Tag: Climategate

Global Warming Hoax Weekly Round-Up, Jan.28th 2010

The IPCC gets a global drubbing for peddling recycled WWF glacier-ganda, Al Gore loves astroturf and there’s more green-on-green action than a superbowl between the Eagles and the Jets. Oh, and Megan Fox is your weekly hottie, so scroll down and get it out of your system now while the links are still fresh.

Part One: Al Gore & Friends

Al Gore is beyond parody. In a post entitled ‘Green Pastors’, Al blogs about ministers that use the environmental agenda to pull in more bums on pews:

“”We actually encourage it as a way to get people into the churches,” said Lee Anne Beres, the executive director of Earth Ministry, a Seattle group founded in 1992 that has guided many area congregations through environmental upgrades over the past decade but has recently emphasized more direct political action for pastors and parishioners. “That is what people are interested in, and I don’t see anything Machiavellian in that.””

Nothing wrong with a bit of inter-faith cooperation, I guess. Al Gore takes a lesson in branding from a diminutive musician from the Twin cities and ‘The Phenomenon Formerly Known as Global Warming’ is born. Maybe next Al will carve ’slave’ onto his cheek too? (satire, as if you didn’t know) How green is my astroturf? Good question Al, good question. Meanwhile, most letters to the editor these days are far more skeptical in tone. That ’settled’ science is looking far more shaky with each revelation from the crooked world of climatology, as this poll shows. Also, for anyone that thought you needed to be smart to be a member of the ‘elite’ the poll provides proof to the contrary. More evidence of this later. Burning books is never a great idea, although some titles are more tempting than others. Enjoy the video, but forgive them their bad English accents, they tried. Bless ‘em. The ignoble Nobel. Klockarman wants it revoked, but that’s against the rules. I know one moonbat who don’t care about rules and revocations: .. The prophet likes the idea of electronics being labeled with information that tells you how quickly your new TV is going to kill a polar bear. Or something. Harry Reid is to most people a vindictive little bureaucrat that long ago exceeded his Peter Principle potential. But to Al, Dingy Harry is a beacon of hope, and, dare I say it… change? Shame that Al’s best Senate buddy looks like he has an expiry date.

Part Two: AGW Scaremongers

Global warming muppet Jim Hansen, not content with representing the US Government’s support for civil disobedience in the UK, is endorsing a book by wannabe eugenecist Keith Farnish that longs for the return of the stone age. You know, instead of trying to pry iPods from our cold, dead hands, isn’t there some fetish camp for these hippies if what they really want to do is drag chicks around by the hair and bash flints together all day long? Sheesh. More here on NASA’s mad scientist. The CRU investigation turns into a thin whitewash job, and while there was law-breaking, they’ll walk on a technicality. Which makes Phil Jones into OJ Simpson, or something. The Mother Nature network rushed to prove that glaciers do still melt, despite the IPCC’s recent embarrassment, but forgets about a basic little something the rest of call ‘winter’ and ’summer’. Doh! Oh noes, global warming causes the Thames’ eel population to crash, threatening a popular east ender delicacy. One local was concerned, “‘cor blimey guv’ner, strike a light. Me luvverly jellied eels are all Father Ted? Now we’re proper Donald Ducked, innit?” Help here. The Royal Society, given a chance to buffer the hapless climate scientists, ducks and passes. Steve McIntyre, the human kryptonite to warmists, notices that one particularly awkward fallout from Glaciergate is that the science behind the EPA’s finding that CO2 is a toxic danger to life on Earth (yeah, I know) might not meet, er, EPA standards for peer-review. Awkward. Donna LaFramboise dug into the glaciergate affair, looking for nefarious work from the WWF. And found it, lots of it. She promises to expose Greenpeace next, which has me rubbing my hands together in anticipation. The green movement has more gates than a place with a lot of gates. Or something. Anyway, say hello to Amazongate. And, no it’s not about a rogue online bookseller. Call the whaaaaambulance, a warmist without the wit to win in a fair debate blames the nasty well-funded vast global-warming skeptic conspiracy. Which reminds me, Big Oil, your check hasn’t arrived yet. Hello? Jennifer Marohasy has a linkilicious page of, er, links and wonders when Pachauri will resign and where is Al Gore. And more. Fun and gates from Jo Nova: Weather hysteric Gwynne dyer sounds about ready to give up. We can dream, right?READ THE REST OVER AT THE DAILY BAYONET!

British government suffers biggest setback since Climategate: Chief Scientist speaks out

Another honest scientist steps forward. Professor John Beddington. Just as we reported yesterday, the anthropogenic global warming theory is fast falling apart at the seams thanks to scientists of integrity bravely standing up to be counted. Earlier today it was Canadian climate scientist Andrew Weaver. On Tuesday, it was Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the man who was once a true insider of the elite, having served as a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead author in 2001 for the Third Assessment Report. Today we can update you with the news that the credibility of the IPCC and Prime Minister Gordon Brown has taken another major blow as Britain’s highest ranked government scientist, Professor John Beddington CMG FRS admits the science for global warming is “uncertain.” Professor Beddington today makes his stand for skeptic principle in the London Times Online:

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

The esteemed professor admitted to the Times that the false claim in the IPCC’s 2007 report that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 had exposed a wider problem with the way that some evidence was presented.

