Stupid Himalayan glacier claim was DELIBERATELY fraudulent

The IPCC bosses knew from the beginning where the "information" originated but deliberately covered it up

I can report a further dramatic twist to what has inevitably been dubbed "Glaciergate" – the international row surrounding the revelation that the latest report on global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained a wildly alarmist, unfounded claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. Last week, the IPCC, led by its increasingly controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to issue an unprecedented admission: the statement in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis, and its inclusion in the report reflected a "poor application" of IPCC procedures.

What has now come to light, however, is that the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is director-general. Furthermore, the claim – now disowned by Dr Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC – has helped TERI to win a substantial share of a $500,000 grant from one of America's leading charities, along with a share in a three million euro research study funded by the EU.

At the same time, Dr Pachauri has personally been drawn into a major row with the Indian government, previously among his leading supporters, after he described as "voodoo science" an official report by the country's leading glaciologist, Dr Vijay Raina, which dismissed Dr Hasnain's claims as baseless. Now that the IPCC has disowned the prediction made by his employee, Dr Pachauri has been castigated by India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, and called on by Dr Raina to apologise for his "voodoo science" charge. At a stormy Delhi press conference on Thursday, Dr Pachauri was asked whether he intended to resign as chairman of the IPCC – on whose behalf he collected a Nobel Peace Prize two years ago, alongside Al Gore – but he refused to answer questions on this fast-escalating row.

To understand why the future of Himalayan glaciers should arouse such peculiar passion, one must recall why they have long been a central icon in global warming campaigners' propaganda. Everything that polar bears have been to the West, the ice of the Himalayas has been – and more – to the East. This is because, as Mr Gore emphasised in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, the vast Himalayan ice sheet feeds seven of the world's major river systems, thus helping to provide water to 40 per cent of the world's population.

The IPCC's shock prediction in its 2007 report that the likelihood of the glaciers "disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high" thus had huge impact in India and other Asian countries, and it is precisely this statement that the IPCC has now been forced to disown.

Since this first came to light, many journalists have tried to track down how such an embarrassing error came to be included in the IPCC report, which is still widely touted as the most authoritative single document on global warming. The only researcher who has dug out the full story, however, is my colleague Dr Richard North, who on successive days last week featured prominently on India's leading English-language TV news channel discussing the issue with the two scientists at the heart of the row, Dr Hasnain and Dr Raina.

Until now it has been generally reported that the IPCC based its offending paragraph on an interview Dr Hasnain gave to the New Scientist in June 1999. This was a time when global warming researchers were busy making ever more extravagant claims in the run-up to the IPCC's 2001 report. It was in that year that Dr Michael Mann in America launched on the world his famous "hockey stick" graph, purporting to show that temperatures had risen faster in the late 20th century than ever before in the Earth's history. The graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, though it has since been comprehensively discredited.

In fact Dr Hasnain had first made his own controversial claim two months earlier, in a much longer interview with an Indian environmental magazine, Down to Earth, in April 1999. It was the wording of this interview which the IPCC was to quote almost exactly in its 2007 report.

Clearly the IPCC was aware that to cite a little Indian magazine as the reference for such a startling prediction would hardly seem sound scientific practice. But it discovered that Dr Hasnain's slightly later interview with New Scientist had been quoted in a 2005 report by the environmental campaigning group WWF. So it was this, rather oddly, which the IPCC cited as its authority – even though the words it quoted were taken directly from the earlier interview.

But even before the 2007 report was published, it now emerges, the offending claim was challenged, not least by a leading Austrian glaciologist, Dr Georg Kaser, a lead author on the 2007 report. He described Dr Hasnain's prediction of glaciers disappearing by 2035 as "so wrong that it is not even worth dismissing".

The year after the IPCC report was published, however, Dr Hasnain was recruited by Dr Pachauri to head a new glaciology unit at TERI. In a matter of months, TERI was given a share in a $500,000 dollar study of melting Himalayan glaciers funded by a US charity, the Carnegie Corporation. It is clear from Carnegie's database that a key part in winning this contract was played by Dr Hasnain's claim that most glaciers in the region "will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming".

In May 2009 TERI was also given a share in a three million euro project funded by the EU. Citing the WWF's 2005 report, the EU set up its "High Noon" project to study the impact of melting Himalayan glaciers. It was particularly keen to foster alarm over the Himalayas as a means to win Indian support for action on climate change at last year's Copenhagen conference.

Last November, however, Dr Raina, the country's most senior glaciologist, published a report for the Indian government showing that the rate of retreat of Himalayan glaciers had not increased in the past 50 years and that the IPCC's predictions were recklessly alarmist. This provoked the furious reaction from Dr Pachauri that tarred Dr Raina's report as "arrogant" and "voodoo science". Only weeks later came the devastating revelation that the IPCC's own prediction had no scientific foundation.

Dr Pachauri's first response to these revelations was to claim that he had "absolutely no responsibility" for the blunder, that it was "the work of independent authors – they're responsible". But the IPCC's error was so blatant that last week Pachauri and other senior officials had to put out their remarkable statement, admitting that it had been due to a serious system failure.

Even more damaging now, however, will be the revelation that the source of that offending prediction was the man whom Dr Pachauri himself has been employing for two years as the head of his glaciology unit at TERI – and that TERI has won a share in two major research contracts based on a scare over the melting of Himalayan glaciers prominently promoted by the IPCC, using words drawn directly from Dr Hasnain.

This is by no means the first time that the procedures used by the IPCC to compile its 2007 report – the most alarmist so far – have been subjected to trenchant questioning. But no one, it seems, is more embarrassed by "Glaciergate" than Dr Pachauri himself, whose expanding worldwide business connections since he became chairman of the IPCC have recently been the subject of articles in these pages by Dr North and myself.

In view of the IPCC's statement last week, the very evident anger of the Indian government at his dismissal of its expert's report and now the revelation of the part played in this fiasco by a senior member of his own TERI staff, it appears that what we may soon be looking at here is not just "Glaciergate" but "Pachaurigate".

SOURCE





Canadian scientist says UN's global warming panel needs a major overhaul

Says it has become political and needs to revert to being scientific

A senior Canadian climate scientist says the United Nations' panel on global warming has become tainted by political advocacy, that its chairman should resign, and that its approach to science should be overhauled. Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.

"There's been some dangerous crossing of that line," said Weaver on Tuesday, echoing the published sentiments of other top climate scientists in the U.S. and Europe this week. "Some might argue we need a change in some of the upper leadership of the IPCC, who are perceived as becoming advocates," he told Canwest News Service. "I think that is a very legitimate question."

Weaver also says the IPCC has become too large and unwieldy. He says its periodic reports, such as the 3,000 page, 2007 report that won the Nobel Prize, are eating up valuable academic resources and driving scientists to produce work on tight, artificial deadlines, at the expense of other, longer-term inquiries that are equally important to understanding climate change.

"The problem we have is that the IPCC process has taken on a life of its own," says Weaver, a climate-modelling physicist who co-authored chapters in the past three IPCC reports. "I think the IPCC needs a fundamental shift."

Weaver's comments follow a series of recent revelations about the scientific credibility of the IPCC's work. The panel admitted last week that its 2007 report wrongly asserted that Himalayan glaciers likely would melt by 2035. That alarming claim created concern across southern and eastern Asia, whose major rivers are fed by the glaciers.

While the content of IPCC reports is supposed to be rigorously checked by a scientific, peer-review system, those rules weren't followed in this case. The glacier-melting claim was kept in the report even though some glacier experts considered it preposterous. The claim originated with an Indian glaciologist, Syed Hasnain, who works for a research company in India headed by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC's chairman. British newspaper reports say Pachauri's company used the false glacier claim to win multi-million-dollar research grants from the U.S. and Europe.

The scientist responsible for the Asia chapter in the IPCC report also told a British newspaper that he included Hasnain's glacier claim for political purposes. "We thought," said IPCC author Murari Lal, according to The Mail on Sunday, "that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action." The damage to the IPCC's credibility caused by the "glaciergate" affair, and by last December's "climategate" scandal, have provided months of fodder for critics who have long been skeptical of the IPCC's warnings.

Weaver says Pachauri, the panel's chairman, should resign, not only for his recent failings but because he was a poor choice to lead the IPCC to begin with.

Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, Ont., and a well-known IPCC critic, says the panel's scientific failings, and its willingness to cross the line into advocacy, will eventually percolate into the policy arena. "The halo has come off the IPCC," he says. "At the time of the 2007 report, there were very few politicians willing to question statements from the IPCC. Now, as this plays out, people will start to be embarrassed to cite the IPCC."

