Not because it was scientifically airtight - it was no such thing - but because it chimed perfectly with the ridiculous biblical prophecies of a future doom brought about by mankind's sinful behaviour that underpin green thinking today. The glacier claim suggested that millions of people in Asia would run out of water and die of thirst or spread around the world like crazy, politically destabilising environmental refugees.
The various climategate scandals suggest that the most alarming-sounding science tends to get bigged up, and that peer review has become an increasingly politicised, back-patting exercise where science that is "politically right" gets elevated over science that is "politically wrong".
But it is not enough to pick apart the bad science of the politics of environmentalism, and to call for the IPCC either to apologise for that bad science or to expunge it in the interests of putting its documents once more "beyond criticism". The bigger, more profound problem is the elevation of science itself to such a sacred, esteemed position in politics, society and international debate. In many ways it doesn't matter if that science is airtight or flimsy, its sanctification is deeply problematic either way.
Fundamentally, the IPCC is a scientific crutch for elites that are bereft of political vision and stunningly lacking in an inspiring or human-based morality. Science has become one of the only sources of authority for politically exhausted and morally bankrupt governments and institutions.
The politicians and green activists desperately calling for the IPCC to get its house in order, to get rid of the crap science and only keep the allegedly good stuff, know which side their bread is buttered. They know that the IPCC is the emperor's last shred of clothing, providing otherwise denuded rulers and campaigners with a form of unquestionable authority for their backward, killjoy, misanthropic agendas.
They are really demanding the preservation of the IPCC by any means necessary because they value the way it provides them with a God-like authority for Orwellian action at a time when serious democratic debate is notable by its absence. And perhaps we should call for the abolition of the IPCC, not because some of its science is daft, but for precisely those same reasons.
SOURCE
Climate alarmists out in the cold
Comment from Miranda Devine in Australia
As the wheels keep falling off the climate alarmist bandwagon, it's suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic. Out of the woodwork have crawled all sorts of fair-weather friends. But where were they when the going was tough, when we were being hammered as Holocaust deniers, planet wreckers, in the pay of the "Big Polluters", bad parents, pariahs, equivalent to murderers? It was pure McCarthyism.
But now, even the most aggressive alarmists have gone quiet or softened their rhetoric and people who sat on the fence have morphed into wise owls. They still think it's acceptable to mock touring British sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton's protruding eyes, a distressing symptom of his thyroid disease, in an effort to marginalise him as a lunatic, rather than address his criticisms. But, when even the British left-leaning, warmist-friendly Guardian newspaper has begun to investigate the fraud involved in "sexing up" climate change science, it's clear the collapse of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's credibility and the holes in the case for catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be ignored.
We are witnessing an outbreak of neo-open-mindedness and face-saving from people who brooked no nuance. The formerly alarmist British chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, has said: "I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper scepticism." Hallelujah.
Australia's Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, who just three months ago was telling us that we had only five years to stop catastrophic global warming, is similarly less gung-ho these days. On ABC television's 7.30 Report this week she expressed concern about "a confusion" between the science and the politics of climate change. "I think that we're seeing more and more a confusion between a political debate, a political debate that needs to happen, it's important to happen, and the discussion of the science. I feel that these two things are being confused and it worries me, actually."
Funny, proponents of the theory of catastrophic man-made climate change never expressed concern about the "confusion", aka politicisation of science, when it was running their way.
Blows to the climate alarm case keep coming, from fraudulent claims about melting glaciers, increased hurricanes and drought, dying Amazon rainforest, disappearing polar bears and the flooding of half of Holland.
The latest, most serious, blow was the revelation this week that an influential paper discounting the so-called urban heat island effect was based on vanished and perhaps fraudulent data from remote Chinese weather stations. The 1990 paper was co-authored by the besieged director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones and a US colleague, who are now accused of a "cover-up".
Jones, of course, and other leading scientists, have been exposed by their leaked "Climategate" emails, as political partisans who tried to suppress data, subvert freedom of information laws, and blackball journals and scientists who didn't toe the alarmist line.
Meanwhile, revelations pile up about shoddy references used to sex up the IPCC's Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of 2007. Among them is the bogus claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, based on a speculative interview in a popular science magazine. The IPCC lead author of the chapter that contained the reference, Murari Lal, told Britain's Mail on Sunday last week that he knew the glacier claim was wrong but included it to put political pressure on world leaders to cut emissions. "We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."
Because it was in a good cause it was somehow OK for the United Nations' lead climate change body to slant science, cherry-pick data, and base claims on such flimsy references as Greenpeace and WWF propaganda, a student's master's thesis and anecdotes in Climber magazine.
This sort of "noble cause" corruption appears to have permeated climate change science, and set back the legitimate cause of fighting pollution. The dishonesty will have only ensured a generation of people will no longer trust environmental warnings.
One of the most significant recent revelations is how influential and embedded were environmental activists such as WWF and Greenpeace. Not only were their publications cited in the 2007 report in at last 24 instances as if they were proper peer-reviewed science, but their staffers were in familiar communication with East Anglia climate researchers, and were regarded apparently as "honest brokers" rather than political lobbyists. In one email, Alan Markham from WWF writes to climate scientists urging a paper on climate change in Australia be "beefed up".
WWF "would like to see the section on a variability and extreme events beefed up, if possible," Markham wrote in 1999. "I guess the bottom line is that if they are going to go with a big public splash on this they need something that will get good support from CSIRO scientists."
In another email to East Anglia scientists, WWF's Stephan Singer offers "a few thousand euros" to write a paper about the economic cost of Europe's 2003 heatwave.
They got away with it for a very long time. Today, the bankruptcy of the climate alarm cause is demonstrated by the fact its highest profile champion is Osama bin Laden. "Boycott [America] to save yourselves … and your children from climate change", he said in an audiotape released last week.
Rising in the opinion polls, the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has found himself on the right side of history. He was even able this week to utter the former heresy that "carbon dioxide is an essential trace gas" and "these so-called nasty big polluters are the people who keep the lights on". But in the game of musical chairs that politics often is Kevin Rudd has found himself with no place to sit.
SOURCE
Costly Proposed Air Standards Lack Scientific Basis
In testimony delivered in Houston today, officials with the American Petroleum Institute said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed new ozone pollution standards would exact significant costs on consumers, jobs and the economy without delivering commensurate benefits. Furthermore, they said there was no solid scientific justification for imposing the more stringent standards.
“Without a clear certain scientific basis for selecting a different numeric standard, the ozone standard need not be changed now. We urge the Administrator not to pursue this proposal,” said policy advisor Ted Steichen, who presented API’s testimony. He said EPA’s own studies failed to support a lowering of the ozone standards.
Steichen emphasized that tremendous progress has been made improving the nation’s air quality, in large part through oil and natural gas industry efforts, and said more improvements will follow – under the existing ozone standards – because of pollution controls in place or soon to be implemented.
EPA’s trends data (Figure 1 above), according ot API, shows that the emissions from six criteria air pollutants dropped by 60 percent between 1970 and 2008, while vehicle miles traveled (VMT) went up 163 percent.
“Thanks to implementation of the Clean Air Act,” Steichen testified, “our air quality has demonstrably improved. Since 1990, the oil and gas industry invested more than $175 billion – that’s billion, with a ‘B’ – towards improving the environmental performance of its products, facilities, and operations.”
Both cleaner vehicles and cleaner fuels will contribute to further improvement, he explained, with “annual emission reductions from the use of Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel with cleaner technology engines … equivalent to removing the pollution from more than 90% of today’s trucks and buses by 2030.”
Steichen said moving forward with the proposed new standards could “impact citizens while they are still suffering from a severe recession, in the very communities where we need to be creating jobs.”
SOURCE. (See the original for graphics)
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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The number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising, a poll for BBC News suggests. The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, a rise of 8% since a similar poll was conducted in November. The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75% this month. And only 26% of those asked believed climate change was happening and "now established as largely man-made". The findings are based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February.
In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus - commissioned by the Times newspaper - showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities. "It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period," Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News. "The British public are sceptical about man's contribution to climate change - and becoming more so," he added. "More people are now doubters than firm believers."
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (Defra) chief scientific adviser, Professor Bob Watson, called the findings "very disappointing". "The fact that there has been a very significant drop in the number of people that believe that we humans are changing the Earth's climate is serious," he told BBC News. "Action is urgently needed," Professor Watson warned. "We need the public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move towards a low carbon economy."
Of the 75% of respondents who agreed that climate change was happening, one-in-three people felt that the potential consequences of living in a warming world had been exaggerated, up from one-in-five people in November. The number of people who felt the risks of climate change had been understated dropped from 38% in November to 25% in the latest poll.
During the intervening period between the two polls, there was a series of high profile climate-related stories, some of which made grim reading for climate scientists and policymakers. In November, the contents of emails stolen from a leading climate science unit led to accusations that a number of researchers had manipulated data. And in January, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted that it had made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.
All of this happened against the backdrop of many parts of the northern hemisphere being gripped by a prolonged period of sub-zero temperatures.
However, 73% of the people who said that they were aware of the "science flaws" stories stated that the media coverage had not changed their views about the risks of climate change. "People tend to make judgements over time based on a whole range of different sources," Mr Simmonds explained. He added that it was very unusual for single events to have a dramatic impact on public opinion. "Normally, people make their minds up over a longer period and are influenced by all the voices they hear, what they read and what people they know are talking about."
SOURCE (See the original for graphics)
Former IPCC Leader Says Climategate Scientists “Manipulated data.”
Dr. William Sprigg is research professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona and was head of the International Technical Review Panel for IPCC’s first report. The distinguished doctor slams the conduct of some of his global warming colleagues and accuses fellow IPCC scientists of “too much hubris.” He also told the Arizona conference, “climate data has been withheld and manipulated ”and that it is clear that “someone took out information.”
Here is a newly released video from the Heartland Institute, of Sprigg’s presentation to a packed audience of scientists at the 13th Annual Energy and Environment Conference, Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday February 2, 2010
Although a non-skeptic, the esteemed former IPCC man is now on the campaign trail to restore the credibility of his profession. Still adamant that human carbon dioxide emissions are impacting the climate, the professor is deeply disturbed by what he has read in the leaked Climategate emails and calls for more respect to be shown to scientists who hold sceptical viewpoints.
Sprigg bemoans the fact that the IPCC has scorned any further reviews, and is unimpressed with the computer forecasts of climatologists calling their scenarios “tentative models.”
All scientists should applaud Sprigg for a clear show of honest principles so wanting of late at the IPCC. We commend Professor Sprigg’s honorable example and we hope that this leads to open sharing of data that needs to be placed in the public domain.
SOURCE (See the original for video)
Climategate Necessary to Cover Incorrect Climate Basics of IPCC
By Dr. Tim Ball
Canada and the US announced new targets for carbon reduction that are completely unnecessary. It is madness and ultimately destructive to western society but what the perpetrators want. Despite exposure of the complete corruption of the science they continue to assume CO2 is a problem. UN Climate chief Yves De Boer said, “what’s happened, it’s unfortunate, it’s bad, it’s wrong, but I don’t think it has damaged the basic science.”
British Climate Secretary Ed Miliband said, “It’s right that there’s rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that’s there,” It’s not one mistake but a complete fabrication of every aspect of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports. In addition, science is only correct when accurate predictions are made and the IPCC have been wrong in every single one. Miliband’s thinking helps explain why the UK is on the brink of economic disaster and needs a diversion. It is said, despite the disclosures, because the objective of eliminating fossil fuels and destroying industrial economies is still pursued.
What they don’t understand or choose to ignore is that the basic science was wrong from the start.
The corruption disclosed was necessary because the science and the evidence didn’t fit what they wanted. They made the science fit the political goals and stopped at nothing to achieve the end. They succeeded, because beyond manipulations that duped politicians, media and most of the public, they knew many scientists who participated did not understand climate science. Blinded by career ambitions and large funding they ignored what was going on or lacked the expertise to know. Now some scientists incorrectly claim the basic evidence is still valid.
Politicians and political leaders worldwide accepted and adopted these reports as their political Bible. Most of them still don’t understand what went on and therefore failed to react properly. Scientists in political positions support them in their chosen ignorance manifest in inappropriate reactions.
John Beddington, science advisor to the UK government and professor of applied population biology demonstrates his lack of understanding of climate science. He says, “It’s unchallengeable that CO2 traps heat and warms the Earth and that burning fossil fuels shoves billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where you can get challenges is on the speed of change.”
There are serious questions about the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. For example, the IPCC claimed CO2 stays in the atmosphere for up to 100 years but we know that this residency time is wrong. It is between five and six years. The duration was an essential part of the political game to increase pressure for action: even if we stopped CO2 production right now the impact would be felt for decades. There’s also the troubling fact that in every record of any duration for any time in the Earth’s history temperature change precedes CO2 change. We have little idea of the greenhouse effect when we have no understanding of the role of water vapor. His argument about the speed of change is not an issue either. They made it one by claiming current change is faster than in the past. It isn’t.
Beddington’s comments show he doesn’t understand the scientific method. He said, “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper skepticism.” How does he distinguish between skepticisms? What is “proper”? All scientists are skeptics and all of their questions and inputs are healthy. The CRU gang and government agencies actively excluded skeptics and skepticism. The use of the term is dismissive and in a backhanded way acknowledges their behavior.
Complaints about the control, typified by CRU Director Phil Jones’s statement he would keep certain papers out even if it meant changing the peer-reviewed process, led to an external review process. It was a sham, a public relations exercise allowing them to say they were inclusive of skeptics, when they changed virtually nothing. I could never discover who chose the reviewers. Virtually none of the corrections amendments and additions proposed by the external reviewers were included. One review editor claimed he had eliminated files when pushed for an accounting.
Recently a paper published in Science announces, “climate scientists have overlooked a major cause of global warming and cooling, a new study reveals today.” No they haven’t, only the scientists involved in the IPCC have overlooked it. We then have a quote from Dr. Susan Solomon of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “current climate models do a remarkable job on water vapor near the surface but this is different it’s a thin wedge of the upper atmosphere that packs a wallop from one decade to the next in a way we didn’t expect.”
No, the current climate models do not do a remarkable job. In fact the entire issue of water vapor as a greenhouse gas is essentially ignored and badly handled. Dr. Solomon was a co-chair of the Working Group 1, the Scientific Group of the IPCC. This means responsibility for the content of their report. Solomon was in direct communication with the people at CRU. Dr. Solomon failed to identify the serious problems now being disclosed. How does the certainty of the Reports and especially the Summary for Policymakers fit with this statement by Solomon? “We call this the 10/10/10 paper, 10 miles above your head, there is 10% less water vapor than there was 10 years ago. Why did the water vapor decrease? We really don’t know, we don’t have enough information yet.”
Despite this Solomon must play down the limitations the findings imply saying, “this isn’t an indication that predictions on global warming are overstated”. Yes it is, and the cooling trend since 2002 while CO2 levels increased is another. “This doesn’t mean there isn’t global warming.” “There’s no significant debate that it is warmer now than it was 100 years ago, due to anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gases.”
The only place were that statement is true is in the computer models of the IPCC and we know they are useless. As CRU and IPCC member Trenberth said on October 12 2009, “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.” Solomon apparently found an answer by claiming the upper level water vapor, “very likely made substantial contributions to the flattening of the global warming trend since about 2000.” And that is probably what the research is all about.
Dr. Solomon was also involved in the claim that CFCs were destroying the ozone when there was never any evidence. In fact, UV interacting with oxygen creates ozone but they incorrectly assumed UV was constant. We now know it varies by up to 200%.
The hypothesis that CO2 was causing warming was accepted as fact before scientific testing began. They blocked most testing and challenges, but it never was the cause. As the evidence accumulated this was the case Climategate became necessary to corrupt and falsify. Now dismissal of Climategate ignores how the fundamental science is wrong. Climategate became necessary to achieve the political objective. Politicians and scientists who bought into the objectives don’t want to believe Climategate or abandon the benefits of appearing green, advancing careers, making money, or imposing taxes and political control on everybody to destroy western economies and democracy.
SOURCE
The IPCC, a would-be Vatican
THE recent climate science scandals have been revealing. For those of us who have had the experience of environmentalists accusing us of being "deniers" and "doubters of The Science", as if science is a gospel truth that you question or ignore at your peril, they have also been enjoyable.
Take the revelations that academics at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia bent over backwards to keep "deniers" out of respected journals, and tried desperately to wriggle out of Freedom of Information demands on their work, or the expose of the bizarre story of the Himalayan glaciers melting by the year 2035, which turned out to be the flighty speculation of a single scientist.
The scandals have revealed that leading lights in the climate change story sought to suppress debate and demonise their opponents, and allowed their moral conviction about humanity's hubris bringing about the end of the world to sprint ahead of the "scientific facts".
The scandals reveal that many climate change alarmists are intolerant and censorious. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has attacked the sceptics who are asking entirely rational questions about some of the IPCC's claims, accusing them of indulging in "skulduggery of the worst kind".
Behaving more like a secular Vatican than a genuinely enlightened, open-minded, inquisitive gathering of investigative scientists, the IPCC's overlords treat dissent as something disgusting.
Of course it is a serious problem when wrong or skewed or speculative science is promoted as "the truth" to the public. And what the recent climate-science scandals reveal is that such dodgy science becomes more likely as science is politicised and used to motor social policy and social-control initiatives.
The elite flattering of scientists as oracles of wisdom whose work can help both to illuminate and possibly offset what is allegedly the worst crisis mankind has ever faced - global warming - must inevitably pollute and distort the scientific process.
Some now claim, disingenuously, that the melting glacier thing was just one little claim in the IPCC's 3000-page report. This slyly overlooks how that one little claim became one of the most widely cited pieces of climate-change evidence among both green-leaning journalists and world leaders.
Why did that happen? Not because it was scientifically airtight - it was no such thing - but because it chimed perfectly with the ridiculous biblical prophecies of a future doom brought about by mankind's sinful behaviour that underpin green thinking today. The glacier claim suggested that millions of people in Asia would run out of water and die of thirst or spread around the world like crazy, politically destabilising environmental refugees.
The various climategate scandals suggest that the most alarming-sounding science tends to get bigged up, and that peer review has become an increasingly politicised, back-patting exercise where science that is "politically right" gets elevated over science that is "politically wrong".
But it is not enough to pick apart the bad science of the politics of environmentalism, and to call for the IPCC either to apologise for that bad science or to expunge it in the interests of putting its documents once more "beyond criticism". The bigger, more profound problem is the elevation of science itself to such a sacred, esteemed position in politics, society and international debate. In many ways it doesn't matter if that science is airtight or flimsy, its sanctification is deeply problematic either way.
Fundamentally, the IPCC is a scientific crutch for elites that are bereft of political vision and stunningly lacking in an inspiring or human-based morality. Science has become one of the only sources of authority for politically exhausted and morally bankrupt governments and institutions.
