WE HAVE BEEN CONNED

An Independent review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by John McLean. McLean is an IT specialist with a particular interest in analysing climate data

SUMMARY FOR POLICY MAKERS

The IPCC is a disgrace to science. In its desire to fit the square peg of science into the round hole of politics it has abandoned the "scientific method" and replaced it with a desperate search for data and other material that might support a specific hypothesis.

Its reports are not an honest assessment of climate because they omit, dismiss or distort research findings that do not conform to a certain belief, and if those reports are supposed to focus only on any possible human influence on climate then why are they even mentioning other forces and where is the corresponding organization that will report on those forces?

The IPCC was established on the basis of alarmist claims that were given a political dimension by organizations that, if they had any integrity, would have demanded better evidence than the output of primitive climate models (Chapter 1).

The IPCC's key product, the various Assessment Reports, are the personal opinions from a cadre of selected authors and contrary to marketing spin, each passage of text is the consensus of a mere handful of people many of whom quote their own papers or selectively omit information that does not support their bias. In one instance supporting material was not available so IPCC authors, accompanied by a few others, wrote a paper that the IPCC report could cite even though the paper had merely been submitted to a journal rather than published (Chapter 2).

The peer-review system used by the IPCC is a travesty because it is nothing like the review prior to publishing scientific papers but only a means of soliciting further supporting information. Of course any suggestions that wider material be included are rejected, even if it means citing an IPCC's author's unpublished paper to do so (Chapter 3).

The IPCC omits and distorts information to suit its agenda. We are not told, for example, that it seems likely that the Earth is currently cool compared to mean temperature of the last 10,000 years and that the 650-year cold spell ending around 1850, which is when the IPCC's temperature data commences, was likely the longest sustained cold spell in 10 millennia.

The IPCC hides, in a throwaway line, buried deep in a long paragraph, the critical fact that amount of warming caused by increasing levels of carbon dioxide is logarithmic (i.e. will decrease as per unit of carbon dioxide increase).

In the IPCC's latest report the discussion of the European heatwave of 2003 is a joke because chapter 3 provides a clear meteorological explanation but chapter 9 claims, on the basis of modelling by one of its authors, that human activity made the heatwave worse, and later the IPCC cites this modelling as if it was both accurate and credible when it is neither (Chapter 4).

The temperature data cited by the IPCC is derived from thermometer readings just above the Earth's surface or just below the surface of the oceans. The data is so flawed and inconsistent, because the circumstances in which it is gathered are so dynamic, that it should be rejected. One wonders if the IPCC audited this data prior to citing it, but given that the agencies supplying it are supporters of the IPCC claims perhaps it felt no need to do so (Chapter 5).

The IPCC's greatest scam is in its use and citing of climate models. The Assessment Reports show very clearly that knowledge of many climate factors is poor, which means that accurate models can't be created, but later chapters of the report ignore those deficiencies and cite the predictions of models as if they were unchallengeable.

Worse yet, these same models are used attribute blame for variation in climate under the risible notion that if observations agree with models that include a certain factor but disagree with the models if that factor is omitted, then it is evidence that the factor was the cause of climate variation.

This line of reason, with the incomplete climate models, is not merely a rejection of commonsense but blatant dishonesty. What's more, the rationale behind this attribution means that blame can only be attributed to climate forces that are accurately modelled, and the IPCC mentions just one force that it considers to be in that category - manmade emissions of carbon dioxide (Chapter 6).


The IPCC's so-called evidence for man-made warming was never strong to begin with but now it's completely undermined by the compromised integrity of the IPCC, the dubious temperature data and the climate models that are known to be inaccurate (Chapter 7).

The IPCC has no integrity and therefore no credibility. It is recommended that it be disbanded, along with its cohort the UNFCCC, and all responsibility for climate matters be handed over to the World Meteorological Organization.

While the WMO is somewhat tainted by co-sponsoring the IPCC it has expertise in meteorological matters and has shown a willingness to consider a wider range of climate forces than the IPCC (Chapter 8).

