U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare

The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man's stewardship of the environment. But we know that's not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.


This is the charming creature who wants to destroy your standard of living

At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said.

Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: "This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history."

The only economic model in the last 150 years that has ever worked at all is capitalism. The evidence is prima facie: From a feudal order that lasted a thousand years, produced zero growth and kept workdays long and lifespans short, the countries that have embraced free-market capitalism have enjoyed a system in which output has increased 70-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled.

Figueres is perhaps the perfect person for the job of transforming "the economic development model" because she's really never seen it work. "If you look at Ms. Figueres' Wikipedia page," notes Cato economist Dan Mitchell: Making the world look at their right hand while they choke developed economies with their left.

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The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever

New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.

One of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.

Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

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Arctic monkeys: climate agencies revise weather records

The article below appeared in Australia's national daily

TEMPERATURE records for the Arctic have been revised sharply by global climate agencies, removing all trace of a warm period early last century and evidence of Iceland’s economy-crippling deep freeze of the late 1960s.

The focus on the Arctic has put debate over manipulation of historic temperature data into an area best known in climate change forums for melting ice and polar bears.

Climate authorities have been challenged over decisions to ­revise and homogenise data, often by reducing historic temperatures, making temperature rises since 1950 appear more ­dramatic. Questions have been raised about temperature data sets in North America, the North Pole, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, with some claiming the changes amount to fraud or criminal behaviour.

Climate agencies, including Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis­tration, have defended the practice as necessary to compensate for non-climatic factors such as site moves for thermometers or changes in equipment and big ­differences with neighbouring stations. The agencies are under increasing pressure to fully ­explain specific reasons for any adjustments.

The changes were first made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network. They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the NOAA’s National Climate Data Centre, which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth.

Reports by respected climate science blogger Paul Homewood about temperature record changes in Paraguay and the ­Arctic have been republished ­internationally.  Mr Homewood is the author of the website notalotofpeopleknowthat, which has posted a ­series of investigations on the issue.

Britain’s Sunday Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker said Mr Homewood’s research showed historic data had been systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the data justified.

Mr Homewood first analysed the homogenisation of temperature records in Paraguay after US climate agencies NASA and NOAA declared 2014 to be the hottest on record. He found that dramatic revisions had been made to ­historic temperature records throughout the region.

After finding big changes in South America, Mr Homewood turned his attention to the Arctic. He found data was adjusted from Greenland in the west to ­Siberia in the east, making the 1930s look cooler than it was.  “The scale and geographic range of these is breathtaking,” he said.

“The effect has been to remove a large part of the 1940s spike, and as a consequence removed much of the drop in temperatures during the subsequent cold decades.”

The deep freeze of the late 60s and early 70s is well ­recorded and remembered.

Trausti Johsson, a senior meteorologist at the Iceland Met Office, told Mr Homewood there had been a very sudden cold ­climatic change in Iceland in 1965 that affected the whole of society, with soaring unemployment rates and a 50 per cent devaluation of the local currency as the big freeze caused a downturn in fishing and other industries.

“It is very sad if this significant climatic change is being interp­reted as an observation error and ­adjusted out of existence,” he said.

NASA has responded to questions about temperature changes by highlighting a YouTube post by British scientist Kevin Cowtan, who is on staff of a Queensland University course, “Making Sense of Climate Change Denial”.

The video that explained possible reasons for adjusting temperature data in Paraguay was not officially sanctioned by NASA and has been criticised by one IPCC reviewer for underplaying the size and ­potential significance of the temperature adjustments.

However, a report on US ­climate scientist Judith Curry’s website yesterday rejected any claims of fraud in the homogenisation process.  The report by Robert Rohde, Zeke Hausfather and Steve Mosher said it was possible to find ­stations that homogenisation had warmed and others that had cooled.  It was also possible to find ­select entire continents that had warmed and others where the ­opposite was the case.

“Globally, however, the effect of adjustments is minor. It’s minor because on average the biases that require adjustments mostly cancel each other out,” the report said.

In a statement to The Australian, NOAA said it was understandable there was a lot of interest in the homogenisation changes. “Numerous peer-­reviewed studies continue to find that NOAA’s temperature record is ­reliable,” NOAA spokesman Brady Phillips said.

