Tag: Climategate

Now that 'global warming' is dead, what's the next eco-scare?

So global warming is dead, nailed into its coffin one devastating disclosure, defection and re-evaluation at a time. Which means that pretty soon we’re going to need another apocalyptic scare to take its place.

As recently as October, the Guardian reported that scientists at Cambridge had “concluded that the Arctic is now melting at such a rate that it will be largely ice free within ten years.” This was supposedly due to global warming. It brought with it the usual lamentations for the grandchildren. But in March came another report in the Guardian, this time based on the research of Japanese scientists, that “much of the record breaking loss of ice in the Arctic ocean in recent years is [due] to the region’s swirling winds and is not a direct result of global warming.”

It also turns out that the extent of Arctic sea ice in March was around the recorded average, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The difference between the two stories has little to do with science: There were plenty of reasons back in October to suspect that the Arctic ice panic—based on data that only goes back to 1979—was as implausible as the now debunked claim about disappearing Himalayan glaciers. But thanks to Climategate and the Copenhagen fiasco, the media are now picking up the kinds of stories they previously thought it easier and wiser to ignore.

This is happening internationally. In France, a book titled “L’imposture climatique” is a runaway bestseller: Its author, Claude Allègre, is one of the country’s most acclaimed scientists and a former minister of education in a Socialist government. In Britain, environmentalist patron saint James Lovelock now tells the BBC he suspects climate scientists have “[fudged] the data” and that if the planet is going to be saved, “it will save itself, as it always has done.” In Germany, the leftish Der Spiegel devotes 15 pages to a deliciously detailed account of “scientists who want to be politicians,” the “curious inconsistencies” in the temperature record, the “sloppy work” of the U.N.’s climate-change panel and sundry other sins of modern climatology.

As for the United States, Gallup reports that global warming now ranks sixth on the list of Americans’ top 10 environmental concerns. My wager is that within a few years “climate change” will exercise global nerves about as much as overpopulation, toxic tampons, nuclear winters, ozone holes, killer bees, low sperm counts, genetically modified foods and mad cows do today.

Something is going to have to take its place.

The world is now several decades into the era of environmental panic. The subject of the panic changes every few years, but the basic ingredients tend to remain fairly constant. A trend, a hypothesis, an invention or a discovery disturbs the sense of global equilibrium. Often the agent of distress is undetectable to the senses, like a malign spirit. A villain—invariably corporate and right-wing—is identified.

Then money begins to flow toward grant-seeking institutions and bureaucracies, which have an interest in raising the level of alarm. Environmentalists counsel their version of virtue, typically some quasi-totalitarian demands on the pattern of human behavior. Politicians assemble expert panels and propose sweeping and expensive legislation. Eventually, the problem vanishes. Few people stop to consider that perhaps it wasn’t such a crisis in the first place.

This is what’s called eschatology—a belief, or psychology, that we are approaching the End Time. Religions have always found a way to take account of those beliefs, but today’s secular panics are unmoored by spiritual consolations or valid moral injunctions. Instead, we have the modern-day equivalent of the old Catholic indulgence in the form of carbon credits. It’s how Al Gore justifies his utility bills.

Given the inescapability of weather, it’s no wonder global warming gripped the public mind as long as it did. And there’s always some extreme-weather event happening somewhere to be offered as further evidence of impending catastrophe. But even weather gets boring, and so do the people who natter about it incessantly. What this decade requires is a new and better panic.

Herewith, then, I propose a readers’ contest to invent the next panic. It must involve something ubiquitous, invisible to the naked eye, and preferably mass-produced. And the solution must require taxes, regulation, and other changes to civilization as we know it. The winner gets a beer and a burger, on me, at the 47th street Pig N’ Whistle in New York City. (Nachos for vegetarians.) Happy panicking!

By Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal

Climategate: two more bricks fall out of the IPCC wall of deceit – rainforests and polar bears

