Even Greenpeace wants Pachauri to go

So they obviously think that the IPCC has damaged its case

The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.

A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported.

The IPCC issued a correction and apology on January 20, three days after the error had made global headlines. Mr Sauven said: “Mistakes will always be made but it’s how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said ‘we made a mistake’. It’s in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn’t.”

The IPCC needed a new chairman who would hold public confidence by introducing more rigorous procedures, Mr Sauven said. “The IPCC needs to regain credibility. Is that going to happen with Pachauri [as chairman]? I don’t think so. We need someone held in high regard who has extremely good judgment and is seen by the global public as someone on their side.

“If we get a new person in with an open mind, prepared to fundamentally review how the IPCC works, we would regain confidence in the organisation.”

Dr Pachauri did not return calls yesterday but he told Indian television at the weekend that he believed attacks on him were being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits because of actions against climate change recommended by the IPCC.He added: “My credibility has been established because I was re-elected chairman in 2008 by all the countries of the world. They must have been satisfied with what I did in terms of the fourth assessment report [published in 2007] because they have given me the mandate of completing the fifth assessment report [[to be released over 2013 and 2014] which I intend doing.”

Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said the countries that had appointed Dr Pachauri should consider his handling of the glacier issue when the IPCC plenary meeting is held in October. “That issue ought to be dealt with by them. It would depend on how he responds to the crisis facing the IPCC.

“He has made mistakes but I don’t think those mistakes are so serious that you would automatically get rid of him. If you changed the head, I don’t think that would necessarily restore the credibility of the IPCC.”

SOURCE







Green math is bad math

On the front page of the New York Times' online edition Sunday was an artist's rendering of the pride and joy of the federal General Services Administration: a renovated federal building in Portland, Ore., that features plants growing up all 18 stories of one side. "They will bloom in the spring and summer when you want the shade, and then they will go away in the winter when you want to let the light in," Bob Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the G.S.A., told the Times, adding, "Don't ask me how you get them irrigated."

Don't ask how much they cost, either. I told you not to ask. OK, I'll tell you: The entire renovation costs $133 million. The plants are only one component, but the G.S.A. admits that the renovation is being undertaken for the purpose of making the building "green." Done as a project of the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, the renovation is Oregon's largest federal stimulus project.

The Obama administration proudly boasts that the effort will dramatically reduce the building's energy use, thereby saving federal taxpayers $280,000 a year in energy costs.

Now here comes the fun part. Nowhere in the article did The New York Times bother to do the math. So I did. (It wasn't hard, I did it on my Blackberry while setting out for a winter hike.) To recoup its investment in this renovation, the government will have to keep the building running for the next 475 years. Look on the bright side. Everything after year 476 is gravy!

As Joe Vaughan, a Portland commercial real estate developer, told The Times, "As a taxpayer, I think it's a horrible waste of money that no private developer would undertake."

The G.S.A response? "The idea is that the cost savings are in the energy efficiency," Caren Auchman, a spokeswoman for the G.S.A., uselessly told the Times, which did not question the validity, or sanity, of that statement.

To provide a little perspective, the taxpayers are going to shell out $133 million -- more than half the cost of the nearby Rose Garden Arena, where the Portland Trailblazers play -- so the government can annually save the taxpayers $68,000 less than the combined yearly salaries of Oregon's two U.S. senators.

This is what passes for a good "green" investment in Washington these days. This is only one tiny example of the type of cost-benefit analysis being promoted in Washington in the name of saving the planet.

More here




The Scientific Collapse of Man-made Global Warming

By Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., a nuclear scientist

The underlying science of man-made global warming has always been quite thin and tenuous, with little hard measurable evidence to support the hypothesis. In fact many temperature stations have shown either no warming or actual cooling over the past 80 years or more.

Similarly exaggerations by many UN nations of sea level changes have flourished and in turn blamed the United States for imagined damages. These are alleged by many nations, even when actual sea level measurements show little changes from the estimated 8 inches per century which has gone on for millennia (http://tinyurl.com/ykb3ctc).

Even though the man-made global warming theory is now collapsing scientifically, it is utterly amazing to realize that many of the most powerful leaders and governments in the world had bought into fiction. Now named Climategate, this was aided and abetted by most (but not all) of the media, the greens, Hollywood, even the educational system.

Skeptics have been pointing to the dearth of such evidence which, if it had been widely understood, would have ended the exaggerations. Actual measured scientific evidence often does that.

The UN and its many sub-organizations have led the charge in promoting the scare around the world, with most of their members subscribing to it. The billions that have been spent for global warming research also suggests that these billions actually helped promote the failed science involved.

After all, the goal of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not a better understanding of the climate. It was intended only to find any man-made influences on the climate. International politics ruled the effort, not the pursuit of science. It was no coincidence that only the wealthy nations, especially the capitalist US, were found to be the villains.

Near the end of November 2009 a huge global warming eruption occurred when thousand emails, documents, and computer codes were release from the files of one of he world’s major institutes in global warming. This was the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU).

These findings were stunning to anyone familiar with the rules of science and the scientific method. Climate data manipulation, massaging, modification, and even omissions were common as indicated from the texts of the emails exchanged among world experts. Even worse, much of the original temperature data has now been lost. This means that that no replication of these studies starting with original data in the IPCC Assessment Reports is now possible. Such replications always begin with the raw data which are no longer available. To attempt replication with contaminated and corrupted data is simply not possible.

It’s been 60 days since the release of this information, with little it being reported in the US media. See link (http://tinyurl.com/y9enj2d). However, a lot of information about the man-made global warming collapse is being reported in the foreign media.

The head of the CRU has taken a leave of absence and now may be facing charges of fraud by the British government (http://tinyurl.com/yjec7ry). More members of the CRU team as well as American instigators may be charged since so many were involved.

Others are writing excellent analyses of the released CRU findings, given the short time for such important efforts. One of them is a 149 page analysis is called “Climategate Analysis” by John P. Costella (http://tinyurl.com/ydkd3cx). Costella is both a mathematical and statistical expert. He writes about the impact of Climategate fraud on the exacting and rigorous nature of honest science (p.5):

“Climategate has shattered that myth (of scientific rigor). It gives us a peephole into the work of the scientists investigating possibly the most important issue ever to face mankind. Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”. Most people are aghast that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long.”

Another excellent analysis of Climategate has been performed by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts. It is titled “Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?” and is 111 pages of detailed analyses (http://tinyurl.com/ydmdtqp). These two analyses (and there are others) literally destroy nearly all of the scientific nature of the IPCC reports and pronouncements. They show that man-made CO2 still has little or nothing to do with climate, and most importantly has a great deal to do with international politics of the UN and allies.

D’Aleo and Watts provide 15 amazing summary points for policy makers describing the scientific malpractice among the UN, the IPCC and the rest of the global warming movement:

* 1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century. MF---Such tampering with data is utterly unprofessional.

* 2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends. MF---Little mention has ever been made regarding the actual quality of temperature data and the need for control of high quality data.

* 3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally. MF---It now seems clear that the global warming movement was hell-bent in producing a man-made global warming scare by a variety of data manipulations.

* 4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting. MF--- This is stunning. Try to imagine adult scientists trying to show climate warming by excluding temperature data from thousands of the world’s coldest stations. Amazing and dreadfully unethical.

* 5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.

* 6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.

* 7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

* 8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.

* 9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.

* 10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

* 11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”. MF---This is important to understanding that these United States climate agencies were also very much involved with the climate deceptions.

* 12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.

* 13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.

* 14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”

* 15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

The main stream media of the US have scarcely reported any of these skullduggeries, which means that the American public is essentially uninformed. We also learned during President Obama’s recent speech that even he has not been informed about the man-made global warming collapse.

This does not speak well of the wisdom of the president and especially of his vaunted science advisors. Obama’s NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, for example, is still under the belief that the IPCC is "the gold standard for authoritative scientific information on climate change because of the rigorous way in which they are prepared, reviewed, and approved." Unfortunately for some, the "gold standard" is at the heart of Climategate. (http://tinyurl.com/yd92q7n).

SOURCE




A falling out among proxies

To estimate temperature and CO2 in the geological past "proxies" (e.g. Tree rings, ice cores) have to be used. And how good they are as proxies is far from agreed. But what if the proxies disagree in what they tell us? That is pretty nasty for the proxy users. In the article below is one look at such a disagreement in estimating CO2 levels

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years

By Daniel H. Rothman

Abstract

The last 500 million years of the strontium-isotope record are shown to correlate significantly with the concurrent record of isotopic fractionation between inorganic and organic carbon after the effects of recycled sediment are removed from the strontium signal. The correlation is shown to result from the common dependence of both signals on weathering and magmatic processes. Because the long-term evolution of carbon dioxide levels depends similarly on weathering and magmatism, the relative fluctuations of CO2 levels are inferred from the shared fluctuations of the isotopic records. The resulting CO2 signal exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at tectonic time scales.