“To ensure accuracy of the ­record, scientists use peer-­reviewed methods called homo­g­enisation to adjust temperature readings to account for a variety of non-­climate related effects such as changes in station location, changes in observation methods, changes in instrumentation such as thermometers, and the growth of urban heat islands that occur through time,” he said.

Mr Phillips said such changes in observing systems cause false shifts in temperature readings.  “Paraguay is one example of where these false shifts artificially lower the true station temperature trend,” he said.

Mr Phillips said the largest ­adjustment in the global surface temperature record occurs over the oceans. “Adjustments to ­account for the transition in sea surface temperature observing methods actually lowers global temperature trends,” he said.

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Obama's war on energy weakens American security

The Global War on Terrorism has been a war largely fought in the broadly connected region of Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. This region is also home to many of the nations that comprise OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), the oil cartel that supplies the U.S. with much of our imported oil.

Dependency on foreign energy endures as a strategic weakness, as the U.S. continues to import almost six-million barrels of oil a day from many countries, including nation states which have actively opposed the United States or harbor terrorists such as Iran, Libya and Nigeria among others.

Each year, the U.S. sends more than $237-billion abroad to meet our energy needs and doing business with OPEC nations will undoubtedly continue in the short-term. However, as a matter of national interest in the long-term, counting on hostile nations for our energy needs should be viewed as an expensive, dangerous, and increasingly unnecessary option.

More than any time in American history, domestic energy production is a safe and efficient means by which the U.S. may shift away from dangerous foreign-oil dependency. President Obama acknowledged, "We are now in a position to produce more of our own oil than we buy from other nations, and we produce more natural gas than anybody else."

Indeed, and domestic production has created a renaissance of American manufacturing and has spurred tremendous job creation. According to the American Petroleum Institute, "In 2011 the [oil and natural gas] industry supported more than 9.8 million jobs, 600,000 more jobs than it supported just two years earlier," and "industry operations supported 8.4 million full and part-time jobs nationally, while its capital investment supported another 1.4 million jobs."

At the heart of this domestic energy boom is the pairing of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (aka "hydrofracking") to access oil and natural gas that is trapped in shale rock layers far beneath the surface of the earth. The innovative usage of these techniques enables American energy producers to extract the vast and plentiful reserves of oil and natural gas in our shale reserves that were previously thought beyond the reach of economic production. This is shifting the balance of worldwide gas and oil production, dramatically reducing our dependency on foreign oil, and strengthening our national security.

How does it all work? It begins with horizontal drilling, essentially drilling vertically several thousand feet deep before making a 90-degree turn and drilling horizontally, enabling a single drilling pad site to reach far into shale reserves - even in multiple directions from the same pad site. At that point, hydraulic fracturing of the hard shale rock occurs by pumping fracturing fluid at (primarily a mix of sand and water) at high-pressure which releases the oil and natural gas within the shale formation.

The innovations leading to expanded production have been nothing short of revolutionary. Naturally there have been some challenges associated with certain aspects of the shale energy production, such as the volume of water consumed. These concerns have been taken seriously and are allayed upon a close examination of the processes involved. Water usage estimates vary depending on the location and geology of the shale formations, but Dr. Kyle Murray, a hydrogeologist with the Oklahoma Geological Survey (University of Oklahoma), reports that, for example, in 2011, hydraulic fracturing in Oklahoma - home to thousands of horizontal wells - used less than one percent of water compared with all other uses of freshwater. By comparison, a single golf course (out of the 15,000-plus courses across the U.S.) uses as much fresh water in one summer month as is needed to fracture one well.

Water is a precious resource and American know-how, ingenuity and industriousness are hard at work creating even greater efficiencies in the usage and recycling of water used in domestic energy operations. In fact, the water used to stimulate production is a fraction of the amount of naturally occurring "produced water" from deep inside the earth that flows from the well during production. Energy companies are developing increasingly efficient methods for repurposing this water, such as farm irrigation, livestock watering, ecosystem and habitat maintenance, road spreading for dust control, deicing, fire control, water for drilling mud, and water for various industrial cooling units. A prime example of creative use for produced water can be found in northwestern Oklahoma where iodine from natural sources is extracted from produced water and purified for use in the pharmaceutical industry, cattle feed supplements, and in the production of rubber and nylon.

