Asia suffers in worst cold for 70 years

More proof of global cooling: If record hot days prove global warming, what do record cold days prove?

Delhi woke up shivering to an unfamiliar sight yesterday - frost on the ground. India's second biggest city had its first winter frost and ice in more than 70 years as a cold snap, sweeping in from the Himalayas, reached the northern plains, killing a hundred people in 24 hours, most of them homeless street-dwellers. Officials in Delhi ordered schools to shut for three days as the temperature fell to -2C (28.4F), the lowest in the city since 1935, when -6 (21.2C) was reached. The Indian Meteorological Department said: "The normal temperature at this time is 7C. We predicted it would drop to 2C to 3C, not three times as much, as has happened."

Supriya Singh, a fashion designer from Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, said: "I was born here and this is the first time I have seen ice on grass."

Across the capital homeless people huddled around bonfires lit by civic and voluntary groups. Premchand Upadhyay, a security guard who sleeps in the open with his wife and five-year-old daughter, said: "My family kept shivering all night as we don't have a heater. How could one sleep in this cold?" Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous and one of its poorest states, has had 104 confirmed deaths. For the first time in ten years parts of the Dal Lake in Srinagar, Indian Kashmir, were frozen. Authorities banned skating on it after one child fell through ice and drowned. Tourists, including Britons, received a taste of the unusual winter in the popular and usually warm desert resort of Pushkar.

The Indian Army announced it was evacuating troops from its insulated bunkers in the disputed Siachen glacier as temperatures fell below -40 in sectors of the Himalayas




KNEEJERK BRITISH GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO THE HOUSE OF LORDS REPORT

An expert committee of the British House of Lords recently issued a report that pissed all over the global warming scare and its chief bastion of support -- the IPCC. The British government has now issued an official reponse to that report. Economic statistician David Henderson offers some remakably polite comments on the government response:

On behalf of the government, DEFRA gives unqualified endorsement to the IPCC's work, role and procedures, as also to the conduct of British policies. The Response does not so much address the arguments made by the House of Lords Select Committee as restate, reflex-like, the Whitehall and IPCC party line. It evinces an unshakable confidence in the status quo; and this goes with a reluctance to face, to understand properly, or even to recognise, unwelcome arguments and facts. Indeed, the Response is itself an illustration of those features of the IPCC process and milieu which prompted the Select Committee's concerns.

The Response says that the IPCC `assesses available literature rigorously', through it's `two stage, fully documented peer review process'. There is no attempt to meet, or refer to, either of the twin concerns that critics have voiced about this process, namely: Peer review is no safeguard against dubious assumptions, arguments and conclusions if the peers are largely drawn from the same restricted professional milieu. The peer review process as such, here as elsewhere, may be insufficiently rigorous. Its main purpose is to elicit expert advice on whether a paper is worth publishing in a particular journal. Because it does not normally go beyond this, `.peer review does not typically guarantee that data and methods are open to scrutiny or that results are reproducible'.

Among the data and methods that have not been made fully open to scrutiny, and the results that have not been reproducible, are those that entered into the `hockey-stick' study and other temperature reconstructions that the IPCC has given currency to. Such failures in disclosure, which constitute a basic flaw in procedure, are not mentioned in the Response, and what it says about the state of the debate on this study is not accurate.

The Select Committee [of the House of Lords] was highly critical of the scenarios which yielded the projections of emissions that formed the starting point for the TAR, and which were published in 2000 in the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES). Here again the Response is dismissive. It twice makes the point, as though this was all that mattered, that the scenarios yield a wide range of possible outcomes. It conveys the misleading impression that the SRES scenarios are undergoing revision and improvement as part of the preparation of AR4, whereas in fact they are being used unchanged as the point of departure for this Assessment Report as for its predecessor.

In relation to emissions projections, the Response makes a glaring error. It says (p. 13) that: `Most commentators . would agree that any change in emissions due to changed economic assumptions will translate into a smaller effect on [CO2] concentrations and an even smaller effect on temperature. In other words [sic] the current IPCC scenarios are still fit for informing the climate change policy debate'

Even leaving aside the final non-sequitur, the initial statement is false. One has only to look at the opening pages of the report of TAR Working Group I, and in particular Figure 5 on page 14, to see that there are large differences for projected temperature changes shown in the Report which directly result from different projections of emissions. The last-minute decision to extend the upper range of projected temperature changes shown in the Report was the direct consequence of bringing into consideration the emissions-intensive A1FI scenario.

The Response makes other questionable or misleading statements about the scenarios and what has been said by way of criticism of them; and it passes over the key point that those who have questioned the IPCC's treatment of economic issues have not confined their criticisms to the SRES scenarios. The main case for the prosecution is that elements within the TAR contain what many economists and economic statisticians would regard as basic errors, showing a lack of awareness of relevant published sources, and that the same is true of more recent IPCC-related writings, as also of material published by the United Nations Environment Programme which is one of the Panel's two parent agencies. In this area, the IPCC milieu is neither fully competent nor adequately representative.

The Select Committee was critical of the limited part that has been played by HM Treasury in relation to issues of climate change. This line of thought is also rejected in the Response, which says (p. 4) that `Treasury has since the outset played an integral role in the development of UK climate change policy'. Such reassuring language is not consistent with the continued failure on the Treasury's part even to notice, still less to act on, the questionable treatment of economic issues within the IPCC process. From the Response it appears that, in this corner of Whitehall, Dr Pangloss is alive and well.




THE REAL PROBLEM BEHIND EUROPE'S ENERGY CRISIS

An email from Prof. S. Fred Singer (singer@sepp.org):

I am surprised that no one has pointed to the real problem that's creating an energy crisis in Europe and Britain. It is not just Putin. It is of course this widely held fear of global warming that has distorted the energy supply situation, forcing a shift from coal to natural gas. In the US, electric power from gas grew from zero to 23% in a few years, raising the price from $2 per mcf to roughly $14. But at least coal still supplies over 50% of electric power. The answer for Europe is to forget about Kyoto and import cheap coal from So Africa, Australia, and US as quickly as possible to free up natural gas supplies for home heating. And build nuclear plants over the longer term. To a lesser extent, this shift on policy applies also to the US.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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