An amusing conversation

I am of course on Marc Morano's mailing list and Marc's mailouts are exuberant. He sends out anything that MIGHT be of interest to us climate atheists. In a recent mailout he sent a copy of an email conversation he had with a Warmist. I reproduce the conversation below and then add a few comments of my own after it -- JR:

From: Anna Haynes [annahaynes.nc@gmail.com]
Sent: Sat Dec 10 20:19:58 GMT+01:00 2011
To: morano@climatedepot.com
Subject: Mr. Morano, your climate science expertise?

Greetings Mr. Morano -

I'm just now editing your SourceWatch page, adding that you have no evident climate science expertise, because I recall searching (&asking) several years ago & finding & hearing nothing. If I'm mistaken, and you do have a climate science background, please do let me know what courses you've taken or papers you've published, so I can add this information to your SourceWatch page.

Sincerely,
Anna Haynes

--
Disclosure: I have no background in climate science that would equip me to second-guess the findings of the field. See: Gutting's On experts and global warming ( http://goo.gl/v0rV5 ) and Peter Watts ("science is alchemy..." - http://goo.gl/qVSgL )

Hi Anna,

I remember you from Dot Earth comment section a few years back. We had some entertaining back and forth. You always signed you name noting you had a phd. You must be so proud.

My background is in political science, which is highly suited to analyzing man-made global warming claims. The 'science' you bitterly cling to is, after all, political at its core.

My bio is published at Climate Depot for all to see under the about page.

Thanks and enjoy the the sub-prime science you seem to believe in a religious fashion. My bio at Source Watch is not at all that different from my bio at Climate Depot. I look forward to your updating my entry at Source Watch.

Thanks
Marc

Marc's reply is a good one but he could have had a laugh by looking up the authorities on climate science that she gives. One is a soi disant "philosopher" who makes the ludicrous claim that what "authorities" say should always be accepted. And the second reference is to what could reasonably be described as a hate-filled Leftist rave! If those are her idea of climate authorities she is much to be pitied and is certainly undeserving of her Ph.D.

As Marc says, Warmism truly is a religion -- a particularly mind-warping religion in fact. Perhaps "sect" would be a better word for it. Festinger's classic work of social psychology "When Prophecy Fails" seems more applicable to them every day.

The second link she gives did not work when I first tried it so the full URL is here -- JR





U.N. Floats Global 'Climate Court' to Enforce Emissions Rules

United Nations climate envoys have proposed the creation of a global "climate court" that would be responsible for enforcing a sprawling set of rules requiring developed countries to cut emissions while compensating poorer countries in order to pay off a "historical climate debt."

The proposals are contained in a draft document pieced together for the climate conference in Durban, South Africa. Representatives at the conference are struggling to come up with a compromise that negotiators from 194 nations can agree on.

But the draft document, one of many floating around the conference, gives a glimpse into the long-term vision some nations hold for the creation of an international legal framework on climate change.

In the bowels of the document is a provision calling for "an international climate court of justice."

The proposal is meant to "guarantee the compliance of Annex I Parties with all the provisions of this decision."

Annex I countries are mostly developed countries, covering the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and much of Europe -- including countries that are struggling financially such as Greece and Portugal.

The rules of the road the court would presumably enforce are based on the view that these developed countries owe developing countries a "debt" over climate change, and must provide financial aid in addition to taking major steps toward cutting emissions.

In one section, the document calls for developed countries to help poorer countries with "finance, technology and capacity building" so they can "adapt to and mitigate climate change" while helping eliminate poverty. Another section provides that developing countries should receive an amount of money equal to the amount "developed countries spend on defense, security and warfare."

Yet the document also calls for a guaranteed end to warfare altogether -- for the sake of curbing climate change.

One section, noting that "conflict-related activities emit significant greenhouse gas emissions," calls on all parties to "cease destructive activities" like warfare -- and then channel the money that would have been spent on war and other defense projects toward "a common enemy: climate change."

The document also asserts the "rights of mother earth," a concept that environmental activists have been pushing for.

The draft report, which strings together proposals from various working groups, quickly raised alarm among climate change skeptics.

Marc Morano, a former aide to U.N. agitator and Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe, told FoxNews.com the document shows the climate talks are intended to create more "taxing and regulatory authority."

"This is the true U.N. agenda unmasked in this draft report," he said. Morano now runs the ClimateDepot blog, which also reported on the draft document.

However, the idea of a climate court anytime soon -- particularly one that the United States and other big carbon emitters would agree to -- may be far-fetched. One environmental law expert, professor Jonathan Verschuuren at The Netherlands' Tilburg University, wrote in an online column that the court "will certainly not materialize."

Instead, representatives at the Durban conference reportedly are still trying to figure out how and whether to extend the Kyoto protocol, whose emission requirements expire next year. Some industrial nations want a new agreement that would ask more of developing countries.

According to The Associated Press, the U.S. and India have backed down a bit on their objections, while China continues to put up resistance.

SOURCE





Debate denied

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

Dissent on global warming has been shut down from the start

The odd thing about the great debate on global warming is that there never really was a debate. As soon as the global warming scare exploded on the world in 1988, to its promoters there could be no argument about it. The scientists who that year set up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were already convinced beyond doubt that ‘human-induced climate change’ was a reality. Al Gore was soon already pronouncing ‘the science is settled’. In 1992 Dr Richard Lindzen of MIT, the eminent atmospheric physicist who has been a prominent ‘sceptic’ ever since, wrote a paper discussing the peculiar need of the ‘climate establishment’ to insist that their new orthodoxy was supported by a ‘consensus’ of the world’s scientists, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

A corollary of this, as Lindzen showed, was the extraordinary intolerance they displayed towards anyone questioning the orthodoxy. When one respected professor of economics told a US Senate Committee that the issue was still ‘controversial’, Senator Gore expostulated that anyone who said such a thing clearly didn’t know what he was talking about, and the professor was asked to leave the room.

Thus, right from the start, this remarkable hostility towards anyone daring to question the orthodoxy became established as a central feature of the story, Those who dissented, such as Professor Fred Singer, who wrote a sceptical paper with Dr Roger Revelle, the eminent oceanographer who had first alerted Gore to the possibility that rising CO2 levels might lead to rising temperatures, were publicly vilified, with claims that they could only hold such views because they were being paid by Big Oil.

For more than a decade, as CO2 levels rose and temperatures seemed to be following suit, the orthodoxy carried all before it, In 2001, Michael Mann’s famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, completely rewriting climate history by purporting to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period and showing that temperatures had soared in the late 20th century to their highest level in 1,000 years, was the centrepiece of the IPCC’s third report. But in 2003, serious questions began to be asked about the ‘hockey stick’, first by two Harvard astrophysicists, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, then, quite devastatingly, by two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who expertly demonstrated that the graph was no more than a product of computer trickery.

Instead of attempting to engage with these criticisms, the response of the ‘climate establishment’ — as we see confirmed by the recent ‘Climategate 2.0’ emails — was just to dismiss them as ‘tosh’, heaping the critics with abuse, even trying to get the editor of the journal which published Soon and Baliunas removed from his post, So, in essence, the ‘non-debate’ between the two sides has remained ever since. In recent years, the orthodoxy has increasingly come under every kind of fire, from the failure of its computer models to predict what has actually been happening to global temperatures to revelations that nearly a third of the citations on which the IPCC’s latest 2007 report were based were not to proper scientific papers but simply to claims made by environmental activists. The response of the orthodoxy’s defenders has too often been simply to step up their intolerance even further, dismissing the critics as ‘deniers’, ‘flat-earthers’, ‘idiots’ and of course ‘shills for the fossil-fuel industry’.