The long-term carbon cycle is controlled by chemical weathering, volcanic and metamorphic degassing, and the burial of organic carbon (1, 2). Ancient atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are reflected in the isotopic content of organic carbon (3) and, less directly, strontium (4) in marine sedimentary rocks; the former because photosynthetic carbon isotope fractionation is sensitive to CO2 levels, and the latter because weathering and degassing are associated with extreme values of the abundance ratio 87Sr/86Sr. However, attempts to use these geochemical signals to estimate past CO2 levels (5–8) are hindered by the signals' additional relationships to various tectonic (9, 10) and biological (11) effects. Moreover, the strontium signal has proven especially difficult to parse (12–15).

Here, I attempt to resolve these ambiguities in the isotopic signals of carbon and strontium. First, it is shown that the last 500 million years of the strontium signal, after transformation to remove the effects of recycled sediment (16, 17), correlate significantly with the concurrent record of isotopic fractionation between inorganic and organic carbon (3). This empirical result is supplemented by the theoretical deduction that the two records are linked by their common dependence on rates of continental weathering and magmatic activity. The assumption that CO2 levels fall with the former and rise with the latter then indicates that an appropriate average of the two records should reflect the long-term fluctuations of the partial pressure of atmospheric CO2. The CO2 signal derived from this analysis represents fluctuations at time scales greater than about 10 million years (My). Comparison with the geologic record of climatic variations (18) reveals no obvious correspondence.

SOURCE

Take-home message: Be wary of proxies -- JR





Are green power programs a scam?

A touch of skepticism below from the Leftist "Mother Jones" -- asking: Are you paying for renewable energy, or just a bunch of hot air?

THE TWISTING TURBINES on the Columbia River Gorge ridges were one of the first things my husband and I noticed en route from Baltimore to our new house in Oregon. So a few weeks later, when a hawker at the farmers market urged me-with a $5 token for free veggies and a postcard with pictures of children lounging in front of local windmills-to sign up for a renewable energy program called Blue Sky, I didn't hesitate. For less than an extra $10 a month, my utility, Pacific Power, would supply our home with electricity from wind turbines instead of coal.

But it turns out ditching dirty energy is more complicated than that hawker would have me believe. From the windmill postcard, you'd think my premium would go straight to local projects. Not quite: True, Pacific Power operates one wind farm in Oregon, but that's largely because the state mandates that utilities get 25 percent of their power from renewables by 2025. My well-meaning purchase has little to do with those windmills. Instead, Pacific Power hands my Blue Sky money over to companies that buy renewable energy certificates (RECs) from wind farms, mostly in other states, and other renewable projects like methane-burning landfills. Consumers need to understand that the electricity "is not going from the windmill on the ridge to your toaster," says Pacific Power spokesman Tom Gauntt. Michael Gillenwater, a Princeton researcher who codeveloped the EPA's carbon emissions tracking system, says it's more like donating to a cause. "What you are doing is subsidizing the market for renewable energy."

Pacific Power says our premium "avoided the release of 897 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions into the air...equivalent to not driving 909 miles." But it's hard to verify those numbers, says Stanford professor Michael Wara, who studies carbon markets. "You don't have an overseeing regulator ensuring that the claims made are backed up." Green-e, a third-party certification program, ensures that my RECs come from relatively new projects and aren't double-counted to meet state mandates. But Gillenwater says its "additionality" test isn't thorough enough to prove I paid for an emission reduction that wouldn't have happened anyway.

Experts say that RECs like mine can make renewable projects more profitable, but they play a much smaller role than government subsidies. (Disclosure: My father recently invested in a wood-chip-fueled electricity plant in Florida, and he said RECs sweetened that deal.) Gillenwater says most projects would have produced the energy regardless of whether consumers like me pitched in-in 2008, for example, Pacific Power bought a third of my RECs from two Puget Sound Energy wind farms built in 2005. (A spokesman says the projects' planners didn't count on revenue from residential RECs in their budget.) The remaining two-thirds were purchased from other projects, including a landfill-gas plant in Utah. Only 1 percent came from solar.

RECs, mandates, additionality-my head was spinning like those windmills, which were seeming further away. To make matters worse, in 2008, only 67 percent of my Blue Sky bucks purchased RECs; the remaining 33 percent was spent on staff and publicity. On average, 19 percent of green programs' revenues go to marketing, but at small utilities that percentage is far greater.

Utilities insist that the promotion is necessary, since voluntary green power programs work better when lots of people participate. Nationwide, only about a million customers shell out for green power-with corporations, governments, and universities buying the bulk of it. In 2008, residential customers made up only one-quarter of green power purchases.

So what's a consumer to do? Even with their problems, RECs are "one of the simplest and most direct ways to support renewable technologies," says Jeff Deyette, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Premiums can provide that extra profit margin to make renewable projects competitive with fossil fuels. And some utilities are experimenting with other models. If I had enrolled in Pacific Power's Blue Sky Block program, for twice what I pay now, 41 percent of my money would have funded local solar arrays and a geothermal test project-and only 25 percent would have gone to overhead. Or instead, I could spend my premium on efficiency upgrades in my new home: sealing leaks, insulating, and replacing drafty windows. It would just take more time and elbow grease than checking a box.

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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THE SO-CALLED "OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE"

An email from Norm Kalmanovitch [kalhnd@shaw.ca]

In 1971, Rasool and Schneider published an article with the following abstract:

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate

Effects on the global temperature of large increases in carbon dioxide and aerosol densities in the atmosphere of Earth have been computed. It is found that, although the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of temperature increase
diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For aerosols, however, the net effect of increase in density is to reduce the surface temperature of Earth. Because of the exponential dependence of the backscattering, the rate of temperature decrease is augmented with increasing aerosol content. An increase by only a factor of 4 in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 ø K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.

While there is speculation as to whether James Hansen contributed to this article with verification from his climate models; it is without question that Hansen was aware that the Earth had stopped warming in 1942 and that the world had been cooling up to the time of the publishing of this 1971 paper.

In April 1975 Newsweek published an article "The Cooling World" which gives a fascinating look at the climate issue from a perspective before politics and distortion of facts became involved. There was no questioning of the cooling in 1975 so one must assume that Hansen was fully aware that the world cooled from 1942 to 1975 before global warming returned in 1976.

This simple fact is somewhat problematic for Hansen and the entire global warming industry, because the physical record shows that the rapid increase in CO2 emissions did not start until after the Second World War (with the rapid increase in post war industrialization), and prior to that, as the world warmed rapidly from 1910 to 1942, there was only a minor increase in CO2 emissions.

In 1910 CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were 3.5gt/year and increased to only 4.0gt/year by 1942. By 1975, as the world cooled, CO2 emissions jumped to 20.0gt/year. (And emissions have been increasing ever since). For sixty five years from 1910 to 1975 there was absolutely no correlation of global temperature with increasing CO2 emissions, yet in 1988 after just 13 years of concurrent increases in both global temperature and CO2 emissions, Hansen created a forcing parameter for his climate models that was based firstly on the assumption that CO2 emissions were the prime source for the observed increase in atmospheric CO2, and secondly that there was a direct causal relationship between these emissions driven increases and global warming. Essentially the climate model projections are based on a correlation that is only valid for thirteen of the seventy eight years from 1910 to 1988.

The Hadley CRU record shows that the Earth cooled from about 1880 to 1910 as CO2 emissions first started to increase from industrial activity, adding another thirty years to the time when the correlation of CO2 emissions and global warming was not valid. In essence the so called "overwhelming evidence" that global warming is caused by CO2 emissions from fossil fuels has no basis in reality, as there was no correlation of emissions with global warming from 1880 to 1975, and only correlation for 13 years from 1975 to 1988 when this correlation formed the basis for the forcing parameter of the climate models which projected catastrophic global warming from the increasing CO2 emissions.

This is the sum total of the "overwhelming evidence" that has created the Kyoto Protocol with its economically destructive initiatives, that are not only killing the economy but killing people as their food is being converted to biofuels for carbon credits as part of these Kyoto Initiatives.

All that was needed to prevent this calamity was for the peer review committee to demand verification for the derivation of the forcing parameter used in the climate models before allowing publication in 1988. Without this single article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research global warming would never have become an issue and the IPCC would never have been formed.







WHY IT MAY BE CRUCIAL TO STOP LOOKING AT CARBON DIOXIDE AS PUBLIC ENEMY #1

(Below is a sequel to a note by Pierre Jutras entitled "Carbon dioxide isn't the villain it's made out to be", which was published as a web-exclusive comment in Canada's "Globe and Mail" on December 7th of 2006. The sequel was not published, unsurprisingly, but is now reproduced here. Pierre Jutras is Associate Professor, Department of Geology, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada)

The deep geological record is quite clear: the global ecosystem thrives when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are high, and suffers when they are low. Because these now infamous gas molecules stood out as the good guys throughout geological history, saving the day each time they show up in large numbers, and because today's low CO2 budget is reminiscent of the worst page in life's history (the late Palaeozoic), reasonable doubt should be given to the alarmist scenarios that are currently provided by most climate modelers. Apart from obvious effects such as sea-level rise, current predictions for a CO2-induced greenhouse effect are not well supported by the geological record, which casts serious doubt on their overall accuracy.