The politicians and green activists desperately calling for the IPCC to get its house in order, to get rid of the crap science and only keep the allegedly good stuff, know which side their bread is buttered. They know that the IPCC is the emperor's last shred of clothing, providing otherwise denuded rulers and campaigners with a form of unquestionable authority for their backward, killjoy, misanthropic agendas.
They are really demanding the preservation of the IPCC by any means necessary because they value the way it provides them with a God-like authority for Orwellian action at a time when serious democratic debate is notable by its absence. And perhaps we should call for the abolition of the IPCC, not because some of its science is daft, but for precisely those same reasons.
SOURCE
Climate alarmists out in the cold
Comment from Miranda Devine in Australia
As the wheels keep falling off the climate alarmist bandwagon, it's suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic. Out of the woodwork have crawled all sorts of fair-weather friends. But where were they when the going was tough, when we were being hammered as Holocaust deniers, planet wreckers, in the pay of the "Big Polluters", bad parents, pariahs, equivalent to murderers? It was pure McCarthyism.
But now, even the most aggressive alarmists have gone quiet or softened their rhetoric and people who sat on the fence have morphed into wise owls. They still think it's acceptable to mock touring British sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton's protruding eyes, a distressing symptom of his thyroid disease, in an effort to marginalise him as a lunatic, rather than address his criticisms. But, when even the British left-leaning, warmist-friendly Guardian newspaper has begun to investigate the fraud involved in "sexing up" climate change science, it's clear the collapse of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's credibility and the holes in the case for catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be ignored.
We are witnessing an outbreak of neo-open-mindedness and face-saving from people who brooked no nuance. The formerly alarmist British chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, has said: "I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper scepticism." Hallelujah.
Australia's Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, who just three months ago was telling us that we had only five years to stop catastrophic global warming, is similarly less gung-ho these days. On ABC television's 7.30 Report this week she expressed concern about "a confusion" between the science and the politics of climate change. "I think that we're seeing more and more a confusion between a political debate, a political debate that needs to happen, it's important to happen, and the discussion of the science. I feel that these two things are being confused and it worries me, actually."
Funny, proponents of the theory of catastrophic man-made climate change never expressed concern about the "confusion", aka politicisation of science, when it was running their way.
Blows to the climate alarm case keep coming, from fraudulent claims about melting glaciers, increased hurricanes and drought, dying Amazon rainforest, disappearing polar bears and the flooding of half of Holland.
The latest, most serious, blow was the revelation this week that an influential paper discounting the so-called urban heat island effect was based on vanished and perhaps fraudulent data from remote Chinese weather stations. The 1990 paper was co-authored by the besieged director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones and a US colleague, who are now accused of a "cover-up".
Jones, of course, and other leading scientists, have been exposed by their leaked "Climategate" emails, as political partisans who tried to suppress data, subvert freedom of information laws, and blackball journals and scientists who didn't toe the alarmist line.
Meanwhile, revelations pile up about shoddy references used to sex up the IPCC's Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of 2007. Among them is the bogus claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, based on a speculative interview in a popular science magazine. The IPCC lead author of the chapter that contained the reference, Murari Lal, told Britain's Mail on Sunday last week that he knew the glacier claim was wrong but included it to put political pressure on world leaders to cut emissions. "We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."
Because it was in a good cause it was somehow OK for the United Nations' lead climate change body to slant science, cherry-pick data, and base claims on such flimsy references as Greenpeace and WWF propaganda, a student's master's thesis and anecdotes in Climber magazine.
This sort of "noble cause" corruption appears to have permeated climate change science, and set back the legitimate cause of fighting pollution. The dishonesty will have only ensured a generation of people will no longer trust environmental warnings.
One of the most significant recent revelations is how influential and embedded were environmental activists such as WWF and Greenpeace. Not only were their publications cited in the 2007 report in at last 24 instances as if they were proper peer-reviewed science, but their staffers were in familiar communication with East Anglia climate researchers, and were regarded apparently as "honest brokers" rather than political lobbyists. In one email, Alan Markham from WWF writes to climate scientists urging a paper on climate change in Australia be "beefed up".
WWF "would like to see the section on a variability and extreme events beefed up, if possible," Markham wrote in 1999. "I guess the bottom line is that if they are going to go with a big public splash on this they need something that will get good support from CSIRO scientists."
In another email to East Anglia scientists, WWF's Stephan Singer offers "a few thousand euros" to write a paper about the economic cost of Europe's 2003 heatwave.
They got away with it for a very long time. Today, the bankruptcy of the climate alarm cause is demonstrated by the fact its highest profile champion is Osama bin Laden. "Boycott [America] to save yourselves … and your children from climate change", he said in an audiotape released last week.
Rising in the opinion polls, the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has found himself on the right side of history. He was even able this week to utter the former heresy that "carbon dioxide is an essential trace gas" and "these so-called nasty big polluters are the people who keep the lights on". But in the game of musical chairs that politics often is Kevin Rudd has found himself with no place to sit.
SOURCE
Costly Proposed Air Standards Lack Scientific Basis
In testimony delivered in Houston today, officials with the American Petroleum Institute said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed new ozone pollution standards would exact significant costs on consumers, jobs and the economy without delivering commensurate benefits. Furthermore, they said there was no solid scientific justification for imposing the more stringent standards.
“Without a clear certain scientific basis for selecting a different numeric standard, the ozone standard need not be changed now. We urge the Administrator not to pursue this proposal,” said policy advisor Ted Steichen, who presented API’s testimony. He said EPA’s own studies failed to support a lowering of the ozone standards.
Steichen emphasized that tremendous progress has been made improving the nation’s air quality, in large part through oil and natural gas industry efforts, and said more improvements will follow – under the existing ozone standards – because of pollution controls in place or soon to be implemented.
EPA’s trends data (Figure 1 above), according ot API, shows that the emissions from six criteria air pollutants dropped by 60 percent between 1970 and 2008, while vehicle miles traveled (VMT) went up 163 percent.
“Thanks to implementation of the Clean Air Act,” Steichen testified, “our air quality has demonstrably improved. Since 1990, the oil and gas industry invested more than $175 billion – that’s billion, with a ‘B’ – towards improving the environmental performance of its products, facilities, and operations.”
Both cleaner vehicles and cleaner fuels will contribute to further improvement, he explained, with “annual emission reductions from the use of Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel with cleaner technology engines … equivalent to removing the pollution from more than 90% of today’s trucks and buses by 2030.”
Steichen said moving forward with the proposed new standards could “impact citizens while they are still suffering from a severe recession, in the very communities where we need to be creating jobs.”
SOURCE. (See the original for graphics)
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Friday, February 05, 2010
Is the ozone "hole" really shrinking?
It's just fluctuating wildly from year to year as it always has done but by making some complex "allowances", climate statisticians claim to find a declining trend. But since climate statisticians are in the same class as used-car salesmen these days, it would be safer to stick with the raw data -- discouraging to Greenies though that might be
Further: As I read it, the research concerns only overall ozone levels in the atmosphere and has not in fact used measurements of the Antarctic "hole". There's many a slip twixt cup and lip there. It will be interesting to see what is in the relevant journal article when -- and if -- it has passed peer review
THE first hard evidence is in that global action under the Montreal Protocol to mend the hole in the ozone layer is starting to work. In the first accurate assessment of the impact of the treaty, Macquarie University climate dynamicist Murry Salby and his colleague Lilia Deschamps from the Bureau of Meteorology found that the ozone layer was about 10 per cent along the road to recovery. The rebound follows cuts to global emissions of chlorofluorocarbons and halons, which have been destroying the gaseous shield that blocks ultraviolet radiation and which is critical to life on Earth.
The scientists announced their results at the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society conference at the Australian National University in Canberra last Friday .
The ozone layer is in the stratosphere, the zone 10km to 50km above the Earth's surface. The ozone hole is a region where ozone concentrations can drop to only 30 per cent of their natural values. First observed in the late 1970s, it develops over Antarctica each spring and expands to cover the polar cap.
In early summer the Antarctic vortex, an atmospheric circulation pattern that isolates the column of air above the ice continent, breaks down. Released, the ozone-depleted air mixes with air across the southern hemisphere, diluting ozone at mid-latitudes during summer.
The atmospheric concentration of ozone-depleting CFCs and halons has been falling since the adoption of the Montreal Protocol in 1987. But even as these chemicals have been phased out of aerosol cans, refrigerators, fire extinguishers and factories, ozone levels have been fluctuating wildly between years. "These large changes mask the more gradual recovery of the ozone layer that is due to the decrease of ozone-depleting pollutants," Professor Salby told the HES.
He and Dr Deschamps confirmed that the erratic changes between years were due mainly to global atmospheric perturbations called planetary waves. "We showed there was a very strong relationship between planetary waves and changes of the ozone hole from one year to the next," he said. The changes introduced by planetary waves, which controlled the temperature of the stratosphere, at present dominated the evolution of the ozone hole, he said. "Temperature over Antarctica is a very strong determinant of the polar stratospheric cloud, which forms mainly over Antarctica. [This] cloud is at the heart of ozone depletion. It's responsible for the formation of the ozone hole each spring."
Particles in stratospheric clouds are sites where CFCs and halons launch their chemical attack on ozone molecules. Highly reactive forms of chlorine are the most damaging. The scientists compensated for the effect of planetary waves in the 30-year ozone record collected by NASA satellites. "This unmasked the slowly varying anthropogenic contribution," Professor Salby said. "It gives a fairly clear picture of ozone recovery. In it, you can see the rebound of ozone now.
"The signature of recovery is visible over the last decade and extends back into the late 1990s. We compared it against the evolution of chlorine, especially since the Montreal Protocol. "Once planetary waves are accounted for, the ozone graph closely tracks the chlorine graph."
Without the scientists' analysis, it would have taken 20 years for chlorine concentrations to have decreased enough for scientists to make a statistically valid assessment of the Montreal treaty.
Professor Salby said the anthropogenic component of ozone recovery - the gradual rebound over the past decade - amounted to about 10 per cent of a full return to pre-1980 levels. Ozone concentrations were at their lowest in the late 90s and were not expected to recover fully for about 50 years, he said.
The results correlating planetary waves and the ozone hole would clear the way for seasonal forecasts of ozone and the UV index.
SOURCE
IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks
Unquestionably the world's final authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's findings and recommendations have formed the bedrock of literally every climate-related initiative worldwide for more than a decade. Likewise, virtually all such future endeavors -- be they Kyoto II, domestic cap-and-tax, or EPA carbon regulation, would inexorably be built upon the credibility of the same U.N. panel's "expert" counsel. But a glut of ongoing recent discoveries of systemic fraud has rocked that foundation, and the entire man-made global warming house of cards is now teetering on the verge of complete collapse.
Simply stated, we've been swindled. We've been set up as marks by a gang of opportunistic hucksters who have exploited the naïvely altruistic intentions of the environmental movement in an effort to control international energy consumption while redistributing global wealth and (in many cases) greedily lining their own pockets in the process.
Perhaps now, more people will finally understand what many have known for years: Man-made climate change was never really a problem -- but rather, a solution.
For just as the science of the IPCC has been exposed as fraudulent, so have its apparent motives. The true ones became strikingly evident when the negotiating text for the "last chance to save the planet" International Climate Accord [PDF], put forth in Copenhagen in December, was found to contain as many paragraphs outlining the payment of "climate debt" reparations by Western nations under the watchful eye of a U.N.-controlled global government as it did emission reduction schemes.
Then again, neither stratagem should come as any real surprise to those who've paid attention. Here's a recap for those who have, and a long-overdue wake-up call for those who haven't. [See also The CFC Ban: Global Warming's Pilot Episode]
The Perfect Problem to the Imperfect Solution
The U.N. signaled its intent to politicize science as far back as 1972 at its Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm, Sweden. There, an unlikely mélange of legitimate environmental activists, dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, and assorted anti-establishment '60s leftovers were delighted to hear not only the usual complaints about "industrialized" environmental problems, but also a long list of international inequities. Among the many human responsibilities condemned were overpopulation, misuse of resources and technology, unbalanced development, and the worldwide dilemma of urbanization. And from that marriage of global, environmental, and social justice concerns was born the IPCC's parent organization -- the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) -- and the fortune-cookie like prose of its socialist-environmentalist manifesto, the Stockholm Declaration.
It was seven years later that UNEP was handed the ideal villain to fuel its counterfeit crusade. That was the year (1979) in which NASA's James Hansen's team of climate modelers convinced a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel to report [PDF] that doubling atmospheric CO2 -- which had risen from 280 ppmv in the pre-industrial 1800s to over 335 ppmv -- would cause nearly 3°C of global warming. And although the figure was wildly speculative, many funding-minded scientists -- including some previously predicting that aerosols and orbital shifts would lead to catastrophic global cooling -- suddenly embraced greenhouse gas theory and the inevitability of global warming.
It was at that moment that it became clear that the long-held scientific position that the Earth's ecosystem has always and will always maintain CO2 equilibrium could be easily swayed toward a more exploitable belief system. And the UNEP now had the perfect problem to its solution: anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
After all, both its abatement and adaptation require huge expansion of government controls and taxation. Furthermore, it makes industry and capitalism look bad while affording endless visuals of animals and third-world humans suffering at the hands of wealthy Westerners. And most importantly, by fomenting accusations that "rich" countries have effectively violated the human rights of hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people by selfishly causing climate-based global suffering, it helps promote the promise of international wealth redistribution to help less fortunate nations adapt to its consequences.
Best of all, being driven by junk-science that easily metamorphoses as required, it appeared to be endlessly self-sustaining.
But it needed to be packaged for widespread consumption. And packaged it they surely have. Here's an early classic.
The year was 1988, and Colorado Senator Tim Wirth had arranged for Hansen to testify on the subject before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to help sell the dire need to enact national environmental legislation. As Wirth has since admitted, he intentionally scheduled Hansen's appearance on what was forecasted to be the hottest day of the hearings. And in a brilliantly underhanded marketing ploy, he and his cohorts actually snuck into the hearing room the night before and opened the windows, rendering the air conditioning all but useless.
Imagine the devious beauty of the scene that unfolded in front of the cameras the next day -- a NASA scientist preaching fire and brimstone, warning of "unprecedented global warming" and a potential "runaway greenhouse effect," all the while wiping the dripping sweat off his brow. No wonder the resultant NY Times headline screamed, "Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how climate hysteria and not one, but two of its shining stars were born. For coincidentally, that was the same year the IPCC was established by the U.N. Its mandate: to assess "the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change."
How perfect: an organization formed not to prove or disprove AGW, but merely to assess its risks and recommend an appropriate response.....
The Dawn of Outright Climate Fraud
Back in 1989, future Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group 2 (WG2) lead author Stephen Schneider disclosed several tricks of the trade to Discover magazine: " To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest."
And according to MIT's Richard Lindzen's 2001 Senate subcommittee testimony, that's precisely what he witnessed as a Third Assessment Report (TAR) lead author. Among the atmospheric physicist's revelations was the fact that contributing TAR scientists -- already facing the threat of disappearing grant funds and derision as industry stooges -- were also met with ad hominem attacks from IPCC "coordinators" if they refused to tone down criticism of faulty climate models or otherwise questioned AGW dogma. I suppose that's one way to achieve the "consensus" the IPCC loudly boasts of.
As previously discussed here and here, it was in the same 2001 TAR that the IPCC suddenly and inexplicably scrapped its long-held position that global temperatures had fluctuated drastically over the previous millennium and replaced it with a chart depicting relatively flat temperatures prior to a sharp rise beginning in 1900. This, of course, removed the pesky higher-than-present-day temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period of 900-1300 AD, the existence of which obstructed the unprecedented-warming sales pitch.
Truth be told, this little bit of hocus-pocus alone should have marked the end of the panel's scientific credibility, particularly after Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick uncovered the corruption behind it. But thanks to a hugely successful campaign to demonize all critics as big-oil shills, the "Hockey Stick Graph" (aka MBH98) not only survived, but -- after receiving a prominent role in Al Gore's 2006 grossly exaggerated "scary scenarios" sci-fi movie -- actually went on to become a global warming icon. Even after McIntyre finally got his hands on one scientist's data last September and proved that Keith Briffa had cherry-picked data to create his MBH98-supporting series, the MSM paid McIntyre and others reporting the hoax little heed.
Consequently, TAR's false declaration of the 20th as the hottest century of the millennium was widely accepted as fact, right along with its proclamation that the 1990's were the hottest decade and 1998 the hottest year since measurements began in 1861...as was the replacement of "discernible human influence" described six years earlier with the claim of "new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
So by the time AR4 rolled out in 2007, in which they significantly raised not only the threat level, but also the degree of anthropogenic certitude (to 90%), the IPCC's word was all but gospel to the MSM, left-leaning policymakers, and an increasingly large portion of the population. Indeed, everywhere you turned, you'd hear that "the IPCC said this" or "the IPCC said that." The need to address "climate change" had quickly become a foregone and inarguable conclusion in most public discourse.
At that moment, Kyoto II seemed as inevitable as the next insufferable NBC Green is Universal week, and with it, the U.N.'s place as steward of the planet, which would surely be ratified at the pending 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen. ...Until, that is, the mind-boggling magnitude of AR4's deception became glaringly apparent.
Caught with their Green Thumbs on the Scale
Most readers are likely aware that in November of last year, a folder containing documents, source code, data, and e-mails was somehow misappropriated from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU). The so-called "Climategate" emails disclosed an arrogant mockery of the peer review process as well a widespread complicity in and acceptance among climate researchers to hiding and manipulating data unfriendly to the global warming agenda. The modeling source code -- as I reported here -- contained routines which employed a number of "fudge factors" to modify the results of data series -- again, to bias results to the desired outcome. And this, coupled with the disclosure of the Jones "hide the decline" e-mail, provided more evidence that MBH98 -- and ergo unprecedented 20th-century warming -- is a fraud.
The following month, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change had probably tampered with Russian climate data. Apparently, Hadley ignored data submitted by 75% of Russian stations, effectively omitting over 40% of Russian territory from global temperature calculations -- not coincidentally, areas that didn’t "show any substantial warming in the late 20th-century and the early 21st-century."
But Climategate was only the tip of the iceberg. An AR4 warning that unchecked climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was found to be lifted from an erroneous World Wildlife Federation (WWF) report and misrepresented as peer-reviewed science. IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri attempted to parry this "mistake" by accusing the accusers at the Indian environment ministry of "arrogance" and practicing "voodoo science" in issuing a report [PDF] disputing the IPCC. But one in his own ranks, Dr Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the chapter making the claim, had the astoundingly bad manners to admit that he knew all along that it "did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research." Apparently, so had Pachauri, who continued to lie about it for months so as not to sully the exalted AR4 immediately prior to Copenhagen.