Not the least interesting revelation of the latest Climategate emails, exchanged between the small group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC establishment, has been to see how uncertain some of them have privately been about the strength of their own case. Perhaps the Medieval Warm Period did exist? Why have temperatures not continued to rise as their models predicted? But, publicly, what they tellingly called ‘the cause’ had to be defended at all costs. Similarly at all costs, the ‘deniers’ had to be rubbished, painted as ‘cranks’ and ‘loonies’ talking ‘drivel’. No one has reflected this attitude better than the BBC which in 2006, as I describe in a report just published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, held a ‘high-level seminar’ at which Lord May, as ex-President of the Royal Society, persuaded the BBC’s top policymakers that ‘the debate on climate change was over’ and that they must ‘stop reporting the views of climate sceptics’.

In 2007 considerable attention was drawn to a Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle precisely because it featured many of those eminent scientists who dissented from the orthodoxy. Typically, the establishment’s response was to shower Ofcom with complaints, furious that such a programme could have been allowed (scarcely any were upheld). Among the organisers of those complaints was Bob Ward, a tireless advocate for the orthodoxy, who inevitably was at the forefront of those leading a howl of outrage against last week’s Spectator for its cover story by Nils-Axel Mörner, the admittedly slightly eccentric expert who, on the basis of studying the physical evidence, has long questioned the computer models the IPCC uses to promote alarm over rising sea levels.

In 2009, an article of my own about Mörner provoked Ward to take me to the Press Complaints Commission (he has more than once called on the Sunday Telegraph to fire me). I cited a peer-reviewed 2001 paper based on satellite data, which quite independently confirmed Mörner’s finding that sea levels were not rising around Tuvalu. Ward sent the PCC a black-and-white version of the paper’s colour chart, claiming that this disproved my case. I replied with the original colour version, which clearly showed by its colour coding that sea levels around Tuvalu had actually fallen. Quite unabashed, Ward told the PCC that the authors of the 2001 paper had in 2006 published another withdrawing their earlier finding. The 2006 paper made no mention of Tuvalu. As I say, so little are the orthodoxy’s defenders interested in serious debate that they will stop at nothing to discredit any dissent — even as their ‘cause’ continues to crumble around them.

SOURCE





How the IPCC Reports Mislead the Public, Exaggerate the Negative Impacts of Climate Change and Ignore the Benefits of Economic Growth

Study finds climate change panel ignores its own findings and pushes plans that will prolong poverty for developing nations

It is frequently asserted that climate change could have devastating consequences for poor countries. Indeed, this assertion is used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other organizations as one of the primary justifications for imposing restrictions on human emissions of greenhouse gases.

But there is an internal contradiction in the IPCC’s own claims. Indeed, the same highly influential report from the IPCC claims both that poor countries will fare terribly and that they will be much better off than they are today. So, which is it? The apparent contradiction arises because of inconsistencies in the way the IPCC assesses impacts. The process begins with various scenarios of future emissions.

These scenarios are themselves predicated on certain assumptions about the rate of economic growth and related technological change. Under the IPCC’s highest growth scenario, by 2100 GDP per capita in poor countries will be double the U.S.’s 2006 level, even taking into account any negative impact of climate change. (By 2200, it will be triple.) Yet that very same scenario is also the one that leads to the greatest rise in temperature—and is the one that has been used to justify all sorts of scare stories about the impact of climate change on the poor. Under this highest growth scenario (known as A1FI), the poor will logically have adopted, adapted and innovated all manner of new technololgies, making them far better able to adapt to the future climate. But these improvements in adaptive capacity are virtually ignored by most global warming impact assessments. Consequently, the IPCC’s “impacts” assessments systematically overestimate the negative impact of global warming, while underestimating the positive impact. Moreover, in these “impacts” assessments, global warming is not expected for the most part to create new problems; rather, it is expected to exacerbate some existing problems of poverty (in particular, hunger, disease, extreme events), while relieving others (such as habitat loss and water shortages in some places).

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which would reduce every warming impact regardless of whether it is good or bad, is but one approach to dealing with the consequences of warming. And it would likely be very costly. In fact, reducing emissions is unlikely to help poorer countries deal with most of the problems they face either today or in the future. With respect to mortality from hunger, malaria and extreme events, for example, global warming is estimated to contribute to only 13% of the problem in 2085.

Another approach to reducing the impact of global warming would be to reduce the climatesensitive problems of poverty through “focused adaptation.” This might involve, for example, major investments in early warning systems, the development of new crop varieties, and public health interventions. Focused adaptation would allow society to capture the benefits of global warming while allowing it to reduce climate-sensitive problems that global warming might worsen. For instance, emission reductions would at most reduce mortality from hunger, malaria and extreme events by only 13%, whereas focused adaptation could essentially eliminate these causes of mortality.

A third approach would be to fix the root cause of why developing countries are deemed to be most at-risk, namely, poverty. Sustained economic growth would, as is evident from the experience of developed countries, address virtually all problems of poverty, not just that portion exacerbated by global warming. It is far more certain that sustainable economic growth will provide greater benefits than emission reductions: while there is no doubt that poverty leads to disease and death, there is substantial doubt regarding the reality and magnitude of the negative impact of global warming. This is especially true as assessments often ignore improvements in adaptive capacity. Of these three approaches, human well-being in poorer countries is likely to be advanced most effectively by sustained economic development and least by emission reductions. In addition, because of the inertia of the climate system, economic development is likely to bear fruit faster than any emission reductions.

For richer countries, too, net GDP per capita in the future is expected to be much higher than it is today despite any climate change. Thus, all countries should focus on generating sustained economic development. This approach would not only address all of the current problems that might get worse in the future but would also enable humanity to address more effectively any other future problems it encounters, whether climate-related or otherwise.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deems poor countries to be at greater risk from global warming (GW) than rich countries because they are less able to mobilize the resources required to use technologies needed to cope with the impact of GW. That is, their “adaptive capacity” is low.

The IPCC also claims that GW will exacerbate many problems—such as malaria and other vector-borne diseases, hunger, water shortages, vulnerability to extreme weather events and flooding—that the poor currently face and with which they have difficulty coping. Yet aren’t these both basically the same thing and both caused by an underlying lack of economic development?

Building on the notion that the current adaptive capacity of poor countries is low, the IPCC, among others, claims that global warming could also hinder their sustainable development. Others argue that the impact of global warming could overwhelm weak or poor governments, leading to economic and political instability, which, in turn, could breed terrorism and conflict, and precipitate mass migration to richer countries.

This paper seeks to assess whether these assertions are justified. It begins with a discussion that sheds light on the main factors that affect the trends in climate-sensitive indicators of human wellbeing. The discussion recognizes the role of fossil fuels in powering economic and technological development.

Next, it examines the notion—implicit in the view that poor countries will be swamped by the future impact of GW—that their adaptive capacity will remain low in the future. It specifically examines whether this view is justified in light of the economic assumptions built into the IPCC scenarios.

These economic assumptions are among the primary drivers of the IPCC’s climate change projections, which are then used to estimate the likely future impact (including specific damages) from GW. They are, thus, fundamental to estimates of the magnitude and direction of the future impact of GW. The paper then considers the proposition that while higher rates of economic development would lead to greater climate-related impact from GW, it would also result in higher adaptive capacity. This raises the question as to whether or not the economic development and associated technological change assumed by the IPCC scenarios will increase the damage from GW faster than the increases in adaptive capacity and, consequently, hinder sustainable development. Likewise, it raises the question as to whether insufficient economic and technological development would hinder the ability to cope with future GW.

The answers to these questions are crucial in determining which policy is best suited to addressing GW resulting from human activity. Finally, based on the foregoing analysis, the paper outlines policies to help advance human wellbeing in poor countries while enhancing their ability to cope with GW.