It is wrong to believe that CO2-induced global warming will result in a temperature increase for all regions of the globe. The absence of desert conditions during greenhouse ages (a fact provided by the geological record that is poorly known outside of geology circles) suggests that profound changes occur in sub-tropical latitudes due to CO2-induced global warming, which may in fact result in substantial cooling for this specific latitudinal range. Due to the dynamics of the Hadley cells, moisture is currently conveyed from sub-tropical (10ø to 30ø) to equatorial latitudes (0ø to 10ø), which explains why the former is mainly characterized by deserts while the latter hosts rain forest. Due to this, sub-tropical latitudes are currently much warmer than equatorial latitudes due to the greater cloud cover in the latter region, which allows less solar radiation to reach the ground.

Somehow (perhaps due to the establishment of a less steep vertical gradient in temperature, which would effectively change the dynamics of Hadley cells), moisture and heat become better distributed during greenhouse ages and sub-tropical deserts cease to exist. It is very likely that tropical storms would subside as well, as they are also the products of excessive heat in the dry, sub-tropical latitudes, whereas equatorial areas are devoid of them. The equatorial region is in effect a "shelter from the storm", as suggested by data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In other words, although alarmist research on global warming pictures a greenhouse Earth as Dante's Hell, the geological record rather presents it as a worldwide Garden of Eden, with no temperature extremes.

It is somewhat disconcerting that the rise of carbon dioxide levels has been somehow established as the greatest environmental threat faced by humanity, although the pros and cons of this rise have never been properly assessed. Most scientific assessments on the issue of global warming only bring into focus its negative aspects and are therefore biased. As a result of this biased propaganda, which portrays carbon dioxide as the main evil of modern times, it is now considered by most as a blasphemy to dare bring forward any data that happen to place the accused in a good light.

It is well-known and non-controversial that the biosphere was in much better shape during the Cretaceous, when carbon dioxide levels were several times higher than today. Of course, whenever there is a change in external conditions, there are winners and losers. If crop species are doing better, chances are that pest species are not doing so well, and vice-versa. During the Cretaceous greenhouse age, benthic (bottom-dwelling) species were the main losers, as the oceans became permanently stratified, bringing anaerobic conditions on the deep seafloor. However, the hardships of benthic fauna, a minute fraction of the world's biomass and biodiversity, were largely outdone by sheer happiness in the pelagic (water-column-dwelling) and terrestrial realms.

Most agree that, whether or not it is true that the current rise in atmospheric CO2 is detrimental, "better be safe than sorry" and work at curbing down emissions. Not necessarily. It all depends on what method is used to curb down emissions. For instance, many environmentalists are turning to biodiesel fuels to lower their contribution to global warming. It is sad to say that such environmentally-responsible people may in fact pollute more than less concerned citizens. However, if you remove carbon dioxide from the equation, they certainly do. Biodiesel is a very impure fuel that doesn't burn nearly as well as refined gasoline. As a result, it emits much greater amounts of particulates, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide, which are "true" pollutants. If everyone switched to biodiesel fuel, cities would soon become unlivable due to a quick rise in these atmospheric pollutants. In contrast, carbon dioxide is "not" a pollutant. All it does is feed plants and help to maintain solar heat in the lower atmosphere. While so much international effort is put forward to deal with the "carbon dioxide case", less notorious environmental threats get a chance to stay out of the spotlight and thrive on the diversion (when did you last hear about acid rain?).

Another reason why we should give carbon dioxide a fair trial and a chance to revoke itself as public enemy #1 is the fact that it is a very strong opponent to tackle. The economic drawbacks of the ongoing climate war are astronomic, especially for developing countries. The widespread switch to "biofuel" farming is also creating a food crisis.

Finally, before putting in place enormous international efforts such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord, it would have been preferable to derive proper estimates on which prospect is to be most feared, global warming or global cooling? Ice sheets have been intermittently covering most of North America and northern Europe over the past 2.5 million years. Just as winter and summer, glacial advances and retreats are clocked with orbital cycles. The "summer solstice" of this interglacial cycle (warm eccentricity peak in the Milankovitch cycles) is already five thousand years behind us, and we are now heading towards the next winter. The current human-induced rise in atmospheric CO2 may be slowing down global cooling, but it is very unlikely that temperatures in the "Milankovitch winter" (we are now in the "Milankovitch autumn") will ever exceed those of the "Milankovitch summer".

In conclusion, with the parallel threat of orbitally-induced global cooling, a more sophisticated and less biased assessment of climate evolution and its consequences for the global ecosystem is needed to better guide intervention strategies. In other words, the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord may be premature and possibly misguided international interventions, however well-intentioned their initiators and promoters might be.







Crooked "scientist" hid flaws in Chinese data

Now the dodgy Chinese data is finally getting a bit of attention -- even from "The Guardian" (below)

It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China? But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN's top climate science body.

It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.

The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.

Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990. That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?

It is well-known that the concrete, bricks and asphalt of urban areas absorb more heat than the countryside. They result in cities being warmer than the countryside, especially at night. So the question is whether rising mercury is simply a result of thermometers once in the countryside gradually finding themselves in expanding urban areas.

The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then.

The paper became a key reference source for the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - including a chapter in the 2007 one co-authored by Jones. It said that globally "the urbanisation influence . is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale". In other words, it is tiny.

But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim. They were convinced that the urban effect was much bigger, even though it might not change the overall story of global warming too much. After all, two-thirds of the planet is covered by ocean, and the oceans are warming, too.

But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be "unduly burdensome", they concluded that he was covering up the error.

And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud. He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.

Keenan told the Guardian: "The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres"; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that "there were 'few if any changes' to locations is a fabrication". He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.

The emails, which first emerged online in November last year following a hack of the university's computer systems that is being investigated by police, reveal that Jones was hurt, angry and uncertain about the allegations. "It is all malicious . I seem to be a marked man now," he wrote in April 2007.

Another email from him said: "My problem is I don't know the best course of action. I know I'm on the right side and honest, but I seem to be telling myself this more often recently!" An American colleague, and frequent contributor to the leaked emails, Dr Mike Mann at Pennsylvania State University, advised him: "This crowd of charlatans look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised. The last thing you want to do is help them by feeding the fire. Best thing is to ignore them completely."

Another colleague, Kevin Trenberth at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, urged a fightback. "The response should try to somehow label these guys and [sic] lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database."

In August 2007, Keenan submitted a formal complaint about Wang to Wang's employers. The university launched an inquiry. Reporting in May 2008, it found "no evidence of the alleged fabrication of results" and exonerated him. But it did not publish its detailed findings, and refused to give a copy to Keenan.

By then, Keenan had published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. The paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones's colleagues about Wang's missing data - and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.

Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: "It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect."

Wigley was concerned partly because he had been director of the CRU when the original paper was published in 1990. As he told Jones later, in 2009: "The buck should eventually stop with me."

Wigley put to Jones the allegations made by the sceptics. "Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist." This is believed to be a report from the US department of energy, which obtained the original Chinese temperature data.

Wang's defence to the university inquiry says that he had got the Chinese temperature data from a Chinese colleague, although she is not an author on the 1990 Nature paper. Wang's defence explains that the colleague had lost her notes on many station locations during a series of office moves. Nonetheless, "based on her recollections", she could provide information on 41 of the 49 stations. In all, that meant that no fewer than 51 of the 84 stations had been moved during the 30-year study period, 25 had not moved, and eight she could not recollect.

Wang, however, maintained to the university that the 1990 paper's claim that "few, if any" stations had moved was true. The inquiry apparently agreed.

Wigley, in his May 2009 email to Jones, said of Wang: "I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I would .not be surprised if he screwed up here . Were you taking W-C W on trust? Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it's not too late." There is no evidence of any doubts being raised over Wang's previous work.

Jones told the Guardian he was not able to comment on the allegations. Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more. Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them."

The story has a startling postscript. In 2008, Jones prepared a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research re-examining temperatures in eastern China. It found that, far from being negligible, the urban heat phenomenon was responsible for 40% of the warming seen in eastern China between 1951 and 2004.

This does not flatly contradict Jones's 1990 paper. The timeframe for the new analysis is different. But it raises serious new questions about one of the most widely referenced papers on global warming, and about the IPCC's reliance on its conclusions.

SOURCE






BRITAIN'S VERY OWN INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU TAKES ON CLIMATEGATE

It was the Russians. Or possibly the Chinese. No, wait, it was the Americans. Yes, our very own version of Inspector Clouseau is on the case of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Yesterday Sir David King, Tony Blair's former chief scientific advisor, told this newspaper: "It was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies... there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency." However, King goes on to suggest that the expense of such an operation would be too great for the entire Russian state to undertake: "In terms of the expense, there is the American lobby system, which is a very likely source of finance, so the finger must point to them."