And "Glaciergate" opened the floodgates to other serious misrepresentations in AR4, including a boatload of additional non-peer-reviewed projections pulled directly from WWF reports. These included discussions on the effects of melting glaciers on mudflows and avalanches, the significant damages climate change will have on selected marine fish and shellfish, and even assessing global-average per-capita "ecological footprints." It should be noted here that IPCC rules specifically disqualify all non-peer-reviewed primary sources.
Nonetheless, Chapter 13 of the WG2 report stated that forty percent of Amazonian forests are threatened by climate change. And it also cited a WWF piece as its source -- this one by two so-called "experts," who incidentally are actually environmental activists. What's more, the WWF study dealt with anthropogenic forest fires, not global warming, and barely made mention of Amazonian forests at all. Additionally, the WWF's figures were themselves based on a Nature paper [PDF] studying neither global warming nor forest fires, but rather the effects of logging on rain forests. So the IPCC predicted climate change-caused 40% forest destruction based on a report two steps upstream which concluded that "[l]ogging companies in Amazonia kill or damage 10-40% of the living biomass of forests through the harvest process."
Adding to the glacial egg on the AR4 authors' faces was the statement that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps, and Africa were being caused by global warming. It turns out that one of the two source papers cited was actually a mountain-climbers' magazine. Actually, this is a relatively authoritative source compared to the other: a dissertation from a Swiss college student based on his interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The 2007 green bible also contained a gross exaggeration in its citation of Muir-Wood et al., 2006's study on global warming and natural disasters. The original stated that "a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% per year." But the AR4 synthesis report stated that more "heavy precipitation" is "very likely" and that an "increase in tropical cyclone intensity" is "likely" as temperatures rise.
Perhaps the most dumbfounding AR4 citation (so far) was recently discovered by Climatequotes.com. It appears that a WG2 warning that "[t]he multiple stresses of climate change and increasing human activity on the Antarctic Peninsula represent a clear vulnerability and have necessitated the implementation of stringent clothing decontamination guidelines for tourist landings on the Antarctic Peninsula" originated from and was attributed to a guide for Antarctica tour operators on decontaminating boots and clothing. Really.
And here's one you may not have heard yet. A paper published last December by Lockart, Kavetski, and Franks rebuts the AR4 WG1 assertion that CO2-driven higher temperatures drive higher evaporation and thereby cause droughts. The study claims they got it backwards, as higher air temperatures are in fact driven by the lack of evaporation (as occurs during drought). I smell another "-gate" in the works.
And yet, perhaps the greatest undermining of IPCC integrity comes from a recent study, which I’ve summarized here, challenging the global temperature data reported by its two most important American allies: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As these represent the readings used by most climate analysis agencies, including the IPCC, the discovery by meteorologist Joe D'Aleo and computer expert E.M. Smith that they've been intentionally biased to the warm side since 1990 puts literally every temperature-related climate report released since then into question.
...Along with, of course, any policy decisions based on their content.
More HERE (See the original for links)
IPCC goofs again: now Holland is drowned
Comment and roundup from Andrew Bolt in Australia below
Yet another blunder in that IPCC 2007 report which Kevin Rudd uses to justify his great green tax to “stop” global warming:
Funny how every mistake now coming to light is of the kind that tended to make global warming scarier. You know, that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, the Amazonian rain forests were extremely vulnerable, the Antarctica would become too fragile even for dirty shoes. And funny, too, how the IPCC boss cadged so many grants, directorships and business deals as his IPCC hyped the dangers. (Just read a fuller list of IPCC controversies here.)
Nor is that the only sceptical news from the Netherlands:
Surely Cramer’s demand now for a review of the climate science by her scientists is exactly what’s needed here, too. I mean, shouldn’t Climate Change Minister Penny Wong be saying exactly this sort of thing herself:
Here’s Tony Abbott’s way out of the pinch of claiming to still believe in dangerous man-made warming, yet blocking Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. Surely there’s now so many scandals engulging the IPCC and its science, that it’s mad for us to spend a single dollar more until an inquiry - with sceptical scientists on board too - reviews all the science we were once falsely told was “settled”.
Demand an inquiry now.
UPDATE
India goes even further:
SOURCE
Steve Milloy Reacts to Penn State ‘ClimateGate’ News, Says Investigation ‘Not Thorough At All’
Steve Milloy responded to news about Penn State University’s investigation into Dr. Michael Mann’s alleged involvement in the “ClimateGate” e-mails scandal, saying the review appeared to have been “not thorough at all.”
Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com and author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, issued a statement after a panel at the university determined an investigation is warranted in one of four ‘possible allegations’ related to Dr. Mann:
1. The review apparently extended little further than the Climategate e-mails themselves, an interview with Mann, materials submitted by Mann and whatever e-mails and comments floated in over the transom. Not thorough at all.
2. Comically, the report explains at length how the use of the word “trick” can mean a “clever device.” The report ignores that it was a “trick… to hide the decline.” There is no mention of “hide the decline” in the report.
3. The report concludes there is no evidence to indicate that Mann intended to delete e-mails. But this is contradicted by the plain language and circumstances surrounding Mann’s e-mail exchange with Phil Jones — See page 9 of Climategate & Penn State: The Case for an Independent Investigation;
4. The report dismisses the accusation that Mann conspired to silence skeptics by stating, “one finds enormous confusion has been caused by interpretations of the e-mails and their content.” Maybe there wouldn’t be so much “confusion” if PSU actually did a thorough investigation rather than just relying on the word of Michael Mann.
5. Although PSU is continuing the investigation, its reason is not to investigate Mann so much as it is to exonerate climate alarmism. On page 9 of the report, it says that “questions in the public’s mind about Dr. Mann’s conduct… may be undermining confidence in his findings as a scientist… and public trust in science in general and climate science specifically.”
“There needs to be a thorough and independent investigation of Climategate. PSU’s report is a primer for a whitewash,” concluded Milloy.
SOURCE
Time Magazine Has a Problem with the Truth about Global Warming
By Alan Caruba
Bryan Walsh has a great career in public relations awaiting him. Unfortunately he is currently passing himself off as a journalist for Time Magazine. PR, a profession I have enjoyed for several decades, is widely seen to “spin” facts to a client’s advantage and this is frequently the case. PR is advocacy. Journalism is supposed to be something else, i.e., the unbiased, objective reporting of the facts. Someone needs to explain this to Bryan.
In an article titled “Explaining a Global Climate Panel’s Key Missteps”, Bryan barely pretends to be a journalist as he engages in whitewashing some widely known facts about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations' scam for the propagation of the huge global warming hoax. Bryan correctly notes that the IPCC was “one of the most respected organizations in the world” and, in October 2007, had shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, a famed global warming blowhard and fabulist best known for predicting the end of the world next Tuesday.
Bryan noted that the Norwegian Nobel committee had “lauded the IPCC’s fourth assessment report in 2007 as creating an ever broader consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.” Note that these are stated as facts, but in truth there never was a “consensus” in the worldwide community of climatologists and meteorologists, and other scientists.
Indeed, there have been three international conferences to debunk global warming, all sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based non-profit, free market think tank that brought together some of the world’s leading scientists who participated in seminars and gave addresses that were illustrated by graphs and other data that debunked global warming. A fourth conference is scheduled in May and, who knows, some members of the U.S. media might actually attend and report the truth this time?
The assertion that there is a connection between human activities and the non-existent global warming doesn’t even meet the lowest standard of journalistic accuracy. There is no connection. None has ever been proven despite the claims. In general terms, the Earth’s climate is determined by the sun, the oceans, and other factors of such magnitude as to suggest that an ant hill poses a threat to a skyscraper.
Bryan finally got around to mentioning that “over the past week or two, the IPCC has seen its reputation for impartiality and accuracy take serious hits.” Hello! Those hits have been around for years, but the leak of emails in November 2009 between the key players in the global warming fraud unleashed a tsunami of revelations about the way the IPCC relied on deliberately distorted “facts” and strove to suppress the publication of the truth in leading science publications. It wasn’t over the past week or two unless Bryan has been in a deep comma for three months.
Calls for the resignation of IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, were noted. He has been under fire because he knew in advance of the Copenhagen conference that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were bogus. Plaintively, Bryan asked, “What’s wrong with the IPCC?” and then answered saying, “To some degree, it’s a victim of its own size.”
Wrong again. The IPCC may have claimed that it had some 2,500 scientists participating, but the real “work” of the IPCC was undertaken by a close knit group of global warming fraudsters, several of whom are under investigation. They include Prof. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that provided key data regarding the planet’s temperatures---which always seemed to be rising exponentially.
Others included Prof. Michael Mann of Penn State University, a paleoclimatologist famed for his “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that managed to overlook the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. Joining the merry pranksters was Prof. Keith Briffa, another CRU researcher, who dished up a tree ring theory that confirmed global warming.
Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, linked increased hurricane activity to global warming, but was probably hard pressed to explain those years when it did not increase. There are others like Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute that got the whole ball rolling in 1986 when he told Congress that global warming would destroy the Earth if we didn’t put an end to all energy use that generated greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead of noting the misdeeds of these and others closely affiliated with the IPCC, Bryan quoted a scientist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a “lead author on the 2007 IPCC report.” And we know how eager Richard Somerville must have been to suggest it might have been a thousand pages of nonsense. Bryan also quoted Peter Frumhoff of the left-learning Union of Concerned Scientists who repeated the tired IPCC message that “there is no debate about the core urgency” of global warming.
No debate? The debate has been raging for decades. Bryan, however, just plowed on, offering one excuse after another to cover the IPCC’s serious breach of ethics and accuracy, concluding that its “self-assessment” after each report and “the pressure…to be flawless” is the problem,but not the lies it has been putting forth since 1988. “But that’s exactly the sort of information policymakers will need to prepare for climate change going forward,” said Bryan.
No, policymakers need is real science, proven science. And the IPCC “science” about global warming, now rebranded as "climate change", is an insult to all real scientists and, beyond them, to a worldwide public that was consistently led to believe a massive hoax. Time, Newsweek, and countless others in the mainstream media have been co-conspirators in the global warming fraud. It is time to end this shameful blot on journalism and begin to report facts, not apocalyptic fantasy.
SOURCE
Global Warming Naysayers Find Support From Science
Article below from the newspaper of UCSB
In most areas of science, it is considered noble to be a skeptic of a given theory, unless that theory is man-made climate change. According to Al Gore, “The debate [about climate change] in the scientific community is over,” yet the debate curiously rages on. English Prime Minister Gordon Brown, frustrated by those pesky second-guessers, proclaimed, “we mustn’t be distracted by … flat-earth climate skeptics.” Yet while those who reject the climate change orthodoxy are portrayed as denying scientific fact, the facts are overwhelmingly supporting that skeptical view.
The theory of global warming states that greenhouse gasses, like carbon dioxide, trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, therefore an increase in human carbon dioxide emissions could potentially cause a steady rise in temperature. Indeed, Earth’s temperature over the past century of industrialization has risen by about .5 degrees Celsius, but the theory holds that greenhouse warming should be highest in the troposphere, the place where the greenhouse warming effect begins. Utterly confounding global warming temperature models, weather balloon data has shown the opposite; the troposphere has been consistently cooler than surface temperatures. When faced with real atmospheric data, one of the most fundamental assumptions behind climate change due to greenhouse warming absolutely breaks down.
Global warming proponents use data from ice core surveys to show that there is an intimate correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature. However, as the 2007 BBC documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle reveals, the alleged correlation is backward. Professor Ian Clark from the University of Ottawa has demonstrated from several ice core surveys that changes in the level of carbon dioxide lag behind corresponding changes in temperature by hundreds of years.
Carl Wunsch, professor of oceanography at M.I.T., described the phenomenon thus: “The ocean is the major reservoir [of] carbon dioxide … if you heat the surface of the ocean, it tends to emit carbon dioxide.” As the sun becomes increasingly active, it warms the vast oceans which, over a process that takes hundreds of years, release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “The sun is driving climate change,” explains Solar Physicist Piers Corbyn. “Carbon dioxide is irrelevant.”
It is easy for climate change advocates to dismiss skeptics as irrational and avoid a debate that threatens their primitive ideology. Their emotional argument consists of pointing to the thermometer in self-righteous indignation, but while temperature has been increasing, so has solar activity. The intensity of the sun’s magnetic field more than doubled during the twentieth century.
That is why the Left must silence skeptics and maintain a facade of scientific consensus, for if man-made climate change were to be revealed as junk science, their radical, anti-capitalist agenda would be utterly rejected by most Americans. Government regulations, such as caps on carbon emissions, have the potential to destroy both the economic prosperity of western civilization and the industrial progress of the third world. Only global warming skeptics, armed with scientific evidence and a willingness to question authority, have a chance of stopping them.
SOURCE
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It's just fluctuating wildly from year to year as it always has done but by making some complex "allowances", climate statisticians claim to find a declining trend. But since climate statisticians are in the same class as used-car salesmen these days, it would be safer to stick with the raw data -- discouraging to Greenies though that might be
Further: As I read it, the research concerns only overall ozone levels in the atmosphere and has not in fact used measurements of the Antarctic "hole". There's many a slip twixt cup and lip there. It will be interesting to see what is in the relevant journal article when -- and if -- it has passed peer review
THE first hard evidence is in that global action under the Montreal Protocol to mend the hole in the ozone layer is starting to work. In the first accurate assessment of the impact of the treaty, Macquarie University climate dynamicist Murry Salby and his colleague Lilia Deschamps from the Bureau of Meteorology found that the ozone layer was about 10 per cent along the road to recovery. The rebound follows cuts to global emissions of chlorofluorocarbons and halons, which have been destroying the gaseous shield that blocks ultraviolet radiation and which is critical to life on Earth.
The scientists announced their results at the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society conference at the Australian National University in Canberra last Friday .
The ozone layer is in the stratosphere, the zone 10km to 50km above the Earth's surface. The ozone hole is a region where ozone concentrations can drop to only 30 per cent of their natural values. First observed in the late 1970s, it develops over Antarctica each spring and expands to cover the polar cap.
In early summer the Antarctic vortex, an atmospheric circulation pattern that isolates the column of air above the ice continent, breaks down. Released, the ozone-depleted air mixes with air across the southern hemisphere, diluting ozone at mid-latitudes during summer.
The atmospheric concentration of ozone-depleting CFCs and halons has been falling since the adoption of the Montreal Protocol in 1987. But even as these chemicals have been phased out of aerosol cans, refrigerators, fire extinguishers and factories, ozone levels have been fluctuating wildly between years. "These large changes mask the more gradual recovery of the ozone layer that is due to the decrease of ozone-depleting pollutants," Professor Salby told the HES.
He and Dr Deschamps confirmed that the erratic changes between years were due mainly to global atmospheric perturbations called planetary waves. "We showed there was a very strong relationship between planetary waves and changes of the ozone hole from one year to the next," he said. The changes introduced by planetary waves, which controlled the temperature of the stratosphere, at present dominated the evolution of the ozone hole, he said. "Temperature over Antarctica is a very strong determinant of the polar stratospheric cloud, which forms mainly over Antarctica. [This] cloud is at the heart of ozone depletion. It's responsible for the formation of the ozone hole each spring."
Particles in stratospheric clouds are sites where CFCs and halons launch their chemical attack on ozone molecules. Highly reactive forms of chlorine are the most damaging. The scientists compensated for the effect of planetary waves in the 30-year ozone record collected by NASA satellites. "This unmasked the slowly varying anthropogenic contribution," Professor Salby said. "It gives a fairly clear picture of ozone recovery. In it, you can see the rebound of ozone now.
"The signature of recovery is visible over the last decade and extends back into the late 1990s. We compared it against the evolution of chlorine, especially since the Montreal Protocol. "Once planetary waves are accounted for, the ozone graph closely tracks the chlorine graph."
Without the scientists' analysis, it would have taken 20 years for chlorine concentrations to have decreased enough for scientists to make a statistically valid assessment of the Montreal treaty.
Professor Salby said the anthropogenic component of ozone recovery - the gradual rebound over the past decade - amounted to about 10 per cent of a full return to pre-1980 levels. Ozone concentrations were at their lowest in the late 90s and were not expected to recover fully for about 50 years, he said.
The results correlating planetary waves and the ozone hole would clear the way for seasonal forecasts of ozone and the UV index.
SOURCE
IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks
Unquestionably the world's final authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's findings and recommendations have formed the bedrock of literally every climate-related initiative worldwide for more than a decade. Likewise, virtually all such future endeavors -- be they Kyoto II, domestic cap-and-tax, or EPA carbon regulation, would inexorably be built upon the credibility of the same U.N. panel's "expert" counsel. But a glut of ongoing recent discoveries of systemic fraud has rocked that foundation, and the entire man-made global warming house of cards is now teetering on the verge of complete collapse.
Simply stated, we've been swindled. We've been set up as marks by a gang of opportunistic hucksters who have exploited the naïvely altruistic intentions of the environmental movement in an effort to control international energy consumption while redistributing global wealth and (in many cases) greedily lining their own pockets in the process.
Perhaps now, more people will finally understand what many have known for years: Man-made climate change was never really a problem -- but rather, a solution.
For just as the science of the IPCC has been exposed as fraudulent, so have its apparent motives. The true ones became strikingly evident when the negotiating text for the "last chance to save the planet" International Climate Accord [PDF], put forth in Copenhagen in December, was found to contain as many paragraphs outlining the payment of "climate debt" reparations by Western nations under the watchful eye of a U.N.-controlled global government as it did emission reduction schemes.
Then again, neither stratagem should come as any real surprise to those who've paid attention. Here's a recap for those who have, and a long-overdue wake-up call for those who haven't. [See also The CFC Ban: Global Warming's Pilot Episode]
The Perfect Problem to the Imperfect Solution
The U.N. signaled its intent to politicize science as far back as 1972 at its Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm, Sweden. There, an unlikely mélange of legitimate environmental activists, dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, and assorted anti-establishment '60s leftovers were delighted to hear not only the usual complaints about "industrialized" environmental problems, but also a long list of international inequities. Among the many human responsibilities condemned were overpopulation, misuse of resources and technology, unbalanced development, and the worldwide dilemma of urbanization. And from that marriage of global, environmental, and social justice concerns was born the IPCC's parent organization -- the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) -- and the fortune-cookie like prose of its socialist-environmentalist manifesto, the Stockholm Declaration.
It was seven years later that UNEP was handed the ideal villain to fuel its counterfeit crusade. That was the year (1979) in which NASA's James Hansen's team of climate modelers convinced a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel to report [PDF] that doubling atmospheric CO2 -- which had risen from 280 ppmv in the pre-industrial 1800s to over 335 ppmv -- would cause nearly 3°C of global warming. And although the figure was wildly speculative, many funding-minded scientists -- including some previously predicting that aerosols and orbital shifts would lead to catastrophic global cooling -- suddenly embraced greenhouse gas theory and the inevitability of global warming.