By Gerald Warner, UK Telegraph

Oops! There go another two bricks, tumbling out of the IPCC wall of deceit on man-made global warming – there is not a lot left now; even the Berlin Wall (to which the AGW construct is ideologically allied) has survived better. Unhappily for Al, Phil, Michael, George and the rest of the scare-mongers, these two discredited components are among the most totemic in the AGW religion. Firstly, a new study, funded by Nasa (which may be feeling the need to rehabilitate itself post-Climategate) has revealed that the ridiculous claim in the notorious IPCC 2007 report that up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could be drastically affected by even a small reduction in rainfall caused by climate change, so that the trees would be replaced by tropical grassland, is utter nonsense. That assertion has already been exposed as derived from a single report by the environmentalist lobby group WWF. Now Dr Jose Marengo, a climate scientist with the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research and himself a member of the IPCC, says: “The way the WWF report calculated this 40 per cent was totally wrong, while (the new) calculations are by far more reliable and correct.” These calculations were done by researchers at Boston University and were published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. They used satellite data to study the drought of 2005, when rainfall fell to the lowest in living memory, and found that the rainforest suffered no significant effects. So, the rainforest scare, like the Himalayan glaciers panic, is garbage. A further encouraging feature of this development is that genuine scientists are increasingly becoming emboldened to challenge the IPCC’s junk science: the Academy is beginning to reassert its integrity. AGW without withered rainforests is Hamlet without the prince. It was one of those emotive claims much invoked by priggish children in the voice-overs of nanny-state “green” commercials, lecturing their elders on the stewardship of the planet. An even bigger tear-jerker was the plight of polar bears, bolstered by carefully cropped photographs of lonely bears stranded on fast-melting icebergs, doomed to extinction. That is the second brick that has fallen out of the IPCC wall. The official legend is that polar bears are threatened with extinction by global warming. The IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group, which has bought into global warming in a big way, has claimed that, of the 19 sub-populations of polar bears (13 of them in Canada, home to 60 per cent of polar bears), eight are declining, three are stable, one is increasing and there is insufficient data on the remaining seven. Of the eight allegedly declining populations, two of them, including Baffin Bay, are non-contentious: sceptics concede that the two sub-populations, representing 16.4 per cent of the bear population, are declining – but in both regions the temperatures have actually fallen, so warming is an irrelevant issue. H Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, has pointed out that in two regions where the population is growing – the Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea – air temperatures have risen. So polar bears appear to thrive on warming – as scientists claim they did during the Mediaeval Warm Period 1,000 years ago and the Holocene Climate Optimum 5,000-9,000 years ago. Warmists contest the Chukchi Sea claim, insisting the population there is declining, though they concede illegal hunting by Russians is a factor. Closer reading of their literature, however, reveals some interesting semantics. For example, the Southern Beaufort Sea is listed as an area of decline, on the basis of a fall in cub survival rates and a reduction in the weight and skull size of adult males, which was also observed elsewhere, prior to population decline. So this is a prediction rather than an accomplished fact – just like global warming itself. The bottom line is the actual statistics, conceded even by warmists: since 1970 the world’s polar bear population has “declined” from 5,000 to 25,000. Some of us would term that a quintupling, but obviously we do not share the same mathematical skills as those who predicted the imminent loss of the Himalayan glaciers. The IPCC and the whole scam it promotes is now irreversibly on the slide. If you have no devastated rainforests and those pesky polar bears keep on doing what polar bears do on cold Arctic nights, you have lost the schoolchildren – and they were almost the last supporters of man-made global warming.

EDITORIAL: EPA's global-warming power grab

Scientific scandals and record snowfalls have begun to melt away the congressional appetite for more global-warming regulations. On Sunday, to take the latest example, a major scientific journal admitted that “oversights” compelled the retraction of its conclusion that sea levels were rising as a result of increased worldwide temperatures. Reports of this sort make it increasingly difficult for members of Congress to enter iced-over districts to ask their constituents to make economic sacrifices in an attempt to appease Mother Earth into favoring us with colder weather. This does not mean, however, that the left has given up on global warming as a means of exerting more government control over the economy. To avoid a potentially messy vote, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has turned to the administrative rule-making process to impose climate-control regulations. In December, the agency made an “endangerment finding” that declared that six gases – including the carbon dioxide you are exhaling as you read this – are putting the planet’s well-being in peril. The first major rule based on this finding will be finalized next month. President George W. Bush’s EPA administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, warned that such a finding would result in a major government power grab. “[T]he potential regulation of greenhouse gases under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in an unprecedented expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy and touch every household in the land,” he explained. Fortunately, Mr. Obama’s team might not get away with it. So far, 40 senators have signed on to an effort by Sen. Lisa A. Murkowski, Alaska Republican, to nullify the EPA endangerment finding. Three Democrats have been willing to co-sponsor the legislation, but Senate sources suggest a number of others may be willing to vote for the bill when it comes to the floor. Mrs. Murkowski, who takes a moderate stand on the issue, is key to lining up the bipartisan support required for passage. In the past, the Alaska senator has embraced government efforts to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, including a limited form of cap-and-trade. Her resolution is evidence that both sides of the global-warming issue can agree that such a fundamental public-policy question should not be decided by unelected bureaucrats. Both sides also should be troubled by the EPA’s twisting of the Clean Air Act, which originally was designed to cut down on actual pollutants, into regulating so-called greenhouse gases. Instead of preventing smokestacks from belching noxious fumes and toxic chemicals harmful to the health of human beings, the agency has made its new enemy No. 1 a cow chewing grass in a field. Citing U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the EPA declared “enteric fermentation” – a fancy phrase to refer to a cow’s natural emissions in the field – to be the primary source of methane, which is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in planetary warming. The EPA placed what it called a “primary reliance” on reports like those of the IPCC instead of conducting independent research to make its finding. Given the retractions and revelations of faulty science surrounding the global-warming religion, especially at the IPCC, it’s time to take the issue out of the EPA’s hands so Congress can address it in the open. The Senate should pass Mrs. Murkowski’s disapproval resolution when it comes for an expected vote next month.
Source

