The NY Times calls two major national newspapers in the UK, "right-leaning"? What does this say about the NY times then? Communist-leaning?
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NY Times

U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: February 8, 2010

Just over two years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri seemed destined for a scientist’s version of sainthood: A vegetarian economist-engineer who leads the United Nations’ climate change panel, he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the panel, sharing the honor with former Vice President Al Gore...

The accusations of errors in the panel’s report — most originating from two right-leaning British papers, The Sunday Telegraph and The Times of London — have sullied the group’s reputation. They follow a controversy that erupted late last year over e-mail messages and documents released without authorization from a climate research center in Britain.

In one case, the report included a sentence that said the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. The sentence was based on a decade-old interview with a glaciologist in a popular magazine; the scientist now says he was misquoted. The panel recently expressed “regret” for the error.

The panel was also criticized for citing a study about financial losses after extreme weather events that found an increase in such losses of 2 percent a year from 1970 to 2005. That study had not been peer reviewed at the time, although it was later on.

The panel has called the complaint “baseless,” noting that the study was cited appropriately and that other scientific data pointed to a recent rise in severe storms.

Lord Monckton said the incidents reflected a pattern of willful misrepresentation by scientists with financial and professional interests that render them unsuitable to give neutral advice.

In response to the recent criticisms, Dr. Pachauri provided an accounting of some of his outside consulting fees paid to the Energy and Resources Institute. Those include about $140,000 from Deutsche Bank, $25,000 from Credit Suisse, $80,000 from Toyota and $48,750 from Yale. He has recently begun work as a strategic adviser for Pegasus, the investment firm, but has not yet attended a meeting, and no money has yet been paid to the Energy and Resources Institute. He has also provided advice free of charge to groups like the Chicago Climate Exchange.

The energy institute has financial interests in a number of companies. For example, it was awarded stock by the founders of GloriOil, a start-up based in Houston, in exchange for permission to use a method developed at the institute to extract residual oil from older wells.

“We thought about it long and hard, and decided to get involved in this because the U.S. has the largest number of these wells and it is better than drilling offshore or in Alaska,” Dr. Pachauri said.

The institute also provides paid consulting. For example, engineers at the institute are designing two Indian solar parks for the Clinton Climate Initiative. Dr. Pachauri added that research institutes in poorer countries like India could not depend on government largess, as those in the United States did. The institute gets its money from a variety of sources, including the European Union, foundations and private companies.

“We have to generate our own resources from our work,” he said. “This is an institute that has pulled itself up by its bootstraps.”

But even some academics who accept that climate change is a problem are concerned about such activities.

“This is not about whether this is a good person or a good cause; it’s about the integrity of the scientific process,” Dr. Pielke said, adding: “This has become so polarized, it’s like you must be in cahoots with the bad guys if you are at all negative about Pachauri.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02...
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Daily Telegraph

The Royal Society: The unstoppable spirit of inquiry

On the eve of the Telegraph's annual 'Scientists Meet the Media' party, hosted by the Royal Society, its president, Martin Rees, celebrates 350 years of one of our greatest institutions.

By Professor Martin Rees
09 Feb 2010

...As part of our 350th anniversary celebrations the Royal Society asked its fellowship what they saw as the most important questions facing us in the years ahead. We are holding discussion meetings on the "top 10" during the year. We discussed, last month, the prospects of extra-terrestrial life and what its detection might mean for science and society. Other issues include stem cell biology, the science of ageing, new vaccines, climate change and biological diversity. Whatever breakthroughs are in store, we can be sure of one thing: there will be a widening gulf between what science enables us to do, and what it's prudent or ethical actually to do. In respect of (for instance) human reproductive cloning, genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology and robotics, regulation will be called for, on ethical as well as prudential grounds.

The way science is applied is a matter not just for scientists. All citizens need to address questions such as: is the world really getting warmer, and why? Should we build nuclear power stations? Should the law allow "designer babies"? Public decisions should be made, after the widest possible discussion, in the light of the best scientific evidence available. That is one of the key roles of the society. Whether it is the work of our Science Policy Centre, our journals, our discussion meetings, our work in education or our public events, we must be at the heart of helping policy makers and citizens make informed decisions.

But science isn't dogma. Its assertions are sometimes tentative, sometimes compelling; noisy controversy doesn't always connote balanced arguments; risks are never absolutely zero, even if they are hugely outweighed by potential benefits.

In promoting an informed debate, the media are crucial. When reporting a scientific controversy, the aim should be neither to exaggerate risks and uncertainties, nor to gloss over them: this is indeed a challenge, especially when institutional, political or commercial pressures distort the debate....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sci...
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Earlier springs could destroy delicate balance of UK wildlife, study shows

Global warming could be changing seasonal timing with profound consequences, according to analysis of 726 species of plants and animals

David Adam, environment correspondent
The Guardian, Tuesday 9 February 2010

As snow flurries continued to cause disruption across the country today, spring may feel further away than ever. But recent winters have been ending earlier than ever before, according to a new assessment of Britain's wildlife that reveals global warming could be disrupting the delicate balance of nature.

The analysis confirms that spring and summer are occurring earlier, but also shows that this trend appears to be accelerating. The shift could pose problems for animals, birds and fish that rely on springtime flowering of plants to supply food for their young.

Stephen Thackeray, a biologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster, who co-led the research said: "This is about the desynchronisation of events during the year. Animals and birds time their reproduction to coincide with periods when there will be an abundance of food. If changes mean there is not enough food available then this could have negative consequences for their offspring."

The new study compiled 25,000 records of springtime trends for 726 species of plants, animals, plankton, insects, amphibians, birds and fish across land, sea and freshwater habitats. It analysed them for changes in the timing of lifecycle events, such as egg laying, first flights and flowering, a science known as phenology.

The results showed that more than 80% of trends between 1976 and 2005 indicated earlier seasonal events. On average, the study showed the seasonal timing of reproduction and population growth shifted forward by eleven days over the period, and that the change has accelerated recently...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

Daily Telegraph

New errors in IPCC climate change report

The United Nations panel on climate change is facing fresh criticism today as The Sunday Telegraph reveals new factual errors and poor sources of evidence in its influential report to government leaders.

By Richard Gray and Ben Leach
06 Feb 2010

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming.

But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:

The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.

Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.

New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.

More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.

They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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From The Sunday Times

February 7, 2010

Africagate: top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed 'Glaciergate' by commentators.

The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Daily Mail

How Met Office blocked questions on its own man's role in 'hockey stick' climate row

By David Rose

07th February 2010

The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years.

And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.

By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland.

In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today.

Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate.

But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.

Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth – whose department has responsibility for the Met Office.

Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders.

Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled that scientists from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – the source of the leaked ‘Warmergate’ emails – acted unlawfully in refusing FOI requests to share their data...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

You know what? I hope this story is true. I hope the effort IS coordinated. I hope there is money flowing. I hope there IS a certain PR 'know-how' that gets these scandals landing in the MSM one at a time in bright lights like planes arriving at La Guardia.

And I hope some of the profit from the sale of Atlas Shrugged is in the mix.

It's about time to fight this in real time, with real punch, on the ground.

I am proud to be part of the vast anti-AGW consipiracy.

The pro-AGW Independent newspaper has taken that route.

I'm annoyed that Linz isn't passing on the Enron cheques to me! Hey Linz, cut me in on the oil lobby millions!
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Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers

ExxonMobil cash supported concerted campaign to undermine case for man-made warming

By Jonathan Owen and Paul Bignell

Sunday, 7 February 2010

An orchestrated campaign is being waged against climate change science to undermine public acceptance of man-made global warming, environment experts claimed last night.

The attack against scientists supportive of the idea of man-made climate change has grown in ferocity since the leak of thousands of documents on the subject from the University of East Anglia (UEA) on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit last December.

Free-market, anti-climate change think-tanks such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the US and the International Policy Network in the UK have received grants totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds from the multinational energy company ExxonMobil. Both organisations have funded international seminars pulling together climate change deniers from across the globe.

Many of these critics have broadcast material from the leaked UEA emails to undermine climate change predictions and to highlight errors in claims that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. Professor Phil Jones, who has temporarily stood down as director of UEA's climactic research unit, is reported in today's Sunday Times to have "several times" considered suicide. He also drew parallels between his case and that of Dr David Kelly, found dead in the wake of the row over the alleged "sexing up" of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Professor Jones said he was taking sleeping pills and beta-blockers and had received two death threats in the past week alone.

Climate sceptic bloggers broadcast stories last week casting doubts on scientific data predicting dramatic loss of the Amazon rainforest. All three stories, picked up by mainstream media, questioned the credibility of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the way it does its work. A new attack on climate science, already dubbed "Seagate" by sceptics, relating to claims that more than half the Netherlands is in danger of being submerged under rising sea levels, is likely to be at the centre of the newest skirmish in coming weeks...

Bob Ward, the policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, said: "A lot of the climate sceptic arguments are being made by people with demonstrable right-wing ideology which is based on opposition to any environmental regulation of the market, and they are clearly being given money that allows them to disseminate their views more widely than would be the case if they didn't have oil company funding." ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/e...

Marcus did you notice how little attention is now paid to the "Oh that skeptic takes money from Big Oil and is sleeping with Exxon Moble?"

Everyone quickly got it that the stupendous funds descending on a branch of science that was accusomed to crumbs has warped the whole thing.

Keep 'em coming. I for one am reading you posts.

John Donohue
http://earthintime.com

From The Sunday Times

February 7, 2010

I thought of killing myself, says climate scandal professor Phil Jones

Richard Girling

THE scientist at the centre of the “climategate” email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide.

Professor Phil Jones said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times that he had thought about killing himself “several times”. He acknowledged similarities to Dr David Kelly, the scientist who committed suicide after being exposed as the source for a BBC report that alleged the government had “sexed up” evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

In emails that were hacked into and seized upon by global-warming sceptics before the Copenhagen climate summit in December, Jones appeared to call upon his colleagues to destroy scientific data rather than release it to people intent on discrediting their work monitoring climate change.

Jones, 57, said he was unprepared for the scandal: “I am just a scientist. I have no training in PR or dealing with crises.”

The incident has taken a severe toll on his health. He has lost more than a stone in weight and disclosed he is on beta-blockers and using sleeping pills. He said the support of his family, and especially the love of his five-year-old granddaughter, had helped him to shake off suicidal thoughts: “I wanted to see her grow up.”

He remains at risk, still receiving death threats from around the world including two in the past week: “I was shocked. People said I should go and kill myself. They said that they knew where I lived. They were coming from all over the world.”...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Climate scepticism grows among Tories

Green policies have potential to be as divisive as Europe, leadership warned

Anushka Asthana, policy editor
The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010

Most Conservative MPs, including at least six members of the shadow cabinet, are sceptical about their party's continued focus on climate change policies, it has been claimed.

The recent furore around "Climategate" has hardened the views of Tory MPs, many of whom were already unconvinced by the scientific consensus, and has led to increasing calls for the issue to be pushed down the priority list.

Tim Montgomerie, founder and editor of the ConservativeHome website, said climate change had the potential to be as divisive for the party as Europe once was. "You have got 80% or 90% of the party just not signed up to this. No one minded at the beginning, but people are starting to realise this could be quite expensive, so opinion is hardening."

Montgomerie said that while some MPs simply did not believe the science, others felt it would harm the economy too much to focus on policies to reduce emissions. "Some think, 'What is the point in taking all these decisions if India and China and others row ahead?' Nigel Lawson makes the point that 30% of Indian people have no electricity and the Indian government has to give that to them. The cheapest way to do that is fossil fuels."