SOURCE





It's Time To Drastically Slim Down Bias-Ridden BBC

Sir Antony Jay

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has a duty of impartiality, as we all know. But what exactly does ‘impartiality’ mean? If it simply means giving equal time to Labour and Conservative politicians on matters of party contention, the BBC fulfils its duty fairly well. But if it means not having, or at least never revealing, any views of its own on any subject of public debate, well, that is quite another matter.

Anyone familiar with large organisations knows that over the years they develop and perpetuate their own ethos, their own value system, their own corporate beliefs and standards. The police, the Army, the National Health Service, the Civil Service – they all subscribe to their own central orthodoxy, even if not every member accepts every item of it. Connoisseurs of Whitehall are aware that different Ministries have different and even conflicting attitudes – the conservatism of the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Trade and Industry contrasts with the liberalism of the Departments of Education, Health and Social Services and the Department of Environment, though they are united in their belief in a large and well remunerated Civil Service. Those at the top of the tree are the custodians of corporate orthodoxy; they recruit applicants in their own image, and the applicants are steadily indoctrinated with the organisation’s principles and practices. Heretics tend to leave fairly early in their careers.

It would be astonishing if the BBC did not have its own orthodoxy. It has been around for 85 years, recruiting bright graduates, mostly with arts degrees, and deeply involved in current affairs issues and news reporting. And of course for all that time it has been supported by public money. One result of this has been an implicit belief in government funding and government regulation. Another is a remarkable lack of interest in industry and a deep hostility to business and commerce.

At this point I have to declare an interest, or at least admit to previous. I joined BBC television, my first job after university and National Service, in 1955, six months before the start of commercial television, and stayed for nine years as trainee, producer, editor and finally head of a production department. I absorbed and expressed all the accepted BBC attitudes: hostility to, or at least suspicion of, America, monarchy, government, capitalism, empire, banking and the defence establishment, and in favour of the Health Service, state welfare, the social sciences, the environment and state education. But perhaps our most powerful antagonism was directed at advertising. This is not surprising; commercial television was the biggest threat the BBC had ever had to face. The idea that television should be financed by businessmen promoting their products for profit created in us an almost spiritual revulsion.

And when our colleagues, who we had thought were good BBC men, left to join commercial broadcasters, they became pariahs. We could hardly bring ourselves to speak to them again. They had not just gone to join a rival company; they had sinned against the true faith, they were traitors, deserters, heretics.

This deep hostility to people and organisations who made and sold things was not of course exclusive to the BBC. It permeated a lot of upper middle class English society (and has not vanished yet). But it was wider and deeper in the BBC than anywhere else, and it is still very much a part of the BBC ethos. Very few of the BBC producers and executives have any real experience of the business world, and as so often happens, this ignorance, far from giving rise to doubt, increases their certainty.

We were masters of the techniques of promoting our point of view under the cloak of impartiality. The simplest was to hold a discussion between a fluent and persuasive proponent of the view you favoured, and a humourless bigot representing the other side. With a big story, like shale gas for example, you would choose the aspect where your case was strongest: the dangers of subsidence and water pollution, say, rather than the transformation of Britain’s energy supplies and the abandonment of wind farms and nuclear power stations. And you could have a ‘balanced’ summary with the view you favoured coming last: not “the opposition claim that this will just make the rich richer, but the government point out that it will create 10,000 new jobs” but “the government claim it will create 10,000 new jobs, but the opposition point out that it will just make the rich richer.” It is the last thought that stays in the mind. It is curiously satisfying to find all these techniques still being regularly used forty seven years after I left the BBC.

The issue of man-made global warming could have been designed for the BBC. On the one side are the industrialists, the businessmen, the giant corporations and the bankers (or at least those who are not receiving generous grants, subsidies and contracts from their government for climate-related projects such as wind farms or electric cars), on the other the environmentalists, the opponents of commercial expansion and industrial growth. Guessing which side the BBC will be on is a no-brainer, but no one has documented it in such meticulous detail as Christopher Booker. His case is unanswerable. The costs to Britain of trying to combat global warming are horrifying, and the BBC’s role in promoting the alarmist cause is, quite simply, shameful.

So what do we do about the BBC? One course of action that would be doomed from the start is to try and change its ethos, its social attitudes and its political slant. They have been unchanged for over half a century and just about all the influential and creative people involved in political programme commissioning and production are thoroughly indoctrinated. So do we abolish the BBC? After all, we do not have any newspapers or magazines that are subsidised with nearly four billion pounds of taxpayers’ money; why should broadcasting be different? If broadcasting were to start now, with all the benefits of cable and satellite technology, I cannot see anyone suggesting a system devised for the era of restricted wavelengths in which the BBC was born in the 1920s.

Of course no government would actually face up to the problem of privatising the BBC. And there are strong arguments for keeping it: some of its production units are among the best in the world. There is also a case for leaving its news and current affairs operation alone; it may have a built-in liberal/statist bias, but there are lots of other news channels which are commercially funded, so there is no great damage done if one of them is run by the middle class liberal elite.

No, what really needs changing is the size of the BBC. All we need from it is one television channel and one speech radio station – Radio 4, in effect. All its other mass of activities – publishing, websites, orchestras, digital channels, music and local radio stations – could be disposed of without any noticeable loss to the cultural life of the country, and the licence fee could probably be cut by two-thirds.

Could it happen? As the economic squeeze tightens, the case for a drastic slimming down of the BBC gets stronger every day. Cash-strapped households might be glad of the extra £100 a year, even at the expense of repeats, movies, imported programmes, quiz show and panel games – not to mention the sporting events we would see on other channels if the BBC hadn’t outbid them - that the BBC currently uses to fill out its schedules. But in some ways, the strongest case of all is made by Christopher Booker: if the BBC is to be paid to propagate the opinions of a liberal elite minority, it should not be allowed to dominate the national airwaves as it does today. Its voice should be heard, but it should not be allowed to drown out the others.

SOURCE





CO2 . . . The World's Savior?

Well this is interesting. It turns out that pushing CO2 into our atmosphere could well be the key to feeding our growing population.

A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Botany by Fereres, Orgaz, and Gonzalez-Dugo looks at the effect of CO2 on food production in a world increasing in population even as water is becoming increasingly scarce. So what major efficiencies need to be introduced to allow food production to match population growth in this scenario?

The authors posit that our world has become much more efficient in food production in large measure because of the release of carbon dioxide - i.e., plant food - into the air since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

It has significantly increased the leaf photosynthetic rates of our crops, while it has significantly reduced their transpiration rates, which has led to significant increases in leaf water use efficiency, or the amount of biomass produced per unit of water transpired in the process.

The experiments conducted by Fereres, Orgaz and Dugo ultimately verified that CO2 has a significant positive effect on crop production, while showing that theories of negative effects on world crop production from CO2 did not manifest in "real world" tests. So what does this mean?

Mankind's CO2 emissions may ultimately prove a godsend to humanity, as they just might make the difference between our being able to adequately [feed] . . . our expanding population in the very near future or our failing to do so in a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

Apparently, we need more coal plants for the good of the environment. Al Gore's head set to explode in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

Actually, I have been waiting for years for some scientists to confirm this hypothesis, as there had been some limited research a few years ago that showed higher agricultural yields in the presence of increased CO2 concentrations. In a world without the politicized science of Anthropogenic Global Warming, this study would be the impetus for a great deal more research to disprove or prove and extend the findings of the above study. But what I suspect will happen is that this study will be at best ignored, or at worst suppressed, and that we will learn of a conspiracy to delegitimize this study in a decade when the Climategate 7.0 e-mails are released.

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, 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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New Report: The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal

A new report, published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, reveals that the BBC has failed in its professional duty to report accurately and objectively on the issue of climate change, one of the biggest scientific and political stories of our time.