“Certain unqualified statements have been unfortunate. We have a problem in communicating uncertainty. There’s definitely an issue there. If there wasn’t, there wouldn’t be the level of scepticism. All of these predictions have to be caveated by saying, ‘There’s a level of uncertainty about that’.”

There is no one higher in the British Government’s pecking order of scientists than Professor John Beddington. He is the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government and Professor of Applied Population Biology at Imperial College London.Beddington was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. As Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government (CSA) Beddington acts as the personal adviser on science and technology-related activities and policies to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. He has a significant public role as the government’s most visible scientific expert and is a key figure within Britain’s Royal Society. Two years have elapsed since the publication of the IPCC Fourth Report. In that time Britain’s world famous Royal Society has negligently failed to comment on that discredited report. Regular readers will recall that I raised suspicions four days ago that something was seriously amiss within the Royal Society for its omission to state where it stood about the IPCC’s Fourth Report. This will be a story that will fester until the Royal Society follows Professor Beddington’s lead and comes out publicly to stand up for scientific integrity and transparency. Climategate.com heartily welcomes Professor Beddington’s public stand for the noble principles of scientific scepticism and we applaud him as we do all other esteemed scientists who have the courage to speak out publicly for the greater good of science. The honourable professor thinks:

“wherever possible, we should try to ensure there is openness and that source material is available for the whole scientific community”

This is the best news I have heard since the Climategate scandal first broke. It is a positive step forward and gives us all who fight for truth in science real hope that other esteemed Fellows of the Royal Society will have the courage and integrity to follow suit and protect the age old reputation of this great British institution. Sadly, until there is a clear public pronouncement I fear it will be ever more deeply mired in accusations of political toadyism. John O’Sullivan is a legal advocate and writer who for several years has litigated in government corruption and conspiracy cases in both the US and Britain. Visit his website. He offers his services free to the site and is not a site employee. Any opinions he expresses are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the site owner.Source

The billion-dollar hoax

ONCE global warming was the “great moral challenge of our generation”. Or so claimed the Prime Minister. But suddenly it’s the great con that’s falling to bits around Kevin Rudd’s ears. In fact, so fast is global warming theory collapsing that in his flurry of recent speeches to outline his policies for the new decade, Rudd has barely mentioned his “moral challenge” at all. Take his long Australia Day reception speech on Sunday. Rudd talked of our ageing population and of building stuff, of taxes, hospitals and schools – but dared not say one word about the booga booga he used to claim could destroy our economy, Kakadu, the Great Barrier Reef and 750,000 coastal homes. What’s happened? Answer: in just the past few months has come a cascade of evidence that the global warming scare is based on often dodgy science and even outright fraud.

