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31 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 162

30 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

As a complement to my post Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 160 I give you some more graphs to ponder.

But they are worth repeating to give perspective to this the biggest political and scientific scandal in modern time – The Global Warming Hysteria and it’s short-sighted political hubris.

Tornetrask tree-ring width and density AD 500-2004: a test of climatic sensitivity and a new 1500-year reconstruction of north Fennoscandian summers.

Grudd, H. 2008; Climate Dynamics: 10.1007/s00382-0358-2

http://www.springerlink.com/content/8j71453650116753/?p=b851a8f6195a400084f98f58b8efe335&pi=6

Click on the graphs and they get bigger

Temperature patterns over the past eight centuries in Northern Fennoscandia inferred from sedimentary diatoms

Weckstrom, J., Korhola, A., Erasto, P. and Holmstrom, L. 2006; Quaternary Research 66: 78-86

doi:10.1016/j.yqres.2006.01.005

Oxygen isotope and palaeotemperature records from six Greenland ice-core stations: Camp Century

ohnsen, S.J., Dahl-Jensen, D., Gundestrup, N., Steffensen, J.P., Clausen, H.B., Miller, H., Masson-Delmotte, V., Sveinbjörnsdottir, A.E. and White, J. 2001; Journal of Quaternary Science 16: 299-307

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/82002932/abstract

Five thousand years of sediment transfer in a high arctic watershed recorded in annually laminated sediments from Lower Murray Lake, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada

Cook, T.L., Bradley, R.S., Stoner, J.S. and Francus, P. 2009; Journal of Paleolimnology 41: 77-94

http://www.springerlink.com/content/7m27472845280367/

El Niño variability off Peru during the last 20,000 years

Rein B., Lückge, A., Reinhardt, L., Sirocko, F., Wolf, A. and Dullo, W.-C. 2005; Paleoceanography 20: 10.1029/2004PA001099

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004PA001099.shtml

Generation, transport, and preservation of the alkenone-based U37K’ sea surface temperature index in the water column and sediments of the Cariaco Basin (Venezuela)

Goni, M.A., Woodworth, M.P., Aceves, H.L., Thunell, R.C., Tappa, E., Black, D., Muller-Karger, F., Astor, Y. and Varela, R. 2004; Global Biogeochemical Cycles 18: 10.1029/2003GB002132

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2004/2003GB002132.shtml

Impact of climate and CO2 on a millennium-long tree-ring carbon isotope record

Treydte, K.S., Frank, D.C., Saurer, M., Helle, G., Schleser, G.H. and Esper, J. 2009; Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 73: 4635-4647

doi:10.1016/j.gca.2009.05.057

Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om <a href=”http://bloggar.se/om/milj%F6” rel=”tag”>miljö</a>, <a href=” http://bloggar.se/om/yttrandefrihet” rel=”tag”>yttrandefrihet</a>, <a href=”http://bloggar.se/om/fri-+och+r%E4ttigheter” rel=”tag”>fri- och rättigheter</a>, Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om <a href=”http://bloggar.se/om/USA” rel=”tag”>USA</a>

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 161

30 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

As a complement to my post Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 156.

This time to UK institutions.

http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/29/the-foi-myth-2/

The FOI Myth #2

As noted in yesterday’s post, Nature recently editorialized:

If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden…

Similar sentiments have been expressed elsewhere e.g. New Scientist here.

In today’s post, I’ll review FOI requests to UK institutions for data other than CRU station data and unarchived IPCC review comments, showing that these requests were reasonable, that the use of FOI was entirely appropriate and that complying with FOI requests enabled the matters to be dealt with efficiently and expeditiously. I’ve reserved FOI requests for CRU station data and for unarchived IPCC review comments to separate posts, because they are longer topics and raise different issues. Contemporary CA posts on FOI requests are here.

Thus far, I’ve identified three FOI requests for data other than CRU station data by myself or CA readers to UK institutions, none of which can be reasonably described as “endless, time-consuming demands for information”.

Jones et al 1990

On Feb 22, 2007, I submitted an FOI request to CRU for station lists and data for three networks (Russia, China, Australia) used in Jones et al 1990, which had been cited in IPCC AR4, then newly released. (As noted yesterday, a concurrent request for the same data was made to NOAA in the US.)

This request was expeditiously resolved when the requested information was placed online in April 2007 but not before CRU had first attempted to repudiate the request by making untrue statements to support a claim for FOI exemption. In its initial response, CRU stated (1) that the requested data (even station lists for Jones et al 1990) were already “publicly available” at NOAA, and (2) that they no longer possessed the “rural” data. I immediately asked the FOI officer to reconsider the ruling, observing that (1) it was (obviously) impossible to identify the Jones et al 1990 stations by inspection of the GHCN data sets; (2) my disbelief that Jones et al no longer even possessed a record of what stations they used. FOI officer Palmer quickly resiled from these untrue claims and reported:

upon further investigation and work, we have uncovered the annual input data for the paper of Dr. Jones from 1990.

This data was placed online in April 2007 (See cache here). The release of this data confirmed my previous surmise (see CA here, Feb 22, 2007) that the following representation in Jones et al 1990 about the Chinese network was untrue:

The stations were selected on the basis of station history; we selected those with few, if any changes in instrumentation, location or observation times.

I had surmised this representation was untrue because a contemporary technical report (NOAA NDP039) said of its 205-station Chinese network:

Unfortunately, station histories are not currently available for any of the stations in the 205-station network; therefore, details regarding instrumentation, collection methods, changes in station location or observing times, and official data sources are not known.

This misrepresentation became the theme in numerous 2007 Climategate Letters. One letter from me attached to a thread shows that I suggested that Jones issue a correction notice, something that Kevin Trenberth, an unlikely ally, also suggested. However, Jones decided to do nothing. (Climategate strands lead in all directions – I’m quite prepared to discuss the Wang issues, but would rather do so in a separate thread in a forthcoming post and focus in this thread on FOI compliance issues.)

IPCC AR4 Durbin-Watson Statistics

In May 2007, also arising out of AR4, I submitted a second FOI request to CRU (see post here) regarding the calculation of Durbin-Watson statistics in IPCC AR4, then hot off the press.

Although IPCC is supposed to only use results from peer-reviewed studies, in response to criticisms from Ross McKitrick and Cohn and Lins, Jones inserted his own statistical calculations (including Durbin-Watson statistics for temperature trends) into the AR4 chapter of which he was chapter author. I urge readers to consult the original CA post.

After carefully examining the AR4 references for Jones’ calculation – none of which was precisely on point – I asked Jones to clarify this (non-peer-reviewed) calculation as follows:

In Table 3.2 of IPCC AR4, you refer to Durbin-Watson statistics for various trend calculations, but do not show them. Could you please provide me with these statistics.

I am unfamiliar with any prior use of the Durbin-Watson statistic “after allowing for first-order serial correlation”. Could you please provide me your statistical reference showing how one calculates a Durbin-Watson statistic “after allowing for first-order serial correlation” and giving significance levels for the statistic “after allowing for first-order serial correlation”.

Could you please identify the statistical packages used in your calculation of REML trends and Durbin-Watson statistics? Would it be correct to say that (1) fitted a trend to the various series; (2) fitted an AR1 arima model to the residuals from (1)? (3) carried out a Durbin-Watson test on the residuals from (2)?

Where applicable, these requests are made under FOI provisions.
Thank you for your attention, Steve McIntyre

Copying the FOI officer should obviously not have been necessary but the Climategate Letters show unambiguously that Jones and associates had adopted a policy of unresponsiveness. Unlike requests without an FOI number, this request was resolved quickly and in a prompt and professional manner.

Gridded MXD Data Used in Mann et al 2008

Mann et al 2008 used gridded MXD data attributed to Rutherford Mann et al (J Clim 2005). Rutherford et al had stated that the gridded MXD was online at Rutherford’s website, but this was untrue.

In Sep 2008, I sent an FOI request (my third such request to CRU), asking for the gridded MXD data as sent to Mann and associates. I did not ask them for anything new or anything that had not already been sent to others. Had Rutherford et al lived up to their representations to Journal of Climate, the request would not have been necessary.

Whereas previous attempts to obtain this data directly or through the journal (edited by Andrew Weaver) had been unsuccessful, this request through FOI was resolved promptly and expeditiously by CRU placing the requested information on a webpage (see CA discussions here here

Interim Summary

Thus far, over the five year period from 2005 to 2009, I’ve located three UK FOI requests from me or CA readers not involving CRU station data or unarchived IPCC review comments (which I’ll discuss separately.) In making this summary, I’ve reviewed relevant CA threads. If readers are aware of any requests that I’ve missed in this inventory – other than station data/associated confidentiality agreements and IPCC comments, please advise me and I’ll amend accordingly.

Each of these three requests was reasonable and resolved promptly.

At least one of them would have been unnecessary had Rutherford (Mann, Briffa … ) et al complied with their explicit undertakings to Journal of Climate or had Andrew Weaver ensured that they had done so. In any event, complying with this FOI request took negligible effort as precisely the data had already been sent to associates.

In a second case (Durbin-Watson statistics), the FOI request would have been unnecessary if Jones had complied with IPCC policies not to use results not reported in the peer-reviewed-literature. In any event, the request was resolved quickly and professionally.

In the third case (the Jones et al 1990 networks), after a short delay resulting from false statements by CRU, the data was located and placed online and the matter quickly resolved.

Compliance with the FOI requests discussed above cannot reasonably be characterized as “endless, time-consuming demands” under the UK Freedom of Information Acts. A few readers observed yesterday that it was possible that non-CA readers (or CA readers of which I was unaware) had sent “endless, time-consuming demands for information” prior to Climategate. However, there is no evidence of such FOI requests (abusive or otherwise) in the Climategate Letters. Nor has such activity been mentioned at realclimate prior to Climategate. Nor is there evidence of such activity in the NOAA FOI logs.

In our review thus far, the FOI legislation seems to be doing exactly what it was supposed to do – and with negligible effort on the part of the scientists in question. I’ll get to FOI requests for CRU station data and unarchived IPCC review comments in subsequent posts on this theme, following which I’ll make some overall assessment.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 160

29 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Some of the graphs I have posted in some of my early posts 1 ½-2 years ago.

But they are worth repeating to give perspective to this the biggest political and scientific scandal in modern time – The Global Warming Hysteria and it’s short-sighted political hubris.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 159

29 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Interesting that “could not comment on the longer term” bit. Normally, this is the Met Office’s prime speciality. It may not be able to tell us with any reliability what the weather is going to be like next weekend. But ask it to predict what global climate is going to be up to in 50 or a 100 years time and its prescience is truly uncanny.”

“How does the Met Office know this? Because it’s on a mission, that’s why. Visit its website and you’ll quickly appreciate how this supposedly authoritative and balanced taxpayer-funded body has become the most strident activist on behalf of the global climate-fear-promotion movement.”

“The rot set in under its former director Sir John Houghton, a man so fanatically committed to the idea of man-made global warming that he once likened it to “a weapon of mass destruction”. As Christopher Booker reports in The Real Global Warming Disaster, Houghton not only chaired the first IPCC working group on assessing the “scientific information on climate change” but also established in 1990 the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. “

“With friends like that, is it any wonder that the Met Office gets it so wrong so very often? Its computer models, like those of the IPCC, are so thoroughly committed to the idea of Man-Made Global Warming that they continue to predict it regardless of all evidence to the contrary from real-world thermometers.”

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020868/the-uk-meterological-office-slightly-less-reliable-than-tea-leaves-or-cock-entrails/

The UK Meteorological Office: slightly less reliable than tea leaves or cock entrails

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 29th, 2009

One of my personal favourite Comedy Moments of 2009 came in the unlikely context of a BBC Radio 5 Live debate on climate change. The female presenter, as we’ve come to expect of the BBC, was quite shamelessly biased towards the Warmist camp, but this apparently wasn’t enough for the show’s resident weatherman. When his turn came to read the weather, he instead chose to deliver an impromptu homily on the seriousness of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I forget the exact words but his speech began something like: “Well I work for the Met Office and I’d just like to say….”

Dear, oh dear. The poor chap. I fear the time will soon come – if it hasn’t already – when the phrase “I work for the Met Office” will command about as much respect as “I was in charge of the New Orleans levee defences in the run-up to Katrina” or “I’m head of security at Lagos International Airport.” The UK Meteorological Office – established in 1854 – is supposed to be Britain’s greatest authority on forecasting the weather. So how come these days its predictions are so risibly inaccurate you’d probably be better off consulting tea leaves or cock entrails?

We all remember (with some bitterness) the glaring contrast between the Met Office’s rosy prediction of a “barbecue summer” and the chilly wash-out we actually experienced. This month, you may have noticed, they’ve screwed up yet again. A “mild winter” was what the Met Office promised us. But a “mild winter” (clue: notice how many fewer toes you have than you did in June) is what we definitely haven’t got. This has not, of course, prevented the Met Office coming up with one of its characteristic “even though we’re wrong we’re right” defences:

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.

Interesting that “could not comment on the longer term” bit. Normally, this is the Met Office’s prime speciality. It may not be able to tell us with any reliability what the weather is going to be like next weekend. But ask it to predict what global climate is going to be up to in 50 or a 100 years time and its prescience is truly uncanny. It’s going to be warmer, apparently. Much, much warmer. With drastically risen sea levels. Melted glaciers and ice caps. Ravening packs of emaciated polar bears cruising the world on diminishing ice floes. etc.

How does the Met Office know this? Because it’s on a mission, that’s why. Visit its website and you’ll quickly appreciate how this supposedly authoritative and balanced taxpayer-funded body has become the most strident activist on behalf of the global climate-fear-promotion movement. According to the Met Office’s official climate change guide, computer models are “reliable”, the “overwhelming majority of scientists agree on the fundamentals of climate change”, human activity is a major driver of climate change and the Urban Heat Island Effect is an urban myth.

The rot set in under its former director Sir John Houghton, a man so fanatically committed to the idea of man-made global warming that he once likened it to “a weapon of mass destruction”. As Christopher Booker reports in The Real Global Warming Disaster, Houghton not only chaired the first IPCC working group on assessing the “scientific information on climate change” but also established in 1990 the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. In conjunction with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) – whose scientists and associates were so roundly discredited in the Climategate scandal – the Hadley Centre provides one of the four main datasets (HadCrut) used by the IPCC for its increasingly hysterical predictions of man-made climate disaster.

With friends like that, is it any wonder that the Met Office gets it so wrong so very often? Its computer models, like those of the IPCC, are so thoroughly committed to the idea of Man-Made Global Warming that they continue to predict it regardless of all evidence to the contrary from real-world thermometers. If it weren’t so depressing – the Met Office, after all, plays a key role in informing public policy and therefore, in how your money is to be wasted by the government of the day (be it run by Green Gordon or Green Dave the disaster will be just as great) – it would almost be funny.

In fact it is funny, as this glorious Independent article dug up by Richard North reminds us. It was written in March 2000 and has various “experts” explaining how very soon in Northern Europe, the sight of winter snow will almost be as unfamiliar as marauding packs of wolves:

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.”Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Professor Jarich Oosten, an anthropologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, says that even if we no longer see snow, it will remain culturally important.

“We don’t really have wolves in Europe any more, but they are still an important part of our culture and everyone knows what they look like,” he said.

David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes – or eventually “feel” virtual cold.

North contrasts it with this more recent article from the Daily Telegraph, predicting sub-zero temperatures and widespread snow showers over New Year. Let’s hope our kids make the most of this “very rare and exciting event”. If we believe the Met Office – and who could possibly not – it will almost certainly be their last chance ever to build a snowman in England’s green and increasingly subtropical land.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 158

29 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

More on Pachauri, head of IPCC, and his direct economic involvement with the biggest Indian oil and gas company.

The hypocrisy is so staggering it’s beyond belief!

And remember that the favourite weapon of Global Warming Hysterics when attacking ANYONE that question the “science” or “facts” behind this political religion have ALWAYS BEEN THAT THEY ARE PAID BY BIG OIL (The evil incarnated in their world).

And of course it’s extra hypocritical since BIG OIL is NOW funding a lot of this Global Warming Hysteria and their institutions.

And of course the mainstream media is utter silent, totally shaming their journalistic endeavor, and continuing to preach this political hysteria. As a further betrayal of their heritage.

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/pachauri-and-big-oil.html

Pachauri and Big Oil

Posted by Richard Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The Indian company, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), is ranked 152nd in the Fortune Global 500 list of companies. It contributes 77 percent of India’s crude oil production and 81 percent of India’s natural gas production.

The Indian government holds 74.14 percent equity stake in this company which, in the financial year ending 2009, achieved its highest-ever sales revenue of £8.6 billion.

And, for the period of June 2006 to June 2009 it had the good fortune to have as one of its non-executive directors a certain Dr R K Pachauri, also director general of TERI and chairman of the IPCC.

When it comes to ”Big Oil”, there are bigger but ONGC certainly qualifies as a member of this club. And at the heart of the beast for three years, at a crucial point in the development of the IPCC agenda, was Dr Pachauri.

During that time, though, no one could accuse the good doctor of getting rich out of the deal – not directly at any rate. The company paid its non-executive directors a modest attendance fee only. And for the two years of 2007-08 and 2008-09, such was his pitiful attendance record that he netted only just over £2,000.

However, Dr Pachauri is nothing if not good at multi-tasking and networking. And, while diligently looking after the interests of ONGC he was, of course, looking after his own, setting up an offshoot of his institute TERI as a separate company called TERI-Biotech.

This company had developed a patented process for the biodegradation of oil, which could be used for extending the productivity of oil wells and for cleaning up oil spills. And its first – and main – client became ONGC, which allowed it to test and refine its process.

So successful was the association, we are told, that the two companies, TERI-Biotech and ONGC decided to formalise the relationship, forming on 26 March 2007 a joint venture company called ONGC TERI Biotech Ltd (OTBL). TERI – director general Dr R K Pachauri – holds 47 percent of the equity, while ONGC has 49 percent. The remaining 2 percent is held by financial institutions.

Needless to say, the financial contribution to Dr Pachauri’s evident wealth has not been recorded, but his continued partnership with ”Big Oil” is now set to yield dividends. Reported in April 2009, two months before Pachauri stepped down from the main board of ONGC, the joint venture company had decided to bid for a share of a $3bn UN-funded contract to clean up the oil pollution in Kuwait, left behind by Saddam’s invasion.

That Pachauri just happens to be a senior official of a UN institution is, of course, a complete coincidence. But his joint company seems remarkably confident of getting a sizeable slice of the work, so much so that it was telling the Indian financial press that it has ”a plan to clock a top line of $2.1 billion in the next three to four years.”

One can only wish the enterprising Dr Pachauri the best of luck in his venture, but it should be recorded that, while the likes of George Monbiot are quick to associate ”climate deniers” with Big Oil, no one is actually closer than his all-time hero, Dr R K Pachauri.

Etiketter Etanol, IPCC, Temperaturdata, Havsis, Havsnivå, Klimatmodeller, Al Gore, CO2, Kyoto, Carbon Trading, Global Warming Hysteri, Peer review, Isbjörnar, Vindkraft, Snötäcket, Orkaner, Obama, EU, Korruption, EU Parlamentet, UN, Riksdagen, Politik, Media, Traditional Media, Journalism, Press, News
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 157

29 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“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.”

“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.”

http://www.calgaryherald.com/technology/denial/2385380/story.html

Who’s in denial now?

By Kenneth P. Green, For The Calgary HeraldDecember 28, 2009

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.

Former IPCC reviewer Kenneth P. Green, has his doctorate in environmental science and engineering and is an Advisor to the Frontier Center for Public Policy, (www.fcpp.org).Green is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 156

29 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

These poor people, I completely understand why everything come to a standstill because of 3 FOI requests during 5 years. SOOOO much hard work. Especially since ALL 3 was refused.

And remember, dear folks, NEARLY ALL OF THIS “RESEARCH” IS DONE WITH OUR TAX MONEY.

http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/28/foi-myth-1-usa/

FOI Myth #1: USA

Climate scientists have recently been promoting the myth that providing data in response to FOI requests was interfering with their work. Nature uncritically accepted this myth in a recent editorial calling for action to protect climate-change researchers from “endless time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts.”:

If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden…

While the scientific method is supposed to require fact checking, in this case, the mantra had merely been repeated over and over by climate scientists like a sort of tribal chant and, without carrying out even a modicum of due diligence to determine the veracity of the claims, Nature joined into the chant.

Today I’m going to review the allegation that U.S. scientists have been unduly burdened by FOI requests, showing that they haven’t. I’ll discuss the UK situation in a follow-up post (and would appreciate that commenters defer discussion of the UK situation until then.)

In the five-year period from 2005-2009, I made a total of three FOI requests to U.S. institutions. I am unaware of other FOI requests made by CA readers (there is no record of any such requests in CA posts included in the FOI category). Of the three requests, only one actually resulted in the provision of data under the FOI request. (In the other two cases, the institutions apparently planned to archive the data anyway and the requests were resolved outside FOI – see below.) To say that U.S. climate scientists were inconvenienced in any way by the provision of data in response to FOI requests is totally untrue. I will review each of the three FOI requests below.

FOI to NOAA regarding Jones et al 1990

My first FOI request to a US institution (NOAA) was in March 2007. This was the only request actually resulting in information being sent to me pursuant to the FOI request.

This FOI request requested station lists and data for networks (China and Australia) used in Jones et al 1990, an influential study on urban heat island effect that had then been recently cited in IPCC AR4. The request to NOAA was concurrent with an identical request to CRU (coauthors were at each institution.) Oddly, as of a year later, I hadn’t heard back from NOAA – not even an acknowledgement that my request was under consideration.

However, the parallel request to CRU was resolved expeditiously (anomalously.) In April 2007, they posted up station lists for China, Russia and Australia (cache here) As I result, I didn’t follow up with NOAA, as the request had become moot.

To my surprise, as I reported at CA here, I saw two NOAA presentations on the internet referring to my FOI request (not identifying me by name, but referring to an “international researcher” and quoting the exact language of my request.)

Mildly amused, I emailed Tom Karl of NOAA, twitting him about the oversight. He promptly apologized and sent me the station lists for the Russian network (by then moot as noted above.) They also provided information on U.S. stations that I hadn’t requested but appreciated. See here here . The data provided by NOAA consisted only of station lists (the original data having been overwritten by subsequent data) and was not extensive in scope.

IPCC Review Comments

My second FOI request to a U.S. institution, also in 2007, was about IPCC Review Comments.

As an IPCC reviewer, I had previously asked IPCC to provide me with AR4 Review Comments, which IPCC was obliged under its procedures to maintain in an open archive for up to 5 years. IPCC’s answer was that I could inspect a hard copy of the Review Comments in person at Harvard Library during limited hours, where I would be able to only copy up to 100 pages. In an internet age, I (and others) regarded this response as an affront to IPCC’s obligation to be “open and transparent”. This view was shared by some “community” climate scientists, who supported my request for an online archive (e.g. Andrew Dessler, James Annan.)

After IPCC refused to provide a digital version of the Review Comments, I submitted an FOI request to NOAA asking them for any copies of IPCC Review Comments in their possession (US FOI requiring institutions to provide digital copies of information if available). The Chair of Working Group 1 (Susan Solomon) and the head of the WG1 Technical Services Unit (Martin Manning) were both NOAA employees. Both of them had used their NOAA email addresses for their IPCC correspondence. Astonsihingly, NOAA refused the FOI request on the grounds that NOAA did not possess any relevant documents, apparently taking the legal position that correspondence by NOAA employees pertaining to IPCC was IPCC property. In my opinion, this unsupportable legal theory was simply one more case where a climate institution diminished its reputation by making an untrue and absurd statement.

However, shortly after the NOAA refusal, IPCC reversed its stance and placed the majority of Review Comments online. (While the online archive is very extensive, it does not include review comments if chapter authors evaded the requirement to archive all review comments, e.g. Eugene Wahl’s “off the record” review comments sent to Keith Briffa outside the IPCC system to Keith Briffa, or review comments by review editors, but that’s another story.)

Santer Data
My third FOI request was for the monthly tropospheric data for the 49 individual models used in Santer et al 2008. See here for Santer posts.

In October 2008, I had noticed that Santer had used obsolete observations (ending in 1999) and that some key results for model ensembles were reversed using up-to-date data. (Ross and I submitted a comment to IJC on this topic in January 2009, where it was promptly tied up by reviewers – see discussion in the Climategate Letters.)

I was interested in doing a similar comparison of Santer’s individual models with up-to-date data and, in late October 2009, I emailed Santer requesting the monthly tropospheric data used in the statistical analyses reported in Santer et al 2008. (Santer, by the way, is an employee of PCMDI, one of whose principal missions is to provide data to the research community in user-friendly formats.)

In one of the Climategate Letters [link], Tom Wigley suggested to Santer that the requested data would be of considerable benefit to the community and even recommended that Santer provide an even more extensive archive than I had requested. In January 2009, the requested data was placed online. Shortly thereafter, in response to a CA post, Dave Bader, Santer’s supervisor, notified me by email as follows (see here) that the archiving of the data was not in response to my FOI request and that Livermore had always planned to archive the data:

I want to clarify several mis-impressions on your “climateaudit.org” web site with respect to the Synthetic MSU data sets on the PCMDI website.

1. The data were released publicly on 14 January 2009, at which time our Department of Energy sponsors and NNSA Freedom of Information Act officials were notified. These data were released voluntarily by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and we were never directed to do so as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Furthermore, preparation of the datasets and documentation for them began before your FOIA request was received by us.

Taking Bader’s statements at face value, Santer should obviously have informed me of these plans when I originally requested the data in October 2009. Instead, as reported at CA here, Santer not only made no mention of Livermore’s data release plans, instead repudiating my request in extremely rude terms, broadcasting his refusal to 16 climate scientists around the world, most of whom were not employees of Lawrence Livermore or the US Department of Energy, the operator of Lawrence Livermore.

I am copying this email to all co-authors of the 2008 Santer et al. IJoC paper, as well as to Professor Glenn McGregor at IJoC.

I gather that you have appointed yourself as an independent arbiter of the appropriate use of statistical tools in climate research. Rather that “auditing” our paper, you should be directing your attention to the 2007 IJoC paper published by David Douglass et al., which contains an egregious statistical error.

Please do not communicate with me in the future.

Other contemporary Santer emails are in the Climategate Letters and contain a variety of inappropriate allegations and language. After Santer’s refusal, I sent FOI requests to NOAA (the home of several coauthors) and DOE.

Lucia reported on these events in a contemporary post here, drawing the conclusion that it was “Santer’s intransigence” that resulted in any unnecessary paper work – not the FOI requests. Lucia:

Taken at face value, this means that Santer’s intransigence resulted in a lot of unnecessary paper work for SteveM, FOI officials and Bader. Right? Too bad Santer didn’t just hand over the data in the first place, right?

Summary

Nature’s claim that US scientists have been inconvenienced by “endless time-consuming demands for information” under FOI is totally untrue. As noted above, during the five years from 2005 to 2009, there were only three FOI requests in the US involving me (or, to my knowledge, CA readers). In two of the three cases (IPCC, Santer), archiving the requested data was either endorsed by “community” climate scientists or had been planned all along or both. In both these cases, the FOI requests were turned down (but became moot before an appeal was necessary because of institutional recognition of the desirability of archiving the data.) In the third case (the request to NOAA for Jones et al 1990 data), NOAA did not even acknowledge the FOI request, which was moot by the time that it had responded; in any event, the data consisted only of station lists and did not inconvenience NOAA scientists.

The claim by Nature and various climate scientists that U.Sclimate-change researchers had been subjected to “endless time-consuming demands for information” under U.S. Freedom of Information requests is unsupported by the record – something that could have been easily determined had Nature carried out any due diligence, instead of relying on gossip.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 155

29 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Kill us all?

And the cartoon in that post says it all.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 154

28 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

More on medias role and their NON coverage. In this case The BBC and their betrayal of their journalistic role.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 153

28 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Some excelent points by Willis Eschenbach, and the utter unreliability of these computer models and their ”predictions”. And remember it’s upon these models that the WHOLE Global Warming Hysteria is based.

See, among others, my posts:

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 141

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 124

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 122

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 107

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 90

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 88

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 82

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 63

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 31

Not a single climate model could simulate realistically key features of the Indian monsoon

“Unfortunately, while the physics is simple, the climate is far from simple. It is one of the more complex systems that we have ever studied. The climate is a tera-watt scale planetary sized heat engine. It is driven by both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial forcings, a number of which are unknown, and many of which are poorly understood and/or difficult to measure. It is inherently chaotic and turbulent, two conditions for which we have few mathematical tools.

The climate is comprised of five major subsystems — atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. All of these subsystems are imperfectly understood. Each of these subsystems has its own known and unknown internal and external forcings, feedbacks, resonances, and cyclical variations. In addition, each subsystem affects all of the other subsystems through a variety of known and unknown forcings and feedbacks.

Then there is the problem of scale. Climate has crucially important processes at physical scales from the molecular to the planetary, and at temporal scales from milliseconds to millennia.”

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/27/the-unbearable-complexity-of-climate-2/

The Unbearable Complexity of Climate

27 12 2009

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Figure 1. The Experimental Setup

I keep reading statements in various places about how it is indisputable “simple physics” that if we increase amount of atmospheric CO2, it will inevitably warm the planet. Here’s a typical example:

In the hyperbolic language that has infested the debate, researchers have been accused of everything from ditching the scientific method to participating in a vast conspiracy. But the basic concepts of the greenhouse effect is a matter of simple physics and chemistry, and have been part of the scientific dialog for roughly a century.

Here’s another:

The important thing is that we know how greenhouse gases affect climate. It has even been predicted hundred years ago by Arrhenius. It is simple physics.

Unfortunately, while the physics is simple, the climate is far from simple. It is one of the more complex systems that we have ever studied. The climate is a tera-watt scale planetary sized heat engine. It is driven by both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial forcings, a number of which are unknown, and many of which are poorly understood and/or difficult to measure. It is inherently chaotic and turbulent, two conditions for which we have few mathematical tools.

Then there is the problem of scale. Climate has crucially important processes at physical scales from the molecular to the planetary, and at temporal scales from milliseconds to millennia.

As a result of this almost unimaginable complexity, simple physics is simply inadequate to predict the effect of a change in one of the hundreds and hundreds of things that affect the climate. I will give two examples of why “simple physics” doesn’t work with the climate — a river, and a block of steel. I’ll start with a thought experiment with the block of steel.

Suppose that I want to find out about how temperature affects solids. I take a 75 kg block of steel, and I put the bottom end of it in a bucket of hot water. I duct tape a thermometer to the top end in the best experimental fashion, and I start recording how the temperature change with time. At first, nothing happens. So I wait. And soon, the temperature of the other end of the block of steel starts rising. Hey, simple physics, right?

To verify my results, I try the experiment with a block of copper. I get the same result, the end of the block that’s not in the hot water soon begins to warm up. I try it with a block of glass, same thing. My tentative conclusion is that simple physics says that if you heat one end of a solid, the other end will eventually heat up as well.

So I look around for a final test. Not seeing anything obvious, I have a flash of insight. I weigh about 75 kg. So I sit with my feet in the bucket of hot water, put the thermometer in my mouth, and wait for my head to heat up. This experimental setup is shown in Figure 1 above.

After all, simple physics is my guideline, I know what’s going to happen, I just have to wait.

And wait … and wait …

As our thought experiment shows, simple physics may simply not work when applied to a complex system. The problem is that there are feedback mechanisms that negate the effect of the hot water on my cold toes. My body has a preferential temperature which is not set by the external forcings.

For a more nuanced view of what is happening, let’s consider the second example, a river. Again, a thought experiment.

I take a sheet of plywood, and I cover it with some earth. I tilt it up so it slopes from one edge to the other. For our thought experiment, we’ll imagine that this is a hill that goes down to the ocean.

I place a steel ball at the top edge of the earth-covered plywood, and I watch what happens. It rolls, as simple physics predicts, straight down to the lower edge. I try it with a wooden ball, and get the same result. I figure maybe it’s because of the shape of the object.

So I make a small wooden sled, and put it on the plywood. Again, it slides straight down to the ocean. I try it with a miniature steel shed, same result. It goes directly downhill to the ocean as well. Simple physics, understood by Isaac Newton.

As a final test, I take a hose and I start running some water down from the top edge of my hill to make a model river. To my surprise, although the model river starts straight down the hill, it soon starts to wander. Before long, it has formed a meandering stream, which changes its course with time. Sections of the river form long loops, the channel changes, loops are cut off, new channels form, and after while we get something like this:

Figure 2. Meanders, oxbow bends, and oxbow lakes in a river system. Note the old channels where the river used to run.

The most amazing part is that the process never stops. No matter how long we run the river experiment, the channel continues to change. What’s going on here?

Well, the first thing that we can conclude is that, just as in our experiment with the steel block, simple physics simply doesn’t work in this situation. Simple physics says that things roll straight downhill, and clearly, that ain’t happening here … it is obvious we need better tools to analyze the flow of the river.

Are there mathematical tools that we can use to understand this system? Yes, but they are not simple. The breakthrough came in the 1990’s, with the discovery by Adrian Bejan of the Constructal Law. The Constructal Law applies to all flow systems which are far from equilibrium, like a river or the climate.

It turns out that these types of flow systems are not passive systems which can take up any configuration. Instead, they actively strive to maximize some aspect of the system. For the river, as for the climate, the system strives to maximize the sum of the energy moved and the energy lost through turbulence. See the discussion of these principles here, here, here, and here. There is also a website devoted to various applications of the Constructal Law here.

There are several conclusions that we can make from the application of the Constructal Law to flow systems:

1. Any flow system far from equilibrium is not free to take up any form as the climate models assume. Instead, it has a preferential state which it works actively to achieve.

2. This preferential state, however, is never achieved. Instead, the system constantly overshoots and undershoots that state, and does not settle down to one final form. The system never stops modifying its internal aspects to move towards the preferential state.

3. The results of changes in such a flow system are often counterintuitive. For example, suppose we want to shorten the river. Simple physics says it should be easy. So we cut through an oxbow bend, and it makes the river shorter … but only for a little while. Soon the river readjusts, and some other part of the river becomes longer. The length of the river is actively maintained by the system. Contrary to our simplistic assumptions, the length of the river is not changed by our actions.

