Another Green soul declares enough is enough. It’s a question of conscience

Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt is a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa (as green as they come), and has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement. He runs a radio show, and speaks with many activists and NGO’s around the world. He claims that the “activists in the developing world, who need to directly defend their own neighborhoods, they understand that this global warming thing is an invention.”

Climate Depot has released a video of Dr. Rancourt: Man-made global warming is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else” .

“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he stated.

Rancourt is scathing of universities (and rightly so):

“They are all virtually all service intellectuals. They will not truly critique, in a way that could threaten the power interests that keep them in their jobs. The tenure track is just a process to make docile and obedient intellectuals that will then train other intellectuals,” Rancourt said.

“You have this army of university scientists and they have to pretend like they are doing important research without ever criticizing the powerful interests in a real way. So what do they look for, they look for elusive sanitized things like acid rain, global warming,” he added. This entire process “helps to neutralize any kind of dissent,” according to Rancourt.

“When you do find something bad, you quickly learn and are told you better toe the line on this — your career depends on it,” Rancourt said.

Rancourt's article is here Some Big Lies of Science – June 2010

Climate Depot has choice excerpts and a list of other greens who have jumped ship.

In August 2009, the science of global warming was so tenuous that even activists at green festivals were expressing doubts over man-made climate fears. “One college professor, confided to me in private conversation that, ‘I’m not sure climate change is real,’” according to a report from the New York Green Festival.

The left-wing blog Huffington Post surprised many by featuring an article on January 3, 2009, by Harold Ambler, demanding an apology from Gore for promoting unfounded global warming fears.

UK atmospheric scientist Richard Courtney, a left-of-political center socialist, is another dissenter of man-made climate fears. Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant, is a self-described socialist who also happens to reject man-made climate fears. Courtney declared in 2008 that there is “no correlation between the anthropogenic emissions of GHG (greenhouse gases) and global temperature.”

Alexander Cockburn, a maverick journalist who leans left on most topics, lambasted the alleged global-warming consensus on the political Web site CounterPunch.org, arguing that there’s no evidence yet that humans are causing the rise in global temperature. After publicly speaking to reject man-made warming fears, Cockburn wrote on February 22, 2008 “I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.”

Former Greenpeace member and Finnish scientist Dr. Jarl R. Ahlbeck, a lecturer of environmental technology and a chemical engineer at Abo Akademi University in Finland who has authored 200 scientific publications..

Life-long liberal Democrat Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry, also declared his dissent of warming fears in 2008….

Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University, and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, converted from believer to a skeptic about global warming.

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Desperate days for the warmists

Warmists may be winning the big grants, but they're not winning the argument, says Christopher Booker

Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future "such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent". He didn't explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.

Meanwhile, notably little attention has been paid to the disastrous chill which has been sweeping South America thanks to an inrush of air from the Antarctic, killing hundreds in the continent's coldest winter for years.

In America, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been trumpeting that, according to its much-quoted worldwide temperature data, the first six months of this year were the hottest ever recorded. But expert analysis on Watts Up With That, the US science blog, shows that NOAA's claimed warming appears to be strangely concentrated in those parts of the world where it has fewest weather stations. In Greenland, for instance, two of the hottest spots, showing a startling five-degree rise in temperatures, have no weather stations at all.

A second technique the warmists have used lately to keep their spirits up has been to repeat incessantly that the official inquiries into the "Climategate" scandal have cleared the top IPCC scientists involved of any wrongdoing, and that their science has been "vindicated". But, as has been pointed out by critics like Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, this is hardly surprising, since the inquiries were careful not to interview any experts, such as himself, who could have explained just why the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were so horribly damaging.

The perfunctory report of the Science Appraisal Panel, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, examined only 11 papers produced by the CRU, none of them remotely connected to what the fuss was all about. Last week Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, revealed on his blog (Bishop Hill – bishophill.squarespace.com) that the choice of these papers was approved for the inquiry by Sir Brian Hoskins, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College, and by Phil Jones, the CRU's former director – an appraisal of whose work was meant to be the purpose of the inquiry.

A third technique, most familiar of all, has been to fall back on the dog-eared claim that leading sceptics only question warmist orthodoxy because they have been funded by "Big Oil" and the "fossil fuel industry". Particularly bizarre was a story last week covering the front page and an inside page of one newspaper, headed "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics".

The essence of this tale was that Exxon Mobil, the oil giant that is the world's third biggest company, last year gave "almost £1 million" to four US think-tanks. These had gone on to dismiss the Climategate inquiries as "whitewashes".

It was hardly necessary to be given money by Exxon to see what was dubious about those inquiries. Not one of the knowledgeable sceptics who have torn them apart has received a cent from Big Oil. But what made this particularly laughable was that the penny-packets given to think-tanks that have been largely irrelevant to the debate are utterly dwarfed by the colossal sums poured into the army of groups and organisations on the other side of the argument.

Even the big oil companies have long been putting their real money into projects dedicated to showing how they are in favour of a "low-carbon economy". In 2002 Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford University to fund research into energy sources needed to fight global warming. BP, which rebranded itself in 2004 as "Beyond Petroleum", gave $500 million to fund similar research.

The Grantham Institute provides another example. It was set up at the LSE and Imperial College with £24 million from Jeremy Grantham, an investment fund billionaire, to advise governments and firms on how to promote and invest in ways to "fight climate change", now one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative businesses in the world.

Compare the funding received by a handful of think-tanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars lavished on those who speak for the other side by governments, foundations, multinational corporations, even Big Oil, and the warmists are winning hands down. But only financially: they are not winning the argument.

SOURCE





Global Warming Isn’t Proved by Summer Heat or Disproved by Winter Snow

But an NYT economist seems to think it is

Last winter, when the Northeast was buried under record snowfalls, some political activists had a little fun at the expense of global-warming alarmists by quipping that it was going to keep snowing until Al Gore said “uncle.” Those who peddle environmental hysteria denounced this argument, which was obviously tongue-in-cheek, as the sort of know-nothing idiocy that you can expect from all those who refuse to accept the true religion of global warming.

Flash forward to what is proving a hot summer in the Northeast and, amazingly, we find the New York Times’s economic columnist Dave Leonhardt using the same sort of logic as that of the pranksters who built an igloo on Capitol Hill last February and dubbed it Al Gore’s new home. The only difference is that the Grey Lady’s economic wise man is putting forward his case without irony or apology.

The lede of Leonhardt’s column on Tuesday used the current heat wave as the opener for his complaint against members of Congress who refuse to pass President Obama’s energy bill, which would inaugurate a system of massive tax increases on business under the guise of a “cap-and-trade” system that would supposedly decrease carbon usage. Increasing numbers of Americans are skeptical about the theories that assume human responsibility for any climate change, in part because the Climategate scandal showed the lack of integrity on the part of the scientists who have hyped alarmist scenarios rather than sober science. But Leonhardt repeats, again without irony, the talk about the Himalayan Glaciers melting, without noting that his own newspaper reported that the much-ballyhooed assertion that the glaciers would melt by 2030 was a fraud based on bogus science.

Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme won’t pass, despite the laments of both Leonhardt and his fellow Times-man Tom Friedman, largely because most Americans are appalled at the idea of such a massive power grab by the government and know that imposing these sort of punitive taxes at a time of deep recession is a prescription for an economic disaster.

But the point here is that Leonhardt’s effort to whip up support for global-warming legislation because of a heat wave in the middle of summer is as silly as anyone who claimed that the fact that it snowed in the winter meant the opposite about global warming.

The problem with global-warming science is the manipulation of data to prove a preordained conclusion, such as the now discredited “hockey stick” diagram, which “proved” global warming. Leonhardt’s arguments in favor of his statist solutions to the possibility of climate change are weak. But his attempt, based on the current temperature spikes, to shame members of Congress who wisely want no part of this fiscal catastrophe in the making shows a lack of intellectual integrity that strips his advocacy of any credibility.

SOURCE





A very strange scare attempt



IS IT just me? A report says that nasty global warming is to blame for. . . wait for it. . . making yellow-bellied marmots bigger. Seeing as these critters live in America, I'm surprised it's not all BP's fault.

According to Dr Arpat Ozgul, a biologist at London's Imperial College, the wee furry beasts are larger because extra hot weather means they've more time to grow.

That's all very well, except I remember that, only last year, we were warned that Scottish sheep on remote St Kilda were getting smaller. Because of global warming.

In a report written by... good grief... Dr Arpat Ozgul of Imperial College, London!

Hmmm. It makes you wonder what other catastrophes global warming is unleashing. Are baboons' bottoms going redder? Maybe polar bears are getting BO?

This bloke appears to have had a couple of holidays and returned with the earth-shattering news that a rodent with big teeth has gone up a dress size and lamb chops on uninhabited islands don't go as far these days.

And what happens if temperatures keep rising? New York will be stalked by 100ft-tall marmot-zillas, swatting fighter jets out of the sky and picking their teeth with oak trees. While here in Scotland we'll be keeping flocks of sheep in matchboxes.

But this is the power of the white coat isn't it? Put one on and folk will believe any old guff.

This week, we've been warned that beach umbrellas won't keep you safe from the sun. Rogue rays supposedly ricochet off the sand which means you could still get slightly burnt over the space of many long hours. So do take care, folks, if you're thinking of sunbathing well into the night.

Meanwhile, a "supercomputer" shared by Warwick and Sheffield Universities has spent months reaching the stunning conclusion that eggs come from chickens. Fancy that!