It was at that moment that it became clear that the long-held scientific position that the Earth's ecosystem has always and will always maintain CO2 equilibrium could be easily swayed toward a more exploitable belief system. And the UNEP now had the perfect problem to its solution: anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
After all, both its abatement and adaptation require huge expansion of government controls and taxation. Furthermore, it makes industry and capitalism look bad while affording endless visuals of animals and third-world humans suffering at the hands of wealthy Westerners. And most importantly, by fomenting accusations that "rich" countries have effectively violated the human rights of hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people by selfishly causing climate-based global suffering, it helps promote the promise of international wealth redistribution to help less fortunate nations adapt to its consequences.
Best of all, being driven by junk-science that easily metamorphoses as required, it appeared to be endlessly self-sustaining.
But it needed to be packaged for widespread consumption. And packaged it they surely have. Here's an early classic.
The year was 1988, and Colorado Senator Tim Wirth had arranged for Hansen to testify on the subject before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to help sell the dire need to enact national environmental legislation. As Wirth has since admitted, he intentionally scheduled Hansen's appearance on what was forecasted to be the hottest day of the hearings. And in a brilliantly underhanded marketing ploy, he and his cohorts actually snuck into the hearing room the night before and opened the windows, rendering the air conditioning all but useless.
Imagine the devious beauty of the scene that unfolded in front of the cameras the next day -- a NASA scientist preaching fire and brimstone, warning of "unprecedented global warming" and a potential "runaway greenhouse effect," all the while wiping the dripping sweat off his brow. No wonder the resultant NY Times headline screamed, "Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how climate hysteria and not one, but two of its shining stars were born. For coincidentally, that was the same year the IPCC was established by the U.N. Its mandate: to assess "the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change."
How perfect: an organization formed not to prove or disprove AGW, but merely to assess its risks and recommend an appropriate response.....
The Dawn of Outright Climate Fraud
Back in 1989, future Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group 2 (WG2) lead author Stephen Schneider disclosed several tricks of the trade to Discover magazine: " To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest."
And according to MIT's Richard Lindzen's 2001 Senate subcommittee testimony, that's precisely what he witnessed as a Third Assessment Report (TAR) lead author. Among the atmospheric physicist's revelations was the fact that contributing TAR scientists -- already facing the threat of disappearing grant funds and derision as industry stooges -- were also met with ad hominem attacks from IPCC "coordinators" if they refused to tone down criticism of faulty climate models or otherwise questioned AGW dogma. I suppose that's one way to achieve the "consensus" the IPCC loudly boasts of.
As previously discussed here and here, it was in the same 2001 TAR that the IPCC suddenly and inexplicably scrapped its long-held position that global temperatures had fluctuated drastically over the previous millennium and replaced it with a chart depicting relatively flat temperatures prior to a sharp rise beginning in 1900. This, of course, removed the pesky higher-than-present-day temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period of 900-1300 AD, the existence of which obstructed the unprecedented-warming sales pitch.
Truth be told, this little bit of hocus-pocus alone should have marked the end of the panel's scientific credibility, particularly after Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick uncovered the corruption behind it. But thanks to a hugely successful campaign to demonize all critics as big-oil shills, the "Hockey Stick Graph" (aka MBH98) not only survived, but -- after receiving a prominent role in Al Gore's 2006 grossly exaggerated "scary scenarios" sci-fi movie -- actually went on to become a global warming icon. Even after McIntyre finally got his hands on one scientist's data last September and proved that Keith Briffa had cherry-picked data to create his MBH98-supporting series, the MSM paid McIntyre and others reporting the hoax little heed.
Consequently, TAR's false declaration of the 20th as the hottest century of the millennium was widely accepted as fact, right along with its proclamation that the 1990's were the hottest decade and 1998 the hottest year since measurements began in 1861...as was the replacement of "discernible human influence" described six years earlier with the claim of "new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
So by the time AR4 rolled out in 2007, in which they significantly raised not only the threat level, but also the degree of anthropogenic certitude (to 90%), the IPCC's word was all but gospel to the MSM, left-leaning policymakers, and an increasingly large portion of the population. Indeed, everywhere you turned, you'd hear that "the IPCC said this" or "the IPCC said that." The need to address "climate change" had quickly become a foregone and inarguable conclusion in most public discourse.
At that moment, Kyoto II seemed as inevitable as the next insufferable NBC Green is Universal week, and with it, the U.N.'s place as steward of the planet, which would surely be ratified at the pending 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen. ...Until, that is, the mind-boggling magnitude of AR4's deception became glaringly apparent.
Caught with their Green Thumbs on the Scale
Most readers are likely aware that in November of last year, a folder containing documents, source code, data, and e-mails was somehow misappropriated from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU). The so-called "Climategate" emails disclosed an arrogant mockery of the peer review process as well a widespread complicity in and acceptance among climate researchers to hiding and manipulating data unfriendly to the global warming agenda. The modeling source code -- as I reported here -- contained routines which employed a number of "fudge factors" to modify the results of data series -- again, to bias results to the desired outcome. And this, coupled with the disclosure of the Jones "hide the decline" e-mail, provided more evidence that MBH98 -- and ergo unprecedented 20th-century warming -- is a fraud.
The following month, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change had probably tampered with Russian climate data. Apparently, Hadley ignored data submitted by 75% of Russian stations, effectively omitting over 40% of Russian territory from global temperature calculations -- not coincidentally, areas that didn’t "show any substantial warming in the late 20th-century and the early 21st-century."
But Climategate was only the tip of the iceberg. An AR4 warning that unchecked climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was found to be lifted from an erroneous World Wildlife Federation (WWF) report and misrepresented as peer-reviewed science. IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri attempted to parry this "mistake" by accusing the accusers at the Indian environment ministry of "arrogance" and practicing "voodoo science" in issuing a report [PDF] disputing the IPCC. But one in his own ranks, Dr Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the chapter making the claim, had the astoundingly bad manners to admit that he knew all along that it "did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research." Apparently, so had Pachauri, who continued to lie about it for months so as not to sully the exalted AR4 immediately prior to Copenhagen.
And "Glaciergate" opened the floodgates to other serious misrepresentations in AR4, including a boatload of additional non-peer-reviewed projections pulled directly from WWF reports. These included discussions on the effects of melting glaciers on mudflows and avalanches, the significant damages climate change will have on selected marine fish and shellfish, and even assessing global-average per-capita "ecological footprints." It should be noted here that IPCC rules specifically disqualify all non-peer-reviewed primary sources.
Nonetheless, Chapter 13 of the WG2 report stated that forty percent of Amazonian forests are threatened by climate change. And it also cited a WWF piece as its source -- this one by two so-called "experts," who incidentally are actually environmental activists. What's more, the WWF study dealt with anthropogenic forest fires, not global warming, and barely made mention of Amazonian forests at all. Additionally, the WWF's figures were themselves based on a Nature paper [PDF] studying neither global warming nor forest fires, but rather the effects of logging on rain forests. So the IPCC predicted climate change-caused 40% forest destruction based on a report two steps upstream which concluded that "[l]ogging companies in Amazonia kill or damage 10-40% of the living biomass of forests through the harvest process."
Adding to the glacial egg on the AR4 authors' faces was the statement that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps, and Africa were being caused by global warming. It turns out that one of the two source papers cited was actually a mountain-climbers' magazine. Actually, this is a relatively authoritative source compared to the other: a dissertation from a Swiss college student based on his interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The 2007 green bible also contained a gross exaggeration in its citation of Muir-Wood et al., 2006's study on global warming and natural disasters. The original stated that "a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% per year." But the AR4 synthesis report stated that more "heavy precipitation" is "very likely" and that an "increase in tropical cyclone intensity" is "likely" as temperatures rise.
Perhaps the most dumbfounding AR4 citation (so far) was recently discovered by Climatequotes.com. It appears that a WG2 warning that "[t]he multiple stresses of climate change and increasing human activity on the Antarctic Peninsula represent a clear vulnerability and have necessitated the implementation of stringent clothing decontamination guidelines for tourist landings on the Antarctic Peninsula" originated from and was attributed to a guide for Antarctica tour operators on decontaminating boots and clothing. Really.
And here's one you may not have heard yet. A paper published last December by Lockart, Kavetski, and Franks rebuts the AR4 WG1 assertion that CO2-driven higher temperatures drive higher evaporation and thereby cause droughts. The study claims they got it backwards, as higher air temperatures are in fact driven by the lack of evaporation (as occurs during drought). I smell another "-gate" in the works.
And yet, perhaps the greatest undermining of IPCC integrity comes from a recent study, which I’ve summarized here, challenging the global temperature data reported by its two most important American allies: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As these represent the readings used by most climate analysis agencies, including the IPCC, the discovery by meteorologist Joe D'Aleo and computer expert E.M. Smith that they've been intentionally biased to the warm side since 1990 puts literally every temperature-related climate report released since then into question.
...Along with, of course, any policy decisions based on their content.
More HERE (See the original for links)
IPCC goofs again: now Holland is drowned
Comment and roundup from Andrew Bolt in Australia below
Yet another blunder in that IPCC 2007 report which Kevin Rudd uses to justify his great green tax to “stop” global warming:
A United Nations report wrongly claimed that more than half of the Netherlands is currently below sea level.
In fact, just twenty percent of the country consists of polders that are pumped dry, and which are at risk of flooding if global warming causes rising sea levels. Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer has ordered a thorough investigation into the quality of the climate reports which she uses to base her policies on.
Funny how every mistake now coming to light is of the kind that tended to make global warming scarier. You know, that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, the Amazonian rain forests were extremely vulnerable, the Antarctica would become too fragile even for dirty shoes. And funny, too, how the IPCC boss cadged so many grants, directorships and business deals as his IPCC hyped the dangers. (Just read a fuller list of IPCC controversies here.)
Nor is that the only sceptical news from the Netherlands:
Dutch researchers reporting to Minister Cramer on Wednesday said that global warming appears to be slower than had been assumed.
Surely Cramer’s demand now for a review of the climate science by her scientists is exactly what’s needed here, too. I mean, shouldn’t Climate Change Minister Penny Wong be saying exactly this sort of thing herself:
Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer says she will no longer tolerate errors by climate researchers. She expressed her anger to Dutch researchers who presented their annual report on the state of the climate on Wednesday.
Here’s Tony Abbott’s way out of the pinch of claiming to still believe in dangerous man-made warming, yet blocking Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. Surely there’s now so many scandals engulging the IPCC and its science, that it’s mad for us to spend a single dollar more until an inquiry - with sceptical scientists on board too - reviews all the science we were once falsely told was “settled”.
Demand an inquiry now.
UPDATE
India goes even further:
India has threatened to pull out of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and set up its on climate change body because it “cannot rely” on the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri…
In India the (IPCC’s) false claims (on the Himalayas) have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government… In Autumn, its environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said that while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming…
(L)ast night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further. He announced that the Indian government will establish a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s “third ice cap”, and an “Indian IPCC” to use “climate science” to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.
“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. ...” he said.
SOURCE
Steve Milloy Reacts to Penn State ‘ClimateGate’ News, Says Investigation ‘Not Thorough At All’
Steve Milloy responded to news about Penn State University’s investigation into Dr. Michael Mann’s alleged involvement in the “ClimateGate” e-mails scandal, saying the review appeared to have been “not thorough at all.”
Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com and author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, issued a statement after a panel at the university determined an investigation is warranted in one of four ‘possible allegations’ related to Dr. Mann:
1. The review apparently extended little further than the Climategate e-mails themselves, an interview with Mann, materials submitted by Mann and whatever e-mails and comments floated in over the transom. Not thorough at all.
2. Comically, the report explains at length how the use of the word “trick” can mean a “clever device.” The report ignores that it was a “trick… to hide the decline.” There is no mention of “hide the decline” in the report.
3. The report concludes there is no evidence to indicate that Mann intended to delete e-mails. But this is contradicted by the plain language and circumstances surrounding Mann’s e-mail exchange with Phil Jones — See page 9 of Climategate & Penn State: The Case for an Independent Investigation;
4. The report dismisses the accusation that Mann conspired to silence skeptics by stating, “one finds enormous confusion has been caused by interpretations of the e-mails and their content.” Maybe there wouldn’t be so much “confusion” if PSU actually did a thorough investigation rather than just relying on the word of Michael Mann.
5. Although PSU is continuing the investigation, its reason is not to investigate Mann so much as it is to exonerate climate alarmism. On page 9 of the report, it says that “questions in the public’s mind about Dr. Mann’s conduct… may be undermining confidence in his findings as a scientist… and public trust in science in general and climate science specifically.”
“There needs to be a thorough and independent investigation of Climategate. PSU’s report is a primer for a whitewash,” concluded Milloy.
SOURCE
Time Magazine Has a Problem with the Truth about Global Warming
By Alan Caruba
Bryan Walsh has a great career in public relations awaiting him. Unfortunately he is currently passing himself off as a journalist for Time Magazine. PR, a profession I have enjoyed for several decades, is widely seen to “spin” facts to a client’s advantage and this is frequently the case. PR is advocacy. Journalism is supposed to be something else, i.e., the unbiased, objective reporting of the facts. Someone needs to explain this to Bryan.
In an article titled “Explaining a Global Climate Panel’s Key Missteps”, Bryan barely pretends to be a journalist as he engages in whitewashing some widely known facts about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations' scam for the propagation of the huge global warming hoax. Bryan correctly notes that the IPCC was “one of the most respected organizations in the world” and, in October 2007, had shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, a famed global warming blowhard and fabulist best known for predicting the end of the world next Tuesday.
Bryan noted that the Norwegian Nobel committee had “lauded the IPCC’s fourth assessment report in 2007 as creating an ever broader consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.” Note that these are stated as facts, but in truth there never was a “consensus” in the worldwide community of climatologists and meteorologists, and other scientists.
Indeed, there have been three international conferences to debunk global warming, all sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based non-profit, free market think tank that brought together some of the world’s leading scientists who participated in seminars and gave addresses that were illustrated by graphs and other data that debunked global warming. A fourth conference is scheduled in May and, who knows, some members of the U.S. media might actually attend and report the truth this time?
The assertion that there is a connection between human activities and the non-existent global warming doesn’t even meet the lowest standard of journalistic accuracy. There is no connection. None has ever been proven despite the claims. In general terms, the Earth’s climate is determined by the sun, the oceans, and other factors of such magnitude as to suggest that an ant hill poses a threat to a skyscraper.
Bryan finally got around to mentioning that “over the past week or two, the IPCC has seen its reputation for impartiality and accuracy take serious hits.” Hello! Those hits have been around for years, but the leak of emails in November 2009 between the key players in the global warming fraud unleashed a tsunami of revelations about the way the IPCC relied on deliberately distorted “facts” and strove to suppress the publication of the truth in leading science publications. It wasn’t over the past week or two unless Bryan has been in a deep comma for three months.
Calls for the resignation of IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, were noted. He has been under fire because he knew in advance of the Copenhagen conference that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were bogus. Plaintively, Bryan asked, “What’s wrong with the IPCC?” and then answered saying, “To some degree, it’s a victim of its own size.”
Wrong again. The IPCC may have claimed that it had some 2,500 scientists participating, but the real “work” of the IPCC was undertaken by a close knit group of global warming fraudsters, several of whom are under investigation. They include Prof. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that provided key data regarding the planet’s temperatures---which always seemed to be rising exponentially.
Others included Prof. Michael Mann of Penn State University, a paleoclimatologist famed for his “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that managed to overlook the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. Joining the merry pranksters was Prof. Keith Briffa, another CRU researcher, who dished up a tree ring theory that confirmed global warming.
Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, linked increased hurricane activity to global warming, but was probably hard pressed to explain those years when it did not increase. There are others like Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute that got the whole ball rolling in 1986 when he told Congress that global warming would destroy the Earth if we didn’t put an end to all energy use that generated greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead of noting the misdeeds of these and others closely affiliated with the IPCC, Bryan quoted a scientist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a “lead author on the 2007 IPCC report.” And we know how eager Richard Somerville must have been to suggest it might have been a thousand pages of nonsense. Bryan also quoted Peter Frumhoff of the left-learning Union of Concerned Scientists who repeated the tired IPCC message that “there is no debate about the core urgency” of global warming.
No debate? The debate has been raging for decades. Bryan, however, just plowed on, offering one excuse after another to cover the IPCC’s serious breach of ethics and accuracy, concluding that its “self-assessment” after each report and “the pressure…to be flawless” is the problem,but not the lies it has been putting forth since 1988. “But that’s exactly the sort of information policymakers will need to prepare for climate change going forward,” said Bryan.
No, policymakers need is real science, proven science. And the IPCC “science” about global warming, now rebranded as "climate change", is an insult to all real scientists and, beyond them, to a worldwide public that was consistently led to believe a massive hoax. Time, Newsweek, and countless others in the mainstream media have been co-conspirators in the global warming fraud. It is time to end this shameful blot on journalism and begin to report facts, not apocalyptic fantasy.
SOURCE
Global Warming Naysayers Find Support From Science
Article below from the newspaper of UCSB
In most areas of science, it is considered noble to be a skeptic of a given theory, unless that theory is man-made climate change. According to Al Gore, “The debate [about climate change] in the scientific community is over,” yet the debate curiously rages on. English Prime Minister Gordon Brown, frustrated by those pesky second-guessers, proclaimed, “we mustn’t be distracted by … flat-earth climate skeptics.” Yet while those who reject the climate change orthodoxy are portrayed as denying scientific fact, the facts are overwhelmingly supporting that skeptical view.
The theory of global warming states that greenhouse gasses, like carbon dioxide, trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, therefore an increase in human carbon dioxide emissions could potentially cause a steady rise in temperature. Indeed, Earth’s temperature over the past century of industrialization has risen by about .5 degrees Celsius, but the theory holds that greenhouse warming should be highest in the troposphere, the place where the greenhouse warming effect begins. Utterly confounding global warming temperature models, weather balloon data has shown the opposite; the troposphere has been consistently cooler than surface temperatures. When faced with real atmospheric data, one of the most fundamental assumptions behind climate change due to greenhouse warming absolutely breaks down.
Global warming proponents use data from ice core surveys to show that there is an intimate correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature. However, as the 2007 BBC documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle reveals, the alleged correlation is backward. Professor Ian Clark from the University of Ottawa has demonstrated from several ice core surveys that changes in the level of carbon dioxide lag behind corresponding changes in temperature by hundreds of years.
Carl Wunsch, professor of oceanography at M.I.T., described the phenomenon thus: “The ocean is the major reservoir [of] carbon dioxide … if you heat the surface of the ocean, it tends to emit carbon dioxide.” As the sun becomes increasingly active, it warms the vast oceans which, over a process that takes hundreds of years, release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “The sun is driving climate change,” explains Solar Physicist Piers Corbyn. “Carbon dioxide is irrelevant.”