Written by Christopher Booker, one of the UK's most seasoned journalists, the report critically reviews the BBC’s coverage of climate change issues against its statutory obligation to report ‘with due accuracy and impartiality’.

His report, The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal, shows that the BBC has not only failed in its professional duty to report fully and accurately: it has betrayed its own principles, in three respects:

First, it has betrayed its statutory obligation to be impartial, using the excuse that any dissent from the official orthodoxy was so insignificant that it should just be ignored or made to look ridiculous.

Second, it has betrayed the principles of responsible journalism, by allowing its coverage to become so one-sided that it has too often amounted to no more than propaganda.

Third, it has betrayed the fundamental principles of science, which relies on unrelenting scepticism towards any theory until it can be shown to provide a comprehensive explanation for the observed evidence.

"Above all, the BBC has been guilty of abusing the trust of its audience, and of all those compelled to pay for it. On one of the most important and far-reaching issues of our time, its coverage has been so tendentious that it has given its viewers a picture not just misleading but at times even fraudulent," Christopher Booker said.

In the foreword to the GWPF report, Sir Antony Jay writes:

"The costs to Britain of trying to combat global warming are horrifying, and the BBC’s role in promoting the alarmist cause is, quite simply, shameful."

The full report is available here

SOURCE






The BBC and an inconvenient truth about climate change

By CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

From its breathtaking footage of killer whales hunting in packs to the scenes of penguins swimming with balletic grace under the sea ice, Sir David Attenborough’s BBC series Frozen Planet has been acclaimed as perhaps the most riveting sequence of natural history programmes ever produced.

The sophistication of the photography, the extraordinary endeavour of the film crews to get the best shots and Sir David’s breathily authoritative commentary have had viewers entranced in their millions.

Last night’s was the final part of this landmark series, and it set a very different tone from his usual celebration of the natural world. This was because Sir David and the BBC decided to use the last programme to put over a particular message that has become all too familiar from the Corporation in recent years.

The BBC's Frozen Planet has been a massive hit, with its presenter Sir David Attenborough capturing the nation's imagination

Sir David used the awesome shots of the frozen polar wastes to hammer home his belief that the world is facing disaster from man-made global warming.

No one can doubt the passion of his belief. But in putting across his apocalyptic message so forcefully, too many important questions on this hugely important subject were last night neither asked nor answered.

Distorted

In short, it was a deeply disappointing end to the series — for it was the latest one of countless examples of how, in recent years, the BBC has chosen to make its coverage of one of the most crucial issues of our time quite deliberately, even defiantly one-sided.

The BBC is committed by its charter to report with ‘accuracy and impartiality’. Yet on climate change, it has adopted a clear ‘party line’, which has run through almost every aspect of its broadcasting.

Earlier this year, when the Mail serialised the memoirs of the respected former BBC news reporter and anchorman Peter Sissons, his insider’s view explained how the BBC had become ‘a propaganda machine for climate-change zealots’.

So distorted has the BBC’s coverage become that I produced a detailed report on the subject for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the ‘sceptical’ think-tank run by former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, which is published today.

My disturbing findings show that the problem began a few years ago when the alarm over global warming was at its height. Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth — a sensationalist documentary warning of the imminent destruction of our planet because of climate change — was packing in vast audiences and being circulated to our schools to show to children.

Tony Blair was putting global warming at the top of his government’s agenda. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) was producing its scariest report to date.

By making its coverage so flagrantly one-sided on the environment issue, it has betrayed its statutory duty to report on world events impartially

At a secret ‘high-level seminar’ in January 2006, 30 of the BBC’s most senior staff listened as a former president of the Royal Society, Lord May, told them that ‘the scientific debate over climate change’ was over, and that the BBC must ‘stop reporting the sceptics’.

As a result, the BBC adopted a new editorial policy line, throwing any obligation to impartiality to the winds.

The BBC’s journalists and producers were let off the leash — to line up with the more extreme environmental pressure groups, such as Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and Friends of the Earth, in pushing their global warming agenda for all it was worth.

This bias was soon evident across the whole of the BBC’s output. Not just in the news and current affairs coverage, but from children’s programmes such as Blue Peter —which titled one show Green Peter, with top tips to save the planet — to story-lines in The Archers, one of which involved a farmer planting trees to combat climate change.

Even producers of the BBC Proms got in on the act. In 2007 they commissioned a ‘music drama’ centred on a group of children who had lost their homes through floods caused by climate change.

Programme after programme promoted the climate change gospel, including a two-part documentary series by David Attenborough in 2006, which featured practically every scare story ever dreamed up.

These included predictions that hurricane disasters, such as the previous year’s Katrina, would soon be commonplace, as well as familiar claims that the polar ice caps were melting, threatening the world with a catastrophic rise in sea levels.

The only trouble was that, even then, almost every claim Attenborough made was not supported by serious scientific evidence. The truth is that since the New Orleans flood of 2005, hurricane activity has, in fact, dropped to a historic low.

Despite all the scary claims about the vanishing Arctic ice, its modest retreat has been counter-balanced by a striking increase in ice around Antarctica (a fact not exactly highlighted on Frozen Planet last night).

Preaching

Bias: When it comes to climate change, from 2006 the BBC adopted a new editorial policy line, throwing any obligation to impartiality to the wind

The irony is that just when the BBC was going into overdrive with its propaganda, the real ‘global warming’ story was beginning to take a very different turn: none of the predictions made by the doom-mongers were coming true.

Temperatures were not continuing to rise as the IPCC’s computer models had predicted they should. The ice caps were not seriously melting; polar bears were not vanishing; sea levels were not dangerously rising; heatwaves, hurricanes and droughts were not becoming more frequent, as those Nobel Prize-winners Gore and the IPCC panel had insisted they must.

And ever more scientists questioned publicly the theory that the world was dangerously heating up as a result of greater amounts of man-made CO2.

Blithely oblivious to all this, the BBC carried on preaching the same old message, assuring us things were ‘even worse than predicted’, and that the only way to save the planet was to pile ever higher taxes on all emissions of CO2 and to build thousands more wind turbines (without, of course, telling us how ludicrously inefficient and expensive they are).

In 2009, the BBC’s journalists could scarcely hide their dismay at the collapse of the UN’s great Copenhagen climate conference, which planned to cut the world’s ‘carbon emissions’ to such an extent it would have landed mankind with the biggest bill in history, at an estimated cost of hundreds of trillions of pounds.

They tried to brush aside the huge embarrassment of the so-called ‘Climategate’ row in 2009 when hundreds of emails from the Climate Research Unit in Norwich were posted online and which revealed how some of the top scientists had been fiddling their data.

They downplayed scandals erupting round the IPCC when it was revealed that many of its more alarming predictions had not been based on proper science at all, but only on scare stories dreamed up by environmental lobby groups.

Betrayals

Then, last summer, in a bid to justify its conduct, the BBC Trust commissioned one of the Corporation’s regular contributors, the geneticist Professor Steve Jones, to review its science coverage, notably on climate change.

Professor Jones made the astonishing claim that the only problem with the coverage of climate change was not that it was too biased, but that it wasn’t biased enough.

All this is why I am far from alone in concluding that the BBC’s coverage has, on this key issue of our time, gone hopelessly off the rails. The Corporation has been guilty of three separate betrayals.

By making its coverage so flagrantly one-sided on the environment issue, it has betrayed its statutory duty to report on world events impartially.

Second, it has betrayed the basic principles of science by giving such unquestioning support to a theory which the evidence has increasingly called into doubt.

Above all, however, the BBC has betrayed the trust of its audience, by failing to give a fair and balanced picture.

This has become a national scandal. It is time we called this pampered, self-important organisation to account for having misinformed us for too long.

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A new Noah?

