Windmill bursts into flame

Severe winds in Scotland have blown trucks off the road, toppled cement walls, brought down trees and forced a wind turbine to spin so quickly it burst into flames, with extreme weather also causing flooding and cutting power.

A 100-metre tall wind turbine at Ardrossan wind farm caught fire in the hurricane-force winds, with photographs showing bright orange embers flying through the air and thick black smoke.

The wind made operations "extremely challenging", Edinburgh Airport said on its website.

Scottish Hydro said "thousands" of customers were without power, mostly in the west of Scotland. It said it expected the situation to "develop throughout the day" as the storm moved east.

The severe weather also hit parts of northern England, with Cumbria experiencing heavy rain and widespread localised flooding.

SOURCE






Early Signs of CRU/IPCC Corruption and Cover-up

by Dr. Tim Ball

Now, over 5000 more leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), labeled Climategate 2, provide clarity. They add flesh to the skeleton of corrupted climate science identified in 1000 leaked emails of Climategate 1. They show why and how it was achieved and intelligent people became so blinded by what Michael Mann called "the cause." Early signs of what was going on were quickly covered up with a masterful PR strategy.

Many, can't believe a small group of scientists achieved such a massive deception. Edward Wegman in his report to the Chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Committee identified, through social network analysis: "43 individuals all of whom have close ties to Dr. Mann."

He also anticipates the problems with peer-review: "One of the interesting questions associated with the `hockey stick controversy' are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process."(page 38.)

Wegman's primary recommendation identified another way it was achieved: "It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers"

Maurice Strong chose the UN specifically the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to control bureaucracies within every national government and away from legislative oversight. Those bureaucracies directed research funding to one side of the debate and appointed people to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Research was limited by defining climate change as only human caused changes, which predetermined the outcome. The political objective was enshrined through the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), particularly Agenda 21, introduced at the 1992 Rio Conference organized and chaired by Strong.

Basing Agenda 21 on climate and the environment gave them the moral high ground, which they used to control and centralize power. Vaclav Klaus identified this in his book "Blue planet in green shackles" when he wrote: "Today's debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives."

It is likely that Agenda 21 is "the cause" discussed in the leaked emails: "I can't overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don't want to be made to look foolish."

Peter Thorne sensed what was happening and issued a warming: "I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run."

Overall attitude given by the comments and actions suggest the end justifies the means. They were likely emboldened by the demonstrated ability to protect scientists who acted rashly for the cause.

The first action that exposed the modus operandi occurred with the 1995 second Report. Benjamin Santer is a CRU graduate. Tom Wigley supervised his PhD titled, "Regional Validation of General Circulation Models" that used three top computer models to recreate North Atlantic conditions where data was best. They created massive pressure systems that don't exist in reality - so he knew the model limitations. Appointed lead-author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Report titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes" Santer determined to prove humans were a factor by altering the meaning of what was agreed by the others at the draft meeting in Madrid.

Agreed comments were:

1. "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

2. "While some of the pattern-base discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part of climate change observed to man-made causes."

3. "Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."

4. "While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification."

Santer's replacements were:

1. "There is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcing by greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols . from the geographical, seasonal and vertical patterns of temperature change . These results point toward a human influence on global climate."

2. "The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate."

As Avery and Singer noted in 2006: "Santer single-handedly reversed the `climate science' of the whole IPCC report and with it the global warming political process! The `discernible human influence' supposedly revealed by the IPCC has been cited thousands of times since in media around the world, and has been the `stopper' in millions of debates among nonscientists."

At the time a quick cover up was necessary. On July 4, 1996, the apparently compliant journal Nature published, "A Search for Human Influences On the Thermal Structure of the Atmosphere" with a familiar list of authors - Santer, Wigley, Jones, Mitchell, Oort and Stouffer. It provided observational evidence that proved the models were accurate. A graph is worth a thousand words as Mann's "hockey stick' showed and so it was with Santer's "discernible human influence". John Daly recreated Santer et al's graph (Figure 1) of the upward temperature trend in the Upper Atmosphere.


Figure 1 Upper Atmosphere Temperature

Then Daly produced a graph of the wider data set in Figure 2 and explains: "we see that the warming indicated in Santer's version is just a product of the dates chosen" (Daly's bold).