The Jig is Up! Climategate U-turn as Phil Jones admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

Oops. UK Times: ‘World may not be warming, say scientists’ — UN IPCC ‘faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably’ – –
‘Popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development’ — ‘IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias’
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece

Watch Now! Climate Depot’s Morano in MSNBC TV Debate with Daniel Weiss of Center for Am. Progress: Morano: ‘The whole entire [warming] industry has been exposed as sub-prime science’
Morano: ‘Now [the warmists] are trying to say global warming causes blizzards, that’s the level of climate astrology — it’s like a daily horoscope — nothing that happens falsifies the [warming] theory’ — ‘He (Weiss) need’s Tarot cards, that is what he needs, he is peddling astrology’
http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/video.aspx?v=XdnzVruzkU

Hebrew University Scientists publish study in Nature: ‘AGW is refuted’ — ‘Claims that carbon emissions permanently increase global temperature are false’
‘Because the greenhouse effect is temporary rather than permanent, predictions of significant global warming in the 21st century by IPCC arenot supported by the data’ More info here.
http://economics.huji.ac.il/facultye/beenstock/Nature_Paper091209.pdf

Reuters on UN IPCC Train wreck: ‘Admitting yet another flaw’: UN climate panel admits sea level flaws
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61C1V420100213

Via email

U.S. to launch new climate agency amid growing doubts about the theory

By Tony Hake
Despite Congress’ inability to agree to climate change legislation, falling public belief in global warming, and new questions about the science behind the theory, the Obama administration announced plans to launch a new climate change agency. Falling under the umbrella of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Climate Service would be the U.S. government’s one-stop-shop for climate change information. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said, “By providing critical planning information that our businesses and our communities need, NOAA Climate Service will help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change.” Locke reiterated President Barack Obama’s oft-repeated refrain that ‘green jobs’ and technology will help the nation out of the recession. “In the process, we’ll discover new technologies, build new businesses and create new jobs.” The new service would bring together all of NOAA’s climate-related departments under a single agency called the NOAA Climate Service. NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said it would look much like the National Weather Service but dedicated to climate change instead of weather. Carol Browner, President Obama’s ‘global warming czar’, echoed Lubchenco saying, “Through NOAA’s improved climate services we will be better able to confront climate change, and the many challenges it presents for our environment, security, and economy.” The timing of the announcement has raised eyebrows given the current state of climate science and growing doubt amid the public and policy leaders. One claim in NOAA’s press release has drawn been looked at with bemusement by some. Touting NOAA’s past climate work, the statement discussed, “The climate research, observations, modeling, predictions and assessments generated by NOAA’s top scientists – including Nobel Peace Prize award-winners.” This presumably is alluding to the work of many climate scientists on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its work on climate science and the group’s AR4 report has been viewed as one of the most important pieces of work in the field. That very same report however has recently come under fire for dozens of errors and questionable citations. Claims of disappearing glaciers and rain forests, humanitarian disasters in Africa, increased natural disasters and more have all been disproven in recent weeks. Scientists that participated in the authoring of the report have said the spurious claims were included simply for political reasons. Some of those very same scientists were also at the forefront of the Climategate email scandal that continues to reverberate throughout the discussion on manmade climate change. The source of those emails, the University of East Anglia in Britain, has been found to have broken the law by trying to prevent the release of climate information. The head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the university, Dr. Phil Jones, continues to be investigated for his role. Jones and his fellow scientists at CRU were principal contributing authors to the IPCC’s work. In the United States, Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University similarly finds himself under investigation. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, has similarly come under fire after it was revealed he chose to ignore the errors leading up to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in Denmark. Investigations by British media have also shown that Pachauri has financially benefitted from his position raising calls that he has a severe conflict of interest. The attempt to create a new government agency is being viewed by some as an ‘end run’ by the Obama administration around Congress and the American people. Climate change legislation incorporating a cap and trade tax scheme was considered a hallmark of the administration but it has since stalled in Congress. While the House of Representatives passed a version of the legislation, a similar measure sits fallow in the Senate and it appears unlikely it will move forward any time soon. Public doubts about global warming are also on the rise as shown by recent polls. According to the Pew Research Center, it ranks last in what the public believes should be a priority for the federal government. The American people, already casting a wary eye on a growing U.S. government and ballooning debt are not likely to view the new agency favorably. The state of climate science has not been at a lower point than it is now. 2009 was dubbed “The year climate change and global warming activists would like to forget” for the many events that dealt significant blow to the theory.Source

Global Warming Makes the Case Against Global Government

By Alan Caruba

The utterly baseless case for “global warming” is melting a lot faster than the glaciers in India’s Himalayas which, by the way, are not melting.