Warmist David Attenborough: If we continue committing CO2 sins, we will be punished by A Great Flood

10 minutes with David Attenborough | ES Magazine:

[Q] What do you say to those who deny climate change?

[A] You simply can't deny it. What you can do, although it is misguided, is to deny how much we have been responsible for it. But the climate is changing, and if it goes on changing, we are going to be in trouble. Everything we can do to reduce the danger must be done, otherwise great cities are going to be submerged. It's absurd to pretend otherwise.

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Scandal and Insanity at Penn State

In a repeat of Copenhagen, on the eve of the Durban climate change gabfest, someone released another horde of emails from alarmist climate researchers, including Dr. Michael Mann, whose infamous “hockey stick” was headlined in the 2001 IPCC report to justify the Kyoto agreement and demands that nations slash fossil fuel use and economic growth.

Meanwhile, back on Dr. Mann’s campus, Pennsylvania State University was confronting the sordid Jerry Sandusky affair. Sports Illustrated summarized the Augean Stables task in an article titled “Missteps at every turn: Efforts to clean up Penn State reveal how deep the institutional problems lie.”

As SI noted, a key judge in the case, Pennsylvania’s governor, Penn State’s new athletic director and even the attorney appointed to head up a “full and complete” internal investigation all have deep and longstanding ties to the university and/or its big-money football team. Noting these and other “blatant conflicts of interest,” the magazine quoted new PSU president Rodney Erickson as saying, “Penn State is committed to transparency to the fullest extent possible” [emphasis added] – in view of relevant financial, personal and other considerations, and special exemptions that Penn State enjoys from disclosure laws.

SI ended the article by asking, “Is Penn State cleaning house? Or simply rearranging the furniture?”

The same question applies to Dr. Mann. In the wake of Climategate 2009, Penn State hurriedly exonerated him and his department of any wrongdoing, as did NOAA and the National Science Foundation. The blatant whitewashes reflect the desperation of organizations intent on preserving their money train and perpetuating the Hollywood façade of manmade catastrophic climate change.

All three organizations are at the forefront of climate alarmism and its agenda of “radically transforming” the energy and economic foundations of modern nations. As IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has said, climate change is “just a part of” the effort “to bring about major structural changes” in “unsustainable” economic growth, development and lifestyles.

The agenda involves slashing carbon dioxide levels to 80% below 1990 levels. That would carry the United States back to emission levels last seen during the American Civil War – devastating the economy.

Together these institutions receive billions of dollars in annual government grants that foster one line of thinking on “global climate disruption” – another term concocted to spin weather and climate events as unprecedented disasters resulting from hydrocarbon energy use. Delegates from all three institutions get to attend annual climate confabs at exotic 5-star resorts, to promote “the cause” of ending mankind’s “addiction” to fossil fuels and establishing “global governance” under UN auspices.

For all these institutions, full-blown independent investigations – with adverse witnesses, cross-examination, and access to data and records denied to previous investigators – could result in lost income, prestige, and power over public policy decisions. Honest, replicable, truly peer-reviewed, robustly debated science into the causes, effects and extent of climate change would do likewise.

For Penn State, the global warming treasure chest may well exceed the Nittany Lions football cash cow. As meteorologist Art Horn has noted, the university received a whopping $470,000,000 in federal grants and contracts between 2010 and 2011. Neither Mann nor Penn State is saying how much went to climate research. But since the US government spent over $106 billion on climate research money between 2003 and 2010, PSU undoubtedly received a hefty portion for promoting the official alarmist viewpoint.

No wonder they refused to turn over raw data and computer codes to other scientists, IPCC reviewers and even investigators – claiming these were private property, even though taxpayers paid for them and the results generated are being used to justify endless energy, job and economy-killing public policies.

At the tip of the policy iceberg are EPA’s (postponed) CO2 “endangerment” regulations, its boiler and refinery rules, its reams of restrictions on coal-fired power plants, the agency’s opposition to hydraulic shale fracturing and the Keystone XL pipeline, and its new automobile mileage rules, which will raise the cost of cars, reduce crash-worthiness and result in thousands of additional deaths in accidents. Mann’s deceptive models and hockey sticks are also being used to justify a $100-billion-a-year “climate change reparation and mitigation” fund for poor nations, to be financed directly by FRCs (formerly rich countries) or via “climate taxes” imposed on international air travel and imported and exported products.

Also benefitting from the corrupt Climate Armageddon research machine are crony capitalists and climate profiteers too numerous to count: the renewable energy and carbon trading firms that depend on climate scares to maintain renewable energy, “green job,” carbon trading, and similar mandates and schemes.

As Competitive Enterprise Institute analyst Bill Frezza has observed, the US Department of Energy invested $529 million in taxpayer-subsidized loan guarantees to build North America’s largest lithium ion automotive battery plant … to supply a Finnish electric car manufacturer backed by Al Gore’s venture capital fund … to ship 40 (!) cars to the USA to date … so that they can be purchased by “environment-motivated” millionaires like Leonardo DeCaprio, who receive $7,500 tax credits for buying the cars.

Add in billions for wind turbines and solar panels … billions to persuade the poorest nations on Planet Earth to endure “sustainable” lifestyles, rather than modernize through reliable, affordable and, yes, hydrocarbon energy … and billions for IPCC and other UN bureaucrats, who insist that drought and flood, cold and heat, storm and sea level events are no longer due to natural forces, but to mankind’s use of fossil fuels – and we’re talking serious money.

Global warming alarmism could ultimately cause the global economy trillions of dollars.

Meanwhile, what about average workers and families? They get none of these perks, sinecures, subsidies and handouts. Instead, they get to pay taxes to support the bureaucrats, pseudo scientists and activists. They get to pay soaring energy bills that subsidize wind, solar and climate schemes, while driving families into fuel poverty. They get to lose their jobs, as companies faced with skyrocketing energy bills lay people off, close their doors or ship jobs off to overseas factories that have cheap energy and cheap labor, because China, India, et cetera do not and will not operate under Kyoto-style restrictions.

What about families in destitute African countries, where 90% of the people still don’t have electricity – because radical environmentalists, World Bank operatives and Obama Administration bureaucrats collude to delay or prevent the construction of coal and even gas-fired power plants?

It’s maybe possible that we face a genuine manmade climate crisis. It’s highly likely that mankind will continue to confront natural climate changes that compel adaptation through ingenuity and technology.

However, Climategate 1 and 2, The Delinquent Teenager and other exposés make it clear that the climate crisis cabal deliberately altered data, misrepresented and withheld crucial information, squelched inquiry and debate, and presented a one-sided narrative, so as to protect their revenues and reputations, and drive an anti-hydrocarbon agenda. Until truly convincing evidence is presented, vetted and fully debated – that fossil fuels are causing significant warming and climate disruption – Kyoto and its proposed successors should be terminated, and the frenzied rush to renewable energy should be ended.

Penn State needs to conduct a real investigation, by honest independent analysts who have no ties to the university or the climate crisis consortium. Its trustees took bold, decisive action on the Sandusky scandal. They need to do the same thing with Professor Mann, his department and colleagues.

Far too much is at stake – for the university, United States and world at large – to permit Penn State (or the IPCC or White House) to merely rearrange the furniture.

SOURCE





Solar to add billions to Australian power bills

THE federal scheme to promote the installation of rooftop solar panels and hot-water systems will have a cumulative cost to consumers of $4.7 billion by mid-2020, adding to pressure on household power bills.

The prediction is contained in advice to the nation's energy ministers, which also forecasts rises in residential electricity prices of about 37 per cent in the three years to 2013-14, with an average annual hike of 11 per cent.

The predicted rise shows prices may increase faster than previously expected, with predictions in July suggesting the three-year rise was expected to be in the order of 30 per cent.