Lord Lawson chairs the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a thinktank that claims the climate debate has been distorted by exaggeration. On pages 28 and 29, Benny Peiser, director of the foundation, debates the issue with the Observer's science editor, Robin McKie. A recent BBC poll found that 25% of people did not think global warming was happening – compared with 15% in November – and a similar trend is taking place among Conservative MPs...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/poli...
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Daily Telegraph

Climate makes money move in mysterious ways

The British Government has been pouring millions of pounds into 'climate-related' projects all over the world, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker
06 Feb 2010

In all the coverage lately given to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its embattled chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, one rather important part of the story has largely been missed. This is the way in which, in its obsession with climate change, different branches of the UK Government have in recent years been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money into a bewildering array of "climate-related" projects, often throwing a veil of mystery over how much is being paid, to whom and why.

To begin with a small example. Everyone has now heard of "Glaciergate", the inclusion in the IPCC's 2007 report of a wild claim it was recently forced to disown, that by 2035 all Himalayan glaciers will have melted. In 2001 the Department for International Development (DfID) spent £315,277 commissioning a team of British scientists to investigate this prediction. After co-opting its Indian originator, Dr Syed Hasnain, they reported in 2004 that his claim was just a scare story. Some glaciers were retreating, others were not. There was no way they could disappear in a time-span shorter than many centuries.

Three years later, however, when the IPCC produced its 2007 report, it endorsed Dr Hasnain's claim without any mention of the careful UK-funded study which had shown it to be false. What made this particularly shocking was that in 2008 another British ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced that it had paid £1,436,000 to fund all the support needed to run the same IPCC working group which, as we now know from a senior IPCC author, had included the bogus claim in its report.

But the story did not stop there. In a report to Parliament the same year, Defra stated that its funding of the IPCC working group had been not £1.4 million but only £543,816. It was also in 2008 that Dr Hasnain was recruited by Dr Pachauri to work in his Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), where his spurious claim was used to win Teri a share in two lucrative studies of the effects of the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers.

The trail into this tangled undergrowth began last December, when Dr Richard North and I were trying to track down 11 payments made by four separate government departments for projects involving Teri Europe, the London-based branch of Dr Pachauri's institute. We were struck by how reluctant the ministries often seemed to be to reveal how much they had paid under these contracts. What's more, why was UK taxpayers' money being used to fund these projects in the first place?...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...

WSJ

Omitted: The Bright Side of Global Warming

It seems the U.N. IPCC only tabulates the benefits of climate change when they are outweighed by the costs.

By ANNE JOLIS

Could global warming actually be good for humanity? Certainly not, at least if we're to believe the endless warnings of floods, droughts, and pestilences to which we are told climate change will inevitably give rise. But a closer look at the science tells a more complex story than unmitigated disaster. It also tell us something about the extent to which science has been manipulated to fit the preconceptions of warming alarmists.

According to a 2004 paper by British geographer and climatologist Nigel Arnell, global warming would likely reduce the world's total number of people living in "water-stressed watersheds"—that is, areas with less than 1,000 cubic meters of water resources per capita, per year—even though many regions would see increased water shortages. Using multiple models, Mr. Arnell predicted that if temperatures rise, between 867 million and 4.5 billion people around the world could see increased "water stress" by 2085. But Mr. Arnell also found that "water stress" could decrease for between 1.7 billion and 6 billion people. Taking the average of the two ranges, that means that with global warming, nearly 2.7 billion people could see greater water shortages—but 3.85 billion could see fewer of them.

Mr. Arnell's paper, funded by the U.K. government, was duly cited in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's supposedly authoritative 2007 assessment report. But the IPCC uses Mr. Arnell's research to give the opposite impression, by a form of single-entry book-keeping. While it dutifully tallies the numbers of people he predicts will be left with less water access, it largely ignores the greater number likely to see more water courtesy of climate change...

http://online.wsj.com/article/...
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BBC News

Friday, 5 February 2010

Climate scepticism 'on the rise'

The number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising, a poll for BBC News suggests.

The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, a rise of 8% since a similar poll was conducted in November.

The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75% this month.

And only 26% of those asked believed climate change was happening and "now established as largely man-made".

The findings are based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February.

In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus - commissioned by the Times newspaper - showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/sc...
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Daily Telegraph

Met Office to look at more information in forecasts after 'barbecue summer'

The Met Office has said it was wrong to tell people to expect a barbecue summer and a warm winter and it looking at including more information on forecasts.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
05 Feb 2010

Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist at the Met Office, said the national weather service had let the public get the wrong message when it predicted a "barbecue" summer earlier this year and then revised the forecast when July and August turned out to be wet.

She also said the Met Office got "a lot of the communication wrong" this winter by predicting a mild winter before heavy snowfall brought much of the country to a standstill...

She also said the public needs to better understand the science of predicting longer term weather patterns following the recent scandals around climate change.

"People will say if you cannot forecast beyond a week or so how can you forecast climate change?" she said.

"I think the public are very confused and I do not think we as scientists have helped them as much as we should to really understand the fundamental evidence of climate change. To understand why global warming is different from natural variations. Why we can have a very cold winter in the UK when the world as a whole is warming. We have not explained that very well. In the Met Office we are trying to explain the scientific basis of global warming much better at all levels of society."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Prejudice and principle brew at tea party meet

600 delegates from all over the US descended on the cavernous Gaylord hotel to plot strategy as opening speech harks back to America's segregationist past

Ed Pilkington in Nashville The Guardian,
Saturday 6 February 2010

America's disparate army of angry ­conservatives assembled under one roof yesterday at the first national tea party convention in Nashville, amid controversy over an opening speech which preached bigotry bordering on racism.

Up to 600 delegates from all over the US descended on the cavernous Gaylord hotel to plot a strategy on how to take back the country from the perceived threat of the Obama administration. Sporting a shirt made from the Stars and Stripes, Tim Peak from Arizona said he had travelled so far because it was "time for the silent majority to stand up and start speaking"...

Steve Milloy, who runs a global warming denier website, junkscience.com, delivered a speech denouncing environmentalism as the "greatest threat to America now and in the future".

Amid such a ragbag of phobias, paranoia and principles, one unifying force was support for the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who will speak to the convention at its close tonight.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl...

India forms new climate change body

The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
04 Feb 2010

The move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalized the IPC chairman even further.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with international bodies and operate as a “sort of Indian IPCC,” he added...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Daily Express

NO ONE BELIEVES US, ADMIT GLOBAL WARMING SCIENTISTS

Friday February 5,2010
By Mark Reynolds

BRITONS are not convinced that mankind has caused global warming, three leading climate scientists admitted yesterday.

In the wake of the scandal at the University of East Anglia, they conceded there were “uncertainties” about the science, but said the evidence was still overwhelming.

Last year, leaked emails from the university’s climate research unit appeared to show that scientists had changed statistics to strengthen their case.

But yesterday Professors Julia Slingo, Brian Hoskins and Alan Thorpe spoke out after weeks of controversy concerning the accuracy of the evidence.

Professor Slingo, chief scientist at the Met Office, said: “We have a real issue about communicating science in a clear way which the public can understand and we haven’t done that very well.”

She said the impact on temperature of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, or CO2, had been known about since the 19th century. The link was “straightforward fundamental physics”, she said, while other data – from rises in sea level to retreating glaciers – also showed the climate was changing.

Professor Thorpe, head of the Natural Environment Research Council, said that in the wake of the recent controversy there was a need for researchers to engage more openly with the public...

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/...
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Independent

UN climate change boss Rajendra Pachauri vows to resist pressure to quit

By Andrew Woodcock, Press Association

Friday, 5 February 2010

A high-profile error in an international report on climate change does not undermine the scientific case for man-made global warming, the head of the United Nations' panel on the issue insisted today.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said there remained a "huge volume" of science backing the theory that human activity is to blame for changes in global temperatures.

And Dr Pachauri said he would resist pressure to resign as IPCC chair following reports in the UK press that he had made a fortune from carbon trading thanks to links between The Energy Research Institute (Teri) which he heads and private companies...

http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
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Daily Telegraph

Lord Smith warns climate change argument has been undermined by 'climategate'

The fight to tackle climate change in Britain is in danger of being undermined by 'one or two errors' by scientists, the country's top environment watchdog has warned.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
04 Feb 2010

Lord Smith of Finsbury, the Chairman of the Environment Agency, said the climate is changing and the UK is in danger of suffering more extreme weather events like the recent floods in Cumbria.

But he said "sloppy and irresponsible" emails sent by scientists from the University of East Anglia in a scandal known as "climategate" was being used by sceptics to cast doubt on the whole argument.

He also said a mistaken claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the Himalayas will melt by 2035, known as "glaciergate", was being used by critics to suggest that the UN body is not to be trusted.

"Let’s not allow one or two errors to undermine the overwhelming strength of evidence that has been painstakingly accumulated, peer reviewed, tested and tested again, and that shows overwhelmingly that our emissions of greenhouse gases are having a serious impact on the earth’s atmosphere, and that as a result climate change is happening and will accelerate," he said.

Lord Smith was particularly concerned that the "consensus" built up in Britain, that is allowing agencies to build flood defences and other measures to fight climate change, will be lost...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...

i hope we all keep the pressure on.

The Warmers should be made to state whether any conclusion they publish is based strictly on raw data -- which should be published with any paper -- or adjusted, and if adjusted why.

Do any of you know if the CO2 measurement is being kept anywhere in the world besides in Hawaii?

Three choice quotes from the CRU emails:

> Phil Jones to Tom Wigley (21/01/05): "I wouldn't worry about the code. If FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them."

> Phil Jones to Gavin Schmidt (03/02/05): "Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

> Phil Jones to Mike Mann (29/05/08): "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re [IPCC report] AR4? Keith will do likewise."

Scoop reports "NIWA Unable To Justify Official Temperature Record"

Monday, 1 February 2010, 4:02 pm
Press Release: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has been urged by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) to abandon all of its in-house adjustments to temperature records. This follows an admission by NIWA that it no longer holds the records that would support its in-house manipulation of official temperature readings.

In December, NZCSC issued a formal request for the schedule of adjustments under the Official Information Act 1982, specifically seeking copies of "the original worksheets and/or computer records used for the calculations". On 29 January, NIWA responded that they no longer held any internal records, and merely referred to the scientific literature.

"The only inference that can be drawn from this is that NIWA has casually altered its temperature series from time to time, without ever taking the trouble to maintain a continuous record. The result is that the official temperature record has been adjusted on unknown dates for unknown reasons, so that its probative value is little above that of guesswork. In such a case, the only appropriate action would be reversion to the raw data record, perhaps accompanied by a statement of any known issues," said Terry Dunleavy, secretary of NZCSC.

"NIWA's website carries the raw data collected from representative temperature stations, which disclose no measurable change in average temperature over a period of 150 years. But elsewhere on the same website, NIWA displays a graph of the same 150-year period showing a sharp warming trend. The difference between these two official records is a series of undisclosed NIWA-created `adjustments'.

"Late last year our coalition published a paper entitled `Are We Feeling Warmer Yet?' and asked NIWA to disclose the schedule detailing the dates and reasons for the adjustments. The expressed purpose of NZCSC was to replicate the calculations, in the best traditions of peer-reviewed science.

"When NIWA did not respond, Hon Rodney Hide asked Oral and Written Questions in Parliament, and attended a meeting with NIWA scientists. All to no avail, and the schedule of adjustments remained a secret. We now know why NIWA was being so evasive - the requested schedule did not exist.

"Well qualified climate scientist members of our coalition believe that NIWA has forfeited confidence in the credibility of its temperature recording procedures, and that it cannot be trusted to try to cover up its own ineptitude by in-house adjustments. What is needed is open access in the public domain to all of the known reasons for post-reading adjustments to enable independent climate analysts to make their own comparative assessments of temperature variations throughout New Zealand since the middle of the 19th century," said Mr Dunleavy.

The Times

February 4, 2010

IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri under pressure to go over glacier error

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.

A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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The Times

February 2, 2010

Fury as Amazon rainforest dam approved by Brazil

Hannah Strange

Brazil has approved the controversial construction of a giant hydroelectric dam in the heart of the Amazon, defying a 20-year protest by indigenous and environmental campaigners who say that the project will devastate the surrounding rainforest and threaten the survival of local tribes.