So that’s the problem with “simple physics” and the climate. For example, simple physics predicts a simple linear relationship between the climate forcings and the temperature. People seriously believe that a change of X in the forcings will lead inevitably to a chance of A * X in the temperature. This is called the “climate sensitivity”, and is a fundamental assumption in the climate models. The IPCC says that if CO2 doubles, we will get a rise of around 3C in the global temperature.

However, there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, only computer models. But the models assume this relationship, so they cannot be used to establish the relationship.

However, as rivers clearly show, there is no such simple relationship in a flow system far from equilibrium. We can’t cut through an oxbow to shorten the river, it just lengthens elsewhere to maintain the same total length. Instead of being affected by a change in the forcings, the system sets its own preferential operating conditions (e.g. length, temperature, etc.) based on the natural constraints and flow possibilities and other parameters of the system.

Final conclusion? Because climate is a flow system far from equilibrium, it is ruled by the Constructal Law. As a result, there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make any difference to the global temperature, and the Constructal Law gives us reason to think that it may make no difference at all. In any case, regardless of Arrhenius, the “simple physics” relationship between CO2 and global temperature is something that we cannot simply assume to be true.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 152

28 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Sorrel et al. found periods of intense storm activity around 2,700 BP and 1,250 BP, and they note both of these were unusually cool periods. They note that the Medieval Warm Period (around 900 AD to 1200 AD) was a time of few storms, while “In the subsequent 600 years after the MWP, corresponding to the so-called Little Ice Age (LIA), our proxy records mark the return towards more energetic conditions in the Seine estuary”. Basically, they showed over and over that storm activity increases in cold periods and diminishes in warm periods. Claiming that global warming will result in increased mid-latitude storm activity is simply not consistent with 1,000s of years of climate information collected in northwestern France.”

“Fortunately, an article has just appeared in the Journal of Climate on trends in extreme snowfall seasons in the United States. To make a long story really short, Kunkel et al. conclude “The 1900–01 to 2006–07 trends in the annual percentage of high- and low-extreme snowfall years for the entire United States are not statistically significant.” Once again, there is no evidence of any trend upward or downward in extreme storm events in the winter season.”

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/12/27/winter-storms-update/

December 27, 2009

Winter Storms Update

If we happen to see an unusually large number of winter storms this year, we suspect some reporter or some scientist will insist we are witnessing the effects of global warming, or at least declare we are witnessing climate change before our very eyes. Oppositely, if this year’s winter storms are infrequent, we will expect to learn from someone that we have seen the effects of climate change. In fact, in a recent paper in the International Journal of Climatology, the authors begin their piece noting “One area of growing concern in climate science is the impact that global warming could have through modulations of the nature and characteristics of naturally occurring extreme events, such as severe mid-latitude storms.” In the very next sentence, the research team from the United Kingdom and Australia state “However, both observational and modelling studies of historical and future storminess patterns and scenarios are divided on the role that global warming has played, or could play, in changing patterns of mid-latitude storms”. Once again, we find any straightforward link between global warming and winter storms is a bit more dicey than originally thought … there is always more to the story.

The authors of the latest piece are Rob Allan, Simon Tett, and Lisa Alexander of the UK Met Office, the University of Edinburgh, and Monash University in Australia; funding for the research was provided by various sources including the UK Ministry of Defense … go figure? Anyway, Allan et al. made use of a newly digitized 3-hourly station surface pressure data for the United Kingdom and Ireland to extend previous analyses that used data beginning in the 1950s; the new dataset allowed analyses to extend back to 1920. They used the 3-hourly surface pressure data to identify severe winter storms, and their analyses suggested that no major severe winter storm would go undetected by their network of stations.

Allan et al. divided their work into two sub-periods including October – December (OND) and a second period including January – March (JFM). The first figure (Figure1) of special interest to us is below, and it immediately shows the importance of having the additional 30 years of data. The authors note “pronounced inter-annual variations in OND severe storminess across the British Isles are evident” “with most prominent activity in the 1920s and 1990s. There is evidence in the literature to support the 1920s period of a high frequency of severe storms in OND.”

Figure 1. History of OND decadal average severe storm frequency over the British Isles from 1920 (from Allan et al., 2009).

The authors also conducted the analyses for the JFM period, and when the results for OND are combined with the JFM period, the pattern below is established (Figure 2). Allan et al. conclude “The results from this study suggest that natural climate variability will play an important role in future changes in storminess, and thus could overwhelm any anthropogenic signal there might be.” We completely agree, and yet, the popular press continues to suggest that global warming is to blame for anything from few storms to big storms – it is all climate change!

Figure 2. History of October – March decadal average severe storm frequency over the British Isles from 1920 (from Allan et al., 2009).

A second article on storminess in Europe takes on a different perspective in terms of time period; Sorrel et al. were interested in reconstructing storm activity over the past 3,000 years. The research team is from impressive institutions in France, and effort was funded by the French state, the Haute Normandie Region and the other regions of the Paris Basin, the Agence de l’Eau Seine Normandie, and the industrial firms of the Haute-Normandie. Allan et al. collected sediment cores near the mouth of the Seine River in northwestern France and they used radiocarbon dating and paleomagnetic information to date the material in the core. The marine hydrodynamics are reflective of storm activity in the Seine River basin, and the sediment patterns within the core reveal periods of frequent large storms and periods with few or any storms.

Sorrel et al. found periods of intense storm activity around 2,700 BP and 1,250 BP, and they note both of these were unusually cool periods. They note that the Medieval Warm Period (around 900 AD to 1200 AD) was a time of few storms, while “In the subsequent 600 years after the MWP, corresponding to the so-called Little Ice Age (LIA), our proxy records mark the return towards more energetic conditions in the Seine estuary”. Basically, they showed over and over that storm activity increases in cold periods and diminishes in warm periods. Claiming that global warming will result in increased mid-latitude storm activity is simply not consistent with 1,000s of years of climate information collected in northwestern France.

Finally, President Obama returned home from Copenhagen recently only to find a massive snowfall covering much of the Northeast, including Washington DC. With climate change fresh on his mind, he might have wondered global warming impacted the massive winter storm. Fortunately, an article has just appeared in the Journal of Climate on trends in extreme snowfall seasons in the United States. To make a long story really short, Kunkel et al. conclude “The 1900–01 to 2006–07 trends in the annual percentage of high- and low-extreme snowfall years for the entire United States are not statistically significant.” Once again, there is no evidence of any trend upward or downward in extreme storm events in the winter season.

References:

Allan, R., S. Tett, and L. Alexander. 2009. Fluctuations in autumn–winter severe storms over the British Isles: 1920 to present. International Journal of Climatology, 29, 357-371.

Kunkel, K.E., M.A. Palecki, L. Ensor, D. Easterling, K.E. Hubbard, D. Robinson, and K. Redmond. 2009. Trends in twentieth-century U.S. extreme snowfall seasons. Journal of Climate, 22, 6204-6216.

Sorrel, P., B. Tessier, F. Demory, N. Delsinne, D. Mouaze. 2009. Evidence for millennial-scale climatic events in the sedimentary infilling of a macrotidal estuarine system, the Seine estuary (NW France). Quaternary Science Reviews, 28, 499-516.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 151

28 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“The point, of course, is that India – as with China – is in competition with the UK (and the rest of Europe) for this coal resource. Yet, while we are saddling our own generators with increased costs, supposedly to combat global warming, not only are we providing cheap money for Asian development, in the case of India we are actually subsidising the coal plants by allowing them to claim ”carbon credits”.

Fair competition is one thing but castrating our own industries while subsidising our competitors, who are then able to outbid us in the same markets from which we source our energy supplies, is little short of economic suicide. And that is real effect of our government’s obsession with global warming.”

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/economic-suicide.html

Economic suicide

Posted by Richard Monday, December 28, 2009

Although, as The Daily Telegraph observes today, there are many dismissing coal as the unwanted black sheep of the fossil fuel family, coal-fired generation still provides 37 percent of our electricity supply. Moreover, unless or until the lunacy of carbon capture takes hold, it is one of the cheapest means of generation.

However, because of the high fuel cost, relative to capital outlay, coal fired generation is sensitive to increased coal prices. Doubling the price would force a 66 percent increase in the retail price of electricity.

Yet, it seems, with demand set to rise, price increases are precisely what we are having to confront. Analysts from JP Morgan, we are told, are forecasting that thermal coal, used in power stations, will rise from $70 to $85 per ton next year. And the direct cause of this is ”rebounding demand” from China and India.

Part of this is the result of mine closures in the Shanxi region of China and the rise in electricity generation, factors which are expected to drive world stocks down from their current level of 40 million tons to 22.7 million in 2010. But this is only half the story.

In the longer term, global coal usage, far from declining, is set to increase substantially. The International Energy Agency believes that coal will account for 29 percent of global energy needs in 2030, compared with 26 percent four years ago, making this rather than ”green energy” the key fuel for the future.

And, while the focus has been on the increase demand in China, an increasingly important player in the global market is India, not least through the inability of its own domestic industry efficiently to exploit its own reserves.

Only this month an Indian parliamentary panel was ”shocked” to find ”inordinate delays” were slowing development and about 100 coal projects had failed to take off, resulting in a shortfall of domestic coal production.

Thus, to fuel a planned expansion of electricity production from 78 GW in 2006 to 142 GW in 2030 – the bulk of it coal-fired – the state-owned Coal India Limited is rapidly forming strategic partnerships with Australia, the US, South Africa and Indonesia in order to secure future coal supplies.

More recently, the company has secured an agreementwith the Mozambique government to exploit two blocks of land totalling over 220 sq km in which high-grade deposits of coal have been found. The Indians won the bid from nine other bidders, while two bids each from the UK and China were disqualified. There were a total of four Indian bidders in the process.

Elsewhere, Indian interests are highly active in Indonesia where India’s National Aluminium Co aims to buy at least 200 million metric tons of coal reserves from the eastern Indonesian islands of Kalimantan and Sumatra in order or secure aluminium production in India.

This is in addition to the 4GW Mundra power project in India’s Gujarat State which will also be sourcing its 12 million tons of coal each year from Indonesia – and it has eight more such ”ultra mega” projects planned with a total combined coal-fired generating capability of 32 GW.

The point, of course, is that India – as with China – is in competition with the UK (and the rest of Europe) for this coal resource. Yet, while we are saddling our own generators with increased costs, supposedly to combat global warming, not only are we providing cheap money for Asian development, in the case of India we are actually subsidising the coal plants by allowing them to claim ”carbon credits”.

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, China, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 150

28 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Experts are also predicting a shortage in coking coal used to make steel over the next year, driven up 12-fold by demand from China. “

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/6896140/Old-King-Coal-will-stay-on-the-commodities-throne-for-years.html

Old King Coal will stay on the commodities throne for years

Waking up to a stocking full of coal is probably not the most exciting start to a Christmas morning. But at least it’s got a better chance of increasing in value by next year than a Wii Fit or a Zhu Zhu Pet.

By Rowena Mason, City Reporter (Energy)

Published: 6:16PM GMT 27 Dec 2009

There are many dismissing coal as the unwanted black sheep of the fossil fuel family, blamed for 40pc of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

But in defiance of environmental concerns, there has been little sign that any fall off in coal demand this year is due to anything other than the recession.

Analysts from JP Morgan reckon that thermal coal, used in power stations, will rise from $70 to $85 per tonne next year, based on rebounding demand from China and India. While global inventories have been unusually high in the downturn, the bank believes stocks may decline from 40m tonnes this year to 22.7m in 2010.

”Supply will be tight in the next two years,” said Stevanus Juanda, a mining analyst. ”In the second half of 2009, we have observed sizeable imports of coal by China, due to the closure of mines in the Shanxi region and rise in electricity generation.”

Experts are also predicting a shortage in coking coal used to make steel over the next year, driven up 12-fold by demand from China.

Macquarie, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley estimate that prices may jump by between 23pc and 38pc in 2010, as global demand rebounds.

And the International Energy Agency believes that coal will account for 29pc of global energy needs in 2030, compared with 26pc in 2006. For Deloitte’s energy consultants, this all goes to show that green problems with coal do not yet tarnish its prospects as a ”key fuel for the future”.

Listening to the political leaders at the Copenhagen climate change conference, you could be forgiven for imagining that the world was about to be seized with a Thatcherite fervour for closing down the mines.

That was the political rhetoric. But the summit failed to reach agreements on targets for lowering emissions and how they should be financed – mostly because burning coal is still in the national economic interest of most developing countries.

In the aftermath of the Copenhagen chaos, Western politicians have been blaming China and India for sabotaging the talks. If true, it is hardly surprising that they want to resist curbs on the predicted growth of their emissions, largely based on soaring use of coal.

The Copenhagen accord may have been vaguely worded, but its implications for commodities are clear: businesses still have little incentive to invest in more expensive renewables and nuclear power while coal and gas are cheaper.

Europe has decided to start closing coal plants without ”carbon capture” facilities and China is keen to get its hands on this future technology, but the fact remains that old coal stations are still being built at the rate of one a day.

With ”clean coal” technology unlikely to be commercial for another decade, it at least remains a helpful myth for politicians and companies to justify continued investment in the commodity.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 149

28 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“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. “

“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.”

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28 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“With trillions of dollars at stake in the battle over global warming, now would be the time for the press to closely scrutinize the claims of those who would reorganize the world’s economy from farm to factory and laboratory to living room. And the Climategate scandal – where leaked e-mails and dodgy computer programs from the University of East Anglia raise powerful new questions about the role of politics in climate science – would be the perfect opportunity to explore what is going on behind the scenes.

That’s not happening. To judge by recent coverage from Associated Press, the Fourth Estate watchdog has acted like a third-rate pocket pet.”

“The Washington Times tried to raise these issues with the reporters and editors involved, but Jack Stokes, AP’s manager of media relations, said that none of the five reporters who worked on the article nor their editors had time to answer questions.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/28/biased-reporting-on-climategate/

Monday, December 28, 2009

EDITORIAL: Biased reporting on Climategate

Associated Press coverage raises eyebrows

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

With trillions of dollars at stake in the battle over global warming, now would be the time for the press to closely scrutinize the claims of those who would reorganize the world’s economy from farm to factory and laboratory to living room. And the Climategate scandal – where leaked e-mails and dodgy computer programs from the University of East Anglia raise powerful new questions about the role of politics in climate science – would be the perfect opportunity to explore what is going on behind the scenes.

That’s not happening. To judge by recent coverage from Associated Press, the Fourth Estate watchdog has acted like a third-rate pocket pet. Case in point is an 1,800-word AP missive that appeared in hundreds of publications, many carrying it on the front page of their Sunday, Dec. 13 issue with the headline, ”Science not faked, but not pretty.” AP gave three scientists copies of the controversial e-mails and then asked them about their conclusions. The wire service portrayed the trio of scientists as dismissing or minimizing allegations of scientific fraud when, in fact, the scientists believe no such thing.

The first scientist quoted in the article, Mark Frankel, is director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AP quotes him as concluding that there is, ”no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very ‘generous interpretations.’” While the article mentions that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and some Republican lawmakers are calling for independent investigations, AP doesn’t note the views of the scientists they interviewed.

When The Washington Times talked to Mr. Frankel, the scientist gave a quite different impression. The e-mails, he said, are not sufficient to reach any judgment at all on whether the data or science was faked or misleading. ”You can’t do that on the e-mails alone, you can’t do it on the e-mails or the program,” he concluded. For that reason, Mr. Frankel supports investigation of East Anglia and related allegations of fraud at Pennsylvania State University.

There’s a big difference between saying that there isn’t sufficient evidence to determine if falsification of data occurred – and that there should be an investigation – and saying, as AP did: ”Science not faked.”

Mr. Frankel also believes outsiders to the two schools should be asked to take part. ”You should be willing and open to going to outside people to be part of your inquiry,” he advised. ”If I were Penn State, I would certainly be advising them to be very open to the possibility of bringing in one or two people who have impeccable credentials, well-respected, to join in ….”

Arizona State University professor Dan Sarewitz is quoted by AP as saying, ”This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds.” However, Mr. Sarewitz wasn’t speaking about the validity of the climate science; he was discussing his belief that politics infects how most scientific research is conducted. While AP used the quote to suggest that there was nothing terribly wrong that had been revealed in Climategate, Mr. Sarewitz was trying to issue a warning that politics infects too much science and that reporters, politicians and the public are naive about that reality.

As he told The Washington Times, ”When the human underside (of science) gets revealed, then suddenly people are disillusioned and they say, ‘Oh, how shocking!’ But it’s not particularly shocking.” Indeed, Mr. Sarewitz suggests that reporters ask scientists about their political views. (For the record, he is a liberal Democrat.) He also is skeptical of the university investigations, particularly if they don’t include outsiders. ”I think they should have external people [involved in the investigations]. Certainly. … The challenge here might be, can you find people who are independent but also understand the science well enough to really tell (if there was wrongdoing)?”

The third scientist interviewed by AP, professor Gerald North at Texas A&M University, joined Mr. Frankel and Mr. Sarewitz in hoping that climate data would be more readily shared in the future. He told us he also thinks it is important that investigations proceed at the two universities.

The Washington Times tried to raise these issues with the reporters and editors involved, but Jack Stokes, AP’s manager of media relations, said that none of the five reporters who worked on the article nor their editors had time to answer questions.

If AP refuses to explain how it could have given readers across the planet such a distorted view of Climategate, maybe an explanation can be found buried in the article itself. One of the reporters, Seth Borenstein, the AP science reporter who writes on global warming and who is the lead author on the piece, is part of the Climategate story himself. In the last sentence of the article, the authors note that the archive of disputed Climategate e-mails ”includes a request from an AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their stories.”

But Mr. Borenstein’s e-mail was hardly standard and far from neutral. In it, the reporter disparages Marc Morano, a critic of man-made global-warming claims, as ”hyping wildly” the study that Mr. Borenstein asked scientists to comment on. The e-mail almost makes it appear as if Mr. Borenstein were asking those involved in Climategate to help him discredit critics of man-made global warming.

East Anglia and Penn State are not the only two institutions that need to answer questions about what is going on behind the scenes.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 147

28 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

And Pachauri, head of IPCC, again,

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/pachauri-not-300000-but-800000-admitted.html

Pachauri: not $300,000 but $800,000 admitted

Posted by Richard Sunday, December 27, 2009

Following our publication of details of some of Pachauri’s earnings, gleaned from an Indian newspaper, we attributed some $300,000 income to which Pachauri had admitted.

However, now we have seen the original copy (I have put that section of the press release below) of the press release issued by TERI, it seems we may have significantly underestimated even that amount. In the entry for Yale University, we see the sum of $48,750 declared. But alongside this, we see the legend: ”Monthly payments received upto (sic) 30th Nov 2009.”

There is an element of ambiguity here, but the $48,750 could either be the total payment from Yale, or it could be the monthly payment. If it is read as the latter – which is how it actually reads – that would produce an annualised figure of over $500,000 ($585,000 to be exact). This is closer to the sums paid for ”star” performers.

The classic example is Tony Blair who was paid $200,000 by the university after a deal to give seminars ten times a year on religion.

Like Pachauri, Blair ”laundered” the fee through his own set-up, in this case the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, although he also took a direct fee of $10,000 from the university for a speaking engagement. The balance, after tax, was paid to his foundation.

Certainly, Yale University has enough money in the kitty to pay Pauchari more than half a million a year. The Climate and Energy Institute to which he was been appointed head has been funded to the tune of $3 million, provided by an ”anonymous donor,” a base on which it aims to build ”via private donor contributions.”

Who these anonymous donors are, of course, we will never know, which makes the University itself a perfect way of laundering payments to Pachauri. By the time they have been transferred to the university and then TERI, they have passed through two ”cut-outs” and are entirely untraceable.

With his Yale fee, though, Pachauri’s known earnings are in the $800,000 bracket, and these only cover some of the organizations we named in our article. Add the rest, plus Pachauri’s payments from the IPCC, and he must easily be in the million-dollar bracket for his annual earnings. Yet, about how much of that is paid to Pachauri by his own TERI, he remains curiously reticent.

Honoraria payments received by TERI during the period: July 2006 – 21 December 2009
Sl. No.	Organization	Amount	Purpose

1	Deutsche Bank	Euro 100,000	Member, Climate Change Advisory Board

2	Credit Suisse	US$ 25,000	Senior Advisor to Credit Suisse

3	Toyota Motor Company	US$ 80,000	Member, Toyota International Advisory Board

4	Yale University	US$ 48,750	Monthly payments received upto 30th Nov 2009

5	Asian Development Bank	US$ 4425	ADB’s Advisory Group on Climate Change and Sustainable Development

6	EDF	Euro 1200	SD Panel meeting

http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Telegraph-IPCC-reply.doc

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 146

27 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

And more on Pachauri, head of IPCC.

“Rejecting that submission and those of the others, the judge observed that, ”The members of the Governing Council must have been aware of what was going on,” adding: ”If they want us to believe that they did not have any knowledge of the agreement, I am afraid, they demonstrate themselves totally unequal to the task entrusted to them.”

This must have applied in spades to Dr Pachauri who, a year before had moved the offices of TERI, his own organisation, into the building. Certainly, the judge was entirely unconvinced, declaring that the three officers of the Council, including Mr (sic) Pachauri, ”have suppressed material facts and they have sworn to false affidavits.” (No doubt Pachauri was rehearsing for his later roles.)

The Judge went on to say that the defendant had acted in a very arbitrary way, stating: ”such things could not be tolerated in a democratic set up.” In a coruscating indictment, he then declared:

And I am afraid, that the affairs and the efficient management of the Centre are not safe in the hands of officers like … Dr R K Pachauri … and they had ignored that the officers have to function as a public functionaries within the parameters of the Constitution. “

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 145

27 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

And more on Pachauri, head of IPCC.

“And neither has there been any attempt so far to explain how a UN official can work on a fee-paying basis for organisations such as the Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse, without there being a potential conflict of interest.”

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/pachauri-admits-to-300000-in-payments.html

Pachauri: admits to $300,000 in payments

Posted by Richard Thursday, December 24, 2009

In a press release purporting to rebut our Sunday Telegraph piece, Dr Pachauri’s TERI – of which he is Director General – admits to receiving over $300,000 for ”services rendered by Pachauri.”

This, however, only covers ”some of the payments made to TERI”. It includes €100,000 from the Deutsche Bank, $25,000 from Credit Suisse and $80,000 from Toyota Motors. The institute also received $48,750 from Yale University, $4,425 from the Asian Development Bank – which has given loans to Tata – and €1,200 from the French electricity giant EDF. At current conversion rates, that totals $302,746.

The periods for which the payments were made are not specified and neither are the precise ”services rendered” identified. For some organisations, such as Yale University, Pachauri performs more than one service – and his current post as head of the Climate and Energy Institute has only just started.

Pachauri’s institute denies that it has received any payment from the Risk Governance Council in Geneva, the Chicago Climate Exchange, or the New York Investment Fund Pegasus for which he is ”strategic advisor”. This is difficult to believe in respect of the latter two, but the phrasing of the ”rebuttal” does not rule out the possibility of benefits in kind being offered by these companies.

No mention is made of Pachauri’s other current posts. Thus, we know nothing of payments (if any) from GloriOil, Siderian ventures, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Nordic Glitnir Bank, the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, SNCF, his work as a Hindustan Times columnist, the Asian Energy Institute, FEOP (Far East Oil Price) Advisory Board, the International Solar Energy Society, the World Resources Institute or the World Energy Council.

Nor do we learn whether payments were made for Dr Pachauri’s work for the Indian government, in particular the National Environmental Council, the Economic Advisory Council and the Oil Industry Restructuring Group. Nor is it specified whether he is paid for his role on the Governing Council of the India Habitat Centre. Other notable omissions are, as admitted by Pachauri, the ”sometimes pretty generous honoraria, for giving talks in various places” – which themselves could amount to millions of dollars.

As to why TERI’s (Indian) accounts are not published, the reason given is that TERI has tax-exempt status in every country in which it operates. ”Such status is granted on the basis of proper auditing of accounts and proper scrutiny of documents.” Nonetheless, accounts are published in the UK and the US relating to local operations, but not in India.

The US IRS return for the TERI-NA operation in Washington identified a total revenue of $66,701 against expenses of $121,810, leaving a loss on the trading year ending in 2009 of $55,109. The expenses included two remittances totalling $54,000 to TERI India. Also identified is a payment made to Dr Pachauri from a ”related organization” – which is not identified – of $45,791.

This is the only public record of which we are aware which identifies a direct payment to Dr Pachauri. Neither Pachauri nor TERI have chosen to reveal payments made to him by TERI or his salary and other emoluments from the IPCC.

Despite that, TERI is claiming as ”unfounded and false” our charge that Pachauri holds posts in a number of organisations, including Credit Suisse Bank, and is silent about the money he earns, ”which must run into millions of dollars”. Yet nothing so far offered by way of evidence would even begin to rebut that charge.

And neither has there been any attempt so far to explain how a UN official can work on a fee-paying basis for organisations such as the Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse, without there being a potential conflict of interest.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 144

27 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

And more about Rajendra Pachauri, the head of IPCC, and all his financial dealings. And his involvement with companies that are directly to profit from this Global Warming Hysteria.

“On the face of it, therefore, this appears to be another example of Dr Pachauri working for his own commercial interests while booking his expenses to the IPCC.”

“As for Deutsche Bank, it actually has four billion reasons for its interest in climate change and Dr Pachuari, something which its website so clearly explains.

Having identified climate change as ”one of the mega-trends that would drive the global asset management business for the next generation and beyond,” it has become ”one of the leading climate change investors in the world.” As of March 2009, it had approximately $4 billion under its management.

At a mere €100,000 – so far declared – they might think Pachauri comes relatively cheap.”

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/pachauri-deutsche-bank-connection.html

Pachauri: the Deutsche Bank connection

Posted by Richard Saturday, December 26, 2009

Attendees at the inaugural Deutsche Bank Leadership Forum in Berlin on 4 June this year were there for a specific purpose. Unashamedly, the ”DB Leadership Forum”, as the Bank likes to call it, exists solely to discuss ”Business opportunities in addressing climate change”.

Would that they knew it, one of their keynote speakers was a living testament to the ”business opportunities” so afforded. This was none other than Dr Rajendera Pachauri, whose TERI business was being paid €100,000 (that we know of) for his membership of the Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank. Whether TERI was paid separately for its Director General’s guest appearance in Berlin, we have not been told.

However, it would appear that Dr Pachauri is not exactly heavily taxed by his duties for the Advisory Board. On its inception in April 2008, its members were scheduled to meet with the Bank’s own Environmental Steering Committee (ESC) twice a year.

We are told also that, in addition to these two main meetings, the two committees conduct an ongoing dialog in smaller committees dealing with specific topics, such as energy efficiency.

Nevertheless, even the generous payment for Dr Pauchauri’s services seems not to have been sufficient for the chairman of the IPCC. For its first meeting on 2 April 2008, according to official UN documentation, Dr Pachauri also claimed this meeting as part of his ”outreach” activities on behalf of the IPCC.

To attend this meeting, Dr Pachauri flew 3,676 miles from Addis Ababa to London on 30 March, where the business recorded is the advisory board meeting, a meeting with Mr Caio Koch-Weser vice chairman of the Bank and a meeting with Emma Duncan, deputy editor of the Economist. From there, Pachauri flies – again at IPCC expense – a further 924 miles, this time to Budapest for the 37th Session of the IPCC Bureau on 6 – 10 April.

On the face of it, therefore, this appears to be another example of Dr Pachauri working for his own commercial interests while booking his expenses to the IPCC.

You could, perhaps, take the view that Pachauri’s meeting with the Economist’s Emma Duncan might have justified the trip – except that Duncan does not seem to have been acting in a journalistic capacity. She is perhaps more concerned with the forthcoming Economist conference, entitled, ”The Carbon Economy: New Opportunities for Green Business”.

At the time, this was being organised by the Economist, to be held on 17-18 November 2009 in Washington. Pachauri was to be a keynote speaker – his fee is not recorded.

On that day of 2 April, though, Pauchauri, has yet other interests. His separate meeting with Mr Caio Koch-Weser, clearly yields dividends.

On 26 June, less than two months after the meeting, Deutsche Bank announces the launch of a Deutsche Bank Scholarship for the MBA (Infrastructure) programme at the TERI University in Delhi. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to this effect is signed by Dr R K Pachauri, the Chancellor, TERI University and Mr. Caio Koch-Weser, vice chairman, Deutsche Bank Group.

Commenting on the partnership, Mr. Koch-Weser says, ”I am delighted that Deutsche Bank has joined hands with TERI.”

The assiduous courting of Koch-Weser has paid off. Pachauri’s meeting with the Bank’s vice-chairman on 2 April was by no means the first. They also meet on 3 October 2007, at the international lecture by The Royal Academy of Engineering in London, and also with the Academy president, Lord Browne of Madingley, who is also later co-opted on the Bank’s advisory board. Koch-Weser and Pachauri then meet on 17 January 2008, this time at the Carbon Trust Winter Lecture, also in London.

Both of these meetings, incidentally, are claimed as part of the IPCC chairman’s ”outreach” activities. And, strangely, there is no further record of a Deutsche Bank advisory board meeting until 14 November 2008. We have not yet been advised whether Pachauri claimed the expenses from the UN.

For the record, they do meet yet again, at the World Sustainable Development Forum on 5-7 February 2009, where the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit of 2009 is holding a conference under the title ”Towards Copenhagen: an equitable and ethical approach”. Koch-Weser, by the way, is chaired by Mr Nik Gowing, main presenter of the BBC World Service.

As for Deutsche Bank, it actually has four billion reasons for its interest in climate change and Dr Pachuari, something which its website so clearly explains.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 143

27 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

A continuation of my post Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 115 about Rajendra Pachauri, the head of IPCC, and all his financial dealings. And his involvement with companies that are directly to profit from this Global Warming Hysteria.

“Just how surreal the business of ”carbon trading” has become is illustrated by another project, which has no direct connection with Dr Pachauri but which involves the plan by a Tata subsidiary to build one of the world’s largest coal-fired power stations in the state of Gujarat. Nearly $1 billion needed to build the 4 gigawatt Mundra plant is being supplied in cheap ”green loans” by the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank (to both of which Dr Pachauri acts as an adviser), because the plant will emit CO2 at a ”lower intensity” than older power stations in India. For the same reason, the plant will also qualify for a potential $560 million in ”carbon credits” under the UN’s CDM scheme, which can then be sold on the world market.

If our own Government allows E.on to build a similar but much smaller coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent, however, we shall have to pay out millions of pounds through our electricity bills to buy those same ”credits” which in India the UN hands out free – to help Tata build a plant which will be responsible for emitting 26 million tonnes a year of CO2, well over twice as much as Kingsnorth.

Similarly it is Tata which next month is to close down its Corus steel works at Redcar, to make a potential £600 million in ”credits” from the carbon emissions this will save, while in India it will earn a similar amount in UN CDM ”credits” by building a plant of similar capacity in Orissa. It will thus make a potential gain of £1.2 billion, at the expense of 1,700 jobs on Teesside, for no overall reduction in the amount of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere. “

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6890839/The-questions-Dr-Pachauri-still-has-to-answer.html

The questions Dr Pachauri still has to answer

At the least, Dr Rajendra Pachauri’s IPCC position as the world’s ”top climate official” has been earning a substantial income for Teri, the institute he runs.

By Christopher Booker

Published: 6:01PM GMT 26 Dec 2009

It was not just in Britain last week that we all shivered through pre-Christmas snow, ice and cold. Blizzards sweeping across Europe, from the Channel Tunnel to Moscow, killed more than 100 people. Even the beaches of Nice and the gondolas of Venice lay under a blanket of white.

Across the Atlantic, as the northern hemisphere was plunged into its third freezing winter in succession, violent snowstorms left more than two thirds of the US and almost the whole of Canada under December snow for the first time in decades. In the wake of that acrimonious shambles in Copenhagen, ever more questions are now being asked not only over the validity of the science behind the belief that man-made CO2 is causing runaway global warming but about the methods being used to meet that supposed threat.

last week’s Sunday Telegraph Richard North and I wrote an article revealing the worldwide business interests of Dr Rajendra Pachauri who, as chairman since 2002 of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the world’s ”top climate official”. Our report was picked up by newspapers and blogs across the world, and was even the basis for a question put to Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s Secretary General, at a New York press conference. But nowhere did it provoke a greater storm than in India, where Dr Pachauri is director-general of The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), based in New Delhi, the country’s most influential private body involved in climate-change issues and renewable energy. In addition, as we reported, Dr Pachauri also holds more than a score of positions with banks, universities and other institutions that benefit from the vast worldwide industry now based on measures to halt climate change.

In a series of press and television interviews, Dr Pachauri described our report as ”a pack of lies”. He accused us of being part of that same ”powerful vested interest” responsible for ”Climategate”, the emails and other documents leaked from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, which revealed the methods used by the small group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC to manipulate temperature data to show that the earth has been warming further than is justified by the evidence.

When asked whether he intended to take legal action over our article, Dr Pachauri replied that he hadn’t yet made up his mind. But Teri issued a press release listing its main complaints against the article.

A first point to emerge from these responses is how much of what we wrote they do not contradict. Dr Pachauri does not deny that he holds all the positions referred to in our article, such as giving advice on climate change to bodies ranging from major banks such as Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank to the Chicago Climate Change, the worlds’s largest dealer in buying and selling the right to emit CO2.

He and Teri insist, however, that all the money he receives for his services, such as 100,000 euros from Deutsche Bank and $80,000 from Toyota Motors are paid not to him personally but to his institute (and that he receives no fee from the Chicago Climate Exchange). Teri denies that it does not publish its accounts simply by stating that its accounts are supplied to the relevant tax authorities.

Dr Pachauri repeatedly denied that Teri still has any links with the Tata Group, India’s largest privately-owned business empire, with interests ranging from coal and steel to renewable energy, and which set up Teri as the Tata Energy Research Institute in 1974. He now claims that Teri has had no ”direct links” with Tata since 1999 (or, in another interview, 2001). But it was not until 2003 that the name changed to The Energy and Resources Institute, and then a Teri spokesman explained that ”we have not severed our links with the Tatas” and that the change of name was ”only for convenience”.