And why is it that Sir David thinks that the Kremlin joined forces with unspecified "American agencies" to leak emails from the UEA's Climatic Research Unit? He claims it was to undermine the UN's Copenhagen climate Conference (as if it hadn't been doomed anyway). The more interesting question is why the content of the emails might have been thought to have such an effect, as King apparently believes they did.

Perhaps - let's make a wild stab - it was because they revealed that the unit described as the world's most authoritative source of evidence for the threat of man-made climate change had been trying to prevent the methodology behind its predictions from being made public via the Freedom of Information Act.

Perhaps it was also because the emails showed how some members of the UEA team had lobbied scientific journals to block the publishing of papers that dissented from their own opinion about the entirely anthropogenic cause of allegedly unprecedented global temperatures; and perhaps it was also because it contained such emails as this one, from the head of climate analysis of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it's a travesty that we can't... we cannot account for what is happening in the climate system."

For Sir David King, clearly, the travesty is that the public should be allowed to have a glimpse of the true level of uncertainty within climate science. It is astonishing arrogance on his part. His intervention is on the same moral level as any MP who declared that the most important issue about the expenses claims within the Palace of Westminster was how it came to be that the disc on which they were stored was passed to the press. In fact, no MP was that arrogant - or that stupid.

As it happens, we now know that disc was leaked by someone legitimately in possession of it - a whistleblower who was appalled by what he saw, and thought that the public should know. For some reason, it has not occurred to Sir David King that the UEA emails might have been accessed and then leaked by an insider shocked at what he had discovered. Remember also that they were in any case all being collated following a request under the Freedom of Information Act; perhaps this insider became aware that the now suspended head of the Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, had asked colleagues to delete certain emails, and was determined that Jones should not be allowed to get away with it.

Even if the leak were not the work of a whistleblower from inside the UEA, it is still ludicrous scaremongering on Sir David's part to declare that this must have been a concerted operation by one or more foreign intelligence services. Is he unaware that an autistic loner, Gary McKinnon, is facing extradition to the US, after he hacked into some of the Pentagon's most sensitive codes using nothing more than a domestic dial-up internet connection? Yet, according to Sir David King, such a non-secure academic database as the University of East Anglia's could only have been penetrated by SMERSH, sorry, the FSB, sorry, the CIA....oh, whatever.

On the wider issue of climate change, Sir David has form for scaremongering. In 2004 he declared that if the world did not act to reduce its Co2 emissions, by the end of the century Antarctica would be the planet's only inhabitable continent. It is, by the way, most welcome that his successor as chief scientist, John Beddington, has an altogether more...well, scientific approach. Last week Beddington said: "I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper [climate] scepticism...there is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction...there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves."

Beddington was speaking in the wake of a number of damaging revelations about the whole process by which the International Panel On Climate Change comes up with its terrifying forecasts. The most notable was the admission by the IPCC that its 2007 report's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would "disappear by the year 2035" was based on a misunderstanding (let's not be cynical) by the World Wildlife Fund, which was itself citing a magazine article, which was in turn quoting a single Indian glaciologist, who in his turn subsequently claimed that he hadn't said any such thing.

Yet when a number of the IPCC's critics questioned the astonishing claim that the Himalayas would be free of ice by 2035, the IPCC's chairman dismissed them as "voodoo scientists." Among those alleged "voodoo" practitioners was the Indian Government. Last week the Indian Environment Minister, Jairiam Ramesh, welcomed the IPCC's retraction of its most headline-grabbing claim: "The IPCC's claim that [Himalayan] glaciers will vanish by 2035 was not based on an iota of scientific evidence." One can understand Mr Ramesh's fury. About two billion people depend on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers. If they had believed what the IPCC said, then we could have witnessed a panic movement of population of unprecedented scale.

And where does our own climate change minister, Ed Miliband, stand on this? Last month he harrumphed that "We must not let the sceptics pass off political opinion as scientific fact... the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of South Asia could put hundreds of millions of people at risk of drought. Our security is at stake."

Now that Miliband stands revealed as someone who passed off political opinion as scientific fact, what does he say? Under the headline "Miliband declares war on climate change sceptics", the minister was reported this weekend as follows:" I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture... when the next IPCC report comes out it will suggest that there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied."

A mistake? The single most significant and newsworthy claim in the IPCC's report is shown to be complete garbage, undermining confidence in the whole process, and it's just "a mistake"? One is reminded of Tony Blair's response to the Chilcot committee last week, when asked about his utterly discredited claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that would take just 45 minutes to launch. A mere detail, said Blair: it was the media's fault for overstating its significance within the wider picture.

After non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the British Government now wants to terrify us - and the world - with scaremongering about "man-made" weather of mass destruction. That's the scandal - not whether someone has hacked into an East Anglian computer.

SOURCE







Junkscience: Climategate Distortion of Temperature Data

By S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist

We discuss here in some detail the way in which warming trends were introduced into the IPCC Report-when in fact they did not exist or were extremely small. We focus on the period 1979 to 1997. There was cooling up to 1976; in 1998 there was a super-El-Nino and no subsequent warming. Our discussion is in three parts: (1) a `bottoms-up' approach; (2) the `top-down' approach; and next week I shall discuss (3) the treatment of sea surface temperatures (SST).

Bottoms-Up Distortion of Temperature Data

The Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU-UEA), under the direction of Dr. Philip Jones, collected data from weather stations from around the world. These are almost all land-based stations, showing a high concentration in the United States and Western Europe and a lower concentration elsewhere-with many parts of the globe hardly covered by reliable stations.

There are a variety of problems with such data, and the investigators were aware of most of them. Many stations produce useless data, either because of inadequate maintenance, or because of their location. Anthony Watts (in his WUWT blog) has shown that even stations in the USA were badly placed and subject to local warming influences that were not adequately corrected.

The surface of the earth is then divided into grid boxes, usually five degrees by five degrees. When there are several stations in a grid box, the investigators would choose those they considered most reliable-which in many cases meant urban stations, or stations at airports, that are well maintained. However, because of their location, they generally are subject to `urban heat-island' (UHI) effects, a local warming that increases with population and urban growth over time and suggests a temperature trend of a global nature. The investigators tried various ways to eliminate such local UHI trends, but were not very successful.

The problem was greatly exacerbated by the closing of over half the world's weather stations between 1970 and 2000 (see NIPCC Summary, Fig 12-which in most cases removed rural stations but also stations from higher latitudes and altitudes that tended to show a lower warming trend or no warming trend at all. It should be obvious therefore that this drastic change in the sampling population would introduce a fictitious warming trend which is an artifact of the change. E. Michael Smith and Joseph D'Aleo have documented in some detail how such artificial temperature trends could be produced even when there was no global trend.

The Top-Down (TD) Approach

In many ways, the `Top-Down' (TD) approach to derive the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) is to be preferred over `bottom-up' (deriving GMST by collecting data from weather stations and sea surface readings). The TD approach relies primarily on the data from weather satellites, the only truly global measuring system, using a single microwave sounding (MSU) instrument and therefore independent of the vagaries of individual weather stations and their thermometers.

There are of course certain disadvantages: The MSU cannot measure temperatures at different levels of the atmosphere but derives instead a `weighted mean ` of the vertical temperature profile; the times of observation are fixed by the orbit of the satellite; a change of satellite, and MSU instrument, requires an overlap in operating time to permit a recalibration. Nevertheless, by comparing different view angles, one can change the weight factors and obtain a temperature value for `Lower Troposphere.' The University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) group has shown good agreement of UAH results with those of radiosondes from weather balloons.

As early as 1997, I noticed a disparity between temperature trends of satellites and surface trends, esp. in the tropics. (See Fig 9 in Hot Talk, Cold Science, 1997) The troposphere trends (between 1979 and 1995) were close to zero or even slightly negative, while surface trends showed a warming of about 0.05 deg per decade. This disparity is just the reverse of what one would expect from GH models [see IPCC-SAR]-namely a positive (warming) troposphere trend up to twice as large as the surface trend.

In addition, I noticed that the proxy data to which I had access showed no surface warming (tree-ring data of Jacoby et al (Fig 16 in HTCS) and ice core data of Dahl-Jensen et al]. I tried very hard to obtain more proxy data but was not successful. For example, I noticed that Michael Mann's infamous hockeystick graph did not extend beyond 1979 and suspected that his proxy temperatures diverged from the instrumented surface results. Yet when I wrote to Mann about post-1980 proxy data, I received only a brusque negative reply. Thanks to `Climategate' we now know, what I had then suspected, i.e., that Mann and Jones were engaged in a scheme to "hide the decline [in post-1979 proxy temperatures]."

To sum up: Both the satellite results and the proxy data tell us that the claimed rise of surface temperature between 1979 and 1997, shown by IPCC, is probably much smaller or even non-existent.

SOURCE






Brazil to give the Greenies a black eye?