The Belo Monte project on the Xingu river, an Amazon tributary, was started in the 1990s but abandoned amid widespread protests at home and abroad. The rock star Sting led a campaign against the plan with tribal leaders, and revisited Brazil in November last year to urge the Government to consider the impact of deforestation on greenhouse gas levels and global warming.

The $17billion (£11billion) dam in the northern state of Pará will be the world’s third-largest and could provide electricity to 23million homes, a supply that the Government says is vital to the country’s economic growth. Critics argue that the flooding of 500 sq km of rainforest will damage fish stocks and wildlife and force the displacement of indigenous peoples...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Independent

Scientist in climate row speaks out

Academic breaks silence to deny covering up flawed data about global warming

By Kunal Dutta

Wednesday, 3 February 2010

The scientist at the centre of the "Climategate" controversy last night denied claims that he covered up flawed data about rising world temperaturs.

Professor Phil Jones, the former head of the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the 20-year-old study questioned by sceptics "stood up to scrutiny" and was corroborated by more recent work. The UEA's research centre has been under fire from climate sceptics since 13 years of emails were stolen from its servers and posted online in November in the run-up to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen.

One newspaper claimed that Professor Jones deliberately withheld information from Douglas Keenan, a *independent student of climate change, who used a freedom of information request to query data from Chinese weather stations used in the 1990 study on global warming.

Professor Jones said he was certain that the study, which drew on 42 urban and 42 rural sites, was correct because it was validated by the new data. "I am confident.... the site movements that might have taken place at some of the sites were not that important to affect the average of the 42 sites," he said.

The disputed paper was one of several referred to by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 assessment of global warming, which suggested urbanisation had only a small effect on rising temperatures...

http://www.independent.co.uk/e...

New Zealand's Prime Minister was put on the spot this morning on NewstalkZB radio by Leighton Smith. If you follow that link, it begins at 13:38 minutes.

Smith is maintaining the pressure. I'll transcribe some of Key's weasel words later. Worth a listen.

Washington Times

EDITORIAL: Osama and Obama on global warming

Discredited climate theories make strange bedfellows

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama said there was "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change." In his most recent message to the world, Osama bin Laden said that climate change "is not an intellectual luxury but an actual fact." It's nice to see these two leaders can agree on something.

The hitch is that the man-caused catastrophic global warming theory is dead, and it needs to be buried. Evidence had been mounting for years that there were problems with the global warming model; most telling was that the globe refused to warm up. Carbon emissions continued apace, but the world began cooling. This is why true believers abandoned the "global warming" brand name and tried to shift the debate to the more ambiguous label "climate change," which is something the rest of us like to refer to as "weather."

The dam broke with Climategate when hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit revealed that global warming advocates had for years attempted to hide conflicting data and silence their professional critics. British authorities have determined that the university broke freedom-of-information laws by denying information to scientists seeking to check claims that global warming was caused by human activity.

Evidence is emerging that the data had been rigged all along. Russian analysts noted that British temperature calculations excluded data from 40 percent of Russian territory, much of which showed no increase in temperature in the past 50 years. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also cherry-picked data, cutting Canadian data sources from 600 to 35 and relying on only one monitor for all of Canada above the Arctic Circle. This was done even though Canada operates 1,400 weather stations, 100 of which are in the Arctic...

http://www.washingtontimes.com...
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Strange case of moving weather posts and a scientist under siege

In the first part of a major investigation of the so-called 'climategate' emails, one of Britain's top science writers reveals how researchers tried to hide flaws in a key study

Fred Pearce guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 February

It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?

But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN's top climate science body.

It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.

The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

From The Sunday Times

January 31, 2010

UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim

Jonathan Leake

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

This is the third time in as many weeks that serious doubts have been raised over the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Two weeks ago, after reports in The Sunday Times, it was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Pachauri fails to get UK support over 'unsubstantiated' climate report claims

Chair of IPCC facing allegations that claims made in key reports did not have required standard of scientific review

Damian Carrington
The Guardian, Monday 1 February 2010

Rajendra Pachauri, who has faced criticism as chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change following allegations of inaccurate statements in panel reports, suffered a fresh blow last night when he failed to get the backing of the British government.

A senior government official reiterated Pachauri's position but stopped short of expressing confidence in him. "The position is that he is the chair and he has indicated that mistakes were made," the climate change official said. "There is no vacancy at this stage, so there is no issue at this stage."

The IPCC is required by governments to assess the science and imapct of climate change and its thousands of scientists produce major reports and summaries for policymakers. Its last report in 2007 concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities were 90% certain to be causing observed global warming and was accepted by all governments.

"It is clearly unfortunate that individual problems with individual papers have been found," said the official. "But the scientific basis for climate change does not rest on a very small number of papers in which the [IPCC] review process has not been rigorous enough. It relies on thousands and thousands of papers that have been peer reviewed through scientific journals."

The government has told the IPCC through official channels that it must ensure review standards are robust and its communication effective. "They need to communicate that 99% of the science on which they base [their work] is peer reviewed," the official said...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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I've said it many times before, but David "AGW is more of a threat to the UK than terrorism" King is as mad as a hatter!
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The Independent

'Climate emails hacked by spies'

Interception bore hallmarks of foreign intelligence agency, says expert

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Monday, 1 February 2010

A highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency, according to the Government's former chief scientist. Sir David King, who was Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser for seven years until 2007, said that the hacking and selective leaking of the unit's emails, going back 13 years, bore all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated intelligence operation – especially given their release just before the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

The emails were stolen from a backup computer server used by the University of East Anglia. They contained private discussions between climate scientists that have embarrassed those involved, particularly Professor Phil Jones, who has stepped down from his post as head of the unit pending an independent inquiry into whether there is any evidence of scientific misconduct. He is not implicated in the hacking.

In an interview with The Independent, Sir David suggested the email leaks were deliberately designed to destabilise Copenhagen and he dismissed the idea that it was a run-of-the-mill hacking. It was carried out by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States, he said...

http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
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Daily Express

PM HAILS EMISSIONS 'TURNING POINT'

Monday February 1,2010

Pledges to cut emissions mark the "first steps towards a historic transformation" in the fight against global warming, Gordon Brown has said.

As countries responsible for more than 80% of the world's emissions inscribe their commitments to the Copenhagen Accord, the Prime Minister labelled the step a "turning point" in leading to a peak in emissions by 2020 and the target of keeping temperature rises below 2C.

But he called for more action and said lessons must be learned from the "flawed" process at the Copenhagen conference on climate change in December. The two weeks of talks in the Danish capital descended into chaos with repeated clashes between rich and poor countries and wrangling over procedures.

The Copenhagen Accord, agreed on the last day, got developing countries to commit to action on their emissions, laid out finance to help developing countries, recognised temperatures should not go above 2C, and ensured nations would monitor action to curb greenhouse gases. But the deal - agreed by 49 countries - had no timetable for securing a legally-binding international treaty and there were no targets for global greenhouse gas cuts.

Countries were expected to submit pledges for reducing emissions by Sunday, although it is understood commitments will continue to be inscribed over the coming days...

http://www.express.co.uk/posts...

From The Times

January 30, 2010

Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change....

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Daily Mail

Controversial climate change boss uses car AND driver to travel one mile to office... (but he says YOU should use public transport)

By Simon Parry
31st January 2010

He is the climate change chief whose research body produced a report warning that the glaciers in the Himalayas might melt by 2035 and earned a Nobel Prize for his work – so you might expect Dr Rajendra Pachauri to be doing everything he can to reduce his own carbon footprint.

But as controversy continued to simmer last week over the bogus ‘Glaciergate’ claims in a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which he heads – Dr Pachauri showed no apparent inclination to cut global warming in his own back yard.

On Friday, for the one-mile journey from home to his Delhi office, Dr Pachauri could have walked, or cycled, or used the eco-friendly electric car provided for him, known in the UK as G-Wiz.

But instead, he had his personal chauffeur collect him from his £4.5million home – in a 1.8-litre Toyota Corolla.

Hours later, the chauffeur picked up Dr Pachauri from the office of the environmental charity where he is director-general – The Energy and Resources Institute – blatantly ignoring the institute’s own literature, which gives visitors tips on how to reduce pollution by using buses.

Dr Pachauri – who as IPCC chairman once told people to eat less meat to cut greenhouse gas emissions – was driven to an upmarket restaurant popular with expatriates and well-off tourists just half a mile from his luxurious family home.

As he waited outside the institute office for Dr Pachauri, the chauffeur said: ‘Dr Pachauri does use the electric car sometimes but most of the time he uses the Toyota.’

The electric car might be kinder to the environment and more suitable for short trips, explained the chauffeur – who has worked for the environmentalist for 19 years – but it was simply too small for Dr Pachauri and a driver to share. ‘When he uses it, he has to use it by himself,’ he said...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
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Ed Miliband declares war on climate change sceptics

Climate secretary Ed Miliband warns against listening to 'siren voices', in an interview with the Observer

Juliette Jowit, environment editor
The Observer, Sunday 31 January 2010

The climate secretary, Ed Miliband, last night warned of the danger of a public backlash against the science of global warming in the face of continuing claims that experts have manipulated data.

In an exclusive interview with the Observer, Miliband spoke out for the first time about last month's revelations that climate scientists had withheld and covered up information and the apology made by the influential UN climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which admitted it had exaggerated claims about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

The perceived failure of global talks on combating climate change in Copenhagen last month has also been blamed for undermining public support. But in the government's first high-level recognition of the growing pressure on public opinion, Miliband declared a "battle" against the "siren voices" who denied global warming was real or caused by humans, or that there was a need to cut carbon emissions to tackle it.

"It's right that there's rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there," he said.

"We know there's a physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures, that's a question of physics; we know CO2 concentrations are at their highest for 6,000 years; we know there are observed increases in temperatures; and we know there are observed effects that point to the existence of human-made climate change. That's what the vast majority of scientists tell us."...

The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband, who is also energy secretary.

If the UK did not invest in renewable, clean energy, it would lose jobs and investment to other countries, have less energy security because of the dependence on oil and gas imports and contribute to damaging temperature rises for future generations. "There are a whole variety of people who are sceptical, but who they are is less important than what they are saying, and what they are saying is profoundly dangerous," he said. "Every­thing we know about life is that we should obey the precautionary principle; to take what the sceptics say seriously would be a profound risk."...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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Daily Telegraph

Amazongate: new evidence of the IPCC's failures

The IPCC is beginning to melt as global tempers rise, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker
30 Jan 2010

It is now six weeks since I launched an investigation, with my colleague Richard North, into the affairs of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the hugely influential body which for 20 years has been the central driver of worldwide alarm about global warming. Since then the story has grown almost daily, leading to worldwide calls for Dr Pachauri's resignation. But increasingly this has also widened out to question the authority of the IPCC itself. Contrary to the tendentious claim that its reports represent a "consensus of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" (most of its contributors are not climate experts at all), it has now emerged, for instance, that one of the more widely quoted scare stories from its 2007 report was drawn from the work of a British "green activist" who occasionally writes as a freelance for The Guardian and The Independent.

Last week I reported on "Glaciergate", the scandal which has forced the IPCC's top officials, led by Dr Pachauri, to disown a claim originating from an Indian glaciologist, Dr Syed Husnain, that the Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035. What has made this reckless claim in the IPCC's 2007 report even more embarrassing was the fact that Dr Husnain, as we revealed, was then employed by Dr Pachauri's own Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). His baseless scaremongering about the Himalayas helped to win Teri a share in two lucrative research contracts, one funded by the EU.

The source the IPCC cited as its "scientific" authority for this claim, however (as Dr North first reported on his EU Referendum blog), was a propagandist pamphlet published in 2005 by the WWF, the environmentalist pressure group, citing a magazine interview with Dr Husnain six years earlier.

Dr North next uncovered "Amazongate". The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...