It is understandable that among an impartial audience only the ignorant, gullible and ill-informed would accept the biased word of the IPCC. Unfortunately the IPCC has given rise to a host of people with vested interests of various forms and I hope that this review encourages them to reconsider their position.

More HERE (See the original PDF for links, graphics etc.)




NOAA says the Russian heatwave was just a natural fluctuation

An excerpt below from a report by the Physical Sciences Division (PSD) of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the Department of Commerce of the United States Government:

Key sentence: "Greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over Western Russia"

The Russian heat wave of 2010 has been an extreme and abrupt event. The July heat did not simply follow on the heals of a sequence of progressively warmer summers over recent decades, but stands out as a discrete event that is reminiscent of the often sharp year-to-year swings in this region's July surface temperatures during the last 130 years. In many ways,the heat wave is a "black swan" event in that it is well beyond the normal expectations in the instrumental record---it is an outlier that is having an extreme societal impact.

Whereas an event of this magnitude was unexpected for the summer of 2010, and indeed there was little if any advance warming from long lead seasonal forecasts, it is nonetheless important to assess the factors that may have been responsible for such an extreme heat wave.

There is strong evidence that the immediate cause can be placed at the doorstep of an extreme pattern of atmospheric winds---widely referred to as blocking. In the situation of anticyclonic blocking such as developed over western Russia in early July 2010, the normal west-to-east movement of weather systems is inhibited, with the center of a blocking experiencing persistently quiescent weather.

Blocks are not an uncommon occurrence over Eurasia in summer, with a episodes of July blocking in the region between 0-60°E evident during the past half century. This region is vulnerable to episodes of blocking owing to physical factors related to the region's location downstream of the Atlantic westerly jet.

The sector exhibits high climatological frequency of blocking during July, with an average of 15% of summer days experiencing a blocking conditions. During the first 42 days of the summer of 2010 (thru 11 August) this region has experienced 60% blocking days. This event is the most prolonged blocking event over Western Russia for the period since 1948. The duration of this blocking event has been particularly long, and the intensity of the high pressure anomaly itself has been unusually strong.

The intensity of the positive 500mb height anomalies averaged over the geographic region of eastern Europe and western Russia during July 2010 exceeds any prior occurrence of anticyclonic blocking. Preliminary estimates indicate that the strength of the height anomaly at 500mb during July 2010 is equal to nearly 4 times the standard deviation of July heights---a departure amplitude similar to that in the region's July surface temperatures. Typically, there is little persistence of the circulation pattern from July to August, although the current block that formed in early July has continued with great strength through the second week of August.

The extreme surface warmth over western Russia during July and early August is mostly a product of the strong and persistent blocking high.

Surface temperatures have soared as a result of the combination of clear skies, sinking motion within the environment of the high pressure causing compressional heating of air, the lack of any temporary relief owing to the blocking of the typical cold fronts that cool the region intermittently in summer.

Add to this scenario the cumulative effect of drought that began in early summer which has caused soils to dry and plants to desiccate to wilting point, thereby causing additional surface warming via land feedbacks as the blocking condition persisted. These are all well-known and studied physical processes that have accompanied summertime blocking and heat waves in the past.

Much of the intensity of the current heat wave, and also the pattern of surface temperature conditions across Eurasia during July 2010, can be recreated from the atmospheric blocking event itself. The diagnostic procedure involves standard methods applied to the historical record of analyzed 500 mb heights and surface temperatures during the prior period of 1900-2008. The method of statistical regression is used to understand how surface temperature changes during a typical blocking occurrence over Russia during July, and is a method that can be used to infer causal relationships.

The comparison of the above reqression map with the observed temperature anomaly map for July 2010 clarifies the cause for this heat wave. The strong agreement between the July 2010 observed pattern of Eurasian surface temperatures and that pattern attributable to the impact of upper tropospheric blocking provides key evidence that the block is the immediate cause for the heat wave (and related temperature conditions over adjacent countries).