Related Coverage

Here are just the top 10 new signs that catastrophic man-made warming may be just another beat-up, like swine flu, SARS, and the Y2K bug. 1. Climategate THE rot for Rudd started last November with the leaking of emails from the Climatic Research Unit of Britain’s University of East Anglia. Those emails from many of the world’s top climate scientists showed them conspiring to sack sceptical scientists from magazines, hide data from sceptics, and cover up errors. One of the scientists, CRU boss Phil Jones, even boasted of having found a “trick” to “hide the decline” in recent temperature records. Jones was also on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so influential in convincing us our gasses are heating the planet that it won the Nobel Prize. But he showed how political the IPCC actually is by promising in yet another email that he and another colleague would do almost anything to keep sceptical studies out of IPCC reports. Just as damning was the admission by IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth that the world isn’t warming as the IPCC said it must: “We cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” 2. The Copenhagen farce MORE than 40,000 politicians, scientists and activists flew to Copenhagen last month – in clouds of greenhouse gasses – to get all nations to agree to make the rest of us cut our own emissions to “stop” global warming. This circus ended in total failure. China, the world’s biggest emitter, refused to choke its growth. So did India. Now the United States is unlikely to make cuts, either, with Barack Obama’s presidency badly wounded and the economy so sick. Not only did this show that Rudd’s planned tax on our emissions will now be even more suicidally useless. It also suggested world leaders can’t really think global warming is so bad. 3. The Himalayan scare RUDD has quoted the IPCC as his authority on global warming, claiming it’s a group of “guys in white coats” who “just measure things”. But the IPCC also just makes things up. Take this claim from its 2007 report: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.” In fact, we now know this bizarre claim was first made by a little-known Indian scientist in an interview for an online magazine, and then copied into a report by the green group WWF. From there, the IPCC lifted it almost word for word for its own 2007 report, without checking if it was true. It wasn’t, of course, as the IPCC last week conceded. The glaciers will be around for at least centuries more. But why did the IPCC run this mad claim in the first place? The IPCC’s Dr Murari Lal, the co-ordinating lead author responsible, says he knew all along there was no peer-reviewed research to back it up. “(But) we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians … ” Note: you are told not the truth, but what will scare you best. 4. Pachauri’s response BUT what smells just as much is how IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, a former railway engineer, first tried to defend this “mistake” by accusing sceptical scientists of practising “voodoo science”. Deny and abuse. That’s the IPCC way. Even more suspiciously, Syed Hasnain, the scientist who first made the false claim, then turned out to be now employed by The Energy Research Institute, headed by … er, Pachauri. More astonishing still, only two weeks ago TERI won up to $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation to study exactly Hasnain’s bogus claim. See how cash follows a good scare? 5. Pachauri’s conflicts IN fact, Pachauri and TERI do amazingly well from his IPCC job. Britain’s Sunday Telegraph this month revealed TERI had created a global business network since Pachauri became IPCC chairman in 2002. Its recent donors include Deutsche Bank, Toyota, Yale University – and, sadly, Rudd, who last year handed over $1 million, hoping to win influence with such a big UN honcho. Pachauri himself is now a director or adviser to a score of banks, investment institutions and carbon traders, many involved in areas directly affected by IPCC policies. He denies any wrongdoing, and is not paid by the IPCC. But see again how cash follows a scare, and ask if the IPCC chief has a conflict of interest. 6. The green hand revealed WE’VE seen how the IPCC just copied its false claims about the Himalayas from a report by WWF, a green activist group which earn donations by preaching such doom. In fact, the IPCC’s 2007 report cites WWF documents as “evidence” at least another 15 times. Elsewhere it cites a non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed paper from another activist body, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, as its sole proof that global warming could devastate African agriculture. Whose agenda is the IPCC pushing? 7. More fake IPCC claims THIS week came more evidence that the IPCC sexed up its 2007 report, this time when it claimed the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”, thanks to global warming. In fact, the claim was picked out of an unpublished report by a London risk consultant, who later changed his mind and said “the idea that catastrophes are rising in cost because of climate change is completely misleading”. 8. New research on our gasses AT least four new papers by top scientists cast doubt on the IPCC claim that our carbon dioxide emissions are strongly linked to global warming. One, published in Nature, shows the world had ice age activity even when atmospheric CO2 was four times the level of our pre-industrial times. Another, by NASA medallist John Christy and David Douglass, shows global temperatures did not go up as much as expected from man-made emissions over the past three decades. 9. New Australian research JAMES Cook University researcher Peter Ridd says Australian scientists have cried wolf over the threat to the Great Barrier Reef from global warming, and the reef was actually in “bloody brilliant shape”. The alarmist CSIRO this month also backed away from blaming global warming for a drought in Tasmania and in the Murray-Darling basin, saying “the jury is still out”. A new paper by another Australian academic, Assoc Prof Stewart Franks, says the Murray-Darling drought is natural, and has nothing to do with man-made warming. 10. The world still won’t warm AND still the world hasn’t warmed since 2001, even though we pump out more emissions than ever. Even professional alarmist Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers, admits “we haven’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend” and “the computer modelling and the real world data disagree”. And with Europe, the United States and China hit with record cold and snow this winter, no wonder Kevin Rudd has suddenly gone cold on global warming, the mad faith that has cost us so many futile billions already.Source by Andrew Bolt

The Intergovernmental Perjury over Climate Catastrophe (ctd)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is seeing its reputation disappear faster than a fish down a polar bear’s gullet. Christopher Booker reports in the Sunday Telegraph that, following the IPCC’s grovelling admission that its 2007 statement that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis and that its inclusion in the report reflected a ‘poor application’ of IPCC procedures, more has come to light about the bogus ‘research’ on which the IPCC based this claim – which came from a report in New Scientist which was in turn merely drawn from a phone interview with a little-known Indian scientist, and that scientist’s links with the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri:

…the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is director-general. Furthermore, the claim – now disowned by Dr Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC – has helped TERI to win a substantial share of a $500,000 grant from one of America’s leading charities, along with a share in a three million euro research study funded by the EU. At the same time, Dr Pachauri has personally been drawn into a major row with the Indian government, previously among his leading supporters, after he described as ‘voodoo science’ an official report by the country’s leading glaciologist, Dr Vijay Raina, which dismissed Dr Hasnain’s claims as baseless. Now that the IPCC has disowned the prediction made by his employee, Dr Pachauri has been castigated by India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, and called on by Dr Raina to apologise for his ‘voodoo science’ charge. At a stormy Delhi press conference on Thursday, Dr Pachauri was asked whether he intended to resign as chairman of the IPCC – on whose behalf he collected a Nobel Peace Prize two years ago, alongside Al Gore – but he refused to answer questions on this fast-escalating row.

Meanwhile, in the Mail on Sunday David Rose reveals that the co-ordinating lead author of the IPCC report chapter which contained this falsehood about the vanishing Himalayan glaciers, Dr Murari Lal, has admitted that he was well aware that this statement was not backed up by peer-reviewed research but included it anyway purely to put political pressure on world leaders. He said:

It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.

The fact that it was totally untrue appears to have been irrelevant. Also yesterday, the Sunday Times revealed yet another false claim by the IPCC which has now bitten the dust. This was the claim that man-made global warming was linked to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods:

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny – and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough. The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions. Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods – such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 – could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: ‘More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.’ Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen ‘must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm’.

This claim was exploded in a 2006 study by disaster impact expert Robin Muir-Wood, who found that the link between man-made global warming and increases in climatic storms didn’t stand up. The IPCC actually incorporated part of his study into its own report – but quoted it selectively to produce the opposite conclusion. The IPCC also failed to reveal in advance of the Copenhagen summit that the non-peer reviewed paper on which its claim of the link had been based had issued a caveat when it was finally published in 2008, which stated:

We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.