'It is necessary for us to avoid doing business in the dollar, and to finish with it in the fastest possible time,' bin Laden said on the brief tape...

Is Obama writing Bin Laden's speeches too?

Considering that on one day in 2008 the U.S. economic apparatus and indeed that of the entire world nearly came to a complete halt, literally, and considering that Bin Laden still roams the earth 8 years after Pearl New York Harbor...and considering that the cause of the freeze-up remains lodged at the root of the 'system' . . .

...Bin laden might be winning.

Thanks for the Kasper.

That NZ TV interviewer was a complete prick! His argument from authority was a crock of shit. Oh yeah, Hansen has a science degree, but not in climatology! I have a science degree and a PhD, so he better listen to me in the future!
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Daily Telegraph

Water vapour is a major cause of global warming and cooling find scientists

Water vapour is a major cause of global warming and cooling, according to a new study that will spark further debate over the science of climate change.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
29 Jan 2010

The research by scientists at the American weather service found water vapour high in the atmosphere is far more influential on world temperatures than previously thought.

During the 1990s one third of the increase in global temperatures was due to an increase in water vapour. In the same way a drop in water vapour after 2000 could explain the recent slowdown in global warming.

The researchers insist their findings do not mean that global warming is not caused by man made greenhouse gases. But the effect of natural water vapour high up in the air may also be having an effect.

The research comes amid fears global warming has been exaggerated. The United Nations’ climate science panel the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted last week that it made a mistake by claiming that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

It followed another row surrounding the science behind climate change, dubbed “Climategate”, when it was alleged leaked emails showed scientists at the University of East Anglia were willing to manipulate climate change data.

The new research by US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is published in the journal Science, one of the most respected in the world...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Obama sees the positives as US gives formal notice on greenhouse gases

State department climate change envoy Todd Stern writes to UN to formally promise to reduce emissions by 17% by 2020

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment
correspondent guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 January 2010

America embraced the accord reached at the Copenhagen climate summit yesterday by formally giving notice to the United Nations that it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The announcement was the second piece of encouraging news from the US in 24 hours on the prospect of reaching a global deal on climate change.

In his state of the union address on Wednesday, Barack Obama promised to keep pushing on his energy and climate change agenda. The intervention could boost the slim prospects of getting Congress to act on climate change - which is widely seen as a precondition for a global deal.

In his letter to the UN, the state department climate change envoy, Todd Stern, said that America could cut carbon emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020.

However, he said, the commitment was contingent on Congress passing climate change legislation...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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Now Osama bin Laden gets worried about global warming (and offers his own solution)

By Mail Foreign Service
29th January 2010

Osama bin Laden has warned of the dangers of climate change.

The Al Qaeda leader spoke in a new audiotape aired in part on Al Jazeera television today.

In the tape, bin Laden warns of the threat presented by global warming - but he also offered a solution.

'Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality,' he said.

'All of the industrialised countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.'

He added that while wealthy nations had agreed to the Kyoto Protocol that binds them to emission targets, former U.S. President George W Bush had later rejected such limitations before Congress in deference to big business.

The United States never ratified the existing Kyoto Protocol, whose present commitments expire in 2012, and has said it will not sign up to an extended Kyoto Protocol, preferring a new agreement.

Bin Laden's solution, then, to preventing temperatures from rising?

'Bring the wheels of the American economy' to a halt, he apparently said.

He said the world should 'stop consuming American products' and 'refrain from using the dollar', according to a transcript on Al Jazeera's Web site.

'It is necessary for us to avoid doing business in the dollar, and to finish with it in the fastest possible time,' bin Laden said on the brief tape...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

From The Times

January 28, 2010

Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data

Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Jonathan Leake

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.

The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The stolen e-mails , revealed on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, showed how the university’s Climatic Research Unit attempted to thwart requests for scientific data and other information, and suggest that senior figures at the university were involved in decisions to refuse the requests. It is not known who stole the e-mails...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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BBC News

Wednesday, 27 January 2010

Temperature and CO2 feedback loop 'weaker than thought'

By Roger Harrabin
BBC environment analyst

'Comforting'

The team's calculations are based on a probabilistic analysis of climate variation between the years 1050 and 1800 - that is, before the Industrial Revolution introduced fossil carbon into the atmosphere.

Using 200,000 data points, the study - believed by Nature to be the most comprehensive of its kind so far - compared the Antarctic ice core record of trapped CO2 bubbles with so-called proxy data like tree rings, which are used to estimate temperature changes.

The most likely value among their estimates suggests that for every degree Celsius of warming, natural ecosystems tend to release an extra 7.7 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere (the full range of their estimate was between 1.7 and 21.4 parts per million).

This stands in sharp contrast to the recent estimates of positive feedback models, which suggest a release of 40 parts per million per degree; the team say with 95% certainty that value is an overestimate.

The paper will surely not be the last word in this difficult area of research, with multiple uncertainties over data sources.

"I think that the magnitude of the warming amplification given by the carbon cycle is a live issue that will not suddenly be sorted by another paper trying to fit to palaeo-data," Professor Brian Hoskins, a climate expert from Imperial College London, told BBC News.

Professor Tim Lenton from the University of East Anglia said: "It looks intriguing and comforting if they are right. The immediate problem I can see is that past variations in CO2 and temperature over the last millennium were very small, and this group are assuming that the relationship they derive from these very small variations can be extrapolated to the much larger variations in temperature we expect this century.

"We have plenty of reason to believe that the shape of the relationship may change (be nonlinear) when we 'hit the system harder'. So, I don't think they can rule out that the positive feedback from the carbon cycle could become stronger in a significantly warmer climate."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci...
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One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars - not people, new figures show

New analysis of 2009 US Department of Agriculture figures suggests biofuel revolution is impacting on world food supplies

John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 January 2010

One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people, according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007 is impacting on world food supplies.

The 2009 figures from the US Department of Agriculture shows ethanol production rising to record levels driven by farm subsidies and laws which require vehicles to use increasing amounts of biofuels.

"The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels," said Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington thinktank ithat conducted the analysis...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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BBC radio

Analysis - Are environmentalists bad for the planet?

Listen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/e...

From The Times

January 27, 2010

Science chief John Beddington calls for honesty on climate change

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

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

John Beddington was speaking to The Times in the wake of an admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that it grossly overstated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were receding.

Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned scientists who refused to publish the data underpinning their reports.

He said that public confidence in climate science would be improved if there were more openness about its uncertainties, even if that meant admitting that sceptics had been right on some hotly-disputed issues...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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The billion-dollar hoax

Andrew Bolt

From: Herald

Sun January 27, 2010

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...

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/op...
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Climate sceptics distract us from the scientific realities of global warming

Is the goal of climate sceptics to lead us into greater scientific truth – or merely to sow doubt about the temperature record?

John Cook
Wednesday 27 January 2010
guardian.co.uk

When you peruse the many sceptic arguments against man-made global warming, you find a tendency to focus on a narrow piece of the puzzle while ignoring the broader picture. This narrow focus serves as a useful distraction from the scientific realities of global warming.

A recent example is the campaign to sow doubts about the US temperature record. To achieve this, an army of volunteers traversed the US photographing weather stations. Pictures were posted on surfacestations.org, showing weather stations positioned near heated buildings, air conditioners and other sources of artificial heat.

Each new photo was greeted with a clucking of tongues and a sense of reaffirmation among sceptics that global warming was largely the product of suspect temperature data. "How do we know if global warming is a problem if we can't trust the temperature record?" asked Anthony Watts who runs the sceptic blog Wattsupwiththat.

Never mind that the Greenland ice sheet is losing ice at an accelerating rate. That Antarctic ice loss is also accelerating, including east Antarctica which until late 2009 was thought too cold and stable to lose ice. Arctic sea ice is melting, sea levels are rising and glaciers are retreating. These and many other physical realities of global warming are well documented in the peer-reviewed literature. However, to some, the accumulated body of empirical data is no match against the persuasive power of a well-framed photograph...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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From The Times

January 27, 2010

Barack Obama to freeze spending amid drive to boost jobs

Giles Whittell in Washington

...The reality is that Mr Obama’s health reform effort is on life support, because the Massachusetts loss handed Republicans a crucial 41st Senate vote that allows them to block the legislation. His proposal to fight global warming, with a cap-and-trade Bill requiring companies to pay for the right to emit greenhouse gases, now has no chance of clearing the Senate. As with health reform, the most he can hope for is a vastly scaled-back measure.

The sharp pivot by Mr Obama towards job creation and deficit reduction, and away from the bold pledges of his presidential campaign, is also aimed at limiting what is shaping up to be a Democratic rout in November’s congressional elections.

Republicans, emboldened by their victory in Massachusetts, consider Mr Obama’s former Senate seat in Illinois competitive, according to latest polls.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...

Frediano I agree AlGore is slithering. However, he is not depending on stealth or nibbling. He is in it for the stupendously billionously millions.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/n...

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty— their power and privilege— to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians

Carbon Emission Reduction Allowances 'Marketplace.'

Let's be clear: the trading in certificates of 'not doing anything.'

How does the tribe create such a marketplace? By aiming the tribe's guns...

This is the new green 'the' economy: the economy of not doing.

What made sense for cleaning up Sox/Nox makes no sense for CO2...as long as we are doing nothing about H20 ... in an atmosphere thoroughly buffered by massive oceans of pooled water. We are regulating .... nothing. We are accomplishing... nothing.

The 'green economy' is the closet commies dream at last, an absolute stranglehold based on ... nothing.

You only have to look at the players to understand who is playing whom. BNP Paribas -- the folks who brought us the UN Oil for Food scandal -- are all over this latest tribal scam. The head of the UNs IPCC , Rajendra Pachauri, isn't even trying to hide all his banking connections, as he shills around the world for this latest tribal point of a gun scam. Al Gore is slithering around with some pretty scummy friends in his private jets and SUVs, telling us to rein in our 'carbon' footprint.

He and his need a size 12 carbon footprint in their mobbed up ass.

Just so you know I havent deserted your thread in favour of Philips's, heres some PJ that should be here.

We’re told cars are dangerous. It’s safer to drive through South Central Los Angeles than to walk there. We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald’s from a speeding train. And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?

Dermatoscope

"... 300 years. The IPCC has admitted the claim was incorrect, but all senior scientists emphasise that glaciers are melting at historically high rates and that the role of human activity in causing global warming remains very likely. Pachauri said yesterday: "I am not going to stand down, I am going to stand up.""

Wait....

If he and those other senior scientists, having admitted the basis of the first claim was bullshit, still want to stand up for the human role in the high rate of melt, then one of two things must be in effect:

1) they have ACTUAL evidence, hard edged and brillant and duplicated many times. If that is so, why the hell don't they just post it in PDF on every blog and to every news agency in the world and shut them the hell up???

2) they don't care that their basis is bullshit. They like bullshit fine and are standing by it.

In it?

I'd apologize for my cursing but I too damn angry to do it.

IPCC denies newspaper claim that it overstated costs of natural disasters

UN body rebutts Sunday Times allegation that it exaggerated link between costs of natural disasters and climate change

James Randerson
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 January 2010

The UN body that summarises climate science for governments has condemned as "misleading and baseless" claims that it overstated the effect of global warming on natural disasters.

A newspaper report alleged a section in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report incorrectly stated that the cost of natural disasters had risen gradually since 1970 due to climate change. Yesterday, the IPCC issued a statement saying the Sunday Times report was wrong on "two key points".

The IPCC, and its head Rajendra Pachauri, are currently under fire following the inclusion in the same report erroneous of a claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt completely by 2035. The statement was not based on peer reviewed data and the true figure for Himalayan glacier melt is thought to be closer to 300 years. The IPCC has admitted the claim was incorrect, but all senior scientists emphasise that glaciers are melting at historically high rates and that the role of human activity in causing global warming remains very likely. Pachauri said yesterday: "I am not going to stand down, I am going to stand up."

Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, said the row over natural disasters is neither a blunder or a new criticism of the report. He said the row is the result of criticisms that date back to 2006 that are being raked over because the IPCC's procedures for reviewing scientific work is currently under the spotlight...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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Der Spiegel

01/25/2010 07:33 PM

Save the Panel on Climate Change!

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been heavily criticized for erroneous projections. In the following editorial, climate researchers Richard Tol, Roger Pielke and Hans von Storch call for a reform of the IPCC and the resignation of its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri.

We have seen a crisis of confidence gathering momentum around climate science in recent weeks. Following the unauthorized release of e-mails from the University of East Anglia, showing climate scientists not at their best, now comes a flurry of attention to errors in official reports and accusations of conflicts of interest.

The crisis centers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the United Nations Environment Programme and World Meteorological Organization, and its chair, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri. Without significant institutional reform, the IPCC, and climate science as a whole, risks more than just bad press. It risks losing its credibility and trust.

The IPCC was set up to advise policymakers on issues of climate science and policy, with a stated goal to be "policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive". The executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change explains that "the credibility of climate change policy can only be based on credible science." The IPCC seeks to meet its rigorous standards of academic integrity through a thorough review process "to ensure an objective and complete assessment of current information."

The IPCC Has Failed

The ideals of the IPCC are both worthwhile and hard to live up to. Academics have all of the foibles that are seen in every other profession. Politicians and advocates seek to politicize scientific advice, often preferring to hide behind "the science" rather than explain the normative choices behind tough decisions. Such factors make it important for scientific advisory institutions to have rigorous and transparent policies to ensure trust and the credibility of their work. The IPCC has failed in this respect.

The IPCC's shortfalls are illustrated with the behavior of Pachauri, its chair since 2002. In recent months, Pachauri has participated in overt political advocacy, such as by calling on people to eat less meat and on the United States government to pass a certain climate policy. He has endorsed 350 parts per million as the right target for the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, despite the IPCC offering no recommendation on such a target. Being a scientific advisor sometimes means recusing yourself from engaging in the political processes that you are advising. We expect no less from intelligence agencies advising the military and medical professionals advising governments on health and safety.

When the e-mails were stolen or leaked from the University of East Anglia, they revealed, among other things, the intent of IPCC authors to violate IPCC procedures. Pachauri first said that all was fine, then announced an investigation, and then cancelled it.

The Glacier Error is not Unique

When the latest IPCC report said glaciers could disappear from the Himalayas by 2035, with major ramifications for the water supply in South Asia, it generated headlines around the world. That prediction proved to be grossly in error. It revealed a serious breach of the organization's own standards of review. When the error was initially publicized, Pachauri declared that the IPCC does not make mistakes and viciously attacked people who disagreed, before the sheer weight of evidence made him admit the error.

Another IPCC scientist claims to have been aware of the error in 2006, but was unable to have it corrected. The glacier error is not unique. That such a large body of work contains some errors is unavoidable. An appropriate mechanism to deal with false or contested knowledge claims is needed, but has not been implemented.

The whole situation became more bizarre when it emerged from the investigations of Richard North that Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) has built a large research effort on Himalayan glaciers on the back of the error in the IPCC report. TERI is also the beneficiary of considerable sums from companies with a financial interest in climate policy, resulting from payments for Pachauri's advice or authority. Astoundingly, it appears that Pachauri has not broken any rules for the simple reason that there is no code of conduct governing conflicts of interest for IPCC participants and leaders...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
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Climate denier lords it over scientists and their `global warning nonsense'

Jennifer Hewett, National affairs correspondent

From: The Australian January 26, 2010

KEVIN Rudd no longer repeats last election's claim that climate change is "the great moral challenge of our generation". British lord Christopher Monckton does, but for different reasons.
He argues that the "global warming nonsense" has already caused the starvation and further impoverishment of millions because of the diversion of food crops into biofuels.

He also says that mistaken attempts to address the issue through schemes such as emissions trading will cost trillions of dollars, which Western governments and their citizens cannot afford and which will bankrupt their economies.

Regarded as the most articulate international spokesman for the anti-climate change movement, Lord Monckton is in Australia to stir up debate just as Canberra gears up for the renewal of hostilities over the government's emissions trading scheme.

Lord Monckton was a policy adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, where he first investigated the issue of climate change, and then a columnist. Now he's a constant global climate change warrior, with six trips to the US in the past year to address everyone from mine workers to congress.

"It's a very dangerous moment," he says.

He insists his position is based entirely on scientific fact -- in contrast to the views of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- and that those facts are now turning the debate, despite the complicity of the Western media in obscuring the truth.

"Instead of being seen as sacrosanct, the IPCC is now increasingly seen as the venal, corrupt and incompetent organisation it is," he says.

"Public opinion is galloping in the direction of not believing in this nonsense any more."

Well, take that. Viscount Monckton of Brenchley has never been one to mince words. It's one reason why even Tony Abbott has been reluctant to meet him because he knows it would make it easier for the Rudd government to denounce the Liberals as extremist climate change deniers...

http://www.theaustralian.com.a...

From the UN Press Centre

Bowling and batting for a greener planet, UN and cricketers play on same side

22 January 2010- Pushing ahead with its effort to promote eco-friendly sports, the United Nations teamed up with Indian cricket today to reduce it carbon footprint and tap into the vast popularity of the sports’ stars to raise environmental awareness among the country’s 1.15 billion people and beyond.
“Like cricket, environmental interest is growing exponentially and across the globe, so this initiative could be become one of the most powerful environmental outreach campaigns in India and beyond,” UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director Achim Steiner said in Mumbai, India, of the new long-term partnership with the Indian Premier League (IPL).

“Together the IPL and UNEP are sending a clear and powerful signal to millions upon millions of spectators and fans: namely that if we all bat together, we can score fours and sixes for a more sustainable future.”

...for unloading Mann on Penn State, before the crap hit the fan.

Daily Telegraph

Pachauri: the real story behind the Glaciergate scandal

Dr Pachauri has rapidly distanced himself from the IPCC's baseless claim about vanishing glaciers. But the scientist who made the claim now works for Pachauri, writes Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker
23 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...
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From Times Online

January 25, 2010

UN's rogue glacier claim 'was just one page in report', says IPCC deputy

David Charter in Brussels

Calls for the resignation of the embattled head of the UN climate change body were dismissed by its vice-chairman today as the organisation sought to repair its damaged credibility.

The discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 because of global warming was just “one page in a 938-page report”, said Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Mr van Ypersele praised the IPCC chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, for devoting his life to his work on climate change, rejecting accusations that the misleading data had been used to claim grants for Dr Pachauri’s research institute.

He did, however, criticise Dr Pachauri for last year accusing the Indian Government of peddling “voodoo science” when it questioned the IPCC’s claims about Himalayan glaciers.

“I would not have used the same words as Dr Pachauri when he talked about voodoo science and I think he admitted last week that he should not have spoken that way, but he is giving speeches and press conferences almost every day and when you do that, how can you avoid making a mistake at one time or another?” said Mr van Ypersele, professor of climatology and environmental sciences at the Catholic University of Louvain.

“I think in a sense this incident on the Himalayan glaciers might contribute to increase the credibility of the IPCC. If the IPCC was to be considered infallible, who would believe that any human institution is infallible? If it can admit it made a mistake and is ready to learn from it, it will improve its credibility.”

He tried to play down the significance of the mistake that has led to growing calls for Dr Pachauri to step down. “It was not done in the glacier chapter, it was also not in the summary for policy makers in the scientists’ report, which is what the policy-makers are using. Which policy-maker is really going to go to page 450-something to look for that number?”

Mr van Ypersele said that an e-mail from the Austrian glaciologist Georg Kaser warning of the error sent to the IPCC had gone to the wrong person.

“I asked him two days ago, he actually provided the correct information but not to the correct personnel at the correct time, and to a large extent his most pointed criticism came after the plenary which officially finalised this. It is a combination of very unfortunate things.”

Mr van Ypersele defended Dr Pachuri’s involvement with a Houston-based oil company, GloriOil, saying: “I understand he was working on a way to clean up after an oil spill with some biological agents — that is my understanding.”

Suggestions that Dr Pachauri profited personally from his climate-change work were unfounded, his deputy added. “He really does not have a life that you could envy. He is travelling all the time and it is not for the pleasure of being on an aeroplane seat. He is talking, lecturing everywhere. His life is really a service to the work.” ...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Wishful thinking on David Cameron? .............................................

Zoom in on Team Cameron. At best it's a blotchy close-up

A mood for change has allowed vast holes in Tory policy to go unexamined. It is in everyone's interest to turn up the lamplight

Jackie Ashley
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 24 January

"A skim through the Conservative press and blogosphere reminds you just how unpopular anything to do with ­global warming is. The Tory party's intellectuals are clambering on the "global warming isn't caused by mankind" bandwagon with as much enthusiasm as they used to oppose the Maastricht treaty or speak up for apartheid South Africa. ­Displaying contemptuous scepticism for ­climate change science has become the right's new badge of honour.

It seems as if Tory candidates are rejecting green issues, just as the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, and others have sharpened up Labour's environmental credentials. So where do the Tories stand on something millions of voters consider the biggest policy challenge of all? We really don't know."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm...

From The Sunday Times

January 24, 2010

UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

Jonathan Leake, Science and Environment Editor

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions...

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC's 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s".

It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: "One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

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

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

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Daily Mail

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified

By David Rose
24th January 2010

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

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

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

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

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

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
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Climate change: Chinese adviser calls for open mind on causes

China's most senior negotiator on climate change says more research needed to establish whether warming is man-made

Gethin Chamberlain in Delhi
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 24 January 2010

China's most senior negotiator on climate change said today he was keeping an open mind on whether global warming was man-made or the result of natural cycles.

Xie Zhenhua said there was no doubt that warming was taking place, but more and better scientific research was needed to establish the causes.

Xie, Premier Wen Jiabao's special representative on climate change, was speaking in Delhi at the end of a two-day meeting of ministers from four of the most powerful emerging economies – China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

The four countries, known as the Basic group, called on rich nations to ensure that $10bn pledged to combat climate change was handed over before the end of the year. South Africa's environment minister accused the US of lagging behind at Copenhagen and said it had a moral obligation to take a lead on the issue...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

From The Times

January 23, 2010

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

Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent

The Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel's assessment of Himalayan glaciers.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for him to resign over the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s retraction of a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

But he admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible.

“I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them,” he told The Times in an interview. “It was a collective failure by a number of people,” he said. “I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It’s best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip.”...

It says the total area of Himalyan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.

A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m — a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year.

The section says Himalayan glaciers are “receding faster than in any other part of the world” when many glaciologists say they are melting at about the same rate.

An entire paragraph is also attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from it, and the IPCC is not supposed to use such advocacy groups as sources.

Professor Hasnain, who was not involved in drafting the IPCC report, said that he noticed some of the mistakes when he first read the relevant section in 2008.

That was also the year he joined The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is headed by Dr Pachauri.

He said he realised that the 2035 prediction was based on an interview he gave to the New Scientist magazine in 1999, although he blamed the journalist for assigning the actual date.

He said that he did not tell Dr Pachauri because he was not working for the IPCC and was busy with his own programmes at the time.

“I was keeping quiet as I was working here,” he said. “My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Daily Telegraph

Big freeze could signal global warming 'pause'

The Arctic conditions which have brought Britain to a standstill over the past week could be the start of a "pause" in global warming, some scientists believe.

11 Jan 2010

The world could be in for a spell of cooler temperatures, rather than hotter conditions, as a result of cyclical changes in ocean currents for the next 20 or 30 years, it is predicted.

Research by Professor Mojib Latif, one of the world's leading climate modellers, questions the widely held view that global temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming years.

But Prof Latif, of the Leibniz Institute at Germany's Kiel University and an author for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), believes that the cool spell will only be a temporary interruption to climate change.