Blocking events are typically of 1-2 week duration, and by contrast the 2010 situation is highly unusual in that blocking has existed over western Russia on virtually every day form the beginning of July until the middle of August. The cumulative impact of such prolonged blocking has led to the extreme nature of the surface impacts on temperature, soil conditions, and rainfall.

What has been the role of human-induced climate change in the Russian heat wave of 2010? As indicated at the beginning of this report, globally averaged surface temperatures during the first 6 months of 2010 were the warmest since about 1880 based on NOAA and NASA analyses.

A time series of 12-month running mean globally averaged surface temperatures anomalies from NASA data further indicates that the latest 12-month period is likely warmer than the prior record warmest year of 1998 (relative to an 1880-2009 period of analysis).

Despite this strong evidence for a warming planet, greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over western Russia. The natural process of atmospheric blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the principal cause for this heat wave.

The indications are that the current blocking event is intrinsic to the natural variability of summer climate in this region, a region which has a climatological vulnerability to blocking and associated heat waves

More HERE




South Pacific sea levels - Best records show little or no rise!!

Are the small islands of the South Pacific in danger of disappearing, glug, under the waves of the rising ocean? Will thousands of poor inhabitants be forced to emigrate, as desperate refugees, to Australia and New Zealand? Has any of this got anything to do with man-made emissions of CO2?

By looking closely at the records, it turns out that the much advertised rising sea levels in the South Pacific depend on anomalous depressions of the ocean during 1997 and 1998 thanks to an El Nino and two tropical cyclones. The Science and Public Policy Institute has released a report by Vincent Gray which compares 12 Pacific Island records and shows that in many cases it’s these anomalies that set the trends… and if the anomaly is removed, sea levels appear to be more or less constant since the Seaframe measurements began around 1993.

Take the infamous Tuvalu for example. It’s sea level rise was reported as 5.7 mm/year back in 2008. Now it’s calculated as 3.7mm/year. But look at the Seaframe Graph – its flat. It is universally forecast to disappear by 2050. New Zealand has even agreed to accept the “inevitable” rush of refugees, yet the best records available show that sea levels have not risen at all since 1993. It’s not that it will take decades, or hundreds of years to submerge, there’s no reason to suppose it will submerge at all (asteroid strikes excepted). It’s a place that naturally is reshaped and reformed as the ocean moves sand from one part to another, and the corals shift and grow with the changes.

There may indeed be legitimate refugees from some areas, but it’s most likely due to subsidence, rather than sea-level rises.

ABSTRACT

The SEAFRAME sea-level study on 12 Pacific islands is the most comprehensive study of sea level and local climate ever carried out there. The sea level records obtained have all been assessed by the anonymous authors of the official reports as indicating positive trends in sea level over all 12 Pacific Islands involved since the study began in 1993 until the latest report in June 2010. In almost all cases the positive upward trends depend almost exclusively on the depression of the ocean in 1997 and 1998 caused by two tropical cyclones. If these and other similar disturbances are ignored, almost all of the islands have shown negligible change in sea level from 1993 to 2010, particularly after the installation of GPS levelling equipment in 2000.

The study includes the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

One of the big problems with measuring sea-levels is that everything is in motion. The tides shift, the sand moves, and even the bedrock can subside. The Seaframe stations are state of the art, and regularly checked to compensate for all these changes.

The Seaframe equipment used to measure sea levels is carefully recalibrated every 18 months to take these factors into account....

The bottom line

No matter what was heating the Earth, sea levels would rise, the rise in and of itself tells us nothing about the cause of the warming. What’s amazing is that so much of our CO2 has been unleashed since 1993, yet at least in the South Pacific, it’s not clear that sea levels have risen.