Such selectivity and distortion by the IPCC challenge the excuse for its behaviour now being trotted out that errors are bound to creep into such a voluminous body of work from time to time. These are not errors made in good faith. These are falsehoods resulting from a mindset which ruthlessly makes use of any claims that back up AGW theory – with any frailties or contradictions in the evidence deliberately concealed. The Global Warming Policy Foundation reports that the suggestion that the Himalayan glaciers falsehood was an uncharacteristic mistake is not borne out by the evidence, which reveals that doubts and questions are routinely ignored in the IPCC’s review process. But of course. Facts cannot be allowed to get in the way of the theory. Thus the IPCC, the ‘scientific’ body whose apocalyptic predictions of planetary doom have driven the politics of the entire western world off the rails. Who can possibly take this body — or anyone who has supported it and promoted its falsehoods as unchallengeable truths — seriously ever again?Source by Melanie Phillips

The fastest ever collapse of any modern political movement

The latest links from Climate Depot via Marc Morano:
Flashback 2008: Scientist: ‘Global warming’ is sub-prime science, sub-prime economics, and sub-prime politics, and it could well go down with the sub-prime mortgage’ Paper: UN climate chief Pachauri used ‘bogus’ climate claims ‘to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds’ UN IPCC Exposed: ‘Dozens’ of instances where WWF reports have been cited as the sole authority for contentious claims, including one about coastal developments in Latin America’ Obama must call out the UN IPCC to keep his inaugural pledge to ‘restore science to its rightful place’ Australian Herald Sun: ‘Could the Nobel Prize be withdrawn’ from UN IPCC? ‘Al Gore needs to be leading this charge (for Pachauri’s resignation) in the US. Where is he, and why is he silent?’ Na na na hey hey hey goodbye! Pew Survey: Global warming ranks dead last as concern for Americans — 21 out of 21 – ‘Global warming ranks at the bottom of the public’s list of priorities; just 28% consider this a top priority, the lowest measure for any issue tested in the survey’ ‘Pachauri must resign’ Calls for Pachauri to resign: ‘His position is becoming more and more untenable by the day…UN IPCC ‘will continue to leach credibility while he remains in charge’ Flashback 2006: Morano Debates Pachauri at UN Conference in Kenya — Calls UN an ‘echo chamber’ where ‘dissent was being suppressed and demonized’ Houston Chronicle Credits Climate Depot with Warming Movements Collapse!: Morano debating Scientists is ‘just a wipeout’ — ‘It’s an NFL team playing a high school team’ UN Climate Con is Ending! Shock Revelation: UN scientist admits fake data was used in IPCC report ‘purely to put political pressure on world leaders’ – UN IPCC Scientist: Phony glacier claim designed to ‘impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action’ – UK Mail – Jan. 24, 2009 UK Guardian: Global Warming Bubble Bursts: ‘Banks are pulling out of the carbon-offsetting market’ Flashback: 2009: Paper: ‘Don’t let Climategate melt down your portfolio…don’t get stuck with investments tied to global warming’ Flashback 2009: Carbon Bubble Fears! Asian Development Bank warns failure to ‘reach climate deal could lead to a collapse of carbon market’ ‘And now for UN’s Amazongate’: ‘Made false predictions’ on Amazon rainforest, referenced non-peer-reviewed paper produced by WWF Paging George Orwell: Stern Review ‘mysteriously changed’ – Prof. Pielke, Jr.: ‘As much as 40% of the Stern Review projections for the global costs of unmitigated climate change derive from its misuse of (extreme weather paper)’ The IPCC scandal: the African data was sexed up, too China surprises summit — Declares it has ‘open mind’ about global warming: ‘Alternative view that climate change is caused by cyclical trends in nature’ Global Warming ‘is rapidly morphing into the greatest scandal in the history of science since the belief in a flat earth’

Via email

UK Parliament to investigate Climategate

For those of you following the Climategate scandal (and if you haven’t bought our book on the subject yet, you can do so by clicking here: Climategate: The CRUtape Letters), this may be of some interest. The Select Committee on Science and Technology will be investigating Climategate. They have three areas of focus, as explained below. What implications does the scandal have for the integrity of scientific research, is the previously announced review likely to be adequate and most importantly, how independent are the other two international data sets? Unlike many UK investigations, this one might be fruitful, as it is not looking for someone to blame–it’s looking for ways of fixing a system. They are inviting your submissions. See below for details. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE
Select Committee Announcement

22 January 2010

NEW INQUIRY

THE DISCLOSURE OF CLIMATE DATA FROM THE CLIMATIC RESEARCH UNIT AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

The Science and Technology Committee today announces an inquiry into the
unauthorised publication of data, emails and documents relating to the
work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East
Anglia (UEA). The Committee has agreed to examine and invite written
submissions on three questions:
– What are the implications of the disclosures for the
integrity of scientific research?
– Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent
Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate (see below)?
– How independent are the other two international data
sets? (footnote 1)

The Committee intends to hold an oral evidence session in March 2010.