It is easy for climate change advocates to dismiss skeptics as irrational and avoid a debate that threatens their primitive ideology. Their emotional argument consists of pointing to the thermometer in self-righteous indignation, but while temperature has been increasing, so has solar activity. The intensity of the sun’s magnetic field more than doubled during the twentieth century.
That is why the Left must silence skeptics and maintain a facade of scientific consensus, for if man-made climate change were to be revealed as junk science, their radical, anti-capitalist agenda would be utterly rejected by most Americans. Government regulations, such as caps on carbon emissions, have the potential to destroy both the economic prosperity of western civilization and the industrial progress of the third world. Only global warming skeptics, armed with scientific evidence and a willingness to question authority, have a chance of stopping them.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Thursday, February 04, 2010
Even Greenpeace wants Pachauri to go
So they obviously think that the IPCC has damaged its case
The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.
John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.
A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported.
The IPCC issued a correction and apology on January 20, three days after the error had made global headlines. Mr Sauven said: “Mistakes will always be made but it’s how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said ‘we made a mistake’. It’s in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn’t.”
The IPCC needed a new chairman who would hold public confidence by introducing more rigorous procedures, Mr Sauven said. “The IPCC needs to regain credibility. Is that going to happen with Pachauri [as chairman]? I don’t think so. We need someone held in high regard who has extremely good judgment and is seen by the global public as someone on their side.
“If we get a new person in with an open mind, prepared to fundamentally review how the IPCC works, we would regain confidence in the organisation.”
Dr Pachauri did not return calls yesterday but he told Indian television at the weekend that he believed attacks on him were being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits because of actions against climate change recommended by the IPCC.He added: “My credibility has been established because I was re-elected chairman in 2008 by all the countries of the world. They must have been satisfied with what I did in terms of the fourth assessment report [published in 2007] because they have given me the mandate of completing the fifth assessment report [[to be released over 2013 and 2014] which I intend doing.”
Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said the countries that had appointed Dr Pachauri should consider his handling of the glacier issue when the IPCC plenary meeting is held in October. “That issue ought to be dealt with by them. It would depend on how he responds to the crisis facing the IPCC.
“He has made mistakes but I don’t think those mistakes are so serious that you would automatically get rid of him. If you changed the head, I don’t think that would necessarily restore the credibility of the IPCC.”
SOURCE
Green math is bad math
On the front page of the New York Times' online edition Sunday was an artist's rendering of the pride and joy of the federal General Services Administration: a renovated federal building in Portland, Ore., that features plants growing up all 18 stories of one side. "They will bloom in the spring and summer when you want the shade, and then they will go away in the winter when you want to let the light in," Bob Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the G.S.A., told the Times, adding, "Don't ask me how you get them irrigated."
Don't ask how much they cost, either. I told you not to ask. OK, I'll tell you: The entire renovation costs $133 million. The plants are only one component, but the G.S.A. admits that the renovation is being undertaken for the purpose of making the building "green." Done as a project of the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, the renovation is Oregon's largest federal stimulus project.
The Obama administration proudly boasts that the effort will dramatically reduce the building's energy use, thereby saving federal taxpayers $280,000 a year in energy costs.
Now here comes the fun part. Nowhere in the article did The New York Times bother to do the math. So I did. (It wasn't hard, I did it on my Blackberry while setting out for a winter hike.) To recoup its investment in this renovation, the government will have to keep the building running for the next 475 years. Look on the bright side. Everything after year 476 is gravy!
As Joe Vaughan, a Portland commercial real estate developer, told The Times, "As a taxpayer, I think it's a horrible waste of money that no private developer would undertake."
The G.S.A response? "The idea is that the cost savings are in the energy efficiency," Caren Auchman, a spokeswoman for the G.S.A., uselessly told the Times, which did not question the validity, or sanity, of that statement.
To provide a little perspective, the taxpayers are going to shell out $133 million -- more than half the cost of the nearby Rose Garden Arena, where the Portland Trailblazers play -- so the government can annually save the taxpayers $68,000 less than the combined yearly salaries of Oregon's two U.S. senators.
This is what passes for a good "green" investment in Washington these days. This is only one tiny example of the type of cost-benefit analysis being promoted in Washington in the name of saving the planet.
More here
The Scientific Collapse of Man-made Global Warming
By Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., a nuclear scientist
The underlying science of man-made global warming has always been quite thin and tenuous, with little hard measurable evidence to support the hypothesis. In fact many temperature stations have shown either no warming or actual cooling over the past 80 years or more.
Similarly exaggerations by many UN nations of sea level changes have flourished and in turn blamed the United States for imagined damages. These are alleged by many nations, even when actual sea level measurements show little changes from the estimated 8 inches per century which has gone on for millennia (http://tinyurl.com/ykb3ctc).
Even though the man-made global warming theory is now collapsing scientifically, it is utterly amazing to realize that many of the most powerful leaders and governments in the world had bought into fiction. Now named Climategate, this was aided and abetted by most (but not all) of the media, the greens, Hollywood, even the educational system.
Skeptics have been pointing to the dearth of such evidence which, if it had been widely understood, would have ended the exaggerations. Actual measured scientific evidence often does that.
The UN and its many sub-organizations have led the charge in promoting the scare around the world, with most of their members subscribing to it. The billions that have been spent for global warming research also suggests that these billions actually helped promote the failed science involved.
After all, the goal of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not a better understanding of the climate. It was intended only to find any man-made influences on the climate. International politics ruled the effort, not the pursuit of science. It was no coincidence that only the wealthy nations, especially the capitalist US, were found to be the villains.
Near the end of November 2009 a huge global warming eruption occurred when thousand emails, documents, and computer codes were release from the files of one of he world’s major institutes in global warming. This was the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU).
These findings were stunning to anyone familiar with the rules of science and the scientific method. Climate data manipulation, massaging, modification, and even omissions were common as indicated from the texts of the emails exchanged among world experts. Even worse, much of the original temperature data has now been lost. This means that that no replication of these studies starting with original data in the IPCC Assessment Reports is now possible. Such replications always begin with the raw data which are no longer available. To attempt replication with contaminated and corrupted data is simply not possible.
It’s been 60 days since the release of this information, with little it being reported in the US media. See link (http://tinyurl.com/y9enj2d). However, a lot of information about the man-made global warming collapse is being reported in the foreign media.
The head of the CRU has taken a leave of absence and now may be facing charges of fraud by the British government (http://tinyurl.com/yjec7ry). More members of the CRU team as well as American instigators may be charged since so many were involved.
Others are writing excellent analyses of the released CRU findings, given the short time for such important efforts. One of them is a 149 page analysis is called “Climategate Analysis” by John P. Costella (http://tinyurl.com/ydkd3cx). Costella is both a mathematical and statistical expert. He writes about the impact of Climategate fraud on the exacting and rigorous nature of honest science (p.5):
“Climategate has shattered that myth (of scientific rigor). It gives us a peephole into the work of the scientists investigating possibly the most important issue ever to face mankind. Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”. Most people are aghast that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long.”
Another excellent analysis of Climategate has been performed by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts. It is titled “Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?” and is 111 pages of detailed analyses (http://tinyurl.com/ydmdtqp). These two analyses (and there are others) literally destroy nearly all of the scientific nature of the IPCC reports and pronouncements. They show that man-made CO2 still has little or nothing to do with climate, and most importantly has a great deal to do with international politics of the UN and allies.
D’Aleo and Watts provide 15 amazing summary points for policy makers describing the scientific malpractice among the UN, the IPCC and the rest of the global warming movement:
* 1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century. MF---Such tampering with data is utterly unprofessional.
* 2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends. MF---Little mention has ever been made regarding the actual quality of temperature data and the need for control of high quality data.
* 3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally. MF---It now seems clear that the global warming movement was hell-bent in producing a man-made global warming scare by a variety of data manipulations.
* 4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting. MF--- This is stunning. Try to imagine adult scientists trying to show climate warming by excluding temperature data from thousands of the world’s coldest stations. Amazing and dreadfully unethical.
* 5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.
* 6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.
* 7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.
* 8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.
* 9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.
* 10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.
* 11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”. MF---This is important to understanding that these United States climate agencies were also very much involved with the climate deceptions.
* 12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.
* 13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.
* 14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”
* 15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.
The main stream media of the US have scarcely reported any of these skullduggeries, which means that the American public is essentially uninformed. We also learned during President Obama’s recent speech that even he has not been informed about the man-made global warming collapse.
This does not speak well of the wisdom of the president and especially of his vaunted science advisors. Obama’s NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, for example, is still under the belief that the IPCC is "the gold standard for authoritative scientific information on climate change because of the rigorous way in which they are prepared, reviewed, and approved." Unfortunately for some, the "gold standard" is at the heart of Climategate. (http://tinyurl.com/yd92q7n).
SOURCE
A falling out among proxies
To estimate temperature and CO2 in the geological past "proxies" (e.g. Tree rings, ice cores) have to be used. And how good they are as proxies is far from agreed. But what if the proxies disagree in what they tell us? That is pretty nasty for the proxy users. In the article below is one look at such a disagreement in estimating CO2 levels
Take-home message: Be wary of proxies -- JR
Are green power programs a scam?
A touch of skepticism below from the Leftist "Mother Jones" -- asking: Are you paying for renewable energy, or just a bunch of hot air?
THE TWISTING TURBINES on the Columbia River Gorge ridges were one of the first things my husband and I noticed en route from Baltimore to our new house in Oregon. So a few weeks later, when a hawker at the farmers market urged me-with a $5 token for free veggies and a postcard with pictures of children lounging in front of local windmills-to sign up for a renewable energy program called Blue Sky, I didn't hesitate. For less than an extra $10 a month, my utility, Pacific Power, would supply our home with electricity from wind turbines instead of coal.
But it turns out ditching dirty energy is more complicated than that hawker would have me believe. From the windmill postcard, you'd think my premium would go straight to local projects. Not quite: True, Pacific Power operates one wind farm in Oregon, but that's largely because the state mandates that utilities get 25 percent of their power from renewables by 2025. My well-meaning purchase has little to do with those windmills. Instead, Pacific Power hands my Blue Sky money over to companies that buy renewable energy certificates (RECs) from wind farms, mostly in other states, and other renewable projects like methane-burning landfills. Consumers need to understand that the electricity "is not going from the windmill on the ridge to your toaster," says Pacific Power spokesman Tom Gauntt. Michael Gillenwater, a Princeton researcher who codeveloped the EPA's carbon emissions tracking system, says it's more like donating to a cause. "What you are doing is subsidizing the market for renewable energy."
Pacific Power says our premium "avoided the release of 897 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions into the air...equivalent to not driving 909 miles." But it's hard to verify those numbers, says Stanford professor Michael Wara, who studies carbon markets. "You don't have an overseeing regulator ensuring that the claims made are backed up." Green-e, a third-party certification program, ensures that my RECs come from relatively new projects and aren't double-counted to meet state mandates. But Gillenwater says its "additionality" test isn't thorough enough to prove I paid for an emission reduction that wouldn't have happened anyway.
Experts say that RECs like mine can make renewable projects more profitable, but they play a much smaller role than government subsidies. (Disclosure: My father recently invested in a wood-chip-fueled electricity plant in Florida, and he said RECs sweetened that deal.) Gillenwater says most projects would have produced the energy regardless of whether consumers like me pitched in-in 2008, for example, Pacific Power bought a third of my RECs from two Puget Sound Energy wind farms built in 2005. (A spokesman says the projects' planners didn't count on revenue from residential RECs in their budget.) The remaining two-thirds were purchased from other projects, including a landfill-gas plant in Utah. Only 1 percent came from solar.
RECs, mandates, additionality-my head was spinning like those windmills, which were seeming further away. To make matters worse, in 2008, only 67 percent of my Blue Sky bucks purchased RECs; the remaining 33 percent was spent on staff and publicity. On average, 19 percent of green programs' revenues go to marketing, but at small utilities that percentage is far greater.
Utilities insist that the promotion is necessary, since voluntary green power programs work better when lots of people participate. Nationwide, only about a million customers shell out for green power-with corporations, governments, and universities buying the bulk of it. In 2008, residential customers made up only one-quarter of green power purchases.
So what's a consumer to do? Even with their problems, RECs are "one of the simplest and most direct ways to support renewable technologies," says Jeff Deyette, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Premiums can provide that extra profit margin to make renewable projects competitive with fossil fuels. And some utilities are experimenting with other models. If I had enrolled in Pacific Power's Blue Sky Block program, for twice what I pay now, 41 percent of my money would have funded local solar arrays and a geothermal test project-and only 25 percent would have gone to overhead. Or instead, I could spend my premium on efficiency upgrades in my new home: sealing leaks, insulating, and replacing drafty windows. It would just take more time and elbow grease than checking a box.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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So they obviously think that the IPCC has damaged its case
The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.
John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.
A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported.
The IPCC issued a correction and apology on January 20, three days after the error had made global headlines. Mr Sauven said: “Mistakes will always be made but it’s how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said ‘we made a mistake’. It’s in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn’t.”
The IPCC needed a new chairman who would hold public confidence by introducing more rigorous procedures, Mr Sauven said. “The IPCC needs to regain credibility. Is that going to happen with Pachauri [as chairman]? I don’t think so. We need someone held in high regard who has extremely good judgment and is seen by the global public as someone on their side.
“If we get a new person in with an open mind, prepared to fundamentally review how the IPCC works, we would regain confidence in the organisation.”
Dr Pachauri did not return calls yesterday but he told Indian television at the weekend that he believed attacks on him were being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits because of actions against climate change recommended by the IPCC.He added: “My credibility has been established because I was re-elected chairman in 2008 by all the countries of the world. They must have been satisfied with what I did in terms of the fourth assessment report [published in 2007] because they have given me the mandate of completing the fifth assessment report [[to be released over 2013 and 2014] which I intend doing.”
Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said the countries that had appointed Dr Pachauri should consider his handling of the glacier issue when the IPCC plenary meeting is held in October. “That issue ought to be dealt with by them. It would depend on how he responds to the crisis facing the IPCC.
“He has made mistakes but I don’t think those mistakes are so serious that you would automatically get rid of him. If you changed the head, I don’t think that would necessarily restore the credibility of the IPCC.”
SOURCE
Green math is bad math
On the front page of the New York Times' online edition Sunday was an artist's rendering of the pride and joy of the federal General Services Administration: a renovated federal building in Portland, Ore., that features plants growing up all 18 stories of one side. "They will bloom in the spring and summer when you want the shade, and then they will go away in the winter when you want to let the light in," Bob Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the G.S.A., told the Times, adding, "Don't ask me how you get them irrigated."
Don't ask how much they cost, either. I told you not to ask. OK, I'll tell you: The entire renovation costs $133 million. The plants are only one component, but the G.S.A. admits that the renovation is being undertaken for the purpose of making the building "green." Done as a project of the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, the renovation is Oregon's largest federal stimulus project.
The Obama administration proudly boasts that the effort will dramatically reduce the building's energy use, thereby saving federal taxpayers $280,000 a year in energy costs.
Now here comes the fun part. Nowhere in the article did The New York Times bother to do the math. So I did. (It wasn't hard, I did it on my Blackberry while setting out for a winter hike.) To recoup its investment in this renovation, the government will have to keep the building running for the next 475 years. Look on the bright side. Everything after year 476 is gravy!
As Joe Vaughan, a Portland commercial real estate developer, told The Times, "As a taxpayer, I think it's a horrible waste of money that no private developer would undertake."
The G.S.A response? "The idea is that the cost savings are in the energy efficiency," Caren Auchman, a spokeswoman for the G.S.A., uselessly told the Times, which did not question the validity, or sanity, of that statement.
To provide a little perspective, the taxpayers are going to shell out $133 million -- more than half the cost of the nearby Rose Garden Arena, where the Portland Trailblazers play -- so the government can annually save the taxpayers $68,000 less than the combined yearly salaries of Oregon's two U.S. senators.
This is what passes for a good "green" investment in Washington these days. This is only one tiny example of the type of cost-benefit analysis being promoted in Washington in the name of saving the planet.
More here
The Scientific Collapse of Man-made Global Warming
By Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., a nuclear scientist
The underlying science of man-made global warming has always been quite thin and tenuous, with little hard measurable evidence to support the hypothesis. In fact many temperature stations have shown either no warming or actual cooling over the past 80 years or more.
Similarly exaggerations by many UN nations of sea level changes have flourished and in turn blamed the United States for imagined damages. These are alleged by many nations, even when actual sea level measurements show little changes from the estimated 8 inches per century which has gone on for millennia (http://tinyurl.com/ykb3ctc).
Even though the man-made global warming theory is now collapsing scientifically, it is utterly amazing to realize that many of the most powerful leaders and governments in the world had bought into fiction. Now named Climategate, this was aided and abetted by most (but not all) of the media, the greens, Hollywood, even the educational system.
Skeptics have been pointing to the dearth of such evidence which, if it had been widely understood, would have ended the exaggerations. Actual measured scientific evidence often does that.
The UN and its many sub-organizations have led the charge in promoting the scare around the world, with most of their members subscribing to it. The billions that have been spent for global warming research also suggests that these billions actually helped promote the failed science involved.
After all, the goal of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not a better understanding of the climate. It was intended only to find any man-made influences on the climate. International politics ruled the effort, not the pursuit of science. It was no coincidence that only the wealthy nations, especially the capitalist US, were found to be the villains.
Near the end of November 2009 a huge global warming eruption occurred when thousand emails, documents, and computer codes were release from the files of one of he world’s major institutes in global warming. This was the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU).
These findings were stunning to anyone familiar with the rules of science and the scientific method. Climate data manipulation, massaging, modification, and even omissions were common as indicated from the texts of the emails exchanged among world experts. Even worse, much of the original temperature data has now been lost. This means that that no replication of these studies starting with original data in the IPCC Assessment Reports is now possible. Such replications always begin with the raw data which are no longer available. To attempt replication with contaminated and corrupted data is simply not possible.
It’s been 60 days since the release of this information, with little it being reported in the US media. See link (http://tinyurl.com/y9enj2d). However, a lot of information about the man-made global warming collapse is being reported in the foreign media.
The head of the CRU has taken a leave of absence and now may be facing charges of fraud by the British government (http://tinyurl.com/yjec7ry). More members of the CRU team as well as American instigators may be charged since so many were involved.
Others are writing excellent analyses of the released CRU findings, given the short time for such important efforts. One of them is a 149 page analysis is called “Climategate Analysis” by John P. Costella (http://tinyurl.com/ydkd3cx). Costella is both a mathematical and statistical expert. He writes about the impact of Climategate fraud on the exacting and rigorous nature of honest science (p.5):
“Climategate has shattered that myth (of scientific rigor). It gives us a peephole into the work of the scientists investigating possibly the most important issue ever to face mankind. Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”. Most people are aghast that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long.”