Renewable energy? No thanks, say the Greenies

Brazil has approved the controversial construction of a giant hydroelectric dam in the heart of the Amazon, defying a 20-year protest by indigenous and environmental campaigners who say that the project will devastate the surrounding rainforest and threaten the survival of local tribes. The Belo Monte project on the Xingu river, an Amazon tributary, was started in the 1990s but abandoned amid widespread protests at home and abroad. The rock star Sting led a campaign against the plan with tribal leaders, and revisited Brazil in November last year to urge the Government to consider the impact of deforestation on greenhouse gas levels and global warming.

The $17billion dam in the northern state of Par  will be the world's third-largest and could provide electricity to 23million homes, a supply that the Government says is vital to the country's economic growth. Critics argue that the flooding of 500 sq km of rainforest will damage fish stocks and wildlife and force the displacement of indigenous peoples.

Carlos Minc, the Environment Minister, said on Monday that the land flooded would be a fraction of the 5,000 sq km originally planned. "The environmental impact exists but it has been weighed up, calculated and reduced," he said. "Not one Indian on indigenous land will be displaced." However, groups on land not demarcated as tribal territory - a distinction often labelled a get-out clause by indigenous campaigners - still stand to lose their homes.

Mr Minc said that they would be compensated. Indigenous groups complain that they were not properly consulted over the project, which Megaron Tuxucumarrae, a chief of the Kayapo tribe, said would destroy the environment that his people had taken care of for millennia. "We are opposed to dams on the Xingu, and will fight to protect our river," he said.

The state-run company Eletrobras is said to be eyeing the project, but a contract has not yet been awarded. The winning company will have to spend $803million on measures to minimise its impact and resettle an estimated 12,000 people.

Critics said that the Government had underestimated the potential impact in its attempt to meet political ends in an election year. Even within the Government, the project has been so contentious that in November two senior officials from Ibama, Brazil's environmental agency, resigned, citing political pressure.

With general elections looming in October, the Government is under pressure to deal with energy infrastructure problems that resulted in large swathes of the country, including Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, being plunged into darkness in November.
Engineering experts have questioned the efficiency of the 11-gigawatt dam, which would be outstripped in size only by China's Three Gorges and Itaipu on the Brazil-Paraguay border.

Francisco Hernandez, an electrical engineer and joint co-ordinator of a group of 40 specialists who analysed the project, said that the dam would generate little electricity during the three to four-month dry season. Describing it as a scheme of "doubtful engineering viability", he said Belo Monte was an extremely complex project "that would interrupt the flow of water courses over an enormous area, requiring excavation of earth and rocks on the scale of that carried out for digging the Panama Canal". Up to 70 dams, roads, gas pipelines and power grids worth more than $30billion are to be built to tap the region's raw materials and transport agricultural products.

The announcement drew a furious reaction from environmental groups around the world. Aviva Imhof, the campaigns director of International Rivers, described it as a "foolish investment", and said that by investing in energy efficiency, Brazil could cut demand by 40 per cent over the nextdecade and save $19billion. "The amount of energy saved would be equivalent to 14 Belo Monte dams," she said. Fiona Watson, research director of the UK-based Survival International, said the dam would be a catastrophe for indigenous people. "The Brazilian Government has driven through the dam with a cavalier disregard to indigenous peoples' rights," she said. "Development in Brazil comes at an unacceptable price - the destruction of whole tribes."

SOURCE

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Now that Obama has taken most of their space funding away, NASA has found a new role

Funding info here. New role below: Brainwashing children with lies

For a long time, experts trying to raise awareness on the whole issue of global warming and climate change have failed to explain to children why it's important to save the planet. Reducing the most complex natural phenomena and interconnections down to a simple level, where most kids can make sense of them, is something incredibly difficult to do. A new website recently launched by the American space agency NASA finally provides children and adults alike with all the materials they need in order to understand how climate is changing, why, and what can be done about this.

The new website, which can be accessed here, is a companion to the agency's award-winning Global Climate Change site. But the new portal is a lot easier for kids to digest, in the sense that it contains fun games, age-appropriate language, as well as interesting animations that break down the most difficult aspects of global warming and climate change, allowing the little ones to follow them. This is of tremendous importance for the future of our race. If the next generation is not well-educated in these issues, then we could risk developing one that is just as careless and reckless as the current one. And nobody in their right mind wants that.

There are a number of features that visitors to the new site can take advantage of, including commandeering an interactive Climate Time Machine. This is a very powerful tool, because it has the ability to carry kids into the future, in worlds that were modeled based on the most accurate climate simulations in the world today. In addition to this, children also have the possibility to play a number of “green games,” including selecting the best possible scenario for the planet. Another section of the site gives children advice from climate-change scientists, who have been working almost non-stop over the past decades to raise awareness on the issue.

“The climate our children inherit will be different from what we as adults know today. Climate Kids aims to answer some of the big questions about global climate change using simple, fun illustrations and language kids can relate to, helping them become better stewards of our fragile planet. Students will learn basic Earth science concepts such as what the difference is between weather and climate, how we know Earth's climate is changing and what the greenhouse effect is,” the developer of the website's contents, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) expert Diane Fisher, explains. The site itself is a collaboration between the JPL Earth Science Communications Team, and the NASA's award-winning Space Place website.

SOURCE

“Climategate” Ignored in Coverage of SEC Ruling

Global warming alarmism took some big hits toward the end of the last year with “climategate” and the collapse of treaty talks in Copenhagen. This might explain why front page coverage of the topic has fallen off quite dramatically in recent weeks. But there’s an interesting New York Times piece in the business section concerning “interpretitive guidance” the Securities and Exchange Council (SEC) issued to help companies determine when they should disclose potential risks related to climate change.

Mary Shapiro, the SEC chairwoman, was very measured in her comments on the decision saying that there was no new legal requirement and that the agency was not staking out a position on the science. Might that have something do with the exposure of emails that show scientists with the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Great Britain had doctored and manipulated their research?

The report is straightforward and appropriately detached from any policy stance as far as it goes. But there’s rub. Unlike their liberal counterparts overseas, The New York Times, has gone out of their way to avoid any acknowledgment of the email scandal that reveals who global warming science has been doctored and manipulated. This is the same science that has been so often cited as justification for new regulations.

An editor could argue that the scientific dispute over climate change is peripheral to this story and that the email scandal should be handled separately. But anytime The Times saw fit to recognize a scientist or policy expert who questioned the premise of man-made global warming theories in the past they were quick to identify this individual as an “industry-funded, corporate-backed” shrill of some kind, while giving the alarmist side carte blanche.

Kathleen Casey, a Republican appointee, is quoted in the final paragraphs and the reporter deserves credit for allowing her to highlight scientific disputes. But the entire tone of the article suggests that the SEC is engaged in a harmless administrative maneuver that will have little impact on business. In reality, the SEC appears to be opening the way to green activists who are determined to constrain and restrict potentially profitable exercises.

The article ends where new questions should be raised about shareholder activism and the political motivations of advocacy groups that place a greater premium on environmental dogma than they do on scientific data.

SOURCE





Bizarre Climategate Update: Prince Charles Supports Lawbreaking Science Unit

After the British government's Information Commissioner's Office concluded the Climate Research Center at the University of East Anglia violated Britain's Freedom of Information Act law, Prince Charles visited to show his support...

...that is, he showed support for the Climate Research Unit, not the Information Commissioner (the report starts at 4:16 in the video).

Surprising to me, the prince specifically met with Phil Jones (reported at 5:21 in the video), the head of the unit (on leave since the scandal broke) and the man most under fire for the FOIA violation.

Typically in these bad-PR situations an institution will get rid of problem-causers first, and then bring the bigwigs in for a photo op expressing support for the replacement team. Fresh start, break with the past, that kind of message.

Seems Prince Charles doesn't see a need for a fresh start.

John O'Sullivan on Climategate.com has another detail about the prince's visit. Reportedly, the prince told the Climategate team: "Well done all of you. Many, many congratulations on your work. I wish you great success in the future. Don't get downhearted by these little blips here and there!"

Well done? Blips?

SOURCE






Warmists chickening out of debate -- as usual

If you Google “global warming” and “climate change” you’ll get more than 100 million combined hits. And just about every hit yields an opinion. But what are the facts? That’s what science is supposed to find out, and there’s no consensus on climate change among the experts. But who says science is about consensus? If you could, ask Galileo, Newton and Einstein, to name a few of science’s luminaries who dissented from popular views and paved new paths toward understanding the mysteries of the universe.

Two learned men came to Eagle River over the weekend to give presentations in an event billed as the “Northwoods Climate Change Debate,” sponsored by the Northwoods Patriots, an area group whose motto is “Standing up for Faith, Family, Country.” A couple hundred people turned out at the Northland Pines High School field house in Eagle River on Saturday, Jan. 30 to take part.

Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and climatologist Dr. David Legates of the University of Delaware comprised the one-sided panel, representing the skeptical view of global warming, while John McCaughn, a retired chaplain and long-time Northwoods resident, played moderator and devil’s advocate.