Indeed one of the Tata group of companies is still listed among Teri’s corporate sponsors, several directors of Tata serve on Teri’s Business Council for Sustainable Development, and one senior director serves on Teri’s Advisory Board. Other links include the fact that Dr Pachauri and Ratan Tata, the head of the group, both serve on the Indian Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, advising on all aspects of national climate policy.

In short, these initial responses to our article leave many questions unanswered. At the least it seems that Dr Pachauri’s position as the world’s ”top climate official” has been earning a very substantial income for the institute of which he is director-general; and the only way to avoid further questioning must now be for both Dr Pachauri and Teri to come out into the open over all those issues that remain obscure.

For a start, we should be allowed to know what Dr Pachauri is paid by us all as chairman of the IPCC, a figure that remains confidential. Teri should make public its accounts, including details of all payments it has received from Dr Pachauri’s work for other organisations – particularly those that stand to benefit from policies arising directly or indirectly from the recommendations of the IPCC.

Nor is it clear why, on various occasions, the IPCC has listed trips made by Dr Pachauri as part of his ”Outreach” as chairman, stating that the UN has paid for the ”offsetting” of their carbon footprint, when the purpose of these meetings was to further the interests of Teri itself.

There is no question that Teri, an organisation employing 700 people, based in lavish offices near the exclusive residential enclave where Dr Pachauri lives, in one of the most expensive homes in Delhi, has become a very successful enterprise, with connections in the profitable field of ”sustainable energy” all over the world.

It has, for instance, carried out two research contracts for Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative, which is helping to build the world’s largest ”solar park” near the Indo-Pakistani border. Promoted under the Indian government’s drive for renewable energy, and partly-financed by ”carbon credits” under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), this project is due to return an estimated $2 billion a year on an initial $10 billion investment.

Just how surreal the business of ”carbon trading” has become is illustrated by another project, which has no direct connection with Dr Pachauri but which involves the plan by a Tata subsidiary to build one of the world’s largest coal-fired power stations in the state of Gujarat. Nearly $1 billion needed to build the 4 gigawatt Mundra plant is being supplied in cheap ”green loans” by the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank (to both of which Dr Pachauri acts as an adviser), because the plant will emit CO2 at a ”lower intensity” than older power stations in India. For the same reason, the plant will also qualify for a potential $560 million in ”carbon credits” under the UN’s CDM scheme, which can then be sold on the world market.

Truly, as the snow falls, does the business of saving the planet from global warming become more convoluted and more lucrative by the day.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 142

26 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“However, if these published emails are genuine, the contents indicate a scandal in the climate science community that is an insult to the integrity of the entire scientific community. It’s an insult to truth.”

“We all should value scientific integrity, but all scientists must value it above all else if there is to be continued growth of scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, this discipline of science has been so soiled by politics that the lines between science and politics are gone. This scandal is an insult to the integrity of all scientists and a devaluation of our currency of peer-review. It deserves the scoff and scorn of our community.”

http://www.dakotavoice.com/2009/12/an-insult-to-all-science-%E2%80%93-are-we-beyond-reproach/

An Insult to All Science – Are We Beyond Reproach?

By Guest Author on December 23rd, 2009

By Nancy Neale

How do we know our medication is effective; that our vehicle is safe; that the bungee cord in our jump will not break? Most of the population has taken it on faith – faith in the integrity of the scientists – that these questions have been sufficiently studied and answered. And they have been, through effective communication of science in the scientific community. Knowledge is consistently exchanged using our currency, peer-review, until the point where the public benefits from the application of science in our everyday lives. We’ve had faith in the value of that currency, until now.

A few weeks ago, emails reportedly from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in England were published on the internet. With any illegally obtained information, the credibility of the contents should be questioned. However, if these published emails are genuine, the contents indicate a scandal in the climate science community that is an insult to the integrity of the entire scientific community. It’s an insult to truth.

Many scientists have had suspicions about the state of the climate science and the overstated solidity of its predictive ability for some time. I am not a ‘denier’, whatever a denier denies; but I, along with several others have been asking questions about the peer-reviewed science. We cannot conflate climate scientists with environmentalists and activists, though. The latter two have compiled predictive models by the former and asserted that we are headed for doom and destruction if extreme environmental policies are not enacted immediately. Many scientists and critical thinkers have dared ask fundamental questions, though. We have questioned whether the state of the science can allow any definitive conclusion about the significance of anthropogenic carbon dioxide on global warming, let alone its ability to predict future effects.

Climate scientists peddling predictive models, and the environmentalists who have compiled them, present these models where almost any combination of datasets are consistent with the predictive model indicating near disaster. The Third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has the most celebrity in that predictive science. Climatologist Roger Pielke, for example, has demonstrated that there has yet to be a dataset that is not consistent with these models. The prediction scientists rarely articulate a hypothetical dataset that would be inconsistent with a predictive model. A hypothesis or theory is falsifiable, thus scientific, if it can be both verified and falsified through physical experiments and/or observations. If there exists no dataset for which the IPCC predictive models are inconsistent, the model was never scientific. Where is the demarcation of predictive climate science and pseudo-science if there is no falsifiability?

Other indications and warnings that the science is less than solid have been there as well. A rhetorical analysis of many of the reports indicates that the focus on the science and logic have taken a back seat to a focus on the source and emotions, combining near sophistry and propaganda with bandwagon (consensus) and post hoc ergo propter hoc (correlation as causation) fallacies in logic, for example. When presenting science, if the primary tools of rhetoric are not the science and logic, we should immediately probe further into the actual science.

With the allegedly hacked emails, there is apparent evidence of manipulation, fabrication, and suppression of data; collusion to marginalize colleagues who ask and publications who publish valid scientific questions; and manipulation of our currency of knowledge exchange, the peer-review process.

We all should value scientific integrity, but all scientists must value it above all else if there is to be continued growth of scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, this discipline of science has been so soiled by politics that the lines between science and politics are gone. This scandal is an insult to the integrity of all scientists and a devaluation of our currency of peer-review. It deserves the scoff and scorn of our community.

Nancy Neale, former professor of Chemistry, is a guest Liberty Features Syndicate writer for Americans for Limited Government.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 141

25 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

I have written extensively about the unreliability of these computer models and their ”predictions”. And remember it’s upon these models that the WHOLE Global Warming Hysteria is based.

These climate models who cannot predict the weather 2 weeks from now, or how the weather was 2 weeks ago.

And these are the models they want us to believe that they can “predict” the temperature within a tenth of a degree in 100 YEARS!

Our “intelligent” politicians continue in an accelerated speed to deindustrialize America and Europe. And to sacrifice our freedom, wealth and economic living standard and spend trillions of dollars of OUR money to “fight” this PREDICTED rise of temperature by these totally unreliably Computer Models.

Here are is another example from two of these models (Hadley and Canadian). Who cannot agree on ANYTHING EVEN if the area covered is just a small one compared to the global scale THEY SAY THAT THEY CAN ACCURATELY “PREDICT”.

Se my posts:

http://uddebatt.wordpress.com/tag/klimatmodeller/

Figure 16: A result from the U.S. National Assessment of Climate Change [NACC 2000]: Expected precipitation for 18 regions of the United States, according to the Hadley model and Canadian model. Note the huge differences between the two model results in magnitude and even in sign. For example, the Dakotas (Souris – Red – Rainy) can turn either into a swamp or into a desert, depending on which climate model is used.

Page 25

http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/22835.pdf

Click on the graph for larger image

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 140

24 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

An update on my post Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 132.

It seems that William Connolley and his Global Warming Hysteric cohorts are AS BUSY AS EVER upholding ALL THE LIES and MANIPULATIONS on WIKIPEDIA.

Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, as well as a code of civility. Those rules and codes don’t apply to Connolley, or to those he favours.

That this is STILL GOING ON AFTER SO MANY YEARS IS A BIG SCANDAL AND MAKES WIKIPEDIA A DISGRACE!

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/23/lawrence-solomon-climategate-at-wikipedia.aspx

Lawrence Solomon: Climategate at Wikipedia

Posted: December 23, 2009, 7:47 PM by Lawrence Solomon

Since my Saturday column described how Wikipedia editors have been feverishly rewriting climate history over much of the decade, fair-minded Wikipedians have been doing their best to correct the record. No sooner than they remove gross distortions, however, than the distortions are replaced. William Connolley, a Climategate member and Wikipedia’s chief climate change propagandist, remains as active as ever.

How does Wikipedia work and how does Connolley and his co-conspirators exercise control? Take Wikipedia’s page for Medieval Warm Period, as an example. In the three days following my column’s appearance, this page alone was changed some 50 times in battles between Connolley’s crew and those who want a fair presentation of history.

One of the battles concerns the so-called hockey stick graphs, which purport to show that temperatures over the last 2000 years were fairly stable until the last century, when temperatures rose rapidly to today’s supposedly dangerous and unprecedented levels. In these graphs, the Medieval Warm Period – a period of several centuries around the year 1000 – appears to be a modest bump along the way. Before the hockey stick graphs began to be published about a decade ago, scientists everywhere – including those associated with the UN itself – viewed the Medieval Warm Period as much hotter than today. Rather than appearing as a modest bump compared to today’s high temperatures, the Medieval Warm Period looked more like a mountain next to the molehill that is today’s temperature increase.

The hockey stick graphs led to an upheaval in scientific understanding when the UN reversed itself and declared them bona fide. Soon after, the hockey stick graphs were shown to be bogus by a blue-chip panel of experts assembled by the US Congress. The Climategate Emails confirm the blue-chip panel’s assessment – we now know that Climategate scientists themselves doubted the reliability of the hockey stick graphs.

With the hockey stick graphs so thoroughly discredited, you’d think they would become a footnote to a discussion of the Medieval Warm Period, or an object of amusement and curiosity. But no, on the Wikipedia page for the Medieval Warm Period, the hockey stick graph appears prominently at the top, as if it is settled science.

Because the hockey stick graph has become an icon of deceit and in no way an authority worthy of being cited, fair-minded Wikipedians tried to remove the graph from the page, as can be seen here. Exactly two minutes later, one of Connelley’s associates replaced the graph, restoring the page to Connelley’s original version, as seen here.

Battles like this occurred on numerous fronts, until just after midnight on Dec 22, when Connolley reimposed his version of events and, for good measure, froze the page to prevent others from making changes — and to prevent the public, even in two-minute windows, from realizing that today’s temperatures look modest in comparison to those in the past. In the World of Wikipedia, seen as here, the hockey stick graph, and Connolley’s version of history, still rules.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft, Wikipedia
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 139

24 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Now we have the 30 year timeline of Cliamte Gate thanks to Mohib Ebrahim. Study it and read all the details of the biggest political and scientific scandal in modern time – The Global Warming Hysteria.

“ClimateGate: 30 years in the making

Mohib Ebrahim has created professional timelines for exhibitions, so it must have seemed only natural to him to want to visually piece together the full timeline of ClimateGate, laying out the analysis, graphs, emails and history of the scandal as revealed by dozens of researchers over the past weeks, months and years.

The PDF chart is available in different sizes, each also with the 10 pages of cited references. The full chart is over 2 meters wide (94″x34″, or 2 A0 landscape pages) and best viewed on screen where you can zoom in and out, scroll vertically to see everything in a given time period or horizontally across time to see everything related to a particular theme.

From time to time the file will be updated and/or corrected as needed. This is its home, so check back here to download the latest file, and please link to here so people will be able to access the updates. The PDF chart is available in different formats, each also with the 10 pages of cited references.

Think of it as a full poster that shows some key events which built up, year by year, the billion dollar enterprise that now promotes man-made CO2 global warming.”

http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/climategate-30-year-timeline/

“Here’s a Spectacular Poster of ClimateGate covering 3 decades

You have to see this to believe it. Look up close and admire the detail while you despair at how long science has been going off the rails. To better appreciate the past and what was exposed by the CRU emails, the time-line chart consolidates and chronologically organizes the information uncovered and published about the CRU emails by many researchers along with some related contextual events. That the chart exists at all is yet another example of how skilled experts are flocking in to the skeptics position and dedicating hours of time pro bono because they are passionately motivated to fight against those who try to deceive us.”

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/23/the-climategate-timeline-30-years-visualized/

Click on the graph for larger image

Download the PDF here:

http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/climategate/history/

2009.12.23_climategate_30_years_in_the_making_banner.pdf

Download in A4 format as a PDF here:

http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/climategate/history/

2009.12.23_climategate_timeline_a4_18p.pdf

Download in US letter size format as a PDF here:

http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/climategate/

history2009.12.23_climategate_timeline-us_letter_2p.pdf

Download in US Tabloid size format as a PDF here

http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/climategate/history/

2009.12.23_climategate_timeline-us_tabloid_18p.pdf

Plus A2 and A3 formats.

God Jul – Merry Christmas

23 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Vill ta tillfället i akt att önska all mina läsare en riktigt God Jul.

De närmaste två veckorna kommer jag bara sporadiskt att publicera inlägg.

Så här skrev jag för exakt ett år sedan:

”Jag ser med förtröstan fram mot 2009. Det år då den största politiska och vetenskapliga skandalen i modern tid kommer att spricka – Global Warming Hysterin.”

Nå, det blev ju så eller hur.

Så år 2010 ser jag med förtröstan fram emot att den största politiska och vetenskapliga skandalen i modern tid– Global Warming Hysterin – kommer att falla ihop som det korthus det är.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas!

The next two weeks I am only going to publish posts sporadically.

In my post exactly a year ago I wrote:

“I am looking forward to 2009, the year when the biggest political and scientific scandal in modern time is going to implode – The Global Warming Hysteria.”

Well, it did happen.

So for 2010 I am looking forward to that the biggest political and scientific scandal in modern time – The Global Warming Hysteria – is not only going to implode, it is going to vanish into thin air.

christmas_graphics_12

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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 138

21 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“The latest hit to climate-change credibility comes via an embarrassing revelation from Ben Santer, one of the lead authors of the 1995 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I report, which is one of the holy documents of global-warming theology. Mr. Santer admitted that he deleted sections of the document that stated that humans were not responsible for climate change. “

“According to the Russians, the Hadley Centre used numbers that showed temperatures rising and omitted data that did not support global-warming conclusions. We are witnessing the rolling collapse of one of history’s great intellectual frauds.”

“The only reason China gives lip service to the global-warming alarmist agenda is to hamper the competition – and our Democratic president is falling for the trap. Mr. Obama pledged that the United States would move forward with strict emissions limits whether or not the international community did the same. From Beijing’s perspective, if the foolish Americans want to wreck their economy based on the misguided belief that they are saving polar bears, who is China to say no? “

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/20/obamas-cold-day-in-denmark/

Sunday, December 20, 2009

EDITORIAL: Obama’s cold day in Denmark

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Copenhagen was a cold town last week for the global-warming crowd. The expected reorganization of the world economy to fit the green template vanished amid blizzard conditions in a country that has had just seven white Christmases in the past century. God certainly has a sense of humor.

President Obama showed up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference having been assured he would be able to make history, only to find that the proceedings were a flop. The promised treaty – billed with the characteristic understatement of the alarmist community as ”the single most important piece of paper in the world today” – was an anticlimax. Earlier drafts conjured images of world government, command economies and a future free of the evils of greenhouse gasses. It promised a green utopia.

However, as the conference neared, huge gaps in the treaty language persisted. The final three-page version was tossed together in the closing hours with little deliberation and wound up saying little. The much-ballyhooed treaty promises next to nothing, other than a $100 billion slush fund for Third World dictators to ”adapt to climate change,” which probably involves buying mansions in southern France.

Mr. Obama’s speech reflected the general frustration of the hour and was uncharacteristically flat and angry. The president fumed that it was ”not a time to talk but to act,” but we wonder why he’s in such a hurry. There is no particular crisis. The inflated gravitas of the event was punctured by the ongoing collapse of the scientific basis for global-warming theory in the wake of the scandal about fudged scientific research.

The latest hit to climate-change credibility comes via an embarrassing revelation from Ben Santer, one of the lead authors of the 1995 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I report, which is one of the holy documents of global-warming theology. Mr. Santer admitted that he deleted sections of the document that stated that humans were not responsible for climate change.

Also on Tuesday, the Institute of Economic Analysis in Moscow claimed that the influential Hadley Centre for Climate Change at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter, England, apparently had tampered with Russian climate data. According to the Russians, the Hadley Centre used numbers that showed temperatures rising and omitted data that did not support global-warming conclusions. We are witnessing the rolling collapse of one of history’s great intellectual frauds. Global warming is turning out to be a lot of hot air.

The Chinese seem to have been on the right side of this debate all along. China was viewed as the major stumbling block at the conference, and Mr. Obama met privately with Premier Wen Jiabao to try to iron out the wrinkles. It’s ironic that dictatorial goons like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe blamed capitalism for the world’s global-warming ills while China puts the brakes on monitoring emissions. Having weighed all the factors, Beijing would rather be an economic powerhouse.

The only reason China gives lip service to the global-warming alarmist agenda is to hamper the competition – and our Democratic president is falling for the trap. Mr. Obama pledged that the United States would move forward with strict emissions limits whether or not the international community did the same. From Beijing’s perspective, if the foolish Americans want to wreck their economy based on the misguided belief that they are saving polar bears, who is China to say no?

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 137

21 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Granting the spotlight to the tyrannical trio of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez so they could express their profound concern for Mother Earth is like asking former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his prostitute Ashley Dupre to propound upon the state of marriage. “

“No doubt the tanks Mr. Chavez is buying from Russia will come with efficient hybrid engines and will be used only to demand that neighboring countries tighten fuel-efficiency standards. Those TV stations he shut down must have refused to use clean and responsible solar energy.”

“Iran and Venezuela, in particular, finance their oppressive governments with the export of oil. Now what was it that causes carbon emissions again? Fossil fuels, was it? “

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/20/the-green-dictatorship/

Sunday, December 20, 2009

EDITORIAL: The green dictatorship

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Last week’s Copenhagen summit surrendered all pretense to significance when it turned into a showcase for dictators’ attempts to greenwash their bloody regimes. Granting the spotlight to the tyrannical trio of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez so they could express their profound concern for Mother Earth is like asking former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his prostitute Ashley Dupre to propound upon the state of marriage.

Mr. Mugabe used the opportunity to blame global warming for the deaths of millions of his subjects. No doubt his country turned from food exporter to famine because of coal electric plants in Idaho. Of course, driving thousands of farmers from their land, rejecting modern farming methods, confiscating his people’s wealth and turning his nation into a police state have little to do with Zimbabwean poverty.

”When we spew hazardous emissions for selfish, consumptionist ends, in the process threatening land masses and atmospheric space of smaller and weaker nations, are we not guilty of gross human rights violations?” Mr. Mugabe asked. In case you didn’t recognize him, that’s the good dictator, the campaigner for human rights and pollution control.

In Mr. Ahmadinejad’s case, he unsurprisingly pushed an agenda of spreading nuclear technology to all nations. In a slight oversight, the misunderstood Iranian president failed to mention his desperate hurry to create a nuclear arsenal. No matter, the good Mr. Ahmadinejad is about saving the environment with a profound commitment to disarmament. ”Would it not be better that part of the military funds of some countries be dedicated to improving the welfare of people and reducing pollution?” pleaded the green Iranian dictator.

That’s rather an ironic color choice, as Mr. Ahmadinejad recently stole elections from an opposition party using green as its signature campaign color.

Not to be left out is Mr. Chavez as representative of a nation feverishly arming for war with its neighbors, nationalizing whole industries and silencing the opposition press. He believes, ”The cause of all this disastrous situation is the destructive capitalist system. … Capitalism is the road to hell.” No doubt the tanks Mr. Chavez is buying from Russia will come with efficient hybrid engines and will be used only to demand that neighboring countries tighten fuel-efficiency standards. Those TV stations he shut down must have refused to use clean and responsible solar energy.

Such deep concern for Western capitalism, consumerism and militarism didn’t keep the dictators from joining other less developed nations with their hand out for a $100 billion bribe to be financed by that awful capitalism. But these green dictators have more in common than a desire for handouts. Iran and Venezuela, in particular, finance their oppressive governments with the export of oil. Now what was it that causes carbon emissions again? Fossil fuels, was it?

To call the eco-friendly posturing of Third World dictators a farce is to understate the scandal. That the audience greeted such self-serving insanity with applause and that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama sanctified the gathering with their presence exposes a dark side to the green agenda. Global-warming theology is not just a fraud; it attacks freedom and encourages dictatorship.

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, FRA, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 136

20 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Everything is SOOO FAKE it’s beyond belief! Just one small titbit among so many.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/

comments/putting_our_economy_in_the_hands_of_chavez_fans/

UPDATE 3

Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the “solution”. In fact, here’s how fake it all is:

The lead negotiator for the small island nation of Tuvalu, the bow-tie wearing Ian Fry, broke down as he begged delegates to take tough action.

“I woke up this morning crying,” and that’s not easy for a grown man to admit,” Mr Fry said on Saturday, as his eyes welled with tears.

”The fate of my country rests in your hands,” he concluded, as the audience exploded with wild applause.

So moving. But let’s now learn more from Samantha Maiden about this former Greenpeace official from “Tuvalu”:

But the part-time PhD scholar at the Australian National University actually resides in Queanbeyan, NSW, where he’s not likely to be troubled by rising sea levels because the closest beach at Batemans Bay is a two-hour, 144km drive away. Asked whether he had ever lived in Tuvalu, his wife told The Australian last night she would “rather not comment”….

Still, it’s a long way from the endangered atolls of Tuvalu, with his neighbour Michelle Ormay confirming he’s lived in Queanbeyan for more than a decade, while he has worked his way up to being “very high up in climate change”.

(Thanks to readers captainperi and Observer of Wodonga.)

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 135

20 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/19/copenhagen-climate-summit-benny-peiser

This fiasco will further alienate an angry public

Benny Peiser Saturday 19 December 2009 17.54 GMT

I hate to say I told you so, but I have predicted the failure of the Copenhagen summit to agree to binding commitments for over a year.

The Copenhagen fiasco was not just foreseeable, it was inevitable. The inability of the international community to break the climate deadlock reflects the incompatible national interests and demands that divide the west and the rest. This is now a permanent feature in what is likely to become an indefinite moratorium on international climate law-making.

In light of the Copenhagen non-agreement, there will be increased pressure by EU members states to water down unilateral emissions targets that are conditional on an international treaty. Just like Japan, it will be impossible for Europe or, indeed, the UK to continue with policies that are burdening national economies with huge costs and damaging their international competitiveness.

Climate politics face a profound crisis. Revolts among eastern European countries, in Australia and even among Obama’s Blue Dog Democrats are forcing law-makers to renounce support for unilateral climate policies. In the UK, the party-political consensus on climate change is unlikely to survive the general elections as both Labour and the Tories are confronted by a growing public backlash against green taxes and rising fuel bills.

However, the biggest losers of the Copenhagen fiasco appear to be climate science and the scientific establishment who, with a very few distinguished exceptions, have promoted unmitigated climate alarm and hysteria. It confirms beyond doubt that most governments have lost trust in the advice given by climate alarmists and the IPCC. The Copenhagen accord symbolises the loss of political power by Europe whose climate policies have been rendered obsolete.

It is a remarkable irony of history that when the leading voices of the radical environmental movements of the 1960s and 70s occupy governmental power in most western nations, their political and international influence is on the wane. The weakening of global warming anxiety among the general public and the marked decline of western influence and authority on the international stage is a clear manifestation of the green slump.

• Dr Benny Peiser is the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 134

20 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“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? “

“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.“

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/18082

The Real Melt-Down in Copenhagen

By Alan Caruba Friday, December 18, 2009

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.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 133

20 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Wattsupwiththat has issued a challenge to come up with a caption to this photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times. It shows Air Force One returning from Copenhagen in the midst of a snow storm.

“A major winter storm was moving up the Atlantic Coast on Friday night, with forecasters expecting accumulations of one to two feet of snow in some areas. President Obama returned early Saturday from climate talks in Copenhagen, landing at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland in the midst of the storm.”

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/19/obama-returns-from-the-copenhagen-global-warming-conference/

My contribution was “Thank GOD for this Global Warming!”

The picture here:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/12/19/us/20091219-winterstorm_3.html

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 132

19 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“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.”

“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.”

See my posts:

Wikipedia (Wicked Pedia) bias – Or How Global Warming Hysterics Systematically alters everything critically of Global Warming!

Wikipedia (Wicked Pedia) bias – At Wikipedia, one man engineers the debate on global warming, and shapes it to his views!

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 70

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/19/lawrence-solomon-wikipedia-s-climate-doctor.aspx

Lawrence Solomon: Wikipedia’s climate doctor

Posted: December 19, 2009, 2:49 AM by NP Editor

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

By Lawrence Solomon

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.

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.

Financial Post

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft, Wikipedia
Postat i Fri- och rättigheter, Miljö, USA, Yttrandefrihet | 1 kommentar »

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 131

19 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“As Ronald Reagan used to say, facts are stubborn things. The fact is that imminent man-made climate disaster has been shown to be a massive fraud driven by manipulated data and deliberate suppression of facts to the contrary.”

“Russia accounts for 12.5% of the earth’s land mass and has weather stations throughout, so ignoring vast swaths of it can greatly skew any analysis. The IEA says CRU ignored data covering 40% of Russia, preferring data from urban centers and data that showed a warming trend. On the final page of the IEA report is a chart that shows the CRU’s selective use of Russian data produced 0.64C more warming than using all the data would have done.”

See my posts:

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 125

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 122

More on the Blunder with NASA: s GISS Temperature data and the mess they have

The world has never seen such freezing heat OR the Blunder with NASA: s GISS Temperature data

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=515789

To Denmark, From Russia, With Lies

Posted 12/18/2009 07:53 PM ET

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain’s Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to ”hide the decline” in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia?

Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday’s Washington Post that ”stolen” e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit still don’t alter the evidence for climate change.

Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they ”confuse the public.”

Chutzpah has been redefined.

As Ronald Reagan used to say, facts are stubborn things. The fact is that imminent man-made climate disaster has been shown to be a massive fraud driven by manipulated data and deliberate suppression of facts to the contrary.

The latest Climate-gate shoe to drop is the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) accusation that the Hadley Center of Britain’s Meteorological Office deliberately relied on a carefully selected 25% of Russia’s weather stations that fit its theory of global warming.

By ignoring those that don’t, the Russians say, the CRU overestimated warming in the country by more than half a degree Celsius.

Russia accounts for 12.5% of the earth’s land mass and has weather stations throughout, so ignoring vast swaths of it can greatly skew any analysis. The IEA says CRU ignored data covering 40% of Russia, preferring data from urban centers and data that showed a warming trend. On the final page of the IEA report is a chart that shows the CRU’s selective use of Russian data produced 0.64C more warming than using all the data would have done.

Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit reports that the CRU has long been suspected of misusing Russian data. He notes a March 2004 e-mail from CRU director Phil Jones to Mann that says: ”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 (in these journals) I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.” (JGR and GRL are scientific journals).

Siberia has played a pivotal role in this outright fraud. In 1995, a paper by the CRU’s Keith Briffa asserted the medieval warm period was actually really cold, and recent warming is unusually warm. It relied on tree ring data from trees on Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula.

Here too data were carefully selected. Those from just 12 trees from 252 cores in the Yamal data set were used. A larger set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the Middle Ages. They weren’t used.

The hockey-stick graph was produced in 1999 by Mann using these manipulated tree ring data. The graph supposedly proved air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Mann et al. had to make the Medieval Warm Period (A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.

McIntyre, who with fellow Canadian researcher Ross McKitrick exposed the hockey-stick fraud, says the evidence from only one Siberian tree, known as YAD061, seemed to show a hockey-stick pattern. If they look hard enough, the CRU can probably find a tree that shows evidence of elves making cookies.

This tree spawned the hockey stick that found its way into the reports of the U.N.’s climate change panel. It led to Kyoto and Copenhagen, which is why McIntyre calls it ”the most influential tree in the world.” As the CRU e-mails and other evidence reveal, Mann and his unindicted co-conspirators are barking up the wrong one.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 130

19 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“No doubt under the agreement China will continue to get a free climate pass despite its role as the world’s No. 1 emitter. At Copenhagen the emerging economies nonetheless proved skilled at exploiting the West’s carbon guilt, and in exchange for the non concession of continuing to negotiate next year, or the year after that, they’ll receive up to $100 billion in foreign aid by 2020, with the U.S. contributing the lion’s share.

We can’t wait to hear Mr. Obama tell Americans that he wants them to pay higher taxes so the U.S. can pay China to become more energy efficient and thus more economically competitive.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703523504574604130737360364.html

DECEMBER 19, 2009

Copenhagen’s Lesson in Limits

And we don’t mean carbon limits.

Whatever led President Obama to believe that his personal intercession at the climate-change summit would achieve something major, his very presence in Copenhagen made ”a significant breakthrough” a political imperative, no matter how flimsy. And that’s exactly what a senior Administration official called a last-ditch deal—details to come—in a media leak as we went to press last evening and the conference headed into overtime.

Mr. Obama’s inexplicable injunction yesterday that ”the time for talk is over” appears to have produced an agreement to continue talking. The previous 12 days of frantic sound and pointless fury showed that there isn’t anything approaching an international consensus on carbon control. What Copenhagen offered instead was a lesson in limits for a White House partial to symbolic gestures and routinely disappointed by reality.

Apparently, the agreement provides ”the foundation for an eventual legally binding treaty,” but that same ”foundation” has been laid many times before. Copenhagen was supposed to deliver ”legally binding” limits. However, the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol became a pre-emptive dead letter because countries like China, Brazil and India said they were unwilling to accept anything that depressed their economic growth.

No doubt under the agreement China will continue to get a free climate pass despite its role as the world’s No. 1 emitter. At Copenhagen the emerging economies nonetheless proved skilled at exploiting the West’s carbon guilt, and in exchange for the non concession of continuing to negotiate next year, or the year after that, they’ll receive up to $100 billion in foreign aid by 2020, with the U.S. contributing the lion’s share.

Copenhagen also got hung up on whether countries (especially China) will be ”transparent” about whether they are meeting their anticarbon commitments, and the Administration claims to be satisfied with whatever verification pact was struck. Yet nearly every country that ratified Kyoto cheats on it today. Honest carbon accounting would also impede programs like the corrupt ”clean development mechanism,” where European consumers end up paying Chinese companies for emissions reductions that either aren’t real or would have happened anyway. At least Copenhagen’s talk did less tangible harm.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A12

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 129

19 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“When the Climate Change Bill passed through parliament last year, I read the cost benefit assessment ministers are obliged to produce for any bill. Amazingly, it put the potential costs (of reducing carbon emissions by 60%) at £205 billion ($331 billion)—yet the maximum benefits (of reduced climate change damage) were estimated at only £110 billion. This is the first time any government had asked parliament to support a bill that its own figures say will do more harm than good. Yet just five of us voted against it. At least I had the satisfaction of pointing out that while the House was voting for a bill based on the assumption the world is getting warmer, it was snowing in London in October for the first time in 74 years. I was told, ”extreme cold is a symptom of man made global warming.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704238104574601762696721506.html

DECEMBER 17, 2009, 3:45 P.M. ET

Global Warming as Groupthink

By PETER LILLEY

It is easy to mock the thousands of activists, officials and ministers flying to Copenhagen in their jets, driving around in an immense fleet of limousines, and collectively emitting more carbon dioxide than a small African country—all to force the rest of us to reduce our carbon footprints. But it is one thing to accuse them of hypocrisy in not living out their beliefs. Casting doubt on their belief that global warming poses an imminent threat to life on this planet is another.

To question so much scientific expertise and governmental authority seems arrogant or foolhardy—even in the city where Hans Christian Anderson wrote about the little boy who blurted out that the Emperor had no clothes.

Can so many experts be wrong? Well, it is worth remembering that the experts were supposedly united about the apocalyptic dangers of the Y2K millennium bug. Half the world was persuaded to spend an estimated $600 billion to save us from disasters that embarrassingly failed to materialize in the countries and companies that omitted to take any pre-emptive action. Then intelligence agencies around the world were allegedly so convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that we went to war, only to find—zilch. In both cases there was a solid foundation of truth on which enthusiastic professionals and governments constructed an exaggerated scare story that the media lapped up. I was skeptical enough to delve into both those scares and rapidly found the experts were not as unanimous as supposed. But the dissenters were persuaded to keep quiet, bar a handful who were ruthlessly stereotyped as mavericks or worse.

In each case the driving force was ”groupthink.” Irving Janis defined this as ”a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.” The symptoms include:

”Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group; Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as evil, biased, etc.; Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group; Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus; Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.” Campaigners against climate change show remarkably similar symptoms.

There is a solid basis of truth for their claims. Having studied physics at Cambridge I do not for a moment doubt the existence of the greenhouse effect. Without the warm blanket provided by greenhouse gases—mainly water vapor and carbon dioxide—the earth would be a frozen uninhabitable rock. If the amount of CO2 is doubled, the direct effect—other things being equal—would be to raise the Earth’s temperature by about one degree Centigrade. Since warmer air holds more water vapor, that could double the impact—or reduce it if the resultant clouds reflect more sunshine.

But to move from the modest but scientifically well-founded range of 0.5 to 2.0 degrees Centigrade to catastrophic impacts on human life requires successively more uncertain layers of conjecture. Higher temperature projections are obtained by constructing elaborate computer models that build in complex feedbacks that amplify warming and assume nothing could dampen these effects—both tendentious and unproven assumptions. Then, even more unwarranted assumptions must be adopted about the impact of higher temperatures on sea levels, hurricane frequency, disease propagation, and so on (glossing over the fact that it would take centuries for higher temperatures to melt the ice caps sufficiently to raise sea levels substantially).

Finally, heroic assumptions are necessary about low discount rates to maximize the present value of future benefits from cutting carbon, and that decarbonizing industry will be cheap. Meanwhile, the supposed damages from climate change must be aggregated over centuries to prove that we need to remove CO2 immediately rather than adapt to change. Far too little attention is given to measures to help the poorest and most vulnerable countries adapt, rather than spending huge sums to prevent what may not occur.

The tendency of those committed to the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming to unquestioningly adopt the assumptions, at every stage, that maximize the expectation of calamity should alert us that groupthink is driving the movement.