It is time for the Nobel Committee to rescind the Peace Prize given to Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It is time for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences committee to take back Al Gore’s Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”, an alleged documentary that became mandatory viewing for students in the U.S. and around the world. Purporting to “prove” that the Earth was rapidly warming due to the rise in “greenhouse gases”, it is a fraud.

In the event the news hasn’t reached you, in mid-August 2009, after repeated requests for the Climate Research Unit’s raw data from which it calculated global temperatures, the CRU at the University of East Anglia (UK), a key element of the UN’s IPCC, announced that it had discarded the data, thereby making it impossible to determine if their assertions of rising global temperatures were accurate and true. Or not.

In October 2009, in the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, it was demonstrated that the IPCC’s tree ring data from Russia that showed a cooling after 1961 had been disguised in its report (AR4) that, of course, asserted the Earth was warming.

A month later, just prior to a huge, international Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, emails from the CRU were leaked, revealing the lengths to which the CRU staff had gone to discredit and suppress any independent studies that disputed the global warming thesis.

In brief, the entire “scientific” basis on which the IPCC “scientists” and global warming advocates like Al Gore made their claims was a fraud. It rendered AR4 “scientifically questionable” in the polite parlance of the worldwide scientific community.

In January, Joe D’Aleo and E. Michael Smith released a detailed report that indicted the U.S. National Climatic Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies for having eliminated many meteorological stations from their data bases in recent years and, to no one’s surprise, the stations were mostly in colder climate areas. Without their data, the “warmists” could continue to claim the Earth was in a warming cycle.

None of this came as a surprise to the “deniers” and “skeptics”, many of them internationally renowned climatologists and meteorologists, who had attended the Heartland Institute’s two international conferences on climate change, participating in seminars and addressing attendees to provide the truth; the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998, any prior warming was a normal and natural cycle following the Little Ice Age that ended around 1850, and the claims of the IPCC and other alleged science-based government agencies were utterly false.

The sheer magnitude of the deception, directed and orchestrated from within a United Nations entity, given support by United States and British agencies, and further supported by multi-national groups such as the European Union, made it difficult for the average person to believe anything other than the elements of the hoax that were constantly proclaimed and then reinforced by the media and Hollywood.

When the global warming dam burst, millions around the world would conclude what they had always suspected; there was no global warming and all the billions spent in the name of “reducing greenhouse gases” or “clean energy” was part of a massive fraud, a set-up to permit new forms of taxation and to enrich the participants.

That is the case against multinational organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, to name just two. They are, too often, giant propaganda machines whose agenda is to eliminate fundamental concepts of individual liberty and freedom, replacing them with faceless bureaucrats with no obligation to be responsive to citizens anywhere.

A U.S. President, Barack Obama, who attended the UN Copenhagen Conference and would, in the course of his State of the Union speech, claim that there was “overwhelming evidence” of climate change a.k.a. global warming, is part of the cabal that would waste taxpayer’s billions on “green jobs”, “clean energy”, and “biofuels” as opposed to actually encouraging the building of nuclear and coal-fired plants, exploring and extracting offshore oil and natural gas reserves, and maintaining the nation’s vital infrastructure.

A rogue government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, is brazenly warning Congress that it will regulate carbon dioxide if it does not pass the patently false “Cap-and-Trade” legislation intended to limit so-called “greenhouse gases.” The EPA must be reined in and a complete housecleaning is necessary to repeal the many regulations and laws based on the global warming fraud.

The U.S. needs a new Congress filled with men and women who want to protect the nation against the frauds perpetrated by its own science-related agencies, to kill legislation that would impose a massive tax on energy use, and bring the global warming advocates within the government to the bar of justice.

The world needs to dissolve the United Nations in the same way it shunted aside the useless League of Nations. The present institution should be broken into units that perform legitimate services, but governance is not a legitimate purpose. No global taxes. No global army. No global propaganda machine.

Nations, worldwide, need to reclaim their sovereignty and then work together for the mutual goal of peace and other worthwhile causes.

