GREENIE WATCH -- by Dr. John Ray. December 09 archive

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported for the entire 20th century by the United Nations (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows in fact that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

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31 December, 2009

Another example of strange data selectivity by British climatologists

The official British Met office in this case. An email below from a reader -- noting that once again the best data for a location is ignored -- apparently in favour of something that suits Warmist assumptions better. There was a lot of that with the CRU treatment of the Russian data too. The record referred to below which the meteorologists do use has so many gaps in it that one suspects that the gaps are the attraction. Such gaps can be filled in by Warmist guesses

On this page station temperature files for several countries can be downloaded.

Living in the Netherlands Antilles, I checked: there are only records for Juliana Airport, St. Maarten (788660). That station was only opened in 1951 while records are available for Curaçao island since 1894 but are not listed here. St. Maarten temperature records are available from 1920, long before the airport opened its station.

St. Maarten lists a total of 187 "-99" [no record], figures out of 708 monthly averages. I am quite sure that the Curaçao, main island of the country, records are much more complete than that. One wonders then why records for Curaçao have not been used.

CRU now rejecting their own "landmark" findings

$10Mill worth of landmark IPCC climate research – now struck out at CRU

This CRU webpage where you can still download the CRUTEM3 datasets reveals the stunning fact that they no longer include the landmark paper Jones & Moberg 2003 in the list of references.

Instead, to keep their “chain of evidence” alive the CRU-Meisters now jump back to Jones et al 1999. CRU front page 29 Dec 2009: "Jones, P.D., M. New, D.E. Parker, S. Martin, and I.G. Rigor. 1999. Surface air temperature and its changes over the past 150 years. Reviews of Geophysics 37:173-199".

This raises all sorts of questions because the latest masterwork Brohan et al 2006 (Brohan, P., J.J. Kennedy, I. Harris, S.F.B. Tett, and P.D. Jones. 2006. Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes: a new dataset from 1850. J. Geophysical Research 111, D12106) is written as an evolution from Jones & Moberg 2003 – further and surprisingly there is NO REFERENCE to Jones 1999 in Brohan et al 2006.

Reading the Abstract and first paragraph of the Introduction to Jones & Moberg 2003 – the authors are clearly updating directly from Jones 1994, ignoring the more recent and we would assume improved over 1994 – Jones et al 1999.

So I am saying that there is much evidence here of striking out references to previously lauded Jones versions that one would expect to be naturally included in the “chain of evidence”. I can only conclude that for example, Jones & Moberg 2003 does not measure up now as a work that CRU or the UKMO wants to refer to. Taxpayers may never know the reasons for these odd visible twists and turns in the cloistered and highly secretive IPCC world.

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

Major northern hemisphere cold snap coming

Cold event setups in atmospheric circulation patterns are aligning. Two days ago I brought to your attention that there was a strong downspike in the Arctic Oscillation Index and that the North Atlantic Oscillation Index was also negative. See The Arctic Oscillation Index goes strongly negative

Yesterday, Senior AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi let loose with this stunning prediction on the AccuWeather premium web site via Brett Anderson’s Global warming blog:

What is facing the major population centers of the northern hemisphere is unlike anything that we have seen since the global warming debate got to the absurd level it is now, which essentially has been there is no doubt about all this. For cold of a variety not seen in over 25 years in a large scale is about to engulf the major energy consuming areas of the northern Hemisphere. The first 15 days of the opening of the New Year will be the coldest, population weighted, north of 30 north world wide in over 25 years in my opinion.

The Climate Prediction Center discussion for their forecast also concurs with both of the above:

THE AO INDEX WHICH RECENTLY HAS BEEN VERY STRONGLY NEGATIVE IS FORECAST TO INCREASE SLIGHTLY IN VALUE BUT REMAIN STRONGLY NEGATIVE THROUGH DAY 14. TODAYS BLEND CHART INDICATES BELOW NORMAL HEIGHTS ACROSS ROUGHLY THE SOUTHEASTERN TWO-THIRDS OF THE CONUS, AND ABOVE NORMAL HEIGHTS OVER THE NORTHWESTERN THIRD OF THE CONUS, CONSISTENT WITH A STRONGLY NEGATIVE AO.

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

Obama official embarrassed by Democrat plans to convert cropland to forestry

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food.

The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation's incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.

According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.

Mr. Vilsack, in a little-noticed statement issued with the report earlier this month, said the department's forecasts "have caused considerable concern" among farmers and ranchers. "If landowners plant trees to the extent the model suggests, this would be disruptive to agriculture in some regions of the country," he said.

He said the Forest and Agricultural Sector Optimization Model (FASOM), created by researchers at Texas A&M University, does not take into account other provisions in the House-passed bill, which would boost farmers' income while they continue to produce food. Those omissions, he said, cause the model to overestimate the potential for increased forest planting.

Mr. Vilsack said he has directed his chief economist to work with the EPA to "undertake a review of the assumptions in the FASOM model, to update the model and to develop options on how best to avoid unintended consequences for agriculture that might result from climate change legislation."

The legislation would give free emissions credits, known as offsets, to farmers and landowners who plant forests and adopt low-carbon farm and ranching practices. Farmers and ranchers could sell the credits to help major emitters of greenhouse gases comply with the legislation. That revenue would help the farmers deal with an expected rise in fuel and fertilizer costs.

But the economic forecast predicts that nearly 80 percent of the offsets would be earned through the planting of trees, mostly in the Midwest, the South and the Plains states. The American Farm Bureau Federation and some farm-state Republican lawmakers have complained that the offsets program would push landowners to plant trees and terminate their leases with farmers. The model projects that reduced farm production will cause food prices to rise by 4.5 percent by 2050 compared with a scenario in which no legislation is passed, the department found.

A department spokesman declined to comment about how quickly the review would take place or whether Mr. Vilsack would revise the department's economic-impact projections.

The Senate has not taken action on climate legislation, although the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed a bill similar to the House's last month. That measure did not include agriculture provisions.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas Democrat and chairman of the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, has said she will hold hearings on climate provisions but has not indicated when those will take place.

The ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and his counterpart on the House Agriculture Committee, ranking Republican Rep. Frank D. Lucas of Oklahoma, wrote to Mr. Vilsack and EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson earlier this month to ask for new economic analyses of the House and Senate bills. "EPA's analysis was often cited during debate in the House of Representatives and the study had a great impact on the final vote. If there was a flaw in the analysis, then it would be prudent to correct the model and perform a more current and complete analysis on both [bills]," they wrote.

In a statement, the EPA said: "EPA looks forward to working with USDA and the designer of this particular computer model to continue improving the analytical tools that all of [us] use to predict the ways that different climate policies would affect agriculture."

Allison Specht, an economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, said other studies have largely confirmed the results of the EPA and Agriculture Department analysis. "That's one of the realities of cap-and-trade legislation. The biggest bang for your buck for carbon credits is planting trees," she said.

SOURCE

Another Greenie industry in need of a handout

Large fuel cells at risk without U.S. aid. Fuel cells are not only of interest to Greenies but their "clean" energy gives them Greenie cred

The United States leads the world in manufacturing stationary fuel cells — large sources of clean energy — but the industry is warning Congress that the technology and expertise could be shipped overseas unless the federal government does more to encourage domestic production and use.

Stationary fuel cells are on-site power generators that emit almost no pollutants while producing energy. They are powerful enough to supply electricity, heating and air conditioning for a 1,000-room hotel, a 33,000-student college campus or large industrial structures such as the Pepperidge Farm plant in Connecticut and Sierra Nevada brewery in California.

The energy source is pricey, though, ranging in the millions of dollars per unit. Yet demand for the fuel cells in Japan and South Korea far outstrips domestic supply, partly because foreign governments provide tax incentives or subsidies to companies that import and use the stationary fuel cells. "We need legislation with provisions to promote deployment of fuel cells," said Bill Foster, vice president of government business development for FuelCell Energy Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of stationary fuel cells.

Mr. Foster said that including the industry among the many "green" technologies being supported by the federal government is critical to keeping jobs in the U.S. and ramping up the use of this clean energy supply. The Obama administration's main fuel cells focus has been on cars and buses, largely overlooking the stationary sources.

UTC Power, a division of United Technologies Corp. that manufactures stationary fuel cells, said the industry "needs the government to become a customer." "We need volume, we need customers, and I think the government could become a large consumer," said Michael Brown, vice president of government affairs and general counsel to UTC. "To have the government step up and say, 'We're going to buy 500 fuel cells a year' would jump-start the marketplace."

Mr. Foster said that his Danbury, Conn.-based company is working with Congress for special attention in upcoming bills. He asserts that allowing more energy from fuel cells to be counted as part of a federal renewable-electricity standard (RES) would also promote wider use. The standard is part of pending energy legislation and would mandate that a certain percentage of the nation's energy come from clean sources by a certain date. The proposed RES would only allow fuel-cell energy generated from qualified biofuel sources — not natural gas — to contribute to the standard.

In the meantime, in the absence of federal legislation to drive fuel-cell use, some states are using the federal Investment Tax Credit to promote the use of stationary fuel cells. California and Connecticut also have incentive programs that when coupled with the federal tax credit have helped expand the use of stationary fuel cells.

Mr. Brown said additional incentives and partnerships with energy companies and utilities also would benefit the young industry.

The industry is also targeting Connecticut lawmakers in Congress to include fuel-cell provisions in federal legislation. Mr. Foster said Democratic Rep. Christopher S. Murphy and Democratic Rep. John B. Larson have been fuel-cell champions because FuelCell Energy Inc. and UTC Power both have their headquarters in Connecticut.

Although the technology is commercially viable, it is still relatively unknown, posing a major roadblock for the industry, the industry asserts. Stationary fuel cells range in size, with some measuring about one-fourth the size of a tennis court. They are powered by biofuels — gasses from food processing, landfills and wastewater treatment — natural gas, ethanol, diesel and coal gas. The fuel cell is a combustion-free energy source, as it produces heat and electricity directly from chemical energy, somewhat like a battery. It also emits negligible amounts of nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides as well as relatively small amounts of carbon dioxide compared to fossil-fuel-powered electricity plants.

Fuel cells are also a baseload power source and can compete with nuclear and coal-fired electricity to provide the minimum amount of power a utility must make available to its customers. In contrast, wind, solar and other renewable sources can only supply peak-load power, power largely demanded in the late afternoon when consumers return home from work.

The upfront capital cost to produce stationary fuel cells is high, so a larger customer pool, especially in the U.S., would help bring down the cost, the industry asserts.

FuelCell Energy Inc. has sold or has orders for 91 megawatts of stationary fuel cells, with 68 megawatts of that sold to South Korea. The company said it is fearful that without government help, the domestic manufacturing industry will be transferred to nations with a greater demand — a fate that already has befallen wind turbine and solar panel makers. UTC Power, a South Windsor, Conn.-based company, also produces stationary fuel cells that can heat and cool commercial buildings and fuel cells for transportation.

SOURCE

Fireplace fascism in California

Burn wood in the Bay Area, and your neighbors will rat you out and send inspectors to your door who will slap you with a fine. Even on Christmas Day. From the Contra Costa Times:

Bay Area air pollution inspectors found 47 violators burning wood fires illegally during Christmas Day's Spare the Air alert — which was declared because cold, unhealthful air had been forecast. Violators get written warnings for a first offense and $400 fines for a second offense.

"We know a lot of people like to burn on this holiday, but it's our duty to protect public health," said Ralph Borrmann, the spokesman.

It demonstrates once again that there is no limit to how intrusive and destructive government can become in the name of protecting from real or imaginary public threats to safety and health.

SOURCE

Australia: Paint roofs white, says "Green" mayor

FORGET painting the town red - Lord Mayor Robert Doyle wants Melbourne's roofs painted white. Cr Doyle believed slathering the tops of inner-city buildings with a white coating would make them cooler and more energy efficient, according to a report in the Herald Sun. He said the whitewash could reflect the sun's rays, reducing temperatures inside skyscrapers, apartment towers, shopping centres and other city structures.

Cr Doyle hit on the city-wide paint job idea after talking to New York mayor Michael Bloomberg at the Copenhagen climate summit. Mayor Bloomberg recently launched a "Cool Roofs" pilot scheme backed by former vice-president and environment campaigner Al Gore. Volunteers in New York will daub 10,000sq/m of roof space white to reduce air-conditioner use.

Cr Doyle has asked Melbourne council officers to investigate how the scheme could be implemented here. "I think it is a real alternative for us," Cr Doyle said.

US President Barack Obama's green guru has encouraged Americans to consider white roofs for the environmental and economic benefits. The special reflective white surface is rolled or sprayed on roofs and dries like rubber. White roofs are easier and more affordable than roof-top gardens, which are also promoted as a way of reducing a city's carbon footprint.

SOURCE

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30 December, 2009

Britain's major Leftist newspaper, The Guardian, is at least good for a laugh!

Britain's Guardianistas really do take the cake. They are so wrapped up in their own little fantasy world that they have no idea how absurd they can sound to others. For example: This article blames China for the now universally acknowledged "failure" of the Copenhagen climate conclave (There's a tongue-twister for you!).

As the writer himself acknowledges, it is an unwritten rule that the holier-than-thou crowd must never blame poor countries for anything. Only the "rich West" can do wrong. But apparently China is now rich and powerful enough to have lost that protection. So our climate apostle has got daring.

But the funny bit comes towards the end of his article when he concludes in sorrow and in anger that China is not playing the Guardianista game at all. He seems surprised that he has to conclude: "This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action".

China is not interested in global governance! How awful! How concerning! How disillusioning! What is left? Fancy China wanting to run its own affairs! How can those nice Communists be so awful? It's all a terrible shock to a Guardianista!

The Guardian has its flock, however. My first wife (the first of four) has always been Left-leaning and she has just emailed me to tell me that she is now very angry with China! LOL! She would once have turned a deaf ear to any criticism of China.

It reminds me of Israel. For a couple of decades after WWII, the Left were supportive of Israel. But after Israel won the six-day war, that steadily eroded and Israel is now regarded with widespread hostility among Leftists. Leftists just hate other people doing well for themselves. They only like people that they can look down on and patronize. One of the reasons I support Israel is that it gives me pleasure to see other people doing well -- but that makes me a conservative, of course. No Leftist would understand that. I even think highly of Bill Gates!

Oh, Yes, Copenhagen

by Paul Greenberg

The other day a friend asked us if I'd written about the Copenhagen conference on climate change, carbon control, environmental technology, the ecological future of Spaceship Earth, cabbages and kings, and the 101 other Very Important Things covered by that huge, long-awaited and now suddenly fizzled international gabfest.

No, I hadn't written about it. Maybe because it ended not with a bang but with a whimper heard 'round the world: a flurry of non-binding agreements, aka vague misunderstandings. It was the biggest anticlimax since Geraldo the Great Rivera opened Al Capone's vault to find little more than dust. Any actual policies to come out of Copenhagen promise to be as empty.

To sum up the essential deal made at Copenhagen: The developed world sort of promises to give the undeveloped one $30 billion over the next three years -- plus $100 billion a year after 2020 -- in exchange for its separate but equally nebulous promise not to develop too quickly. As with Obamacare, the theoretical benefits are to come first, then the real pain by some always-delayable deadline. It's more convenient that way. Just charge it to some future generation.

Besides the cocksure confidence the delegates displayed in man's ability to reset the world's thermostat, this kind of deal-making in which no one takes the deal made very seriously was the one consistent thread in the tangled web woven at Copenhagen.

There is consolation to be taken in the grand fizzle at Copenhagen. For there is something worse than the conference's failure. And that would have been its success at slowing the world's economic recovery and so dooming still more in the Third World to the bitter fruits of abject poverty: more malnutrition, more disease, and more chaos and instability in general.

Doing nothing has certain advantages over doing the wrong thing, especially on a grand and confusing scale. Besides, the failure of this lavish conference means the delegates can now anticipate many more equally elaborate confabs around the world on the public's tab, complete with equally hyped media coverage and just as inconsequential results. Nice work -- or play -- if you can get it.

Maybe I hadn't written anything of substance about the grand conference at Copenhagen because it proved so insubstantial. My long established policy is, when I have nothing to say about a subject, I try not to say it. Maybe because I've read too many editorials over the years that, having nothing to say, make the grave mistake of saying it. At length. It doesn't exactly make for fascinating reading.

There were doubtless plenty of agreements made at Copenhagen but the major ones were non-binding. Those are the kind of deals that delegates embrace enthusiastically in their speeches but take care not to sign lest their countries be held to their word. They're the kind of oral agreements that the irrepressible Sam Goldwyn, Hollywood mogul and Mr. Malaprop himself, once described as not worth the paper they're written on. Or rather not written on.

Almost coincident with the grand conference at Copenhagen a treasure trove of leaked documents appeared out of the very center of global alarmism over climate change, the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University at Norwich, England, which is "widely recognized as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change," according to its Web site. These days it's widely recognized as a center for the suppression of any and all dissenting views about the causes of global warming. If this is science, what would dogma be?

Conspiracies to suppress scientific dissent scarcely ended with Galileo's trial, but at least the church eventually repented and begged pardon. There is little if any sign that the wannabe Al Gores at East Anglia, more politicians than scientists, have been chastened by what's come to be known as Climategate. Instead, they have adopted a variation of the Dan Rather defense: falsified maybe but accurate.

Barack Obama's appearance at the last minute was the final, flashy touch at Copenhagen as he made much ado about much of nothing. The president hasn't demonstrated his diplomatic finesse so convincingly since he went to the same city not long ago to not get the Olympics for Chicago. Which may have been a blessing in disguise, too. (The traffic in the Loop is already bad enough.)

Naturally the president and his handlers came back from Copenhagen declaring a great victory -- Carbon Control in our Time! But surely even they didn't believe it. Certainly the Europeans didn't. As soon as the Grand Conference concluded, the market for carbon-control permits on the European continent dropped dramatically, as if investors were confirming that the countries represented at Copenhagen weren't serious about controlling carbon emissions. No poll is more reliable than the market, where people put their money where their opinions are. It's a great test of sincerity.

The final accord at Copenhagen didn't specify, not in writing, how much big countries like the United States and mainland China are now supposed to reduce their carbon emissions. Nor did the conference decide precisely how much all the other countries were going to sacrifice in order to clean up the world's climate. Just about the only thing the delegates could agree on was to jet off to the next world climate-change conference, which is already scheduled for Mexico City, the one sure effect of which will be to add still more carbon to the Earth's atmosphere.

SOURCE

Britain's official meteorologists goof again

In line with their Warmist ideology they keep predicting warm dry seasons -- but the weather fails to oblige

Met Office predictions of a mild winter have begun to fall flat as more snow is forecast in parts of Britain tomorrow and temperatures are expected to drop to below freezing over the New Year period. With many people heading back to work after the Christmas break, drivers were warned to take extra care.

Up to four inches of snow is forecast in the Midlands, and falls of up to a foot were predicted on higher ground in Wales. Passengers due to fly from Cardiff Airport today were advised to check flights were on schedule if there was snow.

The turn of the year is set to offer no respite with freezing conditions forecast across Britain. Temperatures are expected to plunge to minus 3C in most of England and Wales on Thursday night, New Year's Eve, and minus 8C in Scotland, with widespread snow showers also predicted. New Year's Day will also be chilly, with the northern half of Britain struggling to get above freezing during the day.

In October, the Met Office predicted Britain would have a mild winter, despite the inaccuracy of its “barbecue summer” forecast which drew strong criticism, after heavy rainfall saw the wettest July for almost 100 years. It said the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 were likely to be “milder than last year” and that there was an 85 per cent chance of normal or above average conditions. Preliminary forecasts for December predicted that temperatures would be above the 38.6F (3.7C) average.

However, after the predictions for the summer turned out to be inaccurate, the forecasters sounded a note of caution, saying there was still a “one in seven chance” of a cold winter. A Met Office spokesman said: “That forecast was dealing with the whole of the winter. December has certainly been cold but the prediction is for December, January and February.” He believed the “climate team” was updating the prediction “perhaps over the course of the next week.” The spokesman added: “It has certainly been a cold winter so far in most parts but the seasonal forecast has not been proven one way or the other.”

He said the weather was expected to remain cold for “the next week or so” but he could not comment on the longer term....

The Met Office defended its forecast of a “barbecue summer” and said its long term prediction was mainly accurate, in particular that temperatures would reach 30C.

More HERE

The "Consistent With" Fallacy: How Not to Compare Predictions and Observations

Over at Real Climate there is a misleading post up about IPCC global temperature projections as compared with actual temperature observations, suggesting success where caution and uncertainty is a more warranted conclusion.

The scientists at Real Climate explain that to compare a prediction with observations one must assess whether the observations fall within a range defined as 95% of model realizations. In other words, if you run a model, or a set of models, 100 times, you would take the average of the 100 runs and plot the 95 individual runs closest to that average, and define that range as an "envelope" of projections. If observations fall within this envelope, they you would declare the projection to be a predictive success.

Imagine if a weather forecaster said that he ran a model 100 times and it showed that tomorrow's temperature was going to be between 25 and 75 degrees, with 95% confidence, with a "best estimate" of 50 degrees. If the temperature came in at 30 degrees you might compare it to the "best estimate" and say that it was a pretty poor forecast. If the weather forecast explained that the temperature was perfectly "consistent with" his forecast, you'd probably look for another forecaster. If the true uncertainty was actually between 25 and 75 degrees, then one might question the use of issuing a "best estimate."

Gavin Schmidt explains how this works in the context of the current "pause" (his words) in the increase in global average surface temperatures over the past 11 years (emphasis added):

The trend in the annual mean HadCRUT3v data from 1998-2009 (assuming the year-to-date is a good estimate of the eventual value) is 0.06+/-0.14 ºC/dec (note this is positive!). If you want a negative (albeit non-significant) trend, then you could pick 2002-2009 in the GISTEMP record which is -0.04+/-0.23 ºC/dec. The range of trends in the model simulations for these two time periods are [-0.08,0.51] and [-0.14, 0.55], and in each case there are multiple model runs that have a lower trend than observed (5 simulations in both cases). Thus ‘a model’ did show a trend consistent with the current ‘pause’. However, that these models showed it, is just coincidence and one shouldn’t assume that these models are better than the others. Had the real world ‘pause’ happened at another time, different models would have had the closest match.

Think about the logic of "consistent with" as used in this context. It means that the larger the model spread, the larger the envelope of projections, and the greater the chance that whatever is observed will in fact fall within that envelope. An alert reader points this out to Gavin in the comments:

I can claim I’m very accurate because my models predict a temperature between absolute zero and the surface temperature of the sun, but that error range is so large, it means I’m not really predicting anything.

Gavin says he agrees with this, which seems contrary to what he wrote in the post about 11-year trends. Elsewhere Gavin says such statistics are meaningful only for 15 years and longer. If so, then discussing them in terms of "consistency with" the model spread just illustrates how this methodology can retrieve a misleading signal from noise.

About 18 months ago I engaged in a series of exchanges with some in the climate modeling community on this same topic. The debate was frustrating because many of the climate scientists thought hat we were debating statistical methods, but from my perspective we were debating the methodology of forecast verification.

At that time I tried to illustrate the "consistent with" fallacy in the context of IPCC projections using the following graph. The blue curve shows a curve fit to 8-year surface temperature trends from 55 realizations from models used by IPCC (the fact that it was 8 years is irrelevant to this example). With the red curve I added 55 additional "realizations" produced from a random number generator. The blue dot shows the observations. Obviously, the observations are more "consistent with" the red curve than the blue curve. We can improve consistency by making worse predictions. There is obviously something wrong with this approach to comparing models and observations.

What should be done instead?

1. A specific prediction has to be identified when it is being made. A prediction in this case should be defined as the occurrence of some event in the future, that is to say, after the prediction is made. For the IPCC AR4 this might generously be defined as starting in 2001.

2. Pick a quantity to be forecast. This might be global average surface temperature as represented by GISS or CRU, the satellite lower tropospheric records, both or something else. But pick a quantity.

3. Decide in advance how you are going to define the uncertainty in your forecast. For instance, the IPCC presented an uncertainty range in its forecast in a manner differently than does Real Climate. Defining uncertainty is of critical importance.

For instance, eyeballing the Real Climate IPCC Figure one might be surprised to learn that had there been no temperature change from 1980 to 2010, this too would have been "consistent with" the model realization "envelope." While such uncertainty may in fact be an accurate representation of our knowledge of climate, it is certainly not how many climate scientists typically represent the certainty of their knowledge.

If any of 1, 2 or 3 above is allowed to vary and be selected in post-hoc fashion it sets the stage for selections of convenience that allow the evaluator to make choices that pretty much show whatever he wants to show.

4. A good place to start is simply with IPCC "best estimate" One can ask if observations fall above or below that value. Real Climate's post suggest that actual temperatures fall below that "best estimate."

5. You can then ask if falling below or above that value has any particular meaning with respect to the knowledge used to generate the forecast. To perform such an evaluation, you need a naive forecast, some baseline expectation against which you can compare your sophisticated forecast. In the case of global climate it might be a prediction of no temperature change or some linear fit to past trends. If the sophisticated method doesn't improve upon the naive baseline, you are not getting much value from that approach.

The bottom line is that with respect to #4 Real Climate shows that actual temperatures are running below a central estimate from the IPCC AR4 as well as below the various scenarios presented by Jim Hansen in 1988. What does this mean? Probably not much. But at the same time it should be obvious that this data should not be used as evidence to announce the successes of climate predictions, as Real Climate does: "the matches to observations are still pretty good, and we are getting to the point where a better winnowing of models dependent on their skill may soon be possible." Such over-hyping of the capabilities of climate science serves neither science nor policy particularly well. The reality is that while the human influence on the climate system is real and significant, predicting its effects for coming years and decades remains a speculative enterprise fraught with uncertainties and ignorance.

SOURCE

French carbon "leadership" crumples

France's new carbon emission tax ruled illegal -- too much corruption even for France

FRANCE'S new carbon emission tax, due to have gone into effect on Friday, has been ruled illegal by the country's constitutional court on the grounds it exempted too many polluters. The Conseil Constitutionnel struck down the tax as the exemptions "create a breach of the principle of (tax) equality."

It estimated that 93 per cent of industrial emissions outside of fuel use, including the emissions of more than 1000 of the country's most polluting industrial sites, would be exempt from the tax of 17 euros ($30) per tonne of emitted carbon dioxide.

The ruling is a severe blow for President Nicolas Sarkozy as the measure was one of his flagship initiatives to cut emissions of greenhouse gasses that fuel climate change.

It also leaves the government scrambling to plug a hole of 4.1 billion euros ($6 billion) in the 2010 budget.

SOURCE

GROW UP, GREENS! Greenie founding father says we need nukes and G.M. crops

A BOOK REVIEW of "Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto" By Stewart Brand. Review by Bryan Appleyard, a journalist on 'The Sunday Times' of London

In 1968 Stewart Brand produced the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. It had a picture of the earth seen from space on the cover and inside were lists of useful tools for transforming the planet by distributing power to the people. I remember seeing it in bookshops. Thrilling and demanding, it called on me to join my generation. Like Woodstock, student demos, dope, tie-dyed T-shirts and improbably flared trousers, the Catalog told us we were different.

We were. But now different has become mainstream. The Catalog was, above all, Green. It treated the planet as a single, finite system whose contents could be catalogued. Now the whole world is Green and the Internet lists its contents. David Cameron and Ed Miliband believe what only doped-out freaks in sandals and Afghan coats believed in 1968. And so Stewart Brand returns to take stock.

Whole Earth Discipline is immensely entertaining, moving and slightly confusing. The confusion is twofold. First, Brand is an unreconstructed cataloguer. The book is, at one level, simply a list of developments in biotechnology, climate science, urbanisation, agriculture and so on. This tends to leave one wondering if these things do tie together in quite the way Brand says they do. Secondly, much of the book is about the author's changes of mind. He is now, for example, pro-nuclear power and genetically engineered foods. This is honourable but it does cast a slight shadow of doubt over his latest enthusiasms.

That said, the book brilliantly defines our present predicament - our need to deploy science to clean up the mess made by science. The modern world was made by burning half a trillion tons of carbon since the Industrial Revolution. The next half trillion will be burned in about forty years at present rates of increase. If that happens, then global temperatures will rise by up to 4 degrees and it is reasonable to assume, on the basis of current scientific thought, that our species' continued existence will be at risk.

As Brand, heavily influenced by James Lovelock, perceives, this means that the Greens are going to have to reverse some of their primary positions. In the giddy days of 1968, eco-awareness was an aspect of the ideological package that included resistance to the Vietnam War and to The System, often defined as the military-industrial complex. We wanted to get 'back to the garden', to a condition of pastoral simplicity. This pastoralism seemed to be the way to save Spaceship Earth and it still clings to the Green movement with its belief in organic foods, wind power and sustainability in general. None of this will work because climate change is happening too quickly.

'That means', writes Brand, 'that Greens are no longer strictly the defenders of natural systems against the incursions of civilization; now they're the defenders of civilization as well. It's a whiplash moment for everyone.'

Climate change really means Mother Nature is preparing to rid herself of humans. If we are to survive, we can no longer worship her, we must fight back with smart weapons. So we have to embrace nuclear - there is no other source of clean energy which can sustain our societies - and genetically engineered 'Frankenfoods'. Ideally, these would be synthesised in laboratories. Farming, as Lovelock has pointed out, is a planetary catastrophe, stripping out biodiversity and filling the atmosphere with the methane from cow farts.

The Green dream must thus become a very hi-tech dream rather than the muddy paradise of Woodstock. Brand's conversion to this view is the central drama of this book and it sends him off on a genial and enthusiastic safari through wild science and cool facts.

Did you know, for example, that only a tenth of the cells in your body are you? The rest are microbes - 'We are a portable swamp.' Did you know that Stora Enso in Sweden is the oldest surviving corporation? King Magnus IV granted its charter in 1347. Did you know that in a fifth of a teaspoon of seawater there are a million bacteria and ten million viruses? Well, now you do.

This is all good fun but the heart of the matter is the word 'ecopragmatist' in the subtitle. Brand's big point is that we must do what works without prejudice. Green prejudices have, in the past, often been on the wrong side of the argument. The campaign to get DDT banned because of its effects on birdlife, for example, may have cost the lives of 20 million children in Africa who were left to die of malaria. And The System we all hated in the Sixties and Seventies produced Norman Borlaug, the man behind the very capitalist Green Revolution - increased crop yields - which may have saved a billion lives.

Now the Greens are threatening to do more damage. They're suckers for anything labelled 'natural'. 'In the marketing world,' remarks Brand, '"natural" now means anything the seller wants to charge extra for or distract your attention with.'

They also resist nuclear power and persist in deluding people into thinking all we have to do is build wind farms and cycle to work. They also go on about the loss of the rainforest when, in fact, fifty-five times more is growing back each year than is being cut. Perhaps worst of all, for Brand, they advocate the Precautionary Principle which requires that any new technology has to be shown to do no harm. This is, of course, impossible. It is also self-fulfilling because it effectively prevents the testing of new technologies to establish risk. Greens have not escaped the pastoralism of their roots and thus find themselves not just on the side of nature, but on the side of nature against humans.

But Stewart Brand lives in hope and this is a very upbeat book. He plainly thinks we'll get there in the end. The Greens are going to have to grow up. This book should help get them out of the nursery.

SOURCE

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29 December, 2009

Warmist foghorn George Monbiot admits that Warmism is really about changing people

It is just another variation on the old and arrogant Leftist aim of creating "a new Soviet man". Warmists and Leftists both hate the world they live in -- particularly its people. They are misanthropes. Monbiot's own headline on the article below reads: "This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity"

It's hard for a species used to ever-expanding frontiers, but survival depends on accepting we live within limits. This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.

The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.

The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's interests forbid us to live.

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.

So here we are, in the land of Beowulf's heroics, lost in a fog of acronyms and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required to accommodate everyone's demands. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it.

Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.

While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.

For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change. There's another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.

We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60% of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees. We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5C. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion.

But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it – rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth – must begin. If governments don't show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers' weakness. They will attack – using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest – the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world's ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.

SOURCE

Democrats pose threat to President Obama’s cap-and-trade climate Bill

Less than ten days after claiming a breakthrough on climate change in Copenhagen President Obama is facing a mutiny from senior Democrats who are imploring him to postpone or even abandon his cap-and-trade Bill.

Democratic Senators, fearful of a drubbing in the mid-term elections next year, are lining up to argue for alternatives to the scheme that is the centrepiece of the carbon reduction proposals that Mr Obama hopes to sign into law. With the Congressional battles over Mr Obama’s healthcare reforms fresh in their memory senior Democrats are asking the Administration to postpone the next big climate change push until at least 2011.

Senators from Louisiana, Indiana, Nebraska and North Dakota, some with powerful energy companies among their constituents, are falling out of love with the idea of a large-scale cap-and-trade scheme — which seeks to allocate tradeable permits to major polluters — in favour of less ambitious proposals that put jobs and the economy first.

Each of their Senate votes is vital for any climate change Bill to have a chance of being passed, and a firm American commitment to cap and trade is essential for similar carbon reduction mechanisms to be effective on a global scale.

Asked if she has urged the White House to abandon cap and trade — at least until after the mid-terms — Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana told the Politico website yesterday: “I am communicating that in every way I know how.”

At least five other high-ranking Democrats have lobbied the Administration in similar terms. Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota said that winning passage of climate change legislation in an election year had “very poor prospects”, and Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska said that he would “just as soon see [climate change] set aside until we work through the economy”.

Even more significant — as indicators of the majority party’s resolve to pass climate change legislation in the face of almost unanimous Republican opposition — were remarks from Dick Durbin, the Senate Majority Whip, and John Kerry, the Massachusetts Senator who is in the process of drafting a climate change Bill favoured by the White House.

“At this point, I’d like to see a complete Bill but we have to be realistic,” Senator Durbin said. Senator Kerry, speaking at the Copenhagen climate conference this month, said: “I can’t tell you the method or the means by which we might price carbon. We haven’t resolved that issue yet.”

Proponents of cap and trade argue that allowing polluters to trade carbon permits gives them a powerful incentive to emit less than the maximum imposed by the cap — and ensures that these emission reductions are achieved by the most cost-effective means available, whether by investing in new, clean technology at home, or in offsetting schemes in developing economies where greater reductions can be achieved per dollar spent.

Critics of the system point to teething problems in the European pilot scheme, begun under the auspices of the Kyoto Protocol, when the price of carbon collapsed because of excessive free allocations of carbon permits to big, politically connected polluters such as the power generation industry.

Mr Obama has been a personal convert to cap and trade since witnessing the success of a scheme limited to the control of sulphur dioxide emissions in the 1990s. The creation of a market in tradeable sulphur dioxide permits cut emissions of the gas so swiftly that the acid rain it produces has disappeared from the Midwest as a serious environmental issue.

Congress will return from its winter break with healthcare reform unfinished, Democrats wary of any new proposals that can be presented as a further burden on the economy and Republicans eager to depict cap and trade as just such a burden.

The official position of the White House remains that “a cap-and-trade mechanism is the best way to achieve the most cost-effective reductions” — but it is not yet embedded firmly in the Senate Bill being drafted by Senators Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman.

That Bill is one of nine competing proposals before the Senate and while most Democrats can be relied on to support it, a half-dozen defectors would leave the party short of the 60-vote majority that they need to overcome a Republican filibuster.

Senator Graham, a Republican, has said that he believes others from his party can be won over. If so, they have gone to ground.

Senator John McCain, once a vocal supporter of cap and trade, now wants huge federal backing for the nuclear industry in return for his vote. Senator Mike Johanns of Nebraska has called the scheme “a death sentence” for farming.

Mr Obama put his political prestige on the line in Copenhagen to reach agreement on a pact to curb carbon emissions while trying to shore up his domestic flank amid rising scepticism about a new climate Bill in the US.

He declined to offer new sweeteners to get a deal, rebuked China’s reluctance to allow outside scrutiny of action on greenhouse-gas emissions and warned developing states that they could forget aid that had no strings attached.

SOURCE

Who's in denial now?

By Kenneth P. Green (Former IPCC reviewer Kenneth P. Green, has his doctorate in environmental science and engineering)

Responses to "Climategate"--the leaked e-mails from Britain's University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit -- remind me of the line "Are your feet wet? Can you see the pyramids? That's because you're in denial."

Climate catastrophists like Al Gore and the UN's Rajendra Pachauri are downplaying Climategate: it's only a few intemperate scientists; there's no real evidence of wrongdoing; now let's persecute the whistleblower. In Calgary, the latest fellow trying to use the Monty Python "nothing to see here, move along" routine is Prof. David Mayne Reid, who penned a column last week denying the importance of Climategate.

Unfortunately for Reid, old saws won't work in the Internet age: Climategate has blazed across the Internet, blogosphere, and social networking sites. Even environmentalist and writer George Monbiot has recognized that the public's perception of climate science will be damaged extensively, calling for one of the Climategate ringleaders to resign.

What's catastrophic about Climategate is that it reveals a science as broken as Michael Mann's hockey stick, which despite Reid's protestations, has been shown to be a misleading chart that erases a 400-year stretch of warm temperatures (called the Medieval Warm Period), and a more recent little ice-age that ended in the mid-1800s. No amount of hand-waving will restore the credibility of climate science while holding onto rubbish like that.

Climategate reveals skulduggery the general public can understand: that a tightly-linked clique of scientists were behaving as crusaders. Their letters reveal they were working in what they repeatedly labelled a "cause" to promote a political agenda.

That's not science, that's a crusade. When you cherry-pick, discard, nip, tuck, and tape disparate bits of data into the most alarming portrayal you can in the name of a "cause," you're not engaged in science, but in the production of propaganda. And this clique tried to subvert the peer-review process as well. They attempted to prevent others from getting into peer reviewed journals -- thus letting them claim skeptic research wasn't peer-reviewed -- a convenient circular (and dishonest) way to discredit skeptics.

Finally, people know that a fish rots from its head. The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia was considered the top climate research community. It was the source of a vast swath of the information then that was funnelled into the supposedly "authoritative" reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If scientific objectivity is corrupt at the top, there's every reason to think that the rot spreads through the entire body. And evidence suggests it has. A Russian think-tank recently revealed the climate temperature record compiled by the Climatic Research Unit cherry-picked data from only 25 per cent of Russia's climate monitoring sites, the sites closest to urban areas, biased by the urban heat island effect. The stations excluded data from 40 per cent of Russia's total land mass, which is 12.5 per cent of all the Earth's land mass.

Reid's indignation about Climategate is beyond ludicrous. "It is wrong," intones Reid, "to castigate people for things said in private, and often taken out of context." He equates the response to Climategate with a "lynch mob." Funny, the professor seems to have highly selective indignation; he is apparently unaware of the unremitting attacks on people skeptical of climate science or policy by climate scientists and politicians.

People skeptical of any aspect of climate change have long been called "deniers," an odious linkage with Holocaust denial, and various luminaries have called for them to be drowned, jailed, and tried for crimes against humanity. One prominent columnist called skepticism treason against the very Earth itself.