The recently leaked email exchanges between scientists at the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia and their colleagues in the U.S., who are among the illuminati of the global warming movement, show vivid evidence of groupthink at work. These scientists have become so committed to a cause that they think it natural to perform ”tricks” to ”hide the decline,” as one email says. Another is so upset by ”The fact… that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” that he suggests ”the data are surely wrong.” It is reminiscent of the German philosopher Hegel who, on being told by his disciples that the facts refuted his scientific theories, replied: ”So much the worse for the facts.” It is clear that while governments think they are pursuing evidence-based policies, these institutes have been serving up ”policy-based evidence.”

The whole U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process could not be better designed to institutionalize groupthink on a global scale. It puts enthusiasts at the helm. It seeks to establish a single view on the science, modeling, and economics. Dissent is banished. Loyalty is demanded. Silence is deemed consent. Moral fervor is reinforced by massive cash research budgets.

Even the British parliament has become caught up in groupthink. Dissent (and there are silent skeptics in both Labour and Conservative ranks) is suppressed by equating skepticism with Holocaust denial. Moral zeal replaces reasoned debate. Scrutiny of costs and benefits of alternative policy options is suspended. Desirable policies such as nuclear power to reduce dependency on hydrocarbons are sidelined in favor of a whimsical dependency on wind and sunshine.

When the Climate Change Bill passed through parliament last year, I read the cost benefit assessment ministers are obliged to produce for any bill. Amazingly, it put the potential costs (of reducing carbon emissions by 60%) at £205 billion ($331 billion)—yet the maximum benefits (of reduced climate change damage) were estimated at only £110 billion. This is the first time any government had asked parliament to support a bill that its own figures say will do more harm than good. Yet just five of us voted against it. At least I had the satisfaction of pointing out that while the House was voting for a bill based on the assumption the world is getting warmer, it was snowing in London in October for the first time in 74 years. I was told, ”extreme cold is a symptom of man made global warming.”

The absurdity did not end there. Because the target for reducing emissions was amended upwards to 80%, I asked for a new cost-benefit assessment. Ministers eventually slipped one out—long after the bill had become an Act. It showed that the cost of meeting this more onerous target had doubled to £400 billion. Yet, miraculously, the government estimate of the likely benefits had risen tenfold. They had apparently previously mislaid nearly £1 trillion of benefits. It would be hard to find clearer evidence of the flaky nature of figures governments employ to justify their commitment to climate-change policies.

More carried away by groupthink than his colleagues, Gordon Brown has strutted his stuff in Copenhagen—the prime minister of a near-bankrupt country offering to bankroll a global deal. When he returns we will find that although the benefits are flaky, the costs are real.

Mr. Lilley is a Conservative member of the U.K. Parliament.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 128

19 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

And the polls shows it

Graphs here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/12/18/GR2009121800213.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/18/AR2009121800002.html

How much do you trust the things that scientists say about the environment – completely, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, or not at all?

10% completely, 19% a lot, 40% a little, 14% not at all

Do you think (most scientists agree with one another) about whether or not global warming is happening, or do you think (there is a lot of disagreement among scientists) on this issue?

36% most agree, 62% a lot of disagreement

Click on the graph for larger image

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 127

18 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“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.”

“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. “

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398304574598230426037244.html

DECEMBER 17, 2009, 10:47 P.M. ET

How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

The East Anglia emails are just the tip of the iceberg. I should know.

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS

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.

Mr. Michaels, formerly professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia (1980-2007), is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 126

18 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Any international meeting that invites Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to speak has no legitimacy. But that’s not the worst of it.

When these fellows spoke in Copenhagen, their asinine remarks were cheered and applauded by attendees who seemed to think they were in the presence of great men. Surely the world now gets what the global warming alarmists are about.

Doesn’t it?”

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=515696

Losers Of World Unite — In Denmark

Posted 12/17/2009 07:46 PM ET

Copenhagen Conference: The United Nations summit was promoted as a serious effort to mitigate climate change. But it’s turned into an attack on capitalism. So what does the U.S. do? It pledges money.

Any international meeting that invites Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to speak has no legitimacy. But that’s not the worst of it.

Doesn’t it?

For reasons that remain a mystery to us, Chavez was celebrated as if he were a popularly elected president who has led his country toward greater freedom and prosperity instead of a socialist who rigged his election to be president for life, crushed civil liberties and wrecked his nation’s economy.

Nevertheless, ”President Chavez brought the house down,” according to newspaper the Australian, when he addressed the U.N. Climate Change Conference on Wednesday. ”When he said there was a ’silent and terrible ghost in the room’ and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.”

Socialism, Chavez told the fawning audience, is ”the way to save the planet” while ”the destructive model of capitalism is the eradication of life.” And: ”Capitalism is the road to hell. … Let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.”

For that nugget of nonsense, Chavez received a standing ovation.

Proceeding Chavez to the rostrum was Evo Morales, a pal of Chavez, Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro and the first fully ”indigenous” head of state in Bolivia. Morales set the table for Chavez, declaring the real cause of climate change to be ”the capitalist system.”

”If we want to save the earth,” he said, ”then we must end that economic model.”

This man, a socialist who also fixed his election and consolidated his power, proposed an ”international climate court of justice to prosecute countries for climate ‘crimes.’”

Mugabe, who has beaten, tortured and killed his opponents and has been sanctioned for human-rights abuses, held forth on the anti-capitalist theme. He scolded the ”capitalist gods of carbon” who ”burp and belch their dangerous emissions,” leaving ”the lesser mortals of the developing sphere” to ”gasp and sink and eventually die.”

The gasping, sinking and dying who Mugabe is most familiar with are within his own country. Tens of thousands have been killed by the poverty, cholera, famine and outright murder brought on by his socialist policies that ruined a once-thriving economy.

On Thursday, the day before the conference wrap-up, Ahmadinejad, another unsavory character, kept alive the narrative that the developed nations should pay for ”improving the welfare of people and reducing pollution.”

And pay we apparently will. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Thursday the U.S. will contribute to an annual $100 billion-a-year climate protection fund. The money will ostensibly cover costs in developing countries associated with global warming.

But who’s she kidding? As with almost all foreign aid, the money will instead be stolen by Third World kleptocrats and never used for its intended purpose.

As economist Gary Becker has said, ”Foreign aid programs other than of a humanitarian nature are destined to fail because they involve transfers of resources from one government to another.” Mugabe, for example, has been accused of misusing hundreds of millions in aid from the U.S. and Britain.

The speakers’ rants, the attendees’ raves and the pledges of greenmail payments from guilt-ridden leaders of developed nations are almost comical.

It’s particularly dispiriting to know that there are those among us who think that living under capitalism — the only system that has improved human existence — is a burden; that handing money to dictators will improve the lives of those they oppress and that the United Nations has only the planet’s interest in mind when it pushes for international global-warming agreements.

Their lack of understanding is far more of a threat than man’s carbon emissions.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 125

17 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

More on the Russian view of Climate Gate from Professor Vitaly Bushuyev, Director of the Energy Strategy Institute.,

Global climate change is not just man’s fault

http://en.rian.ru/video/20091216/157258712.html

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
Postat i Fri- och rättigheter, Miljö, USA, Yttrandefrihet | 1 kommentar »

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 124

17 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

When you reflect on this much, much broader view, and there is other forces of this big scale at work which is not mentioned here, and compare it with this political Global Warming Hysteria it’s beyond pathetic

A “predicted” rise of temperature by the computer models of the order of 0,5-1,5C in the next 100 years, is supposed to be catastrophic and eminent treat within the next 5 years according to the high priest of this hysteria.

And for this they, the politicians, are willing to destroy our livelihood, wealth and the economic foundations of our nations?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004574599981936018834.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

DECEMBER 16, 2009, 8:56 P.M. ET

Climate Change Is Nature’s Way

It’s our good luck one of Earth’s many ice ages ended 12,000 years ago..

Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet’s climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?

Climate change is not the fault of man. It’s Mother Nature’s way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

The stroke of luck that’s misled us? The sheets of ice in whose shadow we made a living for two million years peeled back 12,000 years ago leaving a lush new Garden of Eden. In that Eden we invented agriculture, money, electronics and our current way of life. But that weather standstill has held on for an abnormally long amount of time. And it’s very likely that this atypical weather truce shall someday pass.

Why? What’s the real cause of the Earth’s norm—a climate that rocks back and forth from steamy tropical heat to icy freeze? A climate that deposits fossilized seashells on mountaintops and makes dry land into seas and swamps?

The Earth is a traveler. Its angle as it sweeps around the sun produces the massive weather flips we call seasons—the dance from summer to winter and back again. But there’s more. Our planet has a peculiar wobble—its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. This is called the Milankovich cycle, named for the Serbian engineer and geophysicist who discovered it.

But the wobbles in our trip around the sun are just a start. The sun is a traveler, too. It circles the black hole at the galaxy’s core every 226 million years. And it takes its tiny flock of planets with it. That means us. The result?

The journey around the galactic core is fraught with dangers. For example, every 143 million years we pass through a spiral arm of the galaxy, an arm that tosses tsunamis of cosmic rays our way. Those rays produce massive climate change. Then there’s the innocent-sounding stuff astronomers call galactic ”fluff,” massive clouds of cosmic dust lurking in our solar system’s path that also cause dramatic climate change.

Meanwhile, the sun itself is going through a cycle from birth to death. As a result of its maturation, good old reliable sol is 43% warmer today than it was when the Earth first gathered itself into a globe of planetesimals 4.5 billion years ago.

The bottom line? Weather changes and the occasional meteor have tossed this planet through roughly 142 mass extinctions since life began 3.85 billion years ago. That’s an average of one mass extinction every 26.5 million years. Where did these mass die-offs come from? Nature. There were no human capitalists, industrialists or cultures of consumerism to blame.

We do not want to be the victims of one of these extinctions. Nor do we want to see whales, elephants and pandas go the way of trilobites and dinosaurs. We need to prepare for far more than just the changes we think we make. We need to prepare for the challenge that forced us to evolve into our modern, highly adaptable form. We have to realize that nature tosses us tests, and that we grow by outwitting her. We have to prepare for fire and ice. And we have to realize that Mother Nature is not nice.

Mr. Bloom is the author, most recently, of ”The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism,” published last month by Prometheus Books. He is also founder and head of The Space Development Steering Committee.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 123

17 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Mr. Hansen skated deftly around Climategate, noting that it didn’t matter to the science, which was settled. However, his most worrying remark — given his views on activism — was that scientists should be politicized. Of even more concern is how widely Mr. Hansen’s activism is promoted by the warmist lobby, which doesn’t just theorize about skirting the democratic process.

Maurice Strong, the self-confessed “world’s leading environmentalist,” recently wrote that “Our concept of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified.” This would be less of a concern if Mr. Strong had not also been instrumental in allowing NGOs inside the Rio/Kyoto/Copenhagen process. “

“GO was set up by José Maria Figueres, a former President of Costa Rica. Exactly what Mr. Figueres has in mind when he talks about “bringing the public into negotiations” is clear from a clip available on YouTube, in which he frankly admits that the key to getting the “right” decisions is using NGOs to assemble mobs to pressure politicians.”

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/16/peter-foster-james-hansen-and-mob-rule.aspx

Peter Foster: James Hansen and mob rule

Posted: December 16, 2009, 10:40 PM by NP Editor

The climate action group ‘GO’ seeks to influence the politics of climate change through mob intimidation

By Peter Foster

The CBC seemed yesterday to be very much on the side of the protesters who attempted to break into the deadlocked Copenhagen climate talks. Reports expressed sympathy with the mob’s “frustration” at the “lack of progress.” Inside the Bella conference centre, meanwhile, a bunch of NGOs reportedly tried to help those storming the barricades to infiltrate the building.

Far from being unwelcome to promoters of draconian action, these arrogant noisemakers are a welcome force for intimidation. Take James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who appeared yesterday morning on CBC’s The Current. Mr. Hansen’s Al Gore-orchestrated testimony before Congress in 1988 and 1989 was of seminal importance to the UN climate agenda. He has become perhaps the most oft-quoted voice of official climate alarmism. Like Mr. Gore, Mr. Hansen recommends direct action. In his new book, Storms of My Grandchildren, he writes: “As in other struggles for justice against powerful forces, it may be necessary to take to the streets to draw attention to injustice. Civil resistance may be our best hope. It is crucial for all of us, especially young people, to get involved. This will be the most urgent fight of our lives.”

Mr. Hansen did not mean “fight” metaphorically. He testified on behalf of the “Kingsnorth Six,” a group of Greenpeace activists who caused tens of thousands of dollars worth of criminal damage in trying to shut down a British coal utility.

The Current’s Anna Maria Tremonti — in soft, deferential, non-Larry Solomon mode — claimed that Mr. Hansen, who had allegedly suffered “gagging” by the Bush administration, was giving a “rare interview.” In fact, the gagging consisted of an attempt by NASA officials to get Mr. Hansen to obey the rules which applied to all NASA scientists about giving interviews. Meanwhile Mr. Hansen is reckoned to have given over a thousand interviews during his “silent” period.

Nevertheless, a lot of what Mr. Hansen said yesterday made sense: the Copenhagen process is hypocritical and should scrapped; cap and trade is a crock, from which the only people likely to get rich are Goldman Sachs and JpMorgan Chase; current negotiations are all about paying off developing countries so that developed countries can continue emitting greenhouse gases.

Mr. Hansen suggests that if you want to slash emissions you have to tax them and rebate all the proceeds to citizens. Of course, this is Stephane Dion’s Green Shift, except that Mr. Hansen suggests that “Not one dime should go to … politicians to pick winners.” No argument there. Mr. Hansen calls his system “fees and dividends:” from each according to his emissions, to each according to … well, to just being there. But the key issue is how far human emissions contribute to global warming, and thus how far there is any point in slashing them. This rather essential point didn’t come up yesterday.

Mr. Hansen skated deftly around Climategate, noting that it didn’t matter to the science, which was settled. However, his most worrying remark — given his views on activism — was that scientists should be politicized. Of even more concern is how widely Mr. Hansen’s activism is promoted by the warmist lobby, which doesn’t just theorize about skirting the democratic process.

Mr. Strong himself hasn’t been so prominent since the Iraqi oil-for-food fiasco, but he is involved in something called The Global Observatory, GO, an organization designed to act as “a catalyst, bridging the gap between those responsible for making the decisions at [Copenhagen] and the public.”

GO was set up by José Maria Figueres, a former President of Costa Rica. Exactly what Mr. Figueres has in mind when he talks about “bringing the public into negotiations” is clear from a clip available on YouTube, in which he frankly admits that the key to getting the “right” decisions is using NGOs to assemble mobs to pressure politicians. Mr. Figueres says that he’s not willing to leave the future of his children in the hands of the 1,500 negotiators at Copenhagen, so his plan was to set up a “tent” at the meeting in which there would be scientific experts (He mentions Mr. Hansen). If such scientists declared that, say, Costa Rica was “backtracking,” then GO would get on the phone to select NGOs, who could have a mob outside the presidential palace in 45 minutes. This would result in a call to the country’s environment minister in Copenhagen to change their position.

And lest you think that GO is some fringe group, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, recently said: “The Global Observatory is a useful, timely initiative that can make a difference. We have to back up our words with action. The GO can help create the political space that will inspire, engage and enable leaders from all around the world to take action.”

By mob intimidation.

Every NGO should be tossed out of the Bella centre so that national leaders can come to a non-conclusion today in peace. Meanwhile noisy protesters should be seen for what they are: not idealistic young people, but political dupes of a plot to subvert democracy.

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 122

16 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

The Russian connection.

“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.”

See my posts:

More on the Blunder with NASA: s GISS Temperature data and the mess they have

The world has never seen such freezing heat OR the Blunder with NASA: s GISS Temperature data

PDF in Russian here:

http://www.iea.ru/article/kioto_order/15.12.2009.pdf

Article here:

http://en.rian.ru/papers/20091216/157260660.html

Russia affected by Climategate

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 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.

Etiketter Etanol, IPCC, Temperaturdata, Havsis, Havsnivå, Klimatmodeller, Al Gore, CO2, Kyoto, Carbon Trading, Global Warming Hysteri, Peer review, Isbjörnar, Vindkraft, Snötäcket, Orkaner, Russia, Obama, EU, Korruption, EU Parlamentet, UN, Riksdagen, Politik, Media, Traditional Media, Journalism, Press, News
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 121

16 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Generation green doesn’t recognize the trade-offs of costs and benefits. Indeed, they don’t seem to recognize costs at all. This is likely the fault of politicians in Western countries.”

“After two years of intense negotiations, however, diplomats have made exactly zero progress in answering the all-important question: Who is going to pay the $45 trillion that the International Energy Agency says it would cost to cure the climate of its supposed ills?”

“As such, thousands of young people spewed untold tons of greenhouse gases flying to and living in Copenhagen for a pointless climate conference. The only lasting impact of COP-15 will be its huge carbon footprint! By participating in the Copenhagen climate confab, generation green exhibits the same sort of mindless consumption that it came to protest. “

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/16/a-green-woodstock/

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

A green Woodstock

William Yeatman

Don’t be fooled by the lavish media attention given to raucous anti-globalization types at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark. I’ve seen only scant traces of that riffraff.

Instead of Seattle 1999 – the site of massive rioting at a World Trade Organization meeting – COP-15 is more like a green Woodstock. Thousands of naive young environmentalists have come to Copenhagen to revel in eco-harmony.

The UNFCCC classifies participants to the COP-15 three ways: observers, media and negotiators. Of the three, observers are by far the largest group, and they mostly fit a similar profile. They are younger than 30, they work in the nonprofit sector in the United States or Western Europe, and they passionately believe the world needs to fight global warming.

Yet dedication to the cause isn’t the only reason they traveled to Copenhagen. They also came for the vibe.

Concerts are constant in the huge temporary soundstage erected in city square. At the end of the first week, seemingly everyone was excited for the ”NGO Party” on Saturday at Vega, Copenhagen’s foremost discotheque. The party flier screamed in bold, ”Free Entrance/Conference Badge Required!” According to the hash peddlers in Christiantown, an anything-goes commune in the northern part of the city, business has been brisk during the Copenhagen conference.

To be sure, I don’t begrudge anyone a good time, and I admire these young people’s passion for their chosen cause. My main problem with this generation green is that not very many of them seem to have thought things through. When encountered by the nuance of a nation’s interest or the compromise inherent to democratic politics, they revert to slogans and chants. Like most idealists, they are all too readily mugged by reality.

It is also true that this green corps isn’t interested much in intellectual consistency. Outside the COP-15 Saturday night, a vigil marked the end of a march from the Danish Parliament building. The crowd cheered when a British rocker called for a ”revolution,” and it cheered five minutes later when an Indian academic urged support for China’s rejection of emissions targets. These are mutually exclusive exhortations, mind you.

Generation green doesn’t recognize the trade-offs of costs and benefits. Indeed, they don’t seem to recognize costs at all. This is likely the fault of politicians in Western countries. Consider President Obama, who refuses to acknowledge that his renewable-energy policies are expensive energy policies, for the simple reason that renewable energy costs more than conventional energy. Instead, he trumpets the creation of green jobs. The president surely knows better, so he is pretending that his energy policies are all gain and no pain. The problem is that the youth are listening, and they believe him.

Perhaps the biggest indictment of the young idealists who descended upon Denmark is the mere fact that they came. After all, world leaders conceded that COP-15 would be a failure a month before it even started. Since 2007, the Copenhagen climate conference was supposed to have been the deadline for a legally binding, multilateral treaty to fight global warming.

After two years of intense negotiations, however, diplomats have made exactly zero progress in answering the all-important question: Who is going to pay the $45 trillion that the International Energy Agency says it would cost to cure the climate of its supposed ills? Developed countries refuse to pay without significant participation from developing countries, which refuse to pay anything. In the face of this diplomatic gridlock, world leaders announced at November’s Asian Pacific Economic Conference Summit that COP-15 would fail to produce a treaty. As such, thousands of young people spewed untold tons of greenhouse gases flying to and living in Copenhagen for a pointless climate conference. The only lasting impact of COP-15 will be its huge carbon footprint! By participating in the Copenhagen climate confab, generation green exhibits the same sort of mindless consumption that it came to protest.

All the time I’ve been here in Copenhagen, I have kept thinking about the opportunity cost of generation green’s quixotic dedication to ”doing something” about global warming. What if they cared this much about homelessness? Or mental illness? Or breast cancer?

For a decade, temperatures on Earth have remained the same, but human beings still suffer much the same as they always have. Generation green’s passion is commendable. Its priorities, however, are abominable.

William Yeatman is an energy policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a contributor to Globalwarming.org.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 120

16 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

How the humans became extinct. Hmm it seems to have happened before. And I wonder if our “intelligent” politicians also have “brains” the sixe of walnuts?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/photos/2009/dec/16/66190/

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 119

16 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“More than anything else, Monday’s walkout revealed the real reason that the developing world is in Copenhagen in the first place: They see climate change as a potential foreign-aid bonanza, and they are at the table to leverage the West’s environmental angst into massive transfers of wealth.

In theory, the money is supposed to help poor countries pay for their transition to a carbon-neutral future. But the developed world has been pouring trillions of dollars into development aid in various forms for decades, with little to show for it. The reasons are well-known: Corruption, political oppression, government control of the economy and the absence of rule of law combine to keep poor countries poor. And those factors also ensure that most aid is squandered or skimmed off the top. Recasting foreign aid as ”climate mitigation” won’t change any of that. “

”The world’s scientists and policy decision makers have publicly stated that this is the greatest risk humanity has ever faced,” says Mr. Di-Aping. ”Now if that’s the case, it’s very strange that $10 billion is considered adequate financing.” Mr. Di-Aping deserves credit for taking the climate alarmists on their own terms and drawing consistent conclusions. “

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398304574597900307712862.html

DECEMBER 16, 2009.The Copenhagen Shakedown

Developing countries understand the real costs of climate change.

The U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen was supposed to be the moment when the world came together to save us from an excess of carbon dioxide. Like all such confabs, it’s coming down instead to cold, hard cash.

On Monday, the so-called G-77—in effect, the Third World—walked out of the talks for several hours in protest of the unwillingness, as they saw it, of rich countries to foot the bill for averting or mitigating climate catastrophe in the developing world. The negotiations have since resumed, but with the most difficult questions set aside and expectations lower than ever.

More than anything else, Monday’s walkout revealed the real reason that the developing world is in Copenhagen in the first place: They see climate change as a potential foreign-aid bonanza, and they are at the table to leverage the West’s environmental angst into massive transfers of wealth.

Still, Copenhagen’s fixation on who pays for these huge wealth transfers is instructive because it lays bare the myth that greening the global economy is a cost-free exercise. The G-77 scoffed at a European offer of €7.2 billion ($10 billion) over three years. Instead, the Sudanese chairman of the group, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, suggested in an interview with Mother Jones magazine that something on the order of a trillion dollars, or more, would be appropriate.

Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the Malthusian 1972 classic ”The Limits to Growth,” also served up some climate honesty in a recent interview with Der Spiegel. ”I lived long enough in a country like Afghanistan to know that I don’t want us to have to live like that in the future. But we have to learn to live a life that allows for fulfillment and development, with the CO2 emissions of Afghanistan.” Mr. Meadows’s chilling corollary: ”If you want everyone to have the full potential of mobility, adequate food and self-development, then . . . one or two billion” people is about all the population the planet can sustain.

Given that the world’s population is now about 6.8 billion people, that’s not likely to happen. Nor is the developed world about to reinvent itself as a greener version of Afghanistan, much less fork over trillions of dollars to avert the supposed catastrophe it has done so much to trumpet. If the summit at Copenhagen achieves nothing else but to expose the disconnect between climate alarm and climate ”solutions,” it may even be worth it.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A26

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, UN, Vindkraft
Postat i Fri- och rättigheter, Miljö, USA, Yttrandefrihet | Lämna en kommentar »

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 118

16 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Scientists at Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology have found that solar activity caused Alpine glaciers to melt in the 1940s at rates faster than today’s pace, even though it’s warmer now.”

“The Swiss researchers are spinning their own work, saying that the evidence doesn’t mean the public can stop worrying about man-made warming. But their finding validates other researchers who have said solar activity has a far greater impact on temperatures than human CO2 emissions.”

“It wasn’t the first time Gore has crossed into fantasyland. Last month, he announced on the ”Tonight Show” that ”the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees,” when in fact it’s no more than 9,000 degrees Celsius and might be only 4,000. Not even the sun is ”several million degrees.” Its surface — based on Gore’s criteria — is a cool 5,550 to 6,000 degrees Celsius.”

“The truth, though, is that Gore and so many others gathered in Copenhagen are propagandists. They know that the way to arrange the world economy to fit their preferences and require lifestyle changes in developed nations is to demand that governments do something about the environment.”

Se my posts:

Mt Kilimanjaro – the snow cover is increasing says Tanzanian minister

Alaska’s Glaciers Are Growing

Glaciers in Norway Growing Again. And Alaskan Glaciers Grow for First Time in 250 years

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=515430

Here Comes The Sun

Posted 12/15/2009 07:28 PM ET

Global Warming: Drip by drip, like a glacier melting in the sun, the claim that man is changing the climate is dissolving into irrelevance. The recent findings of Swiss researchers expose another hole.

Former Vice President Al Gore has for years warned that man-made global warming is melting the world’s glaciers — a tactic commonly used by alarmists who want to whip up hysteria. Swiss researchers, however, have presented evidence that weakens the argument.

Scientists at Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology have found that solar activity caused Alpine glaciers to melt in the 1940s at rates faster than today’s pace, even though it’s warmer now.

The study found that the sun in the 1940s was 8% stronger than average and far more powerful than it is today. It also concluded that solar activity was weaker from the 1950s to the 1980s, an era in which the glaciers advanced.

The Swiss researchers are spinning their own work, saying that the evidence doesn’t mean the public can stop worrying about man-made warming. But their finding validates other researchers who have said solar activity has a far greater impact on temperatures than human CO2 emissions.

This report from Zurich reminds us of another myth perpetrated by Gore. In his Academy Award-winning documentary, ”An Inconvenient Truth,” he contends the snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro has retreated because of human greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet scientists have been telling a different story.

They say the melting on the 19,340-foot mountain has been going on for more than a century, beginning long before man accelerated CO2 emissions. They also report that temperatures at the top of Kilimanjaro never fall below freezing, so the reason for snowcap loss has to be due to one or more causes not related to temperature. A lack of snowfall is likely one of those.

Just as the Swiss researchers tried to soft-pedal their findings, the scientists who have studied Kilimanjaro also refuse to let the narrative unravel. They say the facts about the snowcap shouldn’t be used to raise doubts about the official line that man is warming the planet. Nothing to see here, they say in effect, so move on.

Another sign that the alarmists’ claims are falling apart is the statement made Monday by Gore at the global warming conference in Copenhagen: ”Some of the models suggest … that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

While the chance that sea ice will disappear that soon is virtually nil, there’s a 100% certainty that Gore was wrong.

”It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” said Wieslav Maslowski, a scientist from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School whose work Gore had misused. ”I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

It wasn’t the first time Gore has crossed into fantasyland. Last month, he announced on the ”Tonight Show” that ”the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees,” when in fact it’s no more than 9,000 degrees Celsius and might be only 4,000. Not even the sun is ”several million degrees.” Its surface — based on Gore’s criteria — is a cool 5,550 to 6,000 degrees Celsius.

Then there’s his movie, so full of scientific errors — at least nine of them — that a British court two years ago ruled it could be shown in secondary schools only when notes to balance its political bias were also presented in class.

Despite his poor stewardship of the facts and his refusal to debate the issue, Gore is still the go-to guy for most journalists who cover global warming. He’s still identified as the climate guru who actually has something to contribute to the conversation.

The truth, though, is that Gore and so many others gathered in Copenhagen are propagandists. They know that the way to arrange the world economy to fit their preferences and require lifestyle changes in developed nations is to demand that governments do something about the environment.

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16 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“The one thing of which we can be sure is that the end of the week will see the announcement of more tens of billions of dollars in transfers to the Third World, which will mostly wind up in UN salaries, consulting fees, contracts for favoured alternative energy manufacturers, and Swiss bank accounts.”

“Of course, we’re on the side of the angels. We can do what we like.”

Never were truer words spoken. Being “on the side of the angels” means being beyond facts or science, and frequently beyond the law. It means feeling free to rappel down Parliament or stop industry at will, free to engage in street theatre or property-destroying thuggery, free — like Al Gore — to spout any alarmist factoid that comes into your head. Glacier melt threatens a billion!”

“Copenhagen represents the hypocritical in pursuit of the suicidal. There could be nothing better for the citizens of the world — as opposed to power, rent and publicity seekers — than that this toxic process should collapse. Unfortunately, it is likely to be rescued at the eleventh hour, attached to artificial life support systems, and propped up to generate more posturing and policy poison another day. At least Canada will not have been too much a part of it all.”

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/15/peter-foster-canada-s-galileo-government.aspx

Peter Foster: Canada’s Galileo government

Posted: December 15, 2009, 7:22 PM by NP Editor

The Copenhagen agreement will increase bureaucracy and Swiss bank accounts without helping the planet

By Peter Foster

U N Secretary General Ban Ki Moon announced this week on his way to Copenhagen that “There is no time for posturing or blaming.” Good heavens, if there is no time for the UN’s two main activities, the climate talks must really be in peril.

Yesterday the U.S. and the EU were at loggerheads, China accused rich nations of making “empty promises,” and a leaked Cabinet document suggested that Canada, outrageously, wanted to pursue sensible policies by not penalizing particular industries more than the U.S. does. Environment ministers were burning the midnight biomass ahead of the arrival of 115 world leaders.

Will this supertanker of fools succeed by Friday in cobbling together an agreement that will ensure both more intrusive government and more global poverty without doing anything for the environment? Will they manage to sweep Climategate under the carpet? Will they win their clichéd “race against time?” Or will the talks end in “catastrophic failure?” Catastrophic failure, that is, to promote economic catastrophe.

The one thing of which we can be sure is that the end of the week will see the announcement of more tens of billions of dollars in transfers to the Third World, which will mostly wind up in UN salaries, consulting fees, contracts for favoured alternative energy manufacturers, and Swiss bank accounts.

There has been some progress in boosting the demand for bureaucracy. It was announced, after a couple of leaks and a walkout or two, that the conference would continue to pursue “two tracks:” one on behalf of Third World hand-biters to keep the pointless but expensive Kyoto Accord going; the other to frame a new, equally unworkable, agreement.

The government of Canada, like others, feels compelled to replay the Kyoto charade, but is in a uniquely uncomfortable position. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have to negotiate while being vigorously stabbed in the back by a motley crew consisting of the governments of Ontario and Quebec, most of the Canadian media, the global radical NGO movement, and a bunch of self-appointed poobahs who go under the name Power Up Canada.

Power Up delivered a letter yesterday telling Mr. Harper not to be “defeatist” on climate change. Its luminary signatories included not merely former Soviet leader Mikhail Rent-a-Gorbachev but former Canadian prime ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin. These were the men who signed Canada up for the Kyoto fiasco. Have they no shame?

The Canadian media did its best to create a broken-off chunk of Antarctica out of an ice cube via a non-story about an American group of lefty satirists named the Yes Men. These clowns issued fake press releases and a fake news story, and organized a fake press conference. This was portrayed as an “embarrassment” for the government, but how? The only coverage of this non-story outside Canada was in — where else? — The Guardian.

This all-out attack on the Harper government may backfire. When I read the cover story in the latest issue of Maclean’s, “Why the World Hates Canada,” I felt a surge of genuine pride in Mr. Harper for his bravery in resisting the enormous pressures brought to bear by the vociferous cabal of radical NGOs, international bureaucrats, Big Corporate appeasers and political poseurs that make up the world-according-to-Copenhagen.

Canada appeared to stand like Galileo in front of the Inquisition.

As part of their war on Mr. Harper, Canadian news organs (this one included) have taken to quoting the words of Guardian columnist George Monbiot as if they represent received wisdom. Maclean’s too quotes Mr. Monbiot’s claim that Canada is the “real villain” of Copenhagen. But who the hell is George Monbiot?

Mr. Monbiot, at the Munk Debate in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, apart from demonstrating a slim grasp of both facts and logic, provided perhaps the most telling comment of the evening. Having just pulled out a blank piece of paper to demonstrate opponent Nigel Lawson’s “original research” on climate change, Mr. Monbiot declared “this is not a time for intellectual games or for cheap debating society point scoring.” When the audience laughed (at him), he responded “I’m sorry, what I should have said was, this is not a time for their cheap debating society points. Of course, we’re on the side of the angels. We can do what we like.”

The Maclean’s story noted how Canada has received numerous “Fossil of the Week” awards from the radical NGO junta represented by the Climate Action Network for the sin of standing against the braying “international consensus.” But Environment Minister Jim Prentice came across as a model of good sense, and perhaps the story’s most hopeful paragraph was: “And for those who so clearly hope that the bad publicity will force Stephen Harper into a grand gesture at the summit, Prentice had a message: don’t hold your breath.”

Copenhagen represents the hypocritical in pursuit of the suicidal. There could be nothing better for the citizens of the world — as opposed to power, rent and publicity seekers — than that this toxic process should collapse. Unfortunately, it is likely to be rescued at the eleventh hour, attached to artificial life support systems, and propped up to generate more posturing and policy poison another day. At least Canada will not have been too much a part of it all.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 116

15 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Have Fewer Children, Don’t Eat Meat

Tree-Hugging Dictators?

Al Gore Telling More Lies

”I Pledge Allegiance To The…Earth?”

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 115

15 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“No longer, it seems, does Rome hold a pre-eminent position. In this brave new world of climate change and sustainable development, all roads lead to Rajendra K. Pachauri.”

“Thus, at the end of the day, Redcar will lose its biggest employer and one of the largest manufacturing plants left in Britain. Tata, having gained up to £1.2 billion from “carbon credits”, will get its new steel plants – while the net amount of CO2 emitted worldwide will not have been reduced a jot.

This is the real reason why so many big businessmen, bankers, politicians, scientists – led, of course, by Al Gore – are backing stiffer, pan-global governmental legislation on carbon emissions. Because there are such stupendous quantities of money to be made.”