But the real astonishing scientific achievement here is how these geeks have managed the impossible... alchemy in reverse. They have taken heaps of taxpayers' gold and magically transformed it into a bucket of pish.

Here's the point: We haven't two farthings to rub together. So the "science" community could perhaps stop moaning about proposed cuts to their £4BILLION annual budget.

Maybe, until the nation gets back on its feet, they could go easy on weighing chipmunks, measuring sheep or lounging about on beaches trying to get sunburnt very slowly.

When we finally emerge from the wreckage of this recession, we can all get back to normal. Us lot can go back to work to pay tax. And scientists can spend it checking if beagles smoke faster while playing online poker.

That is, of course, unless the world has been overrun by sun-crazed mega-squirrels.

SOURCE





Now the climate modellers are having fun with immigration

You can get anything you like out of a climate model. It is just a patchwork of guesses and leaves out lots of influential factors. Just alter one assumption (e.g. the effect of clouds) and the answers can change dramatically

According a new computer model, a total of nearly seven million additional Mexicans could emigrate to the U.S. by 2080 as a result of reduced crop yields brought about by a hotter, drier climate—assuming other factors influencing immigration remain unchanged.

"The model shows that climate-driven refugees could be a big deal in the future," said study co-author Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Using data on Mexican emigration as well as climate and crop yields in 30 Mexican states between 1995 and 2005, Oppenheimer and colleagues created the computer model to predict the effect of climate change on the rate of people crossing the border.

In that ten-year period, 2 percent of the Mexican population emigrated to the U.S. for every 10 percent reduction in crop yield.

Using the model to extrapolate this real-world figure over the next 70 years, the researchers calculated that 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans—a number roughly equal to 10 percent of Mexico's current adult population—could migrate to the U.S. by 2080.

The research is one of the first attempts by scientists to put hard numbers on how climate change can affect human migration patterns.

"Our study is the first to build a model that can be used for projecting the effects on migration of future climate change," Oppenheimer said.

Global Warming Study "a Simplification"

Though the new global warming study is "original and very interesting," it shouldn't be interpreted as a forecast of what will happen, economist Ian Goldin, who wasn't involved in the project, said via email.

"The [end of the] time range—2080—is a very long time off, and there are many other factors [besides climate change] which may lead to a very different outcome," said Goldin, director of the University of Oxford's James Martin 21st Century School.

Barry Smit, a climate-impact scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada, agreed.

"I wouldn't take these numbers to the bank," said Smit, who also wasn't involved in the research, which is published in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To reach their conclusions, the authors had to make some "heroic assumptions," Smit said, such as that the current economic and political situations of the U.S. and Mexico won't change for decades.

Study co-author Oppenheimer acknowledged there are many uncertainties in his team's model. But it's important for scientists to investigate climate change-induced migration quantitatively, he said.

"This is the first time anybody's built a model to do this," Oppenheimer said. "It's a simplification, and there are a lot of assumptions, but it's the start of a learning process. As we learn more, the model will improve, and the numbers will get more reliable."

More HERE





Just When You Thought New Orleans Schools Were Improving…

…you see something like this piece in the Huffington Post and you lose all your optimism.

It’s an article about a group of left-wing propagandists hard at work in the public schools in Orleans Parish who are using the middle-schoolers in their charge as fodder to spread sheer insanity. And of course, the adults responsible for managing those schools think it’s actually a good idea.

But when these 12- to 14-year-old judges delivered their verdict, the party they held chiefly responsible was the American people. And as members of a student-based school reform group called the Rethinkers, these young people now have a recommendation for New Orleans schools: Move toward becoming oil-free by 2015, the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

“If we want to prevent another oil spill, we need to start weaning ourselves off this product and begin searching for new ideas,” says ninth-grader Danny Do, whose father is a shrimper. “Now is the perfect time to get moving, and schools are a great place to start!”

This may sound about as plausible as “the dog ate my homework,” and the Rethinkers acknowledge that their vision is an ambitious one. But they have both the track record and the supporters to suggest that they are not a bunch of naïve kids who can be easily dismissed.

The press conference they held last week to announce this and other recommendations for school reform in New Orleans attracted The Times-Picayune, ABC News, and other media outlets as well as community and education leaders–notably, Paul Vallas, whose work as CEO of Chicago Public Schools was praised by President Clinton and is now superintendent of the Louisiana Recovery School District, which is focused on transforming underperforming schools into successful ones.

“Paul is obsessed with the Rethinkers and wants Rethinkers clubs in all schools,” says Siona LaFrance, Vallas’s chief of staff. “He likes that the kids are thinking and challenging authority, and that all of their suggestions are based on a lot of consideration. And he likes that this is a continuing effort.”

The article goes on to describe a withering array of psychobabble and lunacy being foisted on Orleans school kids by these “Rethinkers,” including a campaign to do away with sporks in school cafeterias, replacing metal detectors with “mood detectors,” namely, student hall monitors who assess kids as they come to school to see if they’re dangerous and getting more toilet paper into schools (as though kids can’t come up with all kinds of uses for toilet paper beyond what schools buy it for).

There’s even a quote from the founder of this movement which might cause an aneurism among our more susceptible readers…

“I say to the kids, ‘You live in a country where people don’t respect kids. If we’re trying to give dignity to your voice, we have to give you something to talk about where you are the stone-cold expert. There is no one on Earth who can say you’re not an expert on schools.’”

So it’s hardly a surprise when one of these child abusers, who learned her craft at Middlebury College in Vermont and describes herself as a “community organizer,” decides to leverage the oil spill into an assault on the industry in South Louisiana which offers perhaps the most lucrative employment opportunities available to kids in Orleans schools. Meet Mallory Falk…

“We know “oil-free schools” sounds easy to dismiss because it’s such a big vision,” notes Mallory Falk, a recent Middlebury College graduate and community organizer who came to New Orleans to work with the Rethinkers. “That is why our focus over the coming year is to come up with realistic, practical ways for schools to move toward being oil-free.”

This year, for example, they have offered four simple suggestions: Start measuring energy waste (including air conditioners set too high and lights left on unnecessarily), form student green teams to identify ways to reduce waste and convince other kids to get with the program, eliminate the use of incandescent light bulbs, and recycle.

A simple beginning, but stay tuned. The Rethinkers plan to meet throughout the new school year to develop more specifics. And they have already received a grant from the U.S. Green Building Council to film a documentary about their experience.

It’s bad enough that these people are sinking their hooks into school kids in the first place. What’s worse – unforgiveably so – is that the brains they’re poisoning with the ridiculous and poisonous ideas they’re pushing are Orleans public school kids. These are overwhelmingly at-risk students; Orleans is beginning to see a renaissance in education thanks to the advent of school choice and competition since Katrina, but dropout rates are still high and test scores are still low. And Orleans public school kids are still very economically disadvantaged, still in desperate need of marketable skills and still disproportionately lacking in strong parental guidance.

In other words, while it would be bad enough if kids in Montgomery County, Maryland or Beverly Hills were subjected to left-wing pablum like the Rethinkers push, they’re doing this to some of the most vulnerable children in America.

These kids are 12, 13 and 14 years old. Before attempting to turn them into environmentalist freaks, has this cabal insured that they read at grade level? Can they certify their charges in basic math? Can these kids find Omaha on a map? Do they know the difference between a federalist and an anti-federalist?

Didn’t think so.

SOURCE

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Interesting climate implications from a new theory of human survival

This is a bit too speculative to hang your hat on but the evidence that early humans survived an ice age only in Southern South Africa is at least interesting.

Southern South Africa is quite close to the Antarctic so should, on simplistic assumptions, have been at least as deadly an environment as icecapped Europe and North Africa.

On the other hand, the Warmists have never been able to show warming in the Southern hemisphere of our day so it is not entirely surprising that climate change was not symmetrical between the hemispheres in the past: Maybe it has never been "global".

The Southern hemisphere has a lot more ocean so that could be a moderating influence. Go South, young man!



A STRIP of land on Africa's southern coast became a last refuge for the band of early humans who survived an ice age that wiped out the species elsewhere, scientists maintain.

The land, referred to by researchers as "the garden of Eden," may have been the only part of Africa to remain continuously habitable during the ice age that began about 195,000 years ago.

Scientists' excavations showed how a combination of rich vegetation on land and nutrient-laden currents in the sea created a source of food that could sustain early humans through devastating climate changes.

"Shortly after Homo sapiens first evolved, the harsh climate conditions nearly extinguished our species," said Professor Curtis Marean, of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.

"Recent finds suggest the small population that gave rise to all humans alive today survived by exploiting a unique combination of resources along the southern coast of Africa."

The idea that early humans were once reduced to a tiny remnant population arose from research showing that modern humans have far less genetic diversity than most other species. Some scientists suggested the human population could have fallen to as low as a few hundred individuals during this period, while others insisted the evidence to support this theory remains weak.

During his study, Prof Marean discovered that the isolated caves around an area known as Pinnacle Point, South Africa, 386 kilometres east of Cape Town, were rich in ancient human artifacts.

In a soon to be published paper, Prof Marean and his colleagues argued the caves contain archaeological remains going back at least 164,000 years - and possibly even further back. The remains also showed that, despite the hardships suffered by early humans in other places, the inhabitants of Pinnacle Point were living in a land of plenty.

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Another amusing and fact-free post from the eccentric Jo Abbess

It's pure "ad hominem" propaganda with not even a mention of any of the factual issues involved. It's all about "trust" according to her. Slightly pathetic, actually. Maybe she needs a father figure.

Her invocation of "The Science" (without saying what it is) is standard fare from politicians and thus tends to show what Jo Abbess is.