Weaver says the vast majority of the science in the IPCC reports is valid, and that the glacier revelations —"one small thing," in a 3,000 word document, as he calls it — shouldn't be used to discredit other parts of the report. "There is not a global conspiracy to drum up false evidence of global warming," he says.

But Weaver admits the IPCC needs to change, for the sake of climate science, and for its own credibility. He also says the IPCC must stop producing huge, all-encompassing reports on every aspect of climate science and instead re-organize itself into a series of small, highly-focused groups, each tasked with examining a single specific scientific question and none required to publish their conclusions on quick deadlines.

And he says IPCC officials must cease being "over enthusiastic" in pushing for policy changes. "Nobody should be using particular pieces of information to advance an agenda," says Weaver. "The IPCC cannot be an advocate, because it's not tasked to do that."

On this point, Weaver and McKitrick agree. "The IPCC is not going to be able to recover from this unless there's an honest attempt to reform their procedures," says McKitrick. "They need to start doing what they've always claimed to do — to be balanced, and open, and scientifically rigorous."

SOURCE





Earth’s Uncertain Response to CO2

The Earth has warmed substantially less than would have been expected during the industrial era based on current best estimates of Earth's "climate sensitivity" - the amount of global temperature rise predicted in response to a given rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2).

A study just published in the Journal of Climate, Stephen Schwartz, of Brookhaven National Laboratory, and colleagues examines the reasons for this discrepancy.

According to frequently used estimates of climate sensitivity there should be a global temperature rise of 2 deg C which is greater than the 0.8 deg C increase observed (which prior to 1950 also contains a solar warming component.) Schwartz's analysis attributes the reasons for the discrepancy to a possible mix of two major factors: 1) Earth's climate may be less sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than currently assumed and/or 2) reflection of sunlight by haze particles – aerosols - in the atmosphere may be offsetting some of the expected warming.

"Because of present uncertainties in climate sensitivity and the enhanced reflectivity of haze particles," said Schwartz, "it is impossible to accurately assign weights to the relative contributions of these two factors. This has major implications for understanding of Earth's climate and how the world will meet its future energy needs."

A key question facing policymakers is how much additional CO2 and other heat-trapping gases can be introduced into the atmosphere, beyond what is already present, without dangerous warming. Many consider the threshold for dangerous climatic effects to be 2 deg C above the preindustrial level, although there are considerable uncertainties.

The paper in the Journal of Climate suggests that if the Earth's climate sensitivity is at the low end of current estimates as given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then the total maximum future emissions of heat-trapping gases so as not to exceed the 2 deg C would correspond to about 35 years of present annual emissions of CO2. A climate sensitivity at the present best estimate would mean that no more heat-trapping gases can be added.

This paper is another example that IPCC estimates of future temperature trends have limited scientific value and need re-evaluating.

Schwartz observes that formulating energy policy with the present uncertainty in climate sensitivity is like navigating a large ship in perilous waters without charts. "We know we have to change the course of this ship, and we know the direction of the change, but we don't know how much we need to change the course or how soon we have to do it."

SOURCE






BIG GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

With lots from the redoubtable Andrew Bolt. Six current articles below

Conservative Federal politicians still looking for a non-destructive climate change policy

FEDERAL Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has hinted his climate action plan will centre on storing carbon in soil and planting more trees. But the Government is preparing to release modelling which will rubbish Mr Abbott's plan. Highly placed Government sources said an analysis of an Opposition carbon sequestration plan found it would cost taxpayers $10 billion but fall short of targets to cut greenhouse emissions.

Mr Abbott, who again pledged his climate action plan would not be a "big tax" like Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's scheme, has cited research showing a 50 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions could come from improved land management techniques. His plan yesterday received some reserved support from Ross Garnaut, the man who was appointed to head Mr Rudd's climate change review. "Let me say that there's something in the idea of focusing on biosequestration (locking up carbon through tree planting or better agricultural practices)," he said.

Mr Abbott, who yesterday toured a NSW farm said to be a world leader in carbon capture, will release his climate change strategy within a week. The strong focus on agriculture he is believed to be planning was also agreed to by the Government after the ill-fated negotiations with former leader Malcolm Turnbull. "What our policy will involve is encouraging things that will actually help the environment and reduce emissions," Mr Abbott said.

But the Government modelling is believed to show that 30 million hectares of land would need to be involved by 2020 if the Opposition aimed to achieve 150 million tonnes of carbon savings by then. The modelling estimated that each year for a decade, an average of 3 million hectares of land – about half the size of Tasmania – would need to be involved.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said Mr Abbott had only days to come clean on his policy. "If Mr Abbott cannot release a fully costed policy that outlines a clear pathway to reach the bipartisan emissions cuts he has committed to, it will confirm he cannot be trusted on climate change," Senator Wong said.

SOURCE

Be alert but wary on climate claims

Doubts over modelling and emissions trading schemes are justified, says the following skeptical article from "the Age", Australia's most Leftist major newspaper

PRE-COPENHAGEN, the global warming debate had been captured by prophets of doom and the language of apocalypse. This was particularly off-putting in a discussion that depends on high-quality science, cool logic, and careful argument. It raises old suspicions. The West has already experienced theories of impending environmental disaster-with the Club of Rome launching a successful scare campaign in the 1970s about the world running out of food. Its book, Limits to Growth, sold 30 million copies. Hardly a decade had passed before its predictions were proved wrong.

Of course, the objective case for global warming is separate from the manner in which some of its proponents have publicised it. And, it should be judged on its own merits. Nevertheless, I must confess to being wary of causes that attract pseudo-religious enthusiasm and intellectual fanaticism.

Current predictions of global warming and its long-term effects depend on computer-generated mathematical models. There are two major problems with such models. First, their relationship to reality is compromised by the simplifying assumptions they have to make in order to reduce the number of variables they can take into account to a workable number.

In economics this means they are next to useless for long-term prophecy. We are confronted every day with how poor economic commentators are at prediction. If this is true in the domain of economics, how much more the case is it for climate, where the potential variables are vastly greater?

The second problem with mathematical models is that they assume current factors will continue as they are-major ones will stay major, minor ones minor, and no significant new ones will emerge.

History is a story of the rise of the unexpected. Having said this, some predictions are better than others. For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report projects greenhouse gas emissions. In the limited case of carbon dioxide over the next two decades, there is some plausibility to the predictions - given current dependence on coal-fired power stations and the long development times needed to switch modes of electricity generation. However, when it comes to linking emissions to rising world temperatures, the models become fanciful.

The New York Times, hardly an enclave of climate scepticism, featured an article on September 23, 2009, which admitted that global temperatures have been stable for the past decade, and may even drop in the next few years. Surely, this trend may be an anomaly, but its existence does raise a serious question mark, for all but true believers.

Some disciplines in both the arts and the sciences are highly speculative, and that makes their theories and predictions unstable. Does climate science belong here? I have my suspicions. For instance, climatologists told us for a decade or more that climate in south-eastern Australia - and in particular, rainfall - was determined by weather patterns and sea currents across the Pacific Ocean. Now, suddenly we are being told that it is rather the Indian Ocean that is critical.

The claims made about the science have been rash, asserting dogmatic certainty about human-induced warming when the reality is that the overall picture is quite unclear. This has now backfired, with the IPCC admitting mistakes in its 2007 report, and the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, which the IPCC has drawn heavily upon, shown to have been, at the least, devious in the results it has made public.

There may be some link between the rashness of the global warming campaign and the haplessness of the politics that has followed. The best current bet is that, after Copenhagen, emission controls is dead as a serious international issue. And further, only some environmental disaster that can be convincingly linked to climate change will rekindle it. The "sceptics" have won the politics.

The clumsy politics is international and local. An emissions trading scheme, as proposed by the Australian Government, is very bad policy. It is a form of taxation on carbon under another name. To tax carbon will lead to thousands of pages of regulation - a godsend to bureaucracy, but paralysing for initiative and industry.

To give one example: taxing carbon, especially in Australia, would make little sense unless agriculture is included within the scheme. Farmers tell me that the amount of carbon dioxide released from the soil during ploughing depends on the depth of the furrows. There will need to be different regulations for different types of ploughing. Multiply this small particular across the range and complexity of Australian agriculture and our farmers will be looking at a code of regulations that will make the Taxation Act look like a kindergarten primer. One of the benefits of Copenhagen is that an ETS may now be politically dead in Australia.