The Hottest Hoax in the World

It was presented as fact. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, led by India’s very own RK Pachauri, even announced a consensus on it. The world was heating up and humans were to blame. A pack of lies, it turns out.
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrarywise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see? —Alice in Wonderland The climate change fraud that is now unravelling is unprecedented in its deceit, unmatched in scope—and for the liberal elite, akin to 9 on the Richter scale. Never have so few fooled so many for so long, ever. The entire world was being asked to change the way it lives on the basis of pure hyperbole. Propriety, probity and transparency were routinely sacrificed. The truth is: the world is not heating up in any significant way. Neither are the Himalayan glaciers going to melt as claimed by 2035. Nor is there any link at all between natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and global warming. All that was pure nonsense, or if you like, ‘no-science’!
The climate change mafia, led by Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), almost pulled off the heist of the century through fraudulent data and suppression of procedure. All the while, they were cornering millions of dollars in research grants that heaped one convenient untruth upon another. And as if the money wasn’t enough, the Nobel Committee decided they should have the coveted Peace Prize. But let’s begin at the beginning. Mr Pachauri has no training whatsoever in climate science. This was known all the time, yet he heads the pontification panel which proliferates the new gospel of a hotter world. How come? Why did the United Nations not choose someone who was competent? After all, this man is presumably incapable of differentiating between ocean sediments and coral terrestrial deposits, nor can he go about analysing tree ring records and so on. That’s not jargon; these are essential elements of a syllabus in any basic course on climatology.
You cannot blame him. His degree and training is in railroad engineering. You read it right. This man was educated to make railroads from point A to point B.

THE GATHERING STORM

There are many casualties in this sad story of greed and hubris. The big victim is the scientific method. This was pointed out in great detail by John P Costella of the Virginia-based Science and Public Policy Institute. Science is based on three fundamental pillars. The first is fallibility. The fact that you can be wrong, and if so proven by experimental input, any hypothesis can be—indeed, must be—corrected. This was systematically stymied as early as 2004 by the scientific in-charge of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit. This university was at the epicentre of the ‘research’ on global warming. It is here that Professor Phil Jones kept inconvenient details that contradicted climate change claims out of reports. The second pillar of science is that by its very nature, science is impersonal. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘them’. There is only the quest. However, in the entire murky non-scientific global warming episode, if anyone was a sceptic he was labelled as one of ‘them’. At the very apex, before his humiliating retraction, Pachauri had dismissed a report by Indian scientists on glaciers as “voodoo science”. The third pillar of science is peer group assessment. This allows for validation of your thesis by fellow scientists and is usually done in confidence. However, the entire process was set aside by the IPCC while preparing the report. Thus, it has zero scientific value. The fact that there was dissent within the climate science teams, that some people objected to the very basis of the grand claims of global warming, did not come out through the due process. It came to light when emails at the Climate Research Centre at East Anglia were hacked in November 2009. It is from the hacked conversations that a pattern of conspiracy and deceit emerge. It is a peek into the world of global warming scaremongering—amplify the impact of CO2, stick to dramatic timelines on destruction of forests, and never ask for a referral or raise a contrary point. You were either a believer in a hotter world or not welcome in this ‘scientific fold’.

HOUSE OF CARDS AND COLOUR OF CASH

So we have the fact that a non-expert heads the IPCC. We have the fact that glaciers are not melting by 2035; this major scaremongering is now being defended as a minor error (it was originally meant to be 2350, some have clarified). The date was spouted first by Syed Hasnain, an Indian glacier expert, in an interview to a magazine. It had no scientific validity, and, as Hasnain has himself said, was speculative. On the basis of that assertion, The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) that Pachauri heads and where Hasnain works in the glaciology team, got two massive chunks of funding. The first was estimated to be a $300,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation and the second was a part of the $2 million funding from the European Union. So you write a report that is false on glaciers melting and get millions to study the impact of a meltdown which will not be happening in the first place. Now if this is not a neat one, what is? The same goes for dire predictions on Amazon rain forests. The IPCC maintained that there would be a huge depletion in Amazon rain forests because of lack of precipitation. Needless to add, no Amazon rain forest expert could be trusted to back this claim. They depended on a report by a freelance journalist and activist, instead, and now it has blown up in their faces. There’s plenty more in this sordid tale. For one thing, there is no scientific consensus at all that man-made CO2 emissions cause global warming, as claimed by the IPCC. In a recent paper, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who has worked extensively on climate change models, argues: ‘There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps—if any—we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.’ An investigation by Dr Benny Peiser, director, Global Warming Policy Foundation, has revealed that only 13 of the 1,117, or a mere 1 per cent of the scientific papers crosschecked by him, explicitly endorse the consensus as defined by the IPCC. Thus the very basis of the claim of consensus on global warming is false. And so deeply entrenched is the global warming lobby, the prestigious journal Science did not publish a letter that Dr Peiser wrote pointing out the lack of consensus. Speaking to Open, says Dr Peiser, “The IPCC process by which it arrives at its conclusions lacks balance, transparency and due diligence. It is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer-reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC reports. Not surprisingly, the IPCC has lost a lot of credibility in recent years. It is also losing the trust of more and more governments who are no longer following its advice. Until it agrees to undergo a root and branch reform, it will continue to haemorrhage credibility and trust. The time has come for a complete overhaul of its structure and workings.” Another fraud is in the very chart central to Pachauri’s speech at the Copenhagen summit. As Lord Monckton has pointed out, ‘The graph is bogus not only because it relies on made-up data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, but also because it is overlain by four separate trendlines, each with a start-date carefully selected to give the entirely false impression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however—neatly obscured by an ingenious rescaling of the graph and the superimposition of the four bogus trend lines on it—is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940 the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.’