As for indignation about the release of private correspondence, where was Reid's indignation when Greenpeace, looking for something to spin into an incriminating picture, stole skeptic Chris Horner's trash? Where was his indignation a few years ago when scientist Steve Schroeder showed a routine letter of mine to another climate scientist (Andrew Dessler), who posted it to the Internet where it was spun into the scurrilous accusation that I was trying to bribe UN scientists? Reid's indignation is the chutzpah of a man who kills his family then wants pity because he's an orphan.

The Climategate scandal, like others in biology and medicine erodes the credibility of both the scientists involved, and the institution of scientific research. And it should: it has become evident that there is a lot of rot going on in the body of science, and too little effort made to fix it.

A start could be made. They should start by practicing the scientific method: release all data, and release all assumptions and methods used to process the data at the time of publication. Make it available to researchers (even lay researchers) who are outside the clique so the work can be checked. Had the researchers involved in Climategate done this from the beginning, instead of circling their wagons and refusing to allow outsiders to check their work, they would have taken less hectoring. As a bonus for them, Climategate would never have happened.

SOURCE

Get the U.N. Out of the Climate Business

The political theater in Copenhagen shows that we need realistic answers that don't require economic suicide to the challenge of rising global temperatures

By DR. KENNETH P. GREEN

In the aftermath of the Copenhagen Climate conference, it is clear that the United Nations-driven process is a bust, and that any similar process requiring economic suicide and massive wealth transfers will go nowhere. It is long since time to drop this charade, take the question of climate change out of the hands of the U.N., and implement more reasonable policies.

Fostering the resilience of societies around the world in case climate disaster strikes would be a start. Central to this process is for governments to stop making things worse, as they do when they subsidize risk-taking.

One reason that predicted damages from rising sea-levels and more powerful storms are so high is because of the popularity of coastal locales for high-density business and upscale residential development. As a result, damages from extreme coastal weather events have been fantastically expensive. The damages from Hurricane Katrina for example, reached over $150 billion. The question, however, is why there was so much value that was so badly protected against completely predictable events? Why were levees and sea-walls so under-designed? Why were so many houses and businesses uninsured? As Charles Perrow observes in "The Next Catastrophe," "Even in areas known to be hazardous, only about 20% of homeowners purchase flood insurance, and less than 50% of businesses purchase flood and earthquake insurance in risky areas."

In many cases, the answer is that governments stand as insurance stop-gaps, allowing the uninsured to depend on grants to rebuild in vulnerable areas should disaster strike, or otherwise cushioning the real costs of exposure to extreme weather.

Researchers at the Wharton Risk Center observed in a 2007 paper: "Highly subsidized premiums or premiums artificially compressed by regulations, without clear communication on the actual risk facing individuals and businesses, encourage development of hazard-prone areas in ways that are costly to both the individuals who locate there (when the disaster strikes) as well as others who are likely to incur some of the costs of bailing out victims following the next disaster (either at a state level through ex post residual market assessments or through federal taxes in the case of federal relief or tax breaks).

Stripping government measures from the risk market would help reveal the real costs of building in disaster-prone areas, and likely encourage development in more stable locales.

Another near-term option is privatization of infrastructure. Governments are quite good at building infrastructure. After all, what politician doesn't enjoy a ribbon-cutting ceremony for some new element of name-bearing infrastructure? But governments are dismal at maintaining infrastructure. They rarely establish revenue streams to keep up with repairs, nor do they set up systems to provide feedback on whether a particular road should be raised, or power-capability increased, or a water-treatment facility expanded. Roadways, electricity infrastructure, water-treatment infrastructure, and flood-control infrastructure would all benefit from such systems—the kind that private owners have an incentive to develop, since ensuring that future changes in climate do not disrupt their long-run cash flow is critical to their current financial performance.

Over the mid-term, we should consider the proposal of Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economist, who has suggested what he calls a Tropical Tropospheric Temperature (T3) tax—that is, taxing carbon dioxide emissions based on changes in the global average temperature. Ideally, this would be a revenue-neutral tax with all revenues rebated to the public in the form of reduced distortionary taxes, such as income tax.

A T3 tax has the advantage that should be attractive to both global warming skeptics and those who fear Climageddon: If temperatures remain low, as skeptics believe, the tax will stay low. If temperatures rise sharply, the tax will rise also, and incentives will grow to decarbonize energy systems around the world. Carbon taxes are a vastly superior policy option when compared either to cap-and-trade, or command-and-control regulation. Indexing the tax to the temperature of the atmosphere that shows anthropogenic change most clearly is only common sense. Mr. McKitrick suggests starting out small with something politically innocuous, on the order of 10 to15 cents per ton of carbon dioxide emitted.

In the long term, we should trust in resilience and a carbon price, but tie up our camel. We should insure against the possibility that temperatures rise toward the higher-end scenarios of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by speeding the development of a robust geoengineering tool box, with multiple techniques that have been tested long before they might be needed. Such research should be accelerated now, to give us an insurance policy against the calamity predictions. There is at least one well-known mechanism by which Mother Nature cools the planet, and that is when volcanic eruptions launch sulfur dioxide high into the atmosphere, brightening clouds, and increasing their reflectivity. Some scientists have estimated that this could be done extremely inexpensively without harmful environmental impacts.

What went on in Copenhagen was more political theater than an effort to think about realistic approaches to managing the risk of climate change, whether man-made or natural. The world would be better off with a fresh start and a process that isn't run by U.N. bureaucrats for whom every problem is an excuse to expand their power.

SOURCE

The New Climate Litigation

How about if we sue you for breathing?

Fresh from the fiasco in Copenhagen and with a failure in the U.S. Senate looming this coming year, the climate-change lobby is already shifting to Plan B, or is it already Plan D? Meet the carbon tort. Across the country, trial lawyers and green pressure groups—if that's not redundant—are teaming up to sue electric utilities for carbon emissions under "nuisance" laws.

A group of 12 Gulf Coast residents whose homes were damaged by Katrina are suing 33 energy companies for greenhouse gas emissions that allegedly contributed to the global warming that allegedly made the hurricane worse. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and seven state AG allies plus New York City are suing American Electric Power and other utilities for a host of supposed eco-maladies. A native village in Alaska is suing Exxon and 23 oil and energy companies for coastal erosion.

What unites these cases is the creativity of their legal chain of causation and their naked attempts at political intimidation. "My hope is that the court case will provide a powerful incentive for polluters to be reasonable and come to the table and seek affordable and reasonable reductions," Mr. Blumenthal told the trade publication Carbon Control News. "We're trying to compel measures that will stem global warming regardless of what happens in the legislature."

Mull over that one for a moment. Mr. Blumenthal isn't suing to right a wrong. He admits that he's suing to coerce a change in policy no matter what the public's elected representatives choose.

Cap and trade or a global treaty like the one that collapsed in Copenhagen would be destructive—but at least either would need the assent of a politically accountable Congress. The Obama Administration's antidemocratic decision to impose carbon regulation via the Environmental Protection Agency would be even more destructive—but at least it would be grounded in an existing law, the 1977 Clean Air Act, however misinterpreted. The nuisance suits ask the courts to make such fundamentally political decisions themselves, with judges substituting their views for those of the elected branches.

And now that you mention it, the U.S. appeals courts seem more than ready to arrogate to themselves this power. In September, the Second Circuit allowed Mr. Blumenthal's suit to proceed, while a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit reversed a lower court's dismissal of the Katrina case in October. An en banc hearing is now under consideration.

But global warming is, well, global: It doesn't matter whether ubiquitous CO2 emissions come from American Electric Power or Exxon—or China. "There is no logical reason to draw the line at 30 defendants as opposed to 150, or 500, or even 10,000 defendants," says David Rivkin, an attorney at Baker Hostetler and a contributor to our pages, in an amicus brief in the Katrina case. "These plaintiffs—and any others alleging injury by climatic phenomena—would have standing to assert a damages claim against virtually every entity and individual on the planet, since each 'contributes' to global concentrations of carbon dioxide."

In other words, the courts would become a venue for a carbon war of all against all. Not only might businesses sue to shackle their competitors—could we sue the New York Times for deforestation?—but judges would decide the remedies against specific defendants. In practice this would mean ad hoc command-and-control regulation against any industries that happen to catch the green lobby's eye.

Carbon litigation without legislation is one more way to harm the economy, and the rule of law. We hope the Fifth Circuit will have the good sense to deflect this damaging legal theory before it crash-lands at the Supreme Court.

SOURCE

GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Three current articles below:

Man dying because of Warmist laws

As his health begins to fail, protesting farmer Peter Spencer swore yesterday he would die before giving in to a Federal Government decision to make his farm a carbon sink. That vow came as his four children and newborn grandchild arrived in Canberra from the US to support the 58-year-old on day 37 of the protest, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Mr Spencer, who is chained to a wind tower more than 20m above ground, claims the government declared his property in Shannons Flat, north of Cooma, a carbon sink without offering any compensation. He says the move has left him unable to earn a living because he cannot clear land and redevelop the farm, and he is demanding a personal meeting with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to discuss the issue.

Aaron, Emma, Kahn and Sarah Spencer, who were all raised on the property, arrived home on Christmas Day and intend to stay until January 8. Sarah, 30, a registered nurse in her adopted home of Grand Rapids, Michigan, planned to examine her father yesterday after introducing him to her four-month-old son Saxon. "I've got my stethoscope and blood pressure cuff so I want to assess him," the farmer's daughter said. "I want to listen to his lungs, check his blood pressure and look at the swelling on his ankles. The problem is even if I tell him that I think he's coming down with pneumonia or that his kidneys are weakening ... he won't come down.

"It's heartbreaking ... but he's still very much with it mentally and is the same father we've always known. I just don't know how quickly he'll deteriorate. We're going to support him. He will come down if [Mr Rudd] makes an agreement or he'll die waiting." Aaron and Kahn climbed the tower to give their father warm clothes and helped set up a tent to protect him from heavy rainfall.

A spokesperson for Mr Rudd yesterday said the Government had "urged" Mr Spencer to stop the protest. "The Agriculture Minister responded to Mr Spencer's letter on the Prime Minister's behalf, however the Government believes this matter should be settled through the legal system and urges Mr Spencer in the strongest possible terms to end his protest and seek medical attention," the spokesperson said. "The Government sets policy in the national interest. This policy will not be changed by threats of violence or self-harm."

SOURCE

More evidence that CO2 is not the culprit for warming

By Michael Asten (Michael Asten is a professorial fellow in the school of geosciences at Monash University, Melbourne)

THE Copenhagen climate change summit closed two weeks ago in confusion, disagreement and, for some, disillusionment. When the political process shows such a lack of unanimity, it is pertinent to ask whether the science behind the politics is as settled as some participants maintain.

Earlier this month (The Australian, December 9) I commented on recently published results showing huge swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide, both up and down, at a time of global cooling 33.6 million years ago.

Paul Pearson and co-authors in a letter (The Weekend Australian, December 11) took exception to my use of their data and claimed I misrepresented their research, a claim I reject since I quoted their data (the veracity of which they do not contest) but offered an alternative hypothesis, namely that the present global warming theory (which was not the subject of their study) is inconsistent with the CO2-temperature variations of a past age.

Some senior scientists, who are adherents of orthodox global warming theory, do not like authors publishing data that can be used to argue against orthodoxy, a point made by unrelated authors with startling clarity in the Climategate leaked emails from the University of East Anglia.

In the scientific method, however, re-examination of data and formulation of alternative hypotheses is the essence of scientific debate. In any case, the debate on the link between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature will continue since it is not dependent on a single result.

Another example is a study by Richard Zeebe and colleagues, published in Nature Geoscience, of a release of CO2 and an increase in temperature 55 million years ago. At this time there was an increase in global temperature of between 5C and 9C, from a temperature regime slightly warmer than today's (that I will call moderate Earth) to greenhouse temperatures. It can be argued this example may have a message for humanity because the rate of release of CO2 into the atmosphere at the time of this warming was of a similar order to the rate of anthropogenic release today.

However, the analogy turns out to be incomplete when the data is compared with present estimates of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2, and Zeebe and his colleagues conclude that the large temperature increase cannot be explained by our existing understanding of CO2 temperature linkage. Indeed, they write, "our results imply a fundamental gap in our understanding of the amplitude of global warming associated with large and abrupt climate perturbations. This gap needs to be filled to confidently predict future climate change."

I argue there are at least two possible hypotheses to explain the data in this study: either the link between atmospheric CO2 content and global temperature increase is significantly greater (that is, more dangerous) than the existing models show or some mechanism other than atmospheric CO2 is a significant or the main factor influencing global temperature.

The first hypothesis is consistent with climate change orthodoxy. Recent writings on climate sensitivity by James Hansen are consistent with it, as was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its pre-Copenhagen update, The Copenhagen Diagnosis.

Indeed, the 26 authors of the IPCC update went a step further, and encouraged the 46,000 Copenhagen participants with the warning: "A rapid carbon release, not unlike what humans are causing today, has also occurred at least once in climate history, as sediment data from 55 million years ago show. This `Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum' brought a major global warming of 5C, a detrimental ocean acidification and a mass extinction event. It serves as a stark warning to us today."

We have to treat such a warning cautiously because, as Pearson and his colleagues pointed out in their letter two weeks ago, "We caution against any attempt to derive a simple narrative linking CO2 and climate on these large time scales. This is because many other factors come into play, including other greenhouse gases, moving continents, shifting ocean currents, dramatic changes in ocean chemistry, vegetation, ice cover, sea level and variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun."

Sound science also requires us to consider the second of the above two hypotheses. Otherwise, if we attempt to reconcile Zeebe's observation by inferring climate sensitivity to CO2 is greater than that used for current models, how do we explain Pearson's observation of huge swings in atmospheric CO2, both up and down, which appear poorly correlated with temperatures cooling from greenhouse Earth to moderate Earth?

The two geological results discussed both show some discrepancies between observation and model predictions. Such discrepancies do not in any sense reduce the merit of the respective authors' work; rather they illustrate a healthy and continuing process of scientific discovery.

In addition, unrelated satellite data analyses published in the past two years by physicist David Douglass and distinguished atmospheric scientist John Christy in two journals, International Journal of Climatology and Earth and Environment, provide observational evidence that climate sensitivity associated with CO2 is less than that used in present climate modelling, by a factor of about three.

Thus we have two geological examples and two satellite data studies pointing towards a lesser role of CO2 in global warming. This argument does not discount the reality of global warming during the past century or the potential consequences should it continue at the same rate, but it does suggest we need a broader framework in considering our response.

The Copenhagen summit exposed intense political differences in proposals to manage global warming. Scientists are also not unanimous in claiming to understand the complex processes driving climate change and, more important, scientific studies do not unambiguously point to a single solution. Copenhagen will indeed prove to be a historic meeting if it ushers in more open-minded debate.

SOURCE

Warmist bribes will cost the country dearly

It is no surprise that the government doesn't count on the altruism of the Australian voter in framing policies. Rather, it relies on providing favours to powerful constituencies to buy support. Nowhere is this clearer than in its proposed emissions trading scheme, with the government strenuously proclaiming that 70 per cent of households will be "more than compensated" for any adverse effects. Generous compensation also will be provided to business.

Far from the "hard reform" the Prime Minister keeps announcing, what is promised is therefore a painless warm glow. That promise is, of course, too good to be true. In fact, the compensation, far from offsetting the harm, will add to it. This flows from some basic properties of taxes on "bads", such as pollution.

In theory, these are the most efficient taxes, for they raise revenue not by distorting market choices but by correcting them. However, these taxes typically raise a great deal of revenue relative to the change they purport to make. This is because while the tax is collected on every unit, the overall fall in output of the bad is small. In the case of the ETS, each emission requires the purchase of a permit, but each year total emissions fall by only a few per cent. As a result, how a tax on a bad affects efficiency depends to a large extent on what is done with the revenues. When those revenues are wasted or used to distort markets, society is worse off, even if the harm done by the bad is reduced.

In the proposed ETS, there is the Swiss cheese of payments to polluters, aimed at buying the acquiescence of a business community that, for more than a century, has more than made up in rent-seeking prowess for all it lacks in insight and backbone. These payments will distort economic activity for decades to come. For example, firms that obtain free permits cannot sell them on exit from the industry. This encourages them to continue to operate even if their output could be more cheaply supplied by others.

The compensation to households is even worse. Those payments will be income-based, phasing out as income rises. This will increase marginal tax rates that are already high, with the lost compensation meaning that each additional dollar in pre-tax earning could translate into less than 60c of take-home pay. Combined with the increase in prices relative to wages caused by the ETS itself, the effect will be to reduce the incentive to work. If this departs from self-interest, it is not out of altruism but folly.

How great are the resulting costs? Unfortunately, none of the distortions arising from the compensation package are captured in the published Treasury modelling. As a result, that modelling provides little guidance as to the efficiency effects of the ETS.

This is not to suggest that a pure ETS, pristine in its underlying economic intent, is politically possible. What it does mean is that the comparison to be made is not between a textbook ETS and less perfect alternatives. Rather, it is between an ETS mired in sordid deals and other options that may be better or worse.

Were altruism to break out, goals such as reducing emissions might be achieved without give-aways and concessions. We know tragically little about how to produce some of life's most important goods, such as mutual respect, tolerance and a genuine interest in the welfare of others. Until that secret is unlocked, government interventions will be shaped by rent-seeking and will often impose costs far greater than its benefits.

Business's search for handouts has long been a primary factor in this respect. Environmental fundamentalism adds dangerous impetus to the pressures. As the ETS shows, our political system, under the guise of public beneficence, panders all too readily to these single-issue voters, while shifting costs around, including on to future generations, in ways that are as opaque and inequitable as they are inefficient.

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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28 December, 2009

More Warmist pseudo science: "CO2 unleashes more warming than thought"

They assume what they have to prove: That CO2 is the cause of warming. And they are supposed to be paleoclimatologists -- yet paleoclimate data indicate that CO2 rises FOLLOWED temperature rises -- so could not be the cause of the temperature rises. The study is no more than a grovel to the established faith. It is not science

Carbon dioxide indirectly causes up to 50 percent more global warming than originally thought, a finding that raises questions over targets for stabilising carbon emissions over the long term, a study said on Sunday. In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, British scientists said a tool commonly used in climate modelling may have badly underlooked the sensitivity of key natural processes to the warming caused by CO2. As a result, calculations for man-made global warming on the basis of carbon emissions may be underpitched by between 30 and 50 percent, they said.

The study was coincidentally published on the eve of a 12-day UN conference in Copenhagen aimed at providing a durable solution to the greenhouse-gas problem. The authors stressed that the more-than-expected warming would unfold over a matter of hundreds of years, rather than this century. The findings do not mean that the predictions for temperature rise by 2100, established notably by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), should be rewritten, they said. "We don't want to be overly alarmist here," said lead author Dan Lunt of Britain's University of Bristol. "But if people are thinking about stabilising CO2 at a certain atmospheric level, or putting together a treaty, or having a debate about what the levels should be, it really is important to know what the long-term consequences of those emissions are going to be, because CO2 hangs around for so long."

Lunt and colleagues decided to test a widely-used climate model on an epoch called the mid-Pliocene warm period, about three million years ago, when Earth heated up in response to natural processes. Cores drilled from ocean sediment provide a good idea about atmospheric carbon levels and temperature at the time. What the team found, though, was that the CO2 levels in the Pliocene -- around 400 parts per million (ppm) -- were not consistent with the warming, which was around three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than today.

The difference could only [ONLY??] be fully explained by the long-term loss of icesheets and and changes in vegetation, says the paper. These changes cause Earth's surface to absorb more solar radiation, which causes more warming, and so on.

When applied to what awaits us this century, the adjusted model suggests that nothing significantly different will happen compared to what has already been estimated. "In that time scale, we don't think the Greenland icesheet is going to melt completely or that East Antarctica will melt. That was what we saw in the model for three million years ago, but it is unlikely to take place in the next century," said Lunt.

Where it poses a dilemma, though, is how to fix a target for stabilising CO2 emissions so that future generations, centuries from now, are not hit by this long-term warming mechanism. A popular goal is to limit warming since pre-industrial times to 2 C (3.6 F), a figure that in mainstream climate models typically equates to about 450 ppm. At present, Earth's CO2 concentrations are at around 387 ppm.

Lunt says that today's level may already be too high in this context. "Our work says that at 400 parts per million, you are looking at more than two degrees C [3.6 F]. "To stabilise at two degrees C, you would have to aim for something like 380 ppm. But remember, this is the sort of level that applies if you want a long-term commitment that goes on for centuries, for generations to come."

SOURCE

Cap and Trade: An expensive Federal license will be required to sell your home

We encourage you to read the provisions of the Cap and Trade Bill that has passed the House of Representatives and being considered by the Senate. We are ready to join the next march on Washington! This Congress and whoever on their staffs that write this junk are truly out to destroy the middle class of the USA....

Thinking about selling your house - A look at H.R. 2454 (Cap and trade bill) This is unbelievable! Only the beginning from this administration! Home owners take note & tell your friends and relatives who are home owners!

Beginning 1 year after enactment of the Cap and Trade Act, you won't be able to sell your home unless you retrofit it to comply with the energy and water efficiency standards of this Act. H.R. 2454, the "Cap & Trade" bill passed by the House of Representatives, if also passed by the Senate, will be the largest tax increase any of us has ever experienced.

The Congressional Budget Office (supposedly non-partisan) estimates that in just a few years the average cost to every family of four will be $6,800 per year.

* No one is excluded. However, once the lower classes feel the pinch in their wallets, you can be sure these voters get a tax refund (even if they pay no taxes at all) to offset this new cost. Thus, you Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class America will have to pay even more since additional tax dollars will be needed to bail out everyone else.

But wait. This awful bill (that no one in Congress has actually read) has many more surprises in it. Probably the worst one is this:

* A year from now you won't be able to sell your house. Yes, you read that right. The caveat is (there always is a caveat) that if you have enough money to make required major upgrades to your home, then you can sell it. But, if not, then forget it. Even pre-fabricated homes ("mobile homes") are included.

* In effect, this bill prevents you from selling your home without the permission of the EPA administrator.

* To get this permission, you will have to have the energy efficiency of your home measured.

* Then the government will tell you what your new energy efficiency requirement is and you will be forced to make modifications to your home under the retrofit provisions of this Act to comply with the new energy and water efficiency requirements.

* Then you will have to get your home measured again and get a license (called a "label" in the Act) that must be posted on your property to show what your efficiency rating is; sort of like the Energy Star efficiency rating label on your refrigerator or air conditioner.

* If you don't get a high enough rating, you can't sell. And, the EPA administrator is authorized to raise the standards every year, even above the automatic energy efficiency increases built into the Act.

The EPA administrator, appointed by the President, will run the Cap & Trade program (AKA the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009") and is authorized to make any future changes to the regulations and standards he alone determines to be in the government's best interest. Requirements are set low initially so the bill will pass Congress; then the Administrator can set much tougher new standards every year.

* The Act itself contains annual required increases in energy efficiency for private and commercial residences and buildings.

* However, the EPA administrator can set higher standards at any time.

Details

Sect. 202: Building Retrofit Program mandates a national retrofit program to increase the energy efficiency of all existing homes across America .

Beginning 1 year after enactment of the Act, you won't be able to sell your home unless you retrofit it to comply with the energy and water efficiency standards of this Act.

You had better sell soon, because the standards will be raised each year and will be really hard (i.e., ex$pen$ive) to meet in a few years. Oh, goody! The Act allows the government to give you a grant of several thousand dollars to comply with the retrofit program requirements if you meet certain energy efficiency levels. But, wait, the State can set additional requirements on who qualifies to receive the grants.

You should expect requirements such as "can't have an income of more than $50K per year", "home selling price can't be more than $125K", or anything else to target the upper middle class (and that's YOU) and prevent them from qualifying for the grants. Most of us won't get a dime and will have to pay the entire cost of the retrofit out of our own pockets. More transfer of wealth, more "change you can believe in."

Sect. 204: Building Energy Performance Labeling Program establishes a labeling program that for each individual residence will identify the achieved energy efficiency performance for "at least 90 percent of the residential market within 5 years after the date of the enactment of this Act."

This means that within 5 years 90% of all residential homes in the U.S. must be measured and labeled. The EPA administrator will get $50M each year to enforce the labeling program. The Secretary of the Department of Energy will get an additional $20M each year to help enforce the labeling program. Some of this money will, of course, be spent on coming up with tougher standards each year.

Oh, the label will be like a license for your car. You will be required to post the label in a conspicuous location in your home and will not be allowed to sell your home without having this label. And, just like your car license, you will probably be required to get a new label every so often - maybe every year. But, the government estimates the cost of measuring the energy efficiency of your home should only cost about $200 each time.

Remember what they said about the auto smog inspections when they first started: that in California it would only cost $15. That was when the program started. Now the cost is about $50 for the inspection and certificate; a 333% increase. Expect the same from the home labeling program.

Sect. 304: Greater Energy Efficiency in Building Codes establishes new energy efficiency guidelines for the National Building Code and mandates at 304(d), Application of National Code to State and Local Jurisdictions, that 1 year after enactment of this Act, all state and local jurisdictions must adopt the National Building Code energy efficiency provisions or must obtain a certification from the federal government that their state and/or local codes have been brought into full compliance with the National Building Code energy efficiency standards.

SOURCE

Taxpayer Robbery Gate

Aside from ideologues, hydrocarbon haters, Gaia worshipers, profiteers and power-grabbing politicians, most of the sentient world now realizes that the hysteria over global warming disasters is based on dubious to fraudulent temperature data, analyses, models, reports and peer reviews.

Climate Research Unit emails, HARRY_READ_ME.txt computer memos, and blatant tampering with Australian, Russian, UK and US temperature data make the scandal impossible to ignore or explain away. They certainly helped Copenhagen descend into an expensive, carbon-emitting gabfest, and cause China and India to reject any deal that would force them to curtail their energy generation, economic growth and poverty reduction programs.

Senator Barbara Boxer is an exception. Not only does she ignore the obvious. She is doing her best to divert attention from the scandal, circle the alarmist wagons, cover up the fraud, obstruct justice – and ram through yet another legislative power grab. “This isn’t Climategate,” the California Democrat insists. “It’s email theft gate.” The problem isn’t the fraud; it’s that a hacker or whistleblower revealed the fraud.

Wrong, Senator. It’s not theft gate. It’s Taxpayer Robbery Gate. We, the taxpayers, We the people – paid for this “research.” We paid billions of dollars for it – and providing the data, computer codes and analytical methods is a condition of the employment and research grants for these scientists. The work belongs to us. We own it.

We the People, our elected representatives and our climate realist scientists have a right to examine this supposed evidence of planetary disaster, to ensure that it’s driven by science, and not ideology. That it’s complete, accurate – and honest. That it backs up the alarmist scientists’ call for draconian, life-altering restrictions on energy use. That the CRU Cabal did not alter, lose, ignore, toss or destroy “inconvenient” data and evidence that might get in the way of their agendas and predetermined results.

Not only were we stonewalled for years, while these UK and US scientists refused to divulge their data, computer codes and methodologies. Not only did the scientists who wrote these emails and did this bogus research refuse to let taxpayers, other scientists and even members of Congress (and Parliament) see their raw data and analyses. Not only did they prevent debate and replace peer review with a perverted system that allowed only a small network of like-minded colleagues to examine – and applaud – their work. They also excluded, denounced and vilified anyone who asked hard questions or challenged their actions. In short, we were robbed! They took our money, and defrauded us.

Even worse, the Taxpayer Robbery Gate scientists are working hand-in-glove to pressure the United States, Great Britain and world into spending trillions of dollars fighting “catastrophic manmade climate change” … slashing our energy use, living standards and employment base … enacting unaccountable global government … redistributing wealth and technology … restricting our liberties and civil rights … and keeping millions of families deprived of energy and in permanent destitution.

This is the same California Senator who berated an Air Force general for calling her Ma’am. Who treated scientist, physician and author Michael Crichton like a child molester, for daring to disagree with her on global warming and suggest that double-blind climate studies would guard against errors and fraud. Who displays an un-American intolerance for any witnesses before her committee who question her views.

The Boxer-White House effort makes the Watergate cover-up and obstruction of justice look like a juvenile offense. It’s paving the way for cap-tax-and-trade laws that would nationalize the entire US economy – by the same divisive, dictatorial elements that are nationalizing our banking and healthcare systems. They understand, even if the general populace still does not, that by controlling carbon they will control our lives. And if they need fraudulent science and Nixon-era tactics to achieve their goal, so be it.

Just imagine the Boxer, White House and media outcry and denunciations if these emails and fraudulent actions had involved oil companies and climate disaster “deniers.” But of course, if Boxer & Co. didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards.

“We’re honest. We have nothing to hide,” the accused scientists keep saying. That’s wonderful. We’re glad to hear that. But then why don’t they just come clean. Stop hiding everything. Open all their emails. Cooperate with investigators. Honor FOIA requests. Share their data and computer codes. Stop attacking scientists who disagree with them. Put all climate studies, for and against manmade global warming disaster claims, in professional journals – subject to real peer review. Debate their critics. In short, help clean up the mess they created. Or suffer the consequences.

This bogus science and cover-up operation is behind every US, EU and UN proposal to restrict and control our energy, economy, living standards and most fundamental liberties – in the name of preventing alleged global warming disasters.

We need to get to the bottom of this mess. We need a full and complete investigation, by an independent, incorruptible team of knowledgeable scientists, modelers, lawyers and statisticians. We need to start over on the global warming science and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – with honest scientists who do everything in the open. We need to bring honesty, transparency, robust debate and accountability back to the legislative and public policy process.

SOURCE

Defund Taxpayer Supported Science Fraud

Trofim Lysenko was Stalin’s favorite scientist because he liked his meshing of evolution and Marxism. Comrade Lysenko “proved” that there is no such thing as a gene. A lot of money was dumped into the “research” of this crackpot, and woe to those who declared that the emperor had no clothes. Lysenko’s gene-free view of science led to claims that wheat plants could produce rye. Any disagreement was labeled as “political sabotage” -- similar to the contemporary global warming “elite” who libel and banish those who do not worship at their altar.

It turns out that Lysenko’s spiritual children are the global warming alarmists in today’s scientific establishment. The recent dumping of their emails on the internet exposed the fact that their “research” was as invalid as Lysenko’s. As an aside, it seems that the emails were posted from a server in Tomsk, a Russian secret police city. If the Ruskies did the deed, the best guess is that this major oil producer was alarmed by the West’s efforts to commit economic suicide by forcing a cutback in petroleum consumption.

The emails were parked on computers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. But the scandal is not just a British booboo. America’s leading climate Casandras were also part of the scam.

Perhaps you have heard of the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph that supposedly proved the Industrial Revolution, which massively improved the lives of millions of people, was the cause of global warming? The “hockey stick” was a fraudulent representation of data which showed a straight line of constant temperatures with a sharp uptick at the end. That uptick is allegedly the time that industrialization supposedly started generating global warming. Well, it turns out the “hockey stick” graph was as valid as a three-dollar bill.

Those of us active in defending the right to keep and bear arms don’t find it surprising that when politicians fund research, you get political science, not real science. Dr. Arthur Kellerman is the Trofim Lysenko of research on guns and public health. He grabbed some of our money that was funneled by the drunken spenders in Congress through the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

In exchange for our hard-earned money, Kellerman came up with a study that “proved” that someone with a gun in their house is 43 times more likely to be killed than a disarmed householder. Kellerman’s “research” made a few questionable assumptions to ensure that his conclusions arrived at the proper outcome. For example, he stipulated that a successful self-defense use of a gun had to result in the death of a home invader. Cute. Real scientists such as Dr. Gary Kleck of Florida State University find that of the more than 2 million times a year that Americans use a gun in self-defense, they only fire their gun two to three percent of the time.

Kellerman’s methodology is equivalent to the “hockey stick” tricked up by Penn State’s Dr. Michael Mann. One way Mann “found” that global warming did not begin until the last 150 years was to overlook the centuries during the Middle Ages that were warmer than now (where they were growing vegetables in what is now Greenland’s tundra, for example). Like Kellerman, Mann simply ignored data that didn’t support his theory.

The chaps at East Anglia did the same thing that Kellerman did until he got caught. Their modus operandi is “don’t let the public see the data they paid for.” The British Lysenkos destroyed a lot of their data and otherwise refused to comply with British Freedom of Information laws. Kellerman withheld his data for years until Congress forced the Centers for Disease Control to tell him to cough it up.

Is it not time we cut off the looting of our pocketbooks with this kind of fraud?

SOURCE

"Earth-Friendly" Elements are Mined Destructively -- and are dependant on China

Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast. Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.

Western capitals have suddenly grown worried over China’s near monopoly, which gives it a potential stranglehold on technologies of the future. In Washington, Congress is fretting about the United States military’s dependence on Chinese rare earths, and has just ordered a study of potential alternatives.

Here in Guyun Village, a small community in southeastern China fringed by lush bamboo groves and banana trees, the environmental damage can be seen in the red-brown scars of barren clay that run down narrow valleys and the dead lands below, where emerald rice fields once grew. Miners scrape off the topsoil and shovel golden-flecked clay into dirt pits, using acids to extract the rare earths. The acids ultimately wash into streams and rivers, destroying rice paddies and fish farms and tainting water supplies.

On a recent rainy afternoon, Zeng Guohui, a 41-year-old laborer, walked to an abandoned mine where he used to shovel ore, and pointed out still-barren expanses of dirt and mud. The mine exhausted the local deposit of heavy rare earths in three years, but a decade after the mine closed, no one has tried to revive the downstream rice fields. Small mines producing heavy rare earths like dysprosium and terbium still operate on nearby hills. “There are constant protests because it damages the farmland — people are always demanding compensation,” Mr. Zeng said.

“In many places, the mining is abused,” said Wang Caifeng, the top rare-earths industry regulator at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China. “This has caused great harm to the ecology and environment.”

There are 17 rare-earth elements — some of which, despite the name, are not particularly rare — but two heavy rare earths, dysprosium and terbium, are in especially short supply, mainly because they have emerged as the miracle ingredients of green energy products. Tiny quantities of dysprosium can make magnets in electric motors lighter by 90 percent, while terbium can help cut the electricity usage of lights by 80 percent. Dysprosium prices have climbed nearly sevenfold since 2003, to $53 a pound. Terbium prices quadrupled from 2003 to 2008, peaking at $407 a pound, before slumping in the global economic crisis to $205 a pound.

China mines more than 99 percent of the world’s dysprosium and terbium. Most of China’s production comes from about 200 mines here in northern Guangdong and in neighboring Jiangxi Province. China is also the world’s dominant producer of lighter rare earth elements, valuable to a wide range of industries. But these are in less short supply, and the mining is more regulated.

Half the heavy rare earth mines have licenses and the other half are illegal, industry executives said. But even the legal mines, like the one where Mr. Zeng worked, often pose environmental hazards.

A close-knit group of mainland Chinese gangs with a capacity for murder dominates much of the mining and has ties to local officials, said Stephen G. Vickers, the former head of criminal intelligence for the Hong Kong police who is now the chief executive of International Risk, a global security company.

Mr. Zeng defended the industry, saying that he had cousins who owned rare-earth mines and were legitimate businessmen who paid compensation to farmers.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a draft plan last April to halt all exports of heavy rare earths, partly on environmental grounds and partly to force other countries to buy manufactured products from China. When the plan was reported on Sept. 1, Western governments and companies strongly objected and Ms. Wang announced on Sept. 3 that China would not halt exports and would revise its overall plan. But the ministry subsequently cut the annual export quota for all rare earths by 12 percent, the fourth steep cut in as many years.

Congress responded to the Chinese moves by ordering the Defense Department to conduct a comprehensive review, by April 1, of the American military’s dependence on imported rare earths for devices like night-vision gear and rangefinders.

Western users of heavy rare earths say that they have no way of figuring out what proportion of the minerals they buy from China comes from responsibly operated mines. Licensed and illegal mines alike sell to itinerant traders. They buy the valuable material with sacks of cash, then sell it to processing centers in and around Guangzhou that separate the rare earths from each other. Companies that buy these rare earths, including a few in Japan and the West, turn them into refined metal powders. “I don’t know if part of that feed, internal in China, came from an illegal mine and went in a legal separator,” said David Kennedy, the president of Great Western Technologies in Troy, Mich., which imports Chinese rare earths and turns them into powders that are sold worldwide.

Smuggling is another issue. Mr. Kennedy said that he bought only rare earths covered by Chinese export licenses. But up to half of China’s exports of heavy rare earths leave the country illegally, other industry executives said. Zhang Peichen, deputy director of the government-backed Baotou Rare Earth Research Institute, said that smugglers mix rare earths with steel and then export the steel composites, making the smuggling hard to detect. The process is eventually reversed, frequently in Japan, and the rare earths are recovered. Chinese customs officials have stepped up their scrutiny of steel exports to try to stop this trick, one trader said.

According to the Baotou institute, heavy rare-earth deposits in the hills here will be exhausted in 15 years. Companies want to expand production outside China, but most rare-earth deposits, unlike those in southern China, are accompanied by radioactive uranium and thorium that complicate mining.

Multinational corporations are starting to review their dependence on heavy rare earths. Toyota said that it bought auto parts that include rare earths, but did not participate in the purchases of materials by its suppliers. Osram, a large lighting manufacturer that is part of Siemens of Germany, said it used the lowest feasible amount of rare earths.

The biggest user of heavy rare earths in the years ahead could be large wind turbines, which need much lighter magnets for the five-ton generators at the top of ever-taller towers. Vestas, a Danish company that has become the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturer, said that prototypes for its next generation used dysprosium, and that the company was studying the sustainability of the supply. Goldwind, the biggest Chinese turbine maker, has switched from conventional magnets to rare-earth magnets.

Executives in the $1.3 billion rare-earths mining industry say that less environmentally damaging mining is needed, given the importance of their product for green energy technologies. Developers hope to open mines in Canada, South Africa and Australia, but all are years from large-scale production and will produce sizable quantities of light rare earths. Their output of heavy rare earths will most likely be snapped up to meet rising demand from the wind turbine industry.

“This industry wants to save the world,” said Nicholas Curtis, the executive chairman of the Lynas Corporation of Australia, in a speech to an industry gathering in Hong Kong in late November. “We can’t do it and leave a product that is glowing in the dark somewhere else, killing people.”

SOURCE

Australia's proposed Warmist laws: Grocery industry attacks fraudulent government cost estimates

THE grocery industry has sided with the Coalition's claim the Rudd government's emissions trading scheme will be a big tax.

Environment Minister Peter Garrett said yesterday that claims by the Australian Food and Grocery Council that food prices would be pushed up by 5 per cent overstated the reality by seven times. "The Treasury modelling found that in 2013, the average price impact of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on food bills will be around $68 a year -- less than 1 per cent of household food bills," Mr Garrett said.

However, the council chief executive Kate Carnell said this was not realistic, given the role of electricity in the processed food supply chain. "The average shopping basket is about $200 a week, so the government's modelling suggests a barely 0.5 per cent increase off the back of increases in electricity prices of 20 to 40 per cent. That is not even vaguely credible in a manufacturing industry," she said.

Her estimate of a 5 per cent rise was based on internal modelling by food companies. She said the modelling had been presented to Coles Myer and Woolworths. "They didn't suggest we were off the money," she said.

Mr Garrett said that throughout the debate on climate change, "various industries have paid for modelling designed to suit their lobbying purposes".