For the last 14 years, we have been fighting a war against terrorists and radical insurgents who hail from, enjoy freedom of movement in, and are often secretly supported by the very nations we are sending billions of dollars to annually for our energy. Meanwhile, we have lost jobs here at home, and we have lost lives of our young Americans deployed overseas. We need to rebuild a strong America with a sound energy policy ensuring strong energy security. Our energy and national security are too important to lose this opportunity. We simply must do it right for our generation and future generations of Americans.

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War on Energy is a War on Every American

In 2010, Chip Wood at Personal Liberty revealed the Obama Administration ordered nearly half the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA) off-limits to development. Harmfully, the administration bureaucrats have delayed and denied exploration by Shell Oil and Conoco on their leased lands, which was approved for drilling.

The President threatened to veto the Keystone Pipeline, has persistently announced a war on coal and placed onerous restrictions on power plants producing electricity. Ah...but Obama, Pelosi and Reid have funded windmills, solar panels and hybrid vehicles. Restricting the use of hydrocarbons and hoping for green energy has significantly thwarted a robust expansion of the American economy, and the sudden decrease in our gas prices has been the best economic stimulus during the Obama years.

Throughout human history, energy has always had an element of political danger, which must be solved. Essential to advancing civilization, safe and dependable energy heats our homes, supplies electricity to hospitals, expands communications, and enhances almost every aspect of our lives. Through American ingenuity, we have become an energy giant, and fracking and horizontal drilling has increased our access to additional, energy resources. If our children and grandchildren are to continue to have prosperity and peace, the use of our energy resources must be safely extracted and used.

When enough people recognize the importance of energy in all aspects of our lives, the use of hydrocarbon resources will advance the wellbeing of every American. Tragically, young people have been besieged and influenced by the cataclysmic mantra of scientists and governments, and consequently are prone to hope for windmills, solar panels and hybrid cars. Just the opposite, they should study the science, and seek solutions that utilize the energy resources of America and the world.

More important than energy, human ingenuity is the greatest resource that advances civilization. Please, young Americans, find a means to utilize American energy, especially hydrocarbons. Don’t hope for government solutions. Government is politics and power. Seldom is government rational and reasoned.

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Australia: Tasmanian Greenies fighting fracking

A NEW community group formed to raise awareness of fracking will hold a public meeting at Campbell Town next week.

Frack Free Tas is demanding a permanent ban of the controversial mining practice of fracking in Tasmania.  The group joins farmers, winemakers, the dairy industry and the State Government’s Department of Health in raising serious concerns about fracking, which is a technique designed to recover gas and oil from shale rock.

The concerns range from the potential for groundwater contamination to degrading the state’s clean, green image.

A State Government imposed 12-month moratorium on the practice ends next month.

Monday’s meeting is at 6pm at the Campbell Town town hall. There will be another public meeting in Hobart on Wednesday and a rally at Parliament Lawns in Hobart on February 28.

PetraGas, a subsidiary of oil and gas company Petratherm, was awarded a petroleum exploration licence earlier this year covering about 3900km2 in central Tasmania.

The state has coal resources, especially in southern and eastern Tasmania.

Cattle and sheep farmer Brett Hall has been a vocal member of a campaign to ­prevent fracking in the ­region. Mr Hall of Lemont, east of Oatlands, said the mining company had not answered questions about environmental risks associated with exploration and drilling.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has been used in NSW and Queensland for coal seam gas extraction. Only two shale gas wells have been drilled in Australia.

“Landholders need to know their rights in relation to exploration licences and also what happens when these resources are commercialised,” Mr Hall said.  “We have been able to secure some of the most highly regarded speakers in their area of expertise for the meeting.”

PetraGas says the proposed project would avoid methods that have caused debate interstate.

Managing director Terry Kallis said extractions from Tasmanian shale deposits would involve fracking, but would occur as deep as 1km underground and would pose no risk to aquifers

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