See the article below that appeared in the "Windsor Star" on Sept. 11, 1972. Hubert Lamb, the director of the CRU in 1972 says that the overall temperature trend they were forecasting was definitely downwards. Lamb warns that there may be "minor upward fluctuations" but he says we shouldn't be misled by these into thinking the earth was getting warmer
Source
Tim Ball comments:
Yes, but that was when Lamb, who founded the CRU was still in charge. I discussed the same thing with him when he was advising me on my doctoral thesis. Our discussion about the cold was triggered by my comment that I had never been so cold as I was standing on the platform at Norwich railway station. This included five years of flying search and rescue throughout the Canadian Arctic.
He anticipated the loss of control of CRU and to whom. In his autobiography, "Through all the Changing scenes of Life" he wrote:
"The research project which I put forward to the Rockefeller Foundation was awarded a handsome grant, but it came to grief over an understandable difference of scientific judgement between me and the scientist, Dr Tom Wigley, whom we appointed to take charge of the research." (p.204)
Wigley went on to oust Lamb and become Director from which position he linked with the IPCC group in conjunction with his protege Phil Jones who replaced him. Wigley moved to Colorado to expand the Climategate debacle with US funding. You can watch Wigley at his unctuous best in the 1990 documentary "The Greenhouse Conspiracy" talking about getting funding.
A few years after I first met with Lamb I learned from a CRU student that "The Prof," as he almost derisively called him, was still coming in every day but nobody was paying him any mind.
When you read the leaked emails you see that Wigley is the grandfather and eminence grise who they all defer and refer to for his opinion on many issues. I wrote about that here
Incidentally, Lamb received money from the US because the UKMO and other British funding sources ignored his goal of building better historic records. He wrote on page 203 that:
"When the Climatic Research Unit was founded, it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important."
This idea evolved from his difficulties with accurate forecasting for bombers flying over Europe in WWII. He determined that better forecasting required understanding past patterns so he spent time in the archives of the Met Office.
It was an agenda that did not fit with the political use of climate by Wigley, the UKMO, Schneider and many others. Sadly it is a requirement that still limits understanding today, but made worse by the lack of funding to data reconstruction and the closing of weather stations so that data that was already inadequate has become truncated and discontinuous at best.
2010: An Even More Unexceptional Year
The Warmists saw some warm months in this year's data and have ever since been frantically trying to prove that 2010 as a whole is an exceptionally warm year. Dr. David Whitehouse points out, however, that their own datasets betray them -- and that 2010 is in fact a perfectly ordinary year
Following my analysis of 2010 based on Met Office temperature data it has been suggested that I perform my analysis on other global temperature data sets that are more comprehensive. It has also suggested that when I do I will arrive at a different result, and that all of the months in 2010 have been anomalously warm.
Well, here it is.The first data set, from the UK Met Office, is here:
January was cooler than January in 2007, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 1998. SAME.
February was cooler than February in 2007, 2004, 2002, and 1998. SAME.
March was exceptionally warm. However it was, given the errors, statistically comparable with March 2008 and March 1990. SAME.
April was cooler than April 2007, 2005, and 1998. SAME.
May was cooler than May 2003 and 1998. SAME.
June was exceptionally warm though statistically identical to June 2005 and 1998.SAME.
July, when things started to cool, was cooler than July 2006, 2005 and 1998. SAME.
August was cooler than August 2009, about the same as 2005, and cooler than 2001 and 1998. REVISED. August was now cooler than 2006 as well.
September was cooler than September 2009, 2007, 2005, 2001 and 1998.REVISED. September was cooler than 2009, 2007, 2005.
October the last month for which there are records was cooler than October 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 1998. SAME.
Because the world has been markedly cooling for the past four months unless November and December are extraordinary and go against this trend, then 2010 will be cooler than 2005 and 1998, at least.
The same analysis can be performed on the other two commonly used global temperature datasets.
Firstly, NOAA:
January was cooler than 2007, 2003 and 2002.
February was cooler than 2003, 2002, 1999, and 1998.
March was exceptionally warm, statistically equal to 2002.
April was exceptionally warm, statistically equal to 1998.
May was roughly equal to 2005 and cooler than 1998.
June was roughly equal to 2005 and cooler than 1998.
July was roughly equal to 2005 and cooler than 1998.
August was cooler than 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2003, 2001, and 1998.