A spokesman noted that Woolworths had rejected the council's claim of a 5 per cent rise when it was first presented in August. The company had put out a release in response, declaring its support for theemissions trading scheme, and noting that the exclusion of agriculture would reduce what was only ever going to be a "slight price rise". Woolworths is a signatory of the Copenhagen Communique on Climate Change, a document developed by global corporations and endorsing ambitious emission reduction targets. [Woolworths is obsessively "Green" in many ways]

However, the grocery council's renewed attack on the scheme highlights the Coalition's support base among industries which believe they will be adversely affected. Ms Carnell said baking, dairy and tinned processed food, such as canned spaghetti, were the most energy intensive parts of the food industry.

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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27 December, 2009

The Climate Change Scam: A Concise Summary

In the wake of Climategate, common sense deniers like to say that there is lots of other evidence for global warming, in addition to that which has been debunked by the East Anglia whistleblower. Actually, however, the scientific evidence for AGW is remarkably weak. At Icecap, Lee Gerhard, geologist and reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sums up the key scientific evidence with admirable brevity:

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen. Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know:

• The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.

• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.

• Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.

• There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.

• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.

We also know a lot about Earth temperature changes:

• Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.

• The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.

• Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.

• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the "hockey stick" graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.

• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change.

Contrary to many public statements:

• Effects of temperature change are absolutely independent of the cause of the temperature change.

• Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows. Any increase in cost of damages by storms is a product of increasing population density in vulnerable areas such as along the shores and property value inflation, not due to any increase in frequency or severity of storms.

• Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes.

• The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records.

• Rate and magnitude of sea level changes observed during the last 100 years are within normal historical ranges. Current sea level rise is tiny and, at most, justifies a prediction of perhaps ten centimeters rise in this century.

The present climate debate is a classic conflict between data and computer programs. The computer programs are the source of concern over climate change and global warming, not the data. Data are measurements. Computer programs are artificial constructs.

Public announcements use a great deal of hyperbole and inflammatory language. For instance, the word "ever" is misused by media and in public pronouncements alike. It does not mean "in the last 20 years," or "the last 70 years." "Ever" means the last 4.5 billion years.

For example, some argue that the Arctic is melting, with the warmest-ever temperatures. One should ask, "How long is ever?" The answer is since 1979. And then ask, "Is it still warming?" The answer is unequivocally "No." Earth temperatures are cooling. Similarly, the word "unprecedented" cannot be legitimately used to describe any climate change in the last 8,000 years.

SOURCE

Historical background: IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (IPCC-AR-2, 1995, published in 1996)

IPCC assessment reports, and particularly their Summaries for Policymakers (SPM), are noted for their selective use of information and their bias to support the political goal of control of fossil fuels in order to fight an alleged anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Perhaps the most blatant example is IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (SAR), completed in 1995 and published in 1996. Its SPM contains the memorable phrase “the balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.” You may recall that this 1996 IPCC report played a key role in the political deliberations that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

This ambiguous phrase suggests a group of climate scientists, examining both human and natural influences on climate change, looking at published scientific research, and carefully weighing their decision. Nothing of the sort has ever happened. The IPCC has consistently ignored the major natural influences on climate change and has focused almost entirely on human causes, especially on GH gases and more especially on carbon dioxide, which is linked to industrial activities and therefore ‘bad’ almost by definition.

How then did the IPCC-SAR arrive at “balance of evidence”? It was the work of a then-relatively-junior scientist, Dr Benjamin D. Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), who has recently re-emerged as a major actor in ClimateGate. As a Convening Lead Author of a crucial IPCC chapter, Santer carefully removed any verbiage denying that human influences might be the major or almost exclusive cause of warming and substituted new language. There is no evidence that he ever consulted any of his fellow IPCC authors, nor do we know who instructed him to make these changes and later approved the text deletions and insertions that fundamentally transformed IPCC-SAR.

The event is described by Nature [381(1006):539] and in a 1996 WSJ article by the late Professor Frederick Seitz (See also my Science Editorial #2-09). Seitz compared the draft of IPCC Chapter 8 (Detection and Attribution) and the final printed text. He noted that, before printing, key phrases had been deleted from the draft that had earlier been approved by its several scientist-authors. For a full account of these text changes see my Hoover Essay in Public Policy No. 102 [2000] “Climate Policy: From Rio to Kyoto”

Exec Summary http://media.hoover.org/documents/epp_102a.pdf

Essay pdf http://media.hoover.org/documents/epp_102b.pdf

Essay Notes http://media.hoover.org/documents/epp_102c.pdf

Seitz wrote [WSJ, Aug 13, 1996]:

“Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations organization regarded by many as the best source of scientific information about the human impact on the earth's climate, released "The Science of Climate Change 1995," its first new report in five years. The report will surely be hailed as the latest and most authoritative statement on global warming. Policy makers and the press around the world will likely view the report as the basis for critical decisions on energy policy that would have an enormous impact on U.S. oil and gas prices and on the international economy.

This IPCC report, like all others, is held in such high regard largely because it has been peer-reviewed. That is, it has been read, discussed, modified and approved by an international body of experts. These scientists have laid their reputations on the line. But this report is not what it appears to be--it is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page. In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.

A comparison between the report approved by the contributing scientists and the published version reveals that key changes were made after the scientists had met and accepted what they thought was the final peer-reviewed version. The scientists were assuming that the IPCC would obey the IPCC Rules--a body of regulations that is supposed to govern the panel's actions. Nothing in the IPCC Rules permits anyone to change a scientific report after it has been accepted by the panel of scientific contributors and the full IPCC.

The participating scientists accepted "The Science of Climate Change" in Madrid last November; the full IPCC accepted it the following month in Rome. But more than 15 sections in Chapter 8 of the report--the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over climate--were changed or deleted after the scientists charged with examining this question had accepted the supposedly final text.

Few of these changes were merely cosmetic; nearly all worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general and on global warming in particular.

The following passages are examples of those included in the approved report but deleted from the supposedly peer-reviewed published version:

· "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases." "No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes." "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."

The reviewing scientists used this original language to keep themselves and the IPCC honest. I am in no position to know who made the major changes in Chapter 8; but the report's lead author, Benjamin D. Santer, must presumably take the major responsibility.

IPCC reports are often called the "consensus" view. If they lead to carbon taxes and restraints on economic growth, they will have a major and almost certainly destructive impact on the economies of the world. Whatever the intent was of those who made these significant changes, their effect is to deceive policy makers and the public into believing that the scientific evidence shows human activities are causing global warming.

If the IPCC is incapable of following its most basic procedures, it would be best to abandon the entire IPCC process, or at least that part that is concerned with the scientific evidence on climate change, and look for more reliable sources of advice to governments on this important question.”

But in addition to these text changes there are also two key graphs that were doctored in order to convey the impression that anthropogenic influences are dominant. Again, my Hoover essay gives the details.

1. According to all climate models, GH warming shows a characteristic ‘fingerprint’: a ‘hot spot’ in temperature trend values in the tropical upper troposphere. Michaels and Knappenberger [Nature 384 (1996):522-523] discovered that the IPCC’s claimed agreement with observations was spurious and obtained by selecting a convenient segment of the radiosonde temperature data and ignoring the rest.

2. Santer also claimed that the modeled and observed patterns of geographic surface temperatures were correlated, with the correlation coefficient increasing over time (suggesting to the reader that a growing human component gradually emerged from background noise). I found, however, that Santer had obtained this result by simply deleting from a published graph all the trend lines that disagreed with his desired outcome [Eos 80 (1999):372]. In fact, the original paper had Santer himself as lead author and did not appear in print until after the IPCC report was completed – in contravention of IPCC rules.

It is interesting that these several documented falsifications went largely unreported and had little impact on scientists and politicians, who went on to support the passage of the Kyoto Protocol -- in spite of the absence of any scientific support. A wide-ranging investigation of ClimateGate may yet serve to bring this IPCC triple-malfeasance to light.

SEPP SCIENCE EDITORIAL #41-2009 (Dec 26, 2009)

APS Appeals to Authority

There are no authorities in science. Experts, yes. Brilliant, well educated experts, yes. Mistaken, brilliant, well-educated experts, yes. (The only people who never make mistakes are those who never do anything.) But there are no authorities.

It is therefore distressing to find that an ad-hoc committee of the American Physical Society (APS) has asserted on no uncertain terms that authority rules.

The background is this. The Executive Committee of the APS issued a statement in November 2007 saying:

"Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes. "The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

"Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth's climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases."

The second and third lines of the first paragraph are reasonable statements of fact, and the only other reasonable part is "the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth's climate." Would that they had followed their own counsel, and even broadened the sentence to include natural effects on the climate.

About 100 APS members, including many Fellows and Distinguished Professors have signed a petition submitted by Robert H. Austin [1] challenging the APS 2007 Statement on Climate Change. One very good reason for issuing the challenge was not in the petition: the executive board has no business pretending that they speak for the membership. A second is that the board itself has no expertise in climate science.

The petition drive was initiated because the Statement is riddled with unproven assertions. The petition did not seek to discard the Statement, but instead to supplant it, using phrases like, "[M]easured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th - 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent." Later, "The APS supports an objective scientific effort to understand the effects of all processes-natural and human- on the Earth's climate and the biosphere's response to climate change."

Accordingly, the APS cobbled together an ad-hoc committee to consider the petition. The Chairman was Dan Kleppner (MIT) who has expertise in laser cooling and trapping [TEA January 2009, "Optical Molasses"], a topic that relates to precisely one component of climate. Robert Adair (Yale) has written some nice books about the physics of baseball. I am unacquainted with the others, David M. Ceperley (theoretical physics, U. of Illinois) Alexander L. Fetter (bosonic gases, Stanford), Helen R. Quinn (missing antimatter, CP violation, Stanford), and Ellen D. Williams (surface physics, U. of Maryland).

This is obviously a group of brilliant people-but where is the expertise in anything related to climatology? Anybody who has followed the global-warming discussions would know that skeptics challenge the data, methodology, and conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Accordingly, it would be reasonable to do some independent investigation of those topics. Apparently the ad-hoc committee did no such thing. I quote:

"To review these issues we have relied primarily on the 4th Assessment Report [AR4] of the International Panel on Climate Change, in particular its first volume: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon et al, Cambridge University Press]. (PSB). We have also turned to the NRC report Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, (National Research Council, 2006). (STR).

It may come as a surprise to the ad-hoc committee, but skeptics have also read those reports-thoroughly-and still disagree. (By its vocabulary, the NC's STR seems to have been lifted uncritically from AR4.) It adds no intellectual or scientific content to the two reports merely to read and parrot them. To put it fairly but bluntly, the ad-hoc committee of the APS said that the reports are true because the reports say they are true.

[1] Robert H. Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton University, Fellow APS, AAAS; APS Council: 1991-1994, 2007-2010, Member National Academy of Sciences, American Association of Arts and Sciences

More HERE

Cheap Natural Gas and Its Enemies

A vast reservoir of clean-burning natural gas could be available at reasonable cost in the coming years, freeing us from some of our dependence on imported energy. Yet there are those who consider such a development a threat.

A small group of billionaires (and mere multimillionaires), formed under the aegis of the Democracy Alliance, has amassed a great deal of political influence in America on behalf of the Democratic Party and Democratic politicians. Among the more important members of this "club" are George Soros and his liberal allies, Herbert and Marion Sandler. The latter two are billionaire beneficiaries of the mortgage bubble who timed their exit from the savings and loan industry before the bubble popped. They went on to fund (with George Soros) the Center for American Progress -- otherwise known as Obama's "idea factory."

One other venture that the Sandlers started is a media group called Pro Publica -- an outfit supposed to "engage in investigative journalism" and provide its findings to larger media outlets for greater impact. These "exposés" are provided at no cost to newspapers (and others), who, in an era of cutbacks, are happy to have good copy written by respected journalists. Free material is a no-brainer.

But why would the politically active Sandlers suddenly enter the media world? Perhaps it's because they realize the political and financial benefits that can flow from influencing the news. We may be seeing a sample of this type of handiwork now.

Among the first "exposés" Pro Publica undertook was an attack on energy companies for developing the Marcellus Shale, a vast natural gas reservoir stretching across several states. The "exposé" focused on putative environmental effects that might result from tapping these reserves. The technology used to unleash this natural gas from the shale in which it is trapped is called "fracking." Energy companies inject water, sand, and drilling fluids into the rock to "crack" it and release the natural gas. The potential for this technology is huge: America is a vast storehouse of this type of gas. Much of this is located not just in the Marcellus formation, but throughout the Rocky Mountain states. Also, the Barnett Shale region of Texas and the Bakken Shale region of North Dakota are rich with this type of natural gas.

Fracking is a proven technology. Energy experts are now predicting this technology will help free us from dependency on foreign sources of natural gas. The quantity is so vast that there is even potential for substituting natural gas for petroleum in cars and trucks. Natural gas is a clean-burning fuel that can replace coal in electric power plants. Already, the impact of this technology is beneficial. The prospect of this huge resource being tapped for years to come has brought down the price of natural gas, both in the spot market (where it is priced now) and in the futures market (where it is priced for future delivery). Indeed, the price has come down so much that the publicly held exploration and production companies that focus on natural gas have seen their share prices weaken.

Exxon Mobil was so entranced with the prospects of this technology that it has offered $31 billion dollars for XTO Energy, an energy company that has vast reserves of shale gas that can be tapped at a relatively small cost through fracking.

But there is one potential snag in the deal: Exxon can walk away if laws are passed that restrict the use of fracking. These laws would be a response to claims that fracking can harm the environment. Already, Representative Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), Chairman of the House Energy and Environmental Subcommittee (of the Energy and Commerce Committee -- the Russian-doll nature of Congressional committees and subcommittees can be mind-boggling) has called hearings into the Exxon-XTO deal. He will focus on the environmental concerns related to air pollution and water contamination (fracking uses water).

Now how coincidental is it that the Sandler-funded Pro Publica focuses on "fracking" as their inaugural topic? The Sandlers have no apparent experience in or knowledge of the energy industry. Why not have Pro Publica focus on other investigative topics -- say, the savings and loan crisis and the malefactors of great wealth who made out like the proverbial bandits? We know the answer to that question, but maybe we have an inkling of why Pro Publica has been pushing the "fracking" story, and why Democrats in Congress are going along with the media/political campaign.

George Soros is a pal and ally of the Sandlers. He also owns major stakes in energy companies that don't rely on shale gas for their revenue. These companies would be harmed and become less profitable if shale gas were released onto the market in the vast quantities industry experts believe are available through fracking. He also owns a major interest in InterOil, an energy company that has discovered a vast natural gas find in Papua New Guinea. The potential of that find is enormous and could lead to a very profitable export of liquefied natural gas to the American market.

However, the potential value of InterOil and Soros's other investments would suffer if the vast reserves of shale natural gas that lie below much of America are tapped. Furthermore, Soros operates through a hedge fund domiciled overseas. We cannot know who his investors are. They are rumored to include some of the world's petrocrats, who also have a vested interest in ensuring that America's own energy resources remain undeveloped so that we can send our billions to them...but of course, only Soros insiders know.

Did Soros foresee the problem that shale natural gas might pose? He is a legendary investor who sees risks and reward years before anyone else. That is how he made his billions. Did he ask the Sandlers to have Pro Publica focus on fracking? Is he now using his vast influence with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party (symbolized by Congressman Markey, also a pal of one of those petrocats, Hugo Chavez) to derail the potential of fracking? Will Soros use his influence with Barack Obama to command the Environmental Protection Agency to focus on the environmental consequences of fracking? Is he behind efforts by Senator Feingold (D-WI) to give the EPA more power over water resources throughout America?

Of course, this is all conjecture. After all, George Soros and company are not the type of people who leave e-mails on servers or fingerprints on their plans.

SOURCE

No Substitute For Fossil Fuels

Earlier this year, Congress approved a scheme to pour $80 billion — on top of the tens of billions already spent — into renewables. A government report released last week indicates the money will be wasted.

Renewable energy is the shiny gem that everyone wants but no one can have. Not even a president. Campaigning last year in Lansing, Mich., President Barack Obama said that it was his goal for the U.S. to generate 10% of its electric power from renewable sources by 2012 and 25% by 2025. But he cannot, by the force of will or executive order, change the laws of physics and economics.

America has long relied on fossil fuels to power its economy. Oil, natural gas and coal provide about 84% of the nation's energy. And for good reason. They are plentiful and typically easy to retrieve, and, consequently, cheap.

At the other end of the spectrum are renewable sources such as solar, wind, biomass and geothermal. They supply only about 4% of our energy, the remainder coming from hydro and nuclear power.

An axis of environmentalists and Democrats want to change this ratio, because, according to the usual complaint, we depend too heavily on the fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide. Trouble is, the market for renewables is poor. Few want to use the inefficient, unreliable and expensive sources. But that hasn't slowed the renewable energy campaign, which has succeeded in persuading the public that renewables are a sensible energy source and convincing Congress to fund supporters' daydreams.

The government can continue to "invest" in renewables, and the dreamers will keep using public money to find the magic formula. But little will change over the next 25 years. The federal Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Outlook says in 2035, demand for liquid fuels will increase by almost 10% over 2008 levels, natural gas by nearly 7% and coal by 12%. While use of renewables will increase as well — by 81%, including hydropower — they will still be unable to unseat our dominant energy source. Fossil fuels' share of consumption will fall by only six percentage points, from 84% to 78% by 2035. Renewables will provide about 8%.

It's clear that renewables, which have benefited from government subsidies far in excess of what fossil fuels have received, can't compete in today's market and won't be faring much better a quarter century from now, according to the government's own reckoning. It's just as clear that throwing taxpayers' dollars at renewables has produced little progress.

Spain provides perhaps the best lesson. The government there has spent $43 billion on solar energy projects, yet solar provides less than 1% of the country's electric power. It was a bad investment.

Chasing the wind is just as ineffective. When Congress temporarily eliminated wind power credits in 1999, 2001 and 2003, the number of new turbine projects fell sharply. The Texas Public Policy Foundation says that providing a modest level of wind power in that state would cost taxpayers at least $60 billion through 2025.

Biomass is also a poor substitute. It's both primitive — its sources are wood and trash — and an environmental nightmare, devouring in some cases as much as 10 times the land mass than needed to create a wind farm. And wind farms themselves are big land eaters.

Geothermal energy, considered "free" energy from the earth, is also a space eater that requires heavy capital investment, which is often hard to recoup. In California earlier this month, a geothermal project was abandoned, despite a $6 million grant from the Energy Department and roughly $30 million in venture capital. Geothermal has, as well, some environmental drawbacks. The day before the California project was closed, Swiss government officials permanently shut down a geothermal project in Basel because, the New York Times reports, "of the damaging earthquakes it produced in 2006 and 2007."

Maybe some of these renewables will one day be cheap and reliable. Technological advances will help. But today they are neither cheap nor reliable, and, based on the government's report, won't be for another generation. Until they can compete, the country has to rely on proven sources: fossil fuels and nuclear power. To force cutbacks on these so that renewables can get a bigger market share, and to continue to fund projects with public money, is foolish and irresponsible.

SOURCE

What’s Next? Fish for Fidos

Since the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Change Conference ended in complete failure, some on the eco-left are engaging in a bit of gallows humor including Head of Research for Oxfam Duncan Green who writes on his blog:

The BBC’s ‘Ethical Man’ (probably another cat lover) has done the numbers. Keeping a medium-sized dog has the same ecological impact as driving a 4.6 litre Land Cruiser (I assume that’s some kind of car) 10,000km a year.

Using a unit known as a ‘global hectare’ – a measure of the land area needed to support a certain ecological footprint, growing and manufacturing the 164kg of meat and 95kg of cereals a border collie or cocker spaniel eats every year takes about 0.84 gha. A bigger dog such as a German shepherd consumes even more – its carbon pawprint is more like 1.1 gha. That is more than the environmental footprint of the average Indian person, who uses just 0.8 gha of resources. If you are a multiple dog owner you are in even more trouble. Two big dogs are responsible for more carbon emissions than some British citizens.

By contrast a cat (hah!) needs 0.15 gha, a hamster 0.014 gha, and a canary 0.007 gha. The most carbon efficient pet is a goldfish. Its carbon finprint requires just 0.00034 gha. That’s over 3,000 fish per pooch.

So if you care about climate change, join my new campaign. Our key demand is a ‘fish for fidos’ scheme, loosely based on Cash for Clunkers, whereby people trade in their dogs in return for goldfish. It makes at least as much sense to promote this as a solution to climate change as human population control in poor countries.

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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26 December, 2009

Yet Another Human Climate Warming Effect In The Arctic – Aircraft Contrails

We have reported on the role of black carbon (soot) as a major non-greenhouse gas human climate forcing in the Arctic; e.g. see: "New Study On The Role Of Soot Within the Climate In The Higher Latitudes And On “Global Warming" -- where an article in Scientific American by David Biello based on a study by Charlie Zender, a climate physicist at the University of California, Irvine stated: ““…. on snow—even at concentrations below five parts per billion—such dark carbon triggers melting, and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming”.

Now we have yet another human climate forcing that was reported by Rex Dalton of Nature News in the article: "How aircraft emissions contribute to warming – Aviation contributes up to one-fifth of warming in some areas of the Arctic."

The article includes the text: "The first analysis of emissions from commercial airline flights shows that they are responsible for 4–8% of surface global warming since surface air temperature records began in 1850 — equivalent to a temperature increase of 0.03–0.06 °C overall. The analysis, by atmospheric scientists at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, also shows that in the Arctic, aircraft vapour trails produced 15–20% of warming.”

The photo in the news release has the caption: “Aircraft emissions could be having a dramatic effect on the warming of the Arctic”.

Clearly, as we summarized in our EOS article: "the human role in the climate system is much more than the human emissions of CO2 and a few other greenhouse gases."

SOURCE (See the original for links)

The Population Control Agenda Behind The Global Warming Movement: For The Environmental Extremists At Copenhagen Population Reduction Is The “Cheapest” Way To Reduce Carbon Emissions

For the environmental extremists attending the U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen, fighting global warming is not just about reducing carbon emissions or promoting alternative energy. Rather, public documents released by some of the most important organizations represented at Copenhagen reveal an absolute obsession with population control and a bizarre belief by environmental extremists that population reduction is the "cheapest" way to achieve a reduction in carbon emissions. You see, to many of those gathered in Copenhagen, the math is simple. Less people = less carbon emitters. In fact, a carbon offset initiative launched by the Optimum Population Trust even allows people to offset their "carbon footprint" by making online payments to support "family planning" in poor countries. In other words, you can now be forgiven for your carbon "sins" by paying for a baby on the other side of the world to be killed.

As bizarre as this may seem, it is actually happening. These new "population carbon offsets" are being offered by the Optimum Population Trust. The OPT calls itself "the leading think tank in the UK concerned with the impact of population growth on the environment". The truth is that the OPT does have some really big names associated with it. Just some of the world famous individuals involved in the Optimum Population Trust include Sir David Attenborough, Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and Dr. Jane Goodall. One of the stated goals of the OPT is to "advance the education of the public in issues relating to human population worldwide and its impact on environmental sustainability".

The OPT's website even includes a "Stop At Two" pledge which asks people to take "another green step towards environmental survival for all" by making the following pledge: "I'm going to try not to have more than two children"!

To show just how committed they are to the population control agenda, the OPT launched this population carbon offset scheme on December 3rd - just prior to the beginning of the Copenhagen climate change summit.

In his report on this new carbon offset initiative, John Vidal, the environment editor for the Guardian, noted that many of the participants at the Copenhagen summit could easily offset the carbon emissions that they would be producing during their travel to the conference by paying for one child in Africa to be killed.... Calculations based on the trust's figures show the 10 tonnes emitted by a return flight from London to Sydney would be offset by enabling the avoidance of one unwanted birth in a country such as Kenya.

In fact, the OPT has launched a dedicated website, http://www.popoffsets.com/, which allows people to offset their carbon footprint by making online payments to OPT which will go towards "family planning" around the world.

But not only that, earlier this year the Optimum Population Trust commissioned the London School of Economics to produce a report on population issues. The final report, entitled "Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost", says that the best way to reduce "greenhouse gases" is to have fewer people on earth.

This report by the London School of Economics actually performed a "cost-benefit analysis" on the various methods for reducing carbon emissions around the world, and they found that the "cheapest" way to reduce carbon emissions by far was to increase funding for "family planning".

But not only is population control the official agenda for organizations such as the OPT, it is also the official agenda of the United Nations. Very few people have talked about the U.N. Population Division policy brief from March 2009, but it is an absolutely explosive document. This shocking policy document openly asks how fertility decline in the least developed countries can be "accelerated" as quickly as possible.

The entire March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief can be read here. The policy brief begins with this shocking question.... "What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?" The report then proceeds to discuss how the earth's population is clearly unsustainable (especially in "developing" countries) and it considers what can be done to make sure that fewer babies are born in the "least developed" nations.

But as bad as that report was, the U.N. recently released a report on population that was even more shocking.

The United Nations Population Fund recently released its annual State of the World Population Report entitled "Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate". This stunning report goes farther than any U.N. report has ever gone before by unequivocally linking population growth with climate change. The report states that the only way a climate disaster can be avoided is to radically increase "family planning" services around the globe and to do whatever it takes to reduce worldwide fertility rates. In a statement accompanying the release of the report, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid stated that "rapid population growth and industrialization have led to a rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions. We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster."

The director of the UNFPA says that we are on the brink of disaster. A "climate change" disaster. And what is causing it? According to him, the biggest cause is population growth.

But the truth is that mankind is not even causing climate change. For those who do not yet understand this, we highly recommend that you read a comprehensive article that we posted about this issue on our sister site entitled "How To Save The Environment? Get Al Gore The Heck Away From It".

But even if you concede that humanity is causing climate change, the truth is that there is still no justification for reducing the population in order to combat it. But according to the authors of this new U.N. report, the link between population growth and climate change is undeniable....

More HERE

Good Science, Bad Politics

'Climategate' reveals a concerted effort to emphasize scientific results useful to a political agenda

By HANS VON STORCH (Von Storch is director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht, Germany, and a professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg)

"Frankly, he's an odd individual," a well-known climatologist wrote about me in a private e-mail to a friend in the U.K. On this, we agree—I am an odd individual, if by that we mean a climatologist whose e-mails would not document a contempt for such basic scientific virtues such as openness, falsifiability, replicability and independent review.

The colleague is a member of the CRU cartel—the influential network of researchers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and their colleagues in the U.S.—whose sanctum was exposed last month when a whistleblower or hacker published e-mails and documents from the CRU server on the Internet. What we can now see is a concerted effort to emphasize scientific results that are useful to a political agenda by blocking papers in the purportedly independent review process and skewing the assessments of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The effort has not been so successful, but trying was bad enough.

We—society and climate researchers—need to discuss now what constitutes "good science." Some think good science is a societal institution that produces results that serve an ideology. Take, for instance, the counsel that then-Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen gave to scientists at a climate change conference in March, as transcribed by Environmental Research Letters: "I would give you the piece of advice, not to provide us with too many moving targets, because it is already a very, very complicated process. And I need your assistance to push this process in the right direction, and in that respect, I need fixed targets and certain figures, and not too many considerations on uncertainty and risk and things like that."

I do not share that view. For me, good science means generating knowledge through a superior method, the scientific method. The merits of a scientifically constructed result do not depend on its utility for any politician's agenda. Indeed, the utility of my results is not my business, and the contextualization of my results should not depend on my personal preferences. It is up to democratic societies to decide how to use or not use my insights and explanations.

But it seems I am an odd individual for taking this position. As a scientist, I strive for independence from vested interests. I am in the pocket of neither Exxon nor Greenpeace, and for this I come under fire from both sides—the skeptics and the alarmists—who have fiercely opposing views but are otherwise siblings in their methods and contempt.

I am told that I should keep my mouth shut, that criticizing colleagues is not "tactful," and will damage the reputation of science—even when the CRU e-mails have already sunk that ship. I hear that the now-notorious "trick" is normal, that to "hide the decline" is just an unfortunate colloquialism. But we know by now that the activity described by these words was by no means innocent.

And what of the alarmists' kin, the skeptics? They say these words show that everything was a hoax—not just the historical temperature results in question, but also the warming documented by different groups using thermometer data. They conclude I must have been forced out of my position as chief editor of the journal Climate Research back in 2003 for my allegiance to science over politics. In fact, I left this post on my own, with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper—a skeptic's paper, at that. But in 2006 I urged a CRU scientist to make his data public for critics and, yes, skeptics—as documented in one of the stolen e-mails.

We need to repair the damage, and heal the public's new mistrust of the workings of climate science. True, we are in a difficult situation: Climate science is in an abnormal situation, hounded by manifest political and economic interests of different sorts, and the uncertainties in our work are large and unavoidable. Then this abnormal brew forms, with scientists acting as politicians and politicians posturing as scientists.

But the core of the knowledge about man-made climate change is simple and hard to contest. Elevated greenhouse gas concentrations have led, and will continue to lead, to changing weather conditions (climate), in particular to warmer temperatures and changing precipitation. Such a change causes stress for societies and ecosystems. More emissions mean more stress, fewer emissions less. Thus, when society wants to limit this stress, it has to make sure that fewer greenhouse gases enter and remain in the atmosphere. Societies have decided they want to limit the stress so that temperatures rise no further than the politically produced number of two degrees Centigrade, relative to pre-industrial conditions. Fine. For this goal, it does not matter whether the sea level will rise 50 cm or 150 cm by the end of this century, or if hurricanes do or do not become significantly more severe. These are relevant scientific issues, with great importance for the design of adaptive strategies—but not particularly relevant to the political task of coming to an effective agreement on reducing emissions.

What we need to do is open the process. Data must be accessible to adversaries; joint efforts are needed to agree on test procedures to validate, once again, already broadly accepted insights. The authors of the damaging e-mails would be wise to stand back from positions as reviewers and participants in the IPCC process. The journals Nature and Science must review their quality-control measures and selection criteria for papers.

So please, you media, you NGOs, and you Mr. Rasmussen: You have the knowledge you need for the political decisions. Let us sit in our studies and discuss the remaining issues, the sea level, the ice sheets, the hurricanes, and other issues. Give us time to consider, to test alternative hypotheses, to falsify theories—to do our work without worrying if the results support your causes. Science is a valuable and unique societal institution, but not if it is consumed by short-sighted political goals.

But, admittedly, I am an odd individual, one who loves København—when it is not the "Hopenhagen" for thousands of COP-15 activists, lobbyists, business leaders, and politicians.

SOURCE

From Nicaea to Copenhagen

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. It became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.

Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics, the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and "institutes of climate change" across academia. It's where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

Many of the landmines in the CRU e-mails tend to buttress longstanding charges by skeptics (yours truly included) that statistical chicanery by professor Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the 20th century, a historical fact that makes nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the 20th century. Here's Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an e-mail Sept. 22, 1999: "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. ... I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago."

Now, in the fall of 1999, the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important "Summary for Policymakers" — essentially a press release, one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into nonexistence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in 20th-century temperatures.

Briffa's reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-20th-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a "problem and a potential distraction/detraction." So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa's reconstruction. The CRU's Jones happily applauded Mann's deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over "Mike's Nature trick."

Other landmines include e-mails from Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On Oct. 14, he wrote to the CRU's Tom Wigley: "How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!"

Only a few weeks before Copenhagen, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that "we are no where close to knowing" how the supposedly proven AGW warming model might actually work, and that therefore geoengineering — such as carbon mitigation — is "hopeless."

This admission edges close to acknowledgment of a huge core problem: that "greenhouse" theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body without compensation. Greenhouse gases in the cold upper atmosphere cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. (Readers interested in the science can read Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner's "Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics," updated in January 2009.)

Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly across the past eight years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance.

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention — geoengineering — could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it's a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it's a terrible tragedy.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

SOURCE

Warmism now in the textbooks

The change from pure science to political science has invaded college atmospheric science classes. A few months ago one of us and another co-author lamented the intrusion of politics into the science debate concerning climate change (see "Global-warming politics," The Washington Times, April 22). Now, much of the same politically motivated "science" is appearing in the newest editions of university textbooks.

Hopefully, the students exposed to these instances of revisionist history will have knowledgeable professors and the personal critical evaluation skills to see through the deception. Sadly, though, many in academia accept textbook information as gospel truth, and future generations of students will be indoctrinated through exposure to "fancy," rather than fact.

A specific example from a popular climatology textbook is most egregious. The example involves the infamous "hockey-stick" graph, supposedly portraying global temperature fluctuations over the past 1,000 years, with the long, relatively flat handle for the first 900 years and the sharply upward-angled head of the stick for the last 100 years. This temperature graph became the showcase of the Summary for Policymakers, Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2001. The diagram was instrumental in convincing many in government to buy into the idea that human-related emissions of carbon dioxide were causing an unprecedented increase in global temperature.

But there was a problem. The "hockey stick" contradicted the time-tested, nonpolitical temperature trend graphs generated by climatology professionals dating back to the science's beginning.

In the early days of climatology, it was anybody's guess how global temperatures fluctuated in the distant past. So, the pioneers of the field coupled recent temperature measurements with "proxy" data (such as historic written records, tree ring growth patterns, polar ice core analysis and river bed sediment studies) to estimate temperatures back more than 1,000 years. Data gleaned by numerous atmospheric scientists revealed a distinct medieval warm period from roughly 950 to 1250 A.D., which they labeled the Little Climatic Optimum. The scientists also documented a significant cooling period between 1645 and 1715, called the Maunder Minimum because of the apparent lack of sunspots. Climatologists believed these temperature extremes in the historic record, and climatology textbooks displayed a temperature trend chart showing such extremes.

Alas, these dramatic events were missing from the hockey-stick graph. How could that be? The investigative work of a couple of dedicated scientists demonstrated how the raw proxy data was analyzed and subjected to questionable statistical manipulation to create the hockey stick. By 2005, the graph had been exposed as invalid, and it is now disavowed by climate scientists. Even the IPCC stripped the graph from subsequent publications of its organizational reports.

Despite the rejection of this particular piece of tenuous science, the new editorial team tasked with producing the 2010 edition of the particular textbook in question has resurrected the hockey-stick graph. In this newest edition, the hockey-stick graph replaces the original temperature trend graph that remains the field's accepted and verified representation of temperature changes over the past 1,000 years.

Scientific theory should not be discarded because it conflicts with a popular political agenda, or because it is desirable for someone in a position of power to advance their personal agenda. And it is unconscionable for educators to present refuted data and theories to students as the prevailing state of the science. You may be entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Working with reality produces better results than relying on fantasy.

The truth can be hard to see when a lie is hidden in plain sight. The hockey-stick graph and the rewriting of climate history may be honest misrepresentation. However, the cumulative effect of invalid theories and manipulated data is damaging to the science of climatology in particular and the practice of science in general.

Moreover, the damage goes beyond science. Classroom science eventually makes its way into the community as educated citizens are asked to consider and vote on consequential programs such as carbon emission "cap-and-trade" legislation. The entire rationale for restricting carbon dioxide emissions is a concern that carbon dioxide emissions will impact global temperatures. But, if temperature trends and other data are manipulated to influence voters and the decision-makers to a particular outcome, our planet is indeed in trouble.

SOURCE

Let's face it: Australia's ETS is dead

By financial journalist Terry McCrann

TONY Abbott almost singlehandedly put the Emissions Trading Scheme on life support. Now Copenhagen has killed it stone cold, motherless dead. Climate change minister Penny Wong, who is too emotionally committed to it to accept that truth, will carry it into the new year.

A responsible prime minister would give the ETS a decent Christian burial. And it has to be a formal state funeral. A Treasury that was not so absolutely compromised by a bizarre combination of religious zeal, institutional pomposity and basic incompetence would be gently but persistently and emphatically advising the government that the ETS was no longer a good idea. If indeed it ever was.

While an argument could have been mounted before Copenhagen for moving towards an ETS, that is not possible after the chaos in doleful Hamlet's hometown that produced the "China solution".

There will be no global agreement to cut emissions of carbon dioxide. Formally, it was "Chindia" -- China and India. But China is the elephant in that pairing. And in any event, nothing that President Barack Obama might have promised in Copenhagen was ever going to be endorsed by the US Senate, as it has to be.

While we wouldn't have quite seen a replay of the 95-0 vote that rejected the Kyoto Treaty in 1997, there is zero prospect of the US adopting either binding CO2 emission targets or a cap-and-trade policy, their name for an ETS.

So we have a situation post-Copenhagen, where the two countries that between them are responsible for nearly half of all global emissions of CO2 are not committed to cutting emissions, far less binding targets. And more pointedly, they won't have an ETS.

It is the latter that makes any move by Australia to have an ETS even more senseless than before. We would become ground zero for every spiv and main-chancer that would have an emission permit or million in their pocket to sell us. Indeed, even "respectable" Wall Streeters would be -- correction, are -- salivating over the next big thing.

Two things simply cannot be denied about Copenhagen. Australia locking in its ETS wouldn't have made the slightest difference to the outcome. Not even Kevin Rudd is delusional enough to believe that if only he and Penny had been able to arrive with their bit of paper, China would have agreed to destroy its future.

Secondly, but for Abbott's aggression -- helped in no small part by Malcolm Turnbull's overweening arrogance -- we would have been locked into a bad policy and a disastrous process, which is even worse. The ETS.

It's time the business community woke up from its dozy slumber, with the doziest of all being the Business Council. This is something they should be able to understand. Copenhagen has shattered any prospect of a local ETS delivering the "certainty" they crave. Now it would only be the certainty of the grave. That of carbon export and permit volatility and rip-offs.

That's the export of jobs, businesses and investment to other places that had no price on carbon dioxide. Those "other places" are essentially the rest of the world except for Europe -- which doesn't matter and in any event has totally debased the permits system, just as it has cynically approached the whole sorry climate saga, starting with Kyoto.

Our ETS could only work as part of a properly regulated and audited global system in which at the very minimum the US, the second-biggest emitter, participated. Even then it would still have been extremely volatile, open to manipulation and outright rorting: the very antithesis of certainty. Without the US, an Australian ETS is an invitation to chaos.

Are our Australian Federal "Carbon Cops" Police going to control the permits that would fall from the sky like confetti from Africa, Asia and Russia? Do you sincerely believe that ASIC, Australia's Simply Ineffective (corporate) Cop, is a match for the masters of Wall St manipulation? They couldn't nail Jodee Rich and Andrew Forrest. But never fear, they'll be right on top of global real-time trading in complex permit derivatives.

It remains extraordinary that any government could embark on a policy that directly attacked its own country. The "production" of carbon dioxide is the absolute foundation of not just our economy but our modern society. It is an ironic comment on the crass stupidity of both our politicians and our bureaucrats that if they'd actually succeeded at Copenhagen, they would have succeeded in destroying our future export growth.

The issue of emission cuts has to be cut free from the dead parrot, the ETS. That leaves one or both of Abbott's direct action emission cuts or a carbon tax. If we believe we have to join hands with the rest of the world in a mutual suicide pact, let us at least choose the more efficient method.

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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25 December, 2009

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL WHO COME BY HERE!