Background

On 1 December 2009 Phil Willis, Chairman of the Science and Technology
Committee, wrote to Professor Edward Acton, Vice-Chancellor of UEA
following the considerable press coverage of the data, emails and
documents relating to the work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The
coverage alleged that data may have been manipulated or deleted in order
to produce evidence on global warming. On 3 December the UEA announced
an Independent Review into the allegations to be headed by Sir Muir
Russell.

The Independent Review will:

1. Examine the hacked e-mail exchanges, other relevant e-mail exchanges
and any other information held at CRU to determine whether there is any
evidence of the manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds
with acceptable scientific practice and may therefore call into question
any of the research outcomes.

2. Review CRU’s policies and practices for acquiring, assembling,
subjecting to peer review and disseminating data and research findings,
and their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice.

3. Review CRU’s compliance or otherwise with the University’s policies
and practices regarding requests under the Freedom of Information Act
(‘the FOIA’) and the Environmental Information Regulations (‘the EIR’)
for the release of data.

4. Review and make recommendations as to the appropriate management,
governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity
and release of the data it holds. (footnote 2)

Submissions

The Committee invites written submissions from interested parties on the
three questions set out above by noon on Wednesday 10 February:

Each submission should:
a) be no more than 3,000 words in length
b) be in Word format (no later than 2003) with as little use of
colour or logos as possible
c) have numbered paragraphs
d) include a declaration of interests.

A copy of the submission should be sent by e-mail to
scitechcom@parliament.uk and marked “Climatic Research Unit”. An
additional paper copy should be sent to:

The Clerk
Science and Technology Committee House of Commons
7 Millbank
London SW1P 3JA

It would be helpful, for Data Protection purposes, if individuals
submitting written evidence send their contact details separately in a
covering letter. You should be aware that there may be circumstances in
which the House of Commons will be required to communicate information
to third parties on request, in order to comply with its obligations
under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.Source by Thomas Fuller

As Global Warming Movement Collapses, Activists Already 'Test-Marketing' the Next Eco-Fear

By Marc Morano

Climate Depot Editorial As the man-made global warming fear movement collapses and the climate establishment lay in a Climategate ridden tatters, many are asking what next? (For latest on climate movement’s demise go to www.ClimateDepot.com)
As man-made global warming fears enter the ashbin of history, what will environmentalists, UN activists and politicians do to fill the void of a failed eco-scare?
Well, wonder no more….
Some forward thinking green activists and even the UN climate Chief have already taken up the task of test-marketing the next eco-scares to replace man-made global warming.
 One of the most prominent eco-scares now being quietly promoted behind man-made climate fears is the allegedly “growing” nitrous oxide (a.k.a. “laughing gas”) threat to the planet. See: Time for next eco-scare already?! ‘Earth’s growing nitrogen threat’: ‘It helps feed a hungry world, but it’s worse than CO2’The Christian Science Monitor – January 12, 2010 – Excerpt: Nitrous oxide is nearly 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide – considered the leading cause of climate change – and the third most threatening greenhouse gas overall. As man-made climate fears subside and the scientific, economic, cultural and political case evaporates for climate change “action,” expect more and more green activists to take up the mantle for “laughing gas” as a possible replacement eco-scare.
See also: Laughing Gas Knocks Out CO2 – By Doug Hoffman – Oct. 30, 2009 – Excerpt: “In the face of ever mounting evidence that CO2 is incapable of causing the level of global devastation prophesied by climate change catastrophists a new villain is being sought. The leading candidate is nitrous oxide (N2O), better known as laughing gas. A report in Science claims that N2O emissions are currently the single most important cause of ozone depletion and are expected to remain so throughout the 21st century. The IPCC rates N2O as 310 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 on a 100 year time scale. Is this a greenhouse gas bait and switch, or are the global warming alarmists trying to up the ante.”
Still can’t picture former Vice President Al Gore touting the “laughing gas” crisis as the “moral” challenge of our time in a Oscar-winning documentary? Not to worry, there are many more eco-scares currently being test-marketed.
Gore’s own producer of “An Inconvenient Truth” — Hollywood eco-activist Laurie David — is already test-marketing another eco-scare with potential promise.
“One Word: Plastics.” Yes, just 43 years after the 1967 film “The Graduate”, “plastics” just may be the future! See: AGW RIP? Is It Time for Next Eco-Scare Already? Gore’s producer Laure David touts plastic crisis: ‘Plastic waste is in some ways more alarming for us humans than global warming’ – July 31, 2009
 “The rapid rise in global plastic production is leading to a rise in plastic pollution and its devastating effects on our oceans and our lives.,” Laurie David wrote on July 31, 2009. Selected Excerpts From David’s blog post: “This insidious invasion of the biosphere by our plastic waste is in some ways more alarming for us humans than global warming. Our bodies have evolved to handle carbon dioxide, the nemesis of global warming, indeed, we exhale it with every breath. Plastic, though present in the biosphere from the nano scale on up, is too stable a molecule for any organism to fully assimilate or biodegrade. So we have a situation in which a vector for a suite of devastating chemicals, chemicals implicated in many modern diseases, is now invading the ocean, our bodies and indeed, the entire biosphere. The prognosis for improvement in this situation is grim.”
Still not convinced of either “laughing gas” or “plastics” as the next dominant eco-scare? Don’t worry, we are just getting started. Just how widespread is the test marketing of a new eco-scare to replace the flailing global warming movement? It now has the attention of the beleaguered head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra Pachauri.
In a remarkable posting on his personal blog, Pachauri openly admitted that man-made global warming was not even the biggest eco-issue! See: Et tu? Head of UN IPCC Pachauri Now throwing global warming under the bus?! There is a ‘larger problem’ than climate fears?! – November 23, 2009
 Pachauri wrote on November 23, 2009: “The question is whether the additional time that the world would now have to arrive at an agreement at the next Conference of the Parties in Mexico will give us time and space to look at the larger problem of unsustainable development, of which climate change is at best a symptom. Human society cannot continue to ignore the vital dependence that exists between human welfare and the health of our natural resources.” The UK Green Party and a UN advisor are already concocting yet another potential new eco-scare that may be an easy transition from failed global warming fears. See: UK Green Party: ‘There exists a more serious crisis than the ‘CO2 crisis’: the oxygen levels are dropping and the human activity has decreased them by 1/3 or ½ – By Peter Tatchell of the UK Green party – UK Guardian – August 13, 2008
 Excerpt: “In the view of Professor Ervin Laszlo, the drop in atmospheric oxygen has potentially serious consequences. A UN advisor who has been a professor of philosophy and systems sciences, Laszlo writes: Evidence from prehistoric times indicates that the oxygen content of pristine nature was above the 21% of total volume that it is today. It has decreased in recent times due mainly to the burning of coal in the middle of the last century. Currently the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere dips to 19% over impacted areas, and it is down to 12 to 17% over the major cities. At these levels it is difficult for people to get sufficient oxygen to maintain bodily health: it takes a proper intake of oxygen to keep body cells and organs, and the entire immune system, functioning at full efficiency. At the levels we have reached today cancers and other degenerative diseases are likely to develop. And at 6 to 7% life can no longer be sustained.”
Wow. Imagine scaring school children with suffocation due to our modern way of life! Documentaries, text books and Hollywood could really instill fear in the kids and adults with scary predictions of Mom and Dad choking to death due to a lack of oxygen created by evil modern society. Mom and Dad turning blue and suffering fatal convulsions sure beats the emotional imagery of a Polar Bear drowning or a building be flooded to due to rising seas. Keep your eye on this one, it just may get some traction.