“Last year, on official figures, buying and selling the right to emit CO2 was worth $126 billion across the world. This market, now enriching many of our leading financial institutions (not to mention Al Gore), is growing so fast that within a few years it is predicted to be worth trillions, making carbon the most valuable traded commodity in the world. Forget Big Oil: the new world power is Big Carbon.Truly it has been a miracle of our time that they have managed to transform carbon dioxide, a gas upon which all life on earth depends, into a “pollutant”, worth more than diamonds, let alone oil. And many of those now gathered in Copenhagen are making a great deal of money out of it.”

They are SOOO altruistic aren’t they. ONLY thinking about what’s best for us. That’s why THEY HAVE TO SCARE US.

What links the Copenhagen conference with the steelworks closing in Redcar?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6798052/What-links-the-Copenhagen-conference-with-the-steelworks-closing-in-Redcar.html

EXECUTIVE PROFILE Rajendra K. Pachauri

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=9089242&privcapId=22361&previousCapId=138823&previousTitle=General%20Catalyst%20Partners

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100019821/climategate-with-business-interests-like-these-are-we-really-sure-dr-rajendra-pachauri-is-fit-to-head-the-ipcc/

Climategate: with business interests like these are we really sure Dr Rajendra Pachauri is fit to head the IPCC?

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 14th, 2009

After the Climategate scandal erupted, few were quicker to dismiss the significance of the leaked emails than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In no way, he insisted, just two days after the story broke, had the integrity of the IPCC been compromised:

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he said.

“Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.”

And if any investigation into the affair were necessary, argued Dr Pachauri, it ought purely to be a criminal one into how the emails came to light.

Pachauri said he doubted that trust in the IPCC would be damaged by the affair. “People who are aware of how the IPCC functions and are appreciative of the credibility that the IPCC has attained will probably not be swayed by an incident of this kind,” he said.

Quite so. And I’m quite sure that no one will in any wise have their faith in the integrity of the IPCC shaken by these revelations courtesy of the mighty Richard North.

North’s tribute to Dr Pachauri’s multifarious talents is so startling I think I shall have to quote it in full:

As reported by Reuters – with a slight correction: The head of the Asian Development Bank (ADP), Haruhiko Kuroda, warned governments that a failure to reach a climate deal in Copenhagen could lead to a collapse of the carbon market, which would hit efforts to deal with climate change make carbon traders very rich.

It helps of course to know that Mr Kuroda is best known in greenie circles for setting up the ADB Advisory Group on Climate Change – chaired by millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri, part-time chairman of the IPCC.

An interesting member of that Group is Dr Klaus Toepfer, Founding Director, Institute for Advanced Studies Climate, Earth System and Sustainability Sciences and former executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). And it was UNEP, of course, which set up the IPCC – which now has as its part-time chairman millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

One other member is professor Hironori Hamanaka, Chair, Board of Directors, Institute of Global Environmental Strategies (IGES). The IGES claims to be “a research institute that conducts pragmatic and innovative strategic policy research to support sustainable development in the Asia-Pacific region.” It will come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that the organisation works very closely with TERI, whose Director-General is millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

Yet another is Ms Huguette Labelle, also a Board Member of the UN Global Compact organisation, the very same UN to which millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri belongs. Hilariously, Ms Labelle is Chair of Transparency International, the global civil society organisation “leading the fight against corruption.” TI’s mission “is to create change towards a world free of corruption.”

The Board also includes professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University. This is the same Earth Institute which set up the Climate-Risk Center, inviting millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri to become its first Board Chairman.

One other interesting character is Dr. Emil Salim, an adviser to Indonesia’s President on environment and sustainable development issues. But he is also a member of APFED – the Asia-Pacific Forum for Environment and Development. One of its major activities is sponsoring the “Partnership Initiatives for Knowledge Network and Capacity Building” – in conjunction with TERI as a major partner, the Director General of which is millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

And last but not least is Professor Dadi Zhou, Director General (Emeritus) of the Energy Research Institute, which of course is otherwise known as TERI, the Director General of which is millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

No longer, it seems, does Rome hold a pre-eminent position. In this brave new world of climate change and sustainable development, all roads lead to Rajendra K. Pachauri.

Particularly interesting is Dr Pachauri’s connection with the “not-for-profit organisation” TERI. As we learn from its website, this used to stand for Tata Energy Research Institute, but was renamed in The Energy And Resources Institute in 2003. Nothing sinister, I’m sure, in its decision to play down the Tata connection; nor in the fact that Dr Pachauri makes no mention of the fact that he is funded by Tata on his website. And obviously, it is quite normal that TERI makes no disclosure on its website – or in its downloadable annual report (all you get is a pie chart with no figures on it) – about its financial arrangements: the pay scales of its 800 staff members and its esteemed director general are quite rightly hidden from the world’s prying eyes.

Nevertheless, as Christopher Booker has noted elsewhere, one of the global business interests which will make – and indeed already has made – large sums of money thanks to the climate doom scenarios of the IPCC, is the Indian giant Tata. By fingering CO2 as the primary driver of AGW, the IPCC has been primarily responsible for creating the market in carbon trading. Dr Pachauri was, of course, the lead author on the IPCC’s second report which paved the way to Kyoto – which in turn ushered in the world’s first carbon trading schemes.

As Booker reported, what has been great for Tata’s bottom line has not been so good for useful for the 1700 workers who recently lost their jobs in Redcar, North Yorkshire, when the owner of the Corus steelworks – Tata – decided to close its plant.

The real gain to Corus from stopping production at Redcar, however, is the saving it will make on its carbon allowances, allocated by the EU under its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). By ceasing to emit a potential six million tonnes of CO2 a year, Corus will benefit from carbon allowances which could soon, according to European Commission projections, be worth up to £600 million over the three years before current allocations expire.

Will this make any difference at all to the quantities of plant food – sorry, deadly, planet-destroying CO2 – pumped into the atmosphere? Not at all, as Booker goes on to explain:

But this is only half the story. In India, Corus’s owner, Tata, plans to increase steel production from 53 million tonnes to 124 million over the same period. By replacing inefficient old plants with new ones which emit only “European levels” of CO2, Tata could claim a further £600 million under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, which is operated by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – the organisers of the Copenhagen conference. Under this scheme, organisations in developed countries such as Britain – ranging from electricity supply companies to the NHS – can buy the right to exceed their CO2 allocations from those in developing countries, such as India. The huge but hidden cost of these “carbon permits” will be passed on to all of us, notably through our electricity bills.

Thus, at the end of the day, Redcar will lose its biggest employer and one of the largest manufacturing plants left in Britain. Tata, having gained up to £1.2 billion from “carbon credits”, will get its new steel plants – while the net amount of CO2 emitted worldwide will not have been reduced a jot.

Last year, on official figures, buying and selling the right to emit CO2 was worth $126 billion across the world. This market, now enriching many of our leading financial institutions (not to mention Al Gore), is growing so fast that within a few years it is predicted to be worth trillions, making carbon the most valuable traded commodity in the world. Forget Big Oil: the new world power is Big Carbon.Truly it has been a miracle of our time that they have managed to transform carbon dioxide, a gas upon which all life on earth depends, into a “pollutant”, worth more than diamonds, let alone oil. And many of those now gathered in Copenhagen are making a great deal of money out of it.

One thing is for certain in all this business: Dr Pachauri’s behaviour has been beyond reproach. We know this because Dr Pachauri is a fervent advocate of what he calls “sustainable consumption”. A committed vegetarian, he believes that we should all learn to fly less, be made responsible for energy use in our hotel bedrooms (”I don’t see why you couldn’t have a meter in the room to register your energy consumption from air-conditioning or heating and you should be charged for that”), eat less meat, and do without ice in our water in restaurants (”It is just an enormous amount of waste that we don’t even think about”). It would be quite outrageous to suggest that a man of such extreme ascetism could in any way be benefiting financially by the worldwide promotion of AGW theory.

Nevertheless, with the best will in the world, does the good Dr Pachauri not feel there might be certain potential conflict-of-interest issues between his role as head of the IPCC and his sundry business interests?

Oh, and while he’s mulling over that question, here are a few more of Dr Pachauri’s business interests listed below, as disclosed by Business Week.

Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri is a Strategic Advisor at Pegasus Capital Advisors, L.P. He has been a Director-General of The Energy Research Institute (TERI) since April 2001. Dr. Pachauri has been Head of Tata Energy Research Institute, New Delhi (now known as The Energy and Resources Institute) since April 2001.He has been the President of the Asian Energy Institute since 1992. Dr. Pachauri has been the President of the International Association for Energy Economics … since 1988. He has been Chairman and Member of the Advisory Group at Asian Development Bank since May 2009. Dr. Pachauri has been an Independent Director of Oil and Natural Gas Corp. Ltd., since June 26, 2006. He serves as Vice-Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Pachauri serves as Director of GloriOil Limited. He serves as Director of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Japan. Dr. Pachauri serves as a Member of External Advisory Board of Chicago Climate Exchange, Inc. He serves as Member of the Advisory Board on Energy. Dr. Pachauri serves as a Member of the International Advisory Board of Toyota Motors. He serves as a Member of Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG. Dr. Pachauri served as Chairman of the International Association for Energy Economics from 1989 to 1990. He served as an Independent Director of NTPC Ltd. (National Thermal Power Corp.), from January 30, 2006 to January 2009. Dr. Pachauri served as a Director of the Indian Oil Corporation Limited until August 28, 2003. He served as non-official Part-time Director of NTPC Ltd., from August 2002 to August 2005. Dr. Pachauri served as a Director of Gail India Ltd. from August 18, 2003 to October 26, 2004. He served as Director of Tata Energy Research Institute., since 1981. Dr. Pachauri serves as Member of National Environmental Council, Government of India under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister of India. He serves as a Member of the International Solar Energy Society, World Resources Institute, World Energy Council. Dr. Pachauri has been Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India since July 2001. He serves as Member of the Oil Industry Restructuring Group, for the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Government of India. Dr. Pachauri serves as a Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. He served as an Advisor to the Government of India. Dr. Pachauri also served as Director of Consulting and Applied Research Division at the Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad. He served as Visiting Professor, Resource Economics at the College of Mineral and Energy Resources, West Virginia University. Dr. Pachauri served as a Member of the faculty of several prominent academic and research institutions and has published 22 books and several papers and articles. He received the Padma Bhushan award. Dr. Pachauri was a Senior Visiting Fellow of Resource Systems Institute, East — West Center, USA. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at The World Bank, Washington, DC and McCluskey Fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale University. Dr. Pachauri received a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Economics from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A. and a Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering in 1972.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 114

15 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Worse still, some at the World Bank have vowed to divert actual development and disease prevention aid help to global warming causes — something that didn’t sit well with countries that actually care about real jobs and infrastructure.”

“Meanwhile, a draft climate accord by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for a 50% cut in global emissions by 2050, has been kicked down the road till 2015 or 2016. Gee, maybe it’s not the most urgent threat facing humankind after all.

This shows that all the pretty words about going green and controlling climate have turned into nothing but a money-grab.

Maybe the reality is sinking in that the entire science of climate change is a sham.”

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=515260

Copenhagen Collapse

Posted 12/14/2009 06:55 PM ET

Copenhagen: When an overblown environmental conference culminates with Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lecturing the West on virtue, color it another shakedown.

The United Nations’ Copenhagen Climate Conference is going fast into meltdown. It may be because it’s not about climate anymore, but fitting a noose on the world’s productive economies and extracting wealth transfers.

Poor countries have gone from defending their right to economic development as a reason for exemptions to emissions cuts to claiming a ”legitimate” right to vast wealth transfers from the West to prevent emissions. They call it ”climate justice.”

Monday, the Group of 77, led by African states, shut down the conference for the second time, saying they would pick up their marbles and go home if the West didn’t agree to their formula for emissions cutbacks and send them more than the $10 billion promised by the West.

Sudanese diplomat Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping said the African states would ”not participate in any negotiations until the issues of Kyoto Protocol are discussed.”

Having manipulated the foreign aid racket for decades, the African officials knew just what buttons to push with Western Europeans. Not surprisingly, they won concessions. No doubt they’ll do it again to get more, and the Danes and other one-worlders will give them what they want.

It’s no surprise it’s come to this. It follows calls from environmental extremists like billionaire George Soros to have the International Monetary Fund front billions in cash to third world countries for climate control, creating a vast pool of money for Third World kleptocrats that won’t be subject to accountability by pesky taxpayers.

Worse still, some at the World Bank have vowed to divert actual development and disease prevention aid help to global warming causes — something that didn’t sit well with countries that actually care about real jobs and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, a draft climate accord by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for a 50% cut in global emissions by 2050, has been kicked down the road till 2015 or 2016. Gee, maybe it’s not the most urgent threat facing humankind after all.

This shows that all the pretty words about going green and controlling climate have turned into nothing but a money-grab.

Maybe the reality is sinking in that the entire science of climate change is a sham.

The hacked CRU e-mails of the University of East Anglia show science has been corrupted by supposedly respected scientists in charge of the climate data at the university from the beginning. They falsified data and repressed inconvenient facts and then tried to silence real scientists who tried to determine the truth.

In such an atmosphere of unreality, it’s no surprise the radical thugs attracted to United Nations extravaganzas were out in force.

In Copenhagen, violent radical extremists burned cars and spattered the Danish capital with graffiti in the name of the environment. Over 1,200 were arrested over the weekend, with the bacchanalia of barbarism expected to continue through the week.

Now, during the conference’s waning days, it’s also become a dirt-magnet for dictators with their hands out.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are expected this week to hector the West on wealth transfers and to browbeat guilt-ridden liberals to get more cash for their own dictatorial schemes.

These three lawless leaders have laid waste to their nations’ own economies in some of the world’s most perfect models of unsustainability. Now they want the West to give them money for it.

Is there someone out there who will stand up and say enough?

Or must this farce continue in a bad memory of the Jimmy Carter 1970s?

It’s time to scrap the entire Copenhagen concept and for developed countries to jump from this sinking ship while they still have their wallets. It’s time they recognized zealous climate change movement for what it is: a very large, very expensive hoax.

Etiketter Etanol, IPCC, Temperaturdata, Havsis, Havsnivå, Klimatmodeller, Al Gore, CO2, Kyoto, Carbon Trading, Global Warming Hysteri, Peer review, Isbjörnar, Vindkraft, Snötäcket, Orkaner, Obama, EU, Korruption, EU Parlamentet, UN, Riksdagen, Politik, Media, Traditional Media, Journalism, News
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 113

14 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“The temporary buildings housing delegation offices are not well insulated and are warmed by oil heaters, so this area is the most energy-wasteful, she said.”

“Balslev said most of the energy used by the conference was from coal fired power stations that power the electricity grid, but some was from wind power.”

As a complement to my posts Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 81 and Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 75 about the UN pack, this travelling circus that fly around the globe in first class, or private jet, stay in hotel rooms at £400-500 per night in spa resorts, and gets wined and dined at expensive restaurants.

And the enormous costs and hypocrisy of Copenhagen. Here they are arriving in their chauffeur driven limousines, and their special busses are of course empty. Their housing warmed by oil heaters and the energy used by the conference was from coal fired power stations. And seventy percent of the summit’s greenhouse gas emissions came from activities inside the conference center,

Telling us THAT WE HAVE TO CUT BACK!

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BD4D020091214

Copenhagen summit carbon footprint biggest ever: report

Mon Dec 14, 2009 2:28pm EST

By Sunanda Creagh

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – The Copenhagen climate talks will generate more carbon emissions than any previous climate conference, equivalent to the annual output of over half a million Ethiopians, figures commissioned by hosts Denmark show.

Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the Dec 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, most of it from their flights.

This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, and is the same amount produced each year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians — the vast difference is due to the huge gap in consumption patterns in the two countries — according to U.S. government statistics about per person emissions in 2006.

Despite efforts by the Danish government to reduce the conference’s carbon footprint, around 5,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be created by the summit and a further 40,500 tonnes created by attendees’ flights to Copenhagen.

The figure for the flights was calculated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while the domestic carbon footprint from the summit was calculated by accountants Deloitte, said Deloitte consultant Stine Balslev.

”This is much bigger than the last talks because there are many more people here,” she said, adding that 18,000 people were expected to pass through the conference center every day.

”These are preliminary figures but we expect that when we do the final calculations after the conference is over, the carbon footprint will be about the same.”

Deloitte included in their calculations emissions caused by accommodation, local transport, electricity and heating of the conference center, paper, security, transport of goods and services as well as energy used by computers, kitchens, photocopiers and printers inside the conference center.

Accommodation accounted for 23 percent of the summit’s greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen, while transport caused 7 percent. Seventy percent came from activities inside the conference center, she said.

”We have been forced to put up some temporary buildings in order to provide the delegation rooms because the number of participants is so much larger than expected,” said Balslev.

”For instance the U.S. delegation has ordered an area that’s five times as big as last year.”

The temporary buildings housing delegation offices are not well insulated and are warmed by oil heaters, so this area is the most energy-wasteful, she said.

The researchers assumed that 60 percent of conference participants would catch public transport to and from the conference but Balslev said that was probably optimistic.

Balslev said most of the energy used by the conference was from coal fired power stations that power the electricity grid, but some was from wind power.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 112

14 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Armed UN Security Officers Stop Questions About ClimateGate

Journalist Phelim McAleer asks Al Gore an Inconvenient Question about ‘Climategate’ emails. McAleer is interrupted by Al Gores “press secretary” and armed UN security guard pulls the cable from the microphone

This is UN, IPCC and Global Warming Hysterics and there “consensus” in action – i.e. SILENCE EVERYONE NOW!

Se also my posts:

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 106

Why Does Al Gore Hate The Press?

Why Does Al Gore Hate The Press -2?

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 111

14 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Mr. Gore and his cohorts have consistently smeared climate realists and policy skeptics as “deniers,” paranoiacs or corporate shills. “Denier” invokes Holocaust denial. Paranoia is linked to those conspiracy theorists who claim that Neil Armstrong’s lunar landscape was really a movie backlot. The corporate shill angle is usually based on “exposing” some skeptical individual’s or organization’s link to Big Oil, which is in fact irrelevant unless you judge science on the basis of funding rather than objectivity. Oil companies in fact devote far more money to supporting climate hysteria.

Nevertheless, the corporate angle means that skeptics can simultaneously be identified as crazy conspiracy theorists, and part of a corporate conspiracy!”

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/11/peter-foster-the-goracle-speaks-on-climategate.aspx

Peter Foster: The Goracle speaks on Climategate

Posted: December 11, 2009, 9:10 PM by NP Editor

The emails, far from being meaningless or out of context, show alteration of data and attempts to rig the peer review process

By Peter Foster

True believers in catastrophic man-made climate change have been waiting for Al Gore to lead them through the Valley of Climategate. This week, The Goracle spoke. Appearing on CNN, he claimed that the emails to and from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia were more than 10 years old and amounted to a mere discussion of “arcane points.” What this was really about, he said, was an example of “people who don’t want to do anything about the climate crisis taking things out of context and misrepresenting them.” But then what would you expect Mr. Gore to say about his co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize? If they go down, he goes down.

The emails, (which in fact date up to late this year), far from being meaningless or out of context, show alteration of scientific data and flagrant attempts to rig the peer review process, which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has always claimed was the bedrock of its scientific objectivity.

During his CNN interview, Mr. Gore went through his usual parade of extreme weather factoids, technological wonkery and green stimulus fantasies, while spouting blatant untruths. Asked about the relative contribution of humans to atmospheric CO2 emissions, he claimed that they put up “the majority” (in fact, they are estimated to contribute about one-twentieth). Interestingly, though, Mr. Gore didn’t use one of the staples of his climate vaudeville act: that “deniers” are like those who believe that the moon landing was faked. Perhaps even he lacked the gall to bring up conspiracy theories when the evidence of a genuine conspiracy is so obvious.

Mr. Gore and his cohorts have consistently smeared climate realists and policy skeptics as “deniers,” paranoiacs or corporate shills. “Denier” invokes Holocaust denial. Paranoia is linked to those conspiracy theorists who claim that Neil Armstrong’s lunar landscape was really a movie backlot. The corporate shill angle is usually based on “exposing” some skeptical individual’s or organization’s link to Big Oil, which is in fact irrelevant unless you judge science on the basis of funding rather than objectivity. Oil companies in fact devote far more money to supporting climate hysteria.

Nevertheless, the corporate angle means that skeptics can simultaneously be identified as crazy conspiracy theorists, and part of a corporate conspiracy! For example, U.S. warmist Senator Barbara Boxer recently claimed that “email-theft-gate” required “looking at a criminal activity which could well have been co-ordinated.” We don’t have to ask who did the co-ordinating.

The anti-skeptic smears serve to avoid addressing the valid issues they raise. Mr. Gore has resolutely refused to debate his opponents on the basis that there is nothing to debate. The shenanigans at CRU prove there is. The new line of obfuscation is that the past century’s temperature record is still intact and the glaciers are still melting! But the key issue is why, and what can or should be done about these alleged facts (which now require treble checking).

Nobody is denying that the past 10 years may have featured some of the hottest years “on record,” but that is not what is in dispute. What is in dispute is the degree to which human activity is responsible. Also, “hot compared to what?” The warming of the past century has been relatively mild, and “the record” goes back only a relatively short time.

According to The Scotsman: “The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will investigate claims that the hacked emails have revealed a conspiracy to boost the evidence for man-made global warming.”

Fat chance. The IPCC was designed to boost the evidence for man-made global warming. The CRU doesn’t consist of some group of rogue scientists. They were, and are, central to the IPCC’s fundamental political purpose. The true significance of the “hide the decline” email is not that CRU’s head Phil Jones substituted actual for proxy readings in a temperature series, but that the fact that the proxies deviated from actual readings further undermined their validity for judging past temperatures and, in particular, for “getting rid of” the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). The MWP was inconvenient because if global climate was as warm today as a 1000 years ago, then that would undermine the claim that the warming of the past century had to be based on human activity, which was the result needed to meet the UN’s larger agenda.

Those who created the IPCC want global taxation and regulation powers, vast new transfers to the Third World (despite the manifest failures of such transfers in the past) and an end to industrial society as we know it. That’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s their stated purpose.

One of those previously fingered as a deranged conspiracist is Dr. William Gray, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU) and a renowned hurricane forecaster. Dr. Gray suggests that the Climategate revelations “are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well-organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years. This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the emails of the publicly funded climate research groups of the United States and of foreign governments were ever made public.”

Now there’s an idea. But can you imagine how much “raw data” would, like that of Dr. Jones, get “lost …” Or am I being paranoid?

Etiketter Etanol, IPCC, Temperaturdata, Havsis, Havsnivå, Klimatmodeller, Al Gore, CO2, Kyoto, Carbon Trading, Global Warming Hysteri, Peer review, Isbjörnar, Vindkraft, Snötäcket, Orkaner, Obama, EU, Korruption, EU Parlamentet, UN, Riksdagen, Politik, Media, Traditional Media, Journalism, Press, News
Postat i Fri- och rättigheter, Försvar, USA, Yttrandefrihet | Lämna en kommentar »

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 110

14 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“The bureaucrats at Copenhagen dread high CO2 levels. The biosphere craves them. Plants evolved when CO2 levels in the atmosphere stood at a healthy 1000 parts per million, two-to-three times today’s paltry level of about 380 parts per million. Plants crave CO2 so much that commercial greenhouse operators often enrich greenhouse air with CO2 — also known as nature’s fertilizer — to levels of 1500 parts per million, or four times that of our current atmosphere.”

Here are some of my posts on the benefits of CO2:

This is what the Global Warming Hysteria is all about - 0,03%!

Humans and Their CO2 Save the Planet! We’re really in a CO2 famine now.

The wonderful benefits of CO2!

50 Years of CO2 monitoring: Can you see the increase???

När CO2 var som störst var temperaturen som lägst!

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 91

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 92

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 105

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 104

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 102

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/12/lawrence-solomon-the-gas-of-life.aspx

Lawrence Solomon: The gas of life

Posted: December 12, 2009, 1:53 AM by NP Editor

Western carbon dioxide emissions increase plant yields in the Third World. So why are they asking for reparations?

By Lawrence Solomon

At Copenhagen, Third World countries are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations from the West for the consequences of the West’s fossil fuel burning, among them droughts and crop failures.

Third World countries have it backwards. The West’s CO2 emissions have been increasing crop yields while helping to ease the Third World’s water shortages. Rather than plead for reparations, Third World governments should offer a paean to Providence.

The bureaucrats at Copenhagen dread high CO2 levels. The biosphere craves them. Plants evolved when CO2 levels in the atmosphere stood at a healthy 1000 parts per million, two-to-three times today’s paltry level of about 380 parts per million. Plants crave CO2 so much that commercial greenhouse operators often enrich greenhouse air with CO2 — also known as nature’s fertilizer — to levels of 1500 parts per million, or four times that of our current atmosphere.

Since humans began adding CO2 to the planet’s atmosphere, taking plants off their starvation rations by creating a planet-wide greenhouse, plants have thrived. Data from NASA satellites, which since the early 1980s have been tracking the amount of biota on Earth, vividly demonstrate the results. As CO2 emissions grew in leaps and bounds, so did plants — the data shows planet Earth is now greener than when those satellite measurements began.

Growth in greenery varies from country to country, and within countries, because climatic factors are so many and so varied, but the overall trend is clear, and especially in the Third World. The Indian subcontinent, the Amazon, the tropical countries generally, all show marked improvement, with studies pointing to improvements in carbon dioxide levels as an important factor.

China, which includes some of the most resource-stretched regions on the planet, provides the most dramatic demonstration of the boon in biota. As shown in a 2007 analysis by academics at the country’s prestigious Beijing Normal University, China’s plant growth increased by an astounding 24 % over the 18-year period studied, 1982 to 1999. The Chinese analysis, which like many others was based on satellite data, notes that China’s resource-constrained regions sometimes did particularly well. In water-constrained Northwest China, for example, plant growth increased by 29%. In Northeast China and the Tibetan Plateau, where temperatures ordinarily place severe limits on vegetation, plant growth increased by 30%. South China and East China, where sunlight is a limiting factor, saw plant growth increase by a still-impressive 19%. Changes in CO2 during those 18 years correlated well with the changes in vegetation.

That plants love CO2 comes as no surprise — CO2 is not only their food, it is a gas to which they are superbly adapted. When the air is rich in CO2, plants don’t need to work as hard to breathe it in, letting them reduce the number of stomata, or air pores, on the surfaces of their leaves. Fewer pores means the plants breathe out less water vapour, letting them conserve moisture and better survive droughts. CO2 also helps plants survive droughts and other adverse conditions by extending their root systems, allowing them to collect minerals and moisture from afar. Through other mechanisms, CO2 protects plants against insect infestations, soil salinity and other environmental threats.

This gas — also known as the gas of life — is healthful and helpful to humans, too. CO2 not only boosts agricultural yields, it boosts the antioxidant and vitamin content in plants, as well as their essential minerals. Also importantly, CO2 helps make hospitable marginal areas of the world that would otherwise be inhospitable.

Industrialization in the West, along with the fossil fuel burning that it has entailed, has been a win for the West and a win for the world, including the Third World. The colourless, odourless, tasteless gas called CO2 is indispensable to life and, because China and India are certain to rapidly increase their CO2 emissions, the world will soon be getting more of it. They say you can have too much of a good thing. With CO2, the science tells us, the planet is far, far away from reaching its cornucopia potential.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 109

14 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

As a good complement to my previous post about the Vostok Ice Core 422 800 years of temperature data, here is another one to give you a perspective on this Global warming Hysteria.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/12/historical-video-perspective-our-current-unprecedented-global-warming-in-the-context-of-scale/

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 108

13 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Some of the graphs I have posted in some of my early posts 1 ½-2 years ago.

But they are worth repeating to give perspective to this short-sighted Global Warming Hysteria.

Se my post

422 700 år av temperaturdata från Antarktis

Data here: http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/temp/vostok/vostok.1999.temp.dat

Vostok Ice Core 422 800 years of temperature data

Click on the graph and it gets bigger

Here are the GISP2 ice core data for Greenland during the last 11 000 years

About 1,000 years ago average temperatures were about 1 degree higher than today (which makes our concern about an 0.4 degree rise since 1980 rather minor).

About 2,100 years ago average temperatures were about 2 degrees higher than today.

About 3,300 years ago average temperatures were about 3 degrees higher than today.

http://mclean.ch/climate/Ice_cores.htm

Click on the graph and it gets bigger

From the northern Sweden during the last 1500 years

http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/Grudd-2008.html

The Austrian Alps during the last 2000 years

http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_spannagel.php

http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_spannagel2.php

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 107

13 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Here is another Very Good Example of this “scientific” tweaking and altering that is going on. This time from Brisbane, Australia. And this my friends is the “science” behind the Global Warming Hysteria.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 106

12 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Armed UN Security Officers Stop Questions About ClimateGate

Journalist Phelim McAleer asks Prof Stephen Schneider from Stanford University an Inconvenient Question about ‘Climategate’ emails. McAleer is interrupted twice by Prof Schneider’s assistant and UN staff and then told to stop filming by an armed UN security guard.

This is UN, IPCC and Global Warming Hysterics and there “consensus” in action – i.e. SILENCE EVERYONE NOW!

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 105

11 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/12/10/why-russia-doesnt-care-about-copenhagen/

Why Russia Doesn’t Care About Copenhagen

Posted December 10th, 2009 at 3.50pm

MOSCOW – The rest of the world’s passions may be boiling over in Copenhagen this week, but Russia is paying no attention.

There is an impression that the government and public opinion – quite in the classical liberal laissez faire spirit – share the conclusion that global warming has a moderate and non-unprecedented nature, its impact on human health and wildlife is largely positive and that carbon emissions are hardly the primary factor in climate shaping. Thus, it is not a crisis and there is no need to resort to massive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

How has such an absurd situation arisen in modern Russia with strong statist traditions? Isn’t objectively existing global climate change impacting it?

Climate studies are largely done by government-funded research centers that are closely linked to international agencies primarily with the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). In the early 2009 the Federal Hydro-Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring Service (Roshydromet) published the “Assessment Report on Climate Change and Its Consequences in Russian Federation.” Most of the study’s authors are affiliated with this UN agency and their conclusions are in line with IPCC’s basic conceptions. For example, the report claims that “comparison of simulated and observed variations of surface air temperature provides convincing evidence supporting the anthropogenic nature of observed climate warming.” However, the report did not enjoy a broad publicity and had virtually no effect on public opinion.

But there is a widespread opinion among the Russian ruling elites that global warming could be beneficial to Russia. Thus, the aforementioned Roshydromet’s report lists such factors as displacement of comfortable habitation northward, increase in farming potential in regions with sufficient water resources and favorable influence on ice conditions in the Arctic seas, enhancing the potential for sea transportation and development projects on the Arctic shelf.

Admittedly, addressing the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference the Russian representatives are bound to make statements of how critical the global warming problem is and that resolute moves are needed to address it. Practically, however, Russia is hardly going to make a significant and constructive contribution to the debate and decision making.

Author: Yevgeny VolkInteract: SphereShare This

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 104

11 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means over a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises.

Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.”

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=514939

New Socialism Planning Heist In Copenhagen

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Posted 12/10/2009 06:45 PM ET

In the 1970s and early ’80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a ”New International Economic Order.”

The NIEO’s essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

On what grounds? In the name of equality — wealth redistribution via global socialism — with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early ’80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques.

Politically it’s an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man’s guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt.

But the idea of shaking down the industrial democracies in the name of the environment thrives not just in the refined internationalist precincts of Copenhagen. It thrives on the national scale too.

On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an ”endangerment” to human health.

Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means over a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises.

(The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.)

Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.

This naked assertion of vast executive power in the name of the environment is the perfect fulfillment of the prediction of Czech President (and economist) Vaclav Klaus that environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, i.e., the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.

Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment.

The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet.

Not everyone is pleased with the coming New Carbon-Free International Order. When the Obama administration signaled (in a gesture to Copenhagen) a U.S. commitment to major cuts in carbon emissions, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb wrote the president protesting that he lacks the authority to do so unilaterally. That requires congressional concurrence by legislation or treaty.

With the Senate blocking President Obama’s cap-and-trade carbon legislation, the EPA coup d’etat served as the administration’s loud response to Webb: The hell we can’t. With this EPA ”endangerment” finding, we can do as we wish with carbon. Either the Senate passes cap-and-trade, or the EPA will impose even more draconian measures: all cap, no trade.

Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity.

There’s the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society — as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85% carbon-based — you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats.

Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend existing clean air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation.

Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn’t lurking in CIA cloak. He’s knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
Postat i Fri- och rättigheter, Miljö, USA, Yttrandefrihet | 3 kommentarer »

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 103

11 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“But signing a loyalty oath under pressure from the government is itself a corrupt act. Anyone who signs this petition thereby raises doubts about his own integrity. And once again, the question arises: Why should any layman regard global warmism as credible when the ”consensus” rests on political machinations, statistical tricks and efforts to suppress alternative hypotheses?”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703514404574587811671196406.html

DECEMBER 10, 2009.

I Pledge Allegiance to Global Warming

British scientists sign a government loyalty oath..ArticleComments (36)more in

By JAMES TARANTO

The Met Office, Britain’s national weather service, ”has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science” in the wake of a whistle-blower’s revelation of widespread misconduct by climate scientists, London’s Times reports:

More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the ”professional integrity” of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. . . .

One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. ”The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.

The concept of scientists–or journalists, or artists–signing a petition is ludicrous. The idea is that they are lending their authority to whatever cause the petition represents–but in fact they are undermining that authority, which is based on the presumption that they think for themselves.

The problem with the petition as a form is also a problem with the Met Office petition’s substance. The purpose of the petition is to shore up scientists’ authority by vouching for their integrity. But signing a loyalty oath under pressure from the government is itself a corrupt act. Anyone who signs this petition thereby raises doubts about his own integrity. And once again, the question arises: Why should any layman regard global warmism as credible when the ”consensus” rests on political machinations, statistical tricks and efforts to suppress alternative hypotheses?

To be sure, Joseph McCarthy was right about communism even though the ways he combated it were wrong and counterproductive. But that’s all the more reason that honest scientists who view global warmism as credible–if such creatures exist–should rise up against these McCarthyite tactics.

White House Suicide Threat

”The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a ‘command-and-control’ role over the process in a way that could hurt business,” Fox News reports:

While administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own.

And it won’t be pretty.

”If you don’t pass this legislation, then . . . the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area,” the official said. ”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.”