My survey of current news and current commentary has been a bit abbreviated today due to Christmas celebrations but I think that there is still some interesting stuff below:

The Copenhagen Crash and Global Cooling

If you're wondering why the national political news focus has been on health care and not on the aftermath of the historic conference in Copenhagen, Denmark which ended less than a week ago...it's because nothing productive happened there. Even worse, more lies have been exposed from the IPCC report, more agendas uncovered about leaders at the United Nations and the "accord" that was supposedly reached at the 11th hour in Denmark is already falling apart. In addition, the planet continues to cool and we'll likely see that cooling accelerate in the coming years. I touch on these topics and more in a podcast interview you can listen to here.

Here are just a few of the stories developing since the Copenhagen conference, which cost the United States millions of dollars in travel and accommodations alone and left a huge carbon footprint from 1,200 limousines and hundreds of private jets.

First, it was fitting that President Obama returned to Washington D.C. in a snowstorm. However, aside from Air Force One, he brought little else back from the conference. Here is a story from the UK Guardian.

The accord is already in trouble and may fall apart soon. Just days after the conference ended we have this story from the Financial Times. For what it's worth, there wasn't much of an agreement anyway since it was all about the United States and other "wealthy" (and cleaner) countries sending billions of dollars to developing (third-world and more polluted) nations. That's it, nothing more. There was no science discussed, no sharing of ideas from both sides and certainly no acknowledgement of reality from the leaders of more than 100 countries. Instead, there was an agreement to transfer our hard-earned money to other countries and to meet again in the near future. I want to personally thank every leader involved for this fantastic failure...the best possible outcome of this conference.

But wait, there is much more. It turns out that the head of the UN's Climate Change panel has some conflicts of interest and stands to make millions of dollars because of the global warming fraud. Here's the story from the UK Telegraph. Apparently, Dr Rajendra Pachauri has vested interests in a number of companies that benefit greatly from carbon trading...and this is the supposedly unbiased head of a panel on climate change, which I have known all along was a fraud consisting of hand-picked scientists (only 50 to 60, not the 2,500 or more you heard about) who support the global warming (GW) religion.

And it continues with revelations that Wikipedia has (or had) an administrator with a warming bias who routinely edited articles to his world view and rejected editing by those who know the truth. You can read more about this huge Wikipedia scam here and here. There is an additional update here.

I also just read a lengthy but interesting article about the abuse of the "peer-review" process in which climate skeptics had research put on the shelf for months before being approved while research that supported global warming was fast-tracked for publication. Read that scary account here.

One journalist who was a big GW believer has now seen the light and discusses it in this article. Remember, all of the above have happened since the end of the Copenhagen conference, and we're not finished yet.

A new study indicates that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and Cosmic Rays may be the real culprit in any warming and cooling we have seen in recent decades, and you can read that here. No matter what the cause or causes, one thing is clear. We really don't know how or why our climate changes the way it does. This is something that scientists are still trying to figure out...but nothing is "settled" except the fact that we just don't know.

You think that's enough? Well...there's more. The State Climatologist in Texas found a HUGE error in the IPCC's latest report concerning the melting of glaciers. You have been hearing that most glaciers will disappear by 2050, right? Did you know that the original report listed a date that was 200 to 300 years later and that the study quoted by the IPCC was never peer-reviewed? The shocking details here.

Remember that arctic ice which was supposedly melting away? Well, we know Al Gore got that horribly wrong, but since I am highlighting new articles just in the past few days as the Copenhagen conference collapsed, I won't go over that again, but I need to let you know that a new study shows that we had much less ice thousands of years ago and what we're seeing now (ice levels have returned to normal levels) is nothing unusual in earth's history. Read the highlights of that breaking news here.

Finally, the sick scare tactics of the GW alarmists and worshipers continue with this from a company that should fold up its tent and go home...Build-A-Bear. Check out their pathetic attempt to frighten children here.

The party is over for Al Gore and all the corrupt scientists involved in Climate Gate, the IPCC, the Hadley Climatic Research Unit, and in some departments at NASA, NOAA / NCDC and Penn State University. This may be the Merriam-Webster definition of Failure, but I think we can shorten that to: Copenhagen!

SOURCE

Disappearing sunspots may signal end to global warming

Oh, where, oh where have all the sunspots gone? The fiery orange ball overhead has quieted during the past three years. Quiet in the sense that there have been very few sunspots – those black blotches on the sun’s surface caused by intense magnetic activity. But just how quiet is quiet? Well, so far during the recent solar minimum (a period of low activity during the sun’s typical 11-year solar cycle), we’ve seen 183 sun-spotless days in 2007, 266 in 2008 and 259 in 2009 (as of Dec. 16 2009). Earth hasn’t witnessed a similar three-year stretch (1911, 192, 1913) of sun-spotless days since the early 1900s.

The blank sun has not gone unnoticed by the experts. "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

So why are sunspots under the spotlight? Because, according to solar scientists, their declining numbers, significant even by solar-minimum standards, could be the harbinger of colder temperatures ahead. If so, it won’t be the first time the earth shivered as sunspots numbers declined. In the 17th century, the sun experienced a sunspot drought, dubbed the Maunder Minimum, which lasted 70 years – from 1645 until 1715. Astronomers at the time counted only a few dozen sunspots per year, thousands fewer than usual.

As sunspots vanished temperatures fell. The River Thames in London froze, sea ice was reported along the coasts of southeast England, and ice floes blocked many harbors. Agricultural production nose-dived as growing seasons grew shorter, leading to lower crop yields, food shortages and famine.

Canadian author and National Post environmental columnist Lawrence Solomon describes the period: “Glaciers advanced rapidly in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and North America, making vast tracts of land uninhabitable. The Arctic pack ice extended so far south that several reports describe Eskimos landing their kayaks in Scotland. Finland’s population fell by one-third, Iceland’s by half, the Viking colonies in Greenland [yes, it was once green, with forests and pastureland] were abandoned altogether, as were many Inuit communities. The cold in North America spread so far south that, in the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, enabling people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.”

Is mankind headed for another cool-down or big freeze? Based on recent scientific findings, it might be a possibility. A Danish research team led by Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, has discovered a strong correlation between sunspot activity, galactic cosmic rays and variations in the earth’s climate, a theory (supported by experiments) that challenges the prevailing concept of human-induced climate change, popularly known as anthropogenic global warming.

Henrik and his team have discovered that increased solar activity in the form of sunspots, flares and other disturbances generate solar winds that strengthen the magnetic fields surrounding earth, creating a bubble that suppresses cosmic ray penetration, inhibiting cloud formation and causing warming.

Conversely, when solar activity diminishes, the protective magnetic bubble weakens and more cosmic rays penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. The high-energy particles serve as host nuclei around which water vapor can condense and form droplets, resulting in more cloud cover and precipitation. Temperatures begin to fall as the clouds reflect more sunlight back into space.

“Galactic cosmic rays carry with them radiation from other parts of our galaxy,” says Ed Smith, NASA’s Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere [earth’s protective bubble] will diminish in size and strength. If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system.”

If Svensmark and other climate scientists are correct, the decline in solar activity may be responsible for the recent fall in global temperatures. In 1998, global temperatures at the earth’s surface began leveling off and have actually declined slightly since 2001, despite an increase in CO2 levels, calling into question the accuracy of climate models that predict catastrophic global warming.

The decade-long cool-down is clearly visible in satellite temperature measurements, which are widely viewed as more accurate than land-based temperatures readings, according to Dr. David Evans, who was a researcher with the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1995 to 2005. Such readings, he says, are often skewed by what is called the “urban heat island” effect, which articially elevates temperatures.

“NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling,” says Evans. “The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.”

As Svensmark observes: “In fact, global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the [global warming] projections of future climate are unreliable.”

If what Svensmark and other researchers say is true, it is very likely that when the heated debate between global warmers and global-warming skeptics finally ends, cooler heads may ultimately prevail.

SOURCE

Why the Global Warming Hoax?

The major unanswered question are the motives behind all the lies, exaggerations, cover-ups, and suppression of opposing views. The scientists’ actions can be understood in part because of all the fame, luxury meetings, and millions of dollars of government money they received to promote their agenda—namely, (1) that the world was warming and (2) that human beings were responsible. If sunspots were responsible for the warming cycles, then there would be little justification for government money to subsidize the scientists to find ways to stop it.

Similarly, many big corporations saw billions in government “carbon” subsidies for windmills, research, and such, so they supported the theories as well. They could sucker the taxpayers while making for themselves an image of concerned citizens helping to “save the world.” (See Climate Money–$79 Billion So Far and Trillions To Come from the Science and Public Policy Institute.) For comparison, think also of the way many businesses supported the lies about ethanol saving energy–with billions of dollars in subsidies for ethanol production. The whole hype was another hoax. Historians one day will write in awe of America’s unbelievable waste of money and resources during the Bush-Obama years.

The crazy big-media hype was mainly for the same old reason newsboys used to shout “FIRE!” or “MURDER!” The “end of the world” is always a good topic to pique readers’ and TV viewers’ interest. Circulation and money drive big media. Everyone would pay to learn about coming disasters. Remember how, a little while ago, they were telling us that more and stronger hurricanes would be coming every year.

However, there were some real brains with other motives for promoting the lies. Extreme environmentalism has become the new socialism, an excuse for dictatorial rule to limit consumption and justify highly centralized government power “to save humanity.” Below is a list of quotes from leading leftists. There were brains behind it all, the old socialists looking for a new justification for government takeover of the economy, for a “planned” economy which they would plan and manage. Man-made global warming became the substitute agenda for Leftists who had been discredited by Reaganomics and the collapse of communism.

The following quotes were first circulated by Ralph Voss, editor of the Unterrified Democrat published in Linn, Mo. They well explain the agenda. They provide much hard evidence about the hoax.

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” Timothy Wirth, President of the U.N. Foundation and former Democratic U.S. senator from Colorado.

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” Christine Stewart, former Canadian minister of the environment who led that country’s delegation to Kyoto.

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” John Holdren (Obama’s Science Czar) wrote in a 1973 book he co-authored with Paul R. Ehrlch and Anne H. Ehrlich. “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.” See also John Holdren and the Anti-Growth Malthusians for interesting links and quotations.

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton professor and member of Environmental Defense Fund.

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” Maurice Strong, a native of Canada considered by some to be one of the leading environmentalists in the world. He is an official at the U.N.

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” Paul Watson, co-founder of the environmental group Greenpeace.

“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with its full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” Dave Foreman, U.S. environmentalist and co-founder of radical environmental group Earth First.

SOURCE

Don’t confuse environmentalism with science

Truth is not determined by majority vote. Any talk of a "consensus" in science is best not taken as the final word. As Somerset Maugham once put it, "If 40 million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie."

Climatology is a science, not to be confused with environmentalism. The heart of environmentalism is not to be found in the natural sciences. It is ideology and nothing more. That is why it ends in "-ism."

Environmentalism is itself not a monolith, but its dominant strand is distinctly statist in character. As such, its main nemesis is the science of economics, not climatology or any of the other natural sciences.

A sound understanding of economics is all that is needed to discredit the emerging interventionist social agenda of the environmental movement. The methods that they recommend cannot deliver the results that they promise.

It is common to hear accusations of "junk science" hurled against environmentalists, particularly those touting the dangers of climate change.

These accusations might be well taken and, if so, would be sufficient to derail the CO2 "Cap and Trade" juggernaut. But the real objective of the environmental movement appears to be in the social realm. That means the control of people, with environmental controls serving merely as the instrument.

We have had considerable domestic and international experience with governments that micromanage the lives of their residents. The more governments interfere in our lives, the more things go wrong. The people are poorer, less healthy and less able to adapt to the vagaries of nature and of other men. If ever a science were settled, this would be it.

It should be obvious that each individual's actions affect the rest of us to some greater or lesser extent. The same is true with respect to the environment around us. Complex interactions present us with great regularities, as well as many unexpected events. It has always been so; and we can expect it to remain so.

The environmental activists of Copenhagen need to mature a bit and come to understand that we have less to fear from CO2 than from bad ideas.

Instead of sucking the oxygen out of the debate, they should admit that they know far less than their claims would suggest. They need to learn humility, an essential ingredient in anyone who would speak of science.

We need not con ourselves that we know enough to predict the Earth's temperature 100, or even 20 years from now. Even less certain should we be that we have the power to control it.

What we can control is our readiness to face whatever comes. But to follow the advice of the Copenhagen activists, or those who voted for the Waxman-Markey bill, is the path of fools.

It is the path of weakness and dissipation.

We know better, and we have done better. It is free societies that have done the best in meeting economic and environmental challenges. It is free societies that have led the way in developing new energy sources and making them incrementally more efficient.

If we, as consumers, really feel that burning coal for energy is too dirty, we don't even need to put a tax on it. All we need to do is stop wasting money on subsidies to low-yield, low-reliability sources, such as wind and solar and remove the irrational and crushing regulatory burdens from more promising energy sources, such as nuclear. We don't need to subsidize any energy source.

The technology has already advanced sufficiently that private competition to serve customers would result in a systematic replacement of old energy sources by cheaper and cleaner sources.

If governments would stick to their job of protecting us from aggression, rather than blocking us from progress, we would now be wealthier, healthier, safer and cleaner.

SOURCE

A green, sustainable future that doesn't work

In the high desert of central Arizona, more than five thousand miles from the global-warming summit in Copenhagen, sits an aging and unfinished vision of the enviro-friendly, sustainable life that some climate change activists foresee for us all. It's called Arcosanti, created in 1970 by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri, and it is the prototype of a green community of the future. The only problem is, it doesn't work. And it never did.

Arcosanti is an "arcology," a word Soleri coined by combining "architecture" and "ecology." In Soleri's vision, an arcology is a self-contained city in which hundreds of thousands of people live in a small space, their needs met by green energy sources, recycled and sustainable products, and carefully planned social and cultural events. There are -- God forbid -- no cars.

In a Soleri design, masses of people are packed into the small-footprint arcology so that the land surrounding the community can remain pristine, unpolluted by human touch. It was an idea much in fashion a few decades back. "As urban architecture, Arcosanti is probably the most important experiment undertaken in our lifetime," wrote Newsweek in 1976.

Soleri designed models of many futuristic communities, guided by his intense dislike of U.S.-style development. "The 'American Dream,' as physically embodied in the single-family house," he once wrote, "has to be scrapped and reinvented in terms which are coherent with the human and biospheric reality." Despite his many designs, the only community Soleri ever attempted to build is here, on the edge of the Agua Fria River canyon about 70 miles north of Phoenix.

Arcosanti was never intended as a full-scale arcology. Rather, it was to be a small model, eventually becoming home to 5,000 people. It would include a common area, composed of an open-air theater, shops, offices, and parks under a soaring, 25-story half-dome. The half-dome would have a hivelike structure in which residents would live in little honeycomb-style apartments. The whole thing would take up no more than 25 acres, surrounded by thousands of acres of empty Arizona landscape.

But today, after nearly 40 years, just a few buildings of the common space have been built, and those are gray, leaky and crumbling. On the chilly December day when I visited recently, there were maybe 50 people there, and there are never, even in good weather, more than 100 or 150 inhabitants, mostly students who come to learn about Soleri's radical environmental and architectural ideas.

In one of the common areas, there were piles of empty cardboard boxes, an empty Mountain Dew carton, a couple of children's bikes with training wheels, and pools of water from the previous day's rain. When I took a look at the "Sky Suite," a spare and minimally furnished apartment with a lovely view of the canyon, the man staying there had put a towel under the door in an attempt to keep the water out. It didn't work; on the floor was a soaked towel and a little pool of water. Everyone was cold, despite Arcosanti's vaunted solar heating system.

There's no half-dome, no honeycomb of apartments, no nothing. Soleri never had enough money to build his dream, and the project never made sense to any investors who could have made it happen. Instead, Arcosanti supports itself largely from the sale of bronze and ceramic wind chimes, made here, and from the student tuition. It's enough to keep a bare-bones operation going, but nowhere near what would be needed to construct an arcology, even a tiny, prototype arcology.

Soleri is still around, now 90 years old. His reputation faded as Arcosanti struggled, but now that has changed. "As the world wakes up to the grim realities of climate change, peak oil and sustainability," a recent account in the Guardian observes, "[Soleri] is now something of a guru: in demand on the lecture circuit and, recently, offering sage advice in Leonardo DiCaprio's 'How can we save the world?' documentary The 11th Hour."

Soleri's vision -- of Earth's population confined to high-density communities -- is shared by some of the more extreme elements of the environmental movement now gathered in Copenhagen. There's even a new, Soleri-inspired project starting in Abu Dhabi. But it's hard to imagine many Americans ever living in an arcology, except perhaps at gunpoint. If you want to see why, just pay a visit to Arcosanti.

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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24 December, 2009

Yet another gaping hole in the Warmist story

Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major culprits for global warming

Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth's ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper. In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

"My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century," Lu said. "Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming."

His conclusions are based on observations that from 1950 up to now, the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact. "Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000," Lu said. "Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate."

In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.

As well, there is no solid evidence that the global warming from 1950 to 2000 was due to CO2. Instead, Lu notes, it was probably due to CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays. And from 1850 to 1950, the recorded CO2 level increased significantly because of the industrial revolution, while the global temperature kept nearly constant or only rose by about 0.1 C.

In previously published work, Lu demonstrated that an observed cyclic hole in the ozone layer provided proof of a new ozone depletion theory involving cosmic rays, which was developed by Lu and his former co-workers at Rutgers University and the Université de Sherbrooke. In the past, it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth's ozone layer is depleted due to the sun's ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere.

The depletion theory says cosmic rays, rather than the sun's UV light, play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone. In his study, published in Physical Review Letters, Lu analyzed reliable cosmic ray and ozone data in the period of 1980-2007, which cover two full 11-year solar cycles.

In his latest paper, Lu further proves the cosmic-ray-driven ozone depletion theory by showing a large number of data from laboratory and satellite observations. One reviewer wrote: "These are very strong facts and it appears that they have largely been ignored in the past when modelling the Antarctic ozone loss."

New observations of the effects of CFCs and cosmic rays on ozone loss and global warming/cooling could be important to the Earth and humans in the 21st century. "It certainly deserves close attention," Lu wrote in his paper, entitled Cosmic-Ray-Driven Electron-Induced Reactions of Halogenated Molecules Adsorbed on Ice Surfaces: Implications for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change.

SOURCE

Journal abstract follows:

Cosmic-ray-driven electron-induced reactions of halogenated molecules adsorbed on ice surfaces: Implications for atmospheric ozone depletion

By Qing-Bin Lu

The cosmic-ray driven electron-induced reaction of halogenated molecules adsorbed on ice surfaces has been proposed as a new mechanism for the formation of the polar ozone hole. Here, experimental findings of dissociative electron transfer reactions of halogenated molecules on ice surfaces in electron-stimulated desorption, electron trapping and femtosecond time-resolved laser spectroscopic measurements are reviewed. It is followed by a review of the evidence from recent satellite observations of this new mechanism for the Antarctic ozone hole, and all other possible physical mechanisms are discussed. Moreover, new observations of the 11 year cyclic variations of both polar ozone loss and stratospheric cooling and the seasonal variations of CFCs and CH4 in the polar stratosphere are presented, and quantitative predictions of the Antarctic ozone hole in the future are given. Finally, new observation of the effects of CFCs and cosmic-ray driven ozone depletion on global climate change is also presented and discussed.

The guesswork that passed for climate science at CRU

They made stuff up willy nilly

In Part 1 of this series we learned that Ian "Harry" Harris was creating a different data set for the 2006-2009 temperature readings that excluded Alpha values, those values that pose a risk for rejecting the global warming trend. In short, eliminating problematic values.

In Part 2 of this series we learned that Ian "Harry" Harris claimed Dr. Tim Osborne was using the wrong temperature values when performing comparisons with temperature anomaly values. Also, when doing compiling the precipitation results, Harry commented Tim's program for doing the compilation was "Not good enough for the bloody Sun!!!" and caused several errors. Harry was able to get the precipitation results to compile with Tim's program, but only after replacing questionable values with a default filler value of "-9999". Harry also indicated that he and Tim's results differed by at 5%.

In Part 3 of this series we learned that the precipitation temperature database file dates were altered, but not actually updated according to the modfied dates. In short, the final version of the precipitation files compiled by Dr. Tim Osborne could not have been using the latest precipitation database (as Harry said). The synthetic Cloud precipitation values were missing from 1996-2001 and lost by a collegue of Harry's by the name of Mark. To accomadate, Harry found a Fortran program created by Mark to convert Sunshine temperature values (those temperatures with no Clouds) to "Psuedo Cloud" temperature values. In short, convert many of the Sunshine temperature values to more Cloud-like temperatures (which often run warmer). Not finding a good database with precipitation values (because everything was undocumented), Harry just picked one he thought would be a good Candidate for the compilation of precipitation results and forming a standard grid model for those results.

In Part 4 of this series we learned there were 6003 missing precipitation temperature values out of a possible 15,942 temperature readings. The missing 6003 values were not recovered. Also, there were over 200 weather stations with a temperature reading of '0' (North Africa and the West coast of South America) for their cells. According to Harry, there was a '0' reading for each of these 200+ stations throughout the whole temperature series from 1901-1996, thus making Phil's comment illogical in that a '0' meant the climate has not changed since the last reading. If this were the case, North Africa and the West coast of South America would not have had a temperature change ever since recording of the temps!

Moving on through this data file (see part 1 for brief explanation of this file), Harry notes this is the worst project he's ever attempted: "Wahey! It's halfway through April and I'm still working on it. This surely is the worst project I've ever attempted. Eeeek."

Adding US temperatures, more lost data and "no time to follow-up on everything"

The next step was to merge the US normailzed temperature readings into the new database Harry generated in the previous sections. After doing a merge, Harry says there were 210 duplicate and non-missing lines found (comment 26): "What's worse - there are STILL duplicate non-missing lines, 210 of them. The first example is this:"

Not much Harry could do other than to write it off as "one of those things": "I just do not have the time to follow up everything. We'll have to take 210 year repetitions as 'one of those things'." Harry, after-all, was able to remove allot of the duplicates, yet there were still several.

Longitude and Latitude readings off by a factor of 10

Many, if not most, of the US station locations were off by a factor of 10 in terms of their longitude and latitude coordinates. Writing yet another small program (proglet) to do some patching and correct the values (thus causing an even larger margin for error), Harry finds he is able to correct the normal temperature longitude and latitude stations (having those readings) but the stations' longitudes and latitudes with precipitation readings were still amiss.

Australia stations missing 800 out of 1000 values

Now that the US was indexed into the new database, Harry attempts split this database up into two new databases, one holding all the minimum temperatures (t-min) and one holding all the maximum temperatures (t-max). Before proceeding, Australia needs to be factored into the mix. After receiving two files with Australia's temps from a colleague named "Dave L.", Harry notes that these two files for Australia have over 800 stations out of a 1000 with no values. In order to rectify this, Harry sets out to write yet another program to find matches in earlier database and use those values in place of the missing values: "But what about the others?! There are close to 1000 incoming stations in the bulletins, must every one be identified in this way?!! Oh God. There's nothing for it - I'll have to write a prog to find matches for the incoming Australian bulletin stations in the main databases."

SOURCE (See the original for links)

On scepticism about climate change

Some letter excerpts in "The Economist"

Passion is the root problem in what you term “the modern argument over climate change” (“A heated debate”, November 28th). You state, for instance, that the “majority of the world’s climate scientists have convinced themselves” that human activity is the cause of climate change. I know of no poll that confirms this, but your choice of words is telling. In science, our interpretations of nature are based on observation, experiment and evidence, not self-conviction.

Those of us who are dismissed, often derided, as sceptics have waited a long time for the chicanery behind the global-warming movement to come to light. But we should not blame scientists—however unprincipled—nor UN organisations, nor national governments. The true culprits are the latter-day Nostradamuses who, under their icons of cuddly pandas and polar bears, have misused science to stoke fear, guilt and a craving for atonement in the minds of the public. Governments have been browbeaten to respond to these catastrophists, and some scientists, dependent on public money, have fashioned their behaviour accordingly.

Nikolay Semyonov, a Soviet scientist and Nobel prize winner in chemistry, wrote that: “There is nothing more dangerous than blind passion in science. This is a direct path to unjustified self-confidence, to loss of self-criticalness, to scientific fanaticism, to false science. Given support from someone in power, it can lead to suppression of true science and, since science is now a matter of state importance, to inflicting great injury on the country.”

Semyonov was referring to the ruthless manipulation of Soviet science by Trofim Lysenko and other opportunists. In a similar vein, it is time we recognise that we are becoming prey to a new fanaticism, a religious fervour that runs contrary to rational society.

You proclaimed that a scientist’s effort to “hide the decline” was “not sinister” (“Mail-strom”, November 28th). What is it, then, when a scientist formulates a hypothesis that growth patterns follow temperature, and tests the hypothesis against data only to find that growth patterns do not follow temperature at all for 30% of the data and only partially for the rest? Do you then conclude, as would any sane person, that your hypothesis is not valid? Or do you instead take the road followed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and conclude that data which undermine your favoured hypothesis are not valid, and throw out the data? If this is “not sinister”, then it is flabbergastingly stupid.

SOURCE

Solar Shutdown: Feinstein to Block Energy Projects

There's no such thing as a happy Greenie

We need to transform to a new, clean energy economy but we can’t build solar panels in the Mojave Desert if California Senator Diane Feinstein has anything to say about it:

Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.

But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy.

Developers of the projects have already postponed several proposals or abandoned them entirely. The California agency charged with planning a renewable energy transmission grid has rerouted proposed power lines to avoid the monument.”

Years of subsidies and tax credits haven’t helped wind and solar projects compete with more reliable sources of energy. Solar power supplies less than one percent of the country’s electricity demand; wind does slightly better. That’s not necessarily a red flag to stop building more, but it is indicative of how far we have to go and how costly it would be “transform to a clean energy economy” as President Obama said in his remarks to the delegation at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen.

If the private businesses deem it in their interest to pursue renewable energy projects (without federal help), they should be able to do so. But where these projects may be the most economically viable, such as the Mojave Dessert, the government is shutting them down.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., environmentalist and a partner with a venture capital firm invested in solar, told the New York Times, “This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Senator Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review.”

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, the renewable projects have either been thwarted or put on hold because of self-interested in politicians. Cape Wind spent millions in litigation costs, delays and regulatory hurdles in attempting to build a 130-turbine offshore project in the Nantucket Sound that Senator Ted Kennedy long opposed despite the turbines being barely visible from the horizon.

The Mojave Dessert situation is slightly different because Sen. Feinstein says, “the lands were purchased with nearly $45 million in private funds and $18 million in federal funds and donated to the federal government for the purpose of conservation, and that commitment must be upheld. Period.” But if an environmental group wants to preserve these lands, they shouldn’t rely on the taxpayer to fund the purchase nor fund the conservation of the land. In fact, many environmental groups do just that. Private property rights make it possible for the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited to protect habitat by purchasing land and establishing wildlife preserves.’

Nantucket and the Mojave Dessert aren’t unique. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Project No Project shows that the “Not in My Back Yard” crowd is everywhere. It’s not just anti-oil and anti-coal, it’s anti-energy and anti-development.

Even with subsidies, tax breaks and mandates, shifting our energy away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy will be a prohibitively costly and difficult task. Senator Feinstein is about to make it that much more difficult.

SOURCE

Environmental attention-seeker said just 15 months ago: Global warming means no snow or cold in DC

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who flies around on private planes so as to tell larger numbers of people how they must live their lives in order to save the planet, wrote a column last year on the lack of winter weather in Washington, D.C.

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today's anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don't own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington's C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy.

Having shoveled my walk five times in the midst of this past weekend's extreme cold and blizzard, I think perhaps RFK, Jr. should leave weather analysis to the meteorologists instead of trying to attribute every global phenomenon to anthropogenic climate change.

SOURCE

Fun! Do Electric Cars Cause Cancer?

The world of electric cars is a rah-rah world. There are numerous economic arguments against their widespread adoption, but that hasn’t stopped government officials, environmental activists, and most importantly automakers from moving aggressively toward electrified transportation. On balance, ramped-up EV development is a good thing: Over the next 40 years, our existing oil supplies are going to run out, according to a set of more-or-less accepted geological assumptions generally referred to as "peak oil." The concept, which was first articulated in the 1950s by a petroleum scientist named M. King Hubbert, doesn’t say, Bam! We’re suddenly going to have no more oil in 2020 or whatever. Rather, the theory says that petroleum discovery and production will at some point peak, after which it will follow a declining rather than ascending curve. Depending on whom you talk to, peak oil has already happened, is happening, will happen soon, or is a few decades off. But there’s agreement that it will take place.

So we need to switch over to alternative forms of transportation, or at least prepare ourselves to do so. Because transportation consumes a major amount of oil, bringing EVs into the picture in a big way is seen as a solution, with the added benefit of eliminating tailpipe emissions and at least stabilizing global warming (although the burning of coal for energy also has to go away). Obviously, however, an EV running off an electric motor with a battery that can weigh 600 lbs. raises the health-hazard issue: Does the electromagnetic field generated by the car pose a threat to drivers and passengers?

This question has been bandied around the blogosphere, and answered as best as can be, given limited research, much of which is extrapolated from EMF studies of the fields generated by power lines, cell phones, household appliances, and so on. The National Cancer Institute says that there are indications that EMFs can cause certain cancers, but the research is far from conclusive. EVs and hybrids haven’t been in the market long enough for studies to be done, although automakers have tested their vehicles for EMFs (conventional cars as well as hybrids and EVs), and found them to be within accepted limits.

Unfortunately, nothing in this area is completely benign. Autos pose risk simply because they go fast and there are lots of them, enough for 40,000 people to die in accidents every year. But we trade that off for the convenience of personal mobility. EVs will solve peak oil and some emissions problems, but they will also stress the power-generating grid, initially run, in a matter of speaking, mostly on coal, and create thousands of new, rolling EMFs. Ultimately, the only way to completely dodge these problems is to remake society according to radical efficiency principles: live in compact communities (as large as megacities or as small as rural villages, but no gray-area exurbs in between), generate power from sources such as wind and sun (which means much less power than what we currently get from fossil fuels), abandon personal mobility, limit freight shipping, etc., etc., etc.

That’s right, it’s not going to happen. So even in the seemingly unlikely event that EVs and hybrids do cause cancer, we’ll have to tolerate that risk, if we’re going to move forward rather than back.

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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23 December, 2009

"The CRU webserver is gradually being rebuilt"

(CRU being the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, Holy of Holies in the temple of Warmism)

Or so we learn from their minimalist webite. One consequence of the "rebuilding" is that the picture of Phil Jones that I had at the top of this blog is now no longer hosted by the UEA. Amusing. Is the "rebuild" designed to distance the UEA from him? You decide. I have however rehosted the picture so it still appears in its accustomed place here. There is an even tinier picture of him hosted by the UEA here though.

I note that they have still got their amusing graphic of global warming up though. See above. Ignore the arbitrary horizontal line they have put through it, however, and you see that it in fact shows a steady process of warming from 1910 onwards -- not from the late 20th century as they usually claim and as their graphic purports to show. The warming began, in other words, long BEFORE the era of mass industrialization, so cannot be attributed to it. So even after all their "adjustments" to the raw data, it is still only chartmanship (deceptive graphics) that allows them to make their case! All the huge political activity over global warming depends on deceptively presented graphics!

There is actually a second deception in the graphic as well. And perhaps a worse one. Because mere tenths of one degree Celsius are graphed (in another classic tactic of chartmanship), the slope of the graph is vastly exaggerated. You would be unlikely to notice it, but from top to bottom the temperature rise over the entire century totals only about one degree Celsius. If the room you are in now warmed up by that tiny amount, you wouldn't notice it! The change is trivial in reality but made to look huge in the graph. If units of just one degree (which is probably what most people would expect) had been used, the graph would show a flat line instead of a rising one!

Climate Change: Hoax of the Century

Carbon dioxide, a benign, life giving molecule has been miscast by a world wide political movement to be an environmental hazard in what will soon be discovered to be the hoax of the century. This molecule, CO2 is vital to all life on earth. It is exhaled by all living things and even comes from nocturnal emissions by plants. It forms the bubbles in your soda, wine and beer. Standard air has 370 parts per million (PPM) of carbon dioxide of which 93% comes from “natural sources” which are all beyond human control. These sources include decomposition of organic matter, exhaling by living things and volcanic vents, which is by far the greatest atmospheric source.

The climate change hoax is based on faulty science from two things. First, hoaxers assume that ice layers give information on temperature like tree rings do with rainfall. Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, from thousands of years of deposits, are measured for CO2 content of the air at the time the snow layer was deposited and thickness of the ice layers. The thickness of these snow fall layers is then assumed to be an indication of global temperature. There are numerous errors in this assumption, which have been presented in a more technical analysis, but for now pretend that this evidence is true. The hoaxers then show graphs over time with a near perfect match of CO2 levels and snow thickness and by implication the earth’s temperature.

The second bit of “proof” of human caused global warming is the Global Climate Model which is available to all at Wikipedia. By their own admission, this model was developed for SHORT RANGE weather forecasting and we all know how accurate that is. This formula, though not given on this web site, has a hundred parameters each with its own coefficient and exponent. By manipulating these numbers the hoaxers are able to “prove” that an increase of CO2 will raise world temperature.

The whole concept of “greenhouse gas” is absurd. The earth receives a full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation by day (Duh!) but by night only a portion, the infrared stored on the surface, is radiated back into space. There is no gaseous one way control of this energy. The atmospheric gasses can absorb or reflect some of this energy but can not increase the incoming amount. Carbon dioxide is a three-atom molecule that cannot possibly determine that all radiation should be allowed in by day, but none can escape by night. Consider the insulation or radiant barrier in your home’s attic. The radiant barrier bounces solar radiant energy away from your living space in the summer and bounces radiant energy trying to exit back into your house in the winter. Insulation does the same thing with convective energy, keeping heat out in summer and heat in during the winter.

The atmosphere behaves the same way. To claim that any gas, whether CO2 or methane or any other, can simultaneously allow energy in by day but block energy exit by night is absurd. To think that the hoaxers claim of a change in 10 parts per million of CO2 molecules could effect the earths climate in any way is insane. IF CO2 had these miracle properties then all double pane glass panels would be filled with CO2 and the magic molecules would work like little Venetian blinds allowing full heat by day and no loss at night. In fact, greenhouse glass does not block radiant heat loss at night, but only a fraction of convective heat loss that is trapped by the physical glass barrier.

If you Goggle the Last Glacial Maximum you will see maps of the thousands of square miles of ice and the ocean levels over 400 ft below current levels. All of this ice melted in 100 years. There is no evidence that humans caused this so we must look for the force that could cause this change. The earth does not rotate in a circle around the sun but rather in an ellipse, varying our distance between 91 and 93 million miles. Because of this we receive a 4% change in solar radiation every year but this has no effect on earth’s climate.

Our seasons are the result of the planets 23 degree axis of rotation. Our summer occurs when we are farthest from the sun. The southern hemisphere has summer when the planet is closest to the sun. There is little difference in latitude by latitude comparisons of these opposite globe seasons. Based on this fact, even a 10% change in solar activity would have negligible effect. A ten percent change is beyond any observed solar cycle. The earth’s crust is a 10 to 20 miles thick layer of solid rock that floats on 7000 miles of molten rock. Gravity cannot provide the pressure necessary to melt this much rock. What causes this rock to melt and the earth to have massive periodic climate changes is the irregular decay of uranium in our earth’s core.

A more technical analysis of this earth warming force has been presented to members of Congress and for scientific peer review but for this presentation just consider two elements that result from this uranium decay. Radon, the radioactive gas we are warned about constantly can only occur from nuclear reaction and has a half-life of 3.8 days. A one pound container of Radon would only weigh 1/8 of an ounce in just 23 days. The fact that Radon is a health hazard is proof of its daily production. Helium, another inert element, is eight times lighter than air and all helium released on earth is lost to outer space in just minutes. Helium does not come from the break down of any compound but only from nuclear reaction. It is occurs in natural gas deposits in just a few locations on earth.

The geo-nuclear energy that melts our core and creates these gases is also the greatest variable in the earth’s climate. This geo-nuclear energy is at present beyond human control or understanding. It is most convenient for the hoaxers to neglect this greatest variable in climate change from their defective climate model. The graphic match of CO2 and ice core layer thickness (earth’s temperature ?) is also matched by the amount of ash in the layer. When volcanic energy is released it produces large amounts of heat….and ash…. and CO2. Blaming CO2 for climate change is like saying ashes cause fire. CO2 is the effect of heat and not the cause.

Our democracy depends on informed consent. Informed should not be limited to lies told by a political movement. When the full scope of the scientific errors involved in this hoax are exposed everyone will realize this has been the greatest folly since the flat earth theory. We deserve a real debate. In this case, the truth will be very inconvenient.

SOURCE

Think the World Isn't Coming to an End? It's All in Your Head

The Green/Left always turn to sneers and contempt when the facts do not suit them

In the latest example of "accountability journalism," the Associated Press holds "ordinary folks" accountable for lacking "a sense of urgency" about global warming. The wire service puts us all on the couch:

It's hard for people to get excited about a threat that seems far away in space and time, psychologists say. "It's not in people's faces," said psychologist Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. "It is in the media, but not in their everyday experience. That's quite a different thing." . . .

Janet Swim, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University, recalls a conversation from last month with a taxi driver in Cape Town, South Africa. "I don't think there's climate change," the driver said. "If there was climate change and sea levels were rising, I would have seen it."

He was going by his own experience, said Swim, who studies how people feel about global warming. "People experience weather on a day-to-day basis, and that's how they think about climate change," she said. In fact, it takes careful analysis of lots of data from lots of places to tease out the signal of global warming, she noted.

Right, careful analysis involving "tricks" to "hide the decline," and efforts to suppress alternative hypotheses and to ensure that "lots of data from lots of places" are never made public so that the conclusions can be checked by others. The AP story makes no mention whatever of the recent revelations of corruption by climate scientists--revelations that suggest ordinary people are a lot saner, or maybe just smarter, than the journalists who suggest they're crazy.

Radical cooling not predicted

Autumn ended with a brutal storm in the American Northeast, but the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Friday that not everyone saw it coming:

"This could wind up being a historic event," said Louis Uccellini, a winter-storm expert who is director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, outside Washington. . . .

"It looks really impressive," said Henry Margusity, a meteorologist with Accu-Weather Inc., the commercial service in State College, Pa. . . .

The latest forecasts are starkly different from the outlooks earlier in the week when the computer models that meteorologists use to forecast the weather had the storm passing out to sea, with minimal impact on Philadelphia.

Uccellini said that some of the early model runs had heavy snow in Delaware and nothing in Philadelphia. However, subsequent runs have brought the snows farther north and west. "The computer models play their own games," said Margusity, "but the reality is they always come farther north."

If only they had a trick to hide the decline, we could have enjoyed a nice balmy weekend.

SOURCE

Green dream is just alien

By Andrew Bolt

MOST people will date the death of the great global warming scare not from the Copenhagen fiasco - boring! - but from Avatar. It won't be the world's most expensive warmist conference but the world's most expensive movie that will stick in most memories as the precise point at which the green faith started to shrivel from sheer stupidity. Avatar, in fact, is the warmist dream filmed in 3D. Staring through your glasses at James Cameron's spectacular $400 million creation, you can finally see where this global warming cult was going. And you can see, too, everything that will now slowly pull it back to earth.