MANY INVITED, ONLY TWO CAME

Event organizer Kim Simac spent weeks organizing the debate and was clearly frustrated by her failed attempts to get some balance into the discussion. “I invited scientists from all over the country — even some from around the world — to a fair and balanced event,” she said. “I was amazed at the lack of response to the many invitations that went out, but more interesting were the insulting, mocking, sarcastic replies I received from scientists who seem to share a similar belief that a debate is ridiculous on such a settled science.”

On this bitterly cold day in late January, McCaughn, who graduated from Eagle River High School and the University of Wisconsin-Superior, noted wryly that he had woken up at 5:30 a.m. and the temperature outside his Conover home was 27 below. “They didn’t have anyone to represent the global warming side,” said McCaughn, who had refereed previous forums.

Deflecting criticism that they tour the country on behalf of industry giants such as ExxonMobil and others that have special interests to protect, Drs. Legates and Soon were quick to defend their integrity. “I maintain my objectivity and speak around the country to anyone,” said Dr. Legates, when asked whether he was funded by any particular group. “I don’t charge honorariums. If they pay my way I’ll be glad to speak. I haven’t received any money from oil and gas interests.”

Dr. Soon, also in response to the same question, said his scientific findings would be the same whether he gave them to Greenpeace or ExxonMobil, which had paid him from time to time to conduct research along with other corporations. “My condition is very simple; that there is no condition,” he said. “No amount of money could corrupt me. If CO2 is as bad as they say it is, I would be far ahead of Al Gore and say we must take action. But much of what is being said is based on false arguments. Science is not about he said, she said, but all about the data and evidence. I keep an open mind always.”

HUMAN ACTIVITY IMPACTS ENVIRONMENT

Dr. Legates said there is no question that humans have an impact on the environment, especially when it comes to land disturbances and changing the surface of the landscape. Such activity, for example, affects the possibility of flooding because vast expanses of grasslands and other porous soils have been replaced by parking lots and other impervious surfaces, causing water runoff. “Urbanization is definitely a factor in environmental changes, but the climate effects are almost negligible,” he said.

Chuck Boyd, a retired physicist who lives in the Northwoods, decried the efforts by vast segments of “the administration, Congress, media, industrial complex, and academia” to paint a distorted picture of the global warming debate. “All combined, they are willing to sacrifice the economic future of our country in the name of what I call a monumental anthropogenic global warming hoax.”

Spurred by former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth,” which asserted global warming is largely man-made and warned of dire consequences for the planet unless steps are taken to stem carbon emissions, proponents of this argument say evidence is indisputable. In his narration, Gore said climate change “is really not a political issue, so much as a moral one.” Many climate researchers found few faults with Gore’s thesis but some labeled it “junk science” and it caused one U.S. Republican Senator to call it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Others said that while Gore was right about many of his claims, he was went too far with his predictions of doom.

Just before Saturday's discussion, a series of short films, pro and con, were shown, one of which was produced by National Geographic propounding the warming theory. McCaughn, as moderator and taking the Gore side, summed up the global warming position by quoting several dire outcomes from the movie and asked the panelists to respond.

Drs. Soon and Legates, both of whom have PhD’s after their names and a long list of published papers and honors in their resumes, have not bought into the increasingly popular premise that the earth is getting hotter because of human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestration. Instead, they postulate that climate change is inevitable and that global warming is mainly due to natural causes such as solar activity and other phenomena.

GORE’S FILM: FACT OR FICTION?

Asked about Gore’s movie, Dr. Legates called it “very much of a staged show with little substance.”

Dr. Soon likewise poked fun at the former Veep by interrupting his slide slow Saturday by pretending to take a cell phone call from Gore and finding out that he was delayed in his travel plans by a snowstorm in Nashville, Tennessee (Gore’s home state). The audience got a big laugh out of that.

Dr. Soon concedes that scientific data has never been and is not now perfect. “The difference, though, is there is a tendency to make some sort of claim that is so exaggerated and so disproportionate that it amounts to an alarmist approach. The theme is all about scare. Michael Crichton wrote about this in his book, ‘State of Fear.’ It’s a big tragedy.”

Quoting Albert Einstein, who said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong,” Dr. Soon said conventional thinking about gases such as carbon dioxide is often wrong. “CO2 is not an air pollutant. It is food for plants and marine life,” he said. Atmospheric CO2 levels are controlled by temperature and other biological/chemical variables and not the other way around, he added.

Gore’s claims that polar ice melting is another proof of global warming brings this response from Dr. Soon: “Who says that the ice was not melting before?” Weather records before around 1850, when the last ice age is said to have ended, are unreliable, calling into question the accuracy of old data, he added.

Global warming proponents took a hit when it was revealed that last November, someone hacked into computers at a climate research unit located at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and released thousands of emails that showed scientists may have distorted or withheld key data. The episode became known as "Climate Gate" in the mass media and raised a firestorm over whether some scientists were slanting some information to buttress their global warming claims while deliberately suppressing or downplaying other data that undermined their position.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS CONSTANT

Dr. Legates said climate change is both constant and variable in that no one day and no one year is like another and while trends are discernible for short periods of time climates are anything but stable. Looking at average temperatures, a case could be made that one year is hotter than another or cooler, but that over time, nature has a way of stabilizing herself. “From 2000 to the present, there has been no increase in global temperatures,” he said pointing to a graph supporting his remark.

On the other side of the question, however, fears mount that an increase in global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and alter the amount and pattern of precipitation, changing green areas to subtropical deserts. Warming in the Arctic would coincide with the retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice, and other threats include species extinctions and reductions in crop yields.

All conjecture at best, say Drs. Soon and Legates, the latter producing another slide that showed a U.S. Weather Bureau report stating: “The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. Reports all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic Zone. Expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.” The dire report was made in 1922.

Dr. Soon says any global warming is more the result of solar cycle variations that cause temperature fluctuations rather than man-made CO2 emissions, which represent a tiny fraction of the earth’s atmosphere made up of 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, with only 0.038 percent carbon dioxide and the rest small amounts of other gases.

SCIENTISTS DON’T SEE EYE TO EYE

As the author of many papers on solar and stellar behavior, Dr. Soon and co-author Sallie Baliunas shook things up with a review paper in the journal Climate Research that concluded “the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.”

In another controversial area, Dr. Soon and others in an article disputed claims that polar bear survival was not so much a result of global warming, but possibly because of more human-bear interaction. Dr. Soon also maintains that the ozone layer that surrounds the earth, which protects the planet from the sun’s potentially damaging ultraviolet rays, even while depleted, can fully replenish itself in a matter of 150 days rather than hundreds or thousands of years as some have contended.

While nothing was settled during Saturday’s session, it provided much food for thought. There will always be people who are persuaded that man is chiefly responsible for warming the planet and people who remain skeptical of the idea, and ask for concrete proof. Perhaps the late Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had insight into the matter when he wrote, “The scientist does not tell nature its laws; nature tells the scientist.”

SOURCE






Britain shivers through coldest January since 1987... and February starts with more snow and temperatures of -7c

More sun and less rain - what's to complain about? Quite a lot, actually. For January this year turned out to be perishingly cold.

The sunnier and drier than usual combination is normally ideal for most of us. But the usual rules were turned on their head in the first half of January when heavy snow meant it was also the coldest for 20 years, according to a monthly review by climatologist Philip Eden. He said: 'Although the second half of the month was unremarkable temperature-wise, the severity of the cold period during the first half was such that January turned out to be the coldest since 1987, and the ninth coldest in the past 100 years.

'Snow fell frequently and sometimes heavily during the first fortnight, notably on the 4th/5th when depths of 25-35cm (10-14ins) were measured across a large area from the Cotswolds to the Weald. 'Accumulated depths of 40-60cm (16-24ins) were noted in upland parts of eastern Scotland and North-East England and here snow on the ground lasted throughout the month. 'Overall it was both drier and sunnier than an average January although most of the sunshine came during the first and last weeks.'

Temperatures dropped to minus 22.3c (minus 8f) at Altnaharra, Sutherland, overnight on January 7-8 - the lowest temperature recorded in the UK since late December 1995, Mr Eden said. The lowest daytime maximum occurred on January 10 when the temperature failed to climb higher than minus 13.5c (8f) at Altnaharra. A peak daytime high of 12.4c (54f) was recorded in Exeter on January 16 while the warmest night was 9.2c (49f) at St Mary's in the Isles of Scilly on January 14-15.

According to Mr Eden, the Central England Temperature of 1.1c (34f) was 3.1c (38f) below the 1971-2000 mean, the lowest since 1987. The CET in January 1987 was 0.8c (33f). The month started off as normal, but within a week virtually the whole country was covered in snow with temperatures below zero. Up to two inches could settle in northern Scotland and in northern and western Wales, with lighter snow showers expected in Merseyside, Shropshire and Derbyshire. Temperatures dropped well below freezing over the weekend with a low of -7c recorded in Benson, Oxfordshire.