Figure 2 Upper Atmosphere Data - Radio Sonde Data

Errors were spotted quickly but Nature didn't publish the rebuttals until 5 months later (12 Dec, 1996), one identified the cherry-picking, the other a natural explanation for the pattern. However, by that time the PR cover up was under way. On July 25, 1996 the American Meteorological Society (AMS) sent a letter of defense to Santer. The letter appears to be evidence of CRU influence and a PR masterpiece. It said there were two questions, the science, and what society must do about scientific findings and the debate they engendered. Science should only be debated in: "peer-reviewed scientific publications - not the media."

This was the strategy confirmed in a leaked email from Michael Mann: "This was the danger of always criticizing (sic) the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature".

Then AMS wrote: "What is important scientific information and how it is interpreted in the policy debates is an important part of our jobs." "That is, after all, the very reasons for the mix of science and policy in the IPCC."

Daly correctly called this "Scientism".

Santer reportedly later admitted: "he deleted sections of the IPCC chapter which stated that humans were not responsible for climate change."

He did not admit the changes at the time and achieved the objective of getting the discernible human influence message on the world stage. He was protected by the group that demonstrated its control over peer review, journals, professional societies, and the media, until the emails leaked in November 2009 and were reinforced in 2011.

SOURCE





What I learned from Climategate

I am still struck by how many intelligent people, some of whom I respect, say that the Climategate emails are a ho-hum matter. They apparently know a lot more about how "mainstream" climatologists work than I do. I actually learned four things that I did not know before. Apparently, they did know these things. At the risk of boring someone, and in the spirit of getting on the same page, let me list these things:

1. I had thought the the famous hockey stick graph and other global temperature information represented in some direct way readings of actual thermometers in the real world. In fact, these results do not directly report such raw data. Rather, climatologists nudge and tweak the raw data in various ways. This is understandable, in and of itself. After all, there are a great many of these thermometers around the world, and they record their data in a variety of situations. Some sit near air conditioners that spew hot air, others sit on pavement, or on rooftops, or on green grass. Not all have equal value. Adjustments or allowances must be made. This wouldn't be so bad, of course, if these tweaks follow fixed formulas, which are published.

2. In fact, these adjustments in the data do not follow fixed formulas. Well, that is not good, but it wouldn't be so bad if these adjustments in the data are not being made by people who think they know what the results of the data ought to be. However,

3. These adjustments are being made by people who have very strong, even passionate views on what the results are supposed to be. Hm. Well, this doesn't look good. But it's not really, really bad, as far as the science involved is concerned, if the raw data are publicly available and can be checked by others, to see if they get the same results from the same thermometer readings. Science is all about reproducible results, after all! But, no...

4. The raw data are not publicly available. In fact, that is what precipitated Climategate in the first place. Somebody actually had put in a Freedom of Information Act (England has a FOIA, just as the US does) request to see the damn data. Many of the emails involve these climatologists conspiring to continue to conceal this information. Indeed one of the things I learned from Climategate (but didn't seem to surprise certain other people) was that a significant portion of these data had been deliberately destroyed and cannot ever be checked by anyone.

The people who say "this is what academics are like" and "this is how science works" evidently knew all this. I have to confess my ignorance here: I did not. I learned it from the Climategate emails.

I should add the it is also clear that the academics and scientists that these people know are very different from the ones that I have known.

SOURCE




Jerry Sandusky and Michael Mann - Much In Common?

So what have these two men got in common? Well both have worked or work for Penn State and both have been the subject of recent "controversy".

JERRY Sandusky, a Penn State football coach, is accused of child sex abuse. Michael Mann is a famous Penn State climate scientist and he was accused of tampering with data to push an alarmist Global Warming agenda.

Oh and they have one other thing in common - after they were accused of wrongdoing both were "exonerated" by an internal Penn State inquiry.

Well a Grand Jury has just announced what it thinks of one Penn State internal inquiries. Jerry Sandusky has been indicted on multiple counts of child abuse and rape. Perhaps more importantly the officials who conducted the "internal inquiry" into his activities have been charged with perjury and covering up child abuse.

Now everyone is innocent until proven guilty but these officials admit they were told by a member of staff that Sandusky was sexually touching a young boy whilst both were naked in a shower. (It is actually claimed they were told the member of staff `witnessed a rape' but that is disputed).