Skeptics do things like pointing out the lack of correspondence between tree-ring "measures" of temperature and what actual thermometers say. THAT is science -- but you get none of that from Ms Abbess below.

And her claim that what Phil Jones does is "rigorous" is the funniest bit of all.

She has however so far allowed comments on her blog that contradict her.

Glad to see Professor Phil Jones is back at work and enrolling students for the autumn on the Climate Change MSc postgraduate degree programme at the University of East Anglia (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU) :-

http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/courses/msc-climate-change

This course would probably be useful for a number of mainstream media journalists to follow. Even if they don’t have an appropriate background in Physics, Chemistry, Geography, Environmental studies or similar, it could be of benefit to ameliorate their world view.

They could learn something from the lectures and coursework – that the Science of Climate Change is a serious and rigorous endeavour – unlike the apparently lax behaviour of their own profession over the last year or so.

Investigative journalism without the “investigation” part appears to be a mishmash of unverifiable facts and unfounded opinions. You need to know who is credible at the very least, and you can’t get that from following the vindictive views of public contrarians.

If you want to understand Climate Change, you need to study the Science, not just read denier-sceptic web logs or talk to Steve McIntyre, Benny Peiser, Marc Morano, Anthony Watts, Doug Keenan, Nigel Lawson or Christopher Monckton, and think that you have thereby become sufficiently informed.

“Climategate”-style attacks on Climate Change Scientists by negatively-motivated commentators are completely unacceptable. Media workers need to learn to identify those whose opinions they cannot trust.

SOURCE





An Australian professor of political science says the Warmists were proven right by the various sham "Inquiries" so far launched into their notorious actions

The pathetic peroration below was published in a Left-leaning Australian daily. Note that, as usual, it is all "ad hominem", which again shows what pathetic souls Warmists are: just clinging to one-another for support.

No interest in "The science" is apparent below, of course -- such as the fact that the "decline" (in 20th century temperatures as measured by tree rings) hidden by Phil Jones & Co. completely invalidates the measures of past temperatures that Warmists have always relied upon.

But I suppose it is a big ask to expect an expert in in political science to know any real science

The author below is Rodney Tiffen. Tiffin is a light meal. A very light meal in this case, I would suggest

Chances are, you have not heard much about Climategate lately, but last November it dominated the media. Three weeks before the Copenhagen summit, thousands of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were published on a Russian website.

The research institute was a leading contributor to the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and some of the leaked emails showed the scientists in a poor light.

The scandal was one of the pivotal moments in changing the politics of climate change. What seemed close to a bipartisan agreement on an environmental trading scheme collapsed with Tony Abbott's defeat of Malcolm Turnbull. Within months the Rudd government lost its nerve on what the former prime minister called "the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time".

By casting doubt on the integrity of the scientists, Climategate helped puncture public faith in the science, and probably contributed to Labor's political panic. The echo chamber of columnists reverberated with angry and accusatory claims. In Australia, Piers Akerman said: "The tsunami of leaked emails . . . reveal a culture of fraud, manipulation, deceit and personal vindictiveness to rival anything in a John le Carre or John Grisham thriller." Later he wrote: "The crowd that gathered in Copenhagen were there pushing a fraud."

Andrew Bolt thought that "what they reveal is perhaps the greatest scientific scandal" of our time. "Emails leaked on the weekend show there is indeed a conspiracy to deceive the world - and Mr Rudd has fallen for it."

Miranda Devine wrote: "We see clearly the rotten heart of the propaganda machine that has driven the world to the brink of insanity."

The ramifications of Climategate were immediate. The climate unit's head, Professor Phil Jones, was forced to stand down. Three inquiries were set up to examine the scientists' conduct.

The first, a British House of Commons select committee, reported in March that the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and the CRU remained intact. The second, a science assessment panel, set up with the Royal Society and consisting of eminent British researchers, reported in April.

Its chairman, Lord Oxburgh, said his team found "absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever" and that "whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly".

The third, set up by the university itself, published its 160-page report two weeks ago. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of the CRU scientists, "we find that the rigour and honesty [of the scientists] as scientists are not in doubt". Importantly, it concluded: "We did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."

In other words, nothing in the emails undermined the research of the climate scientists. Like the other two, the inquiry found aspects of the scientists' behaviour that fell short of professional standards - "failing to display the proper degree of openness".

What might seem the most damning was the way Jones dealt with freedom of information requests, but context makes his behaviour more understandable. In July last year alone, the CRU received 60 FoI requests. Answering them would have been too much for even all the unit's staff time. In a matter of days, it received 40 similar FoI requests, each wanting data from five different countries - 200 requests in all. Jones concluded the unit was subject to a vexatious campaign.

While not fully excusing their behaviour, one has to appreciate the embattled position of scientists who received a steady stream of obscene and abusive emails and constant public attacks on their integrity.

After the leaks, Jones, now reinstated, received death threats and said he had contemplated suicide.

You might imagine the media would be keen to report on authoritative conclusions about allegations it had found so newsworthy in December. But coverage of each of the reports has been non-existent in many news organisations and in others brief or without prominence.

At best, the coverage of the inquiries' conclusions added up to a 20th of the coverage the original allegations received, which leaves us to ponder the curiosities of a news media that gets so over-excited by dramatic allegations and then remains so incurably uninterested in their resolution.

The newspapers that gave greatest play to the allegations tended to give less attention to the findings. The columnists who gave greatest vent to their indignation have not made any revisions or corrections, let alone apologised to the scientists whose integrity they so sweepingly impugned.

Even at the time, it was clear much of the coverage was more attuned to maximising sensation rather than to reporting with precision. The sheer number of leaked emails, for instance, was sometimes taken as proof of the scale of the scandal, as if they were all disreputable. In fact, only from a handful could anything sinister be conjured.

It is a common criticism of the media that it prominently publishes allegations, but gives less coverage to the prosaic facts that later refute them. But rarely is the disproportion so stark. Rarely has such an edifice of sweeping accusation and extravagant invective been constructed on such a slender factual basis. Rarely does it do such damage.

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Penn. State's absurd grounds for exonerating Michael Mann

Pennsylvania State University recently released a report summarizing its final “investigation” into whether one of its employees had committed scientific misconduct. The report exonerated Dr. Michael Mann of all charges, although he did receive a tap on the wrist – for sharing unpublished manuscripts with third parties without first getting the authors’ permission!

The result was hardly unexpected. Most experts who question climate disaster claims had assumed Penn State would produce a whitewash. PSU stood to lose significantly in reputation and dollars if it found that Dr. Mann had cheated on research and engaged in other conduct unbecoming of a university professor. What was surprising is the reason it gave for its “not guilty” finding.

Dr. Mann could not possibly be guilty, the report averred, because his “level of success in proposing research and obtaining funding” was possible only because he had “met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession.” Indeed, his research was consistently “judged to be outstanding by his peers.”

Mann’s innocence was further proven, said Penn State, by the awards and recognition he has received. For example, his “hockey stick” temperature graph for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change played a significant role in the IPCC receiving the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Had his “conduct been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions,” the report argued.

Such a circular tautology would earn an “F” in introductory college reasoning courses. It is eerily similar to views taken by starry-eyed investors and SEC officials before they realized Bernie had Madoff with billions in client money. The Penn State report is akin to what Mrs. Madoff might issue following her “investigation” of his conduct, “investment” strategies, “standards,” accolades and awards.

Dr. Mann and many of his “peers” were implicated in the Climategate scandals, obstruction of legitimate FOIA requests via deletion of emails, manipulation of global warming temperature data and research, and the politicized funding system that kept them and their institutions awash in government/taxpayer dollars. They conferred awards and recognition on each other, excluded skeptical scientists from “peer reviews” of one another’s papers, and conspired to blackball editors who permitted the publication of professional papers by Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, Patrick Michaels, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer and other climate experts whose work challenged the Mann-made global warming disaster thesis.

In so doing, Mann and his colleagues promoted laws, treaties and regulatory schemes that imposed higher prices and greater government/activist control over energy use, economic growth, and virtually everything modern societies eat, drive, make, ship and do. They, their institutions, and a host of politicians, bureaucrats, bankers and corporate executives thus had a direct stake in the science, politics and “renewable energy future” supported by billions of dollars in annual research grants – and in ensuring that no investigation upset this convenient golden apple cart.

It is these “accepted practices” and “highest standards of the profession” that are being protected here. It is for this reason that the “investigation” was conducted solely by Penn State – which permitted no contradictory evidence, no adverse witnesses, and no cross-examination of Dr. Mann or anyone else knowledgeable about his research, funding and alleged misconduct.

Penn State’s Tom Sawyeresque report says far more than the university could possibly have intended about the “highest standards” prevailing today in climate research, and the way universities circle the wagons and protect their “rainmakers,” while throwing “manmade climate disaster” skeptics under the bus or shipping them off to academic Siberia.

One could accurately (and sadly) say there is nothing new under the sun. A 1988 NOVA program on PBS investigated the causes and extent of cheating in academia. “Do Scientists Cheat?” interviewed several scientists who discussed how easy and tempting it was to lie and falsify research. Indeed, observed JAMA senior Editor Bruce Dan, while peer review “is a wonderful process for throwing out garbage, I can’t see that [it] can detect fraud, except in a few lucky chances.”

The show focused on two high-profile cases – John Darcy and Robert A. Slutsky, convicted perpetrators of scientific misconduct. Both researchers were well-funded, had numerous publications, won prestigious awards, and were on the fast-track to academic stardom. Both were brought down when other scientists suspected fraud in their work. Investigators concluded that most of their papers were either questionable or demonstrably fraudulent. Many of their co-authors were implicated and their reputations tarnished.

