To U.N. Climate Representatives In Bonn: No One Believes The Bullsh*t Any Longer - Go Home, Please

The United Nations has always been a byzantine institution of little value and of extraordinary waste. The recent U.N. sponsored climate studies and conferences have certainly provided ample evidence of these traits, with the U.N. consumed only with a political agenda of gaining a world governance position for itself that controlling CO2 emissions would facilitate.

Unfortunately for the U.N., their non-scientific claims that modern world temperatures are accelerating and that temperatures are unprecedented have proven decisively to be "unprecedented and accelerating" bullshit. And the world's citizens now know it and have responded.

Go home please, before you do any more damage to world hunger and poverty.

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Melting around the Antarctic peninsula actually slowing CO2 rise

The whole global warming scare is built on postulated feedbacks magnifying the trivial warming observed in the 20th century. The feedback identified below is therefore MOST pesky. It is REDUCING the alleged warming cause, not amplifying it. So what is the SUM of all the feedbacks going to be? Nobody knows. Recent observations of clouds suggest that it could in fact be negative (cooling) overall

Global warming has been blamed for the alarming loss of ice shelves in Antarctica, but a new study says newly-exposed areas of sea are now soaking up some of the carbon gas that causes the problem.

Scientists led by Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said that atmospheric and ocean carbon is being gobbled up by microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton, which float near the surface.

After absorbing the carbon through the natural process of photosynthesis, the phytoplankton are eaten, or otherwise die and sink to the ocean floor.

The phenomenon, known as a carbon sink, has been spotted in areas of open water exposed by the recent, rapid melting of several ice shelves -- vast floating plaques of ice attached to the shore of the Antarctic peninsula.

Over the last 50 years, around 24,000 square kilometres (9,200 square miles) of new open water have been created this way, and swathes of it are now colonised by phytoplankton, Peck's team reports in a specialist journal, Global Change Biology.

Their estimate, based on images of green algal blooms, is that the phytoplankton absorbs 3.5 million tonnes of carbon, equivalent to 12.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas.

To put it in perspective, this is equivalent to the CO2-storing capacity of between 6,000 and 17,000 hectares (15,000 and 42,500 acres) of tropical rainforest, according to the paper.

The tally is minute compared to the quantities of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and deforestation, which amounted to 8.7 billion tonnes of carbon in 2007.

But, said Peck, "it is nevertheless an important discovery. It shows nature's ability to thrive in the face of adversity. "We need to factor this natural carbon absorption into our calculations and models to predict future climate change," he said in a BAS press release. "So far, we don't know if we will see more events like this around the rest of Antarctica's coast, but it's something we'll be keeping an eye on."

The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts up towards South America -- has been hit by greater warming than almost any other region on Earth. In the past 50 years, temperatures there have risen by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), around six times the global average [while is has cooled in Antarctica as a whole].

Ice shelves are ledges of thick ice that float on the sea and are attached to the land. They are formed when ice is exuded from glaciers on the land. In the past 20 years, Antarctica has lost seven ice shelves. The process is marked by shrinkage and the breakaway of increasingly bigger chunks before the remainder of the shelf snaps away from the coast. It then disintegrates into debris or into icebergs that eventually melt as they drift northwards.

The Antarctic ice shelves do not add to sea levels when they melt. Like the Arctic ice cap, they float on the sea and thus displace their own volume.

Ice that runs from land into the sea does add, though, to the ocean's volume, which is why some scientists are concerned for the future of the massive icesheets covering Antarctica and Greenland.

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British campaigner urges UN to accept 'ecocide' as international crime

Oliver Cromwell was a moderate and tolerant man compared to these religious fanatics -- the Ayatollahs of environmentalism

A campaign to declare the mass destruction of ecosystems an international crime against peace - alongside genocide and crimes against humanity - is being launched in the UK.

The proposal for the United Nations to accept "ecocide" as a fifth "crime against peace", which could be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC), is the brainchild of British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins.

The radical idea would have a profound effect on industries blamed for widespread damage to the environment like fossil fuels, mining, agriculture, chemicals and forestry.

Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute "climate deniers" who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.

"Ecocide is in essence the very antithesis of life," says Higgins. "It leads to resource depletion, and where there is escalation of resource depletion, war comes chasing behind. Where such destruction arises out of the actions of mankind, ecocide can be regarded as a crime against peace."