The Met Office warned of widespread icy roads in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, north-west and south-west England and the West Midlands. But the chilly spell will be replaced by warmer weather as bands of rain move in from the West, forecasters said.

Heavy snow in some parts over the weekend caused disruption to motorists and forced the cancellation of several sports fixtures. The worst-hit areas were the east and west coasts of England, northern Scotland and south-west Wales. Drivers had to battle icy conditions and road closures as snow hit parts of the North East on Friday night.

There were five separate crashes on Bonemill Lane in Sunderland on Saturday morning and police were forced to close the road for an hour-and-a-half. And an icy road surface led to a three-vehicle collision at a roundabout near Crowther Road in the city. Nobody was injured in any of the incidents, police said.

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Australian pro-liberty thinktank vindicated on climate

By Greg Lindsay, Executive Director

Eighteen months ago in Tokyo, my two year term as President of the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by F.A. Hayek in the wake of World War II, came to an end. I was succeeded by development economist Professor Deepak Lal.

In my Presidential address, I traced the history and intellectual lineage of that famous Society back to the great thinkers of the Enlightenment and speculated about some of the problems and threats to freedom that modern-day liberals faced.

What I singled out in particular was the so-called ‘debate’ about the theory that man-made carbon emissions are responsible for causing potentially catastrophic increases in global temperatures. My concern wasn’t the evidence for this theory, per se, but what I described as ‘the regrettable features of the climate change debate, which I believe has descended into anything but a reasoned and scientific discussion judged by Enlightenment standards.’

My point was that scepticism – the rigorous evaluation of evidence – a fundamental building block of intellectual and scientific progress, was in danger of being swept away by a new form of pre-enlightenment quasi-religious belief and rent seeking:

'What is disquieting, and should be disquieting to all who cherish the principles of the Enlightenment, is the certainty of belief displayed by some of the believers . . . The politics of climate change have become intensely ideological, and far distant from a rational debate which allows for a free exchange of ideas. The debate, such as it is, has struggled to rise above the ridiculous, at its worst demonstrated by the morally offensive use of the labels ‘denier’ or ‘delusionist’ to discredit all who are so ‘unsound’ as to question the dominant interpretation of the science . . .

There is no question that we should apply the best scientific techniques to discover the truth about this issue and then deal with it appropriately. Unfortunately, one has to question the integrity of a great deal of climate research. This is because climate research has become an industry which is heavily reliant on the steady drip of government funding. Competing and challenging research is too often swept away . . .'

Just a year after that speech, a torrent of disclosures about dubious climate science practices has underlined my concerns. Popular tags such as Climategate have been applied and will stick; reputations have been tarnished and many will most likely be trashed. It seems that key scientists have allowed questionable objectives to politicise their science and have put at risk the standard procedures of the scientific method including peer review.

If the disclosures of the past few months do anything, they should restore some balance to this debate and allow competing ideas, theories and evidence to be tested. Apocalyptic visions distilled from the propaganda of climate activists that ended up in official reports should be seen for what they are. That international bureaucracies such as the IPCC should be taken in by such material should come as no surprise.

If anything good comes out of all this it should be to question the increasing dependence by scientists in all fields on government funding. Hopefully, policymakers will also pause to think through the implications of the dirigiste policies they plan to combat ‘global warming’.

The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated February 1. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590.

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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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Another IPCC meltdown: They based Alpine claims on a hearsay student dissertation and magazine article

The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine. The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming. The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information. However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them. The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007. It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.

This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected.

But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC's use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature. Professor Richard Tol, one of the report's authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: "These are essentially a collection of anecdotes. "Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been. "There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense."

The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government's worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people. The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled "Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming". It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000. The report also states that the section is intended to "assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects".

But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo. The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s. Mr Bowen said: "I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes."

The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps. Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.

The IPCC has faced growing criticism over the sources it used in its last report after it emerged the panel had used unsubstantiated figures on glacial melting in the Himalayas that were contained within a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report. It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports.

One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website. In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature. In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999. When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.

The chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has faced mounting pressure and calls for his resignation amid the growing controversy over the error on glacier melting and use of unreliable sources of information. A survey of 400 authors and contributors to the IPCC report showed, however, that the majority still support Mr Pachauri and the panel's vice chairs. They also insisted the overall findings of the report are robust despite the minor errors. But many expressed concern at the use of non-peer reviewed information in the reports and called for a tightening of the guidelines on how information can be used.

The Met Office, which has seven researchers who contributed to the report including Professor Martin Parry who was co-chair of the working group responsible for the part of the report that contained the glacier errors, said: "The IPCC should continue to ensure that its review process is as robust and transparent as possible, that it draws only from the peer-reviewed literature, and that uncertainties in the science and projections are clearly expressed."

Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the US research organisation Resources for the Future who also contributed to the IPCC's latest report, added: "The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy. "It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation tend to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives."

The IPCC failed to respond to questions about the inclusion of unreliable sources in its report but it has insisted over the past week that despite minor errors, the findings of the report are still robust and consistent with the underlying science.

SOURCE






Ten facts conveniently brushed over by the global warming fanatics

The following article appeared in a Left-leaning major Australian newspaper -- replying in part to some dishonest smears against Viscount Monckton elsewhere

1. The pin-up species of global warming, the polar bear, is increasing in number, not decreasing.

2. The US President, Barack Obama, supports building nuclear power plants. Last week, in his State of the Union address, he said: To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.

3. The Copenhagen climate conference descended into farce. The low point of the gridlock and posturing at Copenhagen came with the appearance by the socialist dictator of Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, whose anti-capitalist diatribe drew a cheering ovation from thousands of left-wing ideologues.

4. The reputation of the chief United Nations scientist on global warming is in disrepair. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is being investigated for financial irregularities, conflicts of interest and scientific distortion. He has already admitted publishing false data.

5. The supposed scientific consensus of the IPCC has been challenged by numerous distinguished scientists.

6. The politicisation of science leads to a heavy price being paid in poor countries. After Western environmentalists succeeded in banning or suppressing the use of the pesticide DDT, the rate of death by malaria rose into the millions. Some scholars estimate the death toll at 20 million or more, most of them children.

7. The biofuels industry has exacerbated world hunger. Diverting huge amounts of grain crops (as distinct from sugar cane) to biofuels has contributed to a rise in world food prices, felt acutely in the poorest nations.

8. The Kyoto Protocol has proved meaningless. Global carbon emissions are significantly higher today than they were when the Kyoto Protocol was introduced.

9. The United Nations global carbon emissions reduction target is a massively costly mirage.

10. Kevin Rudd's political bluff on emissions trading has been exposed. The Prime Minister intimated he would go to the people in an early election if his carbon emissions trading legislation was rejected. He won't. The electorate has shifted.

None of these anti-commandments question the salient negative link between humanity and the environment: that we are an omnivorous, rapacious species which has done enormous damage to the world's environment. Nor do they question the warming of the planet.

What they do question is the morphing of science with ideology, the most pernicious byproduct of the global warming debate. All these anti-commandments were brought into focus this past week by the visit of the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, better known as Lord Christopher Monckton, journalist by trade, mathematician by training, provocateur by inclination.

Last Wednesday a conference room at the Sheraton on the Park was filled to overflowing, all 800 seats sold with a standing-room only crowd at the back, to see the Sydney public appearance of Monckton, a former science adviser to Margaret Thatcher. At the end of his presentation he received a sustained standing ovation.

Monckton is the embodiment of English aristocratic eccentricity. His presentations are a combination of stand-up comedy, evangelical preaching and fierce debating. Almost every argument he makes can be contested, but given the enormity of the multi-trillion-dollars that governments expect taxpayers to expend on combating global warming, the process needs to be subject to brutal interrogation, scrutiny and scepticism. And Monckton was brutal, especially about the media, referring to all this bed-wetting stuff on the ABC and the BBC.

There has also been a monumental political failure surrounding the global warming debate. Those who would have to pay for most of the massive government expenditures proposed, the taxpayers of the West, are beginning to go into open revolt at the prospect.

Last week the Herald reported that Monckton told a large lie while in Sydney. On Tuesday it reported: He said with a straight face on the Alan Jones radio program that he had been awarded the Nobel, a claim Jones did not question. The Herald repeated the accusation on Thursday. It was repeated a third time in a commentary in Saturday's Herald.

In 2007 the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the former US vice-president Al Gore. The prize committee, in citing its selection of the IPCC, said: Through the IPCC … thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of [global] warming. Thousands of people were thus collectively and anonymously part of the prize process.

So what lie did Monckton tell about the prize? Despite the gravity of the accusation, the Herald never published the offending remark. Here, for the record, is what he actually said:

Monckton: I found out on the day of publication of the 2007 [IPCC report] that they'd multiplied, by 10, the observed contribution to sea-level rise of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet. By 10! I got in touch with them and said, 'You will correct this.' And two days later, furtively, on the website, no publicity, they simply relabelled, recalculated and corrected the table they'd got wrong.

Alan Jones: But this report won a Nobel Prize!