Ironically, one of the NOVA interviewees was Professor Rustum Roy, head of the Materials Research Lab at – Penn State University. He said cheating often occurs because researchers are under intense pressure to publish, win awards, and raise more money each year just to keep their labs going, employ research assistants and provide their academic institutions with 40-50% of each grant for “overhead.” Hard cheating, Roy explained, occurred when a scientist concludes he can get away with compromising or cutting corners a little bit, so why not take it a step further?

Thus, those who have big research fiefdoms, are prolific publishers and win many awards have the most to gain by misconduct. They are also most likely to get away with it, partly because of their reputation –and partly because academia has too many incentives to look the other way and avoid taking actions that could bring disrepute on the university and cut off the financial gravy train.

This translates into a high degree of moral apathy toward scientific misconduct, the PBS program argued. Academics are much less outraged than one might expect, even when confronted by obvious fraud. This, of course, undermines the integrity of science, and the ethics of its practitioners.

Perhaps more importantly, the program demonstrated that whistle-blowers who exposed fraud were more likely to be the target of investigations than the alleged perpetrators. This sends a chilling message to anyone who might raise academic misconduct questions, and further insulates guilty parties.

The NOVA program also included excerpts from a House Committee on Oversight and Investigations hearing on academic misconduct. “Unfortunately, few universities, when confronted with the task of investigating misconduct, have conducted as thorough or candid a self-appraisal” as they should have, Rep. John D. Dingell (D-MI) noted.

In fact, universities that conduct investigations of their own scientists were like the “fox actively investigating the chicken coop. The university gets first crack at the data and witnesses, and gets to frame the issues…. There is a natural tendency to limit the damage.”

The program ends with the question: “Does the scientific community really want to expose misconduct?”

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be, No. Worse, over the last 20 years, the problem has only gotten worse, while the stakes have become infinitely higher.

Vastly larger sums of money are involved: $9 billion in 2009 for climate change and renewable energy research alone. Phony studies of melting Himalayan glaciers, disappearing Amazon rainforests, etc etc etc continue to garner attention and praise in IPCC reports, news stories and congressional statements.

The bogus science is used to justify energy and environmental policies, laws, treaties, court decisions and subsidies that will enrich some, bankrupt others, control our lives, and send millions of jobs overseas. Meanwhile, the investigation by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is heatedly denounced by the very academics and institutions that refuse to conduct honest investigations of their own.

And you thought Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll and Jonathon Swift had good material to work with!?!

SOURCE





Now even "Gaia" Lovelock thinks windfarms are absurd

A recent bit of news from Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) suggests that James Lovelock, the scientist behind the Gaia theory of Earth and its life systems, might have a point when he criticises most renewable energy sources as inefficient at best and foolish at worst.

In its latest interim management statement, issued this week, SSE reported that “weather conditions” during April, May and June contributed to a full 30 per cent drop in electricity output from its wind farms, hydroelectric facilities and Slough biomass heat and power plant. Output from those sources fell to 700 gigawatt-hours during that period, compared to the 1,000 gigawatt-hours generated during the last quarter of 2009.

While SSE didn’t elaborate on those “weather conditions,” one factor certainly had to be the fact that the first half of 2010 saw the “driest first six months of the year for 100 years,” according to the UK’s Met Office. And, as the climate continues changing, Britain can expect that type of situation to become more common, the agency warns.

If hydroelectric power sources are threatened by climate change, wind energy’s greatest shortcoming is its great variability, Lovelock warns in his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia:

“Used sensibly, in locations where the fickle nature of wind is no drawback, it is a valuable local resource, but Europe’s massive use of wind as a supplement to baseload electricity will probably be remembered as one of the great follies of the twenty-first century … ,” he writes.

Lovelock argues the only clean energy sources that make sense for society are nuclear and solar thermal energy. All the rest aren’t viable without heavy injections of government subsidies and green cheerleading, he says.

Lovelock acknowledges he sometimes takes a bit of hyperbolic licence to make his points — as when he warned that global warming will lead to a die-off of billions of humans this century, resulting in only a “few breeding pairs of people” left in the Arctic. But does he have a point here? Is the bit of news from SSE a warning sign that we’d be better off by aggressively developing nuclear and concentrating solar power (such as that proposed in the Desertec project), and forgetting more intermittent clean-energy sources?

SOURCE





Sea Level Shenanigans

The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that global sea level will rise by up to 60 cm by 2100 due to global warming. The cause of this rise is twofold: expansion of ocean waters as they warm and additional water from glaciers melting. Despite nearly stable sea levels over the past 3,000 years, a number of low-lying and island nations have seized on the imminent flood as a reason to demand reparations from developed nations. In reality, most of the areas in the world that are suffering from inundation are threatened because of human actions, but not global warming. Damming and rerouting of rivers combined with over-pumping of ground water has led to subsidence in many areas—in other words, the seas are not rising, the land is sinking.

As reported in a review article in Science, authored by Robert J. Nicholls and Anny Cazenav, global sea levels have risen throughout the 20th century but key uncertainties remain. Mean sea level has remained nearly stable since the end of the last deglaciation. The rate of sea level rise over much of the last 6,000 years has been an almost-imperceptible 1.4 millimeters per year (about 6 inches per century). Based on tide gauge measurements, sea level has risen by an average of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm/year since 1950. Since the early 1990s, sea level rise (SLR) has been measured by high-precision altimeter satellites. Between 1993 and 2009, the mean rate of SLR was reported as 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/year. Naturally, to climate change alarmists, this suggests that SLR is accelerating because of warming climatic conditions.

With ~10% of the world population living in low-elevation coastal zones, figuring out what is truly causing the seas to rise in some areas is an area worthy of study. In “Sea-Level Rise and Its Impact on Coastal Zones,” Nicholls and Cazenay sum up the present state of scientific understanding:

Satellite altimetry shows that sea level is not rising uniformly. In some regions (e.g., western Pacific), sea level has risen up to three times faster than the global mean since 1993. Spatial patterns in sea-level trends mainly result from nonuniform ocean warming and salinity variations, although other factors also contribute, including the solid Earth response to the last deglaciation and gravitational effects and changes in ocean circulation due to ongoing land ice melting and freshwater input. Spatial patterns in ocean thermal expansion are not permanent features: They fluctuate in space and time in response to natural perturbations of the climate system; as a result, we expect that the sea-level change patterns will oscillate on multidecadal time scales. IPCC AR4 projections suggest appreciable regional variability around the future global mean rise by 2100 in response to nonuniform future ocean warming, but agreement between the models is poor.

More plainly said, there are a few wrinkles in the IPCC scenario. First, sea level is not rising at the same rate everywhere. In fact, in some places it appears to be falling. This is partly because of the normal action of plate tectonics, the movement of Earth's crustal plates. This results in some areas being uplifted, and others forced downward. And, as glacial ice melts, a great burden is removed from the continental land mass supporting it. This can cause significant change in relative sea levels.

“For example, relative sea level is presently falling where land is uplifting considerably, such as the northern Baltic and Hudson Bay—the sites of large (kilometer-thick) glaciers during the last glacial maximum,” state the authors. “In contrast, relative sea level is rising more rapidly than climate-induced trends on subsiding coasts.” Fluctuation is also caused by the interaction of wind and ocean, and changes in the ocean gyres. The nonuniformity of change can be seen in the map below.

Regional sea-level trends from satellite altimetry.

Other factors not mentioned when the threat of climate change induced sea level rise is discussed are non–climate-related anthropogenic processes. Ground subsidence due to oil and groundwater extraction, or reduced sediment supply to river deltas caused by dam building, are more frequently to blame. As stated in the Science review:

In many regions, human activities are exacerbating subsidence on susceptible coasts, including most river deltas [e.g., the Ganges-Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Changjiang deltas]. The most dramatic subsidence effects have been caused by drainage and groundwater fluid withdrawal; over the 20th century, coasts have subsided by up to 5 m in Tokyo, 3 m in Shanghai, and 2 m in Bangkok. To avoid submergence and/or frequent flooding, these cities now all depend on a substantial flood defense and water management infrastructure. South of Bangkok, subsidence has led to substantial shoreline retreat of more than 1 km, leaving telegraph poles standing in the sea.

Sadly, even after presenting the facts given above, the authors just can't resist reaching into the scaremonger's bag for some old and discredited examples of supposed AGW induced sea rise. “Low islands such as the Maldives or Tuvalu face the real prospect of submergence and complete abandonment during the 21st century,” the authors fatuously report. This flies in the face of evidence from sea level expert N. A. Morner, who has worked extensively in the Maldives and has repeatedly stated that the local sea level has not changed significantly in decades (see “New perspectives for the future of the Maldives”). According to Morner et al.:

Novel prospects for the Maldives do not include a condemnation to future flooding. The people of the Maldives have, in the past, survived a higher sea level of about 50–60 cm. The present trend lack signs of a sea level rise. On the contrary, there is firm morphological evidence of a significant sea level fall in the last 30 years. This sea level fall is likely to be the effect of increased evaporation and an intensification of the NE-monsoon over the central Indian Ocean.

Furthermore, a recent study by Auckland University geographer Paul Kench has shown that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking. Kench measured 27 islands, where local sea levels have risen at an average rate of 2mm a year over the past 60 years, and found that just four had diminished in size. The islands of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, because of coral debris and sediment.

