IPCC PROJECTIONS CONTINUE TO FALSIFY

An email from Lee Rodgers [sregdoreel@yahoo.com]:

There are certain statistical analysis methods that let a researcher know when they might be lying to themselves with misapplied statistical analysis. Lucia over at rankexploits.com has been reviewing IPCC projections using advanced statistical methods. Lucia is a fastidious statistician who opens up all her methodologies to scrutiny. See here.

It may come as little surprise that Lucia finds the IPCC's long-range warming-only forecasts continue to be falsified, and become increasingly unlikely as the ongoing temperature plateau continues. See here

We've had almost nine years of stable global temperatures - another seven really puts the odds against the 2 degrC/century forecasts being likely. Maybe fifteen years of stable temperatures shall be Mother Nature's funny way of letting us know that the sky isn't falling.






JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY WILL LEAD NASA PROBE OF THE SUN

Mounting public concern about global warming has forced NASA to fund a new probe of our heat source -- the Sun. The May 1 news release from Johns Hopkins University reports that Andrew Dantzler of the JHU Applied Physic Laboratory was selected to manage the $750 million Solar Probe, scheduled for launch in 2015. See here





GERMAN TAXPAYERS FACE 120 BILLION EURO BILL FOR SOLAR SUBSIDIES

Germany's ruling political party, the CDU, has proposed to amend the law on renewable energy by calling for a reduction of subsidies for solar energy. In a separate report, Handelsblatt said leading German research institute Rheinisch-Westfaelischse Institut fuer Wirtschaftsforschung is proposing a slash in subsidies for solar energy by 30 percent.

The newspaper cited an obtained report for the Federal Ministry of Economy. If the current subsidy regulation remains in place, state subsidies would amount to 120 billion euros by 2035, the paper said. See here






DARK AGE COMING?

Below is a Letter to the Editor published in the "Canberra Times" on 5th. -- by Malcolm Miller [stellar2@grapevine.com.au]

I used to think that I lived in a world of scientific and social progress, where invention, innovation, and clever development of new ideas and techniques ensured that we would all live better, and our children in turn, better than we did.

Now I have lost that na‹ve optimism. Sometimes I feel we have regressed to the Middle Ages. There are crazy religions proscribing normal human behaviours. There are warlords galore with fanatical followers prepared to kill anyone they decide is their enemy. There are growing shortages of basic foods that we thought had been overcome for all time by a green revolution. There are people who want us to throw away all our advanced technology and abolish our energy sources, the very ones that have extended many life expectancies and opened up a world of travel freedom.

It goes on and on. It is frightening, because it seems to be leading to a new and unpleasant world of shortages, of restrictions, of governments taking new and arbitrary power over citizens and businesses by taxing out of existence the very energy sources such as coal and oil and the very raw materials such as steel and aluminium that require energy to produce. It is a a picture of reversal, of retreat from the very successes that have made life better for so many, to a world of shortages, of power rationing, of higher taxes, of restrictions.

So far our world looks superficially OK. The engine hums, the tanks have fuel, all systems are working. But there are people who are trying to bring our world down, for spurious reasons of their own. If they win we can look forward to a new Dark Age.

Source




GOD, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE EU

Does the European Union have God on its side? Yes. When it comes to fighting climate change, the EU's next big thing, Brussels has the blessing of all the Faiths.

The Gods Squad, various clerics, imams, vicars, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, Grand Muftis (is there a collective noun for them?) and rabbis, all trooped into the European Commission's Berlaymont HQ on Monday to fight the good fight against us "greedy" consumers and our nasty CO2 emissions.

It is perhaps fitting that an out of touch, unpopular and referendum-phobic EU should look for divine help. After all both the eurocrats and theocrats have plenty in common. Both are a pretty preachy bunch and like nothing more than to lay on the guilt trips. Most importantly, both derive their authority from a higher source than the public.

Climate change has become the new orthodoxy for our times. It is the moral fable that justifies new limits and restrictions for our shiny 21st century. It provides, in a post-tradition world, a new internalised framework for individuals to govern their behaviour in the name of reducing their carbon footprint.

The new moral edicts of the climate change brigade - Don't go on holidays abroad! End cheap flights! Ban SUVs! Recycle! Switch off that light! - are all the more pervasive (certainly more than the nostrums of organised religion) because society is suffused with the anti-humanist sentiments that lie behind them.

Janez Jansa, the Slovenian PM and current holder of the EU presidency, speaking alongside the representatives of Europe's combined clergy, put it well. Climate change, he said, is about "changes in habits, philosophy and world outlook", getting rid of "things we do not really need", like overseas holidays, cheap flights, SUVs etc.

In this battle, science and religion have united behind the same orthodoxy to lower our expectations (one with a secular, environmentalist but deeply anti-humanist pedigree). "It is important to have a coordinated approach between science and the different types of religion," said Mr Jansa. "The joint approach is needed to lead to changes in habits... The role of religion is a big one... We have to overcome deep rooted ideas in public opinion."