December 2009. Note it down. The beginning of the end, even as Avatar becomes possibly the biggest-grossing film in history. Cameron, whose last colossal hit was Titanic, has created a virtual new planet called Pandora, on which humans 150 years from now have formed a small settlement. They are there to mine a mineral so rare that it's called Unobtainium (groan), of which the greatest deposit sits right under the great sacred tree of the planet's dominant species, humanoid blue aliens called Na'vi.

If Tim Flannery, Al Gore and all the other Copenhagen delegates could at least agree to design a new kind of people, they'd wind up with something much like these 3m-tall gracelings. The Na'vi live in trees, at one with nature. They worship Mother Earth and, like Gaians today, talk meaningfully of "a network of energy that flows through all living things". They drink water that's pooled in giant leaves, and chant around a tree that whispers of their ancestors. They are also unusually non-sexist for a forest tribe, with the women just as free as men to hunt and choose their spouse. Naturally, like the most fashionable of Hollywood stars, they are also neo-Buddhist reincarnationists, who believe "all energy is borrowed and some day you have to give it back". And, of course, the Na'vi reject all technology that's more advanced than a bow and arrow, for "the wealth of the world is all around us".

Sent to talk dollars and sense into these blue New Agers and move them out of the way of the bulldozers is a former Marine, Jake Sully (played by Australian Sam Worthington), who drives the body of a Na'vi avatar to better gain their trust. (WARNING: Spoiler alert! Don't read on if you plan to see the movie.) But meeting such perfect beings, living such low-emission green lives, Sully realises instead how vile his own species is. Humans, he angrily declares, have already wrecked their own planet through their greed.

"There is no green" on their "dying world" because "they have killed their mother". Now we land-raping humans plan to wreck Pandora, too, with our "shock-and-awe" bombings, our war on "terror" and our genocidal plans to destroy the Na'vi and steal their lands.

So complete is Cameron's disgust with humans - and so convinced he is that his audience shares it - that he's made film history: he's created the first mass-market movie about a war between aliens and humans in which we're actually meant to barrack for the aliens.

(WARNING: Second spoiler alert!) In fact, so vomitous are humans that Sully, the hero, not only chooses to fight on the side of the aliens but to actually become an alien, too. He rejects not just humans but his own humanity.

All of this preaching comes straight from what's left of Cameron's heart after five marriages and a professional reputation of on-set meanness. Avatar, he's said, tackles "our impact on the natural environment, wherever we go strip mining and putting up shopping malls", and it warns "we're going to find out the hard way if we don't wise up and start seeking a life that's in balance with the natural cycle on life on earth".

Mind you, most of this will be just wallpaper to the film's real audience, which won't be greenies in Rasta beanies or wearing save-the-whale T-shirts made in Guatemala. No, scoffing their popcorn as they wait impatiently for the inevitable big-bang shoot-'em-up after a fairground tour of some cool new planet will be the usual bag-laden crowd from the Christmas-choked megaplex - the kind of bug-eyed folk who thrill most to what Cameron claims to condemn, from the hi-tech to the militaristic.

Still, you can hardly blame them if they don't buy the message that Cameron's selling, since he doesn't really buy it himself. Here's Cameron condemning consumerism by spending almost half a billion dollars on a mass-market movie for the Christmas season complete with tie-in burger deals from McDonald's and Avatar toys from Mattel. Here's Cameron damning our love of technology by using the most advanced cinematographic technology to create his new green world. In fact, here's Cameron urging his audience to scorn material possessions and get close to nature, only to himself retire each night to the splendid comfort of his Malibu mansion.

Not even his own creations live up to the philosophy he has them preach. For all their talk of the connectedness of nature, the Na'vi still kill animals for food - although not before saying how sorry they are, of course, since we live in an age in which seeming sorry excuses every selfishness. Likewise, despite all their lectures on not exploiting nature, the Na'vi still come out top dog in the food chain. Even when they physically become at one with wild pterodactyls, by hooking up to them through some USB in their blue tails, they manage to convince their flying reptiles to act like their private jets.

Isn't this against the rules? I mean, in this caring and at-one-with-nature world, shouldn't a plugged-in pterodactyl just once in a while get to direct its human passenger instead - by either telling it to take a flying jump or to at least act like lunch?

In all of this, Avatar captures precisely - and to the point of satire - the creed of the Copenhagen faithful. Rewind what you've seen from those Copenhagen planet-savers in the past two weeks. There were the apocalyptic warnings of how we were killing the planet. There were the standing ovations the delegates gave last week to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's furious denunciations of capitalism, consumerism and the US military. There was Bolivian President Evo Morales' cry for a simpler life: "It's changing economic policies, ending luxury, consumerism ... living better is to exploit human beings."

THERE were great crowds of activists such as Australia's Professor Clive Hamilton, who, like Avatar's Jake Sully, sermonises on the need to embrace "Gaian earth in its ecological, cybernetic way, infused with some notion of mind or soul or chi". And there was the romanticising of the primitive by the demonstrators outside dressed as ferals and wild bears, as they banged tribal drums or chanted "Om" to Mother Earth.

Of course the Cameron-style have-it-both-ways hypocrites were there, too, luxuriating in the very lifestyles they condemned. Take Prince Charles, who flew in his private RAF jet to Copenhagen to deliver a lecture on how our careless use of resources had pushed the planet "to the brink". And then had his pilot fly him home to his palace.

But, yes, you are right. How can I say this great green faith is now toppling into the pit of ridicule, when Avatar seems sure to do colossal business? Won't a whole generation of the slack-jawed just catch this new green faith from the men in the blue costumes? That's a risk. But having the green faith made so alien and such fodder for the entertainment of the candybar crowds will rob it of all sanctimony and cool.

Would a Cate Blanchett really be flattered to now be likened to a naked Na'vi, running from a pack of wild dogs in a dark forest? Would an Al Gore really like to have millions of filmgoers see in 3D where his off-this-planet faith would lead them - up a tree, and without even a paddle? No, we can now see their green world, and can see, too, it's time to come home.

SOURCE

TIME FOR A CLIMATE PLAN B

By Nigel Lawson

The world's political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward. Just one more heave, just one more venue for the great climate-change traveling circus-Mexico City next year-and the job will be done.

Or so we are told. It is, of course, the purest nonsense. The only breakthrough was the political coup for China and India in concluding the anodyne communiqué with the United States behind closed doors, with Brazil and South Africa allowed in the room and Europe left to languish in the cold outside.

Far from achieving a major step forward, Copenhagen-predictably-achieved precisely nothing. The nearest thing to a commitment was the promise by the developed world to pay the developing world $30 billion of "climate aid" over the next three years, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Not only is that (perhaps fortunately) not legally binding, but there is no agreement whatsoever about which countries it will go to, in which amounts, and on what conditions.

The reasons for the complete and utter failure of Copenhagen are both fundamental and irresolvable. The first is that the economic cost of decarbonizing the world's economies is massive, and of at least the same order of magnitude as any benefits it may conceivably bring in terms of a cooler world in the next century.

The reason we use carbon-based energy is not the political power of the oil lobby or the coal industry. It is because it is far and away the cheapest source of energy at the present time and is likely to remain so, not forever, but for the foreseeable future. Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable to us in the developed world (although I see no present evidence of this). But in the developing world, including the rapidly developing nations such as China and India, there are still tens if not hundreds of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of malnutrition, preventable disease and premature death.

The overriding priority for the developing world has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available source of energy: carbon energy.

Moreover, the argument that they should make this economic and human sacrifice to benefit future generations 100 years and more hence is all the less compelling, given that these future generations will, despite any problems caused by warming, be many times better off than the people of the developing world are today. Or, at least, that is the assumption on which the climate scientists' warming projections are based. It is projected economic growth that determines projected carbon emissions, and projected carbon emissions that (according to the somewhat conjectural computer models on which they rely) determine projected warming (according to the same models).

All this overlaps with the second of the two fundamental reasons why Copenhagen failed, and why Mexico City (if our leaders insist on continuing this futile charade) will fail, too. That is the problem of burden-sharing, and in particular how much of the economic cost of decarbonization should be borne by the developed world, which accounts for the bulk of past emissions, and how much by the faster-growing developing world, which will account for the bulk of future emissions.

The 2006 Stern Review, quite the shoddiest pseudo-scientific and pseudo-economic document any British Government has ever produced, claims the overall burden is very small. If that were so, the problem of how to share the burden would be readily overcome-as indeed occurred with the phasing out of chorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the 1987 Montreal Protocol. But the true cost of decarbonization is massive, and the distribution of the burden an insoluble problem.

Moreover, any assessment of the impact of any future warming that may occur is inevitably highly conjectural, depending as it does not only on the uncertainties of climate science but also on the uncertainties of future technological development. So what we are talking about is risk. Not that the risk is all one way. The risk of a 1930s-style outbreak of protectionism -if the developed world were to abjure cheap energy and faced enhanced competition from China and other rapidly industrializing countries that declined to do so- is probably greater than any risk from warming.

But even without that, there is not even a theoretical (let alone a practical) basis for a global agreement on burden-sharing, since, so far as the risk of global warming is concerned (and probably in other areas too) risk aversion is not uniform throughout the world. Not only do different cultures embody very different degrees of risk aversion, but in general the richer countries will tend to be more risk-averse than the poorer countries, if only because we have more to lose.

The time has come to abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B. And the outlines of a credible plan B are clear. First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.

This enables us to pocket the benefits of any warming (and there are many) while reducing the costs. None of the projected costs are new phenomena, but the possible exacerbation of problems our climate already throws at us. Addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. And adaptation does not require a global agreement, although we may well need to help the very poorest countries (not China) to adapt.

Beyond adaptation, plan B should involve a relatively modest, increased government investment in technological research and development-in energy, in adaptation and in geoengineering.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Copenhagen debacle, it is not going to be easy to get our leaders to move to plan B. There is no doubt that calling a halt to the high-profile climate-change traveling circus risks causing a severe conference-deprivation trauma among the participants. If there has to be a small public investment in counseling, it would be money well spent.

SOURCE

The plight of the the green fashionista

Is fur making a comeback?

IT BEGAN with the gift of a vintage rabbit fur coat. Not for me; for my friend. Really, my friend. Who was faced with a modern-day fashion dilemma. For most of her life, she had been opposed to fur on the grounds that it was cruel, unnecessary, gauche. But this coat was so adorable . . . and so thin . . . and so warm. And it was vintage. Which means that, when you think about it, the rabbits were already gone. And when you compared her fur to the alternatives - the fleece sweatshirts that don’t biodegrade, the “vegan leather’’ jackets made from PVC - the winner of the do-good outerwear derby wasn’t entirely clear.

As the Copenhagen climate talks draw to a close, it’s worth noting how much our culture has come to value the merits of green - both because people truly care about the Earth, and because caring about the Earth has grown so chic. But the actual rules of green living are surprisingly hard to navigate, not least of all when it comes to choosing clothes.

Do you want to save the animals or the planet at large? Do you focus on your outfit’s origins, or its afterlife? Do you submit to the harsh realities of the food chain? Or do you fret about the death of cows and bunnies while the planet weeps over your petroleum-based pleather?

The decline of the anti-fur stigma shows just how complex the rules have become. Jo Paoletti, an American studies professor at the University of Maryland, recalls that she once gave away a vintage fur cape because too many people glared at her at parties.

But over the last decade, many fashion houses have begun to embrace fur again. Onetime PETA models Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford have fronted ad campaigns for high-end furriers. Bravo’s Rachel Zoe wears luscious fur vests in public with no apparent guilt. And when my friend started asking around about her coat, she found a lot of people who weren’t appalled by rabbit pelts. Someone told her that Canadians wear fur because it’s warmer than any alternative. Someone else pointed out that people eat rabbit, so why not use all of the rabbit?

These days, the fur industry seems especially emboldened. The Fur Council of Canada has launched an ad campaign declaring that “Fur is Green’’ - in the sense that trappers kill animals who might have overpopulated forests, and that fur breaks down in landfills, unlike performance fleece. The council also takes pains to claim that trappers and farmers treat animals humanely, a byproduct of shame for which animal-rights activists deserve some credit.

But PETA has devolved into self-parody of late, chastising the president for swatting a fly, putting too many naked models in lettuce bikinis, acting overzealous with red paint. When a furrier from Brookline died last month, his obituary ran after his funeral service had taken place, presumably to stave off protesters who had vandalized his store. It’s easier to sympathize with his family than with any friend of the minks.

When it comes to fashion, it seems, everyone has to decide how and when to be cruel, where to stake her own spot on the fur-to-leather-to-meat-to-clean-air continuum. Paoletti points out that, however “natural’’ fur may be, the fur-production process still takes a big environmental toll. But then “greenwashing’’ is rampant in the fashion world today, she says: Fabric made from bamboo is marketed as earth-friendly, but it’s chemically identical to rayon, and manufactured in a way that’s decidedly bad for the planet.

Besides, Paoletti notes, you can make a bigger impact with your laundry habits than with any piece of clothing you buy - and you can also help the Earth by buying fewer clothes in general. In that context, vintage fur could either be the world’s biggest cop-out or a brilliant solution, a way to embrace recycling and luxury at once.

Paoletti isn’t passing judgment, though she wishes my friend could wear a button on her rabbit coat that says, “It’s vintage!’’ Style still has a lot to do with what other people think. But my friend figures that if anyone looks sideways at her coat, she’ll simply tell them it’s a fake.

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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22 December, 2009

Lead Author Admits Deleting Inconvenient Opinions From IPCC Report

Global Warming Profiteers Exposed -- Giant Hole In Climate Change Fraud

The latest installment of Jesse Ventura’s highly successful Conspiracy Theory show exposed millions of viewers on national TV last night to the climate change fraud, blowing a giant hole in the global warming scam by exposing how its adherents comprise wealthy industrialists making billions in profits by fearmongering about the environment.

Ventura and his team attempted to track down the key architects of the scheme, a search which led them to Beijing China and the heavily guarded residence of global warming pioneer and billionaire Maurice Strong.

The show lifts the lid on how the very same alarmists pushing the threat of climate change are profiting in the billions from carbon trading systems in which they have a huge personal stake.

The most damning part of the program is when Ben Santer, a climate researcher and lead IPCC author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Working Group I Report, admits that he deleted sections of the IPCC chapter which stated that humans were not responsible for climate change.

Accusing Santer of altering opinions in the IPCC report that disagreed with the man-made thesis behind climate change, Lord Monckton told the program, “In comes Santer and re-writes it for them, after the scientists have sent in their finalized draft, and that finalized draft said at five different places, there is no discernable human effect on global temperature – I’ve seen a copy of this – Santer went through, crossed out all of those and substituted a new conclusion, and this has been the official conclusion ever since.”

“Lord Monckton points to deletions from the chapter, and there were deletions from the chapter, to be consistent with the other chapters we dropped the summary at the end,” Santer admits to the program.

Commenting on The Alex Jones Show today, Lord Monckton said that this was the first time Santer had publicly admitted to deleting the information.

Santer was intimately involved in the Climategate email scandal, communicating with other IPCC-affiliated scientists who conspired to “hide the decline” in global warming.

Does Santer’s shocking admission that he deleted the opinions of scientists who stated that human activity did not cause global warming from a key IPCC report represent Climategate 2?

Watch the clips below. One of the most insightful moments in the show arrives when Amit Chatterjee, CEO of Hara, a company that sells carbon credits, is confronted with the fact that his business is bankrolled by an investment firm partnered with Al Gore. After admitting that the “carbon market” will be worth a trillion dollars by 2015, and that his company will rake in billions, but then denying that he will profit from lobbying for cap and trade laws as well as any link to Al Gore, Chatterjee is confronted by Ventura.

Watch the clip. “We don’t have any direct relationship with Al Gore,” claims Chatterjee, despite a June 2009 Reuters report headlined, Gore-backed Hara sees profit from low-carbon economy. “Hara, a 25-employee company that debuted in 2008, provides online software to help companies reduce their carbon footprint — a $2.5 billion market that will grow 10-fold if the proposed energy bill, which will require companies to get permits for emissions, becomes law, Chief Executive Amit Chatterjee said,” states the report. The Reuters report states that Hara is “An environmental start-up backed by Al Gore’s venture capital firm.”

Ventura challenges Chatterjee on his denial of a connection with Al Gore, at which point Chatterjee’s slick demeanor changes to that of a deer trapped in the headlights. “No relationship with Al Gore? Let him tell that to me,” comments Ventura. Chatterjee then becomes evasive and refuses to comment when Ventura points out that Chatterjee’s company will make a fortune as a result of Al Gore’s lobbying for cap and trade to be passed. Ventura makes Chatterjee look like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Maybe they never met at the company picnic, but Al Gore owns a piece of his business,” comments Ventura, “He makes sure they make payroll.”

The trail then leads to Maurice Strong, “the world’s leading environmentalist, who just happens to be a billionaire industrialist.” As we have documented, Maurice Strong, who is regularly credited as founding father of the modern environmental movement, serves on the board of directors of The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). Strong was a leading initiate of the Earth Summit in the early 90s, where the theory of global warming caused by CO2 generated by human activity was most notably advanced.

By using his considerable wealth and influence to lobby for cap and trade and a tax on CO2 emissions, Strong stands to enrich his company’s coffers to the tune of trillions if a binding agreement on carbon dioxide is formulated in Copenhagen. Strong and his close ally Al Gore come from a stable of elite groups that have long sought to use the environmental movement to advance their agendas. Strong, who was groomed by David Rockefeller to eventually serve as Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, is also a member of the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Club of Rome.

In their 1991 report, The First Global Revolution, the Club of Rome, a powerful globalist NGO committed to limiting growth and bringing in a post-industrial society, conspired to exploit fears about the environment to make humans the enemy so they could usher in a global government. “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself,” states the report.

Ventura and his team are unable to confront Strong, as he remains ensconced in his heavily guarded Beijing residence, but they do talk to whistleblower George Hunt, an official with the World Wilderness Conference who worked with Strong in 1987. Hunt tells Ventura that Strong is one of the leading conspirators behind a plot on behalf of aristocratic billionaires to use global warming as a justification for a one world bank, a global currency and a global government – which is exactly what’s unfolding right now in Copenhagen with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon insisting that global governance will be imposed to enforce CO2 regulations.

Ventura concludes the show by stating that global warming is a fear tactic invented to control people and make trillions in profit. Ventura signs off by stating that people who preach the global warming gospel, “Are not out to save the world – they’re out to run it.”

SOURCE (See the original for videos)

Viscount Monckton on Copenhagen:

Parturient montes: nascetur ridiculus mus (Monckton read classics at Cambridge)

The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”.

The White House spinmeisters spun, and their official press release proclaimed, with more than usual fatuity, that President Obama had “salvaged” a deal at Copenhagen in bilateral talks with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which had established a negotiating bloc. The plainly-declared common position of these four developing nations had been the one beacon of clarity and common sense at the foggy fortnight of posturing and gibbering in the ghastly Copenhagen conference center. This is what the Forthright Four asked for:

Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.

Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.

Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.

Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.

After President Obama’s dramatic intervention to save the deal, this is what the Forthright Four got:

Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.

Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.

Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.

Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.

Here, in a nutshell - for fortunately nothing larger is needed - are the main points of the “Copenhagen Accord”:

Main points: In the Copenhagen Accord, which is operational immediately, the parties underline that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time ; emphasize their “strong political will to urgently combat climate change”; recognize “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 C” and perhaps below 1.5 C; aspire to “cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible”; acknowledge that eradicating poverty is the “overriding priority of developing countries”; and accept the need to help vulnerable countries - especially the least developed nations, small-island states, and Africa - to adapt to climate change.

Self-imposed emissions targets: All parties will set for themselves, and comply with, emissions targets for 2020, to be submitted to the secretariat by 31 January 2010. Where developing countries are paid to cut their emissions, their compliance will be monitored. Developed countries will financially support less-developed countries to prevent deforestation. Carbon trading may be used. New bureaucracies and funding: Under the supervision of a “High-Level Panel”, developed countries will give up to $30 billion for 2010-12, aiming for $100 billion by 2020, in “scaled up, new and additional, predictable and adequate funding” to developing countries via a “Copenhagen Green Fund”. A “Technology Mechanism” will “accelerate technology development and transfer” to developing countries.

And that’s it. Expensive, yes. Unnecessary, yes. But earth-shaking? No. The disconnect between the gaseous halations of various grandstanding “world leaders” about the supposedly urgent need to “Save The Planet Now” and the puny outcome of the Copenhagen Non-Event is dazzling. And it is welcome.

For all the rhetoric - or the flatulence that passes for rhetoric these days - it has begun to dawn on the “leaders” of those nations that subject them to regular recall and re-election that the people no longer believe the mad scientists are telling them the truth. And the people are right.

What is more, after the failure of the mainstream news media to report what the malevolent and unpleasant scientists involved in the Climategate affair had written to one another about those with whom they disagreed, or about what they had done to invent, fabricate, contrive, fiddle, tweak, alter, massage, conceal, hide or even destroy scientific data for the sake of protecting and peddling the pseudo-science in which environment correspondents had so readily and so ignorantly believed, the people no longer trust the media.

And that is bad news for a governing class that has come to develop a far-too-cosy relationship with the mainstream media. It is also very bad news for the mainstream media themselves, which are now rapidly losing circulation and ad revenue as the people rightly desert them for the Internet, where - notwithstanding various expensive attempts by the over-funded international Left to interfere with Google and Yahoo searches - the truth is still available if you know where to look.

Copenhagen was the last-chance saloon not for the planet, which does not need saving, but for the UN’s world-government wannabes. They blew it, big-time, by believing their own overspun propaganda about planetary peril and thinking they had “world leaders” where they wanted them. They overreached themselves, and have paid the price.

Even though next year is an el Nino year accompanied by fast-recovering solar activity, 2010 may not, after all, set a new global-temperature record to overtop that which was set in 1998, the year of the Great El Nino. By the time the next yackfest takes place in Mexico City in December 2010, the steam will have gone out of the “global warming” scare. We should not let our guard down, but Copenhagen is more than the end of the beginning for Green fascism: it is the beginning of the end. The eco-Nazis’ attempt at global bureaucratic coup d’etat has failed, and no such attempt is likely to succeed again. Too many of you are watching.

SOURCE

Obama Gives China a Free Pass to Emit CO2

The U.N. Climate Control Conference in Copenhagen ended in failure in that no binding agreement was reached to reduce CO2 emissions. China nixed the agreement by refusing to compromise on the issue of international verification as noted by a British newspaper called The Independent:

When the [U.S.] President, in an unyielding speech, said that without international verification "any agreement would be empty words on a page", that was too much for [Chinese Premier] Mr Wen. He left the conference in Copenhagen's Bella Centre, returned to his hotel in the city, and responded with a direct snub of his own - he sent low-level delegates to take his place in the talks.

At the end of the conference, President Obama and leaders of India, Brazil, South Africa, and China negotiated a possible framework for the next conference. In order to be seen as effective, Obama caved in to the demands of the developing countries, which produced the "Copenhagen Accord."

India, Brazil, and South Africa got the reparations they wanted. The developed countries (the U.S., Europe, Japan, etc.) would pay $30 billion by 2012, and $100 billion per year starting in 2020 (U.S. share $10 billion by 2012, about $33 billion per year by 2020), into a fund to be distributed to the developing countries based upon need. The accord states:

The collective commitment by developed countries is to provide new and additional resources, including forestry and investments through international institutions, approaching $30 billion for the period 2010-2012 ... In the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, developed countries support a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.

Meanwhile, China, the world's fastest-growing CO2-polluter, got what it wanted. The accord would let China avoid transparency and international verification by opting out of the reparations. China would generate reports every two years, but only those developing nations receiving reparations would be subject to the transparency requirement in the accord:

Nationally appropriate mitigation actions seeking international support ... will be subject to international measurement, reporting and verification in accordance with guidelines adopted by the Conference of the Parties.

President Obama was changing the terms of the original reparations offer, as announced by his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on December 17 at the conference. She had told the delegates that the $100 billion per year reparations pledge would apply only if there was an agreement involving "all major economies" with "full transparency":

And today I'd like to announce that, in the context of a strong accord in which all major economies stand behind meaningful mitigation actions and provide full transparency as to their implementation, the United States is prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs of developing countries.

In summary, the "Copenhagen Accord," if negotiated in Germany next year, would mean:

1. Rising U.S. energy costs. The U.S would reduce CO2 emissions, increasing U.S. energy costs, causing inflation, and worsening the trade deficits.

2. Substantial reparations. The U.S. would pay reparations of $10 billion by 2012, about $33 billion per year by 2020.

3. Stable Chinese energy costs. China would be able to increase or, at least, not decrease CO2 emissions, keeping energy costs stable and her economy growing.

The Copenhagen Conference ended in failure. The "Copenhagen Accord," negotiated by a few of the participants at the end, is worth only the paper it will be printed on. It is a possibly disastrous framework for future negotiations to take place in Bonn, Germany in mid-2010. It suggests that the U.S. will once again pay most of the costs and get few of the benefits, if any.

Before the Bonn conference, President Obama will try to unilaterally reduce American CO2 emissions through cap-and-trade or EPA regulation. If he succeeds, the rising U.S. energy costs combined with stable Chinese energy costs will send more manufacturing jobs and more investment to China.

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The politics of panic

This is supposed to be the opening video used at the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change. This is a political body controlled by politicians where the "scientific process" is overriding by the politicians and bureaucrats who actually write the final reports. Each step of the way is designed to remove debate. I know some people who served as expert reviewers for the IPCC and all of them said that the material is rewritten to reflect political agendas before being presented to the public. Numerous members of the IPCC have publicly said that they are portrayed as part of the "consensus" when they are not, the false claim that all the scientists who contribute in any way are members. And, of course, there were some notable resignations by scientists who said that their own conclusions were rewritten and distorted in order to satisfy the political agenda of the governments that run the IPCC.

This video, if it is what it purports to be, shows that the IPCC is purposely using the politics of panic in order to push their very political agenda. This is fear-mongering intended to try and stampede the public into accepting the massive state controls that the Left wants in the name of climate change. It is not reason, it is not debate, it is not science. It is unmitigated propaganda meant to terrorize people.

I have no doubt that some people are driven by a pure belief in the theory that they popularize. I also have no doubt that many of the major drivers in the climate debate are politicians with very open political agendas. And the political agenda means they will fudge the science, exaggerate the science, play down the doubts, etc. The number of top warming hysterics who have openly admitted that they do that has been documented on this blog before. The more I watch the debate the less respect I have for the alarmists who seem to be getting desperate as they lose the battle for public opinion—they get more rabid and fanatical the closer they are to failure.

If they are right, and I always accept that possibility although I don't think they are, then much of the reason for their losing this debate is because they have been so rabid in their exaggerated claims. They play the fear card so often that they come across as the boy who cried wolf too many times. If the warming wolf does show up, in the terms they claim in their hysterical moments, it will be in part because they have alienated the public with their intentional fear mongering and political manipulation.

While I've always been skeptical of their claims, and most claims made by political special interest groups, my skepticism has grown the more I watch the debate. Apparently I am not alone. Rasmussen recently polled on the question of global warming and its causes. They do this every so often. I point this out, not because I think polls establish truth, as some critics of mine have claimed, but because it shows how opinion in shifting and in what direction. It says something about how the public perceives the debate.

In April 2008 47% of the public said warming was man-made and 34% said it was primarily due to natural causes. While the numbers have been up and down the trend is fairly clear. The latest poll shows that belief in human-induced warming has dropped to the lowest level since the almost monthly surveys began. It is now at 34% while those who say it is a natural phenomenon have increased to 50%.

Rasmussen also divides people by ideological content those who favor governmental control in general are called the "Political Class." These are people who like big government and think politicians are peachy. Among them the numbers who blame humans for alleged climate change are 80%. Among the group that Rasmussen calls the "political mainstream" the percentage who say that warming has natural causes is 60%.

SOURCE

Glaciers melt, sea level drops

I think that the writer below is wrong in one minor detail. It is true that ice has a larger volume than the water that it contains but the effect when floating ice melts is to leave the water level unchanged. The "missing" volume is the bit above water level. His basic point that melting land-based ice can cause the apparent sea level to FALL is however correct

Actually it is the land that is rising. More on that later. But just as the Church of Global Warming overlooked the possible effects of a drop to zero in solar activity, it seems these Brainiacs overlooked the effects of ice melting.

They have been saying the melting ice will cause the sea to rise. But when sea ice melts the sea level drops. Ask Archimedes about water displacement.

When glaciers melt (ice on land) the sea gets more water. But the land rises, too. At least in Alaska it has been rising.

“The geology is complex, but it boils down to this: Relieved of billions of tons of glacial weight, the land has risen much as a cushion regains its shape after someone gets up from a couch. The land is ascending so fast that the rising seas — a ubiquitous byproduct of global warming — cannot keep pace. As a result, the relative sea level is falling, at a rate ‘among the highest ever recorded, according to a 2007 report by a panel of experts convened by Mayor Bruce Botelho of Juneau,” the New York Times reported.

Now we know that shorelines shift over time. It has nothing to do with mankind producing carbon dioxide.

The predictions of the ice melting and swallowing up San Francisco as sort of a modern version of Sodom and Gomorrah is amusing. The adherents of the Church of Global Warming use parlor tricks and the general lack of knowledge among the general population to push this phrenological-style pseudo-science.

The New York Times story contains not one benefit — other than golf course — of the expansion of the land surface of Alaska. The story is as mournful as missing the glaciers that melted and gave us the Great Lakes after the last Ice Age ended.

SOURCE

Global Warming's Forlorn Hope

Back in the days when war was a form of romance, there was a tactic called the "forlorn hope." When an army reached the end of its string while laying siege to a fortress or walled city, a single unit of several hundred men would be selected for a final attempt at overcoming the walls. Artillery would fire one last series of rounds to make a breach, and the forlorn hope would make its mad dash toward the walls, to try to overcome by muscle and will what months of patient strategy had failed to do. As for the level of success...

Well, the name says it all. While a small proportion of such attempts succeeded, most forlorn hopes wound up being annihilated, after which the besieging army would pack up and seek a softer target.

Copenhagen was the Green left's forlorn hope, their last chance at breaching the wall of public suspicion and stubbornness to impose environmentalism as a governing system through the threat of global warming. Within those walls lay the promise of lifetime sinecure positions, total social control, absolute power, and unlimited free money. One final push, one blind rush up the ladders, and it would be theirs. They had all the big artillery -- the legacy media, "science," the U.N., the international NGO bureaucracy -- on their side. The walls had already been deeply breached. How could they possibly fail?

But they did fail. What's that, you say? They have an agreement! So they do: an agreement that has brought about the loudest keening and caterwauling from the environmental aristocracy that we've heard in quite some time. This "accord," as it's being termed, is not quite what the Greens ordered. Before looking closer, we'll consider what Copenhagen was supposed to produce.

* A total reorganization of the world's economy based on "sustainable" principles.

* A new Green bureaucracy with supranational powers, almost blatantly presented as the template of a world government to oversee all matters of climate and energy.

* The promise of hundreds of billions in payoffs to third-world states, most of it at the expense of the American taxpayer.

* An open-ended commitment of unlimited international resources and effort for the purpose of overcoming a natural phenomenon that has been occurring and recurring for billions of years.

* The subjection of every last human being, both living and yet unborn, to all the above for an undefined and possibly endless period.

Now how much of this did they get? None of it, really. What they got was a nonbinding agreement stating that further discussion and negotiation will take place at some time or other. The Copenhagen accord requires all signatory countries to "list" actions taken to cut CO2 emissions. It asks these states to think very hard about limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Centigrade. It promises at least $30 billion -- and maybe more -- to poor countries to aid in the warming struggle, without any clear notion as to where this money will be coming from.

That, pretty much in toto, is the document that Barack Obama, who scuttled away to Air Force One before the signing occurred, calls an "unprecedented breakthrough." Years of planning, two weeks of effort, over 35,000 delegates, 193 countries represented, a carbon footprint equal to that of the state of Texas (or alternately, Al Gore's Tennessee mansion), and here's our breakthrough. The whimper that ends the AGW story.

Don't get me wrong -- we haven't heard the last of it by any means. There will be no end of chatter concerning climate change, rising temperatures and seas, and threatened species, particularly over the next few weeks and months. We will be told that something is bothering the coral. That the Madagascar Fringed Weevil is suffering from heat prostration. That ice is melting in the summer. That the oil companies don't want Phil Jones to get his job back. But it will all be echo, not even amounting to sound and fury, no more than a faint susurrus slowly fading to unintelligibility

As any conman can tell you, you get one opportunity to talk your way into the bank vault. You can't flub it and then try again next week. The Greens had their chance, and they fumbled it, and it is gone. Al Gore may speak hopefully about the July meeting in Mexico City. He won't be lonely there -- with talk of billions in the air, plenty of delegates will show up, at least from the undeveloped zone. (Among them will certainly be Lumumba Di-Aping, who accused the West of utilizing the agreement to carry out a Holocaust against Africans, debuting a new corollary to Godwin's Law: anybody who attempts to aid his cause by degrading the Holocaust has already lost. We'll pause here to mention -- since nobody else has seen fit to -- that Di-Aping was the delegate from Sudan, which has been engaged in genocide in Darfur for a good dozen years now.) But the money is all they'll be willing to talk about. AGW will be a secondary issue at best from here on out.

We have a number of factors to thank for this outcome. The East Anglia CRU e-mails, in which Phil Jones and company revealed to the world exactly how to load the temperature dice, played a huge role. The brave whistle-blower responsible certainly deserves whatever prize is created to replace the Nobel. The Russians, who politely waited until the Copenhagen proceedings reached a crescendo before revealing that the British Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre had been for years misstating the temperature readings from Russia's vast network of weather stations, also rank high on the list of people to thank. With that revelation, the carpet has been well and truly pulled out from beneath the discipline of climatology. Not a single major institution in either Europe or the U.S. remains untouched by scandal. Climatology is now an empty shell, and it will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

But the true killer, the real silver bullet, was fired by whoever got the brilliant idea of using AGW as yet another means of holding up the West. That's what put warming to sleep -- one from which it is never going to awaken.

In the old days, barbarians would simply leap into a longboat or mount a shaggy pony, make their way to civilized lands, and loot to their heart's content. Today, they have been reduced to going to the U.N. to whine with their hands held out. The decision to introduce the possibility of Western industrial states funding anti-warming efforts in the Third World turned the entire AGW campaign into another whimper-and-loot raid. Now that AGW has been connected with such figures as Hugo Chavez, Robert Mugabe, and Evo "Bagel Hat" Morales, it is doubtful that the movement will ever shake them off. Just as the e-mails assure that it will always be associated with fakery, so Copenhagen has sealed the link between AGW and attempts to extort danegeld on behalf of the world's tramp leaders.

As for serious world leaders -- for our purposes defined as those whose countries pay their own bills -- they didn't even bother to wait for their pictures to be taken. When's the last time a roomful of politicians failed to do that? No further evidence is needed to demonstrate that all sense of expectation has fled the AGW movement. It is dead in the water, and requires only a final torpedo to send it to rest.

It won't get one. AGW remains useful in a limited sense and in a number of quarters. Warming will become one of those eternal grievances endlessly discussed at the U.N. Al will continue to sell carbon indulgences -- he needs enough loose cash to put up his own space station so he can get away from the courts and Interpol. The grants engine will continue to funnel money to researchers engaged in rapt study of a phenomenon that for all practical purposes exists in theory, but not in reality.

For the rest of us, AGW will simply become one of those weird things that people used to get caught up in, like flagpole sitting, hula hoops, or more to the point, the Dutch Tulip Craze of 1636-37, in which the entire Dutch nation went utterly mad for tulip bulbs, selling them back and forth to each other for astonishing sums, until the bottom inevitably fell out, leaving Holland in a deep depression with millions of tulip bulbs cluttering the landscape.

We have not progressed much in 370 years. It's a sobering thought in a world featuring nuclear weapons and looking forward to the prospect of synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and similar treats. It would be a smart move for someone to set aside a little AGW grant money to study this class of phenomenon. After all, it doesn't seem to take much to trigger one of these chiliastic crazes. All you need is a threat that is:

* Universal

* Created by mankind

* Associated with capitalism

* Threatens utter extinction

...not to overlook the money you can make off it. There's some big money there, as Tennessee Al can tell you. So human nature being what it is, the next doomsday campaign will be upon us soon enough. Climate's been used twice in the last forty years and is pretty much worn out. But biology's always good, particularly when you throw in genetic engineering. I'd vote for something scary involving microbes. What do you think?

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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21 December, 2009

The Copenhagen farce is glad tidings for all

After two weeks of increasingly ill-tempered negotiations, one of the European delegates at the Copenhagen summit “to save the planet” had clearly reached breaking point; or perhaps it was the ingratitude of the people he was trying to save that caused this negotiator to tell the BBC’s science correspondent, Susan Watts, that millions of Africans now “deserve” to be incinerated.

Watts was reporting a conversation she had had with an unnamed “European negotiator” after South Africa decided to join the quartet of America, India, China and Brazil in putting its name to a statement rejecting any binding emissions targets, and thus comprehensively sabotaging the entire conference. “South Africa has signed up to this!” the delegate told Watts. “They’re going to fry — and they’ll deserve it.”

One’s heart does not warm to anyone expressing such sentiments, but it’s easy to understand the fury that must have overcome this delegate. Here was Europe offering to impose vast costs on its own industries and peoples to save Africa from the alleged perils of runaway CO2 emissions — and that continent’s most powerful international voice says, thanks very much for the offer, but we think we can best provide health and prosperity to our people by being free to expand our economy exactly as you did in the industrial revolution, by using the wonderfully cheap forms of energy that nature affords: fossil fuels. After all, why is it that in the US many fewer people die as a result of very high temperatures than used to be the case a hundred years ago? Air-conditioning.

I know that for those thousands of “climate activists” who descended on Copenhagen, the idea of air-conditioning in African homes is something almost too revolting to contemplate; but then they have never understood that, for the real inhabitants of the developing world, the American example of achieving health and comfort through technology and subverting harsh nature for human ends is something to be emulated, not shunned.

The climate catastrophists naturally insist that if the developing countries — notably China and India — follow the American path, the planet will become uninhabitable. The most quoted expression of this came in 2004 from Britain’s chief government scientist then, Sir David King, when he said that if we did not act to reduce our carbon emissions, by the end of the century Antarctica would be the world’s only habitable continent.

Even if you share King’s view of what some of the climate models project in terms of anthropogenic CO2’s effect on global temperatures, his apparent belief that man is completely unable to adapt to a changing environment suggests that, whatever his claims as a scientist, he knows next to nothing about either human nature or history.

Unfortunately for those in the same camp as King, the leak of lethally embarrassing emails from the world’s foremost academic climate research unit, at the University of East Anglia, confirmed the suspicions of roughly half the British population, that too much political faith had been placed in the omniscience of a small group of scientists.

The most interesting of those leaked emails came from Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. After observing — this was an email dated October 12, 2009 — that in freezing Boulder, “We have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record ... it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F”, Trenberth turned to the fact that the planet’s average temperature over the past 10 years seemed to have been static and wrote: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of global warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Two days later he reiterated: “We cannot account for what is happening in the climate system.”