September was cooler than 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 2001.
October was cooler than 2009, 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, and 2001.
Using the NASA dataset the results are:
January was cooler than 2007, 2005 and 2002.
February was cooler than 1998.
March was cooler than 2002.
April was the warmest on record.
May was cooler than 1998.
June was cooler than 2009, 2006, 2005, and 1998.
July was cooler than 2009, 2008, 2007, 2005, 2003, and 1998.
August was cooler than 2009, 2006, 2005, 2003, and 1998.
September was cooler than 2009, 2006, 2005 and 2003.
October was cooler than 2005 and 2003.
These databases give the monthly temperature to thousandths of a degree which is superfluous. When rounded up to a more physically sensible 0.1 deg almost all of the differences between the years of the past decade go away, but that is another story, and not the subject of this post.
The suggestion that all the months this year in the CRU, NOAA and NASA global datasets for which data has been collated (January - October) were anomalously warm is incorrect, as even the most cursory examination of the datasets shows.
The result of using the different databases is even more stark than my original analysis.
The conclusion is therefore even more solid about 2010 being an even more unexceptional (in the context of the past decade) El Nino year with a warm Spring.
SOURCE (See the original for links)
New House committee to challenge the "consensus"
Ralph Hall is poised to become the next chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee after fending off a challenge from California Republican Dana Rohrabacher.
Hall, 87, on Tuesday won the endorsement of the GOP panel tasked with selecting chairmen, a member of the steering committee told POLITICO. The recommendation will go before the full caucus Wednesday, but the vote is seen as little more than a formality.
At the helm of the Science Committee, Hall is expected to be at the forefront of GOP efforts to probe the Obama administration’s climate policies next year.
Hall told POLITICO in a recent interview he’s not a climate skeptic. “If they quote me correctly, I've never said it's outrageous to even think about global warming. I want some proof,” he said. “If I get the chair and have the gavel, I'm going to subpoena people from both sides and try to put them under oath and try to find out what the real facts are.”
But he said he does want to question all sides of the issue, including the scientists at the center of the so-called “Climategate” controversy surrounding e-mails stolen from climate researchers last year in England. He said at a hearing last month that the documents exposed a “dishonest undercurrent” within the scientific community. Investigators in the United States and Britain have cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing.
Hall’s expected appointment as Science chairman will likely be seen as the lesser of two evils among proponents of efforts to slash greenhouse gas emissions.
Both Hall and Rohrabacher have expressed doubts about the science linking manmade carbon dioxide emissions to global warming, but Rohrabacher is seen as a more aggressive skeptic than his Texas colleague.
“Dana would be out to disprove the theory,” said outgoing Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who is the current ranking member on the Science Energy and Environment Subcommittee. “Ralph would likely not ... be as animated in his pursuit of the destruction of climate science.”
“He’s very, very smart,” Barton said. “He goes to great lengths to hide his intelligence with his folksiness and his East Texan-ness, but he’s a very bright, sharp fellow. We’re very lucky he still wants to be in Congress and he’ll be a great Science chairman.” And when it comes to investigating climate science, Barton said he’s sure Hall will be aggressive enough. “When he’s got that gavel, he’ll be a tiger.”
Beyond Hall and Rohrabacher, the panel will likely be stacked with vocal climate skeptics, including Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.).
After GOP leadership dismantled Democrats’ global warming panel, Sensenbrenner — the committee’s top republican — could win the chairmanship of the Energy and Environment or Investigations and Oversight subcommittees on the science panel.
Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), ranking member of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee, wants to see it lead the charge on climate science. “I very much would like to debunk this myth that there is a scientific consensus that we have human-induced climate change,” he said last week. “I want to focus on what the truth is, instead of this blanket statement that there is this scientific consensus that this is occurring, which is balderdash.” Broun said he’s unsure whether he’ll remain on the committee.
Meanwhile, some climate scientists are calling on the incoming majority to use its position to further the public understanding of climate science, rather than assailing scientists.
Rep. Inglis urged climate scientists to view any climate science probes as opportunities to share their data and welcome the inquiry, “even if that’s not really the spirit in which they’re given the opportunity to testify,” he said.. “If they do, then hopefully some people will — skeptics will begin to see the data as what it is.”
Outgoing Science Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), said last week he isn’t worried about GOP efforts to upend the science. “There is no upending the science, the science is very clear on it. [What science? Prophecies are not science] So I hope that they will have hearings on it, because it will just demonstrate that,” he said.