Leaving aside the reservations I have expressed here, what if the gloomy predictions about global warming and its consequences turn out to be justified? It is not prudent for us humans to throw too much muck up into the sky.

So where does that leave us? We do need emission controls, but they should be kept as simple as possible. Why not just target major polluters, and notably coal-fired electricity generation? But Copenhagen has rendered even that futile for a trivial world polluter such as Australia, given that China and India have made it clear they will not be cutting back on their use of coal.

SOURCE

It’s over. Even "The Age" is crumbling

By Andrew Bolt

The ultimate sign that the tide is turning agains the great global warming scare: "The Age" publishes an opinion piece by a sceptic [see above]

UPDATE: For Victorians wanting to hear just why the global warming scare is collapsing, I pass on this email:

You are invited to attend the Melbourne public lecture by Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Renowned world-wide for his knowledge of global warming and the eloquence to convey his message.

In: the Ballroom of the Sofitel Hotel (25 Collins St.) At: 5:30 pm. On: Monday February 1st.

Lord Monckton will be introduced by Prof. Ian Plimer (author of best seller “Heaven + Earth") who will also participate in the Question and Answer period after Christopher Monckton’s main address… Admission will be by “donation” of $20 at the door…

Enquiries should be directed to Case SMIT .... smit@gmail.com

UPDATE 2: Another sign that the global warmists’ crusade to cut emissions is going nowhere - and that the weather isn’t matching their predictions, either:

The queue of ships at the world’s biggest coal port, Newcastle, is near its longest level since before the financial crisis and waiting times are at a one-year record.

In a sign of the booming demand for coal, figures published this week show 58 ships were waiting on Monday, just shy of the pre-Christmas peak of 60, which was the longest queue since mid-2007. Average waiting times for vessels at the port have also blown out to a fresh one-year high of 17.86 days, the Newcastle Port Corporation figures show.

The trend, mirrored at key ports around the country, points to the soaring demand from coal buyers in China and Europe, after severe winters caused a surge in demand for electricity.

UPDATE 3: Speaking of which:

Towns such as Thredbo, and Cooma in the NSW Southern Tablelands, reported a brief flurry of snow this morning, Bureau of Meteorology Duty forecaster Jane Golding said… Ms Golding said summer snow was a rare occurrence in towns such as Cooma. “In Cooma, records began there in 1973 and we’ve never had any observations of snow there in December, January and February,’’ she said.

UPDATE 4: And in further chilling news, more evidence that a colder world is much more dangerous than a warmer one:

The United Nations is raising concerns over the worsening humanitarian situation in Mongolia, brought on by drought and temperatures hitting minus 40 degrees Celsius in most provinces. The extreme weather conditions, known locally as the Dzud, have already caused the deaths of more than one million livestock, as supplies of fodder dwindles.

SOURCE

Ten signs that the warming scare is collapsing

By Andrew Bolt

ONCE global warming was “the great moral challenge of our generation”. Or so claimed the Prime Minister.

But suddenly it’s the great con that’s falling to bits around Kevin Rudd’s ears.

In fact, so fast is global warming theory collapsing that in his flurry of recent speeches to outline his policies for the new decade, Rudd has barely mentioned his “moral challenge” at all.

Take his long Australia Day reception speech on Sunday. Rudd talked of our ageing population and of building stuff, of taxes, hospitals and schools - but dared not say one word about the booga booga he used to claim could destroy our economy, Kakadu, the Great Barrier Reef and 750,000 coastal homes.

What’s happened?

Answer: in just the past few months has come a cascade of evidence that the global warming scare is based on often dodgy science and even outright fraud.

Here are just the top 10 new signs that catastrophic man-made warming may be just another beat-up, like swine flu, SARS, and the Y2K bug.

1. Climategate

THE rot for Rudd started last November with the leaking of emails from the Climatic Research Unit of Britain’s University of East Anglia.

Those emails from many of the world’s top climate scientists showed them conspiring to sack sceptical scientists from magazines, hide data from sceptics, and cover up errors.

One of the scientists, CRU boss Phil Jones, even boasted of having found a “trick” to “hide the decline” in recent temperature reconstructions.

Jones was also on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so influential in convincing us our gasses are heating the planet that it won the Nobel Prize.

But he showed how political the IPCC actually is by promising in yet another email that he and another colleague would do almost anything to keep sceptical studies out of IPCC reports.

Just as damning was the admission by IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth that the world isn’t warming as the IPCC said it must: “We cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

2. The Copenhagen farce

MORE than 40,000 politicians, scientists and activists flew to Copenhagen last month - in clouds of greenhouse gasses - to get all nations to agree to make the rest of us cut our own emissions to “stop” global warming.

This circus ended in total failure. China, the world’s biggest emitter, refused to choke its growth. So did India. Now the United States is unlikely to make cuts, either, with Barack Obama’s presidency badly wounded and the economy so sick.

Not only did this show that Rudd’s planned tax on our emissions will now be even more suicidally useless. It also suggested world leaders can’t really think global warming is so bad.

3. The Himalayan scare

More HERE

Which country’s chief scientist defends science?

By Andrew Bolt

Draw your own conclusions about which chief scientist is best defending science against dogma and politics.

Britain:

THE impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the British Government’s chief scientific adviser.

John Beddington was speaking after an admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that it grossly over-stated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were receding. Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned scientists who refused to publish the data underpinning their reports…

“I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper scepticism. Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed,” he said.

Australia:

THE planet has just five years to avoid disastrous global warming, says the Federal Government’s chief scientist. Prof Penny Sackett yesterday urged all Australians to reduce their carbon footprint… “Australians can make an enormous contribution, so why would we not rise to this challenge and this opportunity,” she told a business conference in Melbourne.

Prof Sackett refused to comment on the failure of the emissions trading scheme to be passed by the Senate this week. She said her role was as an adviser to the Government and not a commentator on public policy, but she did not deny her appointment a year ago was a political one.

At some stage there will have to be an accounting among scientists who failed to defend the tenets of their discipline in an age of politically-motivated unreason, and who failed to defend the few sceptics who dared to speak up and were punished for it.

SOURCE

"Stacking" the IPCC

"Stacking" is an old custom on the Australian Left. It means to ensure that some deliberative body (e.g. a Labor Party branch) is mostly composed of people whom you favour and who will therefore decide what you want them to decide -- JR

By Andrew Bolt

How to stack the IPCC. First, let the Rudd Government have sole power to nominate Australia’s IPCC authors:

The IPCC has started work on the preparation of the Fifth Assessment Report that will detail the state of climate change knowledge, and has issued an official call for authors…

The Department of Climate Change (DCC) operates as the National Focal Point for IPCC activities and is inviting Australian experts to nominate for Coordinating Lead Author, Lead Author and Review Editor roles. Interested parties are requested to read the background information and email climatescience@climatechange.gov.au for an Australian Government nomination form. This form will require interested parties to detail their qualifications, areas of expertise, recent publications and contact information.

The Australian Government will select nominees to put forward to the IPCC based on selection criteria that will be provided to interested parties. The IPCC Bureau will then select these positions.

What chance this side of Armageddon that Kevin Rudd or Climate Change Minister Penny Wong will nominate a sceptical scientist to the IPCC? Ditto for Britain and other nations where alarmist governments rule.

SOURCE

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GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE FORCING

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

The GCM Climate Models provide a marvellous tool for studying climate, but they have no application in predicting global temperature changes. This is because climate models balance off complex "forcing" expressed in watts/m2 (Watts per square metre); but temperature needs a 'time value' for this forcing to express energy changes in kWh (kilowatt hours). This is the product of watts/m2 times the number of square metres, times the number of hours that this forcing is operating.

The climate models do not incorporate terms for either the number of square metres or the number of hours for the given energy flux, so there is no direct temperature result possible. The only way that temperature is related to forcing is through a contrived empirical relationship derived to give the predetermined result.

This relationship ranges between 0.5°C and 0.75°C of warming for each watt/m2 of additional forcing. There is no possible physical basis for this relationship because neither 'time' nor 'area' are included in the determination, so it is just one more manipulation designed to give the predetermined catastrophic global warming result.