Higgins, formerly a barrister in London specialising in employment, has already had success at the UN with a Universal Declaration for Planetary Rights, modelled on the human rights declaration. "My starting point was 'how do we create a duty of care to the planet, a pre-emptive obligation to not harm the planet?'"

After a successful launch at the UN in 2008, the idea has been adopted by the Bolivian government, who will propose a full members' vote, and Higgins has taken up her campaign for ecocide.

Ecocide is already recognised by dictionaries, but Higgins' more legal definition would be: "The extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished."

The ICC was set up in 2002 to hear cases for four crimes against peace: genocide, war crimes, crimes of aggression (such as unprovoked war), and crimes against humanity.

Higgins makes her case for ecocide to join that list with a simple equation: extraction leads to ecocide, which leads to resource depletion, and resource depletion leads to conflict. "The link is if you keep over-extracting from your capital asset we'll have very little left and we will go to war over our capital asset, the last of it," adds Higgins, who has support in the UN and European commission, and among climate scientists, environmental lawyers and international campaign groups.

Although there is debate over how frequently people go to war over resources such as water, a growing number of important voices are arguing this case. Most recently Sir David King, the UK's former chief scientist, predicted a century of "resource wars", and in response to a report on resource conflicts by campaign group Global Witness, Lessons Unlearned, the UN appeared to accept many of the arguments.

Controversially, Higgins is suggesting ecocide would include damage done to any species - not just humans. This, she says, would stop prosecutions being tied up in legal wrangling over whether humans were harmed, as many environmental cases currently are.: "If you put in a crime that's absolute you can't spend years arguing: you take a soil sample and if it tests as positive it's bang to rights."

Under an ecocide law, which would be more potent because prosecutions would be against individuals such as directors rather than the companies, traditional energy companies could have to become largely clean energy companies, much extractive mining would have to be scaled back or stopped, chemicals which contaminate soil and water and kill wildlife would have to be abandoned and large-scale deforestation would not be possible. "I'm only just beginning to get to terms with how enormous that change will be," admits Higgins.

Higgins will launch her campaign through a website – thisisecocide.com – asking for global support to pressure national governments to vote for the proposed law if it is accepted by the UN Law commission. The deadline for the text is January, and a vote has been scheduled on other amendments in 2012. It would need a two-thirds majority of the 197 member countries to pass.

Higgins hopes the UN's "one member, one vote" system will help over-ride likely opposition of some nations and vested business interests. She also believes many businesses favour clear regulation because they fear a future public backlash. And she cites how, when the US entered world war two, its car manufacturers - despite initial opposition - made 10 times the number of aircraft originally asked for. "It shows you how industry can turn around very fast."

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Accumulating Evidence of the Corrupted US Temperature Record

A new SPPI paper examines the raw and adjusted historical temperature records for Pennsylvania and finds the mean temperature trend from 1895 to 2009 to be minus .08°C/century, but after unexplained adjustments the official trend becomes positive .7°C/century.

The difference between the raw and adjusted data exceeds the .6°C/century in global warming claimed for the 20th century. An example of the raw and adjusted datasets is shown below for Lebanon, PA:





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The new climate game

Climate scientists play a good game of whack-a-mole. Right from the early days of the global warming controversy, they whacked any scientist who dissented from the view that CO2 was warming the planet in a dangerous way. Up popped other skeptical scientists, and WHACK!! Down they went.

Up popped skeptical journalists and WHACK! Down they went, too. Then more whacks for new scientists who surfaced, or pesky scientists who resurfaced.

Today, decades later, the climate science establishment is still whacking away, faster and more frenetically than ever, as more and more skeptical scientists, journalists and politicians surface. And now there’s a new species of skeptic in need of whacking down ­— the many inquiries that have sprung up in the wake of Climategate, the unauthorized release of some 3,000 documents from the computers of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University showing that data had been manipulated and destroyed.

East Anglia University was the first to establish an inquiry into its conduct. Then it started a second inquiry to complement the first. The Met Office, the UK government’s meteorological department, announced its inquiry to redo the data that CRU had destroyed, a process that would take it three years. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office began an inquiry, to ascertain whether the country’s Freedom of Information Law had been broken. The local police force, working with Scotland Yard, also began an inquiry.