Monckton: Yes. Exactly. And I am also a Nobel Prize winner because I made a correction. I'm part of the process that got the Nobel Prize. Do I deserve it? No. Do they deserve it? No. The thing is a joke.

SOURCE




IPCC ignored scientists in favour of Greenie hysterics

And the Greenie misrepresentation of the facts was deliberate too. They too knew what the science really showed

THE United Nations climate panel ignored warnings by leading scientists not to publish false claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. One warning, in 2006, a year before the report was published, came from Georg Kaser, an Austrian glaciologist who was a lead author on another section of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He said: “I sent warnings to the IPCC telling them the claim about Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 was false.”

Another warning came from Gwyn Rees, a British hydrologist who oversaw a £300,000 study funded by the UK government in 2001 to assess the claims about rapid melt. His findings were published in 2004 — three years before the IPCC report — and also showed there was no risk of rapid melt. Rees said: “The sheer size and altitude of these glaciers made it highly unlikely they would melt by 2035.”

The new revelations follow a report in The Sunday Times this month which forced the IPCC to retract its claim that the glaciers in the Himalayas might be gone by 2035.

They raise more questions about why the IPCC ever took the claim seriously. It means the UN panel ignored scientific publications rejecting the rapid-melt theory in favour of claims that had been reported only in the non-scientific media and in a report by WWF, a conservation pressure group.

The saga began with Syed Hasnain, the Indian glaciologist who issued the first warnings about rapid glacier melt in media interviews in 1999. He now works for The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is run by Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC. It was those claims that prompted Britain to fund the study by Rees — who recruited Hasnain to help lead it. Rees, a water resource scientist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, a government research centre, said Hasnain had signed up to the study’s conclusions. These stated that any suggestions the region’s glaciers might soon melt “would seem unfounded”.

Hasnain was also in the audience at a seminar sponsored by the EU in 2004 where Rees gave a presentation suggesting there would be some glacial melt, but nothing on the scale suggested by Hasnain. His closing slide read: “It is unlikely that all glaciers will vanish by 2035!”

That same audience also included representatives from WWF who were compiling their own report on glacier melt. Despite Rees’s warnings, they later decided to include Hasnain’s claims in their report, published in 2005, from where they were picked up by the IPCC.

SOURCE







IPCC outdid the Greenies in its extravagant and unfounded claims about the Amazon

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

This is the third time in as many weeks that serious doubts have been raised over the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Two weeks ago, after reports in The Sunday Times, it was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report.

The IPCC has been put on the defensive as well over its claims that climate change may be increasing the severity and frequency of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods. This weekend Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, was fighting to keep his job after a barrage of criticism.

Scientists fear the controversies will be used by climate change sceptics to sway public opinion to ignore global warming — even though the fundamental science, that greenhouse gases can heat the world, remains strong.

The latest controversy originates in a report called A Global Review of Forest Fires, which WWF published in 2000. It was commissioned from Andrew Rowell, a freelance journalist and green campaigner who has worked for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and anti-smoking organisations. The second author was Peter Moore, a campaigner and policy analyst with WWF. In their report they suggested that “up to 40% of Brazilian rainforest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall” but made clear that this was because drier forests were more likely to catch fire.

The IPCC report picked up this reference but expanded it to cover the whole Amazon. It also suggested that a slight reduction in rainfall would kill many trees directly, not just by contributing to more fires. It said: “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state. It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas.”

Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at Leeds University who specialises in tropical forest ecology, described the section of Rowell and Moore’s report predicting the potential destruction of large swathes of rainforest as “a mess”. “The Nature paper is about the interactions of logging damage, fire and periodic droughts, all extremely important in understanding the vulnerability of Amazon forest to drought, but is not related to the vulnerability of these forests to reductions in rainfall,” he said. “In my opinion the Rowell and Moore report should not have been cited; it contains no primary research data.”

WWF said it prided itself on the accuracy of its reports and was investigating the latest concerns. “We have a team of people looking at this internationally,” said Keith Allott, its climate change campaigner.

Scientists such as Lewis are demanding that the IPCC ban the use of reports from pressure groups. They fear that environmental campaign groups are bound to cherry-pick the scientific literature that confirms their beliefs and ignore the rest. It was exactly this process that lay behind the bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers were likely to melt by 2035 — a suggestion that got into another WWF report and was then used by the IPCC.

Georg Kaser, a glaciologist who was a lead author on the last IPCC report, said: “Groups like WWF are not scientists and they are not professionally trained to manage data. They may have good intentions but it opens the way to mistakes.”

SOURCE







Muir-Wood's climate change study was ‘misused’ in the Stern report

This weakness in the Stern report has been noted elsewhere but it is interesting to see Muir-Wood saying the same. The response from Stern is astounding, however

LORD STERN’S report on climate change, which underpins [British] government policy, has come under fire from a disaster analyst who says the research he contributed was misused.

Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, a US-based consultancy, said the Stern report misquoted his work to suggest a firm link between global warming and the frequency and severity of disasters such as floods and hurricanes.

The Stern report, citing Muir-Wood, said: “New analysis based on insurance industry data has shown that weather-related catastrophe losses have increased by 2% each year since the 1970s over and above changes in wealth, inflation and population growth/movement. “If this trend continued or intensified with rising global temperatures, losses from extreme weather could reach 0.5%-1% of world GDP by the middle of the century.”

Muir-Wood said his research showed no such thing and accused Stern of “going far beyond what was an acceptable extrapolation of the evidence”.

The criticism is among the strongest made of the Stern report, which, since its publication in 2006, has influenced policy, including green taxes.

Muir-Wood’s study did show an association between global warming and the impact and frequency of disasters. But he said this was caused by exceptionally strong hurricanes in the final two years of his study.

A spokesman for Stern said: “Muir-Wood may have been deceived by his own observations.” [Whaaaat???]

SOURCE







Green/Left dream of global government not likely to happen

EVERYONE is blaming everyone else for the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference but British Prime Minister Gordon Brown blames something else: "The lack of a global body with the sole responsibility for environmental stewardship." This idea for getting around pesky governments and voters is shared by many European and some developing countries. Last September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, saying: "We must make use of the momentum provided by Copenhagen to make further progress toward the creation of a world environmental organisation."

But the momentum stopped dead at Copenhagen because not all nations have the same priorities. Those struggling to fight poverty are unsympathetic to green nagging from Europeans. Before proposing yet another huge international bureaucracy, fans of a WEO should look at the present one. The UN Environment Program was set up as "the environmental conscience of the UN system" after the first UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm in 1972, to publicise problems and co-ordinate policy globally, regionally and within the UN.

But UNEP is a weak institution, with a small staff and budget - just over US$270 million in 2006-07. That may sound a lot but by UN standards it is paltry. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation gets about US$900m ($1.01 billion) a year and the UN Development Program about US$5 billion.

Governments do not want an autonomous international body to interfere in politically sensitive national issues. A great deal of that resistance comes from the developing world, starting at the Stockholm meeting in 1972.

Developing countries demanded that the Earth Summit in 1992 shift from focusing on the environment to "sustainable development", a concept that includes economic growth.

The proliferation of multilateral environmental agreements introduced by rich countries in past decades - with more than 700 in force today - has put an increasing economic burden on developing countries while they have made clear they want more emphasis on economic and social goals.

A world environmental organisation would be modelled on the World Health Organisation. But the US, Russia, India and China have already made clear they will not join such a body, while Canada is keeping an eye on things in a UN working group without making any commitment.

Most developing countries jumped on the Copenhagen bandwagon knowing that a successful deal would grant them more foreign aid and technology-transfer without requiring emission cuts from them. They had everything to gain and little to lose. But for economies just escaping mass poverty, such as China and India, the story is different: they faced demands for huge cuts and refused a deal.

British climate change minister Ed Miliband denounced the "impossible resistance from a small number of developing countries, including China, who did not want a legal agreement". But that "small number" will only grow as more developing countries follow China and India down the road of economic growth, the single best defence against climate threats.

Under a WEO, these few defiant nations would multiply into dozens. For example, South American nations want credits for forest conservation under a climate treaty but they have always rejected demands to sign a global treaty against deforestation. Environmental problems are so diverse that any global diktat will generate endless grounds for complaints, exceptions and disputes, especially from poor countries desperate for growth.

A good thing too. It is not clear why rich nations should have a right over Amazonian rainforests or Pacific coral reefs.

Brown says: "Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks." But what he calls deadlock is national sovereignty.

No global bureaucracy will overcome the basic problem haunting UNEP, Copenhagen and international co-operation today: political hostility to top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions. As US delegate to Copenhagen Jonathan Pershing said: "The UN didn't manage the conference that well," adding diplomatically, "I am not sure that any of us are particularly confident that the UN managing the near-term financing is the right way to go."

The failure of Copenhagen shows that rich countries need to respect poor nations' need for growth if they want co-operation for a greener planet. The rich must replace their posturing and restrictions with positive policies for growth and adaptation to climate change.

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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