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)





A fanatic speaks

Excerpt below from an article headed "Time To Terminate Western Civilization Before It Terminates Us". It's just amazing how pervasive Green/Left hatreds of our society are. Note that he quotes not a skerrick of evidence for global warming and ignores all the evidence against it -- such as the tiny degree of warming (two thirds of one degree Celsius even according to the Warmists) observed over the 20th century

The author is a retired professor of ecology and in 2009 he "left the university to prepare for collapse. He now lives in an off-grid, straw-bale house where he puts into practice his lifelong interest in sustainable living via organic gardening, raising small animals for eggs and milk, and working with members of his rural community".

Global climate change threatens our species with extinction by mid-century is we do not terminate the industrial economy soon. Increasingly dire forecasts from extremely conservative sources keep stacking up. Governments refuse to act because they know growth of the industrial economy depends (almost solely) on consumption of fossil fuels. Global climate change and energy decline are similar in this respect: neither is characterized by a politically viable solution.

There simply is no comprehensive substitute for crude oil. It is the overwhelming fuel of choice for transportation, and there is no way out of the crude trap at this late juncture in the industrial era. We passed the world oil peak in 2005, which led to near-collapse of the world’s industrial economy several times between September 2008 and May 2010. And we’re certainly not out of the economic woods yet.

Unchecked, western civilization drives us to one of two outcomes, and perhaps both: (1) Destruction of the living planet on which we depend for our survival, and/or (2) Runaway greenhouse and therefore the near-term extinction of our species. Why would we want to sustain such a system? It is immoral and omnicidal. The industrial economy enslaves us, drives us insane, and kills us in myriad ways. We need a living planet. Everything else is less important than the living planet on which we depend for our very lives. We act as if non-industrial cultures do not matter. We act as if non-human species do not matter. But they do matter, on many levels, including the level of human survival on Earth. And, of course, there’s the matter of ecological overshoot, which is where we’re spending all our time since at least 1980. Every day in overshoot brings us 205,000 people to deal with later. In this case, “deal with” means murder.

Shall we reduce Earth to a lifeless pile of rubble within a generation? Or shall we heat the planet beyond human habitability within two generations? Or shall we keep procreating as if there are no consequences for an already crowded planet? Pick your poison, but recognize it’s poison. We’re dead either way.

Although it’s all coming down, as it has been for quite a while, it’s relatively clear imperial decline is accelerating. We’re obviously headed for full-scale collapse of the industrial economy, as indicated by these 40 statistics. Even Fortune and CNN agree economic collapse will be complete soon, though they don’t express any understanding of how we arrived at this point or the hopelessness of extracting ourselves from the morass.

Credibility? Respectability? It’s time to stop playing by the rules of the destroyers. We need witnesses and warriors, and we need them now. It’s time to terminate western civilization before it terminates us.

More HERE





The Stealth Obama Ocean Grab

It's not enough that the White House is moving to lock up hundreds of millions of acres of land in the name of environmental protection. The Obama administration's neon green radicals are also training their sights on the deep blue seas. The president's grabby-handed bureaucrats have been empowered through executive order to seize unprecedented control from states and localities over "conservation, economic activity, user conflict and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts and the Great Lakes."_

Democrats have tried and failed to pass "comprehensive" federal oceans management legislation five years in a row. The so-called "Oceans 21" bill, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sam Farr of California, went nowhere fast. Among the top reasons: bipartisan concerns about the economic impact of closing off widespread access to recreational fishing. The bill also would have handed environmentalists another punitive litigation weapon under the guise of "ecosystem management." Instead of accepting defeat, the green lobby simply circumvented the legislative process altogether.

In late July, President Obama established a behemoth 27-member "National Ocean Council" with the stroke of a pen. Farr gloated: "We already have a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act. With today's executive order, President Obama in effect creates a Clean Ocean Act." And not a single hearing needed to be held. Not a single amendment considered. Not a single vote cast. Who gives a flying fish about transparency and the deliberative process? The oceans are dying!

The panel will have the power to implement "coastal and marine spatial plans" and to ensure that all executive agencies, departments and offices abide by their determinations. The panel has also been granted authority to establish regional advisory committees that overlap with existing regional and local authorities governing marine and coastal planning.