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

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here

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The Week That Was (to July 24, 2010)

Excerpts from Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

In what appears to be a significant change of events, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that he is dropping cap and tax for now because he does not have enough votes to pass the legislation. Even an editorial in the Las Vegas Review Journal expressed relief that the nation has been spared of this destructive energy tax that would accomplish nothing for climate change. Is it that Senator Reid actually recognizes he does not have the votes? Is it that he is in a tight race to keep his Senate seat? Or is it something more devious?

Given the propensity of the leaders of the 111th Congress to develop thousands of pages of legislation behind closed doors and quickly dump it onto an unsuspecting public, one must be suspicious. Further, corporations and special interest groups have spent millions of dollars on mobilizing one of the greatest lobbing efforts ever. Some, such as Duke Energy and Exelon, have promised their shareholders that they would get Billions of US dollars in profits from this lobbing “investment.” The massive volumes of money that would change hands with cap and tax have attracted many organizations that demand special government “favors.” They will not be pleased.

As mentioned in TWTW last week, some commentators have suggested that after the election a lame duck Congress will pass some version of cap and tax. The Wall Street Journal suggests that it may be a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) which would require utilities to obtain mandatory percentages of their total electricity from renewable generating sources such as solar and wind. Until practical electricity storage is commercially available at a reasonable cost, solar and wind generated electricity is sub-prime energy. Even with government subsidies, the sub-prime energy market will eventually implode as did the sub-prime mortgage market that was driven by government dictates. An implosion of the sub-prime energy market may have greater destructive economic consequences.

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The peer reviewed paper which is part of the basis for Roy Spencer’s new book The Great Global Warming Blunder, reviewed in TWTW July 3 and 10, has been challenged. As all too typical today, the Journal of Climate did not bother informing Spencer so that he could review the challenge and respond. According to Spencer, had the Journal done so he could have corrected some errors and misrepresentations. Spencer points out the challenge offers some new insights, but the major “issues” were corrected in a later paper that is in press. (Please see “Can Climate Feedbacks be Diagnosed from Satellite Data?”)

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Joe D’Aleo has discovered that NASA-GISS is playing games with historic data yet again – call it Creative Enhancement. (Please see his article under “Challenging the Orthodoxy.”) Also, Anthony Watts has discovered missing data in NOAA’s latest heat advisory. More stunning is the sudden cold snap that froze to death thousands of head of cattle in central Brazil. (Please see articles under “Heat Wave.”)

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The BP Oil Spill has been capped, at least for now, but the true cost to the oil industry in general and the nation as a whole is yet to be determined. No doubt, many in the US government would like to use it as an excuse to stop all offshore drilling. The House Energy and Commerce Committee headed by Rep. Waxman passed legislation that will do exactly that. (Please see “Blowout Prevention Act”)

To their credit, four major oil companies are forming a disaster-response system to quickly shut-off deep water blow-outs in the Gulf of Mexico. It is unknown if this would be sufficient address the new Waxman anti-drilling bill. Given the anti-energy attitude in Washington (except for sub-prime energy), some may suggest that the Department of Justice investigates the disaster-response system as unlawful collusion under the Sherman Anti-trust Act.

SOURCE




BOOK OF THE WEEK: "Coming climate crisis?" By Claire L. Parkinson

Reviewed by S. Fred Singer

This is an unusual book. Parkinson is a distinguished climatologist with a specialty of polar sea ice and a strong interest in the history and philosophy of science. She clearly believes that humans are responsible for past warming and that continued emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to further warming in the 21st century, yet she is one of the few AGW supporters who is respectful of contrary opinions. It is interesting that the Foreword, written by Lonnie Thompson, while praising her book, faults her for ascribing “nearly equivalent validity to the contributions of climate skeptics or contrarians.” But Parkinson is unapologetic and explains her position well throughout the book.

Her main theme is to argue effectively against the current craze for “geo-engineering.” I share her view that many of the schemes suggested lack proper evaluation and are likely to cause more harm than good. However, I also doubt the necessity for carrying out large-scale modifications of the global environment since I do not believe that the human emission of greenhouse gases is causing significant climate changes.

Full disclosure: About 40 years ago, I was quite intrigued by the idea of large-scale modifications of the earth’s environment and included it in discussions in a symposium which I organized for the AAAS, entitled “Global Effects of Environmental Pollution.” After publishing a book on this symposium, I worked with the National Research Council on producing a report on geo-engineering, which described the various schemes that were then under consideration. Since this was long before there was any widespread discussion of greenhouse warming, our report dealt with different topics.

The Parkinson book has some very attractive features. A well-written Introduction presents an overview of the Earth System and a descriptive outline of the book itself. Part I describes very well the history of climate change since the earth was created 4.6 billion years ago. There’s also a nice summary of abrupt climate changes.

After this discussion of natural changes, there’s a short history of past human impacts and a chapter on the future, with the intriguing title “Why Some People are So Concerned While Others Aren’t.” While I don’t agree with everything the author says, I do feel she has given adequate space to skeptics like Patrick Michaels and Roy Spencer. She also gives much space to Bjorn Lomborg, who seems to accept the scientific conclusions of the IPCC, but as an economist/statistician does not accept any of their recommendations for action. And on this point, I agree most emphatically.

SOURCE





Global warming does NOT cause more war

The 11 retired generals and admirals initially mentioned below seem to have retired brains too. They reported that global warming will lead to war -- but failed in their most basic duty as strategic planners – know your enemy. They accepted the speculation of the IPCC as definitive intelligence without bothering to test the assumptions. They apparently did not examine the history of warfare as articulated by historians: generally, in non-developed areas cooling leads to war (crops fail) and warming does not

Literally thousands of websites pound home the idea that global warming is a threat to our national security and that violent conflicts will result from disruptions caused by climate change. Many of the websites point to a study released several years ago by the CNA Corporation which is a nonprofit institution that conducts in-depth, independent research on complex public interest challenges. Their study entitled “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change” was prepared with 11 retired generals and admirals, and it is widely quoted by those insisting global warming will increase the threat of war.

The executive summary of the report states “Projected climate change poses a serious threat to America’s national security. The predicted effects of climate change over the coming decades include extreme weather events, drought, flooding, sea level rise, retreating glaciers, habitat shifts, and the increased spread of life-threatening diseases. These conditions have the potential to disrupt our way of life and to force changes in the way we keep ourselves safe and secure.”

The executive summary also states “Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world. Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African, and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states.” And at home they claim “Projected climate change will add to tensions even in stable regions of the world. The U.S. and Europe may experience mounting pressure to accept large numbers of immigrant and refugee populations as drought increases and food production declines in Latin America and Africa.”

Before you enlist in the military or start shining up combat boots, there is a recent article in the journal Climatic Change that might change your mind about global warming and war. The research was conducted by Richard Tol and Sebastian Wagner from The Netherlands and Germany, respectively. The last sentence of their abstract caught our attention as they conclude “it appears that global warming would not lead to an increase in violent conflict” in mid-latitude locations such as China or Europe. We don’t see this study getting a lot of press coverage, so we decided to feature it on World Climate Report – just as we did an earlier study which contradicted the global warming=more war claims.

Tol and Wagner begin noting “In the gloomier scenarios of climate change, violent conflict plays a key part. War would break out over declining water resources, and millions of refugees would cause mayhem. The Nobel Peace Prize of 2007 was partly awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore for their contribution to slowing climate change and thus preventing war. Scenarios of climate-change-induced violence can be painted with abandon, because there is in fact very little research to either support or refute such claims.”

Are these two doubting Al Gore by suggesting there is little research to support any claim that global warming will exacerbate violent conflict? This could get interesting!

Furthermore, they reviewed a paper published a few years ago in Climatic Change in which a research team from China examined the “warmer equals more war” hypothesis. Regarding that study, Tol and Wagner state “They construct a dataset of climate and violent conflict for China for the last millennium, and show that the Chinese are more inclined to fight each other when it is cold.”

Tol and Wagner assembled the data for Figure 1 showing a time series of conflict in Europe back about 1,000 years. To compare with temperature and precipitation, they assembled reconstructed values for Europe available back to 1500 AD. These are gridded data that come from meteorological observations as well as proxy information found in Europe – the climate data had been quality checked for inconsistencies. They even assembled climate model simulation data from Europe based on solar and volcanic forcing as well as greenhouse gas concentrations.

The map below (Figure 2) tells us what we want to know – it shows the correlation coefficient between annual temperatures and the overall state of violent conflict in Europe, and all the blue indicates the coefficients are negative, indicating more war in cold periods, not hot ones. And if your eye has been attracted to the red regions where warmer weather seems to produce more conflict, be aware that Tol and Wagner warn “positive correlations are evident over the Balkans. These correlations should however not be overinterpreted, because the Balkans are largely excluded from the violent conflict data base.”

The two authors recognized some statistical issues dealing with the violent conflict time series, most notably the high level of autoregression in the data (the value of any year is highly related to the value the previous years). They addressed this unwanted property a variety of different ways, and in each case, they continued to find an overall negative association between temperature and conflict. With respect to the model generated climate data they report “Correlations between the simulated temperatures and European wars also show negative correlations, consistent with results obtained for reconstructions based on observational data and proxy data.”

Obviously, Europe changed over the 1500-1900 time period, and indeed, Tol and Wagner observed “that the correlations are stronger in the more distant past. This confirms the agricultural hypothesis. Agriculture became progressively less important over the period, because of economic development, and agriculture became less dependent on the weather, because of improved cultivation methods and better fertilizers.” Fair enough.