When put to a simple "reality check" this relationship fails miserably. Global temperature is a hypothetical average air temperature 1.5m above the surface of the Earth. At a density of 0.0125kg/l the mass of the air from the surface to 1.5m for the entire Earth is 6,371,0002 x 1.5 x 4p x 0.0125 x 1000 = 9.56 x 1015kg. The area of forcing is 6,371,0002 x 4p = 5.59 x 1014 m2. The specific heat of air is 1kcal/kg. The conversion is 1 kWh = 860kcal. The forcing parameter for a doubling of CO2 is 5.35ln(2) = 3.71watts/m2

Since the Earth is radiating 24 hours per day this is an energy transfer of 0.089kWh per m2 each day. This is total energy transfer of 0.50 x 1014watts which is equal to 0.43 x 1014kcal. With a specific heat of 1kcal/kg this is enough heat energy to warm the bottom 1.5m of the atmosphere by 0.50 x 1014/95.6 x 1014 = 0.0052°C each day.

Since there is no time value given for forcing, this energy transfer will continue to occur day after day year after year as long as the CO2 remains at the doubled level. In one year this will equate to 1.90°C of temperature increase. In 100 years this will equate to 190°C increase which would fry everything on the Earth.

Since the geological record shows that in the 79million years of the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs flourished, this did not happen even though CO2 was at levels between two and five times our current level throughout the entire Cretaceous.

This is not "rocket science" just simple high school physics and math, and it is curious how NASA with its actual 'Rocket Scientists" allowed one of its own members to publish such a ridiculous concept as a "peer reviewed" paper and start the whole fraudulent climate change issue.





China has 'open mind' about the cause of climate change

China's most senior climate change official surprised a summit in India when he questioned whether global warming is caused by carbon gas emissions and said Beijing is keeping an "open mind". Xie Zhenhua was speaking at a summit between the developing world's most powerful countries, India, Brazil, South Africa and China, which is now the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the gas believed to be responsible for climate change.

The four countries have joined forces to intensify pressure on the United States and Europe to fulfil promises to cut their emissions and give more than $10 billion (£6.2 billion) to those countries worst affected by climate change by the end of this year.

Environment ministers from the four countries voiced their frustration at the US for failing to lead the way with carbon emission reductions despite being responsible for much of the emissions most scientists believe to be the cause of global warming.

But Mr Xie, China's vice-chairman of national development and reforms commission, later said although mainstream scientific opinion blames emissions from industrial development for climate change, China is not convinced. "There are disputes in the scientific community. We have to have an open attitude to the scientific research. There's an alternative view that climate change is caused by cyclical trends in nature itself. We have to keep an open attitude," he said. "It is already a solid fact that climate is warming. The major reasons for this climate change is the unconstrained emissions produced by the developed countries in the process of industrialisation. That's the mainstream view [but] there are other views. Our attitude is an open attitude".

India and South Africa's environment ministers appeared to be baffled by his comments.The Indian delegrate, Jairam Ramesh, said he did not believe his Chinese counterpart had meant what he said, while South Africa's minister Buyelwa Sonjica said she could not "second guess" what Mr Xie had meant by his comments. They appeared to undermine the new group's main argument, that Western developed countries should pay for poor countries to switch to low carbon models because its emissions had caused climate change.

Earlier, the ministers had pledged to give Western countries a "slap in the face" by announcing their plans to cut emissions by the end of this month and by offering their own aid to the poorer countries suffering most from climate change.

SOURCE





Stern review also undermined by the flawed IPCC version of science

More proof that Stern is just a political hack who does what he thinks his government will reward

There is another important story in involving the Muir-Wood et al. 2006 paper that was misrepresented by the IPCC (See here) as showing a linkage between increasing temperatures and rising damages from extreme weather events. The Stern Review Report of the UK government also relied on that paper as the sole basis for its projections of increasing damage from extreme events. In fact as much as 40% of the Stern Review projections for the global costs of unmitigated climate change derive from its misuse of the Muir-Wood et al. paper.

I documented this in a peer reviewed paper published in 2007, which you can see here in PDF. In that paper I wrote:

Furthermore, the Stern Review uses the Muir-Wood et al. (2006) as the sole basis for projecting future global losses from extreme events (see Table 5.2, p. 138). This means that the Stern Review's conclusions on the costs of future extreme events under conditions of climate change are based almost entirely on projections of future hurricane losses, which Stern projects somewhat mysteriously will increase to 1.3% of global GDP or higher. Its reliance on estimate of tropical cyclones losses is both direct and indirect. Its summary Table 5.2 on p. 138 indicates that increasing losses from hurricanes are one or two orders of magnitude larger than other losses that it has examined. . . inexplicably, the Stern Review concludes that US tropical cyclone losses will increase from 0.6% of GDP today to 1.3% of GDP under 2[degrees] of warming (Table 5.2). Yet, on page 130 the Stern Review cites Nordhaus (2007) to suggest that 2-3[degrees] of warming could double tropical cyclone losses from 0.06% of GDP (2005 losses) to 0.13% (future losses). There is no justification provided for increasing the Nordhaus (2007) values by a factor of 10. This apparent error (simply a typo?) is consistent with the Stern Review's overstatement of future economic losses from extreme weather events more generally.

As I was preparing this post, I accessed the Stern Review Report on the archive site of the UK government to capture an image of Table 5.2. Much to my surprise I learned that since the publication of my paper, Table 5.2 has mysteriously changed!

[...]

There is no note, no acknowledgment, nothing indicating that the estimated damage for hurricanes was modified after publication by an order of magnitude. The report was quietly changed to make the error go away. Of course, even with the Table corrected, now the Stern Review math does not add up, as the total GDP impact from USA, UK and Europe does not come anywhere close to the 1% global total for developed country impacts (based on Muir-Wood), much less the higher values suggested as possible in the report's text, underscoring a key point of my 2007 paper.

Consequently, anyone wanting to understand or replicate my analysis from the original source would no doubt be confused because evidence of the error in Table 5.2 was quietly changed after the publication of my paper. Had they noted the error it would have obviously led to questions about the implications, and ultimately the bottom line estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change. Rather than rewrite the report, apparently, it was decided instead to rewrite history. Fixing facts to fit a policy conclusion is not a good idea for any government, but to do so with the quiet participation of leading academic advisors is doubly bad.

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





What the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should Do in the Wake of Unfolding Scandals

Statement of National Center for Public Policy Research president Amy Ridenour

In the wake of admissions the IPCC knew all along it was putting bogus science in its 2007 Assessment Report, that the false prediction was included specifically for its "impact on policymakers and politicians," and that this allegedly was covered up as long as it was because the IPCC chairman was raising money for his personal pursuits based on the prediction, the IPCC must immediately take three steps to restore its credibility. If it does not, the Obama Administration should use its influence to have it shut down.

To restore its credibility, the IPCC should:

1) Return its half of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and replace its current leadership;

2) Adopt and enforce a strict conflict-of-interest policy;

3) Adopt an uncompromising transparency policy, which includes the release of all data, all emails, all meeting minutes, all drafts and all other documentation related to the development of assessment reports and all other policy pronouncements, in the past and from this date forward.

Step one would signal to the world that the IPCC is serious about reform.

Step two would reduce, though not eliminate, the temptation faced by IPCC personnel to tailor conclusions to moneymaking, career or fundraising opportunities for themselves or affiliated businesses or institutions.

Step three would be a constant reminder to IPCC personnel that their work genuinely will be peer-reviewed, in a universal sense, which is as it should be given the gravity of the IPCC's work.

Politicians relying upon IPCC recommendations are considering policies that would limit the access of billions of people to low-cost energy in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This is a grave step that should be undertaken only if the alternative is worse. As many have considered the IPCC to be the institution that can answer that question, given the gravity of these circumstances, no level of transparency and ethics can be too high.

Global warming believers and "skeptics" do not often agree, but this is a subject upon which we should be able to reach a true consensus. No one benefits when the IPCC knowingly publishes bogus science.

SOURCE






Last on Americans’ Priority List: Global Warming

As President Barack Obama begins his second year in office, the public’s priorities for the president and Congress remain much as they were one year ago, according to the folks at the Pew Research Center. Global warming, however, rates at the bottom of 21 items receiving votes.

In Public’s Priorities for 2010: Economy, Jobs, Terrorism, new poll results released today show strengthening the nation’s economy and improving the job situation top the list. In the wake of the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound airliner, defending the country from future terrorist attacks also remains a top priority.

Interestingly, President Obama’s top issue, health care, barely cracked the Top 10, coming in 8th place.

SOURCE





Official Greenie vandalism coming to Britain

Huge expanses of British town and city centres built in the Sixties and Seventies may have to be torn down to meet carbon emission standards for buildings.

In an interview with The Times, the Government’s new chief construction adviser said that there may be no choice but to demolish buildings put up in those decades because it is impossible to refurbish them to a sufficiently high standard.