The advice also shows that the carbon tax is likely to hit electricity prices hardest in Queensland and NSW, where power prices are tipped to rise by 42 per cent over the next three years - compared with a 32 per cent rise without a carbon price.

This is broadly in line with Treasury modelling, which suggests that the carbon tax will add about 10 per cent to power prices from 2013-17.

Queensland, NSW and the ACT faced the highest predicted price rises over the next three years, at 42 per cent.

They are followed by South Australia, with a predicted rise of 36 per cent; Victoria (33 per cent), Western Australia (30 per cent), Tasmania (25 per cent); and the Northern Territory (16 per cent).

The reports, by the Australian Energy Market Commission, were released by the Ministerial Standing Council on Energy and Resources.

After the meeting, federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson announced a Productivity Commission inquiry into aspects of electricity network regulation.

Mr Ferguson said that significant investment was required in electricity networks to replace and upgrade ageing assets, to meet growing levels of demand and facilitate a transition towards clean-energy technologies.

"Critical to delivering our energy needs is ensuring that our network regulatory frameworks are delivering efficient and reliable outcomes for consumers," Mr Ferguson said.

But the energy network businesses hit back, saying network prices had to rise to ensure safe electricity supplies to consumers and because the costs of raising funds offshore was increasing.

The AEMC reports found that on top of the $4.7 billion from small-scale renewable projects, energy consumers would also pay for the costs of state-based feed-in tariffs for households for injecting power back into the grid over the life of systems that have already been installed.

The AEMC found if the states adhered to caps on feed-in tariffs - which several states are imposing in an attempt to rein in generous rebates - then the take-up of the small-scale renewable energy scheme should fall from existing levels.

"But forecasts of higher retail electricity prices and reductions in the technology costs for solar PV will still provide incentives for some consumers to take up the SRES," the AEMC found.

As the SRES is a national scheme, decisions by state governments on their feed-in tariffs hit all consumers, as retailers are required to buy certificates that are then "passed through to all consumers in Australia".

By the middle of this year, about 400,000 households had PV solar systems installed.

The number of solar rooftop panel installations could reach more than 1.5 million by 2019-20 - accounting for more than one in every four owner-occupied households - if a carbon price starts next year.

The main beneficiaries of the green policy have been people living in houses and semi-detached homes in suburbs with low population densities, young children and often have three cars to a dwelling. By contrast, young people, those renting, the very affluent and people in higher population density areas were unlikely to tap the scheme.

The majority of the new solar installations were expected in NSW and Queensland, with a significant number in Victoria and Western Australia.

SOURCE





Are We Standing on the Edge of the Climate Change "Abyss"?

Reason's science correspondent sends a third dispatch from the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Durban

Ronald Bailey

Durban, South Africa-Yesterday, before an audience of more than 100 environmental ministers gathered at the opening "high level segment" plenary of the Durban Climate Change Conference, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon flatly declared, "We are nearing the `point of no return,' and we must pull back from the abyss." The "abyss" against which the Secretary-General warned is a future average global temperature higher than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

What's so terrible about exceeding those two degrees, and where did that figure come from? The 2øC baseline is based on climate models that project increases in greenhouse gases produced chiefly by burning fossil fuels will soon commit humanity to this much extra warming.

In political terms, the 2øC figure derives from the 2010 Cancun Agreements in which member countries to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change officially recognized "that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required according to science." How deep? They should be deep enough "to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2øC above preindustrial levels." In addition, the Cancun Agreements resolved that this target should reviewed by 2015 with the idea that it could be lowered to cutting greenhouse gas emissions even further with goal of holding the increase in global average temperature below 1.5øC. Keep in mind that it is generally thought that average global temperatures have already increased by 0.8øC in the last 100 years.

"The world has an ever narrowing window of time to stay within the 2 degrees scenario," asserted Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program. "If we allow the United States to set the framework for negotiations from here to 2020, we can wave goodbye to 2 degrees," warned Tim Gore of Oxfam. Nicholas Stern, lead author of the notorious Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, said "The numbers for climate change are very clear-if we want to remain below 2 degrees the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions have to be radical."

A new report issued this week by Climate Interactive (a collaboration between MIT's Sloan School of Management and the Ventana Systems consultancy) also found that to achieve the 2øC goal, the world economy must decarbonizes at a 5.8 percent rate, more than quadrupling the historical rate of 1.3 percent. But it gets worse, according to the Climate Interactive analysis, if countries wait to impose stringent emissions reductions until after 2020; decarbonization would have to rise to 8 percent per year. Interestingly, the latest reports note that in 2010 global carbon intensity actually increased by 0.6 percent rather than falling.

Obviously, a lot of brain and computer power have been devoted to calculating the suite of "ambitious" industrial policies needed to meet these emissions trajectories. In their models, the analysts and most of the folks here at the conference clearly see the climate "abyss" yawning before the world. But how much should we rely on prominent well-meaning energy experts to accurately discern the future?

In 2009, I looked back at the projections made by a much-ballyhooed 1980 National Academy of Science (NAS) report, Energy in Transition, 1985 to 2010. That report took four years to assemble and involved 350 of America's smartest energy researchers, engineers, and economists. How did they do? Not too well. In the NAS economic growth scenario that most closely matched what actually happened, the experts projected that the U.S. energy consumption would rise from 80 quads to more than 130 quads of primary energy by 2010, a 60 percent increase. (A quad is a quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs) which is equal to the amount of energy in 45 million tons of coal, or 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or 170 million barrels of crude oil.) Instead U.S. energy consumption rose to 98 quads, an increase of 22 percent.

Did government energy efficiency policies lead to the steep reduction in projected energy use? Again, not really. A 2004 study by the Washington, D.C., think tank Resources for the Future found that energy efficiency programs reduced annual primary energy consumption by 4 quads below what it would otherwise have been.

Of course, it is possible that our ambitious 21st century energy policy experts armed with faster computers and more complicated models are right this time in their energy production and consumption projections. At least, that's the economic bet that the climate activists and negotiators here in Durban want the rest of us to make.

More HERE

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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, 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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Windmill bursts into flame

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE






Early Signs of CRU/IPCC Corruption and Cover-up

by Dr. Tim Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agreed comments were:

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

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

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

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

Santer's replacements were:

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

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

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

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


Figure 1 Upper Atmosphere Temperature

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


Figure 2 Upper Atmosphere Data - Radio Sonde Data

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

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

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

Daly correctly called this "Scientism".

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

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

SOURCE





What I learned from Climategate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE




Jerry Sandusky and Michael Mann - Much In Common?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE




This is "the science" that Warmists keep talking about

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



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



SOURCE (See the original for links)






Greenpeace destroys an Australian business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, 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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Is global warming slowing? A new study says no (?)

An amusing Warmist article below. Just a few points: "surface temperatures have risen dramatically". A rise of less that one degree Celsius is "dramatic". "Trivial" would be a more honest description. And note that their own graphs confirm the narrow range of the change. They are calibrated in tenths of a degree.

Rahmstorff is Germany's equivalent of Phil Jones so you know how far to trust him and his "adjustments". And perhaps most amusing of all his post-adjustment graph show temperature rises within an even SMALLER range than the original data does.

And, finally, they have been forced to acknowledge a solar influence, something they long denied. There's no limit to how slippery Warmists can be

The global temperature series is one of the clearest pieces of evidence that the planet is heating up. Over the past century, it’s easy to see from, say, NASA’s data that surface temperatures have risen dramatically. But there’s also a fair bit of short-term natural fluctuation from year to year, which can sometimes obscure what, exactly, is going on.