Asked last week by the BBC about these emails, King would say only that their leak and publication in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit had to be the work of some malign national agency (the CIA? The Russians?). Since we know that a Briton with Asperger’s syndrome, working on a domestic dial-up internet connection, managed to hack into the Pentagon’s most secret codes, King’s insistence that only a national agency could have hacked into a non-secure academic research unit’s emails seems as sensible as the assertion that we must all plan to settle in Antarctica. Even if he is right that UEA’s emails were put in the public domain as a result of theft, he deserves as much respect for his reaction as any MP whose only response to the leak of Commons expenses claims had been that the newspaper that bought the disc with all the information had broken the law. As a matter of fact, no MP was quite so arrogant.

King’s old boss, Tony Blair, turned up in Copenhagen to give his take on the leaked emails. The former prime minister declared that they did not lessen by one jot what he called “the need for action” and added: “It is said that the science around climate change is not as certain as its proponents allege. It doesn’t need to be.” Blair is clearly not troubled by irony, since this approach is exactly the one that got us into such a mess over Saddam Hussein’s suppositious biological threat. The actual evidence was tenuous at the time — but to persuade the public of the need for action, Blair was prepared to say that it was watertight. For weapons of mass destruction, read weather of mass destruction.

Blair now argues that even if the science is less clear than is claimed by the climate catastrophists, we have to act because of the risks to humanity if their worst fears turn out to be well founded. This would make perfect sense if there were no risks attached to what he calls “action”, just as it would if there had been no lives put at risk by attacking Iraq. In fact, there are vast costs involved in the war against weather, which could actually cost lives. The highly respected climate economist Professor Richard Tol, a senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that the CO2 tax required to bring emissions down to the levels demanded by the IPCC would reduce global GDP by an amount that would equate — in 2100 — to $40 trillion (£25 trillion) a year. It’s pretty obvious, really: just as cheap energy has transformed the lives of millions for the better, it follows that reversing the process would have an opposite effect.

Carbon cap and trade, recommended by the EU as an alternative to tax, has its own malign effect. Just ask the 1,700 employees being made redundant at Corus’s steel plant in Redcar. The owners of Corus could receive up to $375m (£230m) in carbon credits for laying off those British workers. Then, if they switch production to a so-called clean Indian steel plant, Corus could also receive millions of dollars annually from the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism fund. The net effect of all that on the environment could be safely estimated as zero.

Gordon Brown, who seems to be embarking on a scorched earth economic policy in his final months in power, evidently regards this as worth it — he wants to go down in history as the man who saved the climate. Yet this government — or the next one — has been given a golden opportunity by the farce in Copenhagen: to abandon the carbon witch hunt altogether. If India, China, America, Brazil (and Uncle Tom Cobley and all) carry on with “business as usual”, then anything Europe does to cut its emissions is irrelevant, at best: it will cause pain and hardship for its own citizens to no purpose whatever.

So let’s toast the negotiators of Copenhagen. By failing so spectacularly, they have presented us with a wonderful Christmas present. All we have to do is open it.

SOURCE

Chicken or Egg Questions finally getting some prominence in the Climate Debate

Attention being drawn again to the crucial role of clouds in warming/cooling -- and the dubious assumptions about them that the Warmists make

Which came first, the warmer temperatures or the clearer skies? Answers to that and similar "chicken or egg" type questions could have a significant impact on our understanding of both the climate system and manmade global warming.

In an invited talk the week of December 14 at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, Dr. Roy Spencer from The University of Alabama in Huntsville discussed the challenge of answering questions about cause and effect (also known as forcing and feedback) in the climate. "Feedbacks will determine whether the manmade portion of global warming ends up being catastrophic or barely measurable," Spencer said recently.

Spencer's interest is in using satellite data and a simple climate model to test the simulated feedback processes contained in climate models that are used to forecast global warming. "I am arguing that we can't measure feedbacks the way people have been trying to do it," he said. "The climate modelers see from satellite data that warm years have fewer clouds, then assume that the warmth caused the clouds to dissipate. If this is true, it would be positive feedback and could lead to strong global warming. This is the way their models are programmed to behave. "My question to them was, 'How do you know it wasn't fewer clouds that caused the warm years, rather than the other way around?' It turns out they didn't know. They couldn't answer that question."

One problem is the simplicity of the climate models. Because cloud systems are so complex and so poorly understood, all of the climate models used by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use greatly simplified cloud parameters to represent clouds. But the calculations that set those parameters are based on assumed cause-and-effect relationships. Those assumptions might be working in the wrong direction, Spencer said. "What we have found is that cloud cover variations causing temperature changes dominate the satellite record, and give the illusion of positive feedback."

Using satellite observations interpreted with a simple model, Spencer's data support negative feedback (or cooling) better than they support positive feedback. "This critical component in global warming theory - cloud feedback - is impossible to measure directly in the real climate system," Spencer said. "We haven't figured out a good way to separate cause and effect, so we can't measure cloud feedback directly. And if we don't know what the feedbacks are, we are just guessing at how much impact humans will have on climate change.

"I'm trying to spread the word: Let's go back to basics and look at what we can and cannot do with measurements of the real climate system to validate both climate models and their predictions."

SOURCE

How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles

The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm. The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD. The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.

But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”

Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.

The Climategate Emails showed, for example, that some members of the band were uncomfortable with aspects of their work, some even questioning the need to erase the existence of the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years earlier.

Said Briffa, one of their chief practitioners: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”

In the end, Briffa and other members of the band overcame their doubts and settled on their dogma. With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement — the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago.

But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.

Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. “The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” one email explained, referring to criticisms of the hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team — U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley — would take on particularly crucial duties.

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.

SOURCE

U.N. climate chief has snout in trough too

Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007. Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations. These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’. It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.

Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri’s personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.

The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.

The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company). Although TERI has extended its sponsorship since the name change, the two concerns are still closely linked.

In India, Tata exercises enormous political power, shown not least in the way it has managed to displace hundreds of thousands of poor tribal villagers in the eastern states of Orissa and Jarkhand to make way for large-scale iron mining and steelmaking projects.

Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer. In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.

However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.

Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.

Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained....

But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’. In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’,

In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.

In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.

The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on.....

As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.

One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.

More HERE

Confessions of a Doubter

This is the time of the year when millions of people celebrate the central tenets of their faith. It is, in particular, the time of year when even the poorest among us are now looking hopefully to the far north for the promise of gifts. It is the religious framework that gives rise to this hopeful vision. Yet, as a profound doubter, I have to admit I have hard time entering into its spirit.

How shall we set the scene? Should we talk about the remarkable celestial event that seemed to herald the fact that something of significance for all mankind? Should we talk about the fact that the alleged promise of this religion is nothing short of the salvation of all mankind from prophesied potential death and destruction? Need we even mention that its adherents hope, as a result of their devotion and diligence to create a purer, more perfect Earth?

Perhaps. Yet, despite all of these good tidings of great joy, I still entertain reservations in my heart. I still have the inextinguishable urge to utter, “Bah humbug!”

Of central concern to me is the clash between the central tenets of this religion and science. I cannot ignore the numerous historical accounts of the outright persecution of scientists who failed to bring their own scientific views in line with what this religion said that they ought to be. Deep within me I cannot help but think that such repression of open scientific inquiry is wrong, even if the sought-after religious ends are deemed to be good.

I’m bothered by the fact that sincere scientists, earnest in their pursuit of truth, seemingly have little hope of convincing the adherents of this religion otherwise. Regardless of what evidence enters their purview, the dogmatists maintain their core beliefs as sacrosanct, as articles of faith immune from falsification by any scientifically obtained observational results.

Of concern to me also is the linking of this religion’s values and influence with politics. The Founders of our nation rightly saw the pitfalls of establishing a State Religion. But it seems as though the wisdom and good sense of our Founding Fathers is now being ignored as ardent proponents of this religion become increasingly more powerful and influential in government.

More and more governmental policies are now being shaped by the values and priorities of this religion—so much so lately that one wonders: Are we now on our way to establishing a State religion after all? Other nations, particularly in Europe, already seem to have done so. The results have been suspect, at best. Yet, are we next?

Now, lest any readers take umbrage because they think me a skeptic of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or even Rastafarianism, rest easy. The religion under discussion is, of course, Environmentalism, with its central tenet clearly the belief in Anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming as a phenomenon that threatens our very continued existence on earth and offers belief in Environmentalism as the one safe haven offering Salvation from the catastrophic effects of greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide—Salvation for all Mankind!

Environmentalism, claims physicist Freeman Dyson, “has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.” But I am afraid that I, like Sarah Palin, am a doubter. High Priest Al Gore has us both pegged right. As a skeptic, I believe that there is a Naturalistic explanation for the strange celestial event in the skies over Copenhagen—it was just a failed Russian rocket.

And I am inclined to reject the religions’ central tenet: If 650 thousand years of ice core sample data show that periods of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere followed periods of increased global warming by hundreds of years, then the religion has the cause and effect relationship between warming and carbon dioxide wrong. Periods of increased warming result in heightened levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way around.

And what of the many poorer nations who are now looking to the far north, to Copenhagen, for gifts—for a UN administered program that punishes the sins of richer, more prosperous nations by redistributing some of their wealth into the coffers of the ne’er do wells? Well, like the Christmas Grinch, I can only hope that they leave Copenhagen sorely disappointed, or – dare I say? – perhaps even with coal in their stockings.

SOURCE

Weak Copenhagen outcome a boost for Australia's conservatives

Copenhagen's wishy-washy outcome is a boost for Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and a setback for the Prime Minister, as they look to an election year in which climate policy will be a core issue.

A strong agreement would have given Kevin Rudd backing for his decision to bring back rewritten emissions trading legislation in February. At a personal level, a successful conference would have been a diplomatic plus for Rudd, who was a "friend of the chair". Instead, the minimal progress, with eyes shifting to yet another conference some time next year, has made it easier for Abbott to maintain that other ways to cut emissions are better than a "great big new tax".

Rudd so hyped the need to get his scheme through before Copenhagen that, now the conference has ended with only a weak "accord", people will be inclined to say, "So what was the hurry? And why rush now?". The need for hastening the Australian legislation, which both Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull understood, was because of just what's happened. If Copenhagen delivered little, it was always going to be hard to get the wind back into the emissions trading sails here.

While Abbott is helped by Copenhagen, the climate issue will still be a slog for him. Possibly some voters will transfer their anger at lack of international progress on to those at home who have been sceptics or reluctant to do much. Climate will remain a significant issue, and if Abbott is to have credibility his alternative "direct action" policy will have to do enough and be properly costed.

Soon both Abbott and the Government will specify their targets for cutting emissions within Australia's currently declared range, announced for Copenhagen, of 5-25 per cent.

Rudd said at the weekend that "once we've put together all developed and developing countries' targets and commitments", Australia would determine its own target. Rudd is adamant that "Australia will do no less and no more than the rest of the world … That is why we'll wait 'til we see a pulling together of the aggregate commitments from the rest of the world."

The Opposition does not want an argument about the final target - that would complicate its challenge to the ETS. There will be timing issues - when the Opposition policy is released compared to when the Government sets the target. The Opposition will want to know the official target as soon as possible and its current aim would be to match that target, so it can argue it would do as much at less cost.

Abbott will be fighting not just Rudd but Turnbull. In a tough article in The Times, Turnbull has attacked Abbott, saying if he were "a leftist you could understand his reluctance for market-based mechanisms for putting a price on carbon". From now until the election Turnbull will be sitting on the backbench like a black crow, swooping from time to time to attack the man who deposed him over an issue that has become a passionate cause for the one-time environment minister.

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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20 December, 2009

The world is COOLING not warming says scientist Peter Taylor ... and we're not prepared

Natural scientist Peter Taylor is afraid we are not preparing for a global cool-down that could be part of a long-term cycle. In his provocative book Chill, he warns that the world is cooling not warming and that solutions proposed at Copenhagen ignore the risks of a possible return of the Ice Age...

Like a magician who fools themselves but not audience, the Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) lobby have identified the wrong problem and the wrong solution. Global cooling threatens disaster for humanity in the developed and developing world alike, yet the media and the scientific consensus ignores this peril.

The Climategate controversy revolves around whether warming has been real and why it has not persisted – but it misses the point. Cycles are involved, not short-term trends, and many respected scientists, especially those in Russia and China, think that a cooling cycle is coming.

The AGW brigade have mistaken the current warm period for a trend caused by carbon emissions. But the detailed science says it could be natural and part of a cycle. Behind the scenes at the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change there is no consensus – the dissenting views have been covered over in the summary documents for policy makers – and among UK and EU politicians it’s even worse, and criminally expensive for the British taxpayer.

The real science points to the sun’s magnetic cycle as the key driver by unknown mechanisms. Right now, Nasa is throwing its hands up and saying ‘we’ve never seen anything like it and can’t tell what it is going to do next’. Many scientists expect a repeat of the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century when the Thames froze every winter – and famine spread through Europe and China.

Natural climate change, especially cooling, is already dangerous for very large numbers of people who are vulnerable to climate changing - the urban poor in the developed world, including the UK, plus the poor nations currently dependent on food aid. Cooling reduces food surpluses upon which we all depend. The biofuels programmes aimed at preventing climate change will expose them to greater risk by decreasing the amount of land available and raising costs of food, while this problem coupled with peak oil will affect everyone worldwide and drive up transport and manufacturing costs to levels even the super rich will struggle to afford. These threats are real and here now, not in 50 years time.

Some dramatic changes are needed but not those proposed the EU, IPCC and UK politicians as they try to hunt down the will-of-the-wisp that is CO2 emissions. Business as usual is not an option since cooling actually does put humanity at risk. The apocalyptic scaremongering has made us weary and casual about such threats but we need to act if we are to maintain our humanity.... Food not energy will be the big issue we urgently need to address in the next few years.

Climategate does not just demonstrate the corruption of science and peer-review; it also demonstrates the incompetence of specialists who do not understand planetary ecology, especially its cycles. We’re being fatally led up the wrong garden path by green businesses, politicians, the IPCC and their computer geeks with their doctored spreadsheets and forecasts. They need to get out more and study the real world – not their virtual reality – because, like the asset bubbles of the financial crisis, the global warming bubble is about to burst…

SOURCE

Unprecedented breakdown of channel tunnel trains due to exceptionally cold weather

Another sign of global cooling

MORE than 2000 passengers spent a chilly and hungry night stranded in the Channel Tunnel linking France and Britain after cold weather caused five trains to break down. The trains failed as they moved from the freezing air of northern France into the warmer temperatures of the tunnel on Friday evening, operator Eurostar said. All Eurostar services were suspended until today.

Some passengers complained they were left to fend for themselves when the trains were halted under the English Channel during one of the busiest travel periods of the year. Lee Godfrey, who was travelling back to London from Disneyland Paris with his family, said: "We were without power. We ran out of water, we ran out of food and there was very very poor communication from the staff. "We lost air-conditioning when we lost the power. We had to open the emergency doors ourselves.

Eurostar said all the passengers had been evacuated from the affected trains, which were all travelling from France to Britain. It said the cold weather had forced the suspension of services until Sunday, adding to the chaos for travellers trying to reach their families for Christmas. "We have not had a situation like this in 15 years," Eurostar executive Nicolas Petrovic said.

The problems with the Eurostar trains added to an already difficult situation on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year in Europe as temperatures dropped as low as minus seven degrees Celsius.

More HERE

Blizzard blasts United States, one of the worst in a decade

Another sign of global cooling

A deadly storm described as one of the worst in a decade blanketed much of the eastern United States overnight, grounding flights and bringing traffic to a standstill on the last weekend of the holiday shopping season. In the bullseye of the historic storm, the cities of Baltimore and Washington - in a snow emergency - were on track to topple December snowfall records, with about 30 to 60 centimetres forecast by dawn this morning. That would eclipse Washington's 30 centimetre December record set in 1932, and Baltimore's record 35.8cm from December 1960.

President Barack Obama, attending a heated UN summit in Copenhagen where world leaders struggled to hash out a plan to battle global warming, raced home to avoid the worst of the storm that hammered the East Coast two days before the official beginning of winter.

After snow ploughs cleared the runway at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington for the presidential jet, Obama stepped off Air Force One and into a heavy snowfall shortly after 1am (5pm AEDT). In a rare move he was whisked to the White House by motorcade rather than his traditional Marine 1 helicopter due to the treacherous weather....

"This is a very serious storm," said Maryland Emergency Management chief Richard Muth. "The next 12-to-15 hours are going to be very hazardous," Muth added, warning people not to drive unless in an emergency. Virginia Governor Tim Kaine earlier declared a state of emergency, urging people to stay home, while Maryland's Governor Martin O'Malley followed suit.

Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty declared a snow emergency.

More HERE

NYT edits out cold weather

In a perfect end to a perfect global warming conference, Barack Obama has left Copenhagen “in order to return to Washington before a major snowstorm hits.” It might be only the 12th white Christmas for Washington in weather-recording history. The beauty of this moment was too much for the New York Times, which initially reported, accurately enough: "Aides said he left to get to Washington ahead of a major snowstorm headed toward the capital".

But that piece has since been re-written, omitting a certain word: "Mr. Obama, who left before the conference considered the accord because of a major storm descending on Washington …"

More HERE

Warmist scientists 'crying wolf' over coral reefs

At last some logic and common-sense. I notice that alarmist Hoagy is not saying much these days after some of his own research showed great resilience in coral. It's just amazing how Warmists routinely ignore the fact that corals survived much warmer episodes in the prehistoric past

A SENIOR marine researcher has accused Australian scientists of "crying wolf" over the threat of climate change to the Great Barrier Reef, exposing deep division about its vulnerability.

Peter Ridd's rejection of the consensus position that the reef is doomed unless greenhouse emissions are checked comes as new research on the Keppel group, hugging Queensland's central coast, reveals its resilience after coral bleaching. Professor Ridd, a physicist with Townsville's James Cook University who has spent 25 years investigating the impact of coastal runoff and other problems for the reef, challenged the widely accepted notion that coral bleaching would wipe it out if climate change continued to increase sea surface temperatures. Instead of dying, the reef could expand south towards Brisbane as waters below it became warmer and more tolerable for corals, he said.

His suggestion is backed up by an Australian Institute of Marine Science research team headed by veteran reef scientist Ray Berkelmans, which has documented astonishing levels of recovery on the Keppel outcrops devastated by bleaching in 2006.

Professor Ridd said scientists who predicted corals would be mostly extinct by mid-century had a credibility problem because the Great Barrier Reef was in "bloody brilliant shape". He said the reef had defied predictions that it would be overwhelmed by crown of thorns starfish, smothered in sediment from river runoff or poisoned by sediment and chemicals washed on to corals from the mainland. He accepted that ocean acidification associated with climate change was a genuine danger because it could impede the process of coral calcification, destroying the reef's building block. Scientists responsible for "crying wolf" over lesser threats had done the research community a disservice, he said.

"Ten years ago, I was told that the coral was going to die from sediment, and we have proved that is complete rubbish," Professor Ridd told The Weekend Australian. "They are saying that pesticides are a problem, but when you look at the latest data, that is a load of rubbish. They are saying bleaching is the end of the world, but when you look into it, that is a highly dubious proposition. "So when something comes along like the calcification problem, you are sort of left with this wolf story . . . they are crying wolf all the time."

Leading scientists including former AIMS chief scientist Charlie Veron and reef research pioneer Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, who attended the Copenhagen talks on climate change, have warned that the Great Barrier Reef will be destroyed by the middle of the century if ocean temperatures continue to rise, unleashing more frequent and lethal bleaching. Mass bleaching was recorded on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998 and 2002, affecting up to 60 per cent of all corals. The last severe outbreak, in which stressed corals eject the symbiotic algae that provide them with nutrients, causing many to die, was localised on the Keppel reefs three years ago.

More than 95 per cent of the corals were affected, of which about a third died. The corals became stressed after the water temperature topped 28.5C and began to die when it hit 30C and stayed at that level for a week or more, with limited wind or cloud cover to ease the heating.

Scientists have found the tolerance level of corals varies. Reefs around Magnetic Island, off Townsville, can withstand water temperatures in the low 30s, while those off Yemen, at the foot of the Arabian peninsula, live in temperatures that can reach 34C.

As The Weekend Australian reports today, some of the corals on the Keppel outcrops are more thickly covered in coral than before bleaching in 2006, raising hope the living heart of the reef can acclimatise to spikes in water temperature through a remarkable process of algal shuffling. "That was a real surprise," Dr Berkelmans said, conducting us on an underwater tour of what he calls his "lab rat" reefs at the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef.

He said the findings made him more optimistic about the ability of corals to adapt to climate change, especially on inshore reefs such as those in the Keppels. "People say the reef is dying," Dr Berkelmans said. "The Great Barrier Reef is 2000km long, with 3000 reefs. Are you telling me all of it is going to die?

"I don't think so. There are some areas that are naturally more resilient than others, there are some areas that see warmer temperatures less frequently because of favourable oceanography or other factors . . . We might lose species, and we might lose them at many reefs. The Great Barrier Reef would look vastly different, but the reef would still be there."

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chairman Russell Reichelt, a former AIMS scientist who worked on crown of thorns outbreaks, said Professor Ridd had cherrypicked data to support his thesis that the threat to the reef was exaggerated. "I would liken it to the medical debate around `Does smoking cause cancer?'," Dr Reichelt said. [No facts. Just abuse. Typical Warmist]

SOURCE

Australia: Greenies think that libel is free speech -- when they do the libelling

A Greenie MP's costly outburst raises questions about free speech. Must we watch what we say in the tea room? Might we be taped? Note however that the offender is a notorious extremist

The politician who said too much will return to the scene of the crime tonight. There'll be music and comedians at a fund-raiser for Ian Cohen at the Suffolk Park Progress Association hall, just south of Byron Bay. "And I might walk around with a gag on," says Cohen, a NSW Greens upper house MP. "The less I say, the better."

It was in this same hall in April 2001 that Cohen now admits he was unwise to speak out about a local developer, Jerry Lee Bennette, during two benefit concerts for Bill Mackay, a school teacher. Bennette had been suing Mackay for defamation over a letter to a newspaper criticising an environmental award to the developer for his gated community. Cohen was helping to raise funds to cover Mackay's legal costs. Little did Cohen know that Bennette had sent in private investigators who secretly taped his address. As three courts have heard, Cohen called Bennette a thug and a bully who was suing to stop criticism and stifle public debate - a so-called SLAPP suit (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation).

For that outburst, which was found to be untrue, Bennette sued Cohen, too. The MP now owes the developer more than $1 million, only $15,000 of which is the damages for the defamation. The rest is legal costs. "It is not as though he called him a pedophile or a wife-beater or something," Cohen's barrister, Clive Evatt, told the High Court last month. To no avail. Tonight's show will make a small dent in Cohen's bill. He is selling his Tamarama flat, which might cover half of it. He has raised another $45,000 in donations. He's been offered loans.

But this case is about much more than Ian Cohen, Evatt says. It has "very big" implications for freedom of speech, he claims. The barrister says the NSW Court of Appeal has significantly narrowed the common law defence of qualified privilege for defamation. Evatt warns this should alarm anyone inclined to speak their mind in a small forum, or anyone who dares to make robust comments about their boss or the strata manager.

"That's rubbish," says Bruce McClintock, SC, who represented Bennette. "The defence of qualified privilege has never protected gossip, backstabbing or abuse." McClintock says it has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with a long-term malicious vendetta against his client by green groups in Byron Bay.

While a jury had found in 2007 that Cohen did indeed defame the developer, Justice Ian Harrison accepted Cohen's defence of qualified privilege. To rely on this defence, a person must have an interest or a duty - legal, social or moral - to make the statement to the people receiving it, and they must have a reciprocal interest or duty to hear it. Those who attended the hall had paid an entry fee in support of Bill Mackay. Justice Harrison suggested it was contrary to society's interest that people's rights should be hampered "by constant fear of actions for slander".

The judge ruled there was no malice in Cohen's remarks, at least in those inside the hall. But Justice Harrison said Cohen did demonstrate malice when, in November 1999, he called a local surf club and suggested, without foundation, that Bennette had assaulted a junior member.

The judge also said Bennette had been "prepared to dish it out when it suited him" and had "dedicated much of his life to putting people offside". He considered Bennette's 1996 conviction for assaulting the filmmaker David Bradbury, altercations with neighbours and an often "poisonous" relationship with Cohen. This included Bennette's apprehended violence order against Cohen, later dropped, in 2000. Bennette told the Herald he had been subjected to a malicious campaign, and he disputed Justice Harrison's remarks.

In March this year, the Court of Appeal overturned Justice Harrison's finding. Declaring Bennette was "a thug and a bully does not advance the cause of free speech, the environment or justice", Justice David Ipp said. The High Court refused Cohen leave to appeal last month.

McClintock said: "It is simply ridiculous to say that this case has any freedom of speech implications whatever. What sort of society would we live in if people could purvey … false gossip to their friends under the protection of the law?"

Cohen accepts the right to seek legal redress for defamation. After all, he sued Channel Seven and The Daily Telegraph. But he says there is a key difference: his own remarks, secretly taped, were never meant for wide consumption. Nevertheless, Cohen says: "The damages against me of $15,000 - I can cop that. But when you have a bill for costs from the plaintiff for $1,015,000, there's quite a discrepancy." He now self-censors his remarks.

"That is no good for democracy," says Bob Brown, the federal Greens leader, who believes others will be hushed. Brown was one of the so-called Gunns 20 - the 17 individuals and three organisations that the forestry company sued in 2004 for $6.4 million for activities ranging from protest to public statements. Five years and $2.8 million later, Gunns has dropped its case against 16 of the defendants, including Brown. Its claims against the remaining four amount to just $184,000.

The ACT has adopted the Greens' anti-SLAPP legislation. Brown wants the rest of Australia to follow its lead and that of some US states and introduce the legislation to ensure cases are thrown out if they are designed to prevent protest or debate.

But McClintock rejects the notion that Bennette's cases were SLAPP suits. They were "quite different from Gunns' misguided case … It was not started to shut Cohen up but to vindicate the plaintiff from a false (as the judge found), defamatory (as the jury found), public attack on him."

Cohen will retire in March 2011. Before he goes, he is considering a private member's bill seeking to ensure costs in such cases are commensurate with any damages.

The debate on freedom of speech is far from settled, but there are two certainties: a considerably poorer politician and an aggrieved small-time developer.

Cohen had been planning, in retirement, to do volunteer work in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. "I had big plans but they've been cast astray." He will have to see, but he is not crying poor. He has one property and a stake in another, both with mortgages, around Byron Bay. He knows others do it much tougher. He works with the disabled. Cohen recalls a Buddhist saying: "If they burn down your house, the better you can see the moon."

Jerry Lee Bennette is not so sanguine. "It is not possible to put into a few words the hurt to my family and myself caused by Mr Ian Cohen MP in what I regard as a malicious campaign to destroy my reputation and business."

SOURCE

Australian conservative leader slams Leftist Prime Minister over Copenhagen 'failure'

THE Copenhagen conference on climate change has been a "comprehensive failure" for the prime minister, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says. After 13 days of tortuous talks the representatives of 192 nations have set a goal of limiting warming to 2C and earmarked $US10 billion ($A11.28 billion) in early funding for poor countries most at risk from climate change.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd threw his support behind the deal as "a significant global agreement on climate change action", but said much more remained to be done. "Some will be disappointed by the amount of progress, the alternative was frankly catastrophic collapse," he told reporters at the troubled summit.

However, Mr Abbott said the result was a rebuff to the prime minister. "Intentions are better than nothing, but Mr Rudd has failed his own test," Mr Abbott told Sky News today. "He said a few years ago that what we wanted to get were real targets against real time lines ... and certainly by that standard it's been a comprehensive failure."

He said such agreement as was reached by world leaders was too unspecific to be of value. "We can all say let's get temperature increases down, but they haven't said what they would do to bring that about ... They've said let's not let the temperature go up by more than two degrees but they haven't said how they're going to achieve it. "No country at Copenhagen has committed to any particular way forward. That's why I think it's very disappointing and that's why I think it's very hard for the prime minister, who always said real progress meant real targets against real time lines, it's very hard for him to claim any kind of a victory."

Mr Abbott added: "What this shows is that Kevin Rudd was very unwise to rush Australia into prematurely adopting a commitment in the absence of similar commitments from the rest of the world, and I think it certainly entirely vindicates the opposition's stance in rejecting Mr Rudd's great big new tax on everything when parliament was sitting earlier this month."

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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19 December, 2009

Hot air in Copenhagen, if nowhere else

The climate deal reached between U.S, China and other great powers on Friday night is so vague, hastily hatched and non-binding President Obama isn’t even sure he’ll be required to sign it. “You know, it raises an interesting question as to whether technically there's actually a signature… It's not a legally binding agreement, I don't know what the protocols are,” said a bleary-eyed Obama, before hopping in Air Force One for the trip back to Washington.

Even as he left, it wasn’t clear that the pact Obama described as “meaningful” would even pass muster with the European Union – or attract enough votes with the 193-nation COP 15 conference to become an official declaration. "It’s a catastrophe," said Dan Joergensen, a member of the European delegation. "We’re so far away from the criteria that was set up in order to call it a success, and those weren’t really that ambitious to start with."

Obama told reporters he was able to extract a first-ever commitment by India and China to subject their internal monitoring of emissions to international scrutiny, a move he had earlier tied to American participation in a $100 billion-per-year fund for poor nations. “Those commitments will be subject to international consultation and analysis” similar to World Trade Organization rules but “will not be legally binding,” said Obama. “It will allow each country to show to the world what [they] are doing.”

But the agreement – reached in Friday night talks with leaders of China, India, South Africa and Brazil – was more notable for what it doesn’t accomplish than what it does, an inconvenient truth Obama ruefully acknowledged to reporters. “This is going to be hard,” Obama said. “This is hard within countries; it's going to be even harder between countries. And one of the things that I've felt very strongly about during the course of this year is that hard stuff requires not paralysis, but it requires going ahead and making the best of the situation that you're in.”

He conceded that no more specific deal – much less a legally binding one – was possible until the issue of “trust” between industrialized and developing nations was resolved.

The agreement contained none of the specific emissions targets European and African negotiators had hoped to nail down, simply a broad-brush promise by the countries in the room to cap the overall global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius and provide a written record of their planned reductions.

It's unclear how many nations, particularly poorer countries who felt shut out of the process, were included in the final deal or how they will vote if the deal is put to one. It’s also unclear how the president’s half-a-loaf approach will sit with a deadlocked Senate or the Africans, Europeans and Asians who view him as the quintessential 21st Century leader.

"Squarely the blame is on President Obama. When you look very carefully and dig into what happened, you find that there is no difference whatsoever between President Obama and President Bush, except one of them tells it as it is," said Lumumba Di-Aping, the chief negotiator of the G77 bloc of developing countries, in an interview with POLITICO. He added: "This deal confirms what we have said about the lack not only of transparency but the undemocratic bent of developed nations' leaders… “It is a mockery."

But administration officials painted a different picture, claiming Obama playing an extraordinarily direct – even tactile – diplomatic role, with the president demanding to be admitted to a closed meeting of other countries over the objections of a Chinese protocol officer.

More HERE

The Real Melt-Down in Copenhagen

By Alan Caruba

If the United Nations cannot run a conference in Copenhagen without riots in the streets, why would anyone want to turn over the governance of the world to these people? For old “skeptics” like myself, watching the chaos in Copenhagen was sheer joy. It’s always a mistake for liars to gather in one place to trumpet their lies because it always attracts people who believe that the truth is the best antidote.

And for believers in the universal God of mankind and the universe, how lovely to see four inches of snow fall on Copenhagen in the midst of speeches and panels claiming that the Earth is warming. Even atheists who understand that global warming was and is a fraud could take some pleasure in that. In German, it’s called “schadenfreude.”

What became abundantly clear was that the Climate Change Conference was not about climate at all. It was about getting the developed nations to send billions to the undeveloped nations that have, as in the case of Africa, lived off of this largess while loudly criticizing the donors for being horrid capitalists.

The other aspect of the conference was the way the handful of global warming entrepreneurs like Al Gore (a) journeyed there in their private jets, (b) drove around town in their rented limousines, and (c) desperately repeated all the worn-out and discredited global warming claptrap about melting glaciers and ice caps, the die-off of every species known to man, including man, and the fact that this would occur in five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty or fifty years. Take your pick.

Who do you think is heavily invested in and dependent on the sale of bogus “carbon credits” for the use of “dirty” fuel such as coal, oil, and natural gas? Answer: Al Gore and the other scoundrels who have spent years creating the mechanisms to cash in on this. When the Russians sold their oil or natural gas in Europe, they were delighted to also sell the carbon credits necessary to use it under European Union (Kyoto Protocol) rules.

The other melt-down involved the totally specious “science” that carbon dioxide has anything to do with the Earth’s climate. Or that man-made CO2 can or does change the climate. The carefully constructed spider’s web of lies put forth by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were destroyed by the release of thousands of emails by the “scientists” who, it turns out, were deliberately falsifying the data.

The new addition to the Big Lie of global warming is that the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University had its computers “hacked” when it is abundantly obvious all the emails and other data were on a CD in the event that it was demanded under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act. It was leaked, not hacked. Similarly, the U.S. Act is being used to secure the data behind NASA’s claims supporting global warming.

Naturally, Al Gore claimed that the CRU emails were at least ten years old. NOT! He also managed to claim that all the ice at the polar caps was melting. NOT! And that the center of the Earth is millions of degrees hot. NOT!

And, of course, like a moth drawn to a candle, President Obama had to make an appearance and repeat all the global warming lies that no one believes any more except for the 20% of the U.S. population that thinks he is the Second Coming. NOT! Take note, Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was also there telling lies.

In the weeks, months and years ahead is the slow unraveling of the past twenty years of unrelenting lies about global warming. It will be slow because the mainstream media will be the last to acknowledge that they were wrong. What lessons can we draw from this huge fraud?

* Given control or the collusion of the mass media, it is possible to fool a lot of people a lot of the time.

* Given the backing of the government, billions in taxpayer’s money can be given to organizations and individuals who are delighted to cash in on the fraud.

* Those entrusted with teaching our children the truth about the real world betrayed them.

* Those perpetrating the global warming fraud are among the worst liars and hypocrites to walk the Earth.

* There is no end to the evil of Marxist socialism. It must be fought every day and all through the night. It takes many forms, but it is always about enriching an elite few at the expense of freedom for the rest.

SOURCE

Carbon-Spewing Climate Conference Attenders Offered "Hypocrisy Offsets"

The National Center for Public Policy Research is showcasing the hypocrisy of the carbon-emitting travels of global warming activists at COP-15 in Copenhagen by offering conscience-clearing "hypocrisy offsets" to attendees. The hypocrisy offsets parody carbon offsets sold and traded allegedly to allow people to live carbon-neutral lives. The hypocrisy offsets also highlight the insincerity of world-traveling, energy-guzzling COP-15 delegates.

"Many of those in attendance to press for additional commitments for carbon reductions traveled thousands of miles and used substantial amounts of carbon-emitting jet-fuel just to get to the conference," said David Ridenour, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. "We are exposing the hypocrisy by offering them 'hypocrisy offsets' to alleviate their green guilt. As one who is skeptical of the necessity of draconian carbon cuts, I plan to do my part to ensure plenty of hypocrisy offsets are available. I'll refrain from reducing my own personal carbon footprint."

"Environmentalists are in Copenhagen demanding global limits on emissions, but they don't want to follow the very rules they are proposing for the rest of the world," said Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. "Their participation may earn them some media coverage, but it is having no effect on an agreement. In fact, the United Nations mostly banned them from even entering the conference, so their voluntary contribution to carbon emissions -- emissions they insist imperil the planet -- from this unnecessary travel is a stunning act of hypocrisy. Because we know they must be feeling very guilty about what they've done, and in most cases intend to continue doing indefinitely, we invented hypocrisy offsets as a humanitarian act."

SOURCE

New Zealand climate crooks ducking and weaving too

NIWA have published misleading material on their web site and seem to have advised the Minister for Climate Change Issues to give evasive answers to questions in the Parliament.

For those unfamiliar with the story: NIWA keeps raw data for the national NZ temperature record and makes it available on their web site. The Climate Conversation Group and the NZ Climate Science Coalition conducted a joint study of the temperature record, researched by a science team and published on 25 November under the title: "Are we feeling warmer yet?".

That study demonstrated that the official graph does not represent the raw temperature data. NIWA told us that adjustments have been applied so we’ve asked for the details. So far they obfuscate. We don’t know why they refuse to disclose what the weather has been. We conclude that NIWA’s response to our enquiries has been defensive, obstructive and oddly disparaging.

The Hon Rodney Hide became concerned about deteriorating standards in public science and asked in the Parliament whether the Hon Dr Nick Smith would require NIWA to release the full data for the official NZ temperature record. On the last possible day for answering, Nick finally replied: “You must ask Wayne Mapp; he’s the responsible minister (for Research, Science and Technology, the portfolio that covers NIWA).” We won’t get any Parliamentary questions answered now until well into the New Year, so Nick Smith has caused a considerable delay in getting this information to the public.

Gratuitously, he added: “I would note however that the NZCSC have had this information since 2003.” He hoped that little factoid would hurt the Coalition’s reputation, but it won’t, although it might hurt his own — because the Coalition didn’t exist until 2006.

NIWA say that the Coalition have had all the information needed to reproduce the official graph since 19 July, 2006, when, they say, “NIWA advised NZ Climate Science Coalition member Dr Vincent Gray” of the need for adjustments and gave him a couple of examples. Dr Gray has located an email of that date and we can now reveal that it was from Dr Jim Salinger, not NIWA, it was not addressed to the Coalition and did not mention the Coalition.

It was sent just a few weeks after the Coalition was created, before they ever discussed the national temperature record. Dr Gray tells us that and other emails before and since were not official communications on either side — they were letters between two scientists who had known each other for years.

But most significantly the email does not give details of the adjustments made to the temperatures, nor does it give the information required to derive the adjustments. Dr Salinger just discusses the changes in a general way and gives a few examples and that’s all. NIWA’s assertion that that email contains the requested information is not supported by reading the email.

If Dr Gray had received the information he asked for in 2006, it would have made no sense to ask for it again last October, so the fact that he did ask again is further evidence that NIWA have never supplied the information and they are misinforming us and misleading the public. Even now, Dr James Renwick has not answered Dr Gray, neither has Dr David Wratt, despite a further plea from Dr Gray only three weeks ago.

We are asking valid, reasonable questions of a public body, the very same questions which Dr Gray has been asking for many years. Why don’t they answer? It is unprofessional of them to refer to private emails and give replies that are readily shown to be unfounded. Their refusal betrays a deep reluctance to assist

More HERE

How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

The East Anglia emails are just the tip of the iceberg. I should know

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS (Michaels was formerly professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia)

Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).

But there's something much, much worse going on —a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."

The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.

That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.

A refereed journal, Climate Research, published two particular papers that offended Michael Mann of Penn State and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of "paleoclimate" studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium.

In fact, that period, known as the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.

Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous "hockey stick" article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent "Little Ice Age" (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.

Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn't like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU's own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," he wrote in one of the emails. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn't toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones's line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results. This happened to me and to the University of Alabama's Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene.