No wonder the anti-growth, anti-development, anti-jobs zealots are cheering. The National Ocean Council is co-chaired by wackadoodle science czar John Holdren (notorious for his cheerful musings about eugenics, mass sterilization and forced abortions to protect Mother Earth and for hyping weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich) and White House Council on Environmental Quality head Nancy Sutley (best known as the immediate boss of disgraced green jobs czar/self-avowed communist Van Jones).

Also on the new ocean panel:

-- Socialista and energy/climate change czar Carol Browner, last seen bullying auto company execs to "put nothing in writing, ever" and threatening to push massive cap-and-trade tax hikes during the upcoming congressional lame duck session.

-- Dr. Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a former high-ranking official at the left-wing Environmental Defense Fund, which has long championed drastic reductions of commercial fishing fleets and recreational fishing activity in favor of centralized control.

-- Attorney General Eric Holder, who will no doubt use his stonewalling expertise to shield the ocean council's inner workings from public scrutiny.

-- Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who apparently doesn't have enough to do destroying jobs through his offshore drilling moratorium, blocking onshore development and wreaking havoc on the energy industry.

Given Salazar's fraudulent book-cooking in support of the administration's offshore drilling moratorium (Remember: Obama's own appointed scientists blasted the Interior Secretary for unilaterally contradicting and misrepresenting their conclusions.), his comments on the new ocean grab are more threat than promise: "With two billion acres we help oversee on the Outer Continental Shelf, Interior is a proud partner in this initiative, and we look forward to helping coordinate the science, policies and management of how we use, conserve and protect these public treasures."

"Helping coordinate the science," as interpreted by Obama's Chicago-on-the-Potomac heavies, means doctoring, massaging and ramming through whatever eco-data is necessary "to reduce conflicts among uses, reduce environmental impacts, facilitate compatible uses, and preserve critical ecosystem services to meet economic, environmental, security and social objectives." Translation: drastically limiting human activity from coastal areas to seabeds to achieve the "social objective" of appeasing the enviros and their deep-pocketed philanthropic funders.

Even New York Sen. Charles Schumer slammed the administration's junk science-based fishing limits at a meeting this week between NOAA's Lubchenco and Long Island recreational fishermen. Draconian regulations, he said, according to the New York Post, "put the industry on death's door." Now, the same forces behind such job destroyers will have free reign over a national ocean policy established by administrative fiat. Viva la Summer of Wreckovery.

SOURCE






Some people in Australia's major Leftist political party still put the jobs and wellbeing of the workers ahead of "Green" obsessions

A rather mournful comment from a Leftist writer below

Will Michael O'Connor, powerful forestry division secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, block an effective Australian response to climate change?

It's a worry for our economy because O'Connor is a key figure behind the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and soft left factional allies Martin Ferguson and Penny Wong - who, for one more day at least, control the portfolios that really matter: energy, water and climate.

O'Connor helped both Gillard and Ferguson into Parliament. In her maiden speech, Gillard acknowledged him as her "closest confidante", the "most committed of them all" to her Labor values, going back to her student days.

O'Connor should not be underestimated. If the secret of the Ferguson Left is its willingness to do deals with the Right, O'Connor has a record of going further and abandoning the ALP to support the Coalition. He helped bring down Paul Keating, organising (with the National Association of Forest Industries) the loggers blockade of Parliament House in January 1995 - a bitter protest during the regional forest agreement negotiations.

In an article for The Australian at the time, headlined "Green agenda full of myths", O'Connor railed against the environment movement's campaign to "cripple the forest and forest products industry by denying it access to native forests".

The 350-truck blockade took place just as John Howard was ushered in as opposition leader and helped establish his image as the battlers' friend, according to Australian National University forest economist Dr Judith Ajani, author of The Forest Wars (2007): "Australian voters witnessed the first display of Howard's battlers versus Keating's 'special interest elites': the core of a meticulously crafted election strategy."