Another excellent analysis of Climategate has been performed by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts. It is titled “Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?” and is 111 pages of detailed analyses (http://tinyurl.com/ydmdtqp). These two analyses (and there are others) literally destroy nearly all of the scientific nature of the IPCC reports and pronouncements. They show that man-made CO2 still has little or nothing to do with climate, and most importantly has a great deal to do with international politics of the UN and allies.
D’Aleo and Watts provide 15 amazing summary points for policy makers describing the scientific malpractice among the UN, the IPCC and the rest of the global warming movement:
* 1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century. MF---Such tampering with data is utterly unprofessional.
* 2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends. MF---Little mention has ever been made regarding the actual quality of temperature data and the need for control of high quality data.
* 3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally. MF---It now seems clear that the global warming movement was hell-bent in producing a man-made global warming scare by a variety of data manipulations.
* 4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting. MF--- This is stunning. Try to imagine adult scientists trying to show climate warming by excluding temperature data from thousands of the world’s coldest stations. Amazing and dreadfully unethical.
* 5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.
* 6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.
* 7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.
* 8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.
* 9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.
* 10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.
* 11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”. MF---This is important to understanding that these United States climate agencies were also very much involved with the climate deceptions.
* 12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.
* 13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.
* 14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”
* 15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.
The main stream media of the US have scarcely reported any of these skullduggeries, which means that the American public is essentially uninformed. We also learned during President Obama’s recent speech that even he has not been informed about the man-made global warming collapse.
This does not speak well of the wisdom of the president and especially of his vaunted science advisors. Obama’s NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, for example, is still under the belief that the IPCC is "the gold standard for authoritative scientific information on climate change because of the rigorous way in which they are prepared, reviewed, and approved." Unfortunately for some, the "gold standard" is at the heart of Climategate. (http://tinyurl.com/yd92q7n).
SOURCE
A falling out among proxies
To estimate temperature and CO2 in the geological past "proxies" (e.g. Tree rings, ice cores) have to be used. And how good they are as proxies is far from agreed. But what if the proxies disagree in what they tell us? That is pretty nasty for the proxy users. In the article below is one look at such a disagreement in estimating CO2 levels
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years
By Daniel H. Rothman
Abstract
The last 500 million years of the strontium-isotope record are shown to correlate significantly with the concurrent record of isotopic fractionation between inorganic and organic carbon after the effects of recycled sediment are removed from the strontium signal. The correlation is shown to result from the common dependence of both signals on weathering and magmatic processes. Because the long-term evolution of carbon dioxide levels depends similarly on weathering and magmatism, the relative fluctuations of CO2 levels are inferred from the shared fluctuations of the isotopic records. The resulting CO2 signal exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at tectonic time scales.
The long-term carbon cycle is controlled by chemical weathering, volcanic and metamorphic degassing, and the burial of organic carbon (1, 2). Ancient atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are reflected in the isotopic content of organic carbon (3) and, less directly, strontium (4) in marine sedimentary rocks; the former because photosynthetic carbon isotope fractionation is sensitive to CO2 levels, and the latter because weathering and degassing are associated with extreme values of the abundance ratio 87Sr/86Sr. However, attempts to use these geochemical signals to estimate past CO2 levels (5–8) are hindered by the signals' additional relationships to various tectonic (9, 10) and biological (11) effects. Moreover, the strontium signal has proven especially difficult to parse (12–15).
Here, I attempt to resolve these ambiguities in the isotopic signals of carbon and strontium. First, it is shown that the last 500 million years of the strontium signal, after transformation to remove the effects of recycled sediment (16, 17), correlate significantly with the concurrent record of isotopic fractionation between inorganic and organic carbon (3). This empirical result is supplemented by the theoretical deduction that the two records are linked by their common dependence on rates of continental weathering and magmatic activity. The assumption that CO2 levels fall with the former and rise with the latter then indicates that an appropriate average of the two records should reflect the long-term fluctuations of the partial pressure of atmospheric CO2. The CO2 signal derived from this analysis represents fluctuations at time scales greater than about 10 million years (My). Comparison with the geologic record of climatic variations (18) reveals no obvious correspondence.
SOURCE
Take-home message: Be wary of proxies -- JR
Are green power programs a scam?
A touch of skepticism below from the Leftist "Mother Jones" -- asking: Are you paying for renewable energy, or just a bunch of hot air?
THE TWISTING TURBINES on the Columbia River Gorge ridges were one of the first things my husband and I noticed en route from Baltimore to our new house in Oregon. So a few weeks later, when a hawker at the farmers market urged me-with a $5 token for free veggies and a postcard with pictures of children lounging in front of local windmills-to sign up for a renewable energy program called Blue Sky, I didn't hesitate. For less than an extra $10 a month, my utility, Pacific Power, would supply our home with electricity from wind turbines instead of coal.
But it turns out ditching dirty energy is more complicated than that hawker would have me believe. From the windmill postcard, you'd think my premium would go straight to local projects. Not quite: True, Pacific Power operates one wind farm in Oregon, but that's largely because the state mandates that utilities get 25 percent of their power from renewables by 2025. My well-meaning purchase has little to do with those windmills. Instead, Pacific Power hands my Blue Sky money over to companies that buy renewable energy certificates (RECs) from wind farms, mostly in other states, and other renewable projects like methane-burning landfills. Consumers need to understand that the electricity "is not going from the windmill on the ridge to your toaster," says Pacific Power spokesman Tom Gauntt. Michael Gillenwater, a Princeton researcher who codeveloped the EPA's carbon emissions tracking system, says it's more like donating to a cause. "What you are doing is subsidizing the market for renewable energy."
Pacific Power says our premium "avoided the release of 897 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions into the air...equivalent to not driving 909 miles." But it's hard to verify those numbers, says Stanford professor Michael Wara, who studies carbon markets. "You don't have an overseeing regulator ensuring that the claims made are backed up." Green-e, a third-party certification program, ensures that my RECs come from relatively new projects and aren't double-counted to meet state mandates. But Gillenwater says its "additionality" test isn't thorough enough to prove I paid for an emission reduction that wouldn't have happened anyway.
Experts say that RECs like mine can make renewable projects more profitable, but they play a much smaller role than government subsidies. (Disclosure: My father recently invested in a wood-chip-fueled electricity plant in Florida, and he said RECs sweetened that deal.) Gillenwater says most projects would have produced the energy regardless of whether consumers like me pitched in-in 2008, for example, Pacific Power bought a third of my RECs from two Puget Sound Energy wind farms built in 2005. (A spokesman says the projects' planners didn't count on revenue from residential RECs in their budget.) The remaining two-thirds were purchased from other projects, including a landfill-gas plant in Utah. Only 1 percent came from solar.
RECs, mandates, additionality-my head was spinning like those windmills, which were seeming further away. To make matters worse, in 2008, only 67 percent of my Blue Sky bucks purchased RECs; the remaining 33 percent was spent on staff and publicity. On average, 19 percent of green programs' revenues go to marketing, but at small utilities that percentage is far greater.
Utilities insist that the promotion is necessary, since voluntary green power programs work better when lots of people participate. Nationwide, only about a million customers shell out for green power-with corporations, governments, and universities buying the bulk of it. In 2008, residential customers made up only one-quarter of green power purchases.
So what's a consumer to do? Even with their problems, RECs are "one of the simplest and most direct ways to support renewable technologies," says Jeff Deyette, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Premiums can provide that extra profit margin to make renewable projects competitive with fossil fuels. And some utilities are experimenting with other models. If I had enrolled in Pacific Power's Blue Sky Block program, for twice what I pay now, 41 percent of my money would have funded local solar arrays and a geothermal test project-and only 25 percent would have gone to overhead. Or instead, I could spend my premium on efficiency upgrades in my new home: sealing leaks, insulating, and replacing drafty windows. It would just take more time and elbow grease than checking a box.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Wednesday, February 03, 2010
THE SO-CALLED "OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE"
An email from Norm Kalmanovitch [kalhnd@shaw.ca]
In 1971, Rasool and Schneider published an article with the following abstract:
While there is speculation as to whether James Hansen contributed to this article with verification from his climate models; it is without question that Hansen was aware that the Earth had stopped warming in 1942 and that the world had been cooling up to the time of the publishing of this 1971 paper.
In April 1975 Newsweek published an article "The Cooling World" which gives a fascinating look at the climate issue from a perspective before politics and distortion of facts became involved. There was no questioning of the cooling in 1975 so one must assume that Hansen was fully aware that the world cooled from 1942 to 1975 before global warming returned in 1976.
This simple fact is somewhat problematic for Hansen and the entire global warming industry, because the physical record shows that the rapid increase in CO2 emissions did not start until after the Second World War (with the rapid increase in post war industrialization), and prior to that, as the world warmed rapidly from 1910 to 1942, there was only a minor increase in CO2 emissions.
In 1910 CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were 3.5gt/year and increased to only 4.0gt/year by 1942. By 1975, as the world cooled, CO2 emissions jumped to 20.0gt/year. (And emissions have been increasing ever since). For sixty five years from 1910 to 1975 there was absolutely no correlation of global temperature with increasing CO2 emissions, yet in 1988 after just 13 years of concurrent increases in both global temperature and CO2 emissions, Hansen created a forcing parameter for his climate models that was based firstly on the assumption that CO2 emissions were the prime source for the observed increase in atmospheric CO2, and secondly that there was a direct causal relationship between these emissions driven increases and global warming. Essentially the climate model projections are based on a correlation that is only valid for thirteen of the seventy eight years from 1910 to 1988.
The Hadley CRU record shows that the Earth cooled from about 1880 to 1910 as CO2 emissions first started to increase from industrial activity, adding another thirty years to the time when the correlation of CO2 emissions and global warming was not valid. In essence the so called "overwhelming evidence" that global warming is caused by CO2 emissions from fossil fuels has no basis in reality, as there was no correlation of emissions with global warming from 1880 to 1975, and only correlation for 13 years from 1975 to 1988 when this correlation formed the basis for the forcing parameter of the climate models which projected catastrophic global warming from the increasing CO2 emissions.
This is the sum total of the "overwhelming evidence" that has created the Kyoto Protocol with its economically destructive initiatives, that are not only killing the economy but killing people as their food is being converted to biofuels for carbon credits as part of these Kyoto Initiatives.
All that was needed to prevent this calamity was for the peer review committee to demand verification for the derivation of the forcing parameter used in the climate models before allowing publication in 1988. Without this single article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research global warming would never have become an issue and the IPCC would never have been formed.
WHY IT MAY BE CRUCIAL TO STOP LOOKING AT CARBON DIOXIDE AS PUBLIC ENEMY #1
(Below is a sequel to a note by Pierre Jutras entitled "Carbon dioxide isn't the villain it's made out to be", which was published as a web-exclusive comment in Canada's "Globe and Mail" on December 7th of 2006. The sequel was not published, unsurprisingly, but is now reproduced here. Pierre Jutras is Associate Professor, Department of Geology, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada)
The deep geological record is quite clear: the global ecosystem thrives when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are high, and suffers when they are low. Because these now infamous gas molecules stood out as the good guys throughout geological history, saving the day each time they show up in large numbers, and because today's low CO2 budget is reminiscent of the worst page in life's history (the late Palaeozoic), reasonable doubt should be given to the alarmist scenarios that are currently provided by most climate modelers. Apart from obvious effects such as sea-level rise, current predictions for a CO2-induced greenhouse effect are not well supported by the geological record, which casts serious doubt on their overall accuracy.
It is wrong to believe that CO2-induced global warming will result in a temperature increase for all regions of the globe. The absence of desert conditions during greenhouse ages (a fact provided by the geological record that is poorly known outside of geology circles) suggests that profound changes occur in sub-tropical latitudes due to CO2-induced global warming, which may in fact result in substantial cooling for this specific latitudinal range. Due to the dynamics of the Hadley cells, moisture is currently conveyed from sub-tropical (10ø to 30ø) to equatorial latitudes (0ø to 10ø), which explains why the former is mainly characterized by deserts while the latter hosts rain forest. Due to this, sub-tropical latitudes are currently much warmer than equatorial latitudes due to the greater cloud cover in the latter region, which allows less solar radiation to reach the ground.
Somehow (perhaps due to the establishment of a less steep vertical gradient in temperature, which would effectively change the dynamics of Hadley cells), moisture and heat become better distributed during greenhouse ages and sub-tropical deserts cease to exist. It is very likely that tropical storms would subside as well, as they are also the products of excessive heat in the dry, sub-tropical latitudes, whereas equatorial areas are devoid of them. The equatorial region is in effect a "shelter from the storm", as suggested by data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In other words, although alarmist research on global warming pictures a greenhouse Earth as Dante's Hell, the geological record rather presents it as a worldwide Garden of Eden, with no temperature extremes.
It is somewhat disconcerting that the rise of carbon dioxide levels has been somehow established as the greatest environmental threat faced by humanity, although the pros and cons of this rise have never been properly assessed. Most scientific assessments on the issue of global warming only bring into focus its negative aspects and are therefore biased. As a result of this biased propaganda, which portrays carbon dioxide as the main evil of modern times, it is now considered by most as a blasphemy to dare bring forward any data that happen to place the accused in a good light.
It is well-known and non-controversial that the biosphere was in much better shape during the Cretaceous, when carbon dioxide levels were several times higher than today. Of course, whenever there is a change in external conditions, there are winners and losers. If crop species are doing better, chances are that pest species are not doing so well, and vice-versa. During the Cretaceous greenhouse age, benthic (bottom-dwelling) species were the main losers, as the oceans became permanently stratified, bringing anaerobic conditions on the deep seafloor. However, the hardships of benthic fauna, a minute fraction of the world's biomass and biodiversity, were largely outdone by sheer happiness in the pelagic (water-column-dwelling) and terrestrial realms.
Most agree that, whether or not it is true that the current rise in atmospheric CO2 is detrimental, "better be safe than sorry" and work at curbing down emissions. Not necessarily. It all depends on what method is used to curb down emissions. For instance, many environmentalists are turning to biodiesel fuels to lower their contribution to global warming. It is sad to say that such environmentally-responsible people may in fact pollute more than less concerned citizens. However, if you remove carbon dioxide from the equation, they certainly do. Biodiesel is a very impure fuel that doesn't burn nearly as well as refined gasoline. As a result, it emits much greater amounts of particulates, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide, which are "true" pollutants. If everyone switched to biodiesel fuel, cities would soon become unlivable due to a quick rise in these atmospheric pollutants. In contrast, carbon dioxide is "not" a pollutant. All it does is feed plants and help to maintain solar heat in the lower atmosphere. While so much international effort is put forward to deal with the "carbon dioxide case", less notorious environmental threats get a chance to stay out of the spotlight and thrive on the diversion (when did you last hear about acid rain?).
Another reason why we should give carbon dioxide a fair trial and a chance to revoke itself as public enemy #1 is the fact that it is a very strong opponent to tackle. The economic drawbacks of the ongoing climate war are astronomic, especially for developing countries. The widespread switch to "biofuel" farming is also creating a food crisis.
Finally, before putting in place enormous international efforts such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord, it would have been preferable to derive proper estimates on which prospect is to be most feared, global warming or global cooling? Ice sheets have been intermittently covering most of North America and northern Europe over the past 2.5 million years. Just as winter and summer, glacial advances and retreats are clocked with orbital cycles. The "summer solstice" of this interglacial cycle (warm eccentricity peak in the Milankovitch cycles) is already five thousand years behind us, and we are now heading towards the next winter. The current human-induced rise in atmospheric CO2 may be slowing down global cooling, but it is very unlikely that temperatures in the "Milankovitch winter" (we are now in the "Milankovitch autumn") will ever exceed those of the "Milankovitch summer".
In conclusion, with the parallel threat of orbitally-induced global cooling, a more sophisticated and less biased assessment of climate evolution and its consequences for the global ecosystem is needed to better guide intervention strategies. In other words, the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord may be premature and possibly misguided international interventions, however well-intentioned their initiators and promoters might be.
Crooked "scientist" hid flaws in Chinese data
Now the dodgy Chinese data is finally getting a bit of attention -- even from "The Guardian" (below)
It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China? But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN's top climate science body.
It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.
The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.
Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990. That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?
It is well-known that the concrete, bricks and asphalt of urban areas absorb more heat than the countryside. They result in cities being warmer than the countryside, especially at night. So the question is whether rising mercury is simply a result of thermometers once in the countryside gradually finding themselves in expanding urban areas.
The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then.
The paper became a key reference source for the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - including a chapter in the 2007 one co-authored by Jones. It said that globally "the urbanisation influence . is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale". In other words, it is tiny.
But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim. They were convinced that the urban effect was much bigger, even though it might not change the overall story of global warming too much. After all, two-thirds of the planet is covered by ocean, and the oceans are warming, too.
But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be "unduly burdensome", they concluded that he was covering up the error.
And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud. He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.
Keenan told the Guardian: "The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres"; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that "there were 'few if any changes' to locations is a fabrication". He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.
The emails, which first emerged online in November last year following a hack of the university's computer systems that is being investigated by police, reveal that Jones was hurt, angry and uncertain about the allegations. "It is all malicious . I seem to be a marked man now," he wrote in April 2007.
Another email from him said: "My problem is I don't know the best course of action. I know I'm on the right side and honest, but I seem to be telling myself this more often recently!" An American colleague, and frequent contributor to the leaked emails, Dr Mike Mann at Pennsylvania State University, advised him: "This crowd of charlatans look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised. The last thing you want to do is help them by feeding the fire. Best thing is to ignore them completely."
Another colleague, Kevin Trenberth at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, urged a fightback. "The response should try to somehow label these guys and [sic] lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database."
In August 2007, Keenan submitted a formal complaint about Wang to Wang's employers. The university launched an inquiry. Reporting in May 2008, it found "no evidence of the alleged fabrication of results" and exonerated him. But it did not publish its detailed findings, and refused to give a copy to Keenan.
By then, Keenan had published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. The paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones's colleagues about Wang's missing data - and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.
Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: "It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect."
Wigley was concerned partly because he had been director of the CRU when the original paper was published in 1990. As he told Jones later, in 2009: "The buck should eventually stop with me."
Wigley put to Jones the allegations made by the sceptics. "Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist." This is believed to be a report from the US department of energy, which obtained the original Chinese temperature data.
Wang's defence to the university inquiry says that he had got the Chinese temperature data from a Chinese colleague, although she is not an author on the 1990 Nature paper. Wang's defence explains that the colleague had lost her notes on many station locations during a series of office moves. Nonetheless, "based on her recollections", she could provide information on 41 of the 49 stations. In all, that meant that no fewer than 51 of the 84 stations had been moved during the 30-year study period, 25 had not moved, and eight she could not recollect.
Wang, however, maintained to the university that the 1990 paper's claim that "few, if any" stations had moved was true. The inquiry apparently agreed.
Wigley, in his May 2009 email to Jones, said of Wang: "I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I would .not be surprised if he screwed up here . Were you taking W-C W on trust? Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it's not too late." There is no evidence of any doubts being raised over Wang's previous work.