The anonymous official’s formulation elides a crucial point: The EPA is part of the administration. So really, the threat to Congress should be in the first person: If you don’t pass Cap’n trade, we are going to adopt economy-destroying command-and-control regs. Think about what effect that would have on President Obama’s prospects of re-election, and you realize that this is actually a political suicide threat.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 102

11 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“President Obama, having failed to get climate legislation, didn’t want to show up to the Copenhagen climate talks with a big, fat nothing. So the EPA pulled the pin. In doing so, it exploded its own threat.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703514404574588120572016720.html

DECEMBER 10, 2009, 9:31 P.M. ET.

The EPA’s Carbon Bomb Fizzles

The administration has given a skittish Congress another reason not to pass cap and trade.

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL.

In the high-stakes game of chicken the Obama White House has been playing with Congress over who will regulate the earth’s climate, the president’s team just motored into a ditch. So much for threats.

The threat the White House has been leveling at Congress is the Environmental Protection Agency’s ”endangerment finding,” which EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson finally issued this week. The finding lays the groundwork for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across the entire economy, on the grounds that global warming is hazardous to human health.

From the start, the Obama team has wielded the EPA action as a club, warning Congress that if it did not come up with cap-and-trade legislation the EPA would act on its own—and in a far more blunt fashion than Congress preferred. As one anonymous administration official menaced again this week: ”If [Congress doesn't] pass this legislation,” the EPA is going to have to ”regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

The thing about threats, though, is that at some point you have to act on them. The EPA has been sitting on its finding for months, much to the agitation of environmental groups that have been upping the pressure for action.

President Obama, having failed to get climate legislation, didn’t want to show up to the Copenhagen climate talks with a big, fat nothing. So the EPA pulled the pin. In doing so, it exploded its own threat.

Far from alarm, the feeling sweeping through many quarters of the Democratic Congress is relief. Voters know cap-and-trade is Washington code for painful new energy taxes. With a recession on, the subject has become poisonous in congressional districts. Blue Dogs and swing-state senators watched in alarm as local Democrats in the recent Virginia and New Jersey elections were pounded on the issue, and lost their seats.

But now? Hurrah! It’s the administration’s problem! No one can say Washington isn’t doing something; the EPA has it under control. The agency’s move gives Congress a further excuse not to act.

”The Obama administration now owns this political hot potato,” says one industry source. ”If I’m [Nebraska Senator] Ben Nelson or [North Dakota Senator] Kent Conrad, why would I ever want to take it back?”

All the more so, in Congress’s view, because the EPA ”command and control” threat may yet prove hollow. Now that the endangerment finding has become reality, the litigation is also about to become real. Green groups pioneered the art of environmental lawsuits. It turns out the business community took careful notes.

Industry groups are gearing up for a legal onslaught; and don’t underestimate their prospects. The leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit in England alone are a gold mine for those who want to challenge the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming.

But the EPA’s legal vulnerabilities go beyond that. The agency derives its authority to regulate pollutants from the Clean Air Act. To use that law to regulate greenhouse gases, the EPA has to prove those gases are harmful to human health (thus, the endangerment finding). Put another way, it must provide ”science” showing that a slightly warmer earth will cause Americans injury or death. Given that most climate scientists admit that a warmer earth could provide ”net benefits” to the West, this is a tall order.

Then there are the rules stemming from the finding. Not wanting to take on the political nightmare of regulating every American lawn mower, the EPA has produced a ”tailoring rule” that it says allows it to focus solely on large greenhouse gas emitters. Yet the Clean Air Act—authored by Congress—clearly directs the EPA to also regulate small emitters.

This is where green groups come in. The tailoring rule ”invites suits,” says Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), who has emerged as a top Senate watchdog of EPA actions. Talk of business litigation aside, Mr. Barrasso sees ”most of the lawsuits coming from the environmental groups” who want to force the EPA to regulate everything. The agency is going to get hit from all directions. Even if these outsiders don’t win their suits, they have the ability to twist up the regulations for a while.

Bottom line: At least some congressional Democrats view this as breathing room, a further reason to not tackle a killer issue in the run-up to next year’s election. Mr. Obama may emerge from Copehagen with some sort of ”deal.” But his real problem is getting Congress to act, and his EPA move may have just made that job harder.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 101

11 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Professor William Gray of Colorado State University, often described as the world’s most famous hurricane expert, warned this week that Climategate is ”but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well-organized international climate-warming conspiracy.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/11/the-tip-of-the-climategate-iceberg-83871432/

Friday, December 11, 2009

The tip of the Climategate iceberg

A skeptical public repeatedly has been told that questions about purported global warming are closed. ”I think everybody is clear on the science. I think scientists are clear on the science … I think that this notion that there’s some debate … on the science is kind of silly,” said President Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs when asked Monday about the president’s response to the controversy. The flack was talking smack.

Contrary to the whitewash job conducted by propagandists, there are 450 academic peer-reviewed journal articles questioning the importance of man-made global warming. The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has collected more than 30,000 American scientists urging the U.S. government to reject the Kyoto Treaty, which pushes draconian measures to reduce carbon emissions. Much hay is made of 2,500 United Nations scientists who back Kyoto, but there are many more scientists with Ph.D.s among the 30,000 skeptics than there are among the oft-cited 2,500, most of whom are government bureaucrats without advanced degrees.

That’s hardly meant to be a blanket endorsement of the work done by all those holding doctorates in the field. There are significant problems with the three most-relied-on data series used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report. The report was derived from research at the University of East Anglia, NASA and the British Met Office, which is responsible for weather forecasts in the United Kingdom. All three organizations have refused to release all or part of their raw data. The public only has access to ”value added” data that have been corrected and massaged.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend for a moment that the Obama administration, congressional Democrats and other Chicken Little scaremongers are correct that significant man-made global warming is occurring. That still doesn’t mean government should do anything about it. Many academics argue that higher temperatures are actually good because that means more land to grow food, more biological diversity and improved health for the masses. Plants grown with more carbon dioxide make larger fruit and vegetables and use less water.

On the other hand, even if significant man-made global warming is occurring and we assume that it is on balance a bad thing, a huge amount of government regulations and taxes already exist ostensibly to address the issue. Even more big government will cost more than any claimed benefits. Mr. Obama already has imposed regulations requiring that cars get 42 miles per gallon by 2016. Americans already pay significant gasoline taxes that underwrite more than roads and road maintenance. There already are massive government subsidies to alternative, supposedly ”green” energy. The question shouldn’t be about giving government more power, but how overly intrusive existing regulations and taxes are.

Professor William Gray of Colorado State University, often described as the world’s most famous hurricane expert, warned this week that Climategate is ”but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well-organized international climate-warming conspiracy.” Before Mr. Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency commit trillions of dollars of American wealth to his pet political causes, his administration might want to consider some real science in its decisions. That would be a refreshing change from the White House.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 100

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Back then, when he spoke more honestly about such matters, Harper called Kyoto ”a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations” that ”will not even reduce greenhouse gases.”

All you need to know from that accurate description is Copenhagen is Kyoto on steroids. “

“In transferring hundreds of billions of dollars of our wealth every year to the developing world — including to many of the world’s most tyrannical, corrupt governments — we will be relying on their word they are using our money to cope with climate change and lower emissions. Only an idiot would believe that.”

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2009/12/10/12103996-sun.html

Copenhagen will be a colossal failure

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

Last Updated: 10th December 2009, 5:15am

The way to understand what’s really happening in Copenhagen is to recall Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s description of the Kyoto accord when he was leader of the Canadian Alliance in 2002.

Back then, when he spoke more honestly about such matters, Harper called Kyoto ”a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations” that ”will not even reduce greenhouse gases.”

All you need to know from that accurate description is Copenhagen is Kyoto on steroids.

How much money will this new deal suck out of wealth-producing nations such as Canada and transfer to poorer ones, ostensibly to help them cope with man-made climate change and reduce emissions?

The price tag will start at $10 billion a year, for each of the next three years, until Kyoto expires in 2012. Then it will jump to $100 billion annually, eventually up to $300 billion or more.

People trying to recover from a global recession, are being told by our political elites we owe this money to the developing world because, until now, we have been mainly responsible for burning fossil fuels that caused man-made global warming.

You can believe that or not, but either way, it leads to the next logical question.

That is: ”If we spend all this money, will it work?”

The answer is, unequivocally, ”no.”

We already know this because Copenhagen is indeed Kyoto on steroids.

All it will do is create bigger versions of the failed initiatives Kyoto created — for example, the European cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions.

Born out of Kyoto five years ago, the so-called Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has done nothing to cool the planet. It’s only ”achievement” has been to drive up energy costs and make ordinary people poorer, while showering giant energy companies with undeserved profits.

What will happen under Copenhagen is the ETS will become a global market, in which Canada will have to participate, with similar results.

Kyoto also created mechanisms to generate ”carbon credits” — the basic stock unit of a cap-and-trade market, giving the bearer the right to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, for a negotiated price, because, theoretically, someone else lowered their emissions by a tonne.

We already know carbon credits are rife with profiteering, fraud and corruption. All Copenhagen will do is create more of them.

In transferring hundreds of billions of dollars of our wealth every year to the developing world — including to many of the world’s most tyrannical, corrupt governments — we will be relying on their word they are using our money to cope with climate change and lower emissions. Only an idiot would believe that.

The only place Copenhagen isn’t Kyoto on steroids is on emission cuts, as indicated by the positions of China and the U.S., the world’s two largest emitters, responsible for 40% of all GHG emissions.

U.S. President Barack Obama is offering far less than the cuts the U.S. rejected in refusing to ratify Kyoto 12 years ago.

China is proposing token reductions to its emissions — it was exempted from any cuts under Kyoto — dressed up through political doubletalk to sound much more impressive than they are.

The worst thing for Canada is we’re about to be conscripted into paying for this global farce.

Harper knows what’s going on. He needs to speak up — for us.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 99

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“…given that billions of people are still living in dire energy poverty, how can world leaders expect any significant reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions, particularly when there are no viable substitutes for hydrocarbons, which now provide 88% of the world’s primary energy?”

“Global leaders should give up their fixation on cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Significant cuts will not happen. Instead, they should be focusing their efforts on making energy cheap, abundant, and as clean as possible.“

Very thru indeed!

And what do you think are the chances that our “intelligent” politicians would do that when they have spent the last 25-30 years DOING EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE!

http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2690

Posted on Dec. 09, 2009

By Robert Bryce

The Copenhagen Conundrum: Why Energy Poverty and Population Numbers Make Significant Carbon Emissions Reductions Nearly Impossible

Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg has made famous the phrase “Copenhagen Consensus” which posits that money aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions would be better spent addressing other health and welfare challenges, like preventing the spread of HIV and AIDS.

Now that thousands of politicians and environmentalists are meeting in Copenhagen to discuss ways to achieve drastic cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions, it’s time to recognize the Copenhagen Conundrum: given that billions of people are still living in dire energy poverty, how can world leaders expect any significant reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions, particularly when there are no viable substitutes for hydrocarbons, which now provide 88% of the world’s primary energy?

The Copenhagen Conundrum can easily be understood by considering these two facts: 22% of the world’s population doesn’t have electricity, and nearly 40% still relies on traditional biomass – straw, wood, or dung – for their cooking needs.

The issues of energy poverty and population are closely intertwined. And that connection can be seen by looking at the world’s six most populous countries. They are, in descending order of population: China, India, the US, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan. The energy disparity among the residents of these countries is stark. The US, with about 300 million residents, consumes almost as much energy as the other five most-populous countries – let’s call them the Big Five — combined. The total population of the Big Five – Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan – is about 3 billion, or about 10 times that of the US. And yet the average resident of the Big Five lives in energy poverty. The 3 billion residents of the Big Five consume, on average, about 0.66 gallons of oil equivalent per day, or about one-tenth as much energy as the average American.

Per-Capita Energy Use In the Six Most-Populous Countries, In Gallons of Oil Equivalent Per Day

China	1.26
India	0.31
US	6.32
Brazil	0.97
Indonesia	0.44
Pakistan	0.32

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009

A glance at those numbers shows why the leaders of developing countries are so reluctant to agree to any kind of cap on their carbon dioxide emissions. The simple truth is that as energy consumption increases, so does wealth. While various promoters of “green” energy discuss the potential breakthroughs in alternatives sources like wind and solar, the reality is that 88% of the world’s commercial primary energy is provided by coal, oil, and natural gas. And as much as politicians and environmentalists might like to change that percentage, there are no other sources of energy that can match hydrocarbons when it comes to the Four Imperatives: power density, energy density, cost and scale. Furthermore, barring some miraculous technological breakthrough, there won’t be a significant change in the world’s need for hydrocarbons over the next two to five decades.

But just for grins, let’s assume a technological breakthrough occurs that can displace hydrocarbons. And while it may be a miraculous technology, it must be ultra-cheap and it must be dispersed around the world. It will also have to be implemented on a massive scale – a scale big enough to supplant the world’s hunger for hydrocarbons, which now averages nearly 200 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Put another way, that’s approximately equal to the total daily oil output of more than 23 Saudi Arabias.

The world’s two most-populous countries, China and India, have made it abundantly clear that they will not accept any hard limits on their ability to emit carbon dioxide. And other developing countries are doing the same. The reasons are obvious: too many of their people live in energy poverty, and in particular, they lack electricity.

The IEA recently declared that “electricity is, in practice, indispensable for certain basic activities, such as lighting, refrigeration and the running of household appliances, and cannot easily be replaced by other forms of energy. Individuals’ access to electricity is one of the most clear and un-distorted indication of a country’s energy poverty status.”

You may recall that in June, just a few days after the House of Representatives passed its cap and trade bill, Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said that India “will not accept any emission-reduction target – period. This is a non-negotiable stand.” The Indian leader went on, saying that “there is no way India is going to accept any emission reduction target, period, between now and the Copenhagen meeting and thereafter.”

Or consider the words of Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian academic who chairs the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In July, Pachauri told reporters that nearly 40% of his fellow Indians do not have access to electricity. “Can you imagine 400 million people who do not have a light bulb in their homes?” he asked. He went on to make it clear that India will be burning plenty of its own coal in order to produce electricity. “You cannot, in a democracy, ignore some of these realities and as it happens with the resources of coal that India has, we really don’t have any choice but to use coal.”

Chinese officials have made similar statements. And while both China and India have agreed to set targets on reducing the carbon intensity of their economies, those targets will not actually cut total carbon dioxide emissions.

The simple truth is that the brouhaha over Climategate doesn’t matter. In fact, the entire battle over climate science – and in particular, the arguments over what concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide should be seen as ideal – is largely a waste of time. Given that global policymakers are convinced that carbon dioxide is bad, the most important question they must address is: then what? Put another way, what’s the policy response going to be?

With no ready substitute for hydrocarbons, the answer to those two questions — then what? and what’s the right policy? – should be obvious: nothing. That is, despite all the hew and cry over the need for some dramatic political agreement at Copenhagen, nothing of substance will happen because too many people around the world are still living in energy poverty. And energy poverty brings with it all of the ills that come with poverty: disease, hunger, lack of potable water, lack of education, and other societal ills.

In short, the Copenhagen Consensus and the Copenhagen Conundrum are two sides of the same coin. Global leaders should give up their fixation on cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Significant cuts will not happen. Instead, they should be focusing their efforts on making energy cheap, abundant, and as clean as possible.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 98

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“There is no excuse for academic secrecy in the modern world. Research institutions can easily put up important data sets on Web sites for the world to see. No researchers should be trusted who are not willing to share data central to their controversial conclusions.“

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/10/no-climate-change-transparency/

Thursday, December 10, 2009

EDITORIAL: No climate-change transparency

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

There’s plenty of cause to be skeptical of climate-change theology because global-warming advocates are secretive about their data. If climate-change research were all on the up-and-up, there would be no reason to hide it.

So far, the spotlight has been on Britain’s University of East Anglia and its refusal to release surface temperature data, which is by far the most comprehensive long-term data available on the subject kept anywhere in the world. In an effort to pooh-pooh the cover-up, global-warming activists are trying to reassure a curious public that this isn’t a concern because some other data sources purportedly show the same thing. There’s no way to know because other institutions are dragging their feet on disclosure as well. NASA has been less than forthcoming about its data, as brushed off Freedom of Information Act requests have exposed.

Queen’s University in Belfast is another obstacle to open academic inquiry. It has amassed one of the longest-running data collections on tree rings, which span 7,000 years and range from more than 1,500 sites around the world. How much a tree grows each season can tell us a lot about temperature trends and other climate-related variables. Under normal circumstances, one would expect the institution to be proud of this enormous data set it has diligently created and presume the university would want to share the data with anyone who is interested in the subject matter. Not so.

Scholars have been struggling for two and a half years to use Britain’s Freedom of Information laws to force Queen’s University to release the data, to no avail. As with the University of East Anglia case, the only thing researchers wanted from Queen’s University was complete data to back up papers that global-warming advocates had published using the information. If there were any interest in disclosure, complying with the request would be a breeze because the information is already assembled.

Over the years, most of the data used by global-warming activists have been provided by two institutions: University of East Anglia and NASA. Their secrecy results in negative consequences in the search for truth. Climate-change alarmists allege that global temperatures have increased only about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century; even very small corrections or adjustments in the data can potentially make a big difference in the results of relevant studies.

There is no excuse for academic secrecy in the modern world. Research institutions can easily put up important data sets on Web sites for the world to see. No researchers should be trusted who are not willing to share data central to their controversial conclusions.

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Journalism, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 97

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Government-supported global warming research does what government always does: it discourages any true independent thought, and because political muscle rather than scientific truth decides all issues, it encourages everyone to climb on board the same bandwagon without much discussion or dissent. It may be that there is man-made global warming, but the malign influence of uncompetitive government treasure and power corrupts the whole area of study. Science rests upon independence and integrity or it rests upon nothing at all. As the sewage seeping out of East Anglia shows, right now we have no real ”study” of global warming at all. What we have instead resembles more the dreary memos of dull bureaucrats: just what one would expect from government-driven science.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/climategate_and_governmentdriv.html

December 09, 2009

Climategate and Government-Driven Science

By Bruce Walker

There are many lessons we can learn from Climategate. Environmentalism has become an intolerant religion rather than a rational movement seeking limited goals; the unsavory priests of environmentalism have no qualms about tricking people; and these fanatical clerics also preside over an inquisition of those who profess a different sort of climate study from the one which has become the formal dogma of the faith.

One of the costs of freedom is tolerance of foolishness and even of malice. If individuals privately want to worship pagan religions and embrace a sort of silly Gnosticism, they may do so without government stopping them. Likewise, if individuals want to proclaim a ”new science” or a ”new religion” — the two are almost identical — and then seek acolytes from among the general population, that too is tolerated by governments that cherish freedom.

Because both science and religion are ongoing explorations for truth, no one has the right to declare a particular frontier of either true. We grasp this easily enough with religion, but the same goes for science. The history of science is largely one of blunder to blunder to grain of truth. Cosmologists have no perfect theory for how the universe was born or how it will end, and physicists have no absolute theory to explain how relativity and quantum mechanics operate together at the subatomic level. No one even has a real explanation for such odd ideas as the uncertainty principle.

Does this mean that science is simply opinion and that there is no mechanism to separate good science from junk science? No; science, like business and like every other type of human interaction, has an inherent safeguard. Liberty, which is another way of saying the market of free, individual interactions, naturally lifts what is true and honest and sinks what is false and deceptive.

Credibility is often the most valuable asset of any successful enterprise. What does credibility mean? It’s when no matter the intentions of the managers, their business behavior comprises honest internal operations and open, truthful communication with those outside the enterprise. Large corporations are extremely sensitive to their public image and grasp just how much their success in a free market depends upon their credibility.

Scientists were once the ultimate ”free marketers.” When Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, he was a clerk in a Swiss patent office. Einstein won international acclaim — not because he was an insider in any academic bureaucracy, but because his theory actually described the world better than existing theories. Science which prescribes results beforehand is not really science at all. It is simply government bureaucracy masquerading as independent thought.

These pseudo-scientists need not seek success in the free market of ideas. They crush competition and subsist on the taxpayer’s coerced nickel rather than produce something which can withstand the pressures and challenges of opposing forces. Put another way, it does not matter to them if their science is true or their methods honest. All that concerns them is the coercive power of government and its largess of tax dollars.

Government is always the antithesis of free competition, which is why we need so little of government in our lives and so much of market forces. Science behaves almost exactly like Walmart or General Foods or McDonalds. When challenged every day by competitors, these enterprises must ruthlessly expunge wishful thinking, white lies, and the power of brute size. These businesses are, in fact, mirror images of good science. Each bad idea is exposed as a fraud; each more efficient answer is soon rewarded; and the ”peer review” process of each business operation comes from many millions of independent analysts, each passing judgment on the different aspects of the business.

We have been told that good science requires vast government support. Actually, only bad science requires vast government support. Good science can get by very well in the marketplace. As much as anything else, Climategate is a textbook example of the dangers of having government prop up those people who ought to make their case successfully without our public dollars.

Science works this way. Aside from giants like Einstein or Newton — men who had no public help at all — private organizations like Bell Laboratories made many breakthroughs with not a single tax dollar. More importantly, Einstein, Newton, and Bell Laboratories had to make a compelling case for the integrity of their research. Bad science almost never gains much traction without government help.

End public support for climate research, and what happens? Scientists who believe that the data indicates man-made global warming would have to leave their ivy-walled bunkers and engage in robust, very public debate. That does not mean that these scientists would lose their arguments. It means that they would lose their arguments if they tried to smother opposition, hide research data, and pretend that everyone agreed with them.

Government-supported global warming research does what government always does: it discourages any true independent thought, and because political muscle rather than scientific truth decides all issues, it encourages everyone to climb on board the same bandwagon without much discussion or dissent. It may be that there is man-made global warming, but the malign influence of uncompetitive government treasure and power corrupts the whole area of study. Science rests upon independence and integrity or it rests upon nothing at all. As the sewage seeping out of East Anglia shows, right now we have no real ”study” of global warming at all. What we have instead resembles more the dreary memos of dull bureaucrats: just what one would expect from government-driven science.

Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 96

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“There’s just one problem: as documented by numerous reports, including this thorough piece from the left-leaning German magazine Der Spiegel, there has been no global warming for a decade now. And keep in mind that this is despite millions of dollars and thousands of people dedicated to looking really, really hard to see even the slightest warming.”

“When it comes to global warming, there is a dedicated cadre of researchers, reporters and various hangers-on that are operating in a curiously backward fashion: they believe that global warming is real and bad, therefore anything really bad is obviously caused by global warming. This belief is so devout that it cannot be shaken by anything so minor as a lack of actual global warming. Even when it doesn’t happen, global warming may kill us all. Oh, if only we had ratified Kyoto! “

“And in those rare instances in which the lack of global warming is begrudgingly acknowledged by the more moderate sects of the climatological doomsday cult, it is with a curiously loaded language: global warming has entered a “time out” or a “pause.” If you needed any more proof that Global Warmageddon is the basis of a new secular religion, surely this is it: its believers have faith that while the central figure in the cult may have gone away, it is doubtless that he will come again.”

http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2689

Posted on Dec. 08, 2009

By Mac Johnson

Global Warming: Worst When It’s Not

Global Warmageddon is such an insidious enemy that it is at its worst when it isn’t even occurring. Damn! How does one fight at enemy like that? If that statement seems impossible, then I must refer you to two recent press reports.

The first, from the Associated Press, tells us with much urgency and no doubt, that the effects of global warming over the last 12 years (the 12 years since the Kyoto Protocol was written – apparently how the Cult of Warmageddon now dates time), have been far worse than any of the dire predictions made in the year 1 B.K. (Before Kyoto). In the mere dozen years A.K. (After Kyoto), global warming has caused rising sea levels, droughts, wildfires, storms, the melting of glaciers and one (but not the other) polar ice cap, plagues of beetles, and blackouts.

Heck, there is even a separate report that global warming has forced poor women into prostitution. Egad! Pimped by climate change. Now carbon dioxide has insulted the honor of our women. Who knew my carbon footprint was in the form of a strappy stiletto heel?

There’s just one problem: as documented by numerous reports, including this thorough piece from the left-leaning German magazine Der Spiegel, there has been no global warming for a decade now. And keep in mind that this is despite millions of dollars and thousands of people dedicated to looking really, really hard to see even the slightest warming. In fact, the Der Spiegel article quotes numerous global warming industry employees who are “baffled” by the “time out” global warming has taken. According to Der Spiegel: “Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years.”

While according to der weasel (Al Gore, as quoted in the AP report): “By far the most serious differences [sic] that we’ve had is an acceleration of the crisis itself.”

Oh my goodness, the accelerating stall. How will mankind cope with the incredible pace of non-change? As funny as it all might be, were the economy of the Earth not in the balance, the current incongruence between actual global temperatures and the dreadful chorus of doom from the disciples of global warming is a perfect natural experiment for those that wish to discern the truth.

For ten years now, there has been no global warming. This is evident in any graph of mean global temperature. Since there has been no global warming, it is obviously impossible for any event of the last decade to have been caused by global warming – any more than it would be possible for any event in the last decade to have been caused by alien invasion or balanced federal budgets or the Detroit Lions winning the Super Bowl. If it didn’t occur, it cannot have any consequences.

Yet over the past decade, the media and academic press has been stuffed full of reports of the consequences of the global warming that did not occur. Hurricane Katrina was caused by the lack of global warming. Droughts in the Mountain West and southeast US were caused by the lack of global warming. Alternately, warm winters and unusually deep snowfalls in the Northeast have been reported as being caused by the lack of global warming. Global nonwarming has caused war in Darfur, crop failures in Asia, the spread of tropical diseases in temperate regions, and the loss of ice at the North Pole. At this point, I can only pray that actual global warming will occur to save us from all the horrid consequences of this Global Lukewarming.

When it comes to global warming, there is a dedicated cadre of researchers, reporters and various hangers-on that are operating in a curiously backward fashion: they believe that global warming is real and bad, therefore anything really bad is obviously caused by global warming. This belief is so devout that it cannot be shaken by anything so minor as a lack of actual global warming. Even when it doesn’t happen, global warming may kill us all. Oh, if only we had ratified Kyoto!

And in those rare instances in which the lack of global warming is begrudgingly acknowledged by the more moderate sects of the climatological doomsday cult, it is with a curiously loaded language: global warming has entered a “time out” or a “pause.” If you needed any more proof that Global Warmageddon is the basis of a new secular religion, surely this is it: its believers have faith that while the central figure in the cult may have gone away, it is doubtless that he will come again. Forget about carbon capture, perhaps we should worry about the carbon rapture.

The most frustrating thing for me in the debate over anthropogenic global warming is that the whole time that the proponents of the theory have been off in La-La land drawing untestable connections to every unpleasant event on Earth and then touting each as proof of their position, they have been constantly screeching that we must “look at the facts.” So let’s look at them.

Global warming was real. The Earth did get warmer for a period. The cause was never definitively established and every model based on the idea that it was caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions has failed to successfully predict even the basic trend of the climate over the past decade. Over that decade, the Earth failed to warm and even cooled to a statistically insignificant degree. The future may hold a return to warming, a continued stability, or a turn toward cooling. But whatever the case, it should be clear that every person and group that has blamed any event on the non-existent global warming over the last ten years should be disqualified from any future debate over climate change.

The promoters of the theory of global warming have demonstrated themselves to be incapable of simply acknowledging the basic facts that must drive any rational discussion. And when the doomsayers are no longer taken seriously by the majority of the population, perhaps they can then blame that on (the lack of) global warming as well.

Global warming may turn out to cause deafness — to the claims of Chicken Littles worldwide.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 95

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/12/up_is_down_less_is_more_cold_i.html

December 10, 2009

Up is down, less is more, cold is hot

Randall Hoven

In previous interglacial periods, namely about 125,000, 240,000 and 340,000 years ago, temperatures were about three degrees warmer than now. Or so we had thought.

If you found out that the temperatures in Antarctica were actually about six degrees warmer then, or three degrees warmer than you had thought before, what would you conclude?

The obvious conclusion would be that current temperatures, and even those predicted by man-caused global warming models, are even less alarming than you thought before. We are even further away from an all-time high than we had thought.

But if you are a climate researcher, all evidence must conclude that global warming is man-made and bad, and any new evidence must show things are even worse than we had thought before. If it doesn’t, no more grants or for you and you won’t get published.

So what would you, climate researcher whose livelihood and reputation depends on grants and getting published, then conclude? As reported in Nature, you would conclude thusly,

”East Antarctica is more sensitive than it seemed to global warming.”

Don’t get it yet? ”More sensitive” means that, if the rest of us get hot, Antarctica gets even hotter. If the globe gets five degrees hotter, Antarctica will get 10 degrees hotter. See? Then even more Antarctic ice will melt. There is about 10 times more land ice in Antarctica than Greenland. If Greenland melting causes the oceans to rise seven meters, Antarctica melting will cause them to rise 70 meters! We will all die! Ted Turner was right. Cannibalism in 30 or 40 years.

Question for readers: what if the new data showed Antarctica in previous interglacial periods was three degrees cooler than we had thought, meaning current temperatures match those previous all-time highs?

I’m thinking our climate researcher would say, ”The earth is currently as hot as it’s ever been, and we are making it even hotter! We are at the precipice — on the edge of unprecedented hotness and pushing the planet outside its natural boundaries! We will all die!”

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 94

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Copenhagen is indeed the best place for the charade to fall as it is the city where Hans Christen Anderson published the Emperor’s New Clothes – a book every child should read – the irony is truly prophetic.”

“Just how robust and independent are these two data sets. Well they are really only ONE data set. NOAA collects the data from temperature sensing equipment within the USA whereupon they ‘correct’ it before sending it to GISS who ‘correct’ it again before using the data in their climate models. NOAA collects the data GISS runs the models. But NOAA only collects data from the USA so where does GISS get its data for the rest of the world. They get most of it from the CRU and where does CRU get its data for the USA? You guessed it, it comes from GISS. So now you can see that three independent data sets are all part of the same data set. All three are intricately tied together.”

http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4605

THE DEEP THOUGHT RORT – by Paul M Murray

Wednesday, December 9th 2009, 2:37 PM EST

I was originally a believer in Global Warming until two years ago when I started to research the subject in more detail whereupon I discovered the same tactics used against plasma physicists – carefully ignoral, ad hom attacks, denial of publication, refusal to accept observational scientific evidence – are the same tactics used in the climate debate.

After reading many of the so called global warming websites and blogs the language was always the same ” science settled, NASA agrees, general consensus, 1000’s of scientists can’t be wrong.

I instantly smelled something decomposing.

So I checked the skeptic’s camp and found Piers and many others who talked only of the science, real world evidence, first principle physics and just plain common sense.

The entire global warming theory was built on erroneous assumptions about temperatures and the real physical properties of CO2 along with proxy data that has been proven to be ambitious at best.

Real scientists such as physicists, biologists, glaciologists, ecologist, geologists, medical technologists and many other disciplines that have been studying CO2 since it was discovered 200 years ago and who have a greater knowledge of its properties and effect on natural and biological systems have been shut out of the debated because ”they are not climate scientists” – a discipline that is less than thirty years old and is dominated by computer modelers who have no real world concept of the how an extremely complex interlocking non-linear chaotic system like the Earth’s climate system actually works. No one does. Only a widely drawn interdisciplinary study by all the sciences involved could ever hope to come close to explaining climate. ONLY THEN WOULD MODELING BE OF ANY PRACTICAL USE.

My conclusions have led me to reject the entire global warming theory because it is not science.

Copenhagen is indeed the best place for the charade to fall as it is the city where Hans Christen Anderson published the Emperor’s New Clothes – a book every child should read – the irony is truly prophetic.

THE DEEP THOUGHT RORT – by Paul M Murray

The title comes from Douglas Adams’ scientific spoof novels and is related to the giant computer that was built to find the answer to ‘life the universe and everything’. The answer was 42, which thanks to the Wegman Report, is the number of climates scientist involved in the “Climategate” scandal. While Adams had a healthy scepticism about his subject matter –Astrophysics -the theme is no less relevant to climate science. Just an aside and still related to Adams is that the next scientific scandal is likely to be the billion dollar Large Hadron Collider project. When this gargantuan misguided enterprise is outed as a dismal failure you’ll witness the same obfuscation you are seeing now in climate science.

People on both sides of the argument can snipe and rationalise the Email traffic as much as they like but it is just a secondary issue, which encompasses the shallow vindictive and secretive mindset of a group of scientists entrusted with the critical analysis of the world’s temperature data; data that is being used to justify changing the economies of virtually every nation on earth.

The primary evidence is the data itself. What it shows is that not only has it been manipulated with false assumptions, fudge factors and glaring omissions but the actual data itself is also riddled with inconsistencies, double entries and unexplained infills of missing records. This code should serve as the classic example of GIGO (garbage in garbage out) in every university computer science and statistical analysis class around the world. It is RUBBISH.

We have been told by the perpetrators and by the climate change devotees that it really doesn’t matter because the other two data sets used to “confirm” man made global warming have reached the same conclusions so there is independent confirmation of climate change. Like Frank Drebben standing in front of a smouldering ruin they parrot “move along, nothing to see here”. All the time not realising the logical fallacy entwined in their statements. If the Dodgy CRU has produced a dog’s breakfast with their data set then anyone coming to the same conclusions irrespective of the data set used becomes immediately suspect.

And what are these other two independent data sets that are so robust they can negate the CRU findings. There is the NOAA and GISS (NASA).

Just how robust and independent are these two data sets. Well they are really only ONE data set. NOAA collects the data from temperature sensing equipment within the USA whereupon they ‘correct’ it before sending it to GISS who ‘correct’ it again before using the data in their climate models. NOAA collects the data GISS runs the models. But NOAA only collects data from the USA so where does GISS get its data for the rest of the world. They get most of it from the CRU and where does CRU get its data for the USA? You guessed it, it comes from GISS. So now you can see that three independent data sets are all part of the same data set. All three are intricately tied together.