GRL is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was "in the skeptics camp." He emailed Michael Mann to say that "if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official . . . channels to get him ousted." Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that "It's one thing to lose 'Climate Research.' We can't afford to lose GRL." In this context, "losing" obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.

Soon the suspect editor, Yale's James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU's Phil Jones that "the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there."

It didn't stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that "If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available —raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations— I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals."

Messrs. Jones and Santer were Ph.D. students of Mr. Wigley. Mr. Santer is the same fellow who, in an email to Phil Jones on Oct. 9, 2009, wrote that he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap" out of me at a scientific meeting. He was angry that I published "The Dog Ate Global Warming" in National Review, about CRU's claim that it had lost primary warming data.

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to "skeptics" (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn't publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature —even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.

SOURCE

Britain: What’s liberal about booing off Johnny Ball?

The jeering of a climate sceptic by supposedly liberal atheists confirms that questioning manmade climate change is the new blasphemy

Everyone hates the tabloid phrase ‘You couldn’t make it up’, I know, but there are times when no other form of words will do. On Tuesday night Johnny Ball, the veteran children’s TV presenter who introduced my generation (thirtysomethings) to the wonders of science and maths, was booed and slow-handclapped off stage in London for daring to express scepticism about manmade climate change. And who was in the audience, doing the booing, the jeering, the hissing and the chanting of ‘shame, shame, shame’ until a ‘shaken-looking’ Ball agreed to ‘leave the stage’? (1) Liberal atheists who claim to be allergic to orthodox beliefs, and campaigning scientists who have defended ‘free speech for scientists’. As I said, you couldn’t make it up.

Ball was invited to speak at ‘Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People’, one of an increasing number of religious right-style get-togethers at which hundreds of individuals mock and pour scorn on the deluded masses - except the gathered individuals are self-styled rationalists rather than Bible-bashers, and their targets are the thickos who believe in God or receive chiropractic treatment rather than drunks or single mums. Ball, who presented the BBC kids’ science show Think of a Number from 1977 to 1984, decided to devote his stint on stage to singing a George Formby-style ditty about the English physicist John Dalton, before making a speech in which he criticised the ‘bad science’ of global warming and said that natural emissions from insects and spiders (‘spiders farting’) are more damaging to the climate than fossil fuels (2).

Bad move. The new collective of liberal atheists, of agitated ‘rationalists’, of Keepers Of The Scientific Truth As Revealed Unto Them By Richard Dawkins, can tolerate nothing so intolerable as someone taking the piss out of scientific theories about climate change. According to one report there were ‘slow handclaps, whistles and jeers’ (3). A blogger who attended the event said ‘a cry of “shame” from the audience broke the dam, the boos started, and a perplexed and shaken-looking Ball was finally forced from the stage’ (4). No wonder Ball looked perplexed: he thought he had been invited to a free, open-minded, rationalist ideas-knockabout and then found himself being ‘forced from the stage’ as if he were a tattooed Satanist who had gatecrashed a bishops’ tea party down Lambeth way.

Ball says ‘the reaction of the audience [depressed] me’, as well it might. He also says that he just wants to poke holes in the idea that the world is spinning towards some kind of bad behaviour-induced hellfire (global warming): ‘We are depressing children by saying the world is coming to an end through climate change. This is simply wrong’, he said in an interview. Whatever about ‘farting spiders’, on that point he is absolutely right: the warping of scientific facts to tell a story about an imminent End of Days that is being somehow caused by cheap flights and hamburgers is one of the worst aspects of the politics of climate change. (Someone being booed by atheists for challenging the notion of End of Days? Once again, and hopefully for the last time, you couldn’t make it up.) But Ball now says he realises his speech was ‘a mistake’ and he won’t be repeating it at future atheist-scientist gatherings. Reader, he has been re-educated, or at least silenced, his ranting consigned to the Sin Bin of History by the illiberal liberals, or maybe intolerant toleraters, who make up contemporary ‘rationalist’ circles.

There are more ironies to this story than even Alanis Morissette could handle. First there is the irony of liberal atheists, gathered together by the liberal-atheist comedians Robin Ince and Chris Addison (‘Liberal-atheist comedians’? Come back, Jimmy Tarbuck, all is forgiven), booing someone for questioning what has become a debate-strangling, genuflect-demanding orthodoxy: that man caused global warming through his wicked behaviour, that he now must repent for it, and that if he doesn’t we are Doomed with a capital D. In fact, how’s this for ironic: Tuesday night’s Ball incident confirms that the real religiosity that governs society today - far more successfully and suffocatingly than the Catholic Church (collapsing) or the CofE (collapsed) or the religious right (bogeyman) - is the religiosity of climate change, attended and promoted not by smock-wearing God-squadders but by corduroy-sporting God-doubters.

In so many ways, climate-change alarmism, that ugly mish-mash of scientific findings, political hysteria and industry-demonising greenery, resembles traditional religious outlooks. The Science has replaced The Gospels as the container of truth about mankind’s downfallen condition and what he must do to rectify it and save himself. Green activists now march behind banners saying ‘The Scientists Have Spoken’ and give interviews in which they say ‘The Science demands that we [insert some miserabilist policy idea here]’ in the same way that priests once said ‘God demands that we [insert something about not having sex here]’. Carbon-offsetting, where you pay to plant a tree to make up for your eco-sins, smells a lot like Catholic penance. Talk about the ‘heat death of the universe’ (atheist hero Christopher Hitchens’ words) sounds a lot like Armageddon. And most importantly, the labelling of anyone who questions the politics, the science or the consequences (less development, more mud huts) of climate-change alarmism as a ‘DENIER’ springs straight from The Inquisition, when those who questioned the Bible were similarly branded with the D-word. It’s a very weird atheistic rationalism which borrows so liberally from the illiberalism of religious tyranny.

But the key thing here is that climate-change alarmism only ‘resembles’ traditional religions - it’s not the exact same thing, of course! No, because, if anything, it’s actually kind of worse. At least the old religions encouraged us to bend the knee, to live in a state of bread-and-butter self-denial and to censor our inner doubts in the interests of finally getting to some heavenly place in which we would meet Jesus Christ, live in the clouds and eat Philadelphia cheese all day. The dogma of environmentalism, by contrast, wants us to partake in all those backward things - especially self-denial and self-censorship - merely as a way of keeping the planet clean and tidy and not leaving behind an ‘eco-footprint’ when we leave. There’s no transcendence of everyday tedium, no final reward for goodness, no pearly gates… it’s just self-punishment for the sake of self-punishment. Life’s a bitch and then you die.

The second, and most notable, irony of this week’s Ball debacle is that many of those who attended the atheist shebang are defenders of ‘free speech for scientists’. They support Simon Singh’s campaign to reform the English libel laws after he was sued by the British Chiropractic Association for questioning their claims and practices. Indeed, Singh was in the audience that seems to have momentarily forgotten about, er, free speech, as it forced the shaken-looking Ball to leave the stage. The comedian Dara O Briain, who was on telly the other day slagging off the libel laws for curtailing scientific debate and ‘quashing dissent’ (5), compered the atheist get-together at which scientific debate was curtailed and dissent was quashed, announcing ‘I am shell-shocked’ - no, not by the treatment of Ball, but by Ball’s sinful words. ‘I’m discombobulated by a childhood hero doing that’, O Briain announced (6).

This reveals a high level of hypocrisy and double standards amongst today’s defenders of free speech for some (respectable scientists) but not for others (evil deniers). But it also reveals something very important about free speech itself - namely that it is threatened by laws, yes, but is often more urgently and thoroughly threatened by conformism, by a generally accepted way of viewing things, by what that great warrior for liberty John Stuart Mill described as ‘custom’. Indeed, Mill said that of the three major threats to liberty, the ‘tyranny of custom and tradition’ - that is, a non-statute based sense of correct wisdom - was the worst. These binding rules are enforced not by coercion, said Mill, but by the notion of unquestionable ‘right and proper ideas’ held by all respectable members of society. Or as the Ancient Greek leader Pericles described it: ‘that code which, although unwritten, cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.’ (7)

Climate-change alarmism has become just such a code. The ‘despotism of custom’, accepting the general and apparently correct view of things, is a ‘hindrance to human advancement’ and the ‘sprit of liberty’, said Mill. It discourages inquisitiveness and eccentricity of thought and action: ‘[T]he mind itself is bowed to the yoke… peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature, these [followers of custom] have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved; they become generally incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.’ (8) If there is a better description of the robotic adherents to the scientific-political dogma of climate-change alarmism, I have yet to read it.

And now another eccentric, with his nonsense about ‘spider farting’ and his common sense about this not being the end of the world, has been publicly humiliated and intellectually cowed. Yes, the use of libel laws against scientists (responsible or otherwise) and against anyone else is a disgrace, as spiked has been arguing for considerably longer than many of today’s libel reformers. But the use of unwritten codes to make a public example of disobedient thinkers, and to discourage serious, critical, eccentric or, yes, sometimes bizarre question-asking, is in many ways more frightening still. And the fact that those unwritten codes are being wielded precisely by the ‘free speech for science’ lobby… well, I’m going to have to say it one more time, aren’t I? You couldn’t make it up.

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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18 December, 2009

Statistically sophisticated Model Predicts Flat Temperatures Through 2050

And refutes Greenie attempts to dismiss the temperatures of the last 10 years

While climate skeptics have gleefully pointed to the past decade's lack of temperature rise as proof that global warming is not happening as predicted, climate change activists have claimed that this is just “cherry picking” the data. They point to their complex and error prone general circulation models that, after significant re-factoring, are now predicting a stretch of stable temperatures followed by a resurgent global warming onslaught. In a recent paper, a new type of model, based on a test for structural breaks in surface temperature time series, is used to investigate two common claims about global warming. This statistical model predicts no temperature rise until 2050 but the more interesting prediction is what happens between 2050 and 2100.

David R.B. Stockwell and Anthony Cox, in a paper submitted to the International Journal of Forecasting entitled “Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts,” have applied advanced statistical analysis to both Australian temperature and rainfall trends and global temperature records from the Hadley Center's HadCRU3GL dataset. The technique they used is called the Chow test, invented by economist Gregory Chow in 1963. The Chow test is a statistical test of whether the coefficients in two linear regressions on different data sets are equal. In econometrics, the Chow test is commonly used in time series analysis to test for the presence of a structural break.

A structural break appears when an unexpected shift in a time series occurs. Such sudden jumps in a series of measurements can lead to huge forecasting errors and unreliability of a model in general. Stockwell and Cox are the first researchers I know of to apply this econometric technique to temperature and rainfall data (a description of computing the Chow test statistic is available here). They explain their approach in the paper's abstract:

A Chow test for structural breaks in the surface temperature series is used to investigate two common claims about global warming. Quirk (2009) proposed that the increase in Australian temperature from 1910 to the present was largely confined to a regime-shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) between 1976 and 1979. The test finds a step change in both Australian and global temperature trends in 1978 (HadCRU3GL), and in Australian rainfall in 1982 with flat temperatures before and after. Easterling & Wehner (2009) claimed that singling out the apparent flatness in global temperature since 1997 is ’cherry picking’ to reinforce an arbitrary point of view. On the contrary, we find evidence for a significant change in the temperature series around 1997, corroborated with evidence of a coincident oceanographic regime-shift. We use the trends between these significant change points to generate a forecast of future global temperature under specific assumptions.

The climatic effects of fluctuations in oceanic regimes are most often studied using singular spectrum analysis (SSA) or variations on principle components analysis (PCA). In other words, by decomposing rainfall and temperature into periodic components. Such approaches can capture short period phenomena like the effects of El Niño , and the potential impact of longer term phenomena such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) on variations in global temperature. These phenomena take place over a period of years or decades. For finding and testing less frequent regime-shifts different techniques are called for. According to the authors: “An F-statistic known as the Chow test (Chow, 1960) based on the reduction in the residual sum of squares through adoption of a structural break, relative to an unbroken simple linear regression, is a straightforward approach to modeling regime-shifts with structural breaks.” All the statistical details aside, the point here is that a sequence of data that contains sudden shifts or jumps is hard to model accurately using standard methods.

The paper investigates two claims made in the climate literature: first, a proposed regime-shift model of Australian temperature with a slightly increasing trend to 1976, rapidly increasing to 1979 (the shift), and slowly increasing since then; and second, a claim of lack of statistical significance regarding the declining temperature since the El Niño event in 1998. Regarding the first, the authors state: “The increase in Australian temperature of around 0.9°C from the start of the readily available records in 1910 is conventionally modeled as a linear trend and, despite the absence of clear evidence, often attributed to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs).” The main reason to apply econometric techniques to climate time series data it that simple linear forecasting can fail if the underlying data exhibit sudden jumps. “That is, while a forecast based on a linear model would indicate steadily changing global temperatures, forecasts based on shifts would reflect the moves to relatively static mean values,” the study states. The choice of underlying model may also impact estimates of the magnitude of climate change, which is one of the major points put forth by this work.

As for the “cherry picking” assertion, the authors claim that the flat global temperatures since 1998 are not an anomaly but are representative of the actual climate trend. That climate trend exhibits two distinct breakpoints, one in 1978 and another in 1997. The proposed new climate model is what is know as a change point model. Such models are characterized by abrupt changes in the mean value of the underlying dynamical system, rather than a smoothly increasing or decreasing trend. Confidence in the 1978 breakpoint is strengthened by the results for global temperatures since 1910. These data indicate the series can be described as gradually increasing to 1978 (0.05 ± 0.015°C per decade), with a steeper trend thereafter (0.15 ± 0.04°C per decade).

The Chow test since 1978 finds another significant breakpoint in 1997, when an increasing trend up to 1997 (0.13 ± 0.02°C per decade) changes to a practically flat trend thereafter (?0.02 ± 0.05°C per decade). Contrary to claims that the 10 year trend since 1998 is arbitrary, structural change methods indicate that 1997 was a statistically defensible beginning of a new, and apparently stable climate regime. Again, according to the authors: “The significance of the dates around 1978 and 1997 to climatic regimeshifts is not in dispute, as they are associated with a range of oceanic, atmospheric and climatic events, whereby thermocline depth anomalies associated with PDO phase shift and ENSO were transmitted globally via ocean currents, winds, Rossby and Kelvin waves .”

Perhaps most interesting is the application of this analysis to the prediction of future climate change, something GCM climate modelers have been attempting for the past 30 years with little success. Figure 3 from the paper illustrates the prediction for temperatures to 2100 following from our structural break model, the assumptions of continuous underlying warming, regime-shift from 1978 to 1997, and no additional major regime-shift. The projections formed by the presumed global warming trend to 1978 and the trend in the current regime predicts constant temperatures for fifty years to around 2050. This is similar to the period of flat temperatures from 1930-80.

Prediction of global temperature to 2100, by projecting the trends of segments delineated by signi?cant regime-shifts. The ?at trend in the temperature of the current climate-regime (cyan) breaks upwards around 2050 on meeting the (presumed) underlying AGW warming (green), and increases slightly to about 0.2°C above present levels by 2100. The 95% CI for the trend uncertainty is dashed. Figure 3 from Stockwell and Cox.

What is even more encouraging is that, even though temperatures resume their upward climb after 2050, the predicted increase for the rest of the century is only about 0.2? C above present levels. That is around one tenth the increase generally bandied about by the IPCC and its minions, who sometimes predict as much as a 6°C rise by 2100. It must be kept in mind that this extrapolation is based on a number of simplifying assumptions and does not incorporate many of the complexities and natural forcing factors that are incorporated in GCM programs. Can a relatively simple statistical model be more accurate than the climate modelers' coupled GCM that have been under continuous development for decades?

Mathematical models based on statistics are often the only way to successfully deal with non-linear, often chaotic systems. Scientists often find that physical reality at its most detailed level can defy their computational tools. Consider fluid flow, which can be either laminar or turbulent. Laminar fluid flow is described by the Navier-Stokes equations. For cases of non-viscus flow, the Bernoulli equation can be used to describe the flow. The Navier-Stokes equations are differential equations while the Bernoulli equation is a simpler mathematical relationship which can be derived from the former by way of the Euler Equation.

In effect, both are ways of dealing with massive numbers of individual molecules in a flowing fluid collectively instead of individually. At the finest physical level, fluid flow is a bunch of molecules interacting with each other, but trying to model physical reality at the level of atomic interaction would be computationally prohibitive. Instead they are dealt with en mass using equations that are basically statistical approximations of how the uncountable number of molecules in flowing fluid behave. Often such mathematical approximations are accurate enough to be useful as scientific and engineering tools.

Indeed, many of these types of equations find their way into GCM to model parts of the system climate scientists are trying to simulate. Instead of simply looking at the statistical behavior of Earth's climate, GCM try to model all the bits and pieces that comprise the Earth's climate system. Unfortunately, not all of the pieces of the Earth system are well understood and many factors cannot be modeled at the course physical scales forced on the modelers because of the lack of computational capacity. As I have discussed on this blog before, simply changing the structural components of a model, leaving all of the scientific assumptions and factors intact, can radically change the answers a model cranks out (see “Extinction, Climate Change & Modeling Mayhem”). Beyond that, there are the matters of inherent data inaccuracy and error propagation as presented in The Resilient Earth chapters 13 and 14.

If the new model's prediction is true, global temperatures in 2100 will not even approach the tripwire-for-Armageddon 2°C level set by the IPCC as humanity's point of no return. Can a statistical model be better at predicting future temperatures than complex yet incomplete GCM? With the lack of theoretical understanding, paucity of good historical data, and overwhelming simplifications that have to be made to make climate models run on today's supercomputers I would have to say that the statistical model comes off pretty well. Give me a well known statistical technique over a fatally flawed climate model any day.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.

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

East Anglia CRU’s below-standard computer modeling

While the rest of the world focused on the e-mails from East Anglia’s CRU describing attempts to “hide the decline” and silence critics, a programmer in the UK focused on the programming code for CRU’s computer modeling. John Graham-Cumming says he’s not an AGW skeptic, but he’s becoming a skeptic of East Anglia, thanks to its below-standard computer programming for its climate modeling. Breitbart TV has his assessment and damning conclusion in this clip, which gets down to the brass tacks: would you spend money on any conclusions offered by these models? Watch the clip below for the answer:

SOURCE

NASA admits sun/temperature link

It's been known to others for over 100 years but what the heck!

New measurements from a NASA satellite show a dramatic cooling in the upper atmosphere that correlates with the declining phase of the current solar cycle. For the first time, researchers can show a timely link between the Sun and the climate of Earth's thermosphere, the region above 100 km, an essential step in making accurate predictions of climate change in the high atmosphere.

Scientists from NASA's Langley Research Center and Hampton University in Hampton, Va., and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., will present these results at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco from Dec. 14 to 18.

Earth's thermosphere and mesosphere have been the least explored regions of the atmosphere. The NASA Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) mission was developed to explore the Earth's atmosphere above 60 km altitude and was launched in December 2001. One of four instruments on the TIMED mission, the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) instrument, was specifically designed to measure the energy budget of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The SABER dataset now covers eight years of data and has already provided some basic insight into the heat budget of the thermosphere on a variety of timescales.

The extent of current solar minimum conditions has created a unique situation for recent SABER datasets. The end of solar cycle 23 has offered an opportunity to study the radiative cooling in the thermosphere under exceptionally quiescent conditions. "The Sun is in a very unusual period," said Marty Mlynczak, SABER associate principal investigator and senior research scientist at NASA Langley. "The Earth's thermosphere is responding remarkably -- up to an order of magnitude decrease in infrared emission/radiative cooling by some molecules."

The TIMED measurements show a decrease in the amount of ultraviolet radiation emitted by the Sun. In addition, the amount of infrared radiation emitted from the upper atmosphere by nitric oxide molecules has decreased by nearly a factor of 10 since early 2002. These observations imply that the upper atmosphere has cooled substantially since then. The research team expects the atmosphere to heat up again as solar activity starts to pick up in the next year.

While this warming has no implications for climate change in the troposphere, a fundamental prediction of climate change theory is that the upper atmosphere will cool in response to increasing carbon dioxide. As the atmosphere cools the density will increase, which ultimately may impact satellite operations through increased drag over time.

The SABER dataset is the first global, long-term, and continuous record of the Nitric oxide (NO) and Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the thermosphere. "We suggest that the dataset of radiative cooling of the thermosphere by NO and CO2 constitutes a first climate data record for the thermosphere," says Mlynczak.

The TIMED data provide a fundamental climate data record for validation of upper atmosphere climate models which is an essential step in making accurate predictions of climate change in the high atmosphere. SABER provides the first long-term measurements of natural variability in key terms of the upper atmosphere climate. As the TIMED mission continues, these data derived from SABER will become important in assessing long term changes due to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

SOURCE

Lying About Climate Change

The despicable Al Gore features in this story of how climate alarmists have knowingly and persistently lied to support their cause (or obsession). But so do prominent scientists who presumably should be held to a higher standard. Paul Reiter, a professor of medical entomology, writes in the Spectator:

I am a scientist, not a climatologist, so I don't dabble in climatology. My speciality is the epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases. As [Al Gore's] film [An Inconvenient Truth] began, I knew Mr Gore would get to mosquitoes: they're a favourite with climate-change activists. When he got to them, it was all I feared. In his serious voice, Mr Gore presented a nifty animation, a band of little mosquitoes fluttering their way up the slopes of a snow-capped mountain, and he repeated the old line: Nairobi used to be 'above the mosquito line, the limit at which mosquitoes can survive, but now...' Those little mosquitoes kept climbing.

The truth? Nairobi means 'the place of cool waters' in the Masai language. The town grew up around a camp, set up in 1899 during the construction of a railway, the famous 'Lunatic Express'. There certainly was water there -- and mosquitoes. From the start, the place was plagued with malaria, so much so that a few years later doctors tried to have the whole town moved to a healthier place. By 1927, the disease had become such a plague in the 'White Highlands' that £40,000 (equivalent to about £350,000 today) was earmarked for malaria control. The authorities understood the root of the problem: forest clearance had created the perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.

These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them. Even if Mr Gore is innocent, his advisers are not. They have been spouting the same nonsense for more than a decade. As scientists, we have repeatedly challenged them in the scientific press, at meetings and in news articles, and we have been ignored.

In 2004, nine of us published an appeal in the Lancet: 'Malaria and climate change: a call for accuracy'. Clearly, Mr Gore didn't read it. In 2000, I protested when Scientific American published a major article loaded with the usual misrepresentations. And when I watched his animated mosquitoes, his snow-capped mountain was oddly familiar. It took a few moments to click: the images were virtually identical to those in the magazine. The author of the article, Dr Paul Epstein, features high in Gore's credits.

Dr Epstein is a member of a small band dedicated to a cause. And their work gains legitimacy, not by scholarship, but by repetition. While they publish their work in highly regarded journals, they don't write research papers but opinion pieces and reviews, with little or no reference to the mainstream of science. The same claims, the same names; only the order of authors change. I have counted 48 separate pieces by just eight activists. They are myth-makers. And all have been lead authors and/or contributory authors of the prestigious [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] assessment reports.

Take their contention, for example, that as a result of climate change, tropical diseases will move to temperate regions and malaria will come to Britain. If they bothered to learn about the subject, they would know that in a period climatologists call the Little Ice Age, when Charles II held ice parties on the Thames, malaria -- 'the ague' -- was rampant in the Essex marshes, on a par even with regions in Africa today. In the 18th century, the great systematist Linnaeus wrote his doctorate on malaria in central Sweden. In 1922-23 a massive epidemic swept the Soviet Union as far north as Archangel, on the Arctic circle, killing an estimated 600,000 people. And malaria was only eliminated from the Soviet Union and large areas of Europe in the 1950s, after the advent of DDT. So it's hardly a tropical disease. And yet when we put this information under the noses of the activists it is ignored: ours is the inconvenient truth.

That's the story of climate activism. Whenever one portion of the evidence alarmists rely on is shown to be fraudulent, the response is, "But there's lots of other evidence." Yes, and that other evidence is fraudulent, too.

SOURCE

What Energy Crisis? The Truth About America's Oil Reserves

One of the stories that we’ve been hearing for years now, in justification of the government’s refusal to allow any more drilling or the construction of any new refineries, is that our oil reserves are so low that they won’t last us very long if we use them.

It’s true that many people believed that in the past, and many apparently still do, but the truth that’s beginning to emerge now, is going to bury that idea, in the same way that we’re currently debunking the absurd idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

While there have been some stunning new discoveries, a huge part of our new found reserves, has come as a result of recent developments in drilling technology which now allow us to drill far deeper, as well as allowing us to change the direction that we’re drilling in once we’re already down quite deep. As a result of these new techniques, many of the existing proven reserves, can now supply us with far more oil than we thought possible before.

But the numbers are still stunning! According to our government’s Energy Information Agency’s (EIA) latest report (March 2009) the total known oil reserves of the world amounted to roughly 1.3 trillion barrels of which the USA had only 21 billion. While that may sound like a lot of oil to some, it amounted to only 1.6% of the world’s known reserves. According to those statistics, Saudi Arabia, with 265 billion barrels, had close to 13 times as much oil in reserves, as the entire United States.

Now here’s the good news: According to an Investor’s Business Daily (Investors.com) report dated Nov 5, 2009, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in now reporting that the total known energy reserves of the world amounts to roughly 5.58 trillion barrels which is 4.3 times greater than what we had previously been told by the EIA. What’s even more exciting, is that Saudi Arabia, with 540 billion barrels no longer has the biggest slice of the pie. WE DO!

That’s right. According to the CRS statistics, America has 1.32 TRILLION barrels of reserves, or 2.4 times as much as Saudi Arabia, and this doesn’t include all the oil in the shale & tar sands which are mostly in Canada anyway. According to the report, the breakdown of the world’s major reserves are as follows: (in billions of barrels)

1: USA: 1,320
2: Russia: 1,250
3: Saudi Arabia: 540
4: China: 490
5: Iran: 430

Numbers 6 thru 10 belong to the lesser Gulf States, along with Canada at 220, Venezuela at 160, and Nigeria at 130

The truth about the reserves has been known around the oil patch for some time now, but it totally freaks out the enviro fascists, because the majority of these reserves are located in our territorial waters, and all those mindless fools can think of is images of oil rigs visible all along the west coast, and the east & gulf coasts as well. Of course the truth of the matter is that very few of those rigs would be visible at all, as most of the deposits are far enough from the beaches that they couldn’t be seen at all.

The next cry we’ll hear from the enviro fascists is how those rigs would cause an environmental disaster that would destroy the oceans of the world. By the time that happens we’ll probably be referring to BS like that as an “AlgorLie”, because it’s so darn far from the truth.

If you ask any experienced fisherman about offshore oil rigs, you’ll learn that the rigs actually become artificial reefs that attract marine life, not repel it. Fishermen LOVE them, and just like hunters, fishermen for the most part are the true environmentalists of their realm.

The risk to the environment from spills from offshore rigs, is extremely small, and frankly insignificant by comparison to the benefits that they will produce. With the trillions of dollars in wealth that they’d be creating, we’ll be able to clean up the worst possible spills far more efficiently than we have in the past, and we must remember that even the worst spills can indeed be cleaned up. It took quite a while to clean up the majority of the mess from the EXXON Valdez, and mother nature will take care of the rest over time, but the bottom line is that taking such a small risk in order to bring America back from her current bankrupt condition back to being the richest nation in the world once again, is a risk well worth taking. The only potential concern that I have is that we must first get rid of the socialists and communists who are currently running our country, because if a sociopath like Obama were to get his hands on that much wealth, we’d never be able to get out from under his control.

Is there nobody in the government or mainstream media who will tell us the truth about anything anymore? “America has an energy crisis, America is bad, the Israelis are the real terrorists, and on top of that, the world’s about to be roasted on a spit”

SOURCE

The biters bit: Greenie thugs complain that the Japanese use aggressive tactics

They don't like a dose of their own medicine. Typical attitude: Everybody else has to obey the rules but we can do as we like. This lot are very vicious and have attacked whaling ships in the past so the Japanese are fully entitled to use strong countermeasures

THE anti-whale hunting group the Sea Shepherd said a Japanese security ship has illegally followed them into French Antarctic waters and fired "a military class weapon" at their helicopter. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society said the Japanese ship the Shonan Maru No 2 had been following its vessel, the Steve Irwin, for nine of the 10 days it had been sailing since leaving Fremantle. Sea Shepherd said the Shonan Maru had been constantly reporting the Steve Irwin's location, preventing it from closing in on the Japanese whaling fleet.

A Sea Shepherd spokeswoman said the Steve Irwin entered French Antarctic territorial waters, with permission from the French Base at Dumont Durville, in a bid to lose the Shonan Maru. But, the Shonan Maru No 2 followed the Steve Irwin without the French's permission, Sea Shepherd said. The Sea Shepherd group said the French base had confirmed that the Japanese ship neither requested nor received permission to enter French waters.

The spokeswoman said the Steve Irwin helicopter then flew back to film the Shonan Maru in its pursuit. "In response, the crew of the Japanese ship activated their Long Range Acoustical Device (LRAD) at the Sea Shepherd helicopter," she said. "LRAD is a military class weapon." Helicopter pilot Chris Aultman said activating the weapon was extremely irresponsible. [And ramming whaling ships IS responsible??] "That device can cause nausea and disorientation and the use of it against an aircraft is extremely dangerous," he said.

The Sea Shepherd helicopter returned to the Steve Irwin for safety, at which point the Shonan Maru increased speed and aimed their water canons at the helicopter on the landing pad, the spokeswoman said.

Steve Irwin Captain Paul Watson said the situation was now very dangerous. "We have deliberately led the Japanese ship into thick ice in order to lose them in the ice," he said. "The icebergs could easily damage either vessel."

Sea Shepherd said had reported the incident to the French authorities adding that so far the Steve Irwin ship was undamaged but that the pursuit continued.

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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17 December, 2009

Russian scientists say that CRU shamelessly distorted the Russian temperature record to exaggerate global warming

And Russia is a very large part of the Earth's surface. This does sound like the end of the CRU at least

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages. Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap.

A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.

The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.

Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.

What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock. As Richard North says: This is serial.

UPDATE: As Steve McIntyre reports at ClimateAudit, it has long been suspected that the CRU had been playing especially fast and loose with Russian – more particularly Siberian – temperature records. Here from March 2004, is an email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann.

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

And here is what one of the commenters has to say about the way the data has been cherry-picked and skewed for political ends:

The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been done everywhere else. They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available. They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated, ignored length of data set.

On the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done. The complete set of data show 1.4C rise since 1860, the CRU set shows 2.06C rise over the same period.

SOURCE

Say what?! Stanford's Schneider claims: 'Hockey stick never used as proof of anthropogenic global warming by IPCC'

So sad to see such desperate attempts at rewriting history

Over at The Huffington Post, Stanford's Steve Schneider makes this remarkable claim: "The amazing scientific thing that nobody seems to be covering is that the "hockey stick" was never used as proof of anthropogenic global warming by IPCC"

This statement is just not true (maybe that will help to explain why no one seems to be covering it). Consider the image below of a BBC news story which covered a 2001 press conference on the occasion of finalizing the IPCC Third Assessment Report.

The man in the photo is John Houghton, head of the IPCC at that time. Look carefully in the background, that is the "hockey stick" graph up on a screen at the press conference. Well, this is perhaps circumstantial evidence. What did the IPCC actually say in its report?

In 2001, the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC TAR included a section with the following heading: "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities". In that section it reported: "There is a longer and more closely scrutinised temperature record and new model estimates of variability. The warming over the past 100 years is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone, as estimated by current models. Reconstructions of climate data for the past 1,000 years (Figure 1b) also indicate that this warming was unusual and is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin."

What was Figure 1b? Why, the "Hockey Stick"!

If climate scientists want to regain lost credibility, and indeed not see it diminish further, they are going to have to stop playing the rest of us for fools. One way to do that is avoid saying things that are not true.

SOURCE

Zogby poll: More Americans Have Little or No Concern About Climate Change

Survey finds less than half (44%) believe U.S. should act to reduce energy use if it means major lifestyle changes

As the United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen heads into its final week, nearly half of Americans -- 49% -- say they are only slightly or not at all concerned about climate change, while 35% are somewhat or highly concerned, a new Zogby Interactive survey shows. Zogby's latest polling shows an increase in those who hold this view compared with 2007, when 39% said they were slightly or not at all concerned about climate change and 48% said they were somewhat or highly concerned.

Intensity of concern about global climate change has shifted over the past three years in favor of those who are not at all concerned - 27% held this view in 2007, compared to 37% who say the same now. Fewer now say they are highly concerned - 20% today compared to 30% in 2007. This latest survey shows more than two-thirds of Republicans (68%) and 46% of political independents say they are "not at all concerned" about global climate change and global warming, compared to just 7% of Democrats. Thirty-eight percent of Democrats are highly concerned, compared to 4% of Republicans and 14% or independents.

More HERE

Climategate’s Inconvenient Truth

As global-warming alarmists try to recover from “Climategate,” they have returned to the first principles of selling their product to the public. Among the most important of these, as any advertising professional can tell you, is delivering simple message. And so, following the script, alarmists world-wide spent a great deal of time last week declaring that not only is climate science settled, but the ways in which climate forces affect the entire planet is also beyond dispute.

In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell last week, the high-priest of the First Church of climate change, Al Gore, said: “A hundred and fifty years ago this year was the discovery that CO-2 traps heat. That is a — a principle in physics. It’s not a question of debate. It’s like gravity; it exists.”

One wonders why Mitchell didn’t ask the obvious follow-up questions: If the science is indeed that cut and dried, why are scientists across the globe spending billions of dollars to confirm something so blindingly obvious? Indeed, why did delegates at Copenhagen commit to spending billions more to explore a question that, according to Gore, does not merit further investigation?

On December 8, New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman echoed the alarmists’ party line, writing: “This is not complicated. We know that our planet is enveloped in a blanket of greenhouse gases that keep the Earth at a comfortable temperature. As we pump more carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases into that blanket from cars, buildings, agriculture, forests and industry, more heat gets trapped.”

Both statements belie a shocking ignorance of the science involved. Even the leading degreed cheerleaders in the alarmist community, like NASA’s Gavin Schmidt or Penn State’s Michael Mann, would hurry to distance themselves from these sorts of blanket declarations. It’s one thing to simplify scientific concepts. It’s quite another to bastardize them.

Consider Al Gore. There is one ironic truth in Gore’s statement: there is a striking similarity between the theory of gravity and the science of climate change. Scientists universally acknowledge that a force known as gravity exists, but, though theories abound, none can say how it works. In the same vein, it is undeniable that the earth’s climate fluctuates over time, but anyone who tells you that they understand all of the complex mechanisms that influence those changes displays the sort of hubris that would have either struck a chord with ancient Greek playwrights.

The most important scientific law at issue, when it comes to climate change, is Beer’s Law. Put in technical terms, Beer’s Law, which Gore by all accounts has not yet moved to invalidate, says that the relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the global warming effect of carbon dioxide is logarithmic, not linear. Put in more friendly terms, Beer’s Law is the law of diminishing climatic returns: The more carbon dioxide one puts into the atmosphere, the less effect it has on the climate.

Water vapor is, by far, our most important global warming gas. Its global warming potential is over forty times that of carbon dioxide and there is over fifty times more water vapor in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. All told, the net warming effect of water vapor exceeds that of carbon dioxide by a factor of more than two thousand.

The alarmists’ argument, such as it is, declares that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide will result in the evaporation of more water vapor, just enough – in theory – to “tip the balance” and lead to an uncontrollable increase in planetary temperatures. This is a more subtle, and much more difficult to demonstrate, argument than that proposed by alarmists like Gore and Friedman.

Skeptical scientists counter that the tiny amount of increased water evaporation associated with increasing carbon dioxide concentrations might just as well result in increase cloud formation, which everyone acknowledges would have a cooling effect, along with increased evaporative cooling. The alarmists spend an untold amount of time and an unimaginable amount of dollars attempting to prove that those mechanisms are not meaningful. It’s the twenty first century equivalent of determining exactly how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, with about as much practical relevance and at much more a cost to society.

If the public truly understood the subtle nuances of climate change science, along with the way that the alarmists have twisted science in order to further their own agenda and further their grant-funding, it’s hard to imagine that any significant portion of public opinion would express a preference for further climate change legislation or regulation.

The only hope, especially in the aftermath of Climategate, for true believers like Gore and Friedman, is to convince the public that there is nothing remarkable or nuanced or complicated about climate science.

The truth of the matter is quite the opposite. Climate science is enormously complicated. The more we learn about it, the less human activity seems to affect the climate. That may be an inconvenient truth, but based on all of the data we have gathered after spending untold billions of dollars that would appear to be the honest truth – even if it doesn’t support Al Gore’s doom-saying prophecies.

SOURCE

Global warming as a political tool

By Jonah Goldberg

On Monday, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, formally announced that her agency now considers carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, subject to government regulation. The "finding" comes two years after the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 falls under the EPA's jurisdiction.

A day later, an unnamed White House official told Fox's Major Garrett that the message for Congress is clear: "If you don't pass this (cap-and-trade) legislation ... the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. ... And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty."

And such "uncertainty" is a huge "deterrent to investment," which will hurt the economy even more. Translation: We don't want the EPA to kick the economy in the groin, but if Congress doesn't act, well, a-groin-kickin' we shall go.

This is grotesquely dishonest. The White House and Congress could, quite easily, do something about the EPA's threat. President Obama could instruct Jackson to interpret the Supreme Court's 2007 decision granting the EPA power to regulate greenhouse gases more loosely. He could ask Congress to simply rewrite the Clean Air Act so as to exclude carbon dioxide from its list of official pollutants - the policy the EPA followed for years until the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Clean Air Act.

But no. As part of the enduring statist desire to penetrate ever deeper into every nook and cranny of our lives, Greens have wanted to find a way for the government to regulate CO2, a natural byproduct of fire and breathing, for decades. Now they can.

That is why the White House will use Jackson as a Medusa's head, to petrify cap-and-trade opponents with the prospect of something even worse: the effective seizing of the means of production. The White House says nothing of the sort is going on. Jackson, the former chief of staff to lame-duck New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, is an independent, disinterested public servant simply following sound science with no concern for politics.

If Jackson cares so much about sound science, why is she basing some of her policies on data from the discredited scientific frat house, the Climatic Research Unit? If Jackson cares so little about politics, why did she make her announcement to such fanfare at the opening of Climapalooza in Copenhagen?

In fairness, Jackson is only a Medusa's head to those who care desperately about economic growth and who don't think draconian taxes on energy and massive wealth transfers for white elephants in the Third World are the answer to our problems. But for others, she represents another icon from Greek mythology: the Golden Fleece.

Jason and his Argonauts set out to find the fleece so they might place Jason on the throne of Iolcus. The original story is one of power-seeking in a noble cause. It's debatable whether the modern tale of Jackson and the Goregonauts is quite so noble. But it's obvious they're interested in power and hell-bent on fleecing.

Indeed, some of loudest voices have a weird habit of telegraphing their priorities. Tim Wirth, a former Senator and now chairman of the United Nations Foundation, once said: "We've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." New York Times columnist and prominent warm-monger Thomas Friedman has repeatedly said (most recently this week) that he doesn't care if global warming is a "hoax" because even if it is, the fear of it will force us to do what we need to do.