Paul Morrell, who took up his new post at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills at the end of November last year, said: “In the Sixties, everything was built cheaper, faster and nastier. If you are going to try to fix buildings, then really you won’t have too many problems with anything built earlier than the Fifties or after the Eighties. Although you can do some things to buildings from the Sixties and Seventies, like replacing the roofs, there are probably some places that need to come down entirely.”

Mr Morrell has been charged with ridding the construction industry of carbon to meet a government target to cut UK carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, compared with levels in the Nineties. He said that problem areas were likely to be places such as Newcastle city centre, where a lot of buildings went up in the Sixties and Seventies. Other towns that could undergo an eco-makeover could include Slough and Aylesbury, visited by Janet Street-Porter for Channel 4’s Demolition programme, broadcast in 2005.

Mr Morrell said: “The buildings that pose the most difficulties are semi-industrialised, highly inefficient, badly insulated and so ugly that they are not worth refurbishing.”

Property is responsible for 50 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions, according to the British Property Federation. The Government has a target for all new commercial buildings built from 2018 to be zero-carbon, but a strategy for how to deal with existing stock has yet to be established.

The Policy Exchange, the public policy think-tank, has estimated that Britain would need to spend about £400 billion on new and refurbished infrastructure by 2020 to address historic underinvestment and to kick-start transition to a low-carbon economy.

Mr Morrell’s comments will be a blow to fans of retro architecture. The brutalist style that characterised the Sixties and Seventies has gained a following in recent years, as more such buildings have been torn down.

Its devotees may be reassured to learn that listed buildings from any era are likely to remain exempt from carbon targets, according to English Heritage. The listing authority said that many modern refurbishment measures, such as plastic windows and wall insulation, were not suitable for historic buildings because the measures do not allow the buildings to breathe, increasing the risk of mould and rot. However, many adaptations — such as better boilers and loft insulation — are equally applicable to new and most historic houses.

Property landlords are starting to deal with incoming requirements that will force them to spend millions of pounds to improve energy efficiency in their buildings, or to redevelop them. Increasingly owners favour refurbishing stock rather than starting from scratch, according to GVA Grimley, the property consultancy, partly because it is usually cheaper. Mr Morrell, who cited the refurbishment of Hampshire County Council’s Elizabeth II Court building in Winchester as a successful example of how a property can be improved, said: “The problem is weighing up whether it is more energy-efficient to knock something down and start from scratch, or refurbish it. We don’t have the methodologies for weighing that up in all cases.”

Francis Salway, the chief executive of Land Securities, Britain’s biggest commercial landlord, said that the company was using a combination of both approaches. He said: “We have refurbished some smaller buildings, but it is quite high-risk to refurbish larger stock. It is generally cheaper to refurbish, rather than redevelop, but sometimes the numbers come out surprisingly close. Refurbishing is sometimes more complex and less effective than starting from scratch.”

The Government committed itself last week to a consultation on the introduction of display energy certificates (DECs), which show offices’ and shops’ energy use. Responding to the Committee on Climate Change’s first progress report, ministers said that DECs should be rolled out to give everybody a better understanding of carbon emissions. The British Property Federation said that DECs were necessary because they were based on actual energy use.

SOURCE

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

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Is the IPCC con falling apart at last?

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. ‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation. According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF. It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121. Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air. Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25. ‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said. ‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’

One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’

When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’. Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures. It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them. For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.

In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked. The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.

Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue. Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.

The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal, is likely to be considerable. Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.

Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’

Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.

SOURCE






Bogus glacier claims were very profitable for U.N. climate boss

THE chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to $US500,000 ($555,000) by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a $US4 million EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

The revelation comes just a week after London newspaper The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC's 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 -- an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week, a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

However, the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI. One of them, announced earlier this month, resulted in the $US500,000 grant from Carnegie. An extract from the grant application published on Carnegie's website said: "The Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate.

"One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region `will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming, resulting in widespread water shortages'."

The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Dr Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

The money was initially given to the Global Centre, an Icelandic foundation that then channelled it to TERI.

The cash was acknowledged by TERI in a news release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Dr Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt. It said: "According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades."

The same release also quoted Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

Professor Hasnain now heads Dr Pachauri's glaciology unit at TERI, which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacial research.

Critics point out that Professor Hasnain, of all people, should have known the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was bogus because he was meant to be a leading glaciologist specialising in the Himalayas. Any suggestion that TERI has repeated an unchecked scientific claim without checking it, to win grants, could prove hugely embarrassing for Dr Pachauri and the IPCC.

The $US4m grant, from the EU, was designed to "to assess the impact of Himalayan glaciers' retreat". It was part of the EU's HighNoon project, launched last May, to fund research into how India might adapt to loss of glaciers.

In one presentation at last May's launch, Anastasios Kentarchos, of the European Commission's Climate Change and Environmental Risks Unit, specifically cited the bogus IPCC claims about glacier melt as a reason for pouring taxpayers' money into the project.

Dr Pachauri spoke at the same presentation and Professor Hasnain is understood to have been present.

The EU grant was split between leading European research institutions, including Britain's Met Office, with TERI getting a major but unspecified share because it represented the host country.

The glacier affair has seen Dr Pachauri come under increasing pressure in India, prompting him to call a news conference on Saturday, at which he dismissed calls for his resignation and said no action would be taken against the authors of the erroneous section of the IPCC report.

SOURCE






Wobbly prophecies about the impact of global warming

The excerpt below is from Revkin of the NYT, a Warmist. But even he can see some very poor "science" in the most recent IPCC report:

The report on impacts of climate change – one of three main sections of each of the panel’s periodic assessments — has long been seen by some climate scientists, including some participants in the I.P.C.C. process, as a relatively weak element in the overall effort, in part because it has less scientific literature to draw on.

The passage on the Asian glaciers is not alone in including internal inconsistencies or imprecision. The sections on the risks of extinction from warming in the report and the panel’s summaries are, at the very least, confusing.

In the Summary for Policy Makers of the report on climate impacts, there are different summations of extinction risk within a few pages. On page 6, the summary states:

Approximately 20 to 30 percent of plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5 to 2.5°C. * N [4.4, T4.1]

In a chart on page 16, at a point marking a 2°C warming from the global average temperature through the 1980s and 1990s, a label reads:

Up to 30 percent of species at increasing risk of extinction.

In the Summary for Policy Makers of the final Synthesis Report drawing on the entire 2007 assessment, the extinction risk is summarized in yet another way (the italics are from the report):

There is medium confidence that approximately 20 to 30 percent of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5 to 2.5°C (relative to 1980 to 1999).

I asked a half dozen I.P.C.C. scientists about this during a side session at the Copenhagen climate talks and, in particular, asked them to decipher for me the meaning of the nested qualifiers in that final statement. Among other things, how much would extinction risk rise? Basically, they acknowledged there was inconsistency and flawed writing.

How would you translate that last passage into a clear statement on global biological unraveling from that amount of warming?

While it’s clear, from the Arctic to the tropics, that human-driven warming and other human activities can, and will, have substantial ecological impacts, projecting outright extinction remains one of the trickier enterprises in biology.

SOURCE







The mystery of the missing thermometers

Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics say

Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers. Two months after "climategate" cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming. Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada. Worse, only one station -- at Eureka on Ellesmere Island -- is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada. Yet as American researchers Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses "just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees." Both the authors, and the institute, are well-known in climate-change circles for their skepticism about the threat of global warming.

Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have "cherry picked" the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea -- which has a warming effect on winter weather.

Over the past two decades, they say, "the percentage of [Canadian] stations in the lower elevations tripled and those at higher elevations, above 300 feet, were reduced in half." Using the agency's own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA's Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.

Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S. and China. They say NOAA collects no temperature data at all from Bolivia -- a high-altitude, landlocked country -- but instead "interpolates" or assigns temperature values for that country based on data from "nearby" temperature stations located at lower elevations in Peru, or in the Amazon basin.

The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record. "NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler," the authors say. "The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs."

The NOAA database forms the basis of the influential climate modelling work, and the dire, periodic warnings on climate change, issued by James Hanson, the director of the GISS in New York. Neither agency responded to a request for comment Wednesday from Canwest News Service. However Hanson did issue a public statement on the matter earlier this week: "NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis," he said. "The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures."

In addition to the allegations against NOAA and GISS, climate scientists are also dealing with the embarrassment this week of the false glacier-melt warning contained in the 2007 report of the UN Panel on Climate Change. That report said Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear within three decades if current rates of melting continue. This week, however, the panel admitted there is no scientific evidence to support such a claim.