We have seen from the CRU code that its data set is basically rubbish so how good is the NOAA/GISS data. Well according the Phil Jones it is inferior. In an email (Oct 6 2009) to Tom Wigley he writes “I think you can say the GISS is inferior to CRUTEM3”. It’s not just Phil Jones who thinks the GISS data is inferior. In an independent audit of the temperature station within the contiguous USA 90% were found to be sited poorly of very poorly according to NOAA’s own strict siting guidelines. Only 10% were considered to comply with best practice siting. The website www.surfacestations.org has a list and the Google Earth coordinates for over 900 sites personally inspected. Digital and Infrared (IR) images were taken and the siting of most of these stations is truly astonishing; recording equipment in the middle of concrete expanses, adjacent to buildings, air conditioning outlets, airport runways, asphalt roads and other heat generating objects.

There is even one sitting in the middle of a university car park outside the Dept of Atmospheric Physics. Is it any wonder Phil Jones distrusts their accuracy.

There is no justification for using data so flawed and to state publicly that there are three independent data sets is a gross misrepresentation of the known facts. There is an interlocking series of data sets that are being used by three separate entities. Not only is the semblance of independence in these organisations a sham but also the climate scientists who are allowed to share this data are an exclusive few. They are part of a cliché that operates beyond the scrutiny of the normal scientific principles of free and open access to data and methodology. This secret society is entrenched in many climate science organisations around the world. Similar results have been quoted by ‘team members’ in New Zealand and Australia.

They have steadfastly refused to allow independent corroboration of their finding and have disregarded numerous requests under FOI(Freedom Of Information) laws in all the above countries. In fact measures were put in place by the “Team” several years prior to any FOI request being forthcoming to deny access to research material and codes should it be legally requested.

What has taken place in the last two decades since the first assessment report to the UN IPCC is concerted effort by a small group of climate scientist to hijack the resources, funding and agenda of climate science. They have used data from sources that has been questionable and/or has had little of no quality assurance to comply with best practice data collection. Their modelling methodology has been show to be shoddy at best and incompetent at its worst. In order to maintain their stranglehold on funding and the agenda they have deliberately sought to pervert the peer review process with threats, intimidation and blackmail. They have replaced science with subterfuge, methodology with manipulation and integrity with incompetence.

Their vainglorious attempt at science has produced a work of fiction and a poor one at that.

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 93

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Such a status has resulted in the creation of enormous, government-funded institutions to examine seemingly every aspect of human existence, with climate science alone receiving $7 billion annually from the U.S. government — more than is spent on cancer and AIDS research.”

“With the revelations from what is now being called ”Climate-gate,” many people are beginning to see a grand scam in which data were deliberately distorted; peer review was gamed by manipulating and stacking the process; critics were smeared, black-balled, de-funded and even fired; opposing papers were kept from publication; and politically savvy scientists worked in concert with journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and interest groups to deceive both opinion leaders and the public to further their agenda.”

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=514804

Why Science Is Not Final Arbiter Of Truth

By DAVID J. THEROUX

Posted 12/09/2009 06:31 ET

Regardless of what the politicians decide at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the game has changed.

Thanks to the e-mail exchanges and other documents hacked from computers at the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, we now know there has been a conspiracy among some in the science community to spread alarmist views of global warming and intimidate, if not silence, those who disagree.

Let’s hope these revelations result in a sober reassessment both of academia, generally, and the scientific enterprise specifically.

For far too long, science has been shrouded in a cloak of unquestionable authority as the final arbiter of all knowledge (except, of course, when the research has been funded by business, which for some makes it necessarily suspect).

Such a status has resulted in the creation of enormous, government-funded institutions to examine seemingly every aspect of human existence, with climate science alone receiving $7 billion annually from the U.S. government — more than is spent on cancer and AIDS research.

Unlike business- or even independently funded research, the findings and recommendations of government-funded researchers has been viewed by many as sacrosanct.

The mania regarding ”global warming” is Exhibit A, in which the alleged ”peer-reviewed” findings of a ”consensus” of scientists claim to have found the ”fact” that human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are creating an ecological holocaust, and only draconian controls on various areas of human activity can avert this calamity.

In the process, ethics, economic principles, contrary evidence and common sense are all swept aside.

As my colleague Robert Higgs noted last year in Nature magazine: ”The peer-review process is not, contrary to popular belief, a nearly flawless system of Olympian scrutiny. Any editor of a peer-reviewed journal who desires, for whatever reason, to reject a submission can easily do so by choosing referees who will knock it down.”

Unfortunately, Higgs wrote, science, like other enterprises, can fall victim to ”personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion and irresponsibility.”

With the revelations from what is now being called ”Climate-gate,” many people are beginning to see a grand scam in which data were deliberately distorted; peer review was gamed by manipulating and stacking the process; critics were smeared, black-balled, de-funded and even fired; opposing papers were kept from publication; and politically savvy scientists worked in concert with journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and interest groups to deceive both opinion leaders and the public to further their agenda.

We have seen such campaigns before, all claiming to be based on expert findings in the natural and social ”sciences,” including eugenics, zero population growth, the welfare system, ozone depletion, electromagnetism and cancer, economic bailouts, the environmental Superfund and even Obama-Care.

The reality that has been missed here is that science — more accurately, the scientific method — is merely a technique or procedure for examining the material world, and its validity rests upon a philosophical (metaphysical) logic of ideas that is nonmaterial.

While science can tell us what is materially, it cannot tell us what ought to be. Those are our choices. Hence science, while being an irreplaceable method of inquiry, is contingent on other factors and cannot itself be the final authority on truth.

By missing this point, some in academia and the scientific world have too often corrupted and politicized the enterprise of science, producing its exact opposite.

The Climate-gate revelations may finally dispel the myth that has surrounded the global warming movement and trigger a movement to put scientific inquiry back into the laboratory and keep it out of the political arena.

• Theroux is president of the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 92

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

”EPA is clinging for dear life to the notion that the global climate models are holding up,” said Sam Kazman, CEI general counsel. ”In reality, those models are about to sink under the growing weight of evidence that they are fabrications.”

“EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in a conversation with Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has in effect admitted the finding was based on the junk science and data manipulation practiced at Britain’s East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). ”She told me that EPA accepted those findings without any serious independent analysis to see whether they were true,” Inhofe said.”

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/IBDEditorials.aspx#

EPA Must Be Stopped

Posted 12/09/2009 08:26 PM ET

Junk Science: The Environmental Protection Agency’s sneak attack on the U.S. economy and our freedoms, curiously timed for the opening day of the Copenhagen climate charade, won’t go unchallenged. Nor should it.

The EPA’s finding that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant explains why the administration wasn’t too concerned over possible failure at Copenhagen. This was their Plan B.

The finding is an environmental Sword of Damocles held over the head of the U.S. with a warning that if cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Boxer is not signed into law, the full regulatory fury of an unelected bureaucracy will be unleashed on the American people and the U.S. economy.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has announced it will sue to overturn the endangerment finding on the grounds that the EPA has ignored major scientific issues, including those raised in the Climate-gate fraud scandal.

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in a conversation with Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has in effect admitted the finding was based on the junk science and data manipulation practiced at Britain’s East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). ”She told me that EPA accepted those findings without any serious independent analysis to see whether they were true,” Inhofe said.

Dr. Alan Carlin — an EPA senior research analyst at the National Center for Environmental Economics who dared to say, in essence, that emperor Al Gore and his environmental toadies at the EPA were wearing no clothes — agrees that the EPA finding is based on the data manipulation of the CRU.

CRU data have become an integral part of the EPA’s attempts to regulate emissions, Carlin wrote on his Web site Dec. 2.

The EPA plans to blunt opposition by ”tailoring” the Clean Air Act for greenhouse-gas emissions, only covering big emitters that churn out at least 25,000 tons of gases a year.

But this may bring legal challenges from environmentalists who want everything regulated as well as from big businesses complaining of unequal treatment, since the Clean Air Act requires it to cover facilities emitting as little as 250 tons.

Coming after a ”jobs summit,” this is a job killer of unprecedented magnitude that will doom any economic recovery, and is based on made-up facts rooted in false assumptions. It must not be allowed to stand, either in the courts or the Congress.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 91

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Every time we and ALL animals breathe we produce CO2. So how is EPA going to solve this “problem”?

Kill us all?

And as a complement to my post Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 78

http://thechillingeffect.org/2009/12/08/cartoon-special-waiting-a-long-time-to-exhale/

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 90

10 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Second, while the cooling of the Earth took place over a time-span of around 200,000 years, the atmospheric CO2 first dropped in association with the cooling, then rose to around 1100ppmv and remained high for 200,000 years while the Earth cooled further and remained in its new ice ages cycle.”

“The result of their analysis is a CO2-induced amplification factor close to one, which has implications clearly at odds with the earlier IPCC position.

The result was published this year in the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Environment and the paper has not yet been challenged in the scientific literature.

What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/climate-claims-fail-science-test/story-e6frg6zo-1225808398627

Climate claims fail science test

Michael Asten From: The Australian December 09, 2009 12:00AM

THE UN Climate Change Summit started this week in Copenhagen with far more dissent than its organisers hoped for from two extremes of the climate change debate

We had the ”grandfather of climate change”, James Hansen, describing the proceedings as counter-productive and ”a farce”, while the chief Saudi Arabian negotiator to the summit, Mohammed al-Sabban, doubts the current science and suggests there is no longer any point in seeking agreement to reduce emissions.

It is therefore certain that the global political debate on managing carbon emissions and climate change will continue well beyond the Copenhagen summit. It is to be hoped that the scientific debate is also permitted to continue.

Results released this year suggest that the degree of scientific certainty falls short of that desirable before we set binding targets and dollar values on carbon emissions. Indeed, Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council admitted that: ”We can’t pretend we have perfect knowledge: we don’t.”

This is a refreshingly honest comment when contrasted with some of the statements in the hacked emails of the Climatic Research Unit, UK, made by leading British and US climate scientists, who were caught with their fingers on the ”delete button” when faced with climate data that failed to agree with their computer models.

Meanwhile two recent results published by top scientists cast doubt on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s theory about the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming. These are of of significance because whereas the climate models used by the IPCC rely on software to represent a large number of highly complex Earth processes, these results are equivalent to experimental observations on the Earth itself.

Paul Pearson of Cardiff University and his international team achieved a breakthrough recently, published four weeks ago in arguably the world’s top scientific journal, Nature.

They unravelled records of atmosphere, temperature and ice-cap formation 33.6 million years ago, when the Earth cooled from a greenhouse without ice caps, into something quite similar to our present day.

These results from ”Laboratory Earth” have a particular advantage: we can see what happened after the event for two million years.

With today’s records we see changes in atmospheric CO2 and temperature over 50 years and seek to project what will happen in the future.

Pearson’s work contains a couple of remarkable results.

First the greenhouse atmosphere pre-cooling contained a CO2 concentration of 900 parts per million by volume, or more than three times that of the Earth in pre-industrial days.

We can’t be sure what triggered the Earth to cool despite, or because of, its changing green-house atmospheric blanket, but once it did, cycles of ice cap formation and glaciation commenced, apparently governed by the same variations in the Earth’s orbit that govern the ice ages of the past million years.

Second, while the cooling of the Earth took place over a time-span of around 200,000 years, the atmospheric CO2 first dropped in association with the cooling, then rose to around 1100ppmv and remained high for 200,000 years while the Earth cooled further and remained in its new ice ages cycle.

We can compare these huge swings (both up and down) in atmospheric CO2 with current computer-modelled estimates of climate sensitivity by the IPCC which suggest that a doubling of CO2 relative to pre-industrial times will produce a temperature increase of 2.5C to 4C.

If the Earth started a cycle of ice ages 33.6 million years ago while having its very carbon-rich atmosphere, and if the Earth showed cycles of ice-age activity when atmospheric CO2 was four times the level that it was in humankind’s pre-industrial times, what new information must we incorporate into our present climate models?

Another key parameter in climate modelling is the warming amplification associated with increasing CO2 in our atmosphere.

This amplification factor is generally believed to be greater than one, giving rise to an understanding that increases in atmospheric CO2 amplify warming (a positive feedback in the physical process), and the IPCC has quantified this to deliver the finding that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in man-made greenhouse gas concentrations.

However since the IPCC’s fourth report, our Laboratory Earth has also delivered new data on this CO2-induced amplification factor.

The tool for the study in this instance is recent satellite-based temperature data now extending over 30 years.

Building on a methodology published 15 years ago in Nature, climatologist and NASA medallist John Christy and colleague David Douglass studied global temperature impacts of volcanic activity and ocean-atmospheric oscillations (the ”El Nino” effect) and separated these from global temperature trends over the past 28 years.

The result of their analysis is a CO2-induced amplification factor close to one, which has implications clearly at odds with the earlier IPCC position.

The result was published this year in the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Environment and the paper has not yet been challenged in the scientific literature.

What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data.

So are we justified in concluding that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is not the only or major driver of current climate change? And if so, how should we re-shape our ETS legislation?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but as Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman observed: ”It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

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

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 89

9 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Nevertheless, delegates in the Danish capital have practically glossed over the CRU ”Climategate” leaks. That’s partly because they refuse to let the facts get in the way of their cause, but it’s mostly because Copenhagen isn’t about climate change as a physical phenomenon, but rather climate change as an opportunity to regulate people’s lives and incomes on a global scale.”

http://www.nationalpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=2319958

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

The skeleton of climate change

Lorne Gunter, National Post

Imagine if, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, some young monk’s conscience got the better of him and he leaked to the world the fact that the Catholic church had been hiding the actual Earthly skeleton of Jesus of Nazareth.

The council — the 1960s gathering of theologians to update Catholic theology and liturgy — would have been thrown into disarray.

The Resurrection is the central mystery of the Christian faith and if, suddenly, Christ’s bones were found, well, that would prove that he was a mere mortal.

It would prove that Christians had been worshiping a fake.

It wouldn’t matter that most people had never heard of the Office of the Ossuary or whatever Vatican agency was in charge of keeping things quiet. The fact the teachings of the Church had been debunked would be all delegates could talk about.

That’s because the council was about theology.

The proof that the current climate summit in Copenhagen is not about environment and science, but rather about politics and ideology, can be seen in that fact that two weeks ago, some young computer programmer’s conscience got the better of him and he released computer code and emails exposing the skeleton of climate change. Yet almost no one in Copenhagen is talking about it.

It doesn’t matter that almost no one outside the climate change industry had heard of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia before the release. The CRU’s centrality to the mystery of Eco faith is undeniable. The CRU and GISS — NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies — are two of the four major repositories of temperature records in the world, the only two that show continuing warming and the two that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on for its forecasts of disaster.

Scientists from GISS are also implicated in the torquing of climate data revealed in the recent CRU leaks. This is not surprising given that the head of GISS, James Hansen, is Al Gore’s science guru. He testified on behalf of environmental terrorists who attacked a U.K. electrical station, saying they should not be convicted because their vandalism was in the public interest. He has called coal trains ”death trains.”

Nevertheless, delegates in the Danish capital have practically glossed over the CRU ”Climategate” leaks. That’s partly because they refuse to let the facts get in the way of their cause, but it’s mostly because Copenhagen isn’t about climate change as a physical phenomenon, but rather climate change as an opportunity to regulate people’s lives and incomes on a global scale.

It’s about carbon taxes on rich countries to raise money for the UN to give to poorer countries, regardless of whether that has any impact on climate. It’s about international bureaucrats regulating business and personal decisions in the name of saving the planet. And it’s about giving the outward appearance of caring, about patting one another on the back for the deep moral superiority they are demonstrating as climate campaigners.

So what if the CRU emails and code files are full of instructions about where to insert the artificial corrections to real scientific data to make that data produce scary-looking graphs showing catastrophic warming? Who cares if the climate record, without the artificial corrections, shows the current warming is not the greatest warming of the past 8,000 years, or even the second-or third-, but the fourth-greatest?

This is about implementing carbon taxes or cap-and-trade schemes or building huge carbon sequestration systems -more to prove we care than to clear the air.

Without the CRU, the climate crusade is just so much symbolism over substance. But since symbolism is the whole point of Copenhagen, no one there cares.

Etiketter Al Gore, Carbon Trading, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
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Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 88

9 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

Another Very Good Example of this “scientific” tweaking and altering that is going on. And this my friends is the “science” behind the Global Warming Hysteria.

As I wrote in my post Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 61

IT IS SOOO OUTRAGEOUS THAT IT IS MIND-BLOWING!

The BLUE line is the ACTUAL RAW DATA

The RED line is the ”ADJUSTED ” DATA

The BLACK line is the AMOUNT OF ADJUSTMENT

This is the “science” that Global Warming Hysteria a la IPCC et consortes is Made Off.

“YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.”

“According to the IPCC, the Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035.

Or should that be 2350? Yep it seems those scientific experts who make the IPCC’s reports so famously reliable and trustworthy have a bad case of numerical dyslexia. The mistake was spotted by a Canadian academic:

J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

He is astonished they “misread 2350 as 2035″.

“Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and “misread 2350 as 2035″.”

See the original post here with all the graphs:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100019301/climategate-another-smoking-gun/

Climategate: another smoking gun…

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 8th, 2009

Despite the Al-Gore-Kool-Aid-drinkers’ best efforts to suppress it, the Climategate scandal continues to blossom and flourish. (Or should that be putresce and pullulate?)

I think my favourite comic detail this week just has to be the one about the amazing not-so-fast-shrinking glaciers. As you’ll know if you’ve been reading reports like this scare stories about glaciers retreating “faster than predicted” are a central plank of the IPCC’s case that we should carbon-tax ourselves back to the Dark Ages NOW. According to the IPCC, the Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035.

J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

He is astonished they “misread 2350 as 2035″.

In its 2007 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: “Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.

“Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035,” the report said.

It suggested three quarters of a billion people who depend on glacier melt for water supplies in Asia could be affected.

But Professor Cogley has found a 1996 document by a leading hydrologist, VM Kotlyakov, that mentions 2350 as the year by which there will be massive and precipitate melting of glaciers.

“The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates – its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2350,” Mr Kotlyakov’s report said.

Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and “misread 2350 as 2035″.

“I do suggest that the glaciological community might consider advising the IPCC about ways to avoid such egregious errors as the 2035 versus 2350 confusion in the future,” says Mr Cogley.

Well quite.

But just when you think it can’t get any better, along comes this cracker of an expose at Watts Up With That, courtesy of scientist Willis Eschenbach.

Eschenbach has been looking more closely into one of the big unanswered questions of the great Climate Wars: how reliable is the climate data used by the IPCC?

He focuses on just one country, Australia, and on one weather station – at Darwin Airport – and compares the raw temperature data recorded at the station with the “adjusted” version of the data.

Here’s what he found:

Notice the anomaly? It’s not exactly difficult. The blue line is the trend on the raw data, showing a slight cooling. The red line is the data once it has been adjusted by scientists at the Global Historical Climate Network – which is one of the main sources of temperature data used by the IPCC. Eschenbach finds the extremity of this “homogenization” adjustment rather shocking:

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

But just how shocking is this discovery. We-e-ll – as Eschenbach reminds us, it is only one weather station. Also, he points out, it is quite normal for scientists to make these homogeneity adjustments, as he explains quoting the GHCN:

Most long-term climate stations have undergone changes that make a time series of their observations inhomogeneous. There are many causes for the discontinuities, including changes in instruments, shelters, the environment around the shelter, the location of the station, the time of observation, and the method used to calculate mean temperature. Often several of these occur at the same time, as is often the case with the introduction of automatic weather stations that is occurring in many parts of the world. Before one can reliably use such climate data for analysis of longterm climate change, adjustments are needed to compensate for the nonclimatic discontinuities.

What he can’t fathom at all, though, is the mind-boggling scale of these adjustments. They can only be explained in terms of scientists with a very particular agenda.

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.

Do read the full piece. Its wonderfully revealing of the dirty tricks used by the scientists pushing AGW to exaggerate their case. And what’s particularly damning is that it shows how the Climategate scandal extends far, far beyond those so far implicated at the Climatic Research Institute at the University of East Anglia.

Here is the GHCN in context:

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

In other words the most important temperature data record in the world – even more important than CRU – has been found cheating. Here is Eschenbach’s conclusion:

Now, I want to be clear here. The blatantly bogus GHCN adjustment for this one station does NOT mean that the earth is not warming. It also does NOT mean that the three records (CRU, GISS, and GHCN) are generally wrong either. This may be an isolated incident, we don’t know. But every time the data gets revised and homogenized, the trends keep increasing. Now GISS does their own adjustments. However, as they keep telling us, they get the same answer as GHCN gets … which makes their numbers suspicious as well.

And CRU? Who knows what they use? We’re still waiting on that one, no data yet …

What this does show is that there is at least one temperature station where the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling. In addition, the average raw data for Northern Australia is quite different from the adjusted, so there must be a number of … mmm … let me say “interesting” adjustments in Northern Australia other than just Darwin.

And with the Latin saying “Falsus in unum, falsus in omis” (false in one, false in all) as our guide, until all of the station “adjustments” are examined, adjustments of CRU, GHCN, and GISS alike, we can’t trust anyone using homogenized numbers.

Still feel confident, do you, all you warmists who’ve been gloating about all that data allegedly proving that we’re living through times of quite unprecedented hotness?

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 87

9 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Which leaves researchers free to withhold information selectively from critics, as when CRU director Phil Jones told Australian scientist Warwick Hughes in a 2005 email: ”Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704342404574576683216723794.html

DECEMBER 8, 2009, 7:20 P.M. ET.

The Tip of the Climategate Iceberg

The global-warming scandal is bigger than one email leak..

The opening days of the Copenhagen climate-change conference have been rife with denials and—dare we say it?—deniers. American delegate Jonathan Pershing said the emails and files leaked from East Anglia have helped make clear ”the robustness of the science.” Talk about brazening it out. And Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and so ex-officio guardian of the integrity of the science, said the leak proved only that his opponents would stop at nothing to avoid facing the truth of climate change. Uh-huh.

Mr. Pachauri and his allies are fond of pointing out that climate change science is bigger than East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and that other institutions’ research backs the theory. This is true. But it’s also the best argument for opening up to public scrutiny both the raw data and the computer code that lies behind pronouncements of looming climate catastrophe. Citizen-researchers—some of whom are, indeed, skeptics—have been after some of this information for years. CRU’s apparent obstruction of freedom-of-information requests, as revealed by the leaks, is only the tip of the iceberg.

In 2004, retired businessman Stephen McIntyre asked the National Science Foundation for information on various climate research that it funds. Affirming ”the importance of public access to scientific research supported by U.S. federal funds,” the Foundation nonetheless declined, saying ”in general, we allow researchers the freedom to convey their scientific results in a manner consistent with their professional judgment.”

Which leaves researchers free to withhold information selectively from critics, as when CRU director Phil Jones told Australian scientist Warwick Hughes in a 2005 email: ”Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”

An interesting question. Often, when independents obtain raw temperature data or computer codes, they do uncover flaws, thus advancing climate science—the ”sunlight” now shining on CRU’s data and codes is doing just that. That’s what motivated Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Christopher Horner to request a slew of information from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which has already corrected its temperature records thanks to Mr. McIntyre’s probing. Mr. Horner told us he wants ”an entire accounting of rolling, relevant data, adjustments, codes, annotations and of course internal discussion about the frequent revisions.”

Two years later, the requests are unmet. A NASA spokesman said ”We’re clearly late, but we are working on it.” Probably wise, considering Mr. Horner is set to sue, and two U.S. senators have asked NASA’s Inspector General to investigate.

When it comes to questionable accounting, independent researchers cite the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its National Climate Data Center (NCDC) as the most egregious offenders. The NCDC is the world’s largest repository of weather data, responsible for maintaining global historical climate information. But researchers, led by meteorology expert Anthony Watts, grew so frustrated with what they describe as the organization’s failure to quality-control the data, that they created Surfacestations.org to provide an up-to-date, standardized database for the continental U.S.

Mr. McIntyre also notes unsuccessful attempts to get information from NOAA. For the record, NOAA told us that it took quality-control ”very seriously,” as well as transparency, and that all of its datasets were available to the public—except those ”protected by prior agreement,” such as ”commercially purchased with limited distribution, proprietary for internal use only, researcher limited.”

Even politicians and activists—for whom robust wrangling is meant to be a specialty—resist open discussion about climate science. See Al Gore, and his repeated refusals to debate critics such as Denmark’s Bjørn Lomborg.

Which brings us back to CRU, and calls to prosecute whoever exposed its sanctum. U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer has said ”email-theft-gate” requires ”looking at a criminal activity which could well have been coordinated.” Senator Boxer has so far shown considerably less appetite for investigating the various attempts to thwart or obstruct FOIA requests that the leaked emails have brought to light.

Most of the participants in Copenhagen seem intent on rushing headlong into a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. But it would seem more fruitful at this point to redouble our efforts to figure out what we do and don’t know about the climate’s past, present and future. That includes casting some much-needed sunshine on the data on which so much importance is being placed, but which so far has remained shielded from public view.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 86

9 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

A very good question and of course we know the answer.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/PhotoPopup.aspx?id=514659

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 85

9 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“A global map of weather stations shows they are highly concentrated in the U.S. and Europe. Their presence in Asia, Africa and South America is almost nonexistent. How can their readings from only a portion of the globe be indicative of the entire planet?

And what about the placement of weather stations? Developed areas create heat islands that register higher temperatures, which aren’t relevant to climate or global temperatures.”

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=514684

Untrustworthy Data

Posted 12/08/2009 08:08 PM ET

Global Warming: On Day 2 of the Copenhagen climate conference, the United Nations announced that the current decade is the warmest on record. Please allow us to unravel this web of deception.

The U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization released Tuesday a preliminary report that claims the 10-year period from 2000 to 2009 is the warmest since records began in 1850. We find the claim to be, well, a bit silly.

How, for instance, can serious scientists compare data from record keeping in 1850 to modern record-keeping? The report says the data are culled ”from networks of land-based weather and climate stations, ships and buoys, as well as satellites.”

It might be rude to challenge the leaders of the faith, but we have to ask: How many satellites, ships and buoys were used in 1850? Whatever the answer is, the WMO needs to explain to the public how adding data sources in later years skews the overall picture.

Furthermore, how do the land-based weather stations match up? Are they the same set of stations used since 1850, or have stations been added and dropped through the decades? Have there always been enough stations to adequately represent the global temperature?

A global map of weather stations shows they are highly concentrated in the U.S. and Europe. Their presence in Asia, Africa and South America is almost nonexistent. How can their readings from only a portion of the globe be indicative of the entire planet?

And what about the placement of weather stations? Developed areas create heat islands that register higher temperatures, which aren’t relevant to climate or global temperatures. How many stations located in undeveloped areas 150 years ago are now surrounded by growth and are recording distorted temperatures?

There is, as well, a cherry-picking problem. The record-keeping period the U.N. is using is 159 years. But a look at temperatures over the last 10,000 years as determined by ice cores, not weather stations, shows that the planet has gone through much warmer eras than it is now experiencing.

Also inconvenient to the U.N.’s report is the scandal at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of three climate data analysis centers. E-mails between researchers recently made public reveal: a pattern of manipulation of the data; an effort to crush scientists who dissented from the ”consensus” that man is warming the planet; and the possible defrauding of the taxpayers who have funded their research.

The global warming alarmists won’t admit it publicly, but their campaign is in trouble. The truth is catching up to them.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 84

9 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/4369/Hurricane-Expert-Rips-Climate-Fears-There-has-been-an-unrelenting-quarter-century-of-onesided-indoctrination

The following commentary is by Atmospheric Scientist and Hurricane forecasting specialist Dr. William Gray. Gray is the renowned hurricane forecaster and Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU).

Puncturing the Climate Balloon

By Dr. Bill Gray

December 8, 2009

Had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events I would have likely been concerned over the possibility of humans causing serious global climate degradation.

There has been an unrelenting quarter century of one-sided indoctrination of the western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon dioxide (CO_2 ) induced global warming disaster. These warming scenarios have been orchestrated by a combination of environmentalists, vested interest scientists wanting larger federal grants and publicity, the media which profits from doomsday scenario reporting, governmental bureaucrats who want more power over our lives, and socialists who want to level-out global living standards. These many alarmist groups appear to have little concern over whether their global warming prognostications are accurate, however. And they most certainly are not. The alarmists believe they will be able to scare enough of our citizens into believing their propaganda that the public will be willing to follow their advice on future energy usage and agree to a lowering of their standard of living in the name of climate salvation.

Rising levels of CO_2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be a honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO_2 ’s influence on global temperature. The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO_2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.

The last century’s global warming of about 1 degree F is not a consequence of human activities. This warming is primarily the result of a multi-century changes in the globe’s deep ocean circulation. These ocean current changes have lead to a small and gradual increase in the globe’s temperature. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age and into a generally warmer climate state. This is akin to the warmer global climate of the Medieval Period. We can do nothing but adapt to such long period natural temperature changes.

The recent ‘ClimateGate’ revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years. This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publically funded climate research groups of the US and of foreign governments were ever made public.

The disastrous economic consequences of restricting CO_2 emissions from the present by as much as 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 (as being proposed in Copenhagen) have yet to be digested by the general public. Such CO_2 output decreases would cause very large increases in our energy costs, a lowering of our standard of living, and do nothing of significance to improve our climate.

The Cap-and-Trade bill presently before Congress, the likely climate agreements coming out of the Copenhagen Conference, and the EPA’s just announced decision to treat CO_2 as a pollutant represents a grave threat to the industrial world’s continued economic development. We should not allow these proposals to restrict our economic growth. Any United Nations climate bill our country might sign would act as an infringement on our country’s sovereignty.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 83

9 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

This is an excellent sum up of what I have been saying in my posts:

“The thing to understand about the 12-day UN meeting on climate change starting in Copenhagen today, is it’s not an environmental conference. It’s an economic mugging.

That it’s not about saving the planet. It’s about making you poorer.

And finally, that the ”solutions” it proposes to ”fix” the climate, far from being intended to succeed, are guaranteed to fail.

How do we know? Because they’ve already failed.”

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2009/12/07/12062686-sun.html

Climate change: Life and death or cash grab?

Goldstein: It’s not about the planet, it’s about bucks

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, Sun Media

Last Updated: 7th December 2009, 8:25am

The thing to understand about the 12-day UN meeting on climate change starting in Copenhagen today, is it’s not an environmental conference. It’s an economic mugging.

That it’s not about saving the planet. It’s about making you poorer.

And finally, that the ”solutions” it proposes to ”fix” the climate, far from being intended to succeed, are guaranteed to fail.

How do we know? Because they’ve already failed.

The two major initiatives that emerged out of the UN process that created the Kyoto accord, were the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which is a multi-billion-dollar European cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions, and several mechanisms to generate carbon credits for industry.

A carbon credit, the basic stock unit of cap-and-trade, entitles the bearer to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with the daily price set by market trading, as occurs with any stock.

In the five years since Kyoto came into force in 2005, cap-and-trade and carbon credits have proven to be disasters.

The ETS hasn’t helped the environment. All it’s done is drive up energy costs, making ordinary people poorer, while showering Big Business and speculators with undeserved profits.

The carbon credit initiatives Kyoto established, such as the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), are riddled with profiteering and corruption.

To understand what’s going to happen in Copenhagen, what you need to know is this.

The purpose of this meeting is to replace Kyoto, which expires in 2012, with a much larger treaty.

The real-world impact of that will be to expand Europe’s cap-and-trade market into a global one, with far more carbon credits, and thus more opportunities for fraud.

But now there’s a new twist.

To get developing nations, led by China, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions — which they aren’t required to do under Kyoto — developed countries like Canada will have to transfer billions of dollars annually to the developing world, ostensibly to help it cope with climate change and lower its emissions.

But based on the actual performance of Kyoto — particularly the widespread corruption in the CDM, where developed countries invest in developing ones to obtain carbon credits — there’s no reason to think that will happen.

What will happen, based on real-world experience, is Big Business will make even more money — from us — without helping the environment.

That’s why major U.S. money houses that triggered the global recession with irresponsible lending practices — and who then received hundreds of billions of tax dollars in government bailouts — are lobbying fiercely for global cap-and-trade.

They know they will make a fortune brokering carbon trading, at least before the speculative bubbles burst yet again, costing millions more jobs.

As we prepare to endure 12 days of misleading rhetoric, painful self-righteousness and Canada-bashing in Copenhagen, remember this.

The biggest corporate backer of Kyoto in the U.S., which lobbied incessantly in favour of carbon-trading because it saw an easy way to make a killing was … Enron.

Ring any bells?

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 82

8 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“…I can attest to the fact that the more than two-dozen non-linear differential equations in weather models are too difficult for humans to have any idea how to solve accurately. No approximation over long time periods has any chance of accurately predicting global warming. Yet approximation is exactly what the global warming advocates are doing. Each of the more than thirty models being used around the world to predict the weather is just a different inaccurate approximation of the weather equations.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_mathematics_of_global_warm.html

November 30, 2009

The Mathematics of Global Warming

By Peter Landesman

The forecasts of global warming are based on mathematical solutions for equations of weather models. But all of these solutions are inaccurate. Therefore, no valid scientific conclusions can be made concerning global warming. The false claim for the effectiveness of mathematics is an unreported scandal at least as important as the recent climate data fraud. Why is the math important? And why don’t the climatologists use it correctly?

Mathematics has a fundamental role in the development of all physical sciences. First, the researchers strive to understand the laws of nature determining the behavior of what they are studying. Then they build a model and express these laws in the mathematics of differential and difference equations. Next, the mathematicians analyze the solutions to these equations to improve the scientists’ understanding. Often the mathematicians can describe the evolution through time of the scientists’ model.

The most famous successful use of mathematics in this way was Isaac Newton’s demonstration that the planets travel in elliptical paths around the sun. He formulated the law of gravity (that the rate of change of the velocity between two masses is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them) and then developed the mathematics of differential calculus to demonstrate his result.

Every college physics student studies many of the simple models and their successful solutions that have been found over the three hundred years since Newton. Engineers constantly use models and mathematics to gain insight into the physics of their field.

However, for many situations of interest, the mathematics become too difficult to be helpful. The mathematicians are unable to answer the scientist’s important questions because a complete understanding of the differential equations is beyond human knowledge. A famous, longstanding example is the n-body problem: if more than two planets are revolving around one another, according to the law of gravity, will the planets ram each other or will they drift out to infinity?

Fortunately, in the last fifty years, computers have been able to help mathematicians solve complex models over short time periods. Numerical analysts have developed techniques to graph solutions to differential equations and thus to yield new information about the model under consideration. All college calculus students use calculators to find solutions to simple differential equations called integrals. Space-travel is possible because computers can solve the n-body problem for short amounts of time and small n-values. The design of the stealth jet fighter could not have been accomplished without the computing speed of parallel processors. These successes have unrealistically raised the expectations for the application of mathematics to scientific problems.