PACHAURI’S WRONG NUMBERS

This chart, tracking mean global temperature over the past 150 years, was central to the presentation that IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri made at the Copenhagen environment summit. Many scientists believe that the graph is fraudulent. First, there are strong allegations that the data, collected from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, is a tissue of lies. Plus, as British climate change expert Lord Christopher Monckton puts it: “(The main graph, in darker blue) is overlain by four separate lines, each carefully selected to give the entirely false im•pression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however… is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940, the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.” In other words, the graph has been drawn with a motive to prove one’s point, and not to show the truth. Thus the earth has warmed at this rate at least twice in the last 100 years and no major catastrophe has occurred. What is more, the earth has cooled after that warming. Why is the IPCC not willing to explore this startling point? Another total lie has been that the Sunderbans in Bangladesh are sinking on account of the rise in sea level. The IPCC claimed that one-fifth of Bangladesh will be under water by 2050. Well, it turns out this is an absurd, unscientific and outrageous claim. According to scientists at the Centre for Environmental and Geographical Information Services (Cegis) in Dhaka, its surface area appears to be growing by 20 sq km annually. Cegis has based its results on more than 30 years of satellite imagery. IPCC has not retracted this claim. As far as they are concerned, Bangladesh is a goner by 2050, submerged forever in the Bay of Bengal.

THE COOKIE CRUMBLES

The fallout of Climategate is slowly but surely unfolding right where it hurts a large number of special interests—in the field of business. Yes, the carbon trading business is now in the line of fire. Under a cap-and-trade system, a government authority first sets a limit on emissions, deciding how much pollution will be allowed in all. Next, companies are issued credits, essentially licences to pollute, based on how large they are, and what industries they work in. If a company comes in below its cap, it has extra credits which it may trade with other companies, globally. Post Climategate, this worldwide trade, estimated at about $30 billion in 2006, is finding few takers. It is under attack following the renewed uncertainty over the role of human-generated CO2 in global warming. In the US, which never adopted any of this to begin with, there is a serious move now to finish off the cap-and-trade regime globally. It’s a revolt of sorts. Six leading Democrats in the US Congress have joined hands with many Republicans to urge the Obama Administration to back off from the regime. The collapse of the international market for carbon credits, a direct fallout of Climategate, has already sent shudders down many spines in parts of the world that were looking forward to making gains from it. It was big business, after all, and Indian businesses were eyeing it as well. In fact, Indian firms were expected to trade some $1 billion worth of carbon credits this year, and with the market going poof, they stand to lose quite some money (notional or otherwise). Besides the commercial aspect, there is also the issue of wider public credibility. There have been signs of scepticism all along. In a 2009 Gallup poll, a record number of people—41 per cent—elected to say that global warming was an exaggerated threat. This slackening of public support is in sync with a coordinated political movement that is seeking to re-examine the entire issue of global warming from scratch. The movement is led by increasingly vocal Republicans in the US Senate and packs considerable political power. Pachauri’s position is also becoming increasingly untenable with demands for his resignation becoming louder by the day. In an interview to Open, Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute, a noted US think-tank, who has followed the debate for years, says, “Dr Pachauri should resign because he has a consistent record of mixing his political views with climate science, because of his intolerance of legitimate scientific views that he does not agree with, because of his disparagement of India’s glacier scientists as practising ‘voodoo science’, and because of his incomprehension of the serious nature of what was in the East Anglia emails.” Richard North, the professor who brought to light the financial irregularities in a write-up co-authored with Christopher Booker, has also said in a TV interview that, “If Dr Pachauri does not resign voluntarily, he will be forced to do so.”

GLOBAL STORMING AHEAD

The world awaits answers, based not on writings of sundry freelance journalists and non-experts, but on actual verifiable data on whether the globe is warming at all, and if so by how much. Only then can policy options be calibrated. As things stand, there is little doubt that the IPCC will need to be reconstituted with a limited mandate. This mess needs investigation and questions need to be answered as to why absurd claims were taken as gospel truth. The future of everything we know as ‘normal’ depends on this. The real danger is that the general public is now weary of the whole thing, a little tired of the debate, and may not really care for the truth, convenient or otherwise.Source by Ninad D. Sheth

Next up: Greenpeacegate!

Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pauchauri…and now comes Greenpeacegate. We can barely keep up. Every time we think we can rest, another global warming scandal comes up. Hey, not that we’re complaining–it’s all falling apart faster than any of us had dreamed. Let’s just go to Donna Laframboise out of Toronto Canada, the creator of NOconsensus.org, who yesterday broke the story that the IPCC is using the politcal activist group Greenpeace as source for quite a few “facts” in its report; in fact, in at least one case, they were the sole source. She begins:

Considered the climate Bible by governments around the world, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is meant to be a scientific analysis of the most authoritative research. Instead, it references literature generated by Greenpeace – an organization known more for headline-grabbing publicity stunts than sober-minded analysis. (Eight IPCC-cited Greenpeace publications are listed at the bottom of this post.) In one section of this Nobel-winning report, climate change is linked to coral reef degradation. The sole source for this claim? A Greenpeace report titled “Pacific in Peril” (see Hoegh-Guldberg below). Here the report relies on a Greenpeace document to establish the lower-end of an estimate involving solar power plants (Aringhoff). When discussing solar energy elsewhere, the report references two Greenpeace documents in one sentence. Here it uses a Greenpeace paper as its sole means of documenting where the “main wind-energy investments” are located globally (Wind).

[Continue reading her terrific article at her blog…]Source

IPCC “Consensus”—Warning: Use at Your Own Risk

The findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often held up as representing “the consensus of scientists”—a pretty grandiose and presumptuous claim. And one that in recent days, weeks, and months, has been unraveling. So too, therefore, must all of the secondary assessments that are based on the IPCC findings—the most notable of which is the EPA’s Endangerment Finding—that “greenhouse gases taken in combination endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”

Recent events have shown, rather embarrassingly, that the IPCC is not “the” consensus of scientists, but rather the opinions of a few scientists (in some cases as few as one) in various subject areas whose consensus among themselves is then kludged together by the designers of the IPCC final product who a priori know what they want the ultimate outcome to be (that greenhouse gases are leading to dangerous climate change and need to be restricted). So clearly you can see why the EPA (who has a similar objective) would decide to rely on the IPCC findings rather than have to conduct an independent assessment of the science with the same predetermined outcome. Why go through the extra effort to arrive at the same conclusion? The EPA’s official justification for its reliance on the IPCC’s findings is that it has reviewed the IPCC’s “procedures” and found them to be exemplary. Below is a look at some things, recently revealed, that the IPCC “procedures” have produced. These recent revelations indicate that the “procedures” are not infallible and that highly publicized IPCC results are either wrong or unjustified—which has the knock-on effect of rendering the IPCC an unreliable source of information. Unreliable doesn’t mean wrong in all cases, mind you, just that it is hard to know where and when errors are present, and as such, the justification that “the IPCC says so” is no longer sufficient (or acceptable). Himalayan Glaciers The IPCC has actually admitted that, in at least one area, its procedures have failed:

…It has, however, recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938 page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly. The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance. This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report”. We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance.

It turns out, that in this case of Himalayan glaciers (apparently a favored topic of the IPCC head Dr. Rajendra Pachauri for raising funds for a non-profit that he heads), the IPCC’s findings—that the glaciers would largely disappear by the year 2035 (and endanger the water supply for hundreds of millions of people, as well as lead to increased avalanches and mudslides) as a result of anthropogenic global warming—were apparently based on some comments made by one researcher to the press. Those statements were later included in a World Wildlife Fund report that was the source cited by the IPCC. Dr. Pachauri vehemently denied accusations of bad procedures when they were first made, going as far as calling evidence supporting the accusations “voodoo science”. Now, with the IPCC’s admission of its errors, an apology is being sought from Dr. Pauchari becasue of his remarks. The latest scuttlebutt on this issue is that several folks in the IPCC knew of these problems for some time, but that they allowed them to perpetuate anyway and that other attempts to correct them by other IPCC scientists were lost in the mail. This doesn’t speak so highly for the “procedures.” Attribution of Increasing Damages to Rising Temperatures Another issue which has gotten the IPCC’s attention in recent days has been its attribution of increasing weather-related losses to rising temperatures from human activities. In this case, the IPCC decided to issue a statement in which it denied that its “procedures” went astray—despite clear and growing evidence to the contrary. Such a denial in the face of mounting evidence seems like it could do even more harm than actually admitting another goof (but then again, how many major goofs can the IPCC really admit to without having to scrap the whole thing?). The problems contained in the IPCC assessment have been well-documented by a series of posts by Roger Pielke Jr. at his blog (here, here, here, and here). Pielke Jr. builds a pretty convincing case that the IPCC gave short shrift to the body of peer-reviewed literature that concluded that a clear linkage between the rising levels of weather-related damages and rising temperatures was not yet demonstrable. The rapidly growing effect of demographic changes (population, wealth, etc.) overwhelms the influence of the weather and confuses issues of attribution. Yet, somehow, the IPCC’s assessment established that increasing losses were linked to rising temperatures. Pielke Jr. traces this to a “single non-peer reviewed” study “cherrypicked” from a “workshop.” Dr. Pielke Jr. had this to say about the IPCC’s recent statement upholding its findings and its claims that “[i]n writing, reviewing, and editing this section, IPCC procedures were carefully followed to produce the policy-relevant assessment that is the IPCC mandate”:

Carefully followed procedures? Let’s review: (a) The IPCC relied on an unpublished, non-peer reviewed source to produce its top line conclusions in this section, (b) when at least two reviewers complained about this section, the IPCC ignored their complaints and invented a response characterizing my views. (c) When the paper that this section relied on was eventually published it explicitly stated that it could not find a connection between rising temperatures and the costs of disasters.