SOURCE
UK Government Is Asking For Trouble over energy bills
HOUSEHOLD energy bills could double to £2,500 a year in an “unstoppable” rise driven by the £200 billion fight against climate change, a market expert warned yesterday.
Mark Todd, of energyhelpline.com, said rocketing prices will send costs for hard-pressed families and the elderly into the “stratosphere”. He said consumers will have to pick up the tab for new windfarms, nuclear power plants and the networks needed to support them.
Mr Todd’s worst-case scenario forecast means bills could rise from the current £1,215 average for gas and electricity – so-called dual fuel bills – to £2,472 a year within 10 years. He spoke out as five of the biggest energy firms in Britain told MPs that energy bills will rise by up to 25 per cent over the next decade. That would slap another £303 on the average gas and electricity bill.
Yet campaigners Consumer Focus said that over the past seven years alone domestic dual fuel bills have soared 124 per cent – from an average £543 a year. Mr Todd said: “Both the cold spell and rebound in the economy are contributing factors to wholesale gas prices rising by 56 per cent in the past three months. It’s therefore no surprise that five of the big six energy companies have warned MPs that domestic bills will continue to rise.
“There seems to be an almost unstoppable upward trend with prices creeping up remorselessly. When price drops come they tend to be small, when price rises come they tend to be big.”
The Government is shortly expected to announce a consultation on reforming the energy market.
And on Monday the Climate Change Committee quango laid out a blueprint for cutting carbon emissions which it admitted would require investment of about £150 billion in energy infrastructure up to 2030.
Mr Todd said: “The year’s price rises are only the tip of the iceberg. “An unpalatable cocktail of green taxes, power station investment, a crumbling grid and dwindling gas supplies is set to send prices into the stratosphere. “Energy bills are many homes’ biggest expense. UK consumers must shop around for a better deal.”
Head of energy at Consumer Focus, Audrey Gallacher, said: “It is up to the energy industry to show that any price rises are fair. It must be easy for customers to find the best tariff, switch easily and be confident they are paying a fair price.”
Energy UK, which speaks for the major suppliers, last night urged the public to make homes more energy efficient.
SOURCE
Is the EPA necessary?
A repeated myth is that government intervention comes only after private markets have clearly failed and the bureaucracy must step in to stop the abuse. For example, we hear that Congress created the Food and Drug Administration in 1906 because conditions in American meatpacking plants had become progressively dangerous as corporate bosses put “profits ahead of people.”
So it is with the Environmental Protection Agency, created by Congress and President Richard Nixon in 1970. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson painted the same gloomy picture that is given for creation of any federal agency: American life had become too intolerable without it. She writes:
Last month’s elections were not a vote for dirtier air or more pollution in our water. No one was sent to Congress with a mandate to increase health threats to our children or return us to the era before the EPA’s existence when, for example, nearly every meal in America contained elements of pesticides linked to nerve damage, cancer and sometimes death. In Los Angeles, smog-thick air was a daily fact of life, while in New York 21,000 tons of toxic waste awaited discovery beneath the small community of Love Canal. Six months before the EPA’s creation, flames erupted from pollution coating the surface of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, nearly reaching high enough to destroy two rail bridges.
Coverage of the Cuyahoga River fire featured a Time Magazine photo from a 1952 fire on the river with claims it was taken during the June 1969 fire. However, as Stacie Thomas pointed out in this article, the real fire was brief, no photos were taken, and damage to the bridges was minimal.
Furthermore, notes law professor Jonathan H. Adler, the “pollution-was-progressively-becoming-worse” scenario Jackson paints is not true:
Contrary to common perceptions, many measures of environmental quality were already improving prior to the advent of federal environmental laws. The Environmental Protection Agency’s first national water quality inventory, conducted in 1973, found that there had been substantial improvement in water quality in major waterways during the decade before adoption of the federal Clean Water Act, at least for the pollutants of greatest concern at the time, organic waste and bacteria.
Unfortunately, Jackson is not satisfied with rewriting environmental history. She also commits the venerable broken-window fallacy, failing to account for what did not happen because of government intervention. She writes:
We have seen GDP grow by 207% since 1970, and America remains the proud home of storied companies that continue to create opportunities. Instead of cutting productivity, we’ve cut pollution while the number of American cars, buildings and power plants has increased. Alleged “job-killing” regulations have, according to the Commerce Department, sparked a homegrown environmental protection industry that employs more than 1.5 million Americans.