For instance, according to the World Meterological Association, 2011 looks to be the 10th-warmest year on record. But this year was also a La Niña year, part of a natural weather cycle in which oceans run a little cold and temperatures tend to drop (as it happens, 2011 will likely prove to be the warmest La Niña year on record). So how do we tease out the human influence on climate from these short-term natural variations? A number of climate researchers have tried to do just that, but a new paper from statistician Grant Foster and climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf provides two graphs that show rather clearly how we’re warming the planet.

First, Foster and Rahmstorf took the raw data from five different global temperature series since 1978, including surface data and lower-atmosphere data from satellites:



Notice that temperatures have been rising since 1978, but there’s a fair bit of fluctuation due to natural events that affect different data series differently (El Niño events, for instance, affect satellite data more strongly than surface data). That allows skeptics to say things like, “Hey, global warming has stopped since 1998!”

So, in their paper, Foster and Rahmstorf tried to separate the signal from the noise. Using statistical techniques (detailed further by Foster here), they factored out the influence of the three biggest known natural mechanisms that can influence global temperatures in the short term — the El Niño oscillation, solar variability and volcanic eruptions. When those are removed, here’s what the graph looks like:



What’s left over is the global warming signal — the bulk of which is caused by humans emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (There are other smaller factors at play here, too, but previous “attribution” research has found that human activity, El Nino oscillations, solar activities and volcanoes can explain more than three-fourths of temperature variation since 1899.) Moreover, there’s no indication that global warming has slowed at any point. The temperature trend in the raw data gets muted in some years by reduced solar intensity or by a La Niña event, but not every year will be a La Niña year. Greenhouse gases appear to be pushing temperatures inexorably upward.

Stuart Saniford tries to take this analysis a step further and extrapolate how much warming we could expect by the end of the century, based on the linear trend over the past 30 years. This isn’t necessarily a good way to predict the future — after all, the climate can change in non-linear ways, which is why climate models that take into account the physics of the system are so important for predictions — but it gives a rough sense of what to expect if we keep emitting carbon pollution at our current rate. All told, though, Foster and Rahmstorf’s work suggests that there’s no basis for claiming that global warming is slowing or stopping.

SOURCE





Huntsman retreats on climate

Not a moment too soon. In many ways he is a better conservative than either Romney or Perry but his credulous stance on climate has alienated him from the GOP base

Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman appeared to take a notably more skeptical view towards current climate change science Tuesday, saying that the "scientific community owes us more" on the issue and that not enough solid research exists to "formulate policies" based on global warming.

"I'm not a scientist, I'm not a physicist, but I would defer to science in that discussion, and I would say that the scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description or explanation about what might lie beneath all of this," Huntsman told an audience of bloggers at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

"But there's not enough information right now to be able to formulate policies in terms of addressing it overall, primarily because it's a global issue," he went on. "We can enact policies here. But I wouldn't want to unilaterally disarm as a country, I wouldn't want to hinder job creators during a time when our economy is flat."

Huntsman made waves earlier this summer when he took aim at his GOP rivals for expressing skepticism about evolution and climate change science, sending out a much-retweeted message in August that read, "To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

Asked by a reporter Tuesday whether he has reversed that position, Huntsman said that he still "defers" to scientists who study the issue but said that there remain conflicts among the research community.

"Because ... there are questions about the validity of the science, evidence by one university over in Scotland recently, I think the onus is on the scientific community to provide more in the way of information, to help clarify the situation, that's all."

Huntsman also compared the issue of climate change to cancer research.

"If there's some interruption or disconnect in terms of what other scientists have to say, then let the debate play out within the scientific community," he said. "I think that's where we are. There's probably more debate yet to play out."

Huntsman also took questions from attendees about trade policy, education, and the United Nations. He echoed criticisms of one federal agency often derided by his fellow Republicans, telling the audience "I'm still trying to find the value added of the Department of Education."

Spokesman Tim Miller described the former Utah governor's position as consistent, saying that Huntsman has consistently said that if 90 percent of climate scientists agree on the effects of man-made warming, "he trusts their position."

"That was his position then and it's his position now," Miller said, adding that Huntsman's statement today related more specifically to the global nature of the problem -- that United States policy should not be shaped around the threat of global warming until the science is indisputably settled and "until the Chinese are on board."

SOURCE




No recent warming signal found in study of frozen ground

A paper published today in Environmental Research Letters examines a 71 year history of seasonally frozen ground changes in Eurasia.

The paper finds freeze depths decreased (indicative of warming) between the late 1960's to early 1990's, but that "from that point forward, likely through at least 2008, no change is evident."

The paper finds the observed changes linked to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a natural climate cycle, rather than the uncorrelated steady rise in 'greenhouse gases.'

Environmental Research Letters Volume 6 Number 4

An observational 71-year history of seasonally frozen ground changes in the Eurasian high latitudes

Oliver W Frauenfeld and Tingjun Zhang

Abstract

In recent decades, significant changes have occurred in high-latitude areas, particularly to the cryosphere. Sea ice extent and thickness have declined. In land areas, glaciers and ice sheets are experiencing negative mass balance changes, and there is substantial regional snow cover variability. Subsurface changes are also occurring in northern soils. This study focuses on these changes in the soil thermal regime, specifically the seasonally frozen ground region of Eurasia.

We use a database of soil temperatures at 423 stations and estimate the maximum annual soil freezing depth at the 387 sites located on seasonally frozen ground. Evaluating seasonal freeze depth at these sites for 1930–2000 reveals a statistically significant trend of −4.5 cm/decade and a net change of −31.9 cm. Interdecadal variability is also evident such that there was no trend until the late 1960s, after which seasonal freeze depths decreased significantly until the early 1990s.

From that point forward, likely through at least 2008, no change is evident. These changes in the soil thermal regime are most closely linked with the freezing index, but also mean annual air temperatures and snow depth. Antecedent conditions from the previous warm season do not appear to play a large role in affecting the subsequent cold season's seasonal freeze depths.

The strong decrease in seasonal freeze depths during the 1970s to 1990s was likely the result of strong atmospheric forcing from the North Atlantic Oscillation during that time period.

SOURCE

Michael Mann projects his own tactics onto others

The ongoing Climategate scandal, including 5,000-plus Climategate 2 emails released two weeks ago, reveals prominent global warming advocates acknowledging flaws in the theory that humans are causing dramatic climate change, coordinating efforts to hide such flaws, coordinating efforts to misrepresent scientific data, coordinating efforts to destroy evidence of these inconvenient truths, and coordinating efforts to blackball or induce the firing of scientists and editors of peer-reviewed science journals who publish evidence contradicting the alarmist storyline. The most important revelation from the Climategate scandals is that global warming scientist-activists are misrepresenting the scientific data regarding global warming. The second most important revelation is that scientist-activists are waging a brutal and dirty war of personal and professional destruction against skeptical scientists who disagree with them.

Make no mistake, the scientific misconduct revealed in the Climategate emails is severe and undeniable. The Climategate scientist-activists openly acknowledge substantial scientific evidence that contradicts their theories, then work to together to hide that evidence from the public.

For example, in Climategate 1, “hide the decline” became a scandalous punch line for a reason. Scientists had long been in general agreement that the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings established long-term settlements in Greenland and when productive vineyards thrived in more polar latitudes than is possible today, produced a few hundred years of temperatures warmer than today. This was very inconvenient for global warming activists claiming humans are causing dangerous and unprecedented global warming.

Michael Mann, a scientist-activist who is currently a researcher at Penn State University, then produced a controversial historical temperature assessment claiming the Medieval Warm Period wasn’t so warm after all. One of the problems with Mann’s temperature assessment was that it indicated today’s temperatures should be much lower than they actually are.

To get around the inconvenient flaw of his temperature assessment empirically underestimating real-world temperatures, Mann “hid the decline” in his assessment’s recent results and surreptitiously substituted actual surface temperature readings for the past few decades. As a result, Mann used cold-biased model data for prior centuries and a different set of warm-biased data during the last century to misleadingly assert today’s temperatures are much warmer than the Medieval Warm Period.