Jones told the Guardian he was not able to comment on the allegations. Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more. Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them."
The story has a startling postscript. In 2008, Jones prepared a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research re-examining temperatures in eastern China. It found that, far from being negligible, the urban heat phenomenon was responsible for 40% of the warming seen in eastern China between 1951 and 2004.
This does not flatly contradict Jones's 1990 paper. The timeframe for the new analysis is different. But it raises serious new questions about one of the most widely referenced papers on global warming, and about the IPCC's reliance on its conclusions.
SOURCE
BRITAIN'S VERY OWN INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU TAKES ON CLIMATEGATE
It was the Russians. Or possibly the Chinese. No, wait, it was the Americans. Yes, our very own version of Inspector Clouseau is on the case of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Yesterday Sir David King, Tony Blair's former chief scientific advisor, told this newspaper: "It was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies... there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency." However, King goes on to suggest that the expense of such an operation would be too great for the entire Russian state to undertake: "In terms of the expense, there is the American lobby system, which is a very likely source of finance, so the finger must point to them."
And why is it that Sir David thinks that the Kremlin joined forces with unspecified "American agencies" to leak emails from the UEA's Climatic Research Unit? He claims it was to undermine the UN's Copenhagen climate Conference (as if it hadn't been doomed anyway). The more interesting question is why the content of the emails might have been thought to have such an effect, as King apparently believes they did.
Perhaps - let's make a wild stab - it was because they revealed that the unit described as the world's most authoritative source of evidence for the threat of man-made climate change had been trying to prevent the methodology behind its predictions from being made public via the Freedom of Information Act.
Perhaps it was also because the emails showed how some members of the UEA team had lobbied scientific journals to block the publishing of papers that dissented from their own opinion about the entirely anthropogenic cause of allegedly unprecedented global temperatures; and perhaps it was also because it contained such emails as this one, from the head of climate analysis of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it's a travesty that we can't... we cannot account for what is happening in the climate system."
For Sir David King, clearly, the travesty is that the public should be allowed to have a glimpse of the true level of uncertainty within climate science. It is astonishing arrogance on his part. His intervention is on the same moral level as any MP who declared that the most important issue about the expenses claims within the Palace of Westminster was how it came to be that the disc on which they were stored was passed to the press. In fact, no MP was that arrogant - or that stupid.
As it happens, we now know that disc was leaked by someone legitimately in possession of it - a whistleblower who was appalled by what he saw, and thought that the public should know. For some reason, it has not occurred to Sir David King that the UEA emails might have been accessed and then leaked by an insider shocked at what he had discovered. Remember also that they were in any case all being collated following a request under the Freedom of Information Act; perhaps this insider became aware that the now suspended head of the Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, had asked colleagues to delete certain emails, and was determined that Jones should not be allowed to get away with it.
Even if the leak were not the work of a whistleblower from inside the UEA, it is still ludicrous scaremongering on Sir David's part to declare that this must have been a concerted operation by one or more foreign intelligence services. Is he unaware that an autistic loner, Gary McKinnon, is facing extradition to the US, after he hacked into some of the Pentagon's most sensitive codes using nothing more than a domestic dial-up internet connection? Yet, according to Sir David King, such a non-secure academic database as the University of East Anglia's could only have been penetrated by SMERSH, sorry, the FSB, sorry, the CIA....oh, whatever.
On the wider issue of climate change, Sir David has form for scaremongering. In 2004 he declared that if the world did not act to reduce its Co2 emissions, by the end of the century Antarctica would be the planet's only inhabitable continent. It is, by the way, most welcome that his successor as chief scientist, John Beddington, has an altogether more...well, scientific approach. Last week Beddington said: "I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper [climate] scepticism...there is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction...there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves."
Beddington was speaking in the wake of a number of damaging revelations about the whole process by which the International Panel On Climate Change comes up with its terrifying forecasts. The most notable was the admission by the IPCC that its 2007 report's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would "disappear by the year 2035" was based on a misunderstanding (let's not be cynical) by the World Wildlife Fund, which was itself citing a magazine article, which was in turn quoting a single Indian glaciologist, who in his turn subsequently claimed that he hadn't said any such thing.
Yet when a number of the IPCC's critics questioned the astonishing claim that the Himalayas would be free of ice by 2035, the IPCC's chairman dismissed them as "voodoo scientists." Among those alleged "voodoo" practitioners was the Indian Government. Last week the Indian Environment Minister, Jairiam Ramesh, welcomed the IPCC's retraction of its most headline-grabbing claim: "The IPCC's claim that [Himalayan] glaciers will vanish by 2035 was not based on an iota of scientific evidence." One can understand Mr Ramesh's fury. About two billion people depend on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers. If they had believed what the IPCC said, then we could have witnessed a panic movement of population of unprecedented scale.
And where does our own climate change minister, Ed Miliband, stand on this? Last month he harrumphed that "We must not let the sceptics pass off political opinion as scientific fact... the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of South Asia could put hundreds of millions of people at risk of drought. Our security is at stake."
Now that Miliband stands revealed as someone who passed off political opinion as scientific fact, what does he say? Under the headline "Miliband declares war on climate change sceptics", the minister was reported this weekend as follows:" I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture... when the next IPCC report comes out it will suggest that there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied."
A mistake? The single most significant and newsworthy claim in the IPCC's report is shown to be complete garbage, undermining confidence in the whole process, and it's just "a mistake"? One is reminded of Tony Blair's response to the Chilcot committee last week, when asked about his utterly discredited claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that would take just 45 minutes to launch. A mere detail, said Blair: it was the media's fault for overstating its significance within the wider picture.
After non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the British Government now wants to terrify us - and the world - with scaremongering about "man-made" weather of mass destruction. That's the scandal - not whether someone has hacked into an East Anglian computer.
SOURCE
Junkscience: Climategate Distortion of Temperature Data
By S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist
We discuss here in some detail the way in which warming trends were introduced into the IPCC Report-when in fact they did not exist or were extremely small. We focus on the period 1979 to 1997. There was cooling up to 1976; in 1998 there was a super-El-Nino and no subsequent warming. Our discussion is in three parts: (1) a `bottoms-up' approach; (2) the `top-down' approach; and next week I shall discuss (3) the treatment of sea surface temperatures (SST).
Bottoms-Up Distortion of Temperature Data
The Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU-UEA), under the direction of Dr. Philip Jones, collected data from weather stations from around the world. These are almost all land-based stations, showing a high concentration in the United States and Western Europe and a lower concentration elsewhere-with many parts of the globe hardly covered by reliable stations.
There are a variety of problems with such data, and the investigators were aware of most of them. Many stations produce useless data, either because of inadequate maintenance, or because of their location. Anthony Watts (in his WUWT blog) has shown that even stations in the USA were badly placed and subject to local warming influences that were not adequately corrected.
The surface of the earth is then divided into grid boxes, usually five degrees by five degrees. When there are several stations in a grid box, the investigators would choose those they considered most reliable-which in many cases meant urban stations, or stations at airports, that are well maintained. However, because of their location, they generally are subject to `urban heat-island' (UHI) effects, a local warming that increases with population and urban growth over time and suggests a temperature trend of a global nature. The investigators tried various ways to eliminate such local UHI trends, but were not very successful.
The problem was greatly exacerbated by the closing of over half the world's weather stations between 1970 and 2000 (see NIPCC Summary, Fig 12-which in most cases removed rural stations but also stations from higher latitudes and altitudes that tended to show a lower warming trend or no warming trend at all. It should be obvious therefore that this drastic change in the sampling population would introduce a fictitious warming trend which is an artifact of the change. E. Michael Smith and Joseph D'Aleo have documented in some detail how such artificial temperature trends could be produced even when there was no global trend.
The Top-Down (TD) Approach
In many ways, the `Top-Down' (TD) approach to derive the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) is to be preferred over `bottom-up' (deriving GMST by collecting data from weather stations and sea surface readings). The TD approach relies primarily on the data from weather satellites, the only truly global measuring system, using a single microwave sounding (MSU) instrument and therefore independent of the vagaries of individual weather stations and their thermometers.
There are of course certain disadvantages: The MSU cannot measure temperatures at different levels of the atmosphere but derives instead a `weighted mean ` of the vertical temperature profile; the times of observation are fixed by the orbit of the satellite; a change of satellite, and MSU instrument, requires an overlap in operating time to permit a recalibration. Nevertheless, by comparing different view angles, one can change the weight factors and obtain a temperature value for `Lower Troposphere.' The University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) group has shown good agreement of UAH results with those of radiosondes from weather balloons.
As early as 1997, I noticed a disparity between temperature trends of satellites and surface trends, esp. in the tropics. (See Fig 9 in Hot Talk, Cold Science, 1997) The troposphere trends (between 1979 and 1995) were close to zero or even slightly negative, while surface trends showed a warming of about 0.05 deg per decade. This disparity is just the reverse of what one would expect from GH models [see IPCC-SAR]-namely a positive (warming) troposphere trend up to twice as large as the surface trend.
In addition, I noticed that the proxy data to which I had access showed no surface warming (tree-ring data of Jacoby et al (Fig 16 in HTCS) and ice core data of Dahl-Jensen et al]. I tried very hard to obtain more proxy data but was not successful. For example, I noticed that Michael Mann's infamous hockeystick graph did not extend beyond 1979 and suspected that his proxy temperatures diverged from the instrumented surface results. Yet when I wrote to Mann about post-1980 proxy data, I received only a brusque negative reply. Thanks to `Climategate' we now know, what I had then suspected, i.e., that Mann and Jones were engaged in a scheme to "hide the decline [in post-1979 proxy temperatures]."
To sum up: Both the satellite results and the proxy data tell us that the claimed rise of surface temperature between 1979 and 1997, shown by IPCC, is probably much smaller or even non-existent.
SOURCE
Brazil to give the Greenies a black eye?
Renewable energy? No thanks, say the Greenies
Brazil has approved the controversial construction of a giant hydroelectric dam in the heart of the Amazon, defying a 20-year protest by indigenous and environmental campaigners who say that the project will devastate the surrounding rainforest and threaten the survival of local tribes. The Belo Monte project on the Xingu river, an Amazon tributary, was started in the 1990s but abandoned amid widespread protests at home and abroad. The rock star Sting led a campaign against the plan with tribal leaders, and revisited Brazil in November last year to urge the Government to consider the impact of deforestation on greenhouse gas levels and global warming.
The $17billion dam in the northern state of Par will be the world's third-largest and could provide electricity to 23million homes, a supply that the Government says is vital to the country's economic growth. Critics argue that the flooding of 500 sq km of rainforest will damage fish stocks and wildlife and force the displacement of indigenous peoples.
Carlos Minc, the Environment Minister, said on Monday that the land flooded would be a fraction of the 5,000 sq km originally planned. "The environmental impact exists but it has been weighed up, calculated and reduced," he said. "Not one Indian on indigenous land will be displaced." However, groups on land not demarcated as tribal territory - a distinction often labelled a get-out clause by indigenous campaigners - still stand to lose their homes.
Mr Minc said that they would be compensated. Indigenous groups complain that they were not properly consulted over the project, which Megaron Tuxucumarrae, a chief of the Kayapo tribe, said would destroy the environment that his people had taken care of for millennia. "We are opposed to dams on the Xingu, and will fight to protect our river," he said.
The state-run company Eletrobras is said to be eyeing the project, but a contract has not yet been awarded. The winning company will have to spend $803million on measures to minimise its impact and resettle an estimated 12,000 people.
Critics said that the Government had underestimated the potential impact in its attempt to meet political ends in an election year. Even within the Government, the project has been so contentious that in November two senior officials from Ibama, Brazil's environmental agency, resigned, citing political pressure.
With general elections looming in October, the Government is under pressure to deal with energy infrastructure problems that resulted in large swathes of the country, including Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, being plunged into darkness in November.
Engineering experts have questioned the efficiency of the 11-gigawatt dam, which would be outstripped in size only by China's Three Gorges and Itaipu on the Brazil-Paraguay border.
Francisco Hernandez, an electrical engineer and joint co-ordinator of a group of 40 specialists who analysed the project, said that the dam would generate little electricity during the three to four-month dry season. Describing it as a scheme of "doubtful engineering viability", he said Belo Monte was an extremely complex project "that would interrupt the flow of water courses over an enormous area, requiring excavation of earth and rocks on the scale of that carried out for digging the Panama Canal". Up to 70 dams, roads, gas pipelines and power grids worth more than $30billion are to be built to tap the region's raw materials and transport agricultural products.
The announcement drew a furious reaction from environmental groups around the world. Aviva Imhof, the campaigns director of International Rivers, described it as a "foolish investment", and said that by investing in energy efficiency, Brazil could cut demand by 40 per cent over the nextdecade and save $19billion. "The amount of energy saved would be equivalent to 14 Belo Monte dams," she said. Fiona Watson, research director of the UK-based Survival International, said the dam would be a catastrophe for indigenous people. "The Brazilian Government has driven through the dam with a cavalier disregard to indigenous peoples' rights," she said. "Development in Brazil comes at an unacceptable price - the destruction of whole tribes."
SOURCE
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An email from Norm Kalmanovitch [kalhnd@shaw.ca]
In 1971, Rasool and Schneider published an article with the following abstract:
Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate
Effects on the global temperature of large increases in carbon dioxide and aerosol densities in the atmosphere of Earth have been computed. It is found that, although the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of temperature increase
diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For aerosols, however, the net effect of increase in density is to reduce the surface temperature of Earth. Because of the exponential dependence of the backscattering, the rate of temperature decrease is augmented with increasing aerosol content. An increase by only a factor of 4 in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 ø K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.
While there is speculation as to whether James Hansen contributed to this article with verification from his climate models; it is without question that Hansen was aware that the Earth had stopped warming in 1942 and that the world had been cooling up to the time of the publishing of this 1971 paper.
In April 1975 Newsweek published an article "The Cooling World" which gives a fascinating look at the climate issue from a perspective before politics and distortion of facts became involved. There was no questioning of the cooling in 1975 so one must assume that Hansen was fully aware that the world cooled from 1942 to 1975 before global warming returned in 1976.
This simple fact is somewhat problematic for Hansen and the entire global warming industry, because the physical record shows that the rapid increase in CO2 emissions did not start until after the Second World War (with the rapid increase in post war industrialization), and prior to that, as the world warmed rapidly from 1910 to 1942, there was only a minor increase in CO2 emissions.
In 1910 CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were 3.5gt/year and increased to only 4.0gt/year by 1942. By 1975, as the world cooled, CO2 emissions jumped to 20.0gt/year. (And emissions have been increasing ever since). For sixty five years from 1910 to 1975 there was absolutely no correlation of global temperature with increasing CO2 emissions, yet in 1988 after just 13 years of concurrent increases in both global temperature and CO2 emissions, Hansen created a forcing parameter for his climate models that was based firstly on the assumption that CO2 emissions were the prime source for the observed increase in atmospheric CO2, and secondly that there was a direct causal relationship between these emissions driven increases and global warming. Essentially the climate model projections are based on a correlation that is only valid for thirteen of the seventy eight years from 1910 to 1988.
The Hadley CRU record shows that the Earth cooled from about 1880 to 1910 as CO2 emissions first started to increase from industrial activity, adding another thirty years to the time when the correlation of CO2 emissions and global warming was not valid. In essence the so called "overwhelming evidence" that global warming is caused by CO2 emissions from fossil fuels has no basis in reality, as there was no correlation of emissions with global warming from 1880 to 1975, and only correlation for 13 years from 1975 to 1988 when this correlation formed the basis for the forcing parameter of the climate models which projected catastrophic global warming from the increasing CO2 emissions.
This is the sum total of the "overwhelming evidence" that has created the Kyoto Protocol with its economically destructive initiatives, that are not only killing the economy but killing people as their food is being converted to biofuels for carbon credits as part of these Kyoto Initiatives.
All that was needed to prevent this calamity was for the peer review committee to demand verification for the derivation of the forcing parameter used in the climate models before allowing publication in 1988. Without this single article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research global warming would never have become an issue and the IPCC would never have been formed.
WHY IT MAY BE CRUCIAL TO STOP LOOKING AT CARBON DIOXIDE AS PUBLIC ENEMY #1
(Below is a sequel to a note by Pierre Jutras entitled "Carbon dioxide isn't the villain it's made out to be", which was published as a web-exclusive comment in Canada's "Globe and Mail" on December 7th of 2006. The sequel was not published, unsurprisingly, but is now reproduced here. Pierre Jutras is Associate Professor, Department of Geology, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada)
The deep geological record is quite clear: the global ecosystem thrives when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are high, and suffers when they are low. Because these now infamous gas molecules stood out as the good guys throughout geological history, saving the day each time they show up in large numbers, and because today's low CO2 budget is reminiscent of the worst page in life's history (the late Palaeozoic), reasonable doubt should be given to the alarmist scenarios that are currently provided by most climate modelers. Apart from obvious effects such as sea-level rise, current predictions for a CO2-induced greenhouse effect are not well supported by the geological record, which casts serious doubt on their overall accuracy.
It is wrong to believe that CO2-induced global warming will result in a temperature increase for all regions of the globe. The absence of desert conditions during greenhouse ages (a fact provided by the geological record that is poorly known outside of geology circles) suggests that profound changes occur in sub-tropical latitudes due to CO2-induced global warming, which may in fact result in substantial cooling for this specific latitudinal range. Due to the dynamics of the Hadley cells, moisture is currently conveyed from sub-tropical (10ø to 30ø) to equatorial latitudes (0ø to 10ø), which explains why the former is mainly characterized by deserts while the latter hosts rain forest. Due to this, sub-tropical latitudes are currently much warmer than equatorial latitudes due to the greater cloud cover in the latter region, which allows less solar radiation to reach the ground.
Somehow (perhaps due to the establishment of a less steep vertical gradient in temperature, which would effectively change the dynamics of Hadley cells), moisture and heat become better distributed during greenhouse ages and sub-tropical deserts cease to exist. It is very likely that tropical storms would subside as well, as they are also the products of excessive heat in the dry, sub-tropical latitudes, whereas equatorial areas are devoid of them. The equatorial region is in effect a "shelter from the storm", as suggested by data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In other words, although alarmist research on global warming pictures a greenhouse Earth as Dante's Hell, the geological record rather presents it as a worldwide Garden of Eden, with no temperature extremes.
It is somewhat disconcerting that the rise of carbon dioxide levels has been somehow established as the greatest environmental threat faced by humanity, although the pros and cons of this rise have never been properly assessed. Most scientific assessments on the issue of global warming only bring into focus its negative aspects and are therefore biased. As a result of this biased propaganda, which portrays carbon dioxide as the main evil of modern times, it is now considered by most as a blasphemy to dare bring forward any data that happen to place the accused in a good light.