Ok. Let’s assume now that one of the above or yet another not ready for prime time eco-fear catches on, how would the environmental activists go about selling this eco-scare to the public?
For an answer, let’s review a few of the failed eco-alarms of the past 40 years.
The Global Cooling Scare of 1970’s offers vital clues about how the “search-and-replace” tactics are utilized by eco-fear promoters. See: 1974 CIA report on Global Cooling: ‘Embarrassing reading’: ‘All AGW scares are a search-and-replace job from ‘cooling’ to ‘warming’ – Dec. 3, 2009 & Climate Depot’s Factsheet on 1970s Coming ‘Ice Age’ Claims – Oct. 6, 2009
 Ever wonder how Gore and the UN would hype a “tipping point” for various new eco-scares? Newsweek Magazine first used the climate “tipping point” argument in 1975 to urge action to prevent man-made global cooling. Newsweek wrote April 28, 1975 article: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”
Yes, quite literally “a search-and-replace job from cooling to warming.” Also See: Not again! Another 10-year climate ‘tipping point’ warning issued — Despite fact that UN began 10-Year ‘Climate Tipping Point’ in 1989! Climate Depot Factsheet on Inconvenient History of Global Warming ‘Tipping Points’ — Earth ‘Serially Doomed’ – Nov. 15, 2009
 Overpopulation Fears Overpopulation fears have jumped all over the place in recent years. See: Grist Mag. Going Down: Is too few people the new ‘population problem?’ – December 14, 2005 and Could Overpopulation Save The Earth From Global Warming? June 15, 2009. Overpopulation fears can be played any which way advocates would like. Even the guru of overpopulation fears eventually admitted his silliness. See: An Admission finally! ‘The Population Bomb’s’ Paul Ehrlich: ‘I wish I’d taken more math in high school and college. That would have been useful’ – ‘If he were writing ‘The Population Bomb’ now, he’d be more careful about predictions’ – Oct. 8, 2009 – Also see: Climate Depot’s Overpopulation factsheet – August 21, 2009
 Amazon Rainforest Scare The allegedly disappearing rainforest scare was the environmental issue du jour in the 1980’s and 1990’s, long before climate fears took center stage. In fact, In 2000, Climate Depot’s Executive Editor Marc Morano was producer and correspondent for a documentary debunking the myths about the rainforests. Morano’s “Amazon Rainforest: Clear-Cutting the Myths” was greeted with massive controversy. But, just nine years later, the rainforest scare was kaput.