For EU officials, old-time religion has the purely instrumental appeal of helping to legitimise policy, in this case climate change proposals, some of them, like the biofuels target, are getting a bit tarnished as we get to know more about them.

For clerics, the global warming agenda seems to provide them with a new source of moral authority in a relativistic world which no longer looks to organised religion for guidance on what is right or wrong.

It is not really about belief for either group. It is an unholy alliance of convenience to give their respective illegitimate forms of authority a gloss of relevance. Moreover, religious leaders jumping on the green bandwagon in a scramble for contemporary relevance are doing their faith no favours. While the god-fearing can unite with environmentalists in terms of a shared conformist credulity towards doom-mongering clap trap and junk science, the wider agenda is a problem.

Most modern religions still have man, for good or ill, at the heart of the moral universe. Environmentalists tend to view man as a harmful pathogen and elevate nature's blind nihilism over man's purpose or civilisation. In fact, in the case of climate change ideology, man's activity and human history itself is seen as the source of the problem.

At least, religion (and I say this as an atheist), accords man a soul, with humanising possibilities of redemption and transcendence. We may have to be meek (really bad advice, by the way) but we shall inherit the earth.

Not so with the environmentalists. For them we are fleshy gene machines, mere equals amongst others in the animal kingdom, with the misguided hubris to believe our civilisation, our soul, is beyond nature. Climate change is a sharp slap to put us back in our place.

The clerics want us to get on our knees and humble ourselves before God (an old story). More recently, the greens, and many of our rulers, want us to abase ourselves before their bureaucratic requirements in the name of a totally impersonal force, nature.

Source





WE REALLY DO KNOW FAR LESS THAN WE THINK WE DO

Let's call it Apocalypse Postponed. At least temporarily. German climate scientists have just published a study in the respected science journal Nature suggesting global warming has stopped and will not resume until at least 2015. In other words (my words, not theirs) contrary to the received wisdom of Al Gore's simplistic and propagandistic "An Inconvenient Truth," global temperatures aren't moving in lockstep with rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the science isn't settled and we don't know everything we need to know.

Based on new, computer-generated climate models that factor in natural ocean currents, the researchers conclude: "Our results suggest that global surface temperatures may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic (man-made) warming."

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said if their calculations are correct, the 0.3 degree Celsius global temperature rise predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change over the next decade won't happen. "We believe that ocean currents and systems could, in the short term, change global warming patterns, and even mean temperatures," he told National Geographic News.

Since there has actually been no global warming since 1998, that means there would be an almost two-decade span where concentrations of GHG emissions, most notably carbon dioxide, continued to intensify in the atmosphere, without global temperatures following suit.

These researchers aren't climate "deniers." They say their findings - based on cutting-edge computer modelling techniques still in their infancy - are a refinement of existing climate models. They also calculate that after 2015, global warming will resume, as the warming caused by man-made GHG emissions is no longer masked by the cooling effect of ocean currents. They aren't suggesting man-made global warming has permanently stopped.

And that's all fair enough. But let's not kid the troops. Prior to this study, anyone impertinent enough to point out, contrary to the Al Gore Nation, there hasn't been any global warming for a decade was apt to have their head shot off by climate hysterics.

As astrophysicist and award-winning former BBC science correspondent David Whitehouse - who made exactly that point in the British magazine New Statesman last Dec. 19 in an essay titled "Has Global Warming Stopped?" observed in the wake of this new research:

"Not long ago, anyone who looked at the global annual temperature data and disrespectfully pointed out that it might actually be significant that the world hasn't become warmer since 1998, was dismissed as foolish and accused of seeing what they wanted to see . . . Then, if they had the effrontery to point out that even the U.K.'s MET (British Meteorological Office) agreed that the annual data between 2001-7 was an impeccable flat line, they were told they were completely wrong as such things were obviously only year-on-year variability (as an unscientific environmental activist' damned my speculations in the New Statesman about the same topic, whilst at the same time implying I was lying)."

Indeed, Whitehouse got hit from all sides, including a brutal follow-up essay in New Statesman by its "environmental correspondent" who wrote: "I'll be blunt. Whitehouse got it wrong - completely wrong . . . readers of my column will know that I give contrarians, or skeptics or deniers (call them what you will) short shrift . . . So a mistaken article reached a flawed conclusion. Intentionally, or not, readers were misled, and the good name of the New Statesman has been used all over the Internet by climate contrarians seeking to support their entrenched positions."

There's only one problem. Whitehouse isn't a denier. As he wrote in his original essay, "Certainly the working hypotheses of CO2-induced global warming is a good one that stands on good physical principles, but let us not pretend our understanding extends too far, or that the working hypotheses is a sufficient explanation for what is going on ... we are fools if we think we have a sufficient understanding of such a complicated system as the Earth's atmosphere's interaction with sunlight ... We know far less than many think we do, or would like you to think we do." Indeed.

Source

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