She’s also guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Moreover, Jackson confuses jobs with the creation of real wealth. For example, many of the new “green jobs” are created via government subsidies, which means that the government is cannibalizing profitable entities to prop up those firms that are unprofitable. Far from creating wealth, this activity is economically destructive.
One wonders how much economic growth would have taken place had the EPA not existed. Obviously, that is a calculation no one is able to perform, but I suspect that some readers of this site who have had to deal with EPA bureaucrats can tell a few horror tales.
My only contact with the EPA came more than 30 years ago when I was a news reporter covering a story about a fertilizer plant’s discharges into Chickamauga Lake. Although Tennessee state water-quality authorities were willing to work with the firm, given there was no immediate health or aquatic hazards, the EPA was utterly rigid and the plant was shuttered. It was the bureaucratic mind at work.
Jackson wants us to believe that without the EPA we’d all be dead. I doubt that seriously, but I don’t doubt that EPA is a destructive enterprise killer. While Jackson calls for “common-sense solutions,” I submit that common sense tells us to do away with the agency.
SOURCE
Number of climate refugees overstated
The writer below accepts warmism but also knows something about human population movements
If we are to believe recent reports, the effects of climate change over the next 90 years will make up to 1 billion people homeless, deny 3 billion access to clean water and see the emergence of "ghost states" whose governments-in-exile rule over scattered citizens.
The sensational claims in The Observer were based on a scientific report presented this week at the start of climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico. The report outlines the effects of human-induced climate change to be expected this century, largely because it now appears we cannot stop global temperatures rising by 4 degrees.
Climate change-induced migration and displacement are real. But it is too simplistic to suggest that the impacts of climate change on human settlements will spur mass migration, and it could feed panic about the security implications of human movement.
The figures cited don't ring true with any of the research being done by migration experts on the impacts of climate change and human movement. The report might have the basic "science" right, but it overlooks the human elements - people's inherent resilience, their lack of resources and desire to move great distances, their cultural ties to their land - which make it unlikely that billions of people will ever flee their homes for other countries. Perhaps most significantly, it overlooks the evidence we already have about what is happening in countries most at risk. This is underscored by my own field work in Bangladesh and the Pacific.
Bangladesh is often cited as the country that will produce the most "climate refugees". Some alarmist predictions estimate that 30 million people will be displaced by 2050. But, as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) explains, these figures tend to be based on sea level rises outside the "harshest" scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, count land loss but not accretion, assume no adaptation measures, and apply long-term, country-wide estimates that overlook "more localised, fine-grained" contexts.
Existing patterns of movement from natural disasters - which provide the best indicators of future movements - do not support claims that climate-induced displacement will involve large-scale international migration. Despite annual flooding, cyclones and coastal and riverbank erosion, there is no evidence of mass cross-border movement from Bangladesh, although there is considerable internal displacement which needs to be addressed through a human-rights framework.
In fact, research shows that only very few of the poor - the people most heavily impacted by climate change - will move irregularly across an international border, and typically only if they have family links there. Financial restrictions, a close sense of attachment to land, family and culture inhibit movement abroad.
There is also a more fundamental problem which centres on climate change "cause and effect". As one government official in Kiribati, one of the "sinking islands" of the Pacific, observed, climate change overlays pre-existing pressures - overcrowding, unemployment and environmental and development concerns. Certainly the impacts of climate change are real, and affect people's ability to remain in their homes, but attributing displacement to climate change alone is impossible.
There is a risk that focusing on climate change as "the" cause of human movement may backfire.
The IOM has observed that there is a risk of undermining the case for investment and measures to meet the needs of vulnerable coastal communities, such as in the threatened states of Bangladesh, Kiribati and Tuvalu. From an advocacy perspective, one can appreciate that alarmist lobbying - extending to pressure for multinational approaches such as a "climate refugee" treaty - may generate attention and mobilise civil society.
Nevertheless, it is imperative that advocacy is well-informed, because if there is an absence of rigorous analysis and empirical evidence to support claims being made, it will not achieve its ends. Indeed, messy work may lead to a backlash and attempts to discredit the phenomenon of climate change-related human movement altogether.
SOURCE
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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