And it just so happens that with the exception of nuclear power - which most greens still won't support - global warming fuels nearly every progressive ambition. Wealth transfers from rich to poor nations: Check. The rise of "global governance" and the decline of American sovereignty: Check. A secular fatwa not only to erode capitalism but to intrude on every aspect of our lives (Greenpeace offers a guide to carbon-neutral sex): Check. Weaning us off of oil (which, don't let the Goregonauts fool you, was a priority back when we were still worried about global cooling): Check. The checks go on for as far as the eye can see, and we will be writing them for years to come.

SOURCE

Copenhagen 'a big gravy train', says Australian conservative leader

Nice to hear a politician call it for exactly what it is

OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott says the climate change summit in Copenhagen is turning into a gravy train for some countries. Wealthy nations in Copenhagen have so far pledged some $US22 billion ($24.43 billion) to bankroll the war on global warming. Australia was one of six developed countries that promised to set up a fund to fight the loss of forests in neighbouring countries - a leading source for rising temperatures.

Mr Abbott told a gathering of Liberal Party members in the seat of Deakin in Melbourne's east that the coalition would be bringing out its own climate change policy in a few weeks.

He fears that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who is in Copenhagen, will do a deal that will hurt the Australian economy while not doing much to advance world environment. "My problem is, why does Mr Rudd think the best way to save the environment is to increase your cost of living?" Mr Abbott said. "Why does he give us a tax policy and tell us it's an environment policy?" He said the Coalition policy on the environment would be one that tackles the problem and not one that pretends to fix the environment.

"My worry is that the more we see of Copenhagen, the more it looks like a great big gravy train for people whose objective is not so much the environment but it is to get more for them by leaping on the climate change bandwagon."

SOURCE

CFACT drops the banner on Greenpeace ships in daring land and sea raids

Activists tag Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior with “Propaganda Warrior” banner; Arctic Sunrise hit with “Ship of Lies” banner earlier in the day

Global warming skeptics from CFACT yesterday pulled off an international climate caper using GPS triangulation from Greenpeace's own on-board camera photos to locate and sail up long-side of the infamous Greenpeace vessel, Rainbow Warrior. Then in Greenpeace-like fashion, the CFACT activists unfurled a banner reading "Propaganda Warrior" which underscored how the radical green group’s policies and agenda are based on myths, lies, and exaggerations.

Earlier in the day the activists daringly boarded Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise with neither stealth nor force, but by baffling the crew with doughnuts, and unfurled a banner that read “Ship of Lies” off the starboard side. “Greenpeace has been using these kinds of tactics for decades, and now they can find out what it’s like to have a little taste of their own medicine, “ said CFACT executive director Craig Rucker who masterminded the operation.

CFACT unfurled the banners for two reasons, CFACT president David Rothbard explained. “Greenpeace ships, like the Rainbow Warrior and Arctic Sunrise, have become global symbols for radical environmentalism, and we wanted to call attention to the harm these groups are causing. And second, it seemed appropriate to use one of Greenpeace’s favorite tactics to make this point.”

Greenpeace protesters frequently hang banners from factories and office buildings, paint slogans on smokestacks, and employ other publicity stunts. Some are relatively harmless, but others reflect a willingness to lie or even destroy property to make a point.

In 1995, Greenpeace launched a $2-million public relations campaign against Shell Oil, claiming the company was planning to dump tons of oil and toxic waste in the ocean by sinking its Brent Spar platform as an artificial reef. It was a full year before the group issued a written apology, admitting it knew all along that there had been no oil or chemical wastes on the platform.

Greenpeace has frequently destroyed bio-engineered crops, wiping out millions of dollars in research efforts designed to develop food plants that are more nutritious, withstand floods and droughts better, and resist insect infestations without the need for chemical pesticides. It has also waged an unrelenting campaign against insecticides and insect repellants that could prevent malaria, a vicious disease that infects 500 million people a year, kills over 1 million and leaves millions more with permanent brain damage. “Greenpeace employs the same deceitful tactics in opposition to nuclear, hydroelectric and hydrocarbon energy, even though 1.5 billion people still do not have electricity – and thus don’t have lights for homes, hospitals and schools, or power to purify water and run offices, shops and factories,” Rucker says.

Rothbard acknowledged Greenpeace was launched for the best of reasons. “But it radicalized its mission. The more power it acquired, the more it abused that power,” he said. “Some of Greenpeace’s original cadre has left, feeling they can no longer associate themselves with its current agenda.”

Greenpeace claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing “dangerous global climate change.” Hundreds of climate scientists and thousands of other scientists disagree with that assertion, as frequently noted by Lord Christopher Monckton, former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a CFACT advisor. “The continuing scandal over falsified and destroyed temperature data, manipulated climate models, and a perverted scientific and peer review process further demonstrates that there is no valid basis for this anti-energy, wealth-redistribution, global governance Copenhagen treaty,” said Rucker.

Anti-energy policies represent a “clear and present danger to the health and welfare of billions,” he added. Mandates for wind and solar would send energy prices skyrocketing, sharply constrict economic opportunities and destroy jobs. “People in developing countries simply want to improve their living standards, and give their children a chance to live past age five,” Rothbard said. “Greenpeace is diametrically opposed to giving them access to the modern technologies that would help them do that.”

Greenpeace is one of the “most unethical and irresponsible corporations on Earth,” said Christina Wilson, a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota-Duluth. “It’s time to expose it for what it is, and help promote real environmental justice. So I was really excited to participate in this human rights effort.”

“The ‘Ship of Lies’ and ‘Propaganda Warrior’ banners are part of CFACT’s long-term effort to bring sense and balance back to the environmental debate,” said Rothbard.

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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16 December, 2009

And these are the people who think that they can control the world's climate

They are just clueless blowhards pumped up with excessive self-esteem

COPENHAGEN DIARY: THERE was a touch of excitement when a group of African delegates stormed out of a working group at the start of the all-important second week of climate change talks, but at that moment I had more important things to worry about.

As the Africans were walking out, I was desperately trying to walk in. Along with more than 1000 other registered attendants at the conference, I was trapped outside in sub-zero temperatures waiting for the remarkably incompetent UN machinery to let us into Copenhagen's Bella convention centre. We were not exactly blow-ins. Registration had ended weeks earlier so the organisers would know exactly who was coming, and the queues were dotted with officials from government delegations who were supposed to be inside taking part in the talks.

When I joined the queue to pick up my credentials just after 9.30am, I found myself standing near two women who represented one sixth of Iceland's delegation. Like me, they had already lost one full day's work because they had flown in on the weekend only to find the UN organisers had changed their plans and refused to issue accreditations on Sunday.

People queuing started out cheerfully because everybody thought the exercise would be reasonably quick. By 11.30am, and with the queue hardly moving, I began to wonder how the geniuses managing this process could possibly oversee not just the complicated science and politics of this final week's climate change negotiations but the logistics of overseeing any actual climate deal for decades to come.

A deal to combat climate change is likely to include the organisation of trillions of dollars of financial transfers to developing countries and the sophisticated monitoring and reviewing of carbon emissions around the globe. That will take complicated calculations and this was a pretty easy test in simple logistics and arithmetic: what happens when you register 45,215 attendants for a conference that is being held in a convention centre that has a maximum capacity of 15,000 people?

The obvious solution was to have a serious cull of the 22,387 lobbyists and activists registered by non-government organisations so some work could be done by the 192 governments which are parties to the conference, and by the 3547 media representatives who are in Denmark to tell the world what is going on in the talks. Obvious, but not obvious enough for the UN.

At noon, as the first light sprinkling of snow appeared overhead, it became apparent the organisers had come up with the temporary solution of refusing to issue any new credentials at all. By 3pm, the lack of food and toilets was making things uncomfortable and the temperature was sliding towards -2C. At 4pm, the UN officials announced they were curbing the number of NGO members to be admitted to the conference.

A UN official emerged at 5pm to say everybody had to leave because officials were to stop doing accreditations at 6pm. Overtime was obviously out of the question.

SOURCE

Soot warming 'maybe bigger than greenhouse gases' - NASA

Researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, also the home of famous carbopocalypse doom-prophet James Hansen, have repeated earlier assertions that atmospheric soot may be as important as greenhouse gases in driving global warming.

This could be good news for humanity, as atmospheric soot levels would be much easier to reduce. Filtering soot out of exhausts from diesel engines and coal burners is simple compared to removing and sequestering CO2, and as an added benefit the effects would be rapid: soot doesn't persist in the atmosphere for long periods the way greenhouse gases do, as it is washed out by rain or snow. However, many environmental campaigners would resist the idea of soot taking centre stage, fearing that this could lead to a reduced emphasis on greenhouse-gas emissions reductions.

Earlier investigations including the effect of soot had focused on the Arctic, where Goddard scientists have previously suggested that "the impact of aerosols is just as strong as that of the greenhouse gases". Aerosols include soot, which tends to heat the atmosphere, plus sulphates and others which cool it. Unfortunately sulphates also cause acid rain, and clean-air regs in the US and Europe have seen them massively reduced - and the Arctic warm up.

Now, Goddard researchers have carried out new investigations into the effects of sooty aerosols on the glaciers of the Himalayas - sometimes known as the planet's "Third Pole". Glacial melting in the Himalayas has received a lot of play in the greenly-inclined media lately against the background of the COP15 international climate talks underway in Copenhagen; it is widely felt that the mountain ice is disappearing much faster even than CO2-alarmist climate models predict, and that this is a reason to suggest that the Copenhagen talks - focused entirely on greenhouse-gas emissions - may be the last chance for humanity to save itself from a disastrous climate apocalypse.

But according to NASA this week: "The new research, by NASA’s William Lau and collaborators, reinforces with detailed numerical analysis what earlier studies suggest: that soot and dust contribute as much (or more) to atmospheric warming in the Himalayas as greenhouse gases."

"We need to add another topic to the climate dialogue," says Lau. Hal Maring of NASA headquarters goes further, though he cautions that more field results from the "roof of the world" are necessary to validate Lau's modelling. "Even at this stage we should be compelled to take notice," says Maring. “Airborne particles have a much shorter atmospheric lifespan than greenhouse gases, so reducing particle emissions can have much more rapid impact on warming.”

One of the most troublesome types of aerosol is "black carbon", dark particulate soot emitted when fuel is incompletely burned. Diesel engines are a particular villain here, but coal burning and primitive cooking are also big contributors. If the new research is right, huge reductions in warming are on offer from comparatively easy initiatives such as better stoves, more efficient modernised diesel engines and cleaner coal powerplants, boilers etc. These measures would also take effect much more quickly than comparatively difficult, expensive and unpopular cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2 or methane.

Even Lau's Goddard colleague Dr James Hansen, who has spent the last several decades relentlessly bigging-up the greenhouse gas threat and pushing for emissions cuts, now admits that soot is a major issue - though he can't bear to suggest it might actually be bigger than greenhouse gases. "Black soot is probably responsible for as much as half of the glacial melt," he says.

It seems that the assembled, warring delegates at the Copenhagen greenhouse-gas talks - trying to prevent global temperature rises in the next few decades, ie in the fairly short term - may be arguing over the wrong things. According to the latest NASA research the human race might achieve more by sorting out its soot emissions first, a thing which would be comparatively easy to do, and get to the much more difficult, unpopular and less effective greenhouse gas cuts afterwards.

SOURCE

U.S. government lawyers wary of document destruction by Warmists

The following DOE Litigation Hold Notice was widely circulated to offices concerned with climate

DOE-SR has received a “Litigation Hold Notice” from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) General Council and the DOE Office of Inspector General regarding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Accordingly, they are requesting that SRNS, SRR and other Site contractors locate and preserve all documents, records, data, correspondence, notes, and other materials, whether official or unofficial, original or duplicative, drafts or final versions, partial or complete that may relate to the global warming, including, but not limited to, the contract files, any related correspondence files, and any records, including emails or other correspondence, notes, documents, or other material related to this contract, regardless of its location or medium on which it is stored. In other words, please preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.”

As a reminder, this Litigation Hold preservation obligation supersedes any existing statutory or regulatory document retention period or destructive schedule. The determination of what information may be potentially relevant is based upon content and substance and generally does not depend on the type of medium on which the information exists. The information requested may exist in various forms, including paper records, hand-written notes, telephone log entries, email, and other electronic communication (including voicemail), word processing documents (including drafts, spreadsheets, databases, and calendars), telephone logs, electronic address books, PDAs (like Palm Pilots and Blackberries), internet usage files, systems manuals, and network access information in their original format. All ESI should be preserved in its originally-created, or “native” format, along with related metadata. Relevant backup tapes and all indexes for those tapes should also be preserved. Further, information that is reasonably accessible must nonetheless be preserved, because such sources will, at the very least, need to be identified and, under compelling circumstances, may need to be produced.

If you have any doubts as to whether specific information is responsive, err on the side of preserving that information.

Any employee who has information covered by this Litigation Hold is requested to contact Madeline Screven, Paralegal, SRNS Office of General Council, 5-4634, for additional instructions.

More HERE

UN Security Stops Journalist’s Questions About ClimateGate

A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions” during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen. Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book.

McAleer, a veteran journalist and film maker, has recently made a documentary “Not Evil Just Wrong’ which takes a sceptical look at the science and politics behind Global Warming concerns. He asked Professor Schneider about his opinions on Climategate – where leaked emails have revealed that a senior British professor deleted data and encouraged colleagues to do likewise if it contradicted their belief in Global Warming. Professor Phil Jones, the head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, has temporarily stood down pending an investigation into the scandal.

Professor Schneider, who is a senior member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he would not comment on emails that may have been incomplete or edited. During some testy exchanges with McAleer, UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistants twice tried to cut short McAleer’s question.

However as the press conference drew to a close Professor Schneider’s assistant called armed UN security guards to the room. They held McAleer and aggressively ordered cameraman Ian Foster to stop filming. The guard threatened to take away the camera and expel the film crew from the conference if they did not obey his instructions to stop filming Professor Schneider. The guard demanded to look at the film crews press credentials and refused to allow them to film until Professor Schneider left the room.

McAleer said he was disappointed by Professor Schneider’s behaviour. “It was a press conference. Climategate is a major story – it goes to the heart of the Global Warming debate by calling into question the scientific data and the integrity of many scientists involved.” “These questions should be answered. The attempts by UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistant to remove my microphone were hamfisted but events took a more sinister turn when they called an armed UN security officer to silence a journalist.”

Two officers corralled the film crew and one officer can be seen on tape threatening the cameraman. The Guard can also be heard warning that if the crew did not stop filming their would seize the equipment and the journalists expelled from the conference.

McAleer says he has made an official complaint about the incident. “I have met Mr Christopher Ankerson the UN’s head of security for the conference and he has confirmed it was Professor Schneider’s staff who asked the security guards to come corral us at the press conference. Mr Ankerson could not say what grounds the security guard had for ordering us to stop filming.” “This is a blatant attempt to stop journalists doing journalism and asking hard questions. It is not the job of armed UN security officers to stop legitimate journalists asking legitimate questions of senior members of the UN’s IPCC.”

Professor Schneider was interviewed for McAleer’s “Not Evil Just Wrong” documentary but lawyers later wrote to McAleer saying he was withdrawing permission for the interview to be used.

McAleer, who is from Ireland, has gained quite a reputation for asking difficult questions of those who have been promoting the idea of man-made Global Warming. His microphone was cut off after he asked former vice-president Al Gore about the British court case which found that An Inconvenient Truth had a nine significant errors and exaggerations. Almost 500,000 people have watched the incident on youtube.

SOURCE

GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Three current articles below

Greens take moral high road - and finish last

By Peter Costello a former Liberal Party federal treasurer and the outgoing member for the Higgins electorate

Two days out from the Higgins byelection Malcolm Mackerras, Australia's leading psephologist, predicted a Greens victory. Mackerras not only knew the result, he knew the reason for it, forecasting the Liberal candidate would be defeated because of the "arrogance" of the resigning MP and the elevation of Tony Abbott.

When the poll was declared on Monday, the Liberal vote had in fact increased. Mackerras has moved on to other predictions. But the forecast excited the Greens leader, Bob Brown, enough for him to make a whistlestop tour before the ballot, hoping to associate himself with the victory. He appeared in the Melbourne suburbs to tell the media about the concerns of local voters. Surprisingly, they were all his pet policy projects.

I was with the Liberal candidate, Kelly O'Dwyer, that day. The press smelled a rat. "Haven't you been forced into the electorate to counter Bob Brown?" one journalist asked me. I pointed to my former office nearby, explained I had lived in the area for 20 years and that we were in my local shopping centre. "I don't travel here, I have to travel to get out of here," I replied. It was clear the media momentum was on the side of Brown.

It is hard to think of circumstances more propitious for the Greens: a sympathetic press, no Labor candidate, a Liberal leadership spill, parliamentary debate on the emissions trading legislation and the media focus on Copenhagen. And Abbott, as new Liberal leader, didn't get time for a visit. Still the Greens fluffed it. This did not stop Brown declaring a great triumph. As usual, there has been little critical appraisal of his performance. So what went wrong?

In contrast to the Liberal candidate, who was outstanding, the Greens chose a bad candidate. Their central command overrode local supporters to impose someone who lived in Canberra. Most people think an MP should represent locals to Canberra. The Greens had the idea they could represent Canberra back to the locals. And what a representative. When it comes to alarmism, Clive Hamilton is almost without peer.

These days he preaches destruction from climate change. In 2000 Hamilton forecast the GST would kill people on the roads - 65 a year - because it would lead to increased motor vehicle use and pollution. That means the GST has caused well over 500 deaths by now, which is nothing like the body count Hamilton is forecasting from global warming. But it is still a decent set of fatalities he can lay at the feet of the Liberal Party.

Secondly, some Labor voters - particularly among lower-income earners - will not vote for the Greens. To maximise their joint position, the Greens and Labor need to run three-cornered contests, like the Liberals and Nationals do in regional electorates. The Liberal campaign was assisted mightily by Labor's decision not to run.

Thirdly, the Greens have to scale down the sanctimony. They thrive on a message of impending doom. These days the cataclysm is global warming. Previously it was logging, or nuclear annihilation. Only by repentance and obedience to their doctrine can we escape the wrath to come.

But educated people are a little less credulous than that. They know in political policy, outcomes rarely match the promises, particularly the overblown promises of zealous activists. They know that moral absolutists rarely deliver what they promise.

The Greens have a moral superiority complex. In their mind they are not only right but virtuous, which makes their opponents not only wrong but immoral. This is why Hamilton has compared climate sceptics with Holocaust deniers - if you disagree with his policies you are complicit in, or covering, up mass murder. Robert Manne, who launched the campaign for Hamilton, put it this way: "If the Greens can achieve a breakthrough in the byelections … [this] might come to be seen as a turning point in the moral history of this country."

In Melbourne on December 5 electors could have turned to good from evil, to Green from Liberal. Instead, by voting Liberal out of concern for their children's education, or for the lack of aged care, or for their job or business, they demonstrated moral inferiority. One day it might dawn on Brown, Manne and Hamilton that voters do not like moral condescension. Sanctimony can make you feel good, but it rarely appeals to those listening.

SOURCE

Politicians talk green, drive fuel guzzlers

The usual Greenie hypocrisy. It's other people who have to make changes or do without

FEDERAL politicians are using a taxpayer-funded perk to pay for gas-guzzling SUVs, with more than 90 percent of them driving six or eight cylinder cars. A staggering 225 out of the 243 private-plated cars chosen by MPs and Senators have six or eight-cylinder engines, in contrast to the national trend towards smaller, more fuel efficient models. Only a handful of MPs drive low-emission hybrids.

The list, published today on The Punch, shows the most popular car among federal politicians is the Ford Territory, Australia’s answer to the SUV and possibly the heaviest Aussie-built passenger car ever made. It was chosen by 81 MPs, including many who live in suburban electorates. The Federal Government’s own Green Vehicle Guide gives the Territory a woeful 2.5 stars out of five.

The details, released under Freedom of Information laws and current as of March 1 this year, show only 10 MPs drive low-emission hybrids.

All MPs and Senators are entitled to at least one private-plated vehicle for personal use as part of their salary package. They can choose from a list of 35 cars valued at up to $48,990 or with approval from the Special Minister of State, select a “non-standard vehicle”. Apart from the Territory, other popular vehicles include the Holden Berlina and Calais vehicles or the Toyota Aurion V6. Some of the Toyota Landcrusiers, preferred among some country-based MPs, are diesel or in the case of one or two six cylinder cars, dual fuel LPG operated.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was embarrassed into swapping his private-plate Territory for a hybrid Toyota Prius in 2007 when, as Opposition Leader, it was revealed he was calling for action on greenhouse while driving a Territory.

Special Minister of State Joe Ludwig, a Territory driver, said the government was examining “cleaning up” the parliamentary entitlements framework, including the private-plated vehicle scheme. An independent committee would report to him next year with some recommendations intended to “reduce cost and increase transparency”.

SOURCE

The Quixotic war against carbon to add a third to power bills, which will cost $1000 more over three years

AUSTRALIANS will have to pay up to an extra $1000 over the next three years for power, with about a third of the extra cost directly attributable to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. The NSW regulator yesterday issued a draft ruling allowing the state's three electricity companies to raise their charges over the next three years, and it is the first such ruling where the cost of a CPRS can be exactly determined. The federal government has estimated that an ETS would add $1100 a year to the average family's bills, with gas, fuel and groceries set to rise along with electricity.

Power prices in Australia are set by each state within a national framework, and the Australian Energy Regulator recently issued guidelines for South Australia and Queensland, with those for Victoria due to be released in the new year. But these rulings allow only for increased charges for network costs and not a CPRS, making yesterday's ruling by the NSW Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal the first on what it sees as the potential cost to consumers of a CPRS.

While NSW is the first state to make such a call, its figures would be a guide for other state regulatory bodies when they issue their rulings for possible rises. Under the NSW body's draft ruling issued yesterday, the three main energy companies would be able to start charging for a CPRS from the middle of next year, even though the scheme was not due to start until the middle of 2011.

Notes issued with the ruling show that customers of Energy Australia would pay an extra $288 over three years for a CPRS, while those with Integral Energy would pay an extra $314, and those with Country Energy an extra $302. This represents a rise in cost between now and 2012-13 of 23 per cent for Energy Australia, 25 per cent for Integral Energy, and 21 per cent for Country Energy. In the case of all three distributors, the cost of a CPRS is about half the overall increase recommended by the independent regulator, with most of the extra cost to consumers coming from the need to replace ageing infrastructure.

The overall costs allowed by the NSW pricing tribunal would see rises over three years of $554, or 44 per cent, for customers of Integral Energy, $727, or 58 per cent, for those of Energy Australia, and $893, or 62 per cent, for those signed to Country Energy.

Tony Abbott seized on the last figure as evidence of how the CPRS would hit ordinary consumers. He claimed that "those massive increases are due in significant measure to Mr Rudd's emissions tax". "There is a real problem here. Mr Rudd is trying to tell us that there is a painless way to tackle climate change," the Opposition Leader said. "There isn't. And we have learnt today from the NSW authorities that Mr Rudd's emissions tax is likely to impact massively on Australian families." But the federal government planned to allow full or partial compensation for electricity consumers who earned less than $160,000.

The NSW opposition said the planned increases showed the extent that basic infrastructure such as powerlines had been allowed to run down under the Labor government.

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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15 December, 2009

More evidence of GHCN corruption

For the past six days, several climate scientists have discovered an alarming trend: clear evidence of alteration of historical data at weather stations around the world, in order to support the contention of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The changes appear to affect the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), a project of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climate Data Center. Note that this is the same agency that employs Dr. Eugene Wahl, who might be implicated in the research misconduct allegations made against Michael E. Mann at Penn State University.

Richard Keen at the University of Colorado was the first to notice the changes. On December 5, he published this report comparing his own research into the climate of Alaska with the official version of the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). He found no evidence of warming in Alaska over the past three decades, and no substantial difference in average temperature between 1935-1944 and the present time. Overall he found a warming trend of 0.69 Kelvin per century over the span of the twentieth century--while the GHCN dataset projects a warming trend of 2.83 K/century. (The Kelvin is the International System equivalent of a Celsius degree.)

Keen published his findings at icecap.us. They were little noticed until three days later, when Willis Eschenbach published this entry at WattsUpWithThat, containing an analysis of the raw data at the weather stations in and around Darwin Airport in Australia, and the data as adjusted by GHCN. Eschenbach charged that the Darwin data had been distorted, not adjusted, and suggested that the data ought to have been left alone, or else given one single adjustment, downward by 0.6 Kelvin, of the temperature record of 1941 and prior. The result of the official adjustments was a linear warming trend of 1.2 K/century, whereas the raw data showed a cooling trend of 0.7 K/century. Had the data received the single adjustment proposed by Eschenbach, the trend might have been nearly flat.

Worse yet, says Eschenbach, the data from just one station, identified as Station Zero or Darwin Zero, received an adjustment giving it a warming trend of 6 K/century.

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

Eschenbach admitted at the time that his findings at Darwin could be an isolated case. But shortly after the Eschenbach entry appeared on WattsUpWithThat, a reference to it appeared at The Air Vent, whereupon a reader mentioned and linked to Keen's Alaska study. Furthermore, another blogger published this entry (repeated here at WUWT) concerning faulty weather-station siting in Western Australia.

Today, Anthony Watts himself reported on a comment by a reader on the most disturbing finding yet: several GISS station datasets have been altered. The only reason why Watts and his commenter could detect the deletion is that Watts had saved the data from two of the affected weather stations (Orland, CA and Fairmont, CA) two years ago. The alteration at Orland is more serious: prior temperature records (between ca. 1880 and 1900), clearly warmer than subsequent temperatures, are now missing. Those data were in place as recently as 29 December 2008 and are not present today. By way of explanation, the GISS data selector (captured by Watts) says this:

Note to prior users: We no longer include data adjusted by GHCN and have renamed the middle option (old name: prior to homogeneity adjustment).

Watts suggests that the problem might be not with the GISS data but with the GHCN dataset upon which GISS depends for historical data.

SOURCE

ClimateGate Research Unit Disables Its Website

More lies and evasions

The Climatic Research Unit at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal has taken down most of the information previously available at its website.

Prior to November's release of controversial e-mail messages and documents from Britain's University of East Anglea, there was a separate website for the institution's CRU that allowed readers to review articles and studies created by and for the Unit.

Now, no matter what link one tries to access via a Google search, it directs you to a page that reads: "Due to the present high volume of visitors to this page, you will shortly be directed to the latest news about CRU on the main University of East Anglia website, or you can go there immediately by clicking on this link."

Once there, readers are exclusively offered the following:

CRU Statements

* Sir Muir Russell to head the Independent Review into the allegations against the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)

Today the University of East Anglia (UEA) announced that Sir Muir Russell KCB FRSE will head the Independent Review into allegations made against the Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

* CRU update 3

Professor Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review resulting from allegations following the hacking and publication of emails from the Unit. Read more

* CRU update 2

The University of East Anglia has released the following press release and statements from Prof Trevor Davies, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Prof Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit, and from CRU.

* CRU update 1

It is a matter of concern that data, including personal information about individuals, appears to have been illegally taken from the university and elements published selectively on a number of websites.

As such, you can now only retrieve statements from CRU concerning the current controversy, but NOT information and data related to it.

For instance, as Anthony Watts reported moments ago, you can no longer retrieve information about Keith Briffa's tree ring data which is so crucial to the whole manmade global warming myth.

In fact, the following links available at Google all redirect to the CRU Statements page:

* Climatic Research Unit

* Index of /cru

* Temperature Trends: Surface (CRU)

* Data available from CRU

* About the Climatic Research Unit

* CRU information sheets

Some pages don't redirect at all. Temperature Trends: Surface (CRU) goes to a page that says, "Sorry, but the page you requested does not exist."

As for the idea that this is because of "the volume of visitors," Watts noted, "[I]f indeed 'traffic' is a concern, redirecting to another page on the UEA server system doesn’t do much for the load, it just moves it around."

Will global warming-obsessed media that have been either ignoring or downplaying ClimateGate notice what's happened at the website of the CRU in the middle of this scandal, and if they do, how will they report it?

SOURCE. See also here for more comments.

The world must take action on climate change even if the science is not correct?

My! How the false fronts are falling!

Following the ‘climategate scandal’, Mr Blair said the science may not be “as certain as its proponents allege”. But he said the world should act as a precaution against floods, droughts and mass extinction caused by climate change, in fact it would be “grossly irresponsible” not to.

The first week of key UN negotiations on climate change saw clashes between the rich and poor world over the failure of countries like the US to commit to strict cuts in carbon dioxide. Later this week world leaders, including Gordon Brown and President Barack Obama, will arrive.

Mr Blair admitted that the talks are “one of the toughest negotiations that international leaders will ever have been involved in.” But despite sceptics claiming emails stolen from the University of East Anglia question the science, he said it was urgent to act now. “It is said that the science around climate change is not as certain as its proponents allege. It doesn’t need to be. What is beyond debate, however, is that there is a huge amount of scientific support for the view that the climate is changing and as a result of human activity,” he said.

“Therefore, even purely as a matter of precaution, given the seriousness of the consequences if such a view is correct, and the time it will take for action to take effect, we should act. Not to do so would be grossly irresponsible.”

A new report from the ‘Breaking the Climate Deadlock Initiative’ found that the current commitments of rich countries would not be enough to stop global warming. But Mr Blair insisted that even a weak agreement would set the world on a path to a "low carbon future" by encouraging investment in green energy and he suggested a review every five years to toughen targets. He also called for an agreement to halt deforestation that is responsible for a fifth of the world's emissions by paying poor countries not to chop down trees.......

SOURCE

The "Warmest decade" claim

Don Easterbrook shows below that even if we accept the "massaged" figures from the Warmists, the claim is still misleading

Figure 1. Atmospheric temperatures 1900 to 2009. The blue line shows global cooling for the past decade; the red line shows the length of the decade

The decade of 2000 to 2009 appears to be the warmest one in the modern record, the World Meteorological Organization reported in a new analysis on Tuesday. Does that mean that the past decade has been cooling? No—of course not. Comparison of the red line in Fig. 1 with pre-1998 decades shows that the past decade is warmer, but the blue line shows cooling during the past decade—although the decade is warmer than previous decades, the climate did cool during the decade.

Thus, the claim that this proves no global cooling during the past decade is totally false. This is a difficult concept for non-scientists (and apparently some scientists!) to grasp. An analogy would be riding a bicycle up a long hill for a century, going over the crest of the hill and coasting downhill for a decade. Even though you have been going downhill for a decade, you are still higher up the hill than previous decades.

SOURCE

Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don't add up

Media No Longer Giving Gore Free Ride!

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years. In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming....

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community.

“This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. “You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”

Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice. “Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Maslowki, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.

He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” he said. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at, based on the information I provided to Al Gore’s office.”

Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.” [i.e. another stupid and dishonest straight-line projection -- in an area where there are no stright lines]

SOURCE

Oklahoma senator plans to rain on climate talks

The final week of the United Nations climate change summit boils down to a battle between President Obama and the self-described "skunk at the picnic." Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who has called global warming a "hoax," plans to travel this week to Copenhagen. He'll stay just long enough — as few as three hours, he says — to tell heads of state that the Senate will not pass an energy bill that would limit greenhouse gas emissions. "We know (the bill) is never going to go to a vote," Inhofe said in a recent interview. "It's dead. It's gone … I'm not going to allow them to think America is going to do something it's not."

Delegates from other countries say that without Congress' support, Obama won't be able to keep whatever promises he makes when he arrives here Friday to try to seal a deal on capping emissions. Without the full cooperation of the world's second-biggest emitter behind China, any broad agreement to address global warming by the 192 nations gathered in Copenhagen will simply fall apart, they say.

"Unless the U.S. has the political will to make the necessary sacrifices, none of this will work," said Sudanese diplomat Lumumba Di-Aping, the lead representative for more than 130 developing nations at the summit.

Obama has proposed cutting greenhouse gas emissions by about 17% by 2020, compared with levels in 2005. He says a firm cap on carbon dioxide produced by U.S. industry, as mandated by a House bill passed in June, will help slow global warming and provide an incentive for companies to invest in cleaner energy. The Senate is to debate an energy bill early next year.

"There are many (U.S.) companies and investors … waiting for Congress to act, waiting for some certainty before they make these investments," Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said. He said Chinese companies were moving ahead with "green" technology: "If we don't watch out … they'll end up with all those jobs."

Even Republicans who say global warming may be a problem, including Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., say a cap on carbon emissions would damage the U.S. economy by pushing up energy prices. Carbon emitters such as power plants and factories would have to pay for permits to keep burning coal and oil at the same levels. The cost, Republicans say, would be passed on to consumers in higher energy bills.

The U.S. debate is one of many issues unresolved as the summit enters its second week....

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei cautioned countries against trying to save face at the summit by agreeing on goals far into the future — such as in 2050. "If you cannot deliver on the short term or medium term, you cannot talk about the long term," the minister said Friday. By 2050, he said, "most of us will not be here anymore."

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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14 December, 2009

Another UN Scientist Bails: UN IPCC Coordinating Author Dr. Philip Lloyd calls out IPCC 'fraud'

Note: The UN IPCC’s Dr. Lloyd wrote this on November 23, 2009 and apparently did not yet know about Climategate and makes no reference to it

Prof Bruce Hewitson (Uninformed vitriol, November 19) pontificates on Andrew Kenny’s assessment (Ideology and money drive global-warming religion, November 16). Unfortunately for him, there has been a reformation. The time for pontification is over. The critics must be answered. Instead Prof Hewitson stood in his pulpit and preached the gospel according to St IPCC.

He says he was a lead author for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). That is not material — I was a co-ordinating lead author, but it gives me no mantle of infallibility. Instead, it gave me insight into the flaws behind the whole process.

The IPCC claims that it has thousands of scientists and almost as many reviewers of the scientists' work to produce their reports. There are two problems, however. In the scientific world I move in, “review” means that your work is scrutinised by several independent, anonymous reviewers chosen by the editor.

However, when I entered the IPCC world, the reviewers were there at the worktable, criticising our drafts, and finally meeting with all us co-ordinators and many of the IPCC functionaries in a draftfest. The product was not reviewed in the accepted sense of the word — there was no independence of review, and the reviewers were anything but anonymous. The result is not scientific.

The second problem is that the technical publication is not completed by the time the IPCC reports. Instead, it produces a Summary for Policy Makers. Writing the summary involves the co-ordinators, the reviewers and the IPCC functionaries as before, and also various chairmen.

The summary goes out in a blaze of publicity, but there is no means of checking whether it represents what the scientists actually said, because the scientific report isn’t published for another four months or more.

In the Fourth Assessment, the summary was quietly replaced several months after it was first published because some scientists who were involved complained of misrepresentation.

In the early years of the IPCC, there was a slightly different process. The Summary for Policy Makers and the scientific reports were issued at the same time. In those years, however, the Summary for Policy Makers bore a warning that it was the last current word on the subject, whereas the scientific reports were correctly identified as being subject to continuing development. Someone smelled a rat about the “last word” story, so the process was changed, and now the summary is issued with no means of checking.

It isn’t necessary to list all the changes I have identified between what the scientists actually said and what the policy makers who wrote the Summary for Policy Makers said they said. The process is so flawed that the result is tantamount to fraud. As an authority, the IPCC should be consigned to the scrapheap without delay.

SOURCE

Is this a last hurrah for ocean acidification?

Below is an article from "The Times" of London. The writer has not kept up with the science however. His high-school chemistry has not prepared him for the complexity of nature: Both shellfish and corals THRIVE under higher levels of CO2. And warmer water EXPELS CO2 anyway, which is probably what is causing the present slight elevation of atmospheric CO2 levels. The Comments on the article give the author quite a caning anyway. He really is a drip who should stick to something he knows about. He is just a smug journalist with a chip on his shoulder

Ocean acidification has been quite scandalously left out of the reckoning in the past few weeks. I am not for a moment belittling the science behind man-made global warming. This still seems to me solid, despite the shenanigans at the University of East Anglia. That levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are rising is not disputed. We have known since the 19th century that carbon dioxide was a crucial greenhouse gas. Venus has a lot of it and is hot as hell. Mars has almost none and is cold as ice. [Errr... could we mention their very different distances from the sun?]

However, even if you happen to believe that everything we know about greenhouse gases is illusory — unlikely though that is — we would still need to agree at Copenhagen this week to cut our emissions of carbon dioxide because of what is happening to the sea, the source of roughly half our food and provider of other useful services that we tend to take for granted.

We know the ocean absorbs about 25% of the carbon dioxide we emit each year. This CO2 dissolves through wind and wave action to form carbonic acid. This is altering the chemistry of the seas in ways that are not disputed and are far simpler to understand than the effect the same pollutants are having on the atmosphere. I recommend the startling practical demonstration on YouTube of what acidity will do to the oceans given by Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to a congressional select committee this month.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution in about 1750, sea water acidity has increased by 30%. The speed and degree of this change are faster than anything that had happened for 55m years. The changes being observed are beginning to disrupt the ability of any organism to make shells out of calcium carbonate. Organisms that do this include corals, crabs, lobsters, small creatures vital to the diet of fish and plankton of the kind that die and form chalk deposits such as the white cliffs of Dover.

Projections show that by 2060, given the current rate of fossil-fuel emissions, sea water acidity could have increased by 120%. Lubchenco showed Congress a scary picture of what a shell would look like if it had spent a month in water as acidic as this. The shell had begun to dissolve.

Such an effect could trigger a chain of reactions through entire ecosystems, from whales to fish and shellfish, with huge implications for economies and wildlife. It could even stop the sea absorbing as much carbon dioxide as it does now, accelerating global warming. It is pretty scary stuff.

Predictably, the science of ocean acidification, which is accepted by governments on both sides of the Atlantic, does not go uncontested by the global warming sceptics. They say you can’t acidify the ocean because it washes over alkaline rocks. This process of weathering rocks is indeed how the alkalinity of the ocean will recover, but leading scientists say it will take hundreds of thousands of years. At the unprecedented speed that acidification is happening, the marine organisms will be knocked out before the rocks can dilute the acid.

There is plenty we still need to know about the acidification of the ocean. However, it looks as if unpleasant things start to happen if we go beyond 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (bear in mind we reached 390ppm earlier this year). That is, coincidentally, the threshold for holding the Earth’s average temperature rise down to a relatively “safe” 2C.

So ocean acidification, which people are beginning to call climate change’s “evil twin”, may be an even more pressing reason to move to a low-carbon economy than climate change itself. And that makes it doubly irresponsible for those people who scorn the need to cut carbon emissions to ignore what is going on in the oceans.

SOURCE

A.A. Gill in Copenhagen

Gill is famously in love with words but he has an important point below: Warmism is the establishment now. He does not consider that we may be seeing its highpoint before a decline -- a sort of Edwardian England in 1913

Standing here for half an hour to get my accreditation, which is all done by Danish schoolgirls with impeccable mockney accents, I realise that I am standing on one of those ley lines of history, a joint in the space-time continuum. I am stepping across an invisible border, balancing, Nureyev-like, on a pivot of a remarkable moment, a moment of moment.

This chilly melee is the tipping point. Not the climatic one — more important than that. Copenhagen is where