In the Climategate 2 emails, scientists openly acknowledge other contradictions between alarming theories and real-world conditions. These include temperatures in the lower troposphere behaving in stark contrast to how they should behave if greenhouse gas emissions were responsible for recent warming, hurricanes not behaving as scientist-activists said they should behave, ocean temperatures not complying with alarming computer models, etc. Again, as in the first batch of Climategate emails, the scientist-activists are concerned about the scientific evidence not matching their models, but work together to paint an alarming picture of global warming anyway.

The Climategate emails reveal that when the scientist-activists saw skeptical scientists successfully calling public attention to such evidence, they went on a vicious attack, pulling strings to pressure universities and science journals to fire or blackball the skeptical scientists for presenting their competing theories and evidence. The Climategate emails also show Mann as one of the most aggressive warriors in the battle to publicly disparage and ruin the careers of scientists who disagree with his views on global warming.

For example, upset that Harvard University researchers were successfully arguing that solar variance rather than carbon dioxide emissions are the most likely primary cause of recent global temperature fluctuations, Mann sent out an email seeking to coordinate action to pressure Harvard to rebuke or discipline the researchers. “If someone has close ties w/ any individuals there [at Harvard] who might be in a position to actually get some action taken on this, I’d highly encourage pursuing this,” writes Mann to fellow scientist-activists.

The Climategate emails also reveal Mann recruiting investigative journalists to dig up dirt on scientist Steve McIntyre, who had called into questions Mann’s scientific theories.

Two days ago Mann delivered his best impersonation, playing the persecuted victim after being caught red-handed. “[A]ttacks on climate science all seem the same. I should know. I’ve been one of the climate contrarians’ preferred targets for years,” complains Mann in a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

“In recent years, attacks on climate science have become personal,” Mann asserts. Mann certainly should know about that – he wrote the book on it.

Mann paints any scientific criticisms of his theories or methods as an attack on climate science itself. As quoted above, and throughout his Wall Street Journal letter, Mann repeatedly refers to skeptical objections to his theories as “attacks on climate science.” Mann’s assertions are preposterous.

Hiding and misrepresenting scientific evidence is an attack on climate science. Exposing those who do so is advancing the cause of science.

Seeking the personal and professional punishment of scientists for disagreeing with your personal theories is an attack on climate science. Exposing those who do is advancing the cause of science.

By Mann’s logic, those who criticized Richard Nixon over Watergate were attacking the presidency, those who criticize Vladimir Putin’s election-rigging practices in Russia are attacking democracy, those who criticized New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick for breaking NFL rules in the Spygate scandal were attacking professional football, and those who criticized Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly for kneecapping Nancy Kerrigan were attacking Olympic figure skating.

SOURCE





I Just Bet My House on the Outcome of Science Trial of the Century

John O'Sullivan

No truer headline will you read. Yesterday this author literally wagered his home, life savings, and all his possessions on the outcome of a crucial global warming lawsuit currently ongoing in Canada.

So what is it that drove me to such apparent recklessness endangering not only my own well-being but that of my family?

Well, to me this pivotal lawsuit encapsulates the archetypal 'good versus evil' battle no conscientious parent can ignore. Facing each other is Plaintiff, Dr. Michael Mann (he of ‘hockey stick’ graph infamy) representing so-called UN ‘consensus’ climate science. Mann claims his work proves humans are dangerously warming the planet. Defendant, retired Canadian climatologist, Dr. Timothy Ball believes Mann was a key player in the Climategate scandal and has hidden his dodgy tree-ring data for over 13 years to cover up fakery in the numbers. Mann and his ilk are not only responsible for scaring the bejesus out of our kids but are being used as part of a bigger plot involving population control and wealth re-distribution; none of which is good for your family or mine.

Dr. Mann, Director of Earth System Science at Penn. State, the university currently embroiled in the Jerry Sandusky child sex cover up scandal, has enjoyed a lucrative career on the back of his fantastic claims. Dr. Ball famously declared that his adversary belongs “in the state pen, not Penn State.” For that Ball was summarily hit with a libel suit and Ball's legal fees could exceed $300,000. But defiantly, the septuagenarian says, “if you think education is expensive – try ignorance.”

I recently drew attention to the remarkable similarities in the cover-up processes performed for the benefit of Mann and Sandusky at Penn. State. At their root, both cases share the same stench of self-serving financial sleaze.

So persuasive is the evidence to me that last night I signed a contract in favor of Dr. Ball to forsake my worldly goods in the event the B.C. court ruled in favor of his adversary, Dr. Michael Mann .

An honest jury will see from Ball's evidence that Mann perpetrated a cynical and heinous crime by secretly doctoring proxy climate data from a handful of tree rings he took from a corner of California that was then claimed to represent a 1,000-year temperature record for the globe. The Mann graph typifies all that is wrong with post-normal science now practiced in our universities.

As the two bitterly opposed climatologists battle it out toe-to-toe the stakes aren’t just high for me they are high for you, too. But with your support, I'm more than quietly confident of success.

With billions of dollars of climate taxes resting on the outcome, it’s no flannel to label the Mann-v-Ball trial in the British Columbia Supreme Court as the ‘science trial of the century,’ the most profound of its kind since the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ of 1925.

Ball, a 72-year-old retiree has already used up his meager life savings but has made some headway with his escalating legal costs thanks to a fighting fund that is now past the $100,000 mark. But there’s a lot of lawyerly manouvering to go yet before Ball can be assured of victory.

The sickening level of corruption that is now pervading our universities is making many honest folk realize they need to stand shoulder to shoulder with principled scientists like Dr. Ball. In recent months I’ve worked hard to help promote Tim Ball’s Legal Defense Fund. But my efforts also made me a target for Michael Mann’s attorney, Roger McConchie, who didn’t hesitate in naming me as an accessory in his lawsuit. So as a yardstick of commitment to the case, yesterday I signed a binding legal agreement providing my full financial indemnity to Tim in case Mann wins his claim.

I had little reason to hesitate. My conscience was reassured after reading more of the fresh crop of Climategate 2.0 emails that are so damning of Mann’s ‘science.’ I urge readers to examine for themselves Steve Milloy's selection of those emails and see how caustic Mann’s colleagues were privately about his “crap” tree ring graph. The striking difference between those scientists and Dr. Ball is that only Ball had the courage to speak out publicly.

Without experts as principled as Dr. Ball it is very unlikely the general public would be any the wiser about the grotesque billion-dollar fraud called man-made global warming. So please donate what money you can and become part of this force for good.

SOURCE






Public support for tackling climate change declines dramatically in Britain

There has been dramatic decline over the past decade in the public's support for tackling climate change in Britain. Backing for higher green taxes and charges has waned and scepticism about the seriousness of the threat to the environment has increased.

The British Social Attitudes survey shows that in 2000 43% of the population would pay "much higher prices" for "the sake of the environment". Last summer support fell to just 26%, with the poorest sections of society most reluctant to save the planet with their cash.

Over the same period the public has become much more sceptical about the science behind climate change. In 2010 37% said many claims about environmental threats were "exaggerated", up from 24% in 2000.

Alison Park, research director of the survey, said that the two factors that loomed large in the public's mind appeared to be the financial crisis which made people much less likely to be able to sacrifice cash or taxes. She also said that "climategate" claims about the veracity of scientific claims in 2009 had also damaged the case of proponents of global warming theories.

On some questions the public is much less bothered because it thinks the issue has been dealt with. Only 28% regard air pollution from cars as "very" or "extremely" dangerous to the environment, down from 54% in 2000.

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, 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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