The revelations come only two months after the "climategate" scandal, in which the leak or theft of thousands of e-mails -- private discussions between scientists in the U.S. and Britain -- showed that a group of influential climatologists tried for years to manipulate global warming data, rig the scientific peer-review process and keep their methods secret from other, contrary-minded researchers.

SOURCE







Junkscience: Climategate Distortion of Temperature Data

By S. Fred Singer

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

(1) Bottoms-Up Distortion of Temperature Data

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

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

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

The problem was greatly exacerbated by the closing of over half the world’s weather stations between 1970 and 2000 (see NIPCC Summary, Fig 12 – which in most cases removed rural stations but also stations from higher latitudes and altitudes that tended to show a lower warming trend or no warming trend at all. It should be obvious therefore that this drastic change in the sampling population would introduce a fictitious warming trend which is an artifact of the change. E. Michael Smith and Joseph D’Aleo have documented in some detail how such artificial temperature trends could be produced even when there was no global trend. [See http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/climategate_cru_was_but_the_ti.html ]

(2) The Top-Down (TD) Approach

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

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

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

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

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

SEPP SCIENCE EDITORIAL #4-2010( Jan 23, 2010)




The New York Times: Desperate, Blatant Lies

By Alan Caruba



Once, very long ago, I used to be “a stringer” for The New York Times. My articles would appear in the New Jersey section and an occasional short book review would make it into the legendary newspaper.

My Father read the The Times more faithfully than an ayatollah reads the Koran or a Hasidim reads the Torah. Little did he know that, during the early years of Stalin’s regime, a Times reporter named Walter Duranty deliberately failed to report the deaths of millions of people in the Ukraine because Soviet communism demanded they obey or die.

Starting in the 1980s, The Times has led the greatest fraud of the modern era, the global warming hoax. It went through a succession of reporters who turned out articles that all asserted various claims attributed to a dramatic increase in the Earth’s temperature that was not happening. At one point, it published a story that the North Pole was melting.

The leading advocate of the global warming fraud has been Al Gore, a former Vice President who has enriched himself selling bogus “carbon credits” and investing in “renewable energy” businesses. His so-called documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”, was filled with so many inaccuracies that a British court ruled it could not be shown in its schools without informing students of them in advance.

We know now, thanks to the “Climategate” revelations, that a handful of scientists, working at the behest of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deliberately distorted or invented climate data to further the fraudulent claims.

They were associated with the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, the Pennsylvania State Earth System Science Center, as well as U.S. government agencies such as NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Most are currently being investigated for alleged abuses of the positions they held and questionable actions in which they engaged.

The release of emails detailing their conspiratorial efforts to advance their false data and suppress any that represented a contrary point of view destroyed what little credibility there was for the recent UN Conference on Climate Change held in Copenhagen. It collapsed like a circus tent.

So why, on Sunday, January 24, did The New York Times publish an editorial titled “The Case for a Climate Bill” in an effort to support the insupportable, the Senate’s Cap-and-Trade legislation?

The bill is superficially intended to put limits on greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide, that are alleged to be “causing” global warming. It is, in reality, a massive tax on the use of energy, harmful in countless ways to the nation’s economy and a burden on all producers and consumers.

Cap-and-Trade has no basis in science because carbon dioxide plays no role whatever in climate change and because the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998; a cycle that legitimate climate scientists predict will last another decade or two.

It takes an enormous amount of gall to support this legislation claiming “The long-term trend in greenhouse gas emissions is up (the decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record.)” No, a decade in the 1930s was the warmest. The last decade saw a constant decrease in temperature, leading to the record-breaking blizzards, expanding glaciers, and other indications that the Earth is cooling.

“Finally there’s the question of credibility: Mr. Obama said in Copenhagen that the United States would meet at least the House’s 17 percent target” of reduced CO2 emissions said The Times.

President Obama has virtually no credibility left and had to flee the Copenhagen conference in order to avoid being snowed in there and unable to land in Washington, D.C. which was also expecting a snowstorm!

This blind and desperate refusal to face the facts, let alone to report them, will ultimately destroy the famed “newspaper of record” and, if that happens, I will not mourn its passing.

SOURCE

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

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The usual Warmist love of partial data

A recent Warmist paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research purports to disprove claims that U.S. temperature-measuring sites are poorly located and thus lead to a "warm bias" in their measurements:

On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record

By Matthew J. Menne, Claude N. Williams, Jr., and Michael A. Palecki

Abstract

Recent photographic documentation of poor siting conditions at stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has led to questions regarding the reliability of surface temperature trends over the conterminous U.S. (CONUS). To evaluate the potential impact of poor siting/instrument exposure on CONUS temperatures, trends derived from poor and well-sited USHCN stations were compared.

Results indicate that there is a mean bias associated with poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites; however, this bias is consistent with previously documented changes associated with the widespread conversion to electronic sensors in the USHCN during the last 25 years. Moreover, the sign of the bias is counterintuitive to photographic documentation of poor exposure because associated instrument changes have led to an artificial negative ("cool") bias in maximum temperatures and only a slight positive ("warm") bias in minimum temperatures.

These results underscore the need to consider all changes in observation practice when determining the impacts of siting irregularities. Further, the influence of non-standard siting on temperature trends can only be quantified through an analysis of the data. Adjustments applied to USHCN Version 2 data largely account for the impact of instrument and siting changes, although a small overall residual negative ("cool") bias appears to remain in the adjusted maximum temperature series.

Nevertheless, the adjusted USHCN temperatures are extremely well aligned with recent measurements from instruments whose exposure characteristics meet the highest standards for climate monitoring. In summary, we find no evidence that the CONUS temperature trends are inflated due to poor station siting.

So how do they arrive at that conclusion? Anybody who has seen pictures of the temperature-measuring sites located right beside artificial heat sources would have to be amazed.

Easy, Peasy! The old warmist trick of using only part of the data. They took their data from a preliminary list of sites published by the skeptical blog SurfaceStations.org. But that list included less than 50% of the actual temperature-measuring sites. The list is presently up to 82% but the authors of the blog are waiting for it to reach 100% so that they can publish a full analysis. Some temperature stations are easier to get at than others so there is no reason to believe that the preliminary list is representative of the whole. Another problem with the preliminary list is that the categorization of stations as "good" or "bad" was also preliminary and hence wrong in some instances. The number of temperature-measuring sites that conform to official guidelines about where they should be located is actually quite small so the preliminary list was too optimistic about that. I hear informally that the nearly-complete data is showing a very different picture from that described above.

Amusing, though, that scientific journals are now accepting skeptical blogs as a source of data. The worm certainly is turning. I might also mention something that only academics would know: The publication of the above paper gives the skeptical scientists an excellent "hook" to hang their own paper on and more or less ensures that their paper will be accepted for publication in the same journal. Given the general resistance to publishing skeptical papers, that is very handy. It is a rare case of the crooks making it easier for honest men.

And when I say "crooks" I mean it quite literally. It is generally regarded in scientific circles as highly unethical to "jump the gun" -- i.e. to publish analyses of someone else's data before they have had a chance to publish it themselves. But who expects ethics of Warmists?






UN climate change "expert": there could be more errors in report

The Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel's assessment of Himalayan glaciers. Dr Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for him to resign over the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s retraction of a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

But he admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible. “I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them,” he told The Times in an interview. “It was a collective failure by a number of people,” he said. “I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It’s best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip.”

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999. The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

Dr Pachauri said that the IPCC’s report was the responsibility of the panel’s Co-Chairs at the time, both of whom have since moved on.

They were Dr Martin Parry, a British scientist now at Imperial College London, and Dr Osvaldo Canziani , an Argentine meteorologist. Neither was immediately available for comment.

“I don’t want to blame them, but typically the working group reports are managed by the Co-Chairs,” Dr Pachauri said. “Of course the Chair is there to facilitate things, but we have substantial amounts of delegation.”

He declined to blame the 25 authors and editors of the erroneous part of the report , who included a Filipino, a Mongolian, a Malaysian, an Indonesian, an Iranian, an Australian and two Vietnamese.

More HERE





UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

An article from Leaky Jonathan below. Another worm that is slowly turning?

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods. It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny - and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions. Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods - such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 - could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent." Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen "must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm".

The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC's 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s". It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: "One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend." The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses." [i.e. it reversed its conclusions]

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts - but were ignored.

The claim will now be re-examined and could be withdrawn. Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, who is vice-chair of the IPCC, said: "We are reassessing the evidence and will publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings. Despite recent events the IPCC process is still very rigorous and scientific."