Pielke Jr. continued:

This press release from the IPCC would have been a fine opportunity to set the scientific and procedural record straight and admit to what are obvious and major errors in content and process. Instead, it has decided to defend the indefensible, which any observer can easily see through. Of course there is no recourse here as the IPCC is unaccountable and there is no formal way to address errors in its report or its errors and misdirection via press release. Not a good showing by the IPCC.

Basically, with regards to this issue, the IPCC “consensus of scientists” isn’t even the consensus of the leading scientists actively studying the topic, but reflects the wishful thinking of one or two chapter authors and, no doubt, the IPCC designers, as well. Medieval Warm Period Many more examples of the IPCC “procedures” can be found courtesy of the Climategate emails. For instance, in Chapter 6, the paleoclimate chapter of the IPCC’s most recent Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), it is the strong sentiment of one of the chapter’s coordinating lead author, Jonathan Overpeck, that he wants to dismiss the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)—a period of relatively high temperatures that occurred about a thousand years ago. If the MWP were found to be as warm as recent conditions, then the possibility that natural processes may play a larger role in recent warming is harder to ignore—thus the need to dismiss it. The task of doing so fell on Keith Briffa, who developed the contents of a special box in IPCC AR4 Chapter 6 that was apart from the main text and which focused on the WMP. Here’s the advice issued to Briffa by Overpeck:

I get the sense that I’m not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature. The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish. So, pls DO try hard to follow up on my advice provided in previous email. No need to go into details on any but the MWP, but good to mention the others in the same dismissive effort.

Briffa attempted to complete his task by presenting a well-chosen collection of data that showed that while some proxy temperature reconstructions did show a warm period about 1,000 years ago, others did not. He concluded that a more complete picture indicated that the higher temperatures during the MWP were “heterogeneous” (regionalized), while the warming of the late 20th century has been “homogeneous” (i.e. much broader in spatial extent)—confirming that current conditions were likely unprecedented during the past 1,300 years. Briffa received congratulations for a job well done by Overpeck:

[A]ttached is Keith’s MWP box w/ my edits. It reads just great – much like a big hammer. Nice job.”

Thus, that conclusion driven by Overpeck’s desires, written by Briffa, perhaps reviewed by the chapter’s other authors (with varying degrees of knowledge about the subject), is now preserved as “the consensus of scientists. But apparently, that consensus isn’t accepted by other leading paleoclimate researchers. In a peer-reviewed article published in 2009 in the journal Climatic Change, paleo-researchers Jan Esper and David Frank carefully re-examined the same proxy temperature reconstructions used by Briffa and came to conclude that the IPCC was unwarranted in declaring that the temperatures during the MWP were more heterogeneous than now. Here is the abstract from that paper:

In their 2007 report, IPCC working group 1 refers to an increased heterogeneity of climate during medieval times about 1000 years ago. This conclusion would be of relevance, as it implies a contrast in the spatial signature and forcing of current warmth to that during the Medieval Warm Period. Our analysis of the data displayed in the IPCC report, however, shows no indication of an increased spread between long-term proxy records. We emphasize the relevance of sample replication issues, and argue that an estimation of long-term spatial homogeneity changes is premature based on the smattering of data currently available.

Summary So here we have multiple examples of the IPCC “procedures” and how “the consensus of scientists” is formed. In one case, the “consensus” was formed from comments made by a single scientist to the press; in another, the IPCC “consensus” conflicts with the consensus of scientists actually active in the topic of concern; and in the third case, the IPCC “consensus” is driven by the desires of one of the coordinating lead authors, and is now disputed by other members of the field. Others examples seem to be coming to the light daily (see here about conclusions regarding future agricultural productivity in Africa, or here about the IPCC pushing preconceived ideas). In light of what we now know, I suggest that from now on, all IPCC products come with the following warning label:

“The findings of the IPCC reports were developed in advance and furthered by a careful selection from whatever material could be found to support them. In some cases, supporting material was developed or fabricated where none could otherwise be located. As such, these findings may not necessarily reflect the true state of scientific understanding. Use at your own risk.”

Source by Chip Knappenberger