See: Jan. 30, 2009: New York Times: ‘Galloping jungle’: Farmlands revert back to nature as saving the rainforests becomes ‘less urgent’ – ‘For every acre of rainforest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing’
NYT Excerpt: Here, and in other tropical countries around the world, small holdings like Ms. Ortega de Wing’s – and much larger swaths of farmland – are reverting back to nature, as people abandon their land and move to the cities in search of better livings. These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest – an iconic environmental cause – may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster. “There is far more forest here than there was 30 years ago,” said Ms. Ortega de Wing, 64, who remembers fields of mango trees and banana plants.
Also see: ‘Save the trees’ more political myth than environmental truth – Jan. 2009
 Old eco-scares don’t die, they just fade away. The failed rainforest scare inspired this 2009 satire of the death of global warming movement. Spoof: NYT in 2019: Scientists Now Say Global Warming Fears Fading Away – Claim There Never Was Warming Consensus – By Marc Morano
 Other eco-scares that did not pan out include the 1970 and 8190’s baseless scares about resource scarcity and predictions of famine. (Excerpt: The ultimate embarrassment for the Malthusians was when Paul Ehrlich bet Julian Simon $1,000 in 1980 that five resources (of Ehrlich’s choosing) would be more expensive in 10 years. Ehrlich lost: 10 years later every one of the resources had declined in price by an average of 40 percent.) Plus other eco-scares like “ocean acidification” and others too numerous to mention.
It will be a compelling battle to try and replace the mother of all eco-scares — man-made global warming — but Climate Depot is confident that one of these test-marketed new eco-issues will catch on and you may soon see massive denials from environmentalists and UN officials that claims of a man-made global warming crisis never really existed (echoing the claims that there was no widespread concern about global cooling in the 1970’s) See: Spoof: NYT in 2019: Scientists Now Say Global Warming Fears Fading Away – Claim There Never Was Warming Consensus – By Marc Morano
 Already we have some of the most insulting attempts to shift the focus away from the “warming” aspect of “global warming.”

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) — in true “Climate Astrology” fashion — dismissed the lack of global warming on March 4, 2009 by declaring: “Climate change is not just about temperatures going up. It’s also about volatility.”
Not to be outdone, Sen. Stabenow followed up her climate analysis with this claim about touchy-feely warming: “Global warming creates volatility and I feel it when I’m flying. The storms are more volatile,” Sen. Stabenow explained in August 11, 2009.
No wonder, climate fear promoters are now openly demanding exaggeration and wishing for death and destruction to convince the public of man-made climate fears. “You have to find ways to exaggerate the threat,” Nobel-Prize Winning Economist Thomas Schelling said in a July 14, 2009 interview with The Atlantic.
Lest there be any doubt that desperation time has set in for the promoters of man-made climate fears, Schelling removed it.

Schelling continued: “I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening — you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth — that would get people very concerned about climate change.”

Let’s get this straight. A prominent promoter of man-made global warming is now openly wishing for death and destruction of Americans in order to convince them that man-made global warming is a threat? Climate Depot encourages Schelling and Sen. Stabenow to continue their utter climate silliness. Quite simply, alarmism leads to skepticism. No wonder more ‘More Americans believe in haunted houses than man-made global warming’.

In the end, science rules the day.
Related Links: Climategate Prompts UN scientists turn on each other – Nov. 27, 2009) Oct 2009: Losing Their Religion: 2009 officially declared year the media lost their faith in man-made global warming fears

Via email

GLACIERGATE: The disintegration of the IPCC


By Will AlexanderI was in the process of packing my bags for home when there was another explosion on the Internet. The IPCC’s claim that climate change will result in massive melting of the Himalayan glaciers is false. This was disclosed in the UK Sunday Times and rapidly spread to other newspapers and the Internet. The Australian carried a headline article yesterday (Monday) and a full page plus two other articles in this morning’s edition.

This claim is the centrepiece of the IPCC assessment reports as well as Al Gore’s documentary An inconvenient truth.

The IPCC has repeatedly maintained that its conclusions are based on peer-reviewed papers in recognized scientific journals. It has now been disclosed that this claim never passed through the peer-review process.

The following is my summary of the sequence of events derived from media reports of the past two days.

1996. A member of the Russian Academy of Sciences predicted significant Himalayan glacier melting by 2350. Somewhere along the line this was fraudulently transformed to 2035.

1999. An Indian glaciologist Sayed Hasnain speculated in a short telephone interview with the New Scientist that all the glaciers in the central and western Himalayas could soon start disappearing. He did not mention the year of 2035 in his interview.

2005. The environmental group WWF published a report in which it described the New Scientist report as disturbing.

2007. The IPCC published its fourth assessment report. One of the report’s central claims was that the world’s glaciers are melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. It sourced this prediction to the WWF report.

2009. The Indian government reported that there was no substance in claims of large scale melting of the glaciers. The chairman of the IPCC described his government’s report as voodoo science. He has since been widely criticised for his statement.

2010. Hasnain revealed in an interview with the New Scientist that he had never repeated the prediction in a peer-reviewed journal as it was speculative.

There has been no official response to this issue by the IPCC. It cannot afford to remain silent, particularly after the Climategate exposures and the failure of the Copenhagen discussions.

News headlines

When the Climategate scandal broke, the public had difficulty in appreciating its significance. However, Himalayan glaciers like polar bears are readily appreciated. Can the IPCC survive yet another challenge to its scientific honesty and integrity?

The following are some headlines during the past two days.

IPCC IN TROUBLE OVER FALSE CLAIM.

IPCC MISLED WORLD OVER HIMALAYAN GLACIER MELT DOWN.

CLIMATE SCIENCE ON THIN ICE.