In their conclusions, the authors state “We present some evidence that periods with lower temperatures in the pre-industrial era are accompanied by violent conflicts”, consistent with what others had found in China. Furthermore, they note “If anything, lower temperatures imply violence, and this effect is much weaker in the modern world than it was in pre-industrial times. This implies that future global warming is not likely to lead to (civil) war between (within) European countries.”

Another popular claim about global warming is once again not supported by what has been observed for centuries – sound familiar?

SOURCE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)





Global warming's unscientific attitude

Peddlers of phony scare stories are afraid to release data -- A scathing editorial from The Washington Times

What separates a scientific claim from mere opinion is its ability to be tested by experiment. No true scientist objects to having his theories verified; the charlatan is the one with something to hide. Not surprisingly, purveyors of global warming have proved anything but open.

In the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Law and Management, Australian researchers evaluated the community of so-called climate scientists and found them to be "antagonistic toward the disclosure of information." Professor John Abbot of Central Queensland University, a chemist and lawyer, and biologist Jennifer Marohasy studied the response of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU) and the Met Office - Britain's national weather service - to various information requests.

The most noteworthy of these was United Kingdom resident David Holland's demand for the raw data underlying the infamous "hockey stick" graph that was published in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports. This chart was the centerpiece of the claim that the 20th century was the hottest in a thousand years. The stir that Mr. Holland's request triggered among the scientists who worked on the report was captured in the Climategate e-mails.

"If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone," CRU scientist Phil Jones wrote in a February 2005 e-mail. "We think we've found a way around this." So much for transparency.

Under the British Freedom of Information law, like the similar U.S. statute, information created at the public expense must - with limited exceptions - be made available to the public that paid for it. At first, the Met Office answered Mr. Holland's request for data regarding a relatively uncontroversial chapter in the IPCC report. When he asked them for similar details regarding the hockey stick, the Met Office got around the law by claiming the data were "personal information" generated in the free time of the scientists involved. When this dodge failed to hold up, the Met Office began claiming that the records had been deleted.

"Of concern is evidence of a predisposition towards uncooperativeness on the part of the Met Office, which also used spurious claims of deleted correspondence and personal information in attempts to block the release of information," Mr. Abbot and Ms. Marohasy wrote. The attitude isn't limited to Britain. The Washington Times asked the White House Council on Environmental Quality for its oldest pending FOIA requests. Among the top five was an August 26 letter from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeking documents related to its work on climate-change legislation and the Environmental Protection Agency's so-called greenhouse gas ruling.

None of these simple requests should have been denied or delayed. Many of those involved in purported climate science seem more preoccupied with advancing a leftist, anti-business legislative agenda than respecting the integrity of the scientific method. It's obvious why. Their cataclysmic scare stories are unable to withstand scrutiny. By deleting e-mails and using tricks to hide the inconvenient decline in global temperatures, the climate alarmists prove to be not men of science, but ordinary frauds.

SOURCE (See the original for links)




MSM silence some bad news for Warmists

The Warmist media crowed too soon and the facts are now stuck in their throat

Many times in this blog we have noted that the real news is the stuff not being published by the MSM. Now, on the "climate change" front, that has never been more true. The silence speaks volumes.

That particular silence is the one that attends the publication of the Booker column on 11 July, revealing to the world that the IPCC did after all have feet of clay in its claims on the Amazon, with the source of "Amazongate" finally traced to a Brazilian website.

When you get an "exclusive" like that – especially as the original Amazongate story was rather high profile – other newspapers and news agencies tend to pile in and lift the story. This time, though, with only very few exceptions, there has been silence.

One of those exceptions was Lawrence Solomon in The National Post, who saw in the revelations the first test of the IPCC in a new post-Climategate era of openness and accountability that many seemed to be talking about. This, however, was even then a forlorn hope. The retraction on 20 June by The Sunday Times of its Amazongate story had already been hailed as a major victory by the warmists, who were set on exploiting it.

Something of this can be seen from the WWF press release which had Keith Allott, head of climate change (there's glory for you) declaring that it " ... hopefully indicates that after a period of some hysteria, balance and consideration is being restored to the media's reporting of climate science."

In fact, there was more expectation than hope. Led by the WWF, the warmists embarked on a sharply focused campaign against many of the newspapers which had written about Amazongate, demanding that they followed The Sunday Times lead and retracted their own stories.

Under this pressure, not a few editors were beginning to wilt, especially as there were hints of further PCC references. Booker's story, therefore, could not have come at a worse time. Although no newspapers have yet followed suit, it was noted and, at the very least, stopped the rot. No other newspaper has retracted its story.

Quite how finely poised the pendulum is now can be seen by the continuing silence. At the beginning of this week, a major international newspaper was to have published a piece calling for the retraction of The Sunday Times retraction, but internal politics have kept it off the pages so far.

And, while The Guardian and others were quick to publish news of Simon Lewis's complaint to the PCC, which triggered the ST retraction, none of the papers which so prominently announced this development have announced the complaint to the PCC about the retraction, a complaint which has now been formally accepted and is being investigated.

Interestingly, the silence also comes at a time when not only has the IPCC case on the Amazon been trashed but also, on the eve of the publication of a new tranche of research papers which seriously undermine the doom-laden scenarios promulgated by the warmists.

Just one of those, in the coming edition of New Phytologist, puts loss of the forest at a mere six percent. This is a paper by Marina Hirota et al on "The climatic sensitivity of the forest, savanna and forest–savanna transition in tropical South America." With this, the re-evaluation of earlier papers and the emergence of some which have been little-cited, the warmists' case has never been weaker. This makes the silence even more deafening,

SOURCE





Dangerous nuclear hatred in Britain's coalition government

This has the hallmarks of the Liberals getting their way

If ever there was a necessary state intervention, it was the loan agreed by a dying Labour government to Forgemasters to finance the production of components for nuclear power stations – of which there is a worldwide shortage of capacity.

Yet, one of the first things the Clegerons did was cancel the loan – and on grounds that now look very dubious indeed, if The Guardian and the rest of the media have got the details right.

With accusations of sleaze in the air, we are looking at an administration which is on track to be just as vile and disreputable as its predecessor, only in a fraction of the time, especially with that sleazebag Huhne being accused of messing up the loan – possibly deliberately (8 minutes into the video).

The current row follows on from a report by KPMG which tells us that without more direct support from the government, it is still uneconomic for utility companies to invest billions of pounds in nuclear power.

The view is that it is unlikely that the new generation of nuclear plants will actually get built – something which has been evident for some time – simply though noting the lack of news or actual progress. As the timetable slides, and as we see the Forgemaster loan go down the tubes, there is only one conclusion – we are stuffed, stuffed, stuffed.

The Chinese, who recently reported commissioning their first fourth generation plant, and has unveiled plans to increase its 9.1 gigawatts of nuclear power to 40 gigawatts by 2020, must be lost in amazement at the willingness of British politicians to commit economic (and political) suicide.

Our expectations of the previous administration were always low, but there are some who actually expected more of the present incumbents. But it seems to be a general rule of thumb when assessing governments that, just when you think things have got as bad as it is possible for them to be ... they get worse.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here

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Victory! Democrats drop signature climate bill

The beginning of the end

Senators John F. Kerry and Harry Reid conceded yesterday that they have no chance of passing a comprehensive climate and energy bill any time soon, saying they would instead push for a limited bill to address problems with offshore oil drilling and to boost energy conservation.

“We know where we are. We know we don’t have the votes,’’ said Reid, of Nevada, blaming Republicans for stonewalling efforts to tackle the comprehensive bill. The Senate majority leader, calling the lack of Republican votes “deeply disappointing,’’ spoke at a news conference with Kerry and Carol Browner, White House energy adviser.

The stripped-down bill would include provisions that increase the liability costs for oil companies involved in spills such as the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, expand the use of natural gas in long-haul trucks, increase spending on land and water conservation, and provide rebates to people who buy products that reduce energy usage in their homes.

Senate Democrats said they expected to find enough Republican support to pass the legislation before the August recess.

For Kerry, the decision to at least shelve his signature climate legislation is a stinging setback. With Senators Joe Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and, initially, Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, the Massachusetts Democrat spent 18 months and thousands of hours in meetings with colleagues, environmentalists, and business leaders to craft and promote the bill.

Focusing his efforts on forging a partnership with energy producers instead of punishing them for polluting, Kerry created a bill that would put a price on the carbon emissions, provide clean energy incentives for the coal and oil industries, and offer tax credits to the nuclear industry. The bill’s goal was to cut carbon pollution 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

Graham pulled out of the effort in April, saying Democratic leaders were not offering enough support for their bill. “We’ve always known from day one that to pass comprehensive energy reform you’ve got to have 60 votes,’’ Kerry said yesterday. “As we stand here today we don’t have one Republican vote.’’

The House passed an energy and climate bill a year ago.

David Hawkins, director of climate programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called climate change a “real and present danger’’ that needs to be addressed.

The decision to abandon the proposal in the Senate was another concession to the difficult political environment Democratic leaders face, as many rank-and-file are wary of casting any vote that could be used in political attacks by Republicans.

Even Democrats from energy-producing states were deeply divided on the legislation. Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, thought the bill could lead to increased energy costs, while others worried about pushing such a controversial political issue after Democrats had already passed the stimulus and health care bills.

But after the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama sought to push the public and Congress to back the comprehensive approach, saying the accident illustrated the importance of reducing the nation’s dependence on oil. In a speech last month in Pittsburgh, he said, “The votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months.’’

But the president and Kerry never found the votes, even for a pared measure that would only limit greenhouse gas emissions by electric utilities, not other energy producers.