O'Connor features heavily in Ajani's book, although he would not be interviewed for it. Others would. At one point, a bitter Keating calls O'Connor a "Labor rat" who should be "excommunicated" from the party.

Asked why he wasn't kicked out, Keating said: "Because people are too gutless, that's why. And nobody these days likes the fights. They all want consensus results. Well you don't get big issues resolved like this, just by consensus."

O'Connor also helped sink Mark Latham's tilt at federal office in 2004, swinging the CFMEU behind John Howard as the two main parties went toe-to-toe on Tasmanian forests policy. "It is clear that the jobs of workers, the welfare of families and the future of timber communities are to be sold off to appease Bob Brown and the Wilderness Society," O'Connor said of Latham's forest policy.

It was a spectacular betrayal of the party, but Gillard later lined up with O'Connor, saying she was "devastated" by Latham's stance on Tasmanian forests, calling it a "dreadful policy" and a "shocking, shocking error". O'Connor is the type of Laborite who sees the environment as a fashionable obsession of inner-city elites … job-destroyers hostile to the interests of workers. O'Connor calls it "real Labor". "Real Labor doesn't sell out workers," he said once.

In Ajani's telling, O'Connor is one of the forestry union's "economic troglodytes", endlessly perpetuating a false industry-versus-environment movement conflict.

Behind that conflict, according to Ajani, is a deeper struggle of industry versus industry, between native forest logging and the plantation sector which grew so fast between the 1960s and the 1990s that it can now provide all of Australia's sawn timber and pulp and paper needs.

Ajani argues O'Connor and the CFMEU, by fighting trenchantly to protect the old native forest logging sector, have sacrificed workers' long-term interests, which lie in the growth of a sustainable plantation industry. That's the win-win solution - more jobs, and our remaining native forests saved (with all the greenhouse and other immeasurable benefits that entails) - if the CFMEU could see it.

Instead of pushing for the win-win solution, O'Connor fights a rearguard action to preserve native forest logging. For example he fought against the Green Building Council's star ratings system, which gave extra points for use of timber accredited under the internationally recognised Forest Stewardship Council scheme.

He wanted points to be given for timber accredited under an industry-backed scheme, the Australian Forestry Standard, which allows native forest logging. Late last year he got it, calling the decision a "great breakthrough".

His quotes were instructive. "This took four years to achieve. I have little faith in the covenant of the Green Building Council and they have no credibility with us," he told The Australian Financial Review. O'Connor cannot abide a market-based scheme for tenants who want to occupy a green commercial building - or landlords who want to build one - which stipulates no timber from native forests.

O'Connor also has been deputy chairman of the Innovation Minister, Kim Carr's, pulp and paper industry strategy group, which wants to promote burning waste from native forest logging as renewable energy, and is arguing to ensure international carbon accounting rules do not count emissions from native forest logging.

The forest wars have a parallel in the energy sector, where the fossil fuel industry faces competition from an emerging renewables sector. Under Martin Ferguson, over the course of Labor's first term a stream of decisions have favoured the incumbents over the challengers. The saving grace was that the government finally established the 20 per cent renewable energy target by 2020.

Ferguson sees the parallel, accusing the Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown, of "seeking to demonise the coal industry in the same way he has sought to demonise the forest industry".

The pity is that, despite the rhetoric about saving jobs, when these Labor figures are duchessed by the captains of old industry, the result is public handouts to employers, and no focus on retraining or assistance for employees, as we saw during emissions trading scheme negotiations.

O'Connor and his allies will fight tooth and nail for the industries of the past. They do not see the potential of the green industries of the future.

So Gillard has gone out of her way to avoid a mandate for action on climate change, with a deeply cynical platform comprising the citizens assembly (a joke), misleading slogans about "no new dirty coal-fired power stations" and bitsy ad-hockery on renewables, energy efficiency and "cash for clunkers". Her best mandate comes - almost in reverse - from Coalition warnings that Labor under Gillard would bring in a carbon tax "as night follows day".

SOURCE

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