GLACIERGATE COULD NOT HAVE COME AT A WORSE TIME FOR THE UNITED NATIONS PEAK BODY ON CLIMATE.

UNITED NATIONS BLUNDER ON GLACIERS EXPOSED.

MELTING CLAIM BASED ON SPECULATION.

UNITED NATIONS GLACIER BLUNDER A 300-YEAR MIX-UP.

UK Sunday Times article

The following is the original exposure in the UK Sunday Times as reported in CCNet of 18 January.

(1) IPCC MISLED WORLD OVER HIMALAYAN GLACIER MELTDOWN
The Sunday Times January 17, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece
Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings

A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. (My emphasis.) The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

The IPCC’s reliance on Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: “Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.

“Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole massif.”

The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with the New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

The report read: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: “Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.

Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public.

The lead role in that process was played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC’s finding.

He traced the IPCC claim back to the New Scientist and then contacted Pearce. Pearce then re-interviewed Hasnain, who confirmed that his 1999 comments had been “speculative”, and published the update in the New Scientist.

Cogley said: “The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”

Pearce said the IPCC’s reliance on the WWF was “immensely lazy” and the organisation need to explain itself or back up its prediction with another scientific source. Hasnain could not be reached for comment.

The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific consensus over climate change. It follows the so-called climategate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried to prevent other researchers from accessing key date. Last week another row broke out when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were likely to rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely.

Copyright 2010, TST

Cease fire

I have received instructions to call it a day and get on with packing my bags.

Via email

Climategate goes American: NOAA, GISS and the mystery of the vanishing weather stations

For those who haven’t seen it, here’s a link to US weatherman John Coleman’s magisterial demolition of the Great AGW Scam. I particularly recommend part 4 because that’s the one with all the meat. It shows how temperature readings have been manipulated at the two key climate data centres in the United States – the NASA Goddard Science and Space Institute at Columbia University in New York and the NOAA National Climate Data Center in Ashville, North Carolina. (Hat tip: Platosays) This is a scandal to rank with Climategate. What it shows is that, just like in Britain at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) temperature data records have been grotesquely distorted by activist scientists in order to exaggerate the appearance of late 20th century global warming. They achieved this – with an insouciant disregard for scientific integrity which quite beggars belief – through the simple expedient of ignoring most of those weather station sited in higher, colder places and using mainly ones in warmer spots. Then, they averaged out the temperature readings given by the warmer stations to give a global average. Et voila: exactly the scary “climate change” they needed to persuade bodies like the IPCC that AGW was a clear and present danger requiring urgent pan-governmental action. The man who spotted all this is a computer programmer called EM Smith – aka the Chiefio. You can read the full report at his excellent blog. In the 70s, the Chiefio discovered, GISS and NOAA took their temperature data from 6,000 weather stations around the world. By 1990, though, this figure had mysteriously dropped to 1500. Even more mysteriously this 75 per cent reduction in the number of stations used had a clear bias against those at higher latitudes and elevations. Here’s an excellent example of this: Bolivia.

Notice that nice rosy red over the top of Bolivia? Bolivia is that country near, but not on, the coast just about half way up the Pacific Ocean side. It has a patch of high cold Andes Mountains where most of the population live.

One Small Problem with the anomally map. There has not been any thermometer data for Bolivia in GHCN since 1990. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Nothing. Empty Set. So just how can it be so Hot Hot Hot! in Bolivia if there is NO data from the last 20 years? Easy. GIStemp “makes it up” from “nearby” thermometers up to 1200 km away. So what is within 1200 km of Bolivia? The beaches of Chili, Peru and the Amazon Jungle. Not exactly the same as snow capped peaks and high cold desert, but hey, you gotta make do with what you have, you know?

Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo has also been on the case. You can find a link to his superb analysis of the scandal at Watts Up With That. (Sorry: I would give you a more direct link to his pdf file but I can’t work out how to do it)

In Canada the number of stations dropped from 600 to 35 in 2009. The percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet) tripled and those at higher elevations above 3000 feet were reduced in half. Canada’s semi-permanent depicted warmth comes from interpolating from more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as a pure average of the available stations shows a COOLING. Just 1 thermometer remains for everything north of latitude 65N – that station is Eureka. Eureka according to Wikipedia has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” .

You know what this means, don’t you? It means the ragbag of eco-loons, politicians and technocrats pushing AGW can no longer plausibly deploy their main excuse about Climategate – that it was all a little local difficulty of no great importance because the HadCrut temperature data sets were independently confirmed by those at GISS and NOAA. What this story demonstrates, as many of us suspected all along, is that not just the British temperature records but those in the US too have been hijacked by political activists. I need hardly say that this breaking scandal has been almost completely ignored by the MSM. Not unpredictably, the director of one of the two institutions implicated in this – Dr James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies – has issued a (very carefully worded – which makes you wonder what he’s not telling us) denial of any skullduggery.

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis.”

The idea that a man of Dr Hansen’s radical persuasion should be running an organisation as important as GISS is looking increasingly absurd. To get an idea how absurd, think Tony Benn in charge of Britain’s defence policy, or – let’s get really weird – imagine if Ed Balls were in charge of Education or Gordon Brown were running the country. More on Hansen’s activist sympathies in another blog.Source by James Delingpole