He told a UN conference in September that changes in ocean currents known as North Atlantic Oscillation could dominate over man-made global warming for the next few decades.

Controversially, he also said that the fluctuations could also be responsible for much of the rise in global temperatures seen over the past 30 years...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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"...suggests glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035 - hundreds of years earlier than the data actually indicates. The year 2350 was apparently transposed as 2035.

1) BULLSHIT. Even if it was transposed, the REAL fubar is taking the word of some dude on the phone who speculated, then constructing that as a peer-reveiwed article.

2) even if their stupid models predict 2350, WAIT A MINUTE. How do they know the Holocene won't end before then and we begin the plunge back to ice 1000 feet thick over Chicago?

http://earthintime.com

FT

UN abandons climate change deadline

By Fiona Harvey in London and Anna Fifield in Washington

Published: January 20 2010

The timetable to reach a global deal to tackle climate change lay in tatters on Wednesday after the United Nations waived the first deadline of the process laid out at last month’s fractious Copenhagen summit.

Nations agreed then to declare their emissions reduction targets by the end of this month. Developed countries would state their intended cuts by 2020: developing countries would outline how they would curb emissions growth.

But Yvo de Boer, the UN’s senior climate change official, admitted the deadline had in effect been shelved.

“By [the end of] January, countries will have the opportunity to . . . indicate if they want to be associated with the accord,” he said. “[Governments could] indicate by the deadline, or they can also indicate later.”

“You could describe it as a soft deadline,” Mr de Boer said. “There is nothing deadly about it. If [countries] fail to meet it, they can still associate with the Copenhagen accord after.”

Countries pushing for a new legally binding treaty on climate change will be disappointed, as The waiving of the deadline sets a bad precedent for efforts to finalise a deal this year. The next scheduled meeting is not until late May, in Germany, with another in late November, in Mexico but many officials say more will be needed...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8747...
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Daily Express

CLIMATE CHANGE EXPERTS SAY SORRY

Thursday January 21,2010

A Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists who wrote the world's most authoritative report on global warming have apologised after five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph.

The errors are in a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-affiliated body.

All the mistakes appear in a sub-section that suggests glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035 - hundreds of years earlier than the data actually indicates. The year 2350 was apparently transposed as 2035.

The climate panel and even the scientist who publicised the errors said they were not significant in comparison to the entire report, nor were they intentional.

And they do not negate the fact that worldwide, glaciers are melting faster than ever, but the mistakes open the door for more attacks from climate change sceptics, it said.

"The credibility of the IPCC depends on the thoroughness with which its procedures are adhered to," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said.

"The procedures have been violated in this case. That must not be allowed to happen again because the credibility of climate change policy can only be based on credible science."

In a statement, the climate change panel expressed regret over what it called "poorly substantiated estimates" about the Himalayan glaciers.

"The IPCC has established a reputation as a real gold standard in assessment; this is an unfortunate black mark," said Chris Field, a Stanford University professor who in 2008 took over as head of this part of the IPCC research.

"None of the experts picked up on the fact that these were poorly substantiated numbers. From my perspective, that's an area where we have an opportunity to do much better."

http://www.express.co.uk/posts...

Obama faces emissions U-turn with new Congress challenge

Senator Lisa Murkowski is expected to put forward a proposal that would seek to prevent federal regulation of carbon emissions

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 January 2010

The Obama administration faces a challenge in Congress that could strip it of its powers to cut greenhouse gas emissions, barely a month after committing to action at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

An Alaska Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski, is expected to put forward a proposal for a vote as early as tomorrow that would seek to prevent the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

A show of support for Murkowski's proposal would be a personal humiliation for Obama who told the Copenhagen summit that America was committed to action on climate change. It also threatens to remove a fall-back position if Congress fails to pass a climate change law.

Climate law has stalled in the Senate and Democratic leaders had sought to use the possibility of EPA regulation as a prod to get Senate to start moving again. Democrats admit the underlying message of Murkowski's proposed vote – that action on climate is bad – could completely kill off its chances.

"It's a highly political move, and a highly hazardous one to our health and the environment," said Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader at a conference in New York. "If this senator succeeds, it could keep Congress from working constructively in a bipartisan manner to pass clean energy legislation this year."

Thirty-seven environmental and health organisations have condemned Murkowski's effort to block the EPA. The senator has also been widely criticised for calling on energy industry lobbyists to help draft her proposals.

But Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Murkowski, argued she was trying to stop Democrats from using the stick of EPA regulation to force through flawed measures. "What this vote means is that you can't use this to blackmail Congress to pass bad legislation. The whole approach has been the administration threatening Congress that if you don't pass bad legislation, we are going to pass worse regulation," he said...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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From Times Online

January 20, 2010

UN climate chief admits mistake on Himalayan glaciers warning

The vice-chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has admitted that the group made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele said it was an error that the IPCC included the date in its 2007 assessment of climate impacts and added that it would be reviewed. He said, however, that it did not change the broad picture of man-made climate change.

Climate change sceptics have said that it undermines the credibility of climate science, especially after the revelations contained within the contents of e-mails stolen last year from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.

Dr van Ypersele said this was not the case.

"I don't see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report," he told the BBC.

"Some people will attempt to use it to damage the credibility of the IPCC; but if we can uncover it, and explain it and change it, it should strengthen the IPCC's credibility, showing that we are ready to learn from our mistakes."

The admission came after the scientists behind the warning said that it was based on a news story in New Scientist, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Times Now

Angry Pachauri threatens to sue UK daily

20 Jan 2010

It is an all-out war of words between IPCC chief RK Pachauri and UK newspaper The Sunday Telegraph. A day after the newspaper published a stinging article calling Pachauri a hypocrite, the TERI chairman has hit right back. Pachauri, who is the chief of the UN panel on climate change, has accused Telegraph of carrying out "a sustained vendetta" against him.

In a letter addressed to the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Pachauri said he does not receive any payment, honoraria or compensation for work done for the IPCC, adding that his association with various organisations are limited to providing advice on sustainable energy.

Pachuari has asked the newspaper to publish his letter within a week hinting that if they do not do so, he might pursue legal action.

Soon after RK Pachauri sent out this letter, Dr Richard North - the journalist who co-authored the article on Pachauri appeared on the NEWSHOUR and defended his article, saying that there's absolutely no inaccuracy in what has been said...

http://www.timesnow.tv/Angry-P...
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WSJ

JANUARY 20, 2010.

Michael Mann's Climate Stimulus

A case study in one job 'saved.'

As for stimulus jobs—whether "saved" or "created"—we thought readers might be interested to know whose employment they are sustaining. More than $2.4 million is stimulating the career of none other than Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann.

Mr. Mann is the creator of the famous hockey stick graph, which purported to show some 900 years of minor temperature fluctuations, followed by a spike in temperatures over the past century. His work, which became a short-term sensation when seized upon by Al Gore, was later discredited. Mr. Mann made the climate spotlight again last year as a central player in the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, which showed climatologists massaging data, squelching opposing views, and hiding their work from the public.

Mr. Mann came by his grants via the National Science Foundation, which received $3 billion in stimulus money. Last June, the foundation approved a $541,184 grant to fund work "Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing," which will contribute "to the understanding of abrupt climate change." Principal investigator? Michael Mann.

He received another grant worth nearly $1.9 million to investigate the role of "environmental temperature on the transmission of vector-borne diseases." Mr. Mann is listed as a "co-principal investigator" on that project. Both grants say they were "funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009."...

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

Good find Linz, even the Times was on it! However, if you want to see what the enemy is thinking - just read the Guardian!
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From The Sunday Times

January 17, 2010

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

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...

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 concensus over climate change. It follows the so-called climate-gate 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.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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A mistake over Himalayan glaciers should not melt our priorities

Climate change sceptics may seize upon WWF's unfortunate mistake over Himalayan glaciers, but this doesn't change the truth about global warming

Bob Ward
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 January 2010

...What does this episode show? It is clear that WWF made a mistake which should have been picked up while its report was being prepared for publication. Subsequent authors should have checked the primary source and identified the error earlier. The IPCC in particular should have shown far more scepticism about the extraordinary suggestion that glaciers in the Himalayas, which currently cover more than 30,000 sq km, would probably disappear within three decades.

The first volume of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which reviewed the physical science basis for climate change, was much more cautious about the potential effects, noting only that "glaciers in the Asian high mountains have generally shrunk at varying rates". Perhaps the 2035 prediction would have been challenged sooner if it had been repeated in drafts of the more widely read Technical Summary, the Summary for Policymakers or the Synthesis Report, rather than appearing just once on page 493 of Chapter 10 (pdf) of the second lengthy volume on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

This is a regrettable mistake, revealing that there is room for improving the IPCC's review processes. But this does not change the strong evidence that many glaciers around the world, including in the Himalayas, are melting in response to the warming of the Earth. The likely fate of Himalayan glaciers is hugely important because they are the source for many major rivers in Asia. Yet the World Glacier Monitoring Service pointed out in a recent report that the Himalayas are "strongly underrepresented" among glacier measurements and records...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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The Himalayan glaciers may be around for a while as well:

http://www.theaustralian.com.a...

From The Times

January 18, 2010

Met Office under a cloud as BBC considers breaking 90-year partnership

Patrick Foster, Media Correspondent

The storm clouds that have gathered over the Met Office in the past year were looking even more menacing yesterday after it emerged that the organisation will have to fight off a challenge to supply the BBC’s forecasts when its contract with the broadcaster expires this spring.

The state-owned forecaster was derided when its suggestions of a “barbecue summer” last year resulted in a washout. It also suggested that this winter, in which temperatures have already reached -22C (-8F), would be mild.

The Met Office, based in Exeter, admitted this weekend that its annual global mean forecasts suffered from a “warming bias” that meant it had predicted higher temperatures than had occurred in nine out of the past ten years.

Yesterday it emerged that the forecaster’s contract to supply data and presenters to the BBC was due to expire in April. The broadcaster has put the five-year deal out to tender, as is standard practice, and Metra, the national forecaster for New Zealand, has come forward as a competitor...

http://entertainment.timesonli...
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Daily Telegraph

The curious case of the expanding environmental group with falling income

When Douglas Alexander travelled to New Delhi last September to announce Britain was presenting £10 million to the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), standing alongside him was an imposing, bearded figure.

By Christopher Booker and Richard North
17 Jan 2010

Dr Rajendra Pachauri is not only TERI’s director-general but also chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Best known for the moment when he stood with Al Gore to collect the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr Pachauri was the mastermind of the IPCC’s latest monumental report on the dangers of global warming in 2007, giving him huge prestige and influence as the world's "top climate official".

Since being elected to the IPCC chairmanship five years earlier, he has been appointed to more than 20 positions, including directorships and advisory roles to major banks and investment firms.

Dr Pachauri insists that the millions of dollars he receives for these posts are all paid to his Delhi-based institute and not to him personally. But during the same period he has also presided over a massive expansion of TERI’s empire.

Mystery surrounds the financial affairs of the group since its annual reports do not include its accounts.

There is, however, one branch of TERI for which we have been able to unearth a certain amount of information, because it is based in Britain and subject to British law, and our investigations pose some questions which Dr Pachauri may not find easy to answer.

TERI Europe is registered as a charity, based in a residential street in Merton, south London. The house’s joint owners are Dr Ritu Kumar, an "environmental economist", and her husband Nicholas Robins, a substantial donor to the Green Party, who has stood for the party in council elections...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Pants for progress: Chinese climate protesters strip off on train

• 20 men and women in underwear bemuse fellow commuters
• Campaign aims to raise awareness of sustainable consumption

Jonathan Watts
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 January 2010

Chinese climate campaigners are hoping that bare flesh and underwear can succeed where apocalyptic warnings and international pressure have failed: to promote a low-carbon lifestyle in the nation with the world's biggest greenhouse emissions.