SOURCE





Sunset for Subsidies

By Viv Forbes, writing from Australia

While Australia is increasing expenditure of consumer and taxpayer money to the renewables industry, governments around the world have decided that “enough is enough”.

Other countries are realising that renewable energy is a massive waste of tax payer funds and has zero or negligible effect on CO2 emissions. They are thus cutting or eliminating subsidies to the grossly inefficient green power generators. Here are some recently reported examples:

Spain cuts subsidies to wind and solar:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6611YR20100702

Italy cuts subsidies to wind and solar:
http://www.windfair.net/press/7606.html

Germany cuts subsidies to solar:
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2265976/germany-poised-phase-solar

Denmark to cut subsidies to wind:
http://www.ref.org.uk/PressDetails/163

France to slash solar subsidies:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/182530-european-solar-subsidy-slashing-bad-news-for-investors

Ontario cuts incentives for solar:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2010/07/07/ottawa-solar-rate-drop.html

Wind power does not reduce CO2 emissions:
http://www.masterresource.org/2010/06/subsidizing-co2-emissions/

Here are a few examples of the ways in which Australian state and federal Governments subsidise or give unfair advantage to renewables:

* Bans on nuclear power

* Renewable Energy Targets

* Renewable Energy Certificates

* Feed in Tariffs

* Direct government subsidies for renewable energy

* Tax and other incentives

* Cost of the electricity grid enhancements that are needed to accommodate the disruptive, erratic renewable energy generators is shared by everyone instead of being attributed to the renewable energy generators.

* Super Profits Tax on coal mining.

* Threats to shut down or in other ways disadvantage coal fired power plants without fair compensation for the investors.

SOURCE







The Union of Concerned Propagandists

By Alan Caruba

On July 11, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) announced that it had launched “a national advertising campaign as part of a broader effort to showcase the dedication and personal histories of scientists studying climate change.”

I know quite a few climatologists and meteorologists and the ones I know have been courageously refuting the global warming fraud for years, even decades. Beyond them, thousands of comparable scientists have signed petitions and statements to the effect that global warming was and is a hoax.

The UCS campaign, however, is “an effort to educate the public about the work scientists undertaken in their efforts to document and understand human-caused global warming.” Excuse me, but there isn’t any human-caused global warming. There isn’t any global warming insofar as the Earth has been cooling for the past decade.

The UCA is part of a broad pushback against the November 2009 revelations that have since become known as “Climategate.” Thousands of leaked emails among a tiny band of rogue scientists, primarily from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and Penn State University ripped away their curtain of respectability.

Writing about it in the July 12 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Patrick J. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences of the University of Virginia from 1980-2007, characterized the emails as “suggesting some of the world’s leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Ken Briffa called ‘a nice, tidy story’ of climate history.”

Michaels, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was being polite when he used the word “suggesting.” The emails between the scientists involved in Climategate were damning evidence that they were engaged in a huge fraud.

That fraud is now been whitewashed by supposedly independent panels reviewing the emails and activities between Penn State’s Prof. Michael Mann, the CRU’s Phil Jones, and Ken Briffa, and others. On May 29, 2008, Jones emailed Prof. Mann under the subject line, “IPCC & FOI” asking him to delete any emails he had had with Briffa regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in order to thwart any Freedom of Information inquiries.

The so-called independent panels, mindful of the millions of dollars in climate change research grant funding that both Jones and Mann had brought in for their respective universities, saw no evil, heard no evil, and read no evil.

As a full-fledged partner in the global warming hoax, back in November 2009 when the emails were leaked, Francesca Grifo, a senior scientist and director of the UCS Scientific Integrity Program, was asked by Science Insider what she thought. She declined to be interviewed, but later issued a statement through a spokesperson.

“We expect a high degree of scientific integrity by scientists, whether they be in university labs or federal offices. But what may or may no have happened does not change the science—ice sheets are melting, sea level is rising and the top ten hottest years since 1880 include 2001 through 2008.”

Not so. As reported on July 16 by The Heartland Institute’s James Taylor, “In the Northern Hemisphere, Arctic sea ice is currently 19 percent below the 30-year average. In the South Hemisphere, however, Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record extent, continuing a parent of growth that has been ongoing since NASA launched the NOAA satellite instruments in 1979. The growth in Antarctica is so extensive that the poles as a whole have more total ice than the 30-year average.”

Just what is the Union of Concerned Scientists? According to DiscoverTheNetwork.org, the UCS “is a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization with more than 100,000 members. Seeing its mission as building a ‘cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world”, the UCA takes public stands, purportedly based on scientific research, regarding a variety of political and health-related issues.”

The UCS was founded in 1969 by students and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to oppose U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. By 1998, it was assuring the public that American analysts had exaggerated North Korea’s ability to produce nuclear weapons.”

So the UCS is essentially a leftist propagandist organization that is anti-war, anti-nuclear and missile defense, and totally political in its opposition to any Republican administration. Of the signers of a document, “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making”, decrying the Bush administration, “more than half were financial contributors to the Democratic Party, Democratic candidates, or a variety of leftist causes.”

The UCS continues to cling to the view that “Global warming is one of the most serious challenges facing us today. To protect the health and economic well-being of current and future generations, we must reduce our emissions of heat-trapping gases by using the technology, know-how, and practical solutions already at our disposal.”

There is no global warming. The so-called greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, extremely minor factors, play no role in climate change within an atmosphere composed primarily of water vapor.

I suggest a name change. The UCS should call itself the Union of Concerned Propagandists.

SOURCE





The Unscientific American amps up the panic

The fact that the warming stopped late last century goes strangely unmentioned. So even if all the dire effects of warming were true, none of those effects can in fact be happening. And that warming will resume is complete speculation. Geologically, we are in fact at the end of a warm interglacial -- so powerful natural effects could be unleashed any day which will lead to a new ice age. And if that happens we will need all the warming we can get

The average temperature of the planet for the next several thousand years will be determined this century—by those of us living today, according to a new National Research Council report which lays out the impact of every degree of warming on outcomes ranging from sea-level rise to reduced crop yields.

"Because carbon dioxide is so long-lived in the atmosphere, it could effectively lock Earth and future generations into warming not just for decades and centuries, but literally for thousands of years," atmospheric scientist Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who chaired the report, said at a July 16 press briefing held to release it. She compared CO2 to cheesecake: "If I knew that every pound of cheesecake that I ate would give me a pound that could never be lost, I think I would eat a lot less cheesecake."

According to the report, for every degree Celsius of warming, impacts include:

* A 5 to 15 percent lower yield for some crops, including corn in Africa and the U.S., and wheat in India

* A 3 to 10 percent increase in heavy rainfall globally

* A 5 to 10 percent drop in rainfall in southwestern North America, southern Africa and the Mediterranean, among other precipitation changes

* A 5 to 10 percent change (increases in some regions, decreases in others) in stream flow in many river basins globally

* A 15 to 25 percent decrease in the extent of Arctic Ocean sea ice

The report's authors were charged with evaluating a range of "greenhouse gas–stabilization targets and describe the types and scale of impacts likely associated" without any judgment on whether such targets are "technically feasible" or which is "most appropriate." In essence, the scientists evaluated the impacts associated with a given final level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but did so through the lens of temperature change.

This represents a shift in the usual analysis of climate change, particularly in international negotiations, which tend to focus on how much concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will rise by a particular date. "Many impacts respond directly to changes in global temperature, regardless of the sensitivity of the planet to human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases," says geoscientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, a co-author of the report, excluding effects such as ocean acidification and CO2 as a fertilizer for plants. "Those impacts don't 'care' about what the CO2 concentration is."

It also eliminates much of the uncertainty surrounding potentially ill effects; whereas various mathematical models may disagree about when and at what concentrations Arctic Ocean sea ice disappears, they all agree that at roughly 3 degrees C of warming, the far north will be ice-free. "It's amazing how consistent they become," Solomon says. "At what point do you get to three to four degrees of warming, which is roughly the time when Arctic sea ice is mostly gone."

Adds economist Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University, another co-author: "We will commit to an ice-free Arctic sometime this century. We won't know definitively until 2090, but essentially there's nothing we can do about it at that point in time and it changes the climate system dramatically."

Already, the planet's average temperature has warmed by 0.7 degree C, which is "very likely" (greater than 90 percent certain) to be a result of the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That's about half what can ultimately be expected from the roughly 390 parts per million of CO2 already in the atmosphere—the highest level the planet has experienced in at least 800,000 years.

More of the same HERE





Global warming as science fiction

Unprecedented claims require unprecedented proof, and we're simply not seeing it. Mann famously would not release his computer code and data, but was ultimately shown by Steve McIntyre to have fudged his statistics (specifically the R² number that showed whether their results were relevant or not). The story of this, and the incredible contortions that the "Hockey Team" went through to get subsequent, equally flawed papers into the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) is described at length at Bishop Hill in Caspar and the Jesus Paper. Once again, data was withheld when requested:

To have key arguments in the SI [published article's Supplemental information] was most unusual and it quickly became apparent why it had been done: the SI was nowhere to be seen. Even the peer reviewers appear not to have had access, and once again, Amman refused McIntyre's request for the data and code. His reply to this request was startling (and remember that Amman is a public servant):

Under such circumstances, why would I even bother answering your questions, isn’t that just lost time?

As with Mann's original hockey stick, the statistics for this supporting paper were also entirely bollixed up. Statistically, the results were meaningless. That's some impressive "unprecedented proof", right there.