Unfortunately, even assuming the model of the physics is correct, computers and mathematicians cannot solve more difficult problems, such as weather equations, for several reasons. First, the solution may require more computations than computers can make. Faster and faster computers push back the speed barrier every year. Second, it may be too difficult to collect enough data to accurately determine the initial conditions of the model. Third, the equations of the model may be non-linear. This means that no simplification of the equations can accurately predict the properties of the solutions of the differential equations. The solutions are often unstable. This means that a small variation in initial conditions will lead to large variations some time later. This property makes it impossible to compute solutions over long time periods.

As an expert in the solutions of non-linear differential equations, I can attest to the fact that the more than two-dozen non-linear differential equations in weather models are too difficult for humans to have any idea how to solve accurately. No approximation over long time periods has any chance of accurately predicting global warming. Yet approximation is exactly what the global warming advocates are doing. Each of the more than thirty models being used around the world to predict the weather is just a different inaccurate approximation of the weather equations. (Of course, this is an issue only if the model of the weather is correct. It is probably not, because the climatologists probably do not understand all of the physical processes determining the weather.)

Therefore, one cannot logically conclude that any of the global warming predictions are correct. To base economic policy on the wishful thinking of these so-called scientists is just foolhardy from a mathematical point of view. The leaders of the mathematical community, ensconced in universities flush with global warming dollars, have not adequately explained to the public the above facts.

President Obama should appoint a Mathematics Czar to consult before he goes to Copenhagen.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 81

8 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

As a complement to my post Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 75 about the UN pack, this travelling circus that fly around the globe in first class, or private jet, stay in hotel rooms at £400-500 per night in spa resorts, and gets wined and dined at expensive restaurants.

And the enormous costs and hypocrisy of Copenhagen. Here they are arriving in their chauffeur driven limousines, and their special busses are of course empty, telling us THAT WE HAVE TO CUT BACK!

And Saudi Arabia called for an independent investigation into Climate Gate Monday, warning that the scandal over stolen e-mails threatened to undermine the global-warming negotiations beginning in Copenhagen.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 80

8 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“We’ll let others comment on the hypocrisy of those who, while trying to force the rest of us into an ever-smaller carbon footprint, will employ more than 1,200 limousines and 140 private jets while producing 880 pounds of CO2 per attendee at their conference.

Or the even-worse hypocrisy of Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.’s global warming guru, who in one 19-month period flew 443,243 miles — including trips to have dinner at Washington’s Brookings Institution and one memorable overnighter to attend a cricket match — but now wants the rest of us to be forced into a ”carbon allowance.”

“Most of the Group of 77 are poorly run, nondemocratic countries that have routinely and almost systematically ruined their own economies through war, socialist policies, oppression of minorities and government-led despoliation of their own environment.

Their only hope — global warming welfare.

Meanwhile, China, India, Russia and other countries that still hope to grow and expand their citizens’ standards of living are just saying ”no” to Copenhagen.”

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=514619

Greens’ Real Target: U.S. Economy

Posted 12/07/2009 07:30 PM ET

Economy: The 16,000 delegates to the two-week-long orgy of self-flagellation known as the Copenhagen Climate Conference want to shrink global output of CO2 not because of hard science, but out of envy.

Even as Climate-gate suggests that sham science lies behind global warming, delegates are swarming into the Scandinavian city to push for steep cuts in carbon dioxide output by industrialized nations.

We’ll let others comment on the hypocrisy of those who, while trying to force the rest of us into an ever-smaller carbon footprint, will employ more than 1,200 limousines and 140 private jets while producing 880 pounds of CO2 per attendee at their conference.

What goes little commented on, however, is the reason for the vehemence of these calls for CO2 sacrifice on the part of the U.S.: a desire to take our economy down.

Having decisively lost the great debate between capitalism and socialism, the only way the global warming socialists can do this is by imposing restrictions on U.S. output in response to the ginned-up ”emergency” of global warming.

The dynamics of this can be readily seen in the chart (above right). It shows that, contrary to what you might have heard, America’s share of the world economy has remained remarkably stable over 40 years. The same can’t be said for the European Union’s.

As recently as 2000, in its Lisbon Declaration, the EU asserted it would ”leapfrog” the U.S. in productivity and output by 2010. By the time of its midterm review in 2005, however, the chest-thumping was over. It was clear the EU wasn’t ”leapfrogging” the U.S. — or even staying up with it. Instead, its share of world output was falling at an even faster rate.

From about 36% of world GDP in 1969, the EU today accounts for roughly 27% of the world’s $47.9 trillion in output. That’s just a tad higher than the U.S., though the EU has 80 million more people.

In just a few years, it will be eclipsed by Asia as a world economic power — thanks mainly to the booming economies of China and India. The U.S. will remain No. 1 or No. 2 for decades to come, based on just about any forecast you choose.

As the old saw goes, misery loves company. The Europeans now know they can’t beat the U.S. So they want us to join them in their self-inflicted decline by hamstringing our economy with expensive regulations to slash carbon output and regulate businesses to death.

In this effort, Europe has engaged the developing world as its ally. Egged on by EU elites, the so-called Group of 77 of developing countries are urging the same thing as the EU — massive taxes and wealth transfers from the developed nations (mainly the U.S.) to the Third World to alleviate the alleged impacts of global warming.

Again, the bottom of the chart tells the tale. Most of the Group of 77 are poorly run, nondemocratic countries that have routinely and almost systematically ruined their own economies through war, socialist policies, oppression of minorities and government-led despoliation of their own environment.

Their only hope — global warming welfare.

Meanwhile, China, India, Russia and other countries that still hope to grow and expand their citizens’ standards of living are just saying ”no” to Copenhagen. Without China and India, which together make up one-third of the world’s population, no deal made in Copenhagen can work. It’s simply impossible.

The targets currently set for CO2 reductions are so draconian they would drag the world economy into permanent recession. Calls for cuts in greenhouse gases by 2020 of 20% or more below 1990 levels are, in two words, economic suicide. By the U.N.’s own data, these cuts would cost the global economy a minimum of $59 trillion in 2005 dollars through 2100. And that’s a lowball estimate.

This is why it’s important for the U.S., like China and India, to stop playing along. The science is too dubious to put America’s economy and well-being at stake.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 79

8 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“This conclusion is only common sense: Given the choice between spending $100 to feed a hungry child in the present or combat a notional climate problem that might or might not have real consequences a century hence, most of us would surely choose the former. We would do so, moreover, with the confidence that the technologies of the future will be better suited to deal with whatever climate problems might then exist.

A typical retort is that ”we can’t afford to wait until it’s too late,” but one may as well ask whether the child in our example should go hungry while the developed world spends its money on global warming mitigation in the Third World. Yet that is exactly what the conferees at Copenhagen seem prepared to do, to the tune of billions of dollars per year.”

“Meanwhile, none of the ”green” energy sources—wind, solar or biofuels—has so far proved even remotely efficient or scalable, while often entailing serious environmental consequences of their own. These industries exist mainly because governments have thrown tens of billions in subsidies at them, and still they can’t compete with carbon sources.

Much of the momentum for Copenhagen is now driven by the alternative fuels industry and its investors, who stand to lose vast sums unless governments artificially raise the price of carbon. These include our friends at Kleiner Perkins, the ecoventure capital fund that includes Al Gore as a partner. And of course that part of the political class congenitally eager to redistribute taxpayer monies also wants to dispense ”carbon credits” to friends and political donors. “

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704007804574574053846536712.html

DECEMBER 8, 2009.

The Copenhagen Concoction

The U.N.’s climate confab runs into the reality of costs and science.

For months, the U.N. climate change summit that began yesterday in Copenhagen has been billed as the world’s last best hope to match the scientific consensus on global warming with a policy consensus. But now it turns out there is little of either, and Copenhagen looks like it will go down as one of the more remarkable cases of political hubris in recent memory.

That’s no bad outcome, given the ambitions of Copenhagen’s organizers to impose heavy new carbon taxes on top of a struggling world economy. The Australian Senate last week defeated Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s cap-and-trade legislation, largely due to its job-killing potential in the coal-producing continent. Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, said Thursday ”there is no question of India accepting a legally binding emission reduction cut.” China has promised to cut the rate of growth in its carbon emissions, which would nevertheless double over the next decade even on the most optimistic scenario.

As for the U.S., it has become clear even to liberals that it was not the Bush Administration alone that was standing in the way of a global climate deal. Last Thursday, nine Senators sent a letter outlining the terms of their support for cap-and-trade legislation, including that every other country enact and enforce carbon legislation of their own. And those were Democrats.

President Obama has promised an 83% cut in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (from their 2005 level) by 2050. But such extravagant pledges are only possible when everyone knows they won’t happen. Yesterday’s announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency that it will regulate carbon as a dangerous pollutant is an attempt to run around Congress in order to impress Copenhagen’s conferees, but it is also deeply undemocratic and betrays the lack of broader public support. (See below.)

So what exactly is the point of Copenhagen? The question needs to be asked all the more insistently in the wake of last month’s disclosure of thousands of documents and emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), long considered an authoritative center of temperature data, modeling and forecasts.

At a minimum, the emails demonstrate the lengths some of the world’s leading climate scientists were prepared to go to manufacture the ”consensus” they used to demand drastic steps against global warming. The emails are replete with talk of blacklisting dissenting scientists and journals, manipulating peer review and avoiding freedom of information requests.

Nor can the emails be dismissed as a handful of scientists showing their petulant streak. Scientific research must be subject to testing, verification and, if necessary, disproof. Otherwise, its conclusions are worthless. That’s especially true if the basic data on which the climate records are based are deleted, as seems to have been the case with the CRU, or if the elaborate computer models used to forecast climate turn out to be poorly designed, as also seems to be the case.

The core question raised by the emails is why their authors would behave this way if they are as privately convinced of the strength of their case as they claim in public. The Earth’s climate is a profoundly complex system, sensitive, dynamic and subject to a dizzying range of variables interacting in ways that remain poorly understood. Carbon dioxide is only one of those variables. Climate scientists failed to anticipate the absence of warming in the last decade, a point that Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, privately conceded in one of the disclosed emails was a ”travesty.”

Given this, the public is entitled to wonder how exactly climate scientists can state with such certainty that temperatures have never been higher, or that they are sure to rise in the coming decade, to say nothing of the rest of the century. The public is also entitled to know how the climatologists can suggest the precise degrees by which the Earth will warm, or why a warmer Earth is, on balance, worse than a colder one. Is there a ”correct” global average temperature?

The public also has a right to wonder whether the bulk of the scarce financial resources available to mitigate ecological risks ought to be devoted primarily to climate change rather than to other threats to the environment and public health. For several years, Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg has been convening meetings in Copenhagen of some of the world’s leading economists to consider that very question. Overwhelmingly they have concluded that the world’s dollars, euros and yen are better spent on tackling diseases such as AIDS or malaria or problems such as malnutrition and run-of-the-mill pollution than on hugely expensive (and dubiously effective) carbon-mitigation schemes.

This conclusion is only common sense: Given the choice between spending $100 to feed a hungry child in the present or combat a notional climate problem that might or might not have real consequences a century hence, most of us would surely choose the former. We would do so, moreover, with the confidence that the technologies of the future will be better suited to deal with whatever climate problems might then exist.

Even if the Earth does warm by a degree or two this century, the world will be better able to cope with any consequences the more prosperous it is. The worst policy would be to impose higher energy and other costs that reduce global growth for decades. The proponents of cap and trade point to this or that study claiming that a tax on the world’s main current energy supplies (oil, natural gas, coal) is cost free. But this also defies common sense. The Chinese and Indians don’t believe it, and neither do middle-class Americans who can’t easily afford hundreds of dollars a year in extra electricity or transportation costs.

Meanwhile, none of the ”green” energy sources—wind, solar or biofuels—has so far proved even remotely efficient or scalable, while often entailing serious environmental consequences of their own. These industries exist mainly because governments have thrown tens of billions in subsidies at them, and still they can’t compete with carbon sources.

By now, the idea that global warming represents the gravest threat to humanity has become totemic in much of the world, a belief invested with religious fervor and barely susceptible to rational discussion, let alone debate. Yet it remains telling how quickly a sense of reality has reasserted its cold grip in light of the choices Copenhagen now brings starkly into view.

Mr. Obama has delayed his trip to the conference until its final day, when he thinks he might salvage some kind of deal. Perhaps he will. Then again, Copenhagen is more likely to prove that it takes more than environmental faith and political opportunism to forge a genuine global consensus.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A20

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 78

8 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“With cap and trade blown apart in the Senate, the White House has chosen to impose taxes and regulation across the entire economy under clean-air laws that were written decades ago and were never meant to apply to carbon. With this doomsday machine activated, Mr. Obama hopes to accomplish what persuasion and debate among his own party manifestly cannot.”

“For now, this decision moves into the courts, and years if not decades of litigation. Yet the decision really is historic: The White House has opened a Pandora’s box that will be difficult to close, that is breathtakingly undemocratic, and that the country, if not liberal politicians, will come to regret.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703558004574582284174773944.html

DECEMBER 8, 2009.

An Inconvenient Democracy

The EPA aims to bully Congress and business with its carbon ruling.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said yesterday that her ruling that greenhouses gases are dangerous pollutants would ”cement 2009’s place in history” as the moment when the U.S. began ”seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform.” She’s right that this is an historic decision, though not to her or the White House’s credit, and ”seizing” is the right term. President Obama isn’t about to let a trifle like democratic consent impede his climate agenda.

With cap and trade blown apart in the Senate, the White House has chosen to impose taxes and regulation across the entire economy under clean-air laws that were written decades ago and were never meant to apply to carbon. With this doomsday machine activated, Mr. Obama hopes to accomplish what persuasion and debate among his own party manifestly cannot.

This reckless ”endangerment finding” is a political ultimatum: The many Democrats wary of levelling huge new costs on their constituents must surrender, or else the EPA’s carbon police will inflict even worse consequences.

The gambit is also meant to coerce businesses, on the theory that they’ll beg for cap and trade once the command-and-control regulatory pain grows too acute—not to mention the extra bribes in the form of valuable carbon permits that Democrats, since you ask, are happy to dispense. Ms. Jackson appealed to ”the science” and waved off any political implications, yet the formal finding was not coincidentally announced at the start of the U.N.’s Copenhagen climate conference (see above).

This ruling has been inevitable since at least April and we warned about it during Mr. Obama’s campaign, but its cynicism and willfulness still astonish. The political threat is so potent precisely because invoking a faulty interpretation of the 1970 Clean Air Act will expose hundreds of thousands of ”major” sources of emissions that produce more than 250 tons of an air pollutant in a year to the EPA’s costly and onerous review process. This threshold might be reasonable for traditional ”dirty” pollutants (such as NOX) but it makes no sense for ubiquitous carbon, which is the byproduct of almost all types of economic production.

The White House knows this, which is why earlier this fall Ms. Jackson announced a ”tailoring rule” that limits this regulation to sources that emit more than 25,000 or more tons a year like coal-fired power plants and heavy manufacturing. Ms. Jackson claims this unilateral rewrite of a statute is a concession, but its real purpose is to dodge a political backlash while still preserving the EPA’s ability to threaten business and recalcitrant Democrats.

For now, this decision moves into the courts, and years if not decades of litigation. Yet the decision really is historic: The White House has opened a Pandora’s box that will be difficult to close, that is breathtakingly undemocratic, and that the country, if not liberal politicians, will come to regret.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A20

Etiketter Carbon Trading, CO2, Etanol, EU, EU Parlamentet, Global Warming Hysteri, Havsis, Havsnivå, IPCC, Isbjörnar, Klimatmodeller, Korruption, Kyoto, Media, News, Obama, Orkaner, Peer review, Politik, Press, Riksdagen, Snötäcket, Temperaturdata, Traditional Media, UN, Vindkraft
Postat i Fri- och rättigheter, Miljö, USA, Yttrandefrihet | 2 kommentarer »

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 77

8 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“• Revolutionary fervor: There’s a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of ”bourgeois” values, a disgust with democratic practices. So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s—in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse.”

“• Anti-humanism: In his 2007 best seller ”The World Without Us,” environmentalist Alan Weisman considers what the planet would be like without mankind, and finds it’s no bad thing. The U.N. Population Fund complains in a recent report that ”no human is genuinely ‘carbon neutral’”—its latest argument against children. John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, cut his teeth in the policy world as an overpopulation obsessive worried about global cooling. But whether warming or cooling, the problem for the climate alarmists, as for other totalitarians, always seems to boil down to the human race itself.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703558004574581673107794380.html

DECEMBER 7, 2009, 10:32 P.M. ET

The Totalities of Copenhagen Global warming and the psychology of true belief.

By BRET STEPHENS..

‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Is it not obvious that the vision of apocalypse as it was revealed to Saint John of Patmos was, in fact, global warming?

Here’s a partial rundown of some of the ills seriously attributed to climate change: prostitution in the Philippines (along with greater rates of HIV infection); higher suicide rates in Italy; the 1993 ”Black Hawk Down” battle in Somalia; an increase in strokes and heart disease in China; wars in the Middle East; a larger pool of potential recruits to terrorism; harm to indigenous peoples and ”biocultural diversity.”

.All this, of course, on top of the Maldives sinking under the waves, millions of climate refugees, a half-dozen Katrina-type events every year and so on and on—a long parade of horrors animating the policy ambitions of the politicians, scientists, climate mandarins and entrepreneurs now gathered at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen. Never mind that none of these scenarios has any basis in some kind of observable reality (sea levels around the Maldives have been stable for decades), or that the chain of causation linking climate change to sundry disasters is usually of a meaningless six-degrees-of-separation variety.

Still, the really interesting question is less about the facts than it is about the psychology. Last week, I suggested that funding flows had much to do with climate alarmism. But deeper things are at work as well.

One of those things, I suspect, is what I would call the totalitarian impulse. This is not to say that global warming true believers are closet Stalinists. But their intellectual methods are instructively similar. Consider:

• Revolutionary fervor: There’s a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of ”bourgeois” values, a disgust with democratic practices. So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s—in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, insists that ”our lifestyles are unsustainable.” Al Gore gets crowds going by insisting that ”civil disobedience has a role to play” in strong-arming governments to do his bidding. (This from the man who once sought to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.)

.• Utopianism: In the world as it is, climate alarmists see humanity hurtling toward certain doom. In the world as it might be, humanity has seen the light and changed its patterns of behavior, becoming the green equivalent of the Soviet ”new man.” At his disposal are technologies that defy the laws of thermodynamics. The problems now attributed to global warming abate or disappear.

• Anti-humanism: In his 2007 best seller ”The World Without Us,” environmentalist Alan Weisman considers what the planet would be like without mankind, and finds it’s no bad thing. The U.N. Population Fund complains in a recent report that ”no human is genuinely ‘carbon neutral’”—its latest argument against children. John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, cut his teeth in the policy world as an overpopulation obsessive worried about global cooling. But whether warming or cooling, the problem for the climate alarmists, as for other totalitarians, always seems to boil down to the human race itself.

• Intolerance: Why did the scientists at the heart of Climategate go to such lengths to hide or massage the data if truth needs no defense? Why launch campaigns of obstruction and vilification against gadfly Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick if they were such intellectual laughingstocks? It is the unvarying habit of the totalitarian mind to treat any manner of disagreement as prima facie evidence of bad faith and treason.

• Monocausalism: For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists. And as the list above suggests, global warming has become the fill-in-the-blank explanation for whatever happens to be the problem.

• Indifference to evidence: Climate alarmists have become brilliantly adept at changing their terms to suit their convenience. So it’s ”global warming” when there’s a heat wave, but it’s ”climate change” when there’s a cold snap. The earth has registered no discernable warming in the past 10 years: Very well then, they say, natural variability must be the cause. But as for the warming that did occur in the 1980s and 1990s, that plainly was evidence of man-made warming. Am I missing something here?

• Grandiosity: In ”SuperFreakonomics,” Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner give favorable treatment to an idea to cool the earth by pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, something that could be done cheaply and quickly. Maybe it would work, or maybe it wouldn’t. But one suspects that the main reason the chapter was the subject of hysterical criticism is that it didn’t propose to deal with global warming by re-engineering the world economy. The penchant for monumentalism is yet another constant feature of the totalitarian mind.

Today, of course, the very idea of totalitarianism is considered passé. Yet the course of the 20th century was defined by totalitarian regimes, and it would be dangerous to assume that the habits of mind that sustained them have vanished into the mists. In Copenhagen, they are once again at play—and that, comrades, is no accident.

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8 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

CLIMATE-GATE – THE REAL AGENDA

“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, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

- The Club of Rome’s The First Global Revolution (1991) by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider – Page 75

The answer to 1984 is 1776.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 75

7 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

The enormous costs and hypocrisy of Copenhagen.

I have written extensible about the UN pack, this travelling circus that fly around the globe in first class, or private jet, stay in hotel rooms at £400-500 per night in spa resorts, and gets wined and dined at expensive restaurants.

All of this of course paid by us, the normal people.

While they at the same time preach austerity, frugality and sacrifice from us, the taxpayers.

This blatant hypocrisy is so mind numbing that it would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that these people have the power to force us to obey them.

They are a truly parasitic class in the sense that Karl Marx wrote about it.

How ironic that today most of this class is leftists and so called “liberals”.

See among others my posts:

The blatant hypocrisy from the UN pack and their jet set allies

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 59

Al Gore’s Enormous Carbon Footprint!

The master hypocrite Al Gore doesn’t want to criticise his Hollywood buddies!

Miljökonferensen på Balis stora miljökostnader

Miljökonferensen på Balis verkliga inre liv

“The UN has confirmed that the flights, rail, bus, food and energy from the conference will generate at least 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

That’s more greenhouse gas than produced by Malawi, Afghanistan or Sierra Leone over the same period.”

“According to an analysis by the Taxpayer’s Alliance, a conservative cost of Copenhagen is £130million.

It includes £6.3million on flights, £20million on hotels and £3.3million on food.

The figure also includes the salaries for delegates and the contribution from the Danish government of £37 million. Most of the money will come from taxpayers.”

“’This means that a huge amount of money is going to be spent on the summit, and thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted to get there, just to give the delegates a good photo opportunity.’”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233771/Climate-change-summit-produce-CO2-African-country.html

PDF here:

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/costofcopenhagen.pdf

Copenhagen climate change summit to produce as much CO2 as an African country

By David Derbyshire Environment Editor

Last updated at 12:14 PM on 07th December 2009

It is being hyped as the summit that will save the planet.

But according to critics, next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen are more likely to cost the earth.

Researchers have estimated that the bill for the 12-day jamboree will top £130million – and will generate as much greenhouse gas as an entire Africa country.

More than 15,000 delegates and 45,000 green activists are due to descend on the Danish capital over the next two weeks in a meeting described this week by British economist Lord Stern as ‘the most important since the Second World War’.

They will be joined by at least 5,000 journalists – including 35 from the BBC alone – and 100 world leaders, including Gordon Brown and Barack Obama.

The United Nations conference set targets for cutting global greenhouse gas emissions from farming, industry and transport in a bid to prevent dangerous global warming.

The aim is to keep the rise in world temperatures to within 2C by the end of the century.

Climate scientists believe a 40 per cent cut on 1990 levels of emissions is needed by 2020 – rising to an 80 per cent cut by 2050.

At the same time, Western nations will be asked to pay into a fund worth around £100billion a year to help developing countries protect themselves against rising sea levels, droughts and floods, and build their own wind turbines, clean power plants and arrays of solar panels.

There will also be talks on how to protect the world’s rain forests from destruction.

Supporters say the conference costs are a drop in the ocean compared to the benefits of preventing dangerous climate change.

But many climate change believers and sceptics say the talks could do more harm than good.

This week Nasa scientist Dr Jim Hansen – who has argued the case for climate change since the 1980s – says any deal that emerges from the talks will be so flawed, it would be better if the talks end in collapse.

President Obama and Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen have conceded that the conference will not produce a legally binding treaty.

The UN has confirmed that the flights, rail, bus, food and energy from the conference will generate at least 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

That’s more greenhouse gas than produced by Malawi, Afghanistan or Sierra Leone over the same period.

The Danish Government says it will offset any emissions created by the talks by planting trees or investing in green projects that will reduce carbon emissions elsewhere.

According to an analysis by the Taxpayer’s Alliance, a conservative cost of Copenhagen is £130million.

It includes £6.3million on flights, £20million on hotels and £3.3million on food.

The figure also includes the salaries for delegates and the contribution from the Danish government of £37 million. Most of the money will come from taxpayers.

Matthew Sinclair, research director at the Taxpayer’s Alliance, said: ‘The politicians and bureaucrats going to Copenhagen seem to think it’s unlikely that they’ll reach a deal and they know that even if they can get something signed, an increasingly sceptical public aren’t going to accept ever more expensive climate change policies.

‘This means that a huge amount of money is going to be spent on the summit, and thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted to get there, just to give the delegates a good photo opportunity.’

Although a legally binding treaty is off the agenda, the Government says a political deal could pave the way to a full treaty within months.

Climate change minister Ed Miliband said: ‘There is undoubtedly a positive momentum. The fact that in the last ten days or the so the U.S., China, India and Brazil have all put numbers on the table is a sign that the deadline and the raising of the stakes, is working.’

He said there was now overwhelming evidence for man-made global warming supported by thousands of mainstream scientists around the world.

‘There will be people who want to say there’s an easy way out. I think that is wrong,’ he added. ‘Sticking your head in the sand is not an answer.’

Yesterday Mr Miliband clashed with former chancellor Lord Lawson over global warming.

They appeared on the BBC’s Politics Show where Lord Lawson, chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, repeated his long-held doubts.

Mr Miliband accused Lord Lawson of being ‘profoundly irresponsible’.

He said Lord Lawson was ’spreading doubt’ despite a scientific consensus.

Almost half of us remain unconvinced by claims that global warming is man’s fault. In a survey for ICM, 39 per cent said climate change had not been proved to be man-made, while a further 7 per cent said they did not think it was happening at all. Fewer than one in four agreed climate change was ‘the most serious problem posed by man’. One in six said it was ‘not a very serious problem’.

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7 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

John Coleman is founder of the Weather Channel, the original weatherman on Good Morning America, and currently the lead meteorologist at KUSI-TV in San Diego.

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7 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Mr. Stewart: ”It’s nothing. He was just using a trick to hide the decline. It is just scientist speak for using a standard statistical technique recalibrating data in order to trick you into not knowing about the decline. But here is what is great about science in disagreement. We go back and look at the raw data.”

Announcer: ”University scientists say raw data from the 1980s was thrown out.”

Jon Stewart: ”Why would you go and throw out data from the 1980s? I still have Penthouses from the 1970s.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/07/media-complicity-in-climategate/

Monday, December 7, 2009

EDITORIAL: Media complicity in Climategate

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A tale of destroyed documents, fraud, conspiracy and the misuse of millions of government dollars would seem to have all the juicy ingredients of a scandal that journalists would kill to cover. However, the mainstream media apparently doesn’t think that Climategate is news. ABC News hasn’t deemed the story newsworthy. Neither has CBS nor NBC. If Americans only got their news from the networks, they would not know about the global-warming fraud or would merely think there was a simple misunderstanding about what scientists meant in some vague e-mails

Never mind that two major universities have at least temporarily removed prominent academics from heading major climate research facilities. Never mind that there are real questions raised about the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) controversial assessment report that the Obama administration and global-warming advocates have continually hyped in order to advance their case for new global regulations to curtail purported global warming.

Liberal news agencies might be casting a blind eye at this controversy, but even left-wing comedians such as ”The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart take these events seriously enough to make fun of the defenses being offered by the scientists caught in the scandal. Take one of Mr. Stewart’s jokes regarding the now infamous e-mail about the ”trick of adding in the real temps to each series … to hide the decline [in temperature].” A Tuesday repartee follows:

Mr. Stewart: ”It’s nothing. He was just using a trick to hide the decline. It is just scientist speak for using a standard statistical technique recalibrating data in order to trick you into not knowing about the decline. But here is what is great about science in disagreement. We go back and look at the raw data.”

Announcer: ”University scientists say raw data from the 1980s was thrown out.”

Jon Stewart: ”Why would you go and throw out data from the 1980s? I still have Penthouses from the 1970s.”

Despite cracks on late-night TV, the scandal is not considered newsworthy by the major television networks. The Media Research Center reported that through Tuesday, ”none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed Climategate or the incriminating [East Anglia climate scientist Phil] Jones development. … This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal.”

The networks found plenty of airtime to cover rumored family problems plaguing professional golfer Tiger Woods. Yet, even though there is climate-regulation legislation pending in Congress that could cost Americans trillions of dollars, network producers don’t see anything newsworthy in a scandal exposing fraud in global-warming research. Such omissions make mainstream news complicit in the cover-up.

Climate Gate – All the manipulations and lies revealed 72

7 december, 2009 av sophiaalbertina

“Like an invading army, more than 16,500 of the world’s greatest liars will descend on Copenhagen for what may well be the last attempt by the United Nations to use the “global warming” fraud to alter the economies of industrialized nations in the name of “saving the Earth.”

“The fraud-—now dubbed Climategate—-will require the masters of worldwide media to choose between repeating discredited climate lies or to finally report the views of legitimate climate scientists and others that have been repudiating them for decades. “

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17633

UN Climate Treaty: A Sneak Attack on Humanity

By Alan Caruba Sunday, December 6, 2009

It’s ironic that the United Nations Conference on Climate Change began on December 7th. For an aging portion of the U.S. population, December 7, 1941 will always mark the Japanese Empire’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. It drew the U.S. into World War Two.

Humanity has been threatened for decades by the effort of the United Nations, through its environmental program in general and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in particular, to impose an international treaty that would put the UN in charge of all energy use.

The treaty, like the former Kyoto Protocols, would have no basis in science.

The pretext has been that “global warming” is the result of greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the Earth to warm exponentially. The IPCC encountered a problem when the planet began to measurably cool beginning in 1998.

Satellite data since then have demonstrated that the average global temperature has been dropping, mostly in response to the Sun whose solar radiation has moved into what is called “a solar minimum”, a reduction in magnetic storms. This is a natural cycle the Sun has gone through many times over the billions of years of the Earth’s existence.

Like an invading army, more than 16,500 of the world’s greatest liars will descend on Copenhagen for what may well be the last attempt by the United Nations to use the “global warming” fraud to alter the economies of industrialized nations in the name of “saving the Earth.”

We now know conclusively that a key element of the fraud, the data put forth by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, was deliberately falsified. This will test whether the participants in the conference can maintain their massive, international fraud.

If the UN can control energy use, it controls mankind.

The Copenhagen conference has already generated a torrent of green lies from environmental organizations. The fraud-—now dubbed Climategate—-will require the masters of worldwide media to choose between repeating discredited climate lies or to finally report the views of legitimate climate scientists and others that have been repudiating them for decades.

Here are just a few examples of the Climategate propaganda being perpetrated.

Despite the revelations of a massive climate data fraud initially reported on November 20, on November 23, the World Wildlife Fund released a report filled with the usual predictions of climate-related catastrophes, from hurricanes destroying New York to changes in the Asian monsoon patterns.

The World Wildlife Federation announced that it is hosting “Eco-Schools USA” intended to “Green K-12 buildings, grounds and curriculum.” Instead of learning the three R’s, in addition to some real science, groups like the WWF have been steadily indoctrinating young Americans to believe the Earth is doomed.

In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a $52,000 grant for projects in which students “will explore their coastal ecosystems” in New Jersey. The projects “emphasize the importance of taking action to protect the environment.” Not much money, but “since 1992, EPA has funded over $45 million in environmental education grants to support more than three thousand projects across the country.” Is this education or indoctrination?

The EPA has gone on record dismissing the revelations of distorted and false climate data used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is moving ahead to produce a finding that would permit the agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions despite ample evidence that it plays no role in climate change. This reflects the effort of environmentalists to control energy use.

A group called Rare Conservation that describes itself as “a leader in local social and behavioral change for global biodiversity conservation” released a statement to the effect that “tropical deforestation is widely believed to be responsible for 15-20% of climate change.” The Washington Post reported their absurd claim that the Earth’s great “carbon sinks”, oceans and forests, will not be able to absorb increased levels of carbon dioxide, though they have been doing this for millennia!

In October, it was reported that “The federal government has paid out billions of dollars to environmental groups for attorney fees and costs, according to data assembled by a Cheyenne, Wyoming lawyer. A review by the attorney, Karen Budd-Falen, revealed that “the government, between 2003 and 2007, paid more than $4.7 billion in taxpayer money to environmental law firms “and that’s just the lawsuits she tracked.”

It is very doubtful that Americans are aware that they have been paying billions for green lawsuits, many of which were intended to stop various forms of development, i.e. jobs, or to encumber agricultural activity.

Who has grown wealthy from the greening of America? In November, the Capitol Research Center compiled a list based on budget figures from environmental groups.

•Nature Conservancy, $910.7 million.

•Wildlife Conservation Society, $197.4 million,

•World Wildlife Fund, $169.5 million.

•Environmental Defense Fund, $108 million.

•Natural Resources Defense Fund, $122.8 million.

•Natural Resources Defense Council, $108 million.

•National Audubon Society, $92.7 million.

•Natural Wildlife Federation, $90.1 million.

•Sierra Club, $81.8 million.

•Sierra Club Foundation, $29.9 million.

•Greenpeace, Inc, $26.3 million.

Green education of schoolchildren

These are groups that have infiltrated the curriculums of the nation’s schools, frightening a generation of children with global warming claims, along with predictions of the extinction of species, rising sea levels to flood cities, and other base nonsense.

These are just a handful of environmental organizations that have grown fat while doing everything they could to slow the U.S. economy by acquiring private property to put it off-limits to mining, drilling, timber, and agricultural use, among others.

These are groups that have lobbied Congress for all manner of legislation and regulations that have encumbered industrial and agricultural development. The “Cap-and-Trade” bill, based on IPCC data, is awaiting a vote in the U.S. Senate. If passed, it would destroy all hope of any economic recovery.

These are groups that signed onto the global warming fraud and whose representatives will be attending the UN Conference on Climate Change.

It is a sneak attack on humanity.