A group of environmental exhibitionists – none of whom had ever met before – stripped down to their pants and boxers inside a Guangdong subway carriage yesterday to promote awareness about sustainable consumption.

To the astonishment and amusement of watching commuters, the 20 or so men and women then sat down in their seats and continued their journeys for 40 minutes, reading newspapers and listening to music in the semi-nude...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

Daily Mail

I said Obama could turn out to be America's Tony Blair - just a vacuous showman. This week we'll find out if U.S. voters agree

Richard Littlejohn

15th January 2010

On Tuesday, almost a year to the day since he took the oath of office, Barack Obama faces a referendum on his presidency.
The jury is out and the verdict is far from certain.

Voters in Massachussetts go to the ballot box to elect a successor to Senator Edward Kennedy, who died of brain cancer last August.
It should be a formality for the Democrats, who have held the state since the late John F. Kennedy won the seat in 1953.

Yet the opinion polls are showing the Republican challenger running neck-and-neck with the Democratic establishment candidate, who until recently had been expected to stroll home without breaking sweat.

On his historic journey to the White House, Obama won Massachussetts by 26 clear percentage points. For the Democrats to forfeit this liberal fortress state would be unthinkable...

International leaders clamoured to touch the hem of his garment, in the hope that some of the stardust would rub off.

But despite their infatuation with his glamour on the world stage, they weren't able to persuade him to seal a deal on global warming at Copenhagen and, regardless of the ludicrous award of a Nobel Peace Prize, his popularity failed to win the Olympics for his home town of Chicago.

At the end of his first year, Obama has disappointed just about everyone.

His personal ratings have fallen lower at this stage of his presidency than any incumbent since Reagan's first year. His party's approval ratings are scraping along below 25 per cent.

This time last January, I expressed the fear that Obama may be America's Tony Blair, little more than a vacuous showman. Now he resembles Jimmy Carter, the last, weak one-term Democratic president.

It is a mark of desperation that Bill Clinton has been wheeled in to Massachussetts to try to rally the base.

In an intriguing twist, a new book this week revealed that when Clinton was trying to persuade Teddy Kennedy to endorse Hillary in the 2008 race, he said of Obama: 'A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.'

Which only goes to prove that in America, as in Britain, socalled 'liberals' can get away with remarks which would see conservatives facing a lynch mob.

Now it falls to Clinton to try to rescue the Democrats and prop up the man he believes robbed his wife of the presidency.

If the lights go out in Massachussetts, the prospects for Obama are bleak.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/deb...
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Daily Telegraph

Ski resort shuts after 'too much snow'

One of Scotland’s most popular ski resorts has had to shut for the day because too much snow has fallen.

By Simon Johnson
15 Jan 2010

After a two-day blizzard, managers at the CairnGorm Mountain ski centre in the Highlands have had to bring in huge caterpillar vehicles and snowblowers.

Colin Matthew, operations manager at the centre near Aviemore, said roads were blocked by 15ft snow drifts.

He said parts of the funicular railway track up the mountain and the ski-tows had been covered by snow.

The resort had enjoyed its best Christmas holiday season in 14 years, with estimates suggesting there were more than 1,000 visitors on New Year’s Day alone...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
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Daily Express

SNOW CHAOS: AND THEY STILL CLAIM IT'S GLOBAL WARMING

Wednesday January 6, 2010
By Martyn Brown

AS one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is growing warmer.

With millions of Britons battling through snow and ice to get to work today, scientists claim that the cold conditions should not be used as evidence against man-made climate change.

Blizzards, ice and sub-zero temperatures that have gripped the UK for almost a month in a record deep freeze are not “robust” indicators of global weather patterns, they say.

Their claims come despite the fact that the rest of the northern hemisphere, from America to Europe and Asia, is suffering some of the worst winters in living memory.

Huge snowfalls are being witnessed from China and South Korea, across eastern, central and western Europe and to America where even Florida is struggling to record temperatures above freezing.

Last night critics of the global warming lobby said the public were no longer prepared to be conned into believing that man-made emissions were adding to the problem.

Long-term forecaster and trends analyst Piers Corbyn, of WeatherAction, said: “Global warming is a failed science built on falsified data. It is a sham to say that man has caused it.”

But Stephen Dorling, of the scandal-hit University of East Anglia’s school of environmental sciences, remained adamant that the weather should not be used as evidence against climate change.

But he added: “It’s no surprise that people look out of their window and find it hard to rationalise what’s going on with the longer term trend.”

But he said it was wrong to focus on cold snaps or heat waves but look instead at longer-term trends.

The Met Office’s Barry Gromett said December and January’s cold weather was “within the bounds of variability” in a global trend of rising temperatures in which 2009 is set to be the fifth warmest year on record...

http://www.express.co.uk/posts...

It's 15 below zero as weathermen go witch-hunting

Frank Furedi From: The Australian

January 13, 2010

IT is snowing big time in my town in Kent. The family sits in front of the television to discover whether there is more of the white stuff to come. However, instead of an informative weather forecast we are offered a political broadcast.

A dramatic sounding voiceover informs us that David Shukman, who is the BBC's environment and science correspondent, will report "on how one of the longest cold snaps for a generation fits in with theories of a warming planet and global climate change".

Adopting a solemn tone that hints at catastrophes to come, Shukman announces that it is minus 15C in the Pennines and five cars are stranded before stating, "No wonder many are asking, `What about global warming?' "

Just in case the cold temperature encourages the British public to assume a degree of scepticism towards climate change alarmism, Shukman reassuringly informs us that the big freeze is not inconsistent with theories of global warming. A swift cut to a chap from Kew Gardens who insists that "snowdrops are already blooming" . Apparently flowering is starting much earlier than previously, which must mean that the world is getting very, very warm.

Concern that the present episode of cold weather might encourage public scepticism towards apocalyptic climate change scenarios is not confined to the BBC.

"Britain's cold snap does not prove climate science wrong," argue two climate alarmist journalists in The Guardian.

Leo Hickman and George Monbiot helpfully inform their readers that "weather is not the same as climate and single events are not the same as trends".

They are, of course, absolutely right, but rather selective in the way they minimise the significance of a single weather event. A few years ago when the temperature was relatively high and there was little rainfall across southeast England, weather forecasters and campaigning journalists ignored the distinction between climate and weather and insisted it was all a symptom of global warming. Indeed, an unexpected rise in temperature is presented as yet more evidence of the disaster to come.

Just in case you are a complacent sceptic, Hickman and Monbiot seize on an announcement made by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology that claims that the past 10 years are officially the hottest since records began. Apparently a rise in temperature in Australia may have direct significance for making sense of harsh wintry conditions in Britain. They speculate that the cold of the north and the warmth of the south "could be related". It could be, and no doubt their alarmist imagination will have no problems in linking the two as different forms of extreme weather.

The term extreme weather speaks for itself and has become the new normal. "Extreme weather on the rise," warns the website of the Australian Weather Channel. It communicates a sense of helplessness: "But our emergency response teams are under stress" so "who is going to help you"? This is a rhetorical question.

Extreme weather is not so much a scientific as a cultural metaphor that expresses the anxieties of our time. The conceptual linkage of weather with extreme symbolises a growing tendency to endow natural phenomena with moral meaning.

We can no longer accept that sometimes harsh climatic conditions just happen. As in ancient times when superstition reigned, we interpret bad weather as a symptom of divine displeasure.

Today unexpected weather conditions are blamed on the impact of human beings on the environment. In medieval times unusual climatic episodes were seen as the handiwork of wicked demonic forces...

http://www.theaustralian.com.a...
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Get ready for seven-foot sea level rise as climate change melts ice sheets

The IPCC's 2007 report missed out the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets which would be the key drivers in dramatic sea level rises.

Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 January 2010

The reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are balanced and comprehensive documents summarizing the impact of global warming on the planet. But they are not without imperfections, and one of the most notable was the analysis of future sea level rise contained in the latest report, issued in 2007.

Given the complexities of forecasting how much the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will contribute to increases in global sea level, the IPCC chose not to include these giant ice masses in their calculations, thus ignoring what is likely to be the most important source of sea level rise in the 21st century. Arguing that too little was understood about ice sheet collapse to construct a mathematical model upon which even a rough estimate could be based, the IPCC came up with sea level predictions using thermal expansion of the oceans and melting of mountain glaciers outside the poles. Its results were predictably conservative — a maximum of a two-foot rise this century — and were even a foot lower than an earlier IPCC report that factored in some melting of Greenland's ice sheet.

The IPCC's 2007 sea level calculations — widely recognized by the academic community as a critical flaw in the report — have caused confusion among many in the general public and the media and have created fodder for global warming skeptics. But there should be no confusion about the serious threat posed by rising sea levels, especially as evidence has mounted in the past two years of the accelerated pace of melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.

Most climate scientists believe melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet will be one of the main drivers of sea level rise during this century.
The message for the world's leaders and decision makers is that sea level rise is real and is only going to get worse. Indeed, we make the case in our recent book, The Rising Sea, that governments and coastal managers should assume the inevitability of a seven-foot rise in sea level. This number is not a prediction. But we believe that seven feet is the most prudent, conservative long-term planning guideline for coastal cities and communities, especially for the siting of major infrastructure; a number of academic studies examining recent ice sheet dynamics have suggested that an increase of seven feet or more is not only possible, but likely. Certainly, no one should be expecting less than a three-foot rise in sea level this century...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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Daily Telegraph

Global warming could turn Hull into the Venice of the North

Hull could become the Venice of the North, say country's top architects, as they outline plans to cope with rising sea levels.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
15 Jan 2010

Town planners should allow parts of the suburbs to flood while preserving the historic centre to deal with water levels rising by as much of four feet in the next century.

That way they can make a "positive out of a negative" by creating a walled old city with new waterways around the edge that would be attractive places to live and visit.

"With the rising water levels coastal cities like Hull are going to experience pain along the way," said Ewan Willars, the head of policy at Royal Institute of British Architects' Building Futures think-tank.

"You will have to pick the areas that you want to defend and as historic centres are usually the most important they are the obvious choice.

"In the case of Hull you could have an walled historic city in the middle surrounded by waterways. It could be the Venice of the North.

"Everybody loves waterfronts and this is way of using the rising sea level to create potential."

The report, a joint effort between RIBA and and the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), titled Facing Up to Rising Sea-levels outlines three strategies to deal with estuarine cities and expected sea level rises caused by global warming.

Using the examples of Portsmouth and Hull, they say the options include defend – building a huge coastal wall; attack – building floating "aqua-cities" out into the sea; and retreat – allow the water to naturally enter parts of the city while defending the most important areas...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...

After drilling through the shelf, which is between 250 metres and 400 metres thick, Ole Anders Noest of the Norwegian Polar Institute wrote in a statement: 'The water under the ice shelf is very close to the freezing point.

The 'science' in this one seems a little murky. When a mixture of ice and water is heated(ie, heat is added to the mixture), isn't that what would be expected, even if the ice was melting? Latent heat goes into phase change, ice to water, not increase in water temperature. So, even while melting, the water under the ice shelf should be expected to be very close to the freezing point, right?

Daily Mail

Now tests show the ice ISN'T melting: Sea water under shelf in the East Antarctic is still freezing

By Mail Foreign Service
12th January 2010

Sea water under an East Antarctic ice shelf showed no sign of higher temperatures, first tests showed today.

Despite fears of a thaw linked to global warming that could bring higher world ocean levels, tests conducted on the Fimbul Ice Shelf showed the sea water is still around freezing point.

Thanks to sensors, lowered through three holes drilled in the shelf, scientists have discovered the water is not at higher temperatures widely blamed for the break-up of 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, the most northerly part of the frozen continent.

After drilling through the shelf, which is between 250 metres and 400 metres thick, Ole Anders Noest of the Norwegian Polar Institute wrote in a statement: 'The water under the ice shelf is very close to the freezing point.