The problem that is emerging for the people claiming catastrophic warming is that the scientific work they are relying on seems very sloppy indeed. When the CRU was asked for their raw data so that their results could be verified, they first refused, then refused a Freedom of Information Act request, and then - when people still wouldn't stop asking - claimed that they'd lost the data. The IPCC AR4 report, supposedly based solely on peer-reviewed science, was found to be one-third based on Press Releases from environmental advocacy groups. The scientist heading up the Working Group 2 portion of upcoming IPCC AR5 is still falsely claiming that the science shows that hurricanes are getting worse due to Climate Change. It's not - or at least, there are no peer-reviewed articles that show this:

I see that four climate scientists, including the incoming head of IPCC WGII, Chris Field, have written up an op-ed for Politico calling for political action on climate change. That they are calling for political action is not problematic, but the following statement in the op-ed is a problem:

Climate change caused by humans is already affecting our lives and livelihoods — with extreme storms, unusual floods and droughts, intense heat waves, rising seas and many changes in biological systems — as climate scientists have projected.

I have sent Chris Field an email as follows:
I read your op-ed in Politico with interest. In it you state:

"Climate change caused by humans is already affecting our lives and livelihoods — with extreme storms, unusual floods and droughts, intense heat waves, rising seas and many changes in biological systems — as climate scientists have projected."

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39664.html#ixzz0tbNjwMYY

I am unaware of research that shows either detection or attribution of human-caused changes in extreme storms or floods, much less detection or attribution of such changes "affecting lives and livelihoods". Can you point me to the scientific basis for such claims?

This is Roger Pielke, Jr., no Climate Change Denier like me, but an honest scientist and one of the world's experts on hurricane damage. He didn't hear back from Dr. Field.

Sloppy. Add to this the ClimateGate email exchanges where the principals (Mann, Jones, et al) discuss deleting email messages, refusing to release data, and how to prevent publication of opposing scientific opinions by taking over the peer-review process, and you get the flavor of something very different from the typical view of scientists in white lab coats. A comment to Pielke's post is a must-read for this flavor:

The drugmaker Glaxo, we now learn, has been lying for years about its blockbuster diabetes drug. Turns out this multi-billion dollar drug doesn't perform as well as an older drug (in a test paid for by Glaxo), and it also gives people heart attacks. Glaxo withheld and hid this information for years.

I very much hate to say this, but Glaxo's behavior reminds me not just of Michael Mann and Phil Jones -- all their erasure of emails, hiding of data, marginalizing and blackballing articles not to their liking -- but of much of the climate change establishment.

He has specifics. RTWT.

Dean didn't die rich, and neither Mann nor Jones have gotten rich either (although Al Gore certainly has). Dean didn't get a Nobel, and neither Mann nor Jones have either (although Al Gore did). But Mann and Jones have done something that Dean did.

They've put their credibility in a very shaky position. The fact that there are multiple inquiries into their conduct is all you need to know to realize that even the "consensus view" establishment knows this. The fact that none of the inquiries have issued an indictment is cold comfort to Mann and Jones. They'll have to get to Mars on their own, figuratively speaking. What they're burning to generate political thrust is their credibility. As with Interplanetary travel, it'll all be gone long before they arrive at their destination.

Much more HERE






Sun not CO2 the culprit

David Ivory argues from New Zealand that the variation in energy received from the sun has a much greater effect on global temperature balance than the effect of greenhouse gases

by Dr David Ivory (University teacher, Scientist and senior United Nations staff member)

The scientific and public debate on what causes global warming has been very one-sided.

The claim the so-called greenhouse gases (chiefly the natural biological products, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) are the cause of global warming is only a theory. It is not fact or an unequivocal truth, even though the proponents of the theory would want to claim the science behind their theory is beyond debate and supported by an overwhelming majority of scientists.

The reality is the scientists associated with climate change groupings represent only a small proportion of the total physical and biological scientists around the world, but collectively they have had an inordinately large influence on governments and policy makers.

In addition, they have adopted a condescending tactic to rebut criticism by disparaging or questioning the integrity or knowledge of those who oppose their point of view by labelling them deniers and sceptics and to claim the majority of scientists accept the so-called science of greenhouse gas-induced global warming.

The fact is there has been no poll among scientists concerning their beliefs and a large body of physical and biological scientists do not accept this theory (a recent scientific publication rejecting this theory had 10,000 signatories), as they believe the historic scientific record shows clearly the sun has always controlled and continues to control global temperature, not greenhouse gases.

Put simply, although very complex in reality, the earth's temperature balance is dictated by the net effects of energy into (solar irradiance), and energy out of (back radiation and heat loss), the earth's atmosphere and surface.

If energy in exceeds energy out the earth warms and if energy in is less than out the earth cools.

The greenhouse gas theory claims that increasing greenhouse gases restricts thermal energy out to the point that the energy balance is positively affected and therefore the earth warms.

The greenhouse gas theory of global warming, however, is only a very recent proposition in earth time, relating to the period of time since the industrial revolution. It does not explain the reasons for the earth warming and cooling during the millennia of its existence.

The alternative point of view held by a very large number of scientists is that the variation in energy received from the sun has a much greater effect on global temperature balance than the effect of greenhouse gases on energy loss and therefore it is the sun's activity that has always dominantly controlled global warming and cooling.

The scientific record shows clearly that over the past 3000 years there has been a more than 3degC change in global temperature, with both significant warming (in mediaeval times) and cooling (little ice age in 1700s) trends above and below present global temperatures.

What is important is these global temperature changes closely follow radiation level changes and indeed have the highest correlation with temperature change.

More importantly, since the end of the 1700s the earth has been in a general warming trend in response to increasing solar radiation.

And with this warming trend the scientific record shows that glaciers have been steadily retreating and sea levels rising for the past 200-250 years.

Thus it is important to realise these trends are not recent and started long before there was any significant burning of fossil fuels or increase in atmospheric CO2 levels.

However, the most damning evidence against greenhouse gas-induced global warming is the fact that there was a significant global cooling period between about 1940 and 1975 (associated with decreasing radiation levels) even though there was a three-fold increase in burning of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions during this period.

This clearly demonstrates that global temperature was responding to changes in radiation levels and that rising levels of greenhouse gases were not causing global warming.

The recent continuation of the general warming trend in the past 30 years, which is the period upon which the greenhouse gas theorists exclusively concentrate, is associated with further increases in solar radiation level.

Of course, the greenhouse gas theorists claim this warming has been exclusively because of rising greenhouse gases during this period, but as the rates of glacier melting and sea rise continue as they have for the past 200 years, it can only be concluded that rising greenhouse gases are merely coincidental with the long-term warming trend, not the cause.

Niwa announced that the average temperature of New Zealand in 2009 was cooler than the long-term average (i.e. cooler than more than 50% of the 100-plus years since temperature measurement started), with some places between 0.5degC and 1degC lower than average; that there was record cold weather in the last northern hemisphere winter; and that the area of winter Arctic ice increased for a third consecutive year.

These are not coincidences.

While it is too early to be certain of a trend change to lower solar radiation and therefore lower global temperature, the fact that the approximately 11-year solar cycle reached its lowest level in more than 50 years in 2009 may represent the beginning of a new global cooling period despite higher levels of greenhouse gases.

If a second global cooling period occurs during a further period of increasing greenhouse gases, this will surely completely and finally discredit the theory of greenhouse gas-induced global warming.

The bottom line is that there is no unequivocal scientific evidence that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases.

And therefore, this means that the introduction of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) is useless in reducing global temperatures and represents only an expensive venture in futility.

The New Zealand Government would have been better off delaying the introduction of an ETS, as has the Australian Government, until the complexities of climate change are better understood.

SOURCE






People-hate now reaches back a long way

Apparently, humans have been changing the climate for eons. Literally.

Ancient hunters who stalked the world’s last woolly mammoths likely helped warm the Earth’s far northern latitudes thousands of years before humans began burning fossil fuels, according to a study of prehistoric climate change.

The demise of the leaf-chomping woolly mammoths contributed to a proliferation of dwarf birch trees in and around the Arctic, darkening a largely barren, reflective landscape and accelerating a rise in temperatures across the polar north, researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science concluded....

The research attributes about a fourth of the Arctic’s vegetation-driven warming to the decline of the woolly mammoth. If human hunters helped kill off the large mammals, they bear some responsibility for warming the climate, the scientists concluded.

“We’re not saying this was a big effect,” Field said. “The point of the paper isn’t that this is a big effect. But it’s a human effect.”

So everyone’s a loser now: the climate change deniers, the climate change crazies, and the woolly mammoths. The deniers, for saying humans don’t impact climate change (answer: yes, we always have), the crazies, for saying this impact must be stopped (unless you want to stop civilization, good luck with that), and the mammoths, for being in the wrong place at the right time.

The real issue is not “are we changing the climate?”, but how do we adapt to the effects of change and/or mitigate them, without jeopardizing the standard of living we have managed to achieve? Between the socialists who would have us cap every oil well and eat twigs for breakfast, and the conservatives who refuse to see any correlation between human activity and climate change, lies a middle ground: those who accept a measure of change as the price of progress, and search for ways to cope with that change through technological advancement, not luddite retreat.

Human activity is not, and will never be, neutral. Indeed, if we wanted to stop impacting the climate, humanity would have to stop existing, or return to a pre-prehistoric lifestyle, when we didn’t even have the technology to clobber a sufficient number of mammoths.

Sorry, but I don’t want to turn back the clock. I like my fossil-fuel-heated house, my air conditioned car, and my morning coffee, which probably logged more air miles in a day than I have in a year.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here

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