All these would and will need to be whacked, and more would, too. The IPCC itself announced an inquiry. Across the Atlantic, Penn State University, home to Michael Mann, one of America’s most important doomsayers, launched an investigation.

The UK government also decided it needed an inquiry, and fast, to address Climategate before it could call national elections, which were imminent. Its House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee expedited matters by holding a one-day hearing into Climategate during which it took no direct testimony from skeptical scientists. With nothing much discovered the members of the parliamentary committee declared its job done.

“Clearly we would have liked to spend more time of this,” explained the committee’s chair, Phil Willis, en route to the hustings, but “We had to get something out before we were sent packing.”

But many expect the House of Commons committee to pop up again after the elections, particularly since the committee asked whether “publicly funded research groups [were] being as open as they can be, and ought to be, with the details of their methodologies.”

The UK Met Office hasn’t completed its investigation but it has nevertheless been whacked, for announcing its inquiry early on, in December, embarrassing the government before the Copenhagen climate change meetings. The Met Office then assured everyone that it didn’t expect to find anything amiss after its investigation.

In some cases, whacking was not required — at least not by the climate change establishment. The inquiries set up by East Anglia University have as their members people of satisfactory credentials. Consider Lord Oxburgh, who chairs one of the two inquiries. He is also the head of Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment, a lobby group for global warming legislation, and an advisor to Climate Change Capital, which aims to cash in on the $45-trillion market in the coming low-carbon economy. Others on the inquiries have strikingly similar credentials, so much so that the London Telegraph reported that “almost all their members were committed, even fanatical advocates of global warming.”

Whacking was also not required for the Penn State inquiry, which interviewed no skeptical witnesses and has already exonerated Mann on three of four charges.

But a Penn State whacking may nevertheless be required after the Inspector General at the U.S. National Science Foundation, a major funder of Penn State’s global warming research, unexpectedly popped up. The Office of Inspector General states that “in accordance with our research misconduct regulation, (45 C.F.R. part 689), when the OIG is provided with an institution’s investigation report, we review it for fairness, accuracy and completeness.”

When it does, it will represent the first time that an independent investigative government organization will have scrutinized alleged climate change wrongdoing, but it may not be the last, or the most searching.

As made clear in an 84-page Minority Staff report produced in February by the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, criminal charges will be aggressively pursued if the chief force behind the report, Senator James Inhofe, finds himself once again a Senator in the majority after the November elections in the U.S.

Entitled “Consensus’ Exposed: The CRU Controversy,” the report asserts that “The scientists involved in the CRU controversy violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws... An independent inquiry conducted by the UK’s Information Commissioner has already concluded that the scientists employed by the University of East Anglia, and who were at the centre of the controversy, violated the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. … In our view, the CRU documents and emails reveal, among other things, unethical and potentially illegal behavior by some of the world’s preeminent climate scientists.”

And then the whacking might really start, with the climate scientists at the business end of the mallet.

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Stephen Colbert Moderates Global Warming Debate

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert on Tuesday actually moderated a debate about global warming.

In fairness, it was less of a debate and more a vehicle for him to make fun of his guests Joe Bastardi of Accuweather and Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Regardless of the comedic intent on the part of the host, there were indeed some wonderful moments, in particular Bastardi pointing out that we're going to know in the next five to ten years whether there really is a connection between increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures

JOE BASTARDI: I think that there is some argument that climate, in climate science, that CO2 may have a part of this. But we're going to find out very, very soon. You know why? Because the drivers that have been, we believe, have been pushing the temperature up over the last 20 or 30 years, the Pacific Ocean being warm, the Atlantic being warm, they're all going to come off. So if CO2 continues to rise, and the temperature which has flattened out the last five, ten years starts falling, we'll know. It's a simple answer.

Exactly. The reality is that if you ignore the comedy, Bastardi was quite right. If temperatures do indeed decline in the next five to ten years as CO2 rises, the position of the climate alarmists will be completely invalidated.

This is why there's such a rush to get cap and trade legislation passed quickly, for the alarmists quite understand that recent weather events are conspiring against their beloved theory.

If global temperatures are lower ten years from now despite rising CO2 levels, it will be almost impossible for the alarmists to convince anyone but the hopelessly devoted that their theory has any merit.

Somewhat surprising that such an inconvenient truth would be so prominently displayed on the left-leaning Comedy Central, don't you agree?

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