The academic paper at the centre of the latest questions was written in 2006 by Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, a London consultancy, who later became a contributing author to the section of the IPCC's 2007 report dealing with climate change impacts. He is widely respected as an expert on disaster impacts. Muir-Wood wanted to find out if the 8% year-on-year increase in global losses caused by weather-related disasters since the 1960s was larger than could be explained by the impact of social changes like growth in population and infrastructure. Such an increase, coinciding with rising temperatures, might suggest that global warming was to blame. If proven this would be highly significant, both politically and scientifically, because it would confirm the many predictions that global warming will increase the frequency and severity of natural hazards.

In the research Muir-Wood looked at a wide range of hazards, including tropical cyclones, thunder and hail storms, and wildfires as well as floods and hurricanes. He found from 1950 to 2005 there was no increase in the impact of disasters once growth was accounted for. For 1970-2005, however, he found a 2% annual increase which "corresponded with a period of rising global temperatures,"

Muir-Wood was, however, careful to point out that almost all this increase could be accounted for by the exceptionally strong hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005. There were also other more technical factors that could cause bias, such as exchange rates which meant that disasters hitting the US would appear to cost proportionately more in insurance payouts. Despite such caveats, the IPCC report used the study in its section on disasters and hazards, but cited only the 1970-2005 results. The IPCC report said: "Once the data were normalised, a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% a year." It added: "Once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."

Muir-Wood's paper was originally commissioned by Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, also an expert on disaster impacts, for a workshop on disaster losses in 2006. The researchers who attended that workshop published a statement agreeing that so far there was no evidence to link global warming with any increase in the severity or frequency of disasters. Pielke has also told the IPCC that citing one section of Muir-Wood's paper in preference to the rest of his work, and all the other peer-reviewed literature, was wrong.

He said: "All the literature published before and since the IPCC report shows that rising disaster losses can be explained entirely by social change. People have looked hard for evidence that global warming plays a part but can't find it. Muir-Wood's study actually confirmed that."

Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the Tyndall Centre, which advises the UK government on global warming, said there was no real evidence that natural disasters were already being made worse by climate change. He said: "A proper analysis shows that these claims are usually superficial"

Such warnings may prove uncomfortable for Miliband whose recent speeches have often linked climate change with disasters such as the floods that recently hit Bangladesh and Cumbria. Last month he said: "We must not let the sceptics pass off political opinion as scientific fact. Events in Cumbria give a foretaste of the kind of weather runaway climate change could bring. Abroad, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of South Asia could put hundreds of millions of people at risk of drought. Our security is at stake."

Muir-Wood himself is more cautious. He said: "The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is completely misleading. "We could not tell if it was just an association or cause and effect. Also, our study included 2004 and 2005 which was when there were some major hurricanes. If you took those years away then the significance of climate change vanished."

Some researchers have argued that it is unfair to attack the IPCC too strongly, pointing out that some errors are inevitable in a report as long and technical as the IPCC's round-up of climate science. "Part of the problem could simply be that expectations are too high," said one researcher. "We have been seen as a scientific gold standard and that's hard to live up to."

Professor Christopher Field,director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution in California, who is the new co-chairman of the IPCC working group overseeing the climate impacts report, said the 2007 report had been broadly accurate at the time it was written. He said: "The 2007 study should be seen as "a snapshot of what was known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around." However he confirmed he would be introducing rigorous new review procedures for future reports to ensure errors were kept to a minimum.

SOURCE






Glaciergate threatens confidence in climate change

GRAHAM Cogley, the Canadian scientist who trekked a decade-old paper trail to expose the Glaciergate error in a crucial UN-backed document on climate change, says there is one certainty about what will happen next. An expert on glaciers at Trent University in Ontario, Cogley is an instinctively cautious scientist who opposes any leaps to unproven conclusions but he is prepared to bet that climate change sceptics and deniers will pore over the report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change more closely than ever to try to find more errors. "Sceptics have already started using this incident for their own purposes by saying that somehow the whole IPCC document is now in doubt," he tells Focus in a telephone interview from Canada.

It was Cogley's meticulous attention to detail and his resistance to "sexing up" research that exposed the wildly exaggerated claim in the IPCC's most recent assessment of climate change that Himalayan glaciers were likely to melt away as soon as 2035. "I'm confident that the document as a whole is authoritative and the reliance placed on it by policy makers is not misplaced but I suppose you always had to expect that people would try to use this to shoot down the overall evidence on climate change."

Fred Pearce, a British environmental journalist who has found himself at the centre of the Glaciergate row, agrees with Cogley's prediction and says the stakes are now dangerously high for Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC. "People who want to undermine the science on climate change will be crawling over the report looking for another mistake like this and if they do find another one it will be curtains for Pachauri," Pearce says. "The way he has handled this glacier issue means he's now a sitting duck if anything else turns up."

Having accused the Indian government of peddling "voodoo science" when it criticised the IPCCs glacier claims, Pachauri this week was forced into a humiliating apology and admission that instead of being solid, peer-reviewed science the 2035 claim had actually been "cut and pasted" from a WWF (formerly world wildlife fund) campaign document that, in turn, was based on a single-source news article written by Pearce in 1999. The offending paragraph in the IPCCs 2007 assessment declared that "glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate".

Experts say the paragraph is unproven and it could take 300 years for those glaciers to melt.

An IPCC statement conceded this week the paragraph "refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly. "The IPCC regrets the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance."

The IPCC, which is charged with bringing together thousands of scientific viewpoints into one credible, shared assessment of climate science, stressed the error did not change its general understanding that the world's glaciers are rapidly melting. It was just one paragraph in a 3000-page report, they argue, and it was not even reproduced in the more widely read summary for policy makers given to governments before Copenhagen.

In that way the Glaciergate affair resembled the leaking of emails from the University of East Anglia's climate-change unit last year, as the leaked emails contained no evidence that climate-change data had been falsified but they did raise questions about the professional conduct and impartiality of the scientists involved. Yvo de Boer, the head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, conceded the glacier affair was especially damaging because it raised questions about how the voluminous IPCC assessments were put together. "The credibility of the IPCC depends on the thoroughness with which its procedures are adhered to," he said. "The procedures have been violated in this case. That must not be allowed to happen again because the credibility of climate-change policy can only be based on credible science."

Despite their promises of transparency and stricter standards, IPCC officials have refused to name the author of the flawed paragraph and the lead author of the relevant section, Murari Lal, has not accepted any responsibility for the bungle.

Pearce, a freelance reporter for New Scientist and The Guardian, says the incident began in April 1999 when he noticed a report in the Indian magazine Down to Earth quoting an Indian glaciologist, Syed Hasnain, saying the Himalayan glaciers, which help to provide water to two billion people, could be gone by 2035. The Indian magazine quoted Hasnain, who was then vice-chancellor of New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, as saying the grim prediction came from an academic paper he was about to present to a July 1999 academic conference in Birmingham. "I decided to follow it up so I contacted Hasnain and he told me the same thing, which I reported a couple of months later in the New Scientist," Pearce says.

In 2005 the environmental group WWF used the 2035 warning from the New Scientist article in one of its campaign documents, which somehow became the source of the IPCC paragraph.

Last November, the Indian government released a discussion paper written by retired geologist Vijay Kumar Raina, which said while some Himalayan glaciers were retreating, there was "nothing to suggest as some have said that they will disappear". Instead of re-examining the IPCC's position on the glaciers, Pachauri brushed off the Indian report as "voodoo science", saying that "this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago".

The journal Science published a news report on Raina's paper in November and academic Jeffrey S. Kargel of the University of Arizona brought it to the attention of Cogley and some other glacier experts. "That's when I started trying to work out the paper trail to find out where this 2035 date had come from," Cogley tells Focus. "Those glaciers are quite likely losing mass faster now than they were a few decades ago and that is consistent with the acceleration of global warming, but a date as early as 2035 was . . . unsustainable. "There seemed to be some internal political dispute going on among Indian scientists so I wanted to see exactly what it was that Hasnain had said in his original paper back in 1999."

The sponsors of the Birmingham conference, the International Commission on Snow and Ice, had never published Hasnain's paper but Cogley knew Georg Kaser, an Austrian glaciologist who had chaired the conference. "Georg had kept a copy of the paper so I started bugging him to dig it out . . . It turned out that Hasnain had not included any dates at all about the glaciers disappearing, it was all a red herring."