It is well-known and non-controversial that the biosphere was in much better shape during the Cretaceous, when carbon dioxide levels were several times higher than today. Of course, whenever there is a change in external conditions, there are winners and losers. If crop species are doing better, chances are that pest species are not doing so well, and vice-versa. During the Cretaceous greenhouse age, benthic (bottom-dwelling) species were the main losers, as the oceans became permanently stratified, bringing anaerobic conditions on the deep seafloor. However, the hardships of benthic fauna, a minute fraction of the world's biomass and biodiversity, were largely outdone by sheer happiness in the pelagic (water-column-dwelling) and terrestrial realms.
Most agree that, whether or not it is true that the current rise in atmospheric CO2 is detrimental, "better be safe than sorry" and work at curbing down emissions. Not necessarily. It all depends on what method is used to curb down emissions. For instance, many environmentalists are turning to biodiesel fuels to lower their contribution to global warming. It is sad to say that such environmentally-responsible people may in fact pollute more than less concerned citizens. However, if you remove carbon dioxide from the equation, they certainly do. Biodiesel is a very impure fuel that doesn't burn nearly as well as refined gasoline. As a result, it emits much greater amounts of particulates, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide, which are "true" pollutants. If everyone switched to biodiesel fuel, cities would soon become unlivable due to a quick rise in these atmospheric pollutants. In contrast, carbon dioxide is "not" a pollutant. All it does is feed plants and help to maintain solar heat in the lower atmosphere. While so much international effort is put forward to deal with the "carbon dioxide case", less notorious environmental threats get a chance to stay out of the spotlight and thrive on the diversion (when did you last hear about acid rain?).
Another reason why we should give carbon dioxide a fair trial and a chance to revoke itself as public enemy #1 is the fact that it is a very strong opponent to tackle. The economic drawbacks of the ongoing climate war are astronomic, especially for developing countries. The widespread switch to "biofuel" farming is also creating a food crisis.
Finally, before putting in place enormous international efforts such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord, it would have been preferable to derive proper estimates on which prospect is to be most feared, global warming or global cooling? Ice sheets have been intermittently covering most of North America and northern Europe over the past 2.5 million years. Just as winter and summer, glacial advances and retreats are clocked with orbital cycles. The "summer solstice" of this interglacial cycle (warm eccentricity peak in the Milankovitch cycles) is already five thousand years behind us, and we are now heading towards the next winter. The current human-induced rise in atmospheric CO2 may be slowing down global cooling, but it is very unlikely that temperatures in the "Milankovitch winter" (we are now in the "Milankovitch autumn") will ever exceed those of the "Milankovitch summer".
In conclusion, with the parallel threat of orbitally-induced global cooling, a more sophisticated and less biased assessment of climate evolution and its consequences for the global ecosystem is needed to better guide intervention strategies. In other words, the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord may be premature and possibly misguided international interventions, however well-intentioned their initiators and promoters might be.
Crooked "scientist" hid flaws in Chinese data
Now the dodgy Chinese data is finally getting a bit of attention -- even from "The Guardian" (below)
It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China? But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN's top climate science body.
It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.
The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.
Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990. That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?
It is well-known that the concrete, bricks and asphalt of urban areas absorb more heat than the countryside. They result in cities being warmer than the countryside, especially at night. So the question is whether rising mercury is simply a result of thermometers once in the countryside gradually finding themselves in expanding urban areas.
The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then.
The paper became a key reference source for the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - including a chapter in the 2007 one co-authored by Jones. It said that globally "the urbanisation influence . is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale". In other words, it is tiny.
But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim. They were convinced that the urban effect was much bigger, even though it might not change the overall story of global warming too much. After all, two-thirds of the planet is covered by ocean, and the oceans are warming, too.
But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be "unduly burdensome", they concluded that he was covering up the error.
And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud. He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.
Keenan told the Guardian: "The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres"; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that "there were 'few if any changes' to locations is a fabrication". He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.
The emails, which first emerged online in November last year following a hack of the university's computer systems that is being investigated by police, reveal that Jones was hurt, angry and uncertain about the allegations. "It is all malicious . I seem to be a marked man now," he wrote in April 2007.
Another email from him said: "My problem is I don't know the best course of action. I know I'm on the right side and honest, but I seem to be telling myself this more often recently!" An American colleague, and frequent contributor to the leaked emails, Dr Mike Mann at Pennsylvania State University, advised him: "This crowd of charlatans look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised. The last thing you want to do is help them by feeding the fire. Best thing is to ignore them completely."
Another colleague, Kevin Trenberth at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, urged a fightback. "The response should try to somehow label these guys and [sic] lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database."
In August 2007, Keenan submitted a formal complaint about Wang to Wang's employers. The university launched an inquiry. Reporting in May 2008, it found "no evidence of the alleged fabrication of results" and exonerated him. But it did not publish its detailed findings, and refused to give a copy to Keenan.
By then, Keenan had published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. The paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones's colleagues about Wang's missing data - and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.
Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: "It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect."
Wigley was concerned partly because he had been director of the CRU when the original paper was published in 1990. As he told Jones later, in 2009: "The buck should eventually stop with me."
Wigley put to Jones the allegations made by the sceptics. "Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist." This is believed to be a report from the US department of energy, which obtained the original Chinese temperature data.
Wang's defence to the university inquiry says that he had got the Chinese temperature data from a Chinese colleague, although she is not an author on the 1990 Nature paper. Wang's defence explains that the colleague had lost her notes on many station locations during a series of office moves. Nonetheless, "based on her recollections", she could provide information on 41 of the 49 stations. In all, that meant that no fewer than 51 of the 84 stations had been moved during the 30-year study period, 25 had not moved, and eight she could not recollect.
Wang, however, maintained to the university that the 1990 paper's claim that "few, if any" stations had moved was true. The inquiry apparently agreed.
Wigley, in his May 2009 email to Jones, said of Wang: "I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I would .not be surprised if he screwed up here . Were you taking W-C W on trust? Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it's not too late." There is no evidence of any doubts being raised over Wang's previous work.
Jones told the Guardian he was not able to comment on the allegations. Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more. Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them."
The story has a startling postscript. In 2008, Jones prepared a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research re-examining temperatures in eastern China. It found that, far from being negligible, the urban heat phenomenon was responsible for 40% of the warming seen in eastern China between 1951 and 2004.
This does not flatly contradict Jones's 1990 paper. The timeframe for the new analysis is different. But it raises serious new questions about one of the most widely referenced papers on global warming, and about the IPCC's reliance on its conclusions.
SOURCE
BRITAIN'S VERY OWN INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU TAKES ON CLIMATEGATE
It was the Russians. Or possibly the Chinese. No, wait, it was the Americans. Yes, our very own version of Inspector Clouseau is on the case of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Yesterday Sir David King, Tony Blair's former chief scientific advisor, told this newspaper: "It was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies... there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency." However, King goes on to suggest that the expense of such an operation would be too great for the entire Russian state to undertake: "In terms of the expense, there is the American lobby system, which is a very likely source of finance, so the finger must point to them."
And why is it that Sir David thinks that the Kremlin joined forces with unspecified "American agencies" to leak emails from the UEA's Climatic Research Unit? He claims it was to undermine the UN's Copenhagen climate Conference (as if it hadn't been doomed anyway). The more interesting question is why the content of the emails might have been thought to have such an effect, as King apparently believes they did.
Perhaps - let's make a wild stab - it was because they revealed that the unit described as the world's most authoritative source of evidence for the threat of man-made climate change had been trying to prevent the methodology behind its predictions from being made public via the Freedom of Information Act.
Perhaps it was also because the emails showed how some members of the UEA team had lobbied scientific journals to block the publishing of papers that dissented from their own opinion about the entirely anthropogenic cause of allegedly unprecedented global temperatures; and perhaps it was also because it contained such emails as this one, from the head of climate analysis of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it's a travesty that we can't... we cannot account for what is happening in the climate system."
For Sir David King, clearly, the travesty is that the public should be allowed to have a glimpse of the true level of uncertainty within climate science. It is astonishing arrogance on his part. His intervention is on the same moral level as any MP who declared that the most important issue about the expenses claims within the Palace of Westminster was how it came to be that the disc on which they were stored was passed to the press. In fact, no MP was that arrogant - or that stupid.
As it happens, we now know that disc was leaked by someone legitimately in possession of it - a whistleblower who was appalled by what he saw, and thought that the public should know. For some reason, it has not occurred to Sir David King that the UEA emails might have been accessed and then leaked by an insider shocked at what he had discovered. Remember also that they were in any case all being collated following a request under the Freedom of Information Act; perhaps this insider became aware that the now suspended head of the Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, had asked colleagues to delete certain emails, and was determined that Jones should not be allowed to get away with it.
Even if the leak were not the work of a whistleblower from inside the UEA, it is still ludicrous scaremongering on Sir David's part to declare that this must have been a concerted operation by one or more foreign intelligence services. Is he unaware that an autistic loner, Gary McKinnon, is facing extradition to the US, after he hacked into some of the Pentagon's most sensitive codes using nothing more than a domestic dial-up internet connection? Yet, according to Sir David King, such a non-secure academic database as the University of East Anglia's could only have been penetrated by SMERSH, sorry, the FSB, sorry, the CIA....oh, whatever.
On the wider issue of climate change, Sir David has form for scaremongering. In 2004 he declared that if the world did not act to reduce its Co2 emissions, by the end of the century Antarctica would be the planet's only inhabitable continent. It is, by the way, most welcome that his successor as chief scientist, John Beddington, has an altogether more...well, scientific approach. Last week Beddington said: "I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper [climate] scepticism...there is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction...there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves."
Beddington was speaking in the wake of a number of damaging revelations about the whole process by which the International Panel On Climate Change comes up with its terrifying forecasts. The most notable was the admission by the IPCC that its 2007 report's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would "disappear by the year 2035" was based on a misunderstanding (let's not be cynical) by the World Wildlife Fund, which was itself citing a magazine article, which was in turn quoting a single Indian glaciologist, who in his turn subsequently claimed that he hadn't said any such thing.
Yet when a number of the IPCC's critics questioned the astonishing claim that the Himalayas would be free of ice by 2035, the IPCC's chairman dismissed them as "voodoo scientists." Among those alleged "voodoo" practitioners was the Indian Government. Last week the Indian Environment Minister, Jairiam Ramesh, welcomed the IPCC's retraction of its most headline-grabbing claim: "The IPCC's claim that [Himalayan] glaciers will vanish by 2035 was not based on an iota of scientific evidence." One can understand Mr Ramesh's fury. About two billion people depend on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers. If they had believed what the IPCC said, then we could have witnessed a panic movement of population of unprecedented scale.
And where does our own climate change minister, Ed Miliband, stand on this? Last month he harrumphed that "We must not let the sceptics pass off political opinion as scientific fact... the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of South Asia could put hundreds of millions of people at risk of drought. Our security is at stake."
Now that Miliband stands revealed as someone who passed off political opinion as scientific fact, what does he say? Under the headline "Miliband declares war on climate change sceptics", the minister was reported this weekend as follows:" I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture... when the next IPCC report comes out it will suggest that there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied."
A mistake? The single most significant and newsworthy claim in the IPCC's report is shown to be complete garbage, undermining confidence in the whole process, and it's just "a mistake"? One is reminded of Tony Blair's response to the Chilcot committee last week, when asked about his utterly discredited claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that would take just 45 minutes to launch. A mere detail, said Blair: it was the media's fault for overstating its significance within the wider picture.
After non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the British Government now wants to terrify us - and the world - with scaremongering about "man-made" weather of mass destruction. That's the scandal - not whether someone has hacked into an East Anglian computer.
SOURCE
Junkscience: Climategate Distortion of Temperature Data
By S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist
We discuss here in some detail the way in which warming trends were introduced into the IPCC Report-when in fact they did not exist or were extremely small. We focus on the period 1979 to 1997. There was cooling up to 1976; in 1998 there was a super-El-Nino and no subsequent warming. Our discussion is in three parts: (1) a `bottoms-up' approach; (2) the `top-down' approach; and next week I shall discuss (3) the treatment of sea surface temperatures (SST).
Bottoms-Up Distortion of Temperature Data
The Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU-UEA), under the direction of Dr. Philip Jones, collected data from weather stations from around the world. These are almost all land-based stations, showing a high concentration in the United States and Western Europe and a lower concentration elsewhere-with many parts of the globe hardly covered by reliable stations.
There are a variety of problems with such data, and the investigators were aware of most of them. Many stations produce useless data, either because of inadequate maintenance, or because of their location. Anthony Watts (in his WUWT blog) has shown that even stations in the USA were badly placed and subject to local warming influences that were not adequately corrected.
The surface of the earth is then divided into grid boxes, usually five degrees by five degrees. When there are several stations in a grid box, the investigators would choose those they considered most reliable-which in many cases meant urban stations, or stations at airports, that are well maintained. However, because of their location, they generally are subject to `urban heat-island' (UHI) effects, a local warming that increases with population and urban growth over time and suggests a temperature trend of a global nature. The investigators tried various ways to eliminate such local UHI trends, but were not very successful.
The problem was greatly exacerbated by the closing of over half the world's weather stations between 1970 and 2000 (see NIPCC Summary, Fig 12-which in most cases removed rural stations but also stations from higher latitudes and altitudes that tended to show a lower warming trend or no warming trend at all. It should be obvious therefore that this drastic change in the sampling population would introduce a fictitious warming trend which is an artifact of the change. E. Michael Smith and Joseph D'Aleo have documented in some detail how such artificial temperature trends could be produced even when there was no global trend.
The Top-Down (TD) Approach
In many ways, the `Top-Down' (TD) approach to derive the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) is to be preferred over `bottom-up' (deriving GMST by collecting data from weather stations and sea surface readings). The TD approach relies primarily on the data from weather satellites, the only truly global measuring system, using a single microwave sounding (MSU) instrument and therefore independent of the vagaries of individual weather stations and their thermometers.
There are of course certain disadvantages: The MSU cannot measure temperatures at different levels of the atmosphere but derives instead a `weighted mean ` of the vertical temperature profile; the times of observation are fixed by the orbit of the satellite; a change of satellite, and MSU instrument, requires an overlap in operating time to permit a recalibration. Nevertheless, by comparing different view angles, one can change the weight factors and obtain a temperature value for `Lower Troposphere.' The University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) group has shown good agreement of UAH results with those of radiosondes from weather balloons.
As early as 1997, I noticed a disparity between temperature trends of satellites and surface trends, esp. in the tropics. (See Fig 9 in Hot Talk, Cold Science, 1997) The troposphere trends (between 1979 and 1995) were close to zero or even slightly negative, while surface trends showed a warming of about 0.05 deg per decade. This disparity is just the reverse of what one would expect from GH models [see IPCC-SAR]-namely a positive (warming) troposphere trend up to twice as large as the surface trend.
In addition, I noticed that the proxy data to which I had access showed no surface warming (tree-ring data of Jacoby et al (Fig 16 in HTCS) and ice core data of Dahl-Jensen et al]. I tried very hard to obtain more proxy data but was not successful. For example, I noticed that Michael Mann's infamous hockeystick graph did not extend beyond 1979 and suspected that his proxy temperatures diverged from the instrumented surface results. Yet when I wrote to Mann about post-1980 proxy data, I received only a brusque negative reply. Thanks to `Climategate' we now know, what I had then suspected, i.e., that Mann and Jones were engaged in a scheme to "hide the decline [in post-1979 proxy temperatures]."
To sum up: Both the satellite results and the proxy data tell us that the claimed rise of surface temperature between 1979 and 1997, shown by IPCC, is probably much smaller or even non-existent.
SOURCE
Brazil to give the Greenies a black eye?
Renewable energy? No thanks, say the Greenies
Brazil has approved the controversial construction of a giant hydroelectric dam in the heart of the Amazon, defying a 20-year protest by indigenous and environmental campaigners who say that the project will devastate the surrounding rainforest and threaten the survival of local tribes. The Belo Monte project on the Xingu river, an Amazon tributary, was started in the 1990s but abandoned amid widespread protests at home and abroad. The rock star Sting led a campaign against the plan with tribal leaders, and revisited Brazil in November last year to urge the Government to consider the impact of deforestation on greenhouse gas levels and global warming.
The $17billion dam in the northern state of Par will be the world's third-largest and could provide electricity to 23million homes, a supply that the Government says is vital to the country's economic growth. Critics argue that the flooding of 500 sq km of rainforest will damage fish stocks and wildlife and force the displacement of indigenous peoples.
Carlos Minc, the Environment Minister, said on Monday that the land flooded would be a fraction of the 5,000 sq km originally planned. "The environmental impact exists but it has been weighed up, calculated and reduced," he said. "Not one Indian on indigenous land will be displaced." However, groups on land not demarcated as tribal territory - a distinction often labelled a get-out clause by indigenous campaigners - still stand to lose their homes.
Mr Minc said that they would be compensated. Indigenous groups complain that they were not properly consulted over the project, which Megaron Tuxucumarrae, a chief of the Kayapo tribe, said would destroy the environment that his people had taken care of for millennia. "We are opposed to dams on the Xingu, and will fight to protect our river," he said.
The state-run company Eletrobras is said to be eyeing the project, but a contract has not yet been awarded. The winning company will have to spend $803million on measures to minimise its impact and resettle an estimated 12,000 people.
Critics said that the Government had underestimated the potential impact in its attempt to meet political ends in an election year. Even within the Government, the project has been so contentious that in November two senior officials from Ibama, Brazil's environmental agency, resigned, citing political pressure.
With general elections looming in October, the Government is under pressure to deal with energy infrastructure problems that resulted in large swathes of the country, including Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, being plunged into darkness in November.
Engineering experts have questioned the efficiency of the 11-gigawatt dam, which would be outstripped in size only by China's Three Gorges and Itaipu on the Brazil-Paraguay border.
Francisco Hernandez, an electrical engineer and joint co-ordinator of a group of 40 specialists who analysed the project, said that the dam would generate little electricity during the three to four-month dry season. Describing it as a scheme of "doubtful engineering viability", he said Belo Monte was an extremely complex project "that would interrupt the flow of water courses over an enormous area, requiring excavation of earth and rocks on the scale of that carried out for digging the Panama Canal". Up to 70 dams, roads, gas pipelines and power grids worth more than $30billion are to be built to tap the region's raw materials and transport agricultural products.
The announcement drew a furious reaction from environmental groups around the world. Aviva Imhof, the campaigns director of International Rivers, described it as a "foolish investment", and said that by investing in energy efficiency, Brazil could cut demand by 40 per cent over the nextdecade and save $19billion. "The amount of energy saved would be equivalent to 14 Belo Monte dams," she said. Fiona Watson, research director of the UK-based Survival International, said the dam would be a catastrophe for indigenous people. "The Brazilian Government has driven through the dam with a cavalier disregard to indigenous peoples' rights," she said. "Development in Brazil comes at an unacceptable price - the destruction of whole tribes."
SOURCE
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