Given what is admitted it is sickening that Sandusky was exonerated by their internal inquiry. And so to Michael Mann - when emails surfaced that revealed he "used a trick to hide the decline" whilst claiming that temperatures had in fact increased - Penn State set up an internal inquiry and Mr Mann was exonerated.

Now - a new batch of emails has been released "Climategate 2.0" and they reveal his scientific colleagues believe Mann's work contained "probable flaws" was "clearly deficient" and that he was unwilling to evaluate his own work objectively.

Then there were two other colleagues in two unconnected emails who thought his work was "crap". And there are 200,000 emails that have not been released.

Now I don't want to compare Michael Mann to an alleged child abuser such as Jerry Sandusky. What is worth pointing out however is that Penn State apparently covered up child rape to protect their reputation. If they did that for Sandusky - it seems clear and Climategate 2.0 confirms that their internal inquiry into Michael Mann was worthless. And it is worth asking what further climate shenanigans they are covering up.

SOURCE




This is "the science" that Warmists keep talking about

In the year 2000, Hansen and his buddies decided to give underachieving global warming a boost – by adding 0.6 degrees on to the disappointing US data set.



Call it Enron’s nature trick. Now let’s overlay that adjustment (green line below) on GISS US temperatures, and shazaaam …. All of the US warming since 1960 is made inside USHCN computers. If the data was reported as read from the thermometers, there would be zero increase in temperature. No wonder DOE doesn’t want the raw temperature data available.



SOURCE (See the original for links)






Greenpeace destroys an Australian business

A PAPER company is reviewing the future of its $20 million plant in western Sydney after "intimidation" from environmental group Greenpeace cost it major supermarket orders.

The appraisal could see a job-starved section of Sydney lose a facility with a capacity to employ up to 30 workers.

Solaris Paper has been accused by Greenpeace of using an Indonesian supplier, related company Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), which harvests rainforests and puts the disappearing Sumatran tiger at further risk.

Solaris says the Greenpeace claims and support from unions have cost it business with Woolworths and the third-biggest supermarket chain IGA.

"We are not moving away from the fact that there is intimidation and harassment - allbeit on a moral high ground," the director of corporate affairs for Solaris, Steve Nicholson told news.com.au.

Mr Nicholson said Solaris supplies came from "legal non-controversial areas. In other words degraded forest that's good for nothing else".

And he said: "We do more for the preservation and protection of Sumatran tigers than Greenpeace will ever do."

Greenpeace rejects the claim by Solaris that its imported supplies are from appropriate sources.

"It's ridiculous for Solaris, a company controlled by the notorious rainforest destroyer Asia Pulp and Paper to be blaming Greenpeace for its woes," spokesman Reece Turner said.

"This is a company that literally makes money from selling loo roll made from Indonesian rainforests and endangered tiger habitat.

"Once retailers and consumers found out the truth about Solaris and APP it's no wonder they've chosen to reject their products."

Solaris has built a $20 million facility in Greystanes with a capacity to employ 25-30 workers, but at present it is almost idle. It might soon be shut down entirely.

The facility receives rolls of paper from Indonesia and re-packages the sheets into toilet and facial tissues and kitchen paper for sale in Australia.

The Solaris showdown has highlighted increasingly aggressive campaigns by Greenpeace and other groups to marshall consumer comments to force companies into agreements on what ingredients they use.

Retail giant Harvey Norman has been the successful target of one campaign focused on its timber furniture, while this month, Bakers Delight agreed not to use genetically modified wheat - which isn't available anyway.

Mr Turner from Greenpeace told news.com.au potential job losses had to be looked at from "a total employment kind of position".

"Jobs are sensitive and we all want to make sure we have as many jobs as we can in Australia," he said. Mr Turner said more jobs could be created if a tissue-maker produced items in Australia and didn't import materials.

He said APP was "our No.1 public enemy for us in Indonesia".

A statement from Solaris said it was being "forced to review manufacturing operations in Australia".

Mr Nicholson said: "The decision to review and restructure its operations follows a series of unwarranted and unsubstantiated attacks left by NGOs (non-government organisations) led by Greenpeace, unions and those threatened by the introduction of quality, competitive products

SOURCE

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