Hasnain told reporters this week that he never put any dates on the melting, claiming he was misquoted by Pearce. Pearce is adamant he reported the scientist's comments accurately, noting the Indian magazine had carried similar quotes. "But the issue is not what Hasnain said and did," Pearce says. "It is about the IPCC screwing up its report. It is scandalous for them to be just cutting and pasting stuff into their reports. "I always thought the 2035 date was dodgy but I even used it again in another story last year because it had been in the IPCC report so I assumed they had verified it. I couldn't believe it when Cogley found I was the original source."

Pearce reported on the tale of the 2035 prediction in New Scientist last week and it was picked up by British newspaper the The Sunday Times and The Australian.

Patrick Michaels, a global warming sceptic from US libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, is now calling for Pachauri to resign as IPCC chief. "I'd like to know how such an absurd statement made it through the review process," Michaels says.

Bob Ward, a geologist and former journalist who has published academic papers on the misrepresentation of climate-change evidence by environmentalists and climate-change sceptics, says the Cato Institute's response is predictable. "People who have an axe to grind are trying to use this incident to undermine the credibility of the whole IPCC," he says. "But in order to do that you have to enormously exaggerate the significance of the paragraph about the Himalayas," says Ward, who is now policy director at the London School of Economics' Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change. "We are talking about one error in a three-year-old 3000-page report that was clearly a rather glaring mistake. Groups who don't want to see any action on climate change are using anything like this they can get their hands on to try to undermine the science. It is happening particularly in Australia and the US where there are political debates going on about domestic legislation related to climate change.

"Cogley exposed this 2035 date as inaccurate not because he disputes the fact that glaciers are receding -- he doesn't -- but because he genuinely wants all the science to be as accurate as possible. But a lot of the people who are leaping on to it just want to raise as many doubts as possible to try to slow the whole process down."

According to Ward, the most concerted opposition to climate-change action "is coming from ideologically driven right-wing groups like the American think tanks that oppose any sort of restrictions on the market" and fossil fuel companies "that are trying to delay any new restrictions on their business for as long as possible". "It is very similar to the way the tobacco industry managed to delay health regulations for years by playing up any element of doubt at all about the medical research on smoking. That is why it's so dangerous and so stupid for the IPCC to let mistakes like this happen."

SOURCE







Congressional Black Caucus, EPA Start "Race Card Tour" to Promote Climate Regulation

An "environmental justice" public relations tour of economically-disadvantaged communities being led by EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson and members of the Congressional Black Caucus is being criticized by Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli as a desperate attempt to play the "race card" to bolster the Obama Administration's "cap-and-trade" emissions proposal.

Borelli contends energy limits, such as those in the Waxman/Markey bill approved by the U.S. House last year, would devastate the communities the EPA-CBC tour is highlighting as in need of help.

The tour begins today in Greenville, Mississippi and will stop in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia.

CBC Chairwoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) played the race card in an EPA press release, saying: "The consequences of global climate change, disastrous trends of environmental degradation, and our nation's perilous dependence on fossil fuels are being felt in communities here in the United States and around the world, especially in communities of color."

Project 21's Borelli counters that there is little to back up Lee's claims, and that more regulation would actually exacerbate problems in communities said to need environmental justice.

"Having lost the climate change argument on popular, economic and scientific grounds, those who want to regulate fossil fuels have stooped to playing the race card," noted Borelli.

Borelli continued: "Environmental justice is supposed to be about jobs and a better quality of life for disadvantaged minority communities. If the Obama EPA had its way, 'cap-and-trade' policy related to energy and emissions would instead likely destroy jobs and lower the quality of life in the very communities they allegedly want to help. It is shocking that the Congressional Black Caucus would willingly promote something that would likely do more harm than good among their constituents."

Borelli continued, "A study of cap-and-trade for the National Black Chamber of Commerce suggests new emissions regulations would destroy 2.5 million American jobs a year and lower the wages of those still working by almost $400 annually. The Congressional Budget Office separately concluded 'most of the cost of meeting a cap on [carbon dioxide] emissions would be borne by consumers,... [and] poorer households would bear a larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households would.'"

Borelli added, "A recent survey of black Americans commissioned by the National Center for Public Policy Research found that 76 percent of blacks surveyed preferred Congress concentrate on economic recovery rather than climate regulation and that 38 percent thought such regulation would hurt black communities most. And 52 percent of those surveyed also did not want to have to pay anything more for electricity or gasoline in order to reduce alleged man-made greenhouse emissions.

"Finally, all of this man-made climate change speculation could be based on irresponsible science. Recently revealed e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit showed prominent climate scientists expressing uncertainty about their claims, questionable research practices and an unwillingness to consider alternative theories."

Borelli concluded, "For the Congressional Black Caucus to inject race as a means of promoting new emissions regulation is simply wrong. Environmental justice can best be served by looking into reforming regulations that hold communities back and kill jobs."

SOURCE






Britain's windfarm subsidies top £1 billion a year

Britain's energy policy faces new controversy as it can be revealed that electricity customers are paying more than £1 billion a year to subsidise windfarms and other forms of renewable energy. The hidden levy is part of a Government scheme to force energy companies to fund green energy. The companies bear the cost but pass it on to consumers in the form of higher bills. The amount raised has climbed steeply since the introduction of the levy in 2002.

Next month's annual report from Ofgem, the energy regulator, will show that it has risen above £1 billion for the first time, according to analysts at the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a green energy think-tank. It means that renewable energy added an an estimated £13.50 to the average household electricity bill last year. An additional burden fell on industrial users of electricity, who in turn passed on costs to their customers.

Critics claimed that the subsidy scheme unfairly penalised consumers and was being used to fund "unrealistic" plans to increase the use of wind power.

Countryside campaigners have expressed concerns at the number of wind farms being built around the country, as the Government tries to meet its target that 30 per cent of the UK's energy should be generated from renewable sources by 2020.

The Ofgem report will show that over the past three years the subsidies have added a total of £32.50 to the average household's electricity bills. The annual cost has steadily risen from £7 in 2007 to £13.50 in 2009. The proceeds of the levy, known as the Renewables Obligation (RO), are divided between the main renewable energy sources, with wind receiving 40 per cent, landfill gas 25 per cent, biomass 20 per cent, hydroelectric 12 per cent and sewage gas 3 per cent.

Dr John Constable, director of policy and research at the REF, said: "The fundamental problem with the RO is that the cost to the consumer is extremely high. "Since the cost of the scheme is passed onto businesses as well as households, there will also be a significant impact on the economy. "The Government's plans for wind are wildly unrealistic. Wind power is going to be very expensive, very difficult and ultimately very costly." The cost to consumers of the RO scheme has risen from £278 million in 2002/3 to £1.04 billion last year, the Ofgem report is expected to say - a total of £4.4 billion over seven years.

The scheme works by requiring energy suppliers to obtain a set percentage of the electricity they provide to consumers from renewable sources. In 2008/9 this figure was 9.1 per cent, compared to 7.9 per cent in 2007/8. For each megawatt hour of renewable energy bought by a supplier from a generator, suppliers must also buy a certificate as proof. If suppliers fail to meet their obligation by presenting enough certificates, they must pay a fine known as a "buy-out". The cost to energy suppliers is passed on to consumers through their bills.

Ofgem predicts that the total cost of the RO to consumers between 2002 and 2027, when the scheme is set to end, will amount to £32 billion. By 2020 it is estimated that the annual cost will be running at over £5 billion.

Prof Ian Fells, emeritus professor of energy conversion at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, said money that was being invested into wind farms through the RO scheme needed to be diverted elsewhere. He said: "Consumers simply don't realise the cost to them of supporting the renewable energy industry. Not only is there a cost to consumers but there is a cost to businesses as well. "So people will not only see the huge cost of the RO scheme in their household bills but also on the High Street, as they see shops put up prices to meet the rising cost of electricity. "Subsidising wind farms is far too expensive, and the money could be better spent by investing in other forms of power."

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "To ensure we meet our climate change goals we need a massive increase in low carbon energy and that includes renewables. "The RO is helping that expansion happen with the amount of electricity generated from renewables trebling since 2002. "We also need to make sure we have continued secure energy supplies in the future and renewables are part of that too. There's no high-carbon low-price alternative – we must move to low-carbon sources."

There are currently 270 wind farms with 2,775 turbines in operation, with plans for a further 10,000 on and around Britain's shores. It has raised concerns in communities that hundreds of acres of rural landscapes will have wind farms built on them. Last week The Sunday Telegraph revealed how 14 of the UK's officially-designated beauty spots could soon be blighted by turbines, which can reach more than 400ft in height.

SOURCE

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

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