'This situation seems to be stable, suggesting that the melting under the ice shelf does not increase.'...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
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WSJ

The Climate is Changing

The rise of Tony Abbott is part of a worldwide reconsideration of the costs of cap-and-trade.

By TOM SWITZER
When I say the climate is changing, I do not mean, as many people do, that man-made global warming is destroying Planet Earth. I mean that the politics of climate change is changing rapidly all over the globe. Al Gore's moment has come and gone.

In the United States, Democrats, nervously facing midterm elections, are calling on President Obama to jettison the cap-and-trade bills before the Senate. In Canada, the emissions-trading scheme—another term for cap-and-trade—is stalled in legislative limbo. In Britain, Tories are coming out against David Cameron's green stance. In the European Union, cap-and-trade has been the victim of fraudulent traders and the carbon price has more than halved to $18.50 per ton. In France, the Constitutional Council has blocked President Nicolas Sarkozy's tax on carbon emissions that was set to take effect in the New Year.

In Copenhagen, meanwhile, the United Nations' climate-change summit went up in smoke. And in Mexico City later this year hopes for any verifiable, enforceable and legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gases—and to bring in developing nations such as China and India that were, insanely, omitted from the Kyoto protocol in 1997—are a chimera.

Add to this that Washington was buried by record-breaking snowfalls last month, that hurricane activity is at a 30-year low in the U.S., that London is bracing itself for its coldest winter in decades, and that there has still been no recorded global warming this century, and it is no wonder public skepticism is rising across the world...

http://online.wsj.com/article/...
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Financial Post

The next big scam: carbon dioxide
Posted: January 13, 2010

Attempts to create markets for tradeable CO2 are shaping up to be the next Oil-for-Food-sized fraud

By Patricia Adams

Deloitte Forensic calls it “the white collar crime of the future.” Kroll, a business risk subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan, the global professional services firm, calls it “a fraudster’s dream come true.”

These two global financial services firms are referring to carbon trading markets, a business that is estimated to explode from $132-billion in 2009, mostly in the European Union, to $3-trillion by 2020 as jurisdictions around the world join in carbon trading, part of the “cap and trade” system that governments are embracing.

Under cap and trade, companies need permits for the right to emit CO2 as part of their operations. The permits, in effect, guarantee that excess carbon emissions will be “offset” by third parties that will, for example, sequester carbon by growing trees. These permits, which are being traded on carbon exchanges, akin to stock exchanges, have caught the attention of law enforcement officers, who have seen an upsurge in fraud.

Says Chris Perryman of Europol’s Criminal Finances and Technology section in The Hague, in referring to the $7.4-billion in fraud that have occurred in the last 18 months in the EU’s carbon market: “It is clear that [carbon trading] fraudsters are fully aware of the potential that trading in intangible commodities has to further their ends. Such goods or services can be traded without the need to be physically moved or transported, which represents an obvious opportunity to frustrate Law Enforcement efforts to track and trace transactions.” So much fraud has been occurring that, Europol estimates, up to 90% of all carbon market volume in some EU nations was related to fraudulent activities...

http://network.nationalpost.co...
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UN should be sidelined in future climate talks, says Obama official

Suzanne Goldenberg Washington John Vidal
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 January 2010

America sees a diminished role for the United Nations in trying to stop global warming after the "chaotic" Copenhagen climate change summit, an Obama administration official said today.

Jonathan Pershing, who helped lead talks at Copenhagen, instead sketched out a future path for negotiations dominated by the world's largest polluters such as China, the US, India, Brazil and South Africa, who signed up to a deal in the final hours of the summit. That would represent a realignment of the way the international community has dealt with climate change over the last two decades.

"It is impossible to imagine a global agreement in place that doesn't essentially have a global buy-in. There aren't other institutions beside the UN that have that," Pershing said. "But it is also impossible to imagine a negotiation of enormous complexity where you have a table of 192 countries involved in all the detail."

Pershing said the flaws in the UN process, which demands consensus among the international community, were exposed at Copenhagen. "The meeting itself was at best chaotic," he said, in a talk at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "We met mostly overnight. It seemed like we didn't sleep for two weeks. It seemed a funny way to do things, and it showed."

The lack of confidence in the UN extends to the $30bn (£18.5bn) global fund, which will be mobilised over the next three years to help poor countries adapt to climate change...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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From The Sunday Times

January 10, 2010

Brrrr, the thinking on climate is frozen solid

Dominic Lawson

...Now, almost a generation later, we face another election in which the main parties are united in a single masochistic view: that the nation must cut its carbon emissions by 80% — this is what all but five MPs voted for in the Climate Change Act — to save not just ourselves but also the entire planet from global warming. For this to happen — to meet the terms of the act, I mean, not to “save the world” — the typical British family will have to pay thousands of pounds a year more in bills, since the cost of renewable energy is so much higher than that of oil, gas and coal.

The vast programme of wind turbines for which the bills are now coming in will not, by the way, avert the energy cut-offs declared last week by the national grid. Quite the opposite: as is often the case, the recent icy temperatures have been accompanied by negligible amounts of wind. If we had already decommissioned any of our fossil-fuel power stations and replaced them with wind power, we would now be facing a genuine civil emergency rather than merely inconvenience.

There are other portents of impending crisis caused entirely by the political fetish of carbon reduction. As noted in this column three weeks ago, the owners of the Corus steel company stand to gain up to $375m (£234m) in European Union carbon credits for closing their plant in Redcar, only to be rewarded on a similar scale by the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism fund for switching such production to a new “clean” Indian steel plant. That’s right: the three main British political parties — under the mistaken impression that CO2 is itself a pollutant — are asking us to vote for them on the promise that they are committed to subsidise the closure of what is left of our own industrial base.

The collapse of the UN’s climate change summit in Copenhagen makes such a debacle all the more likely. Countries such as India, China and Brazil have made it clear they have not the slightest intention of rejecting the path to prosperity that the developed world has already taken: to use the cheapest sources of energy available to lift their peoples out of hardship, extreme poverty and isolation. Britons may be forced by their own government to cut their carbon emissions — equivalent to less than 2% of the world’s total; but we can forget about the idea that this will encourage any of those much bigger countries to defer their own rapid industrialisation.

Just as the British public never shared the politicians’ unanimous worship of the ERM totem (which is why the voters’ subsequent vengeance upon the governing Tories was implacable), so the public as a whole is much less convinced by the doctrine of man-made global warming than the Palace of Westminster affects to be: the most recent polls suggest only a minority of the population is convinced by the argument. This has caused some of the more passionate climate change catastrophists to question the virtues of democracy and to hanker after a dictatorial government that would treat such dissent as treason. As Professors Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch warned in Der Spiegel last month: “Climate policy must be compatible with democracy; otherwise the threat to civilisation will be much more than just changes to our physical environment.”

The threat of a gulf between a sceptical public and a political class determined — as it would see it — on saving us from the consequences of our own stupidity can have only been increased by the Arctic freeze that has enveloped not just Britain but also the rest of northern Europe, China and the United States. Of course one winter’s unexpected savagery does not in itself disprove any theories of man-made global warming, as the climate change gurus are hastily pointing out. Steve Dorling, of the University of East Anglia’s school of environmental sciences — yes, the UEA of “climategate” email fame — warns that it is “wrong to focus on single events, which are the product of natural variability”.

Quite so; but it would be easier to accept the point that a particular episode of extreme and unexpected cold was entirely due to “natural variations” if the UEA’s chaps had not been so adept at publicising every recent drought or heatwave as possible evidence of “man’s impact”, and if David Viner (then a senior climate scientist at UEA) had not made a headline in The Independent a decade ago by warning that in a few years “British children just aren’t going to know what snow is”.

A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”

After reading this I printed it off and ran out into the snow to show it to my wife, who for some minutes had been unavailingly pounding up and down on our animals’ trough to break the ice. She seemed a bit miserable and, I thought, needed cheering up. “Darling,” I said, “the Met Office still insists that we are enjoying an unseasonably warm winter.”

“Well, why don’t you tell the animals, too?” she said. “Because that would mean they are drinking water instead of staring at a block of ice and I am not jumping up and down on it in front of them like an idiot.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Daily Telegraph

Human civilisation 'will collapse' unless greed culture is stopped, report warns

Human civilisation would “collapse” and efforts to tackle global warming will fail unless the world curbs its culture of greed and excessive consumerism, a report has warned.

By Andrew Hough

13 Jan 2010

The world's population is burning through the planet's resources at such a reckless rate – about 28 per cent more last year - it will eventually cause environmental havoc, said the Worldwatch Institute, a US think-tank.

In its annual State of the World 2010 report, it warned any gains from government action on climate change could be wiped out by the cult of consumption and greed unless changes in our lifestyle were made.

Consumerism had become a "powerful driver" for increasing demand for resources and consequent production of waste, with governments, including the British, too readily wanting to promoted it as necessary for job creation and economic well-being.

More than £2.8 trillion of stimulus packages had been poured into economies to pull the world out of the global recession, it found, with only a small amount into green measures.

But the think tank warned that without a "wholesale transformation” of cultural patterns the world would not be able to "prevent the collapse of human civilisation”.

The think tank found that over the past decade consumption of goods and services had risen by 28 per cent to $30.5 trillion (£19bn) - with the world digging up the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings of material every day.

The average American consumes more than his or her weight in products each day, many US two year-olds can recognise the McDonald’s “Golden Archers” sign, although they cannot read the letter, and an average western family spends more on their pet than by someone trying to live in Bangladesh.

A cultural shift from consumption to valuing sustainable living was needed because government targets and new technology were not enough to rescue humanity from ecological and social threats.

Without action, humans faced problems including changing climates, obesity epidemics, declines in wildlife, loss of agricultural land and more production of hazardous waste.

Consumerism it said had “taken root in culture upon culture over the past half-century ... (and) become a powerful driver of the inexorable increase in demand for resources and production of waste that marks our age”.

Erik Assadourian, the institute’s project director, said it was “no longer enough to change our light bulbs, we must change our very cultures”...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Last-minute agreement at Copenhagen marks turning point for the world

Dramatic finish to summit has radically changed approach to tackling global warming and indicates accord will succeed

Jonathan Lash
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 January 2010

...The next few months will offer strong indicators of whether nations whose heads of state endorsed the accord will treat it as binding. Various signposts will suggest which way the road is heading. The first deadline to watch for is January 31. By then, developed countries must register national commitments — and developing countries national plans of action — to reduce greenhouse gases. Major defections at this point would doom the accord, but early indications are that countries that offered commitments coming into Copenhagen will register them.

A second key indicator that the accord has legs will be how fast and effectively key countries seek to implement its terms. It remains unclear who "owns" the Copenhagen accord, who staffs its implementation and even who has the authority to convene the next meeting to keep the process going. Will negotiations around the accord's implementation be included in the next UNFCCC meeting in late May, or does it require an entirely separate process? The accord includes promises of adaptation assistance, a green climate fund, and forest protection and technology "mechanisms". The question of who moves the process forward needs to be resolved in the next few months.

China has already invited the other emerging countries behind the accord, India, Brazil and South Africa, to meet this month to devise a united front on a way forward. Will Europe take the initiative to define a workable process?

There will be two more important signposts during 2010, from the two largest emitters. China will launch its 12th five-year plan, and much will ride on the strength of the measures they include to improve energy efficiency, and develop low-carbon sources of energy. Already since Copenhagen they have adopted new measures requiring electric utilities to purchase wind and solar energy.

Similarly, the US Congress will decide whether to complete action on legislation to reduce US emissions, as a bi-partisan trio of Senators — John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman — strive to find an acceptable compromise bill that addresses both climate and energy security.

One last hope. Because the accord may reflect a reordering of global political dynamics it may make possible a profoundly important shift in which action on climate change is no longer seen as a threat, but rather the key, to development and the future of poverty eradication is recognised as low carbon development. That would be an historic achievement.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
............................................................................................................................................

From The Sunday Times

January 10, 2010

Climate change experts clash over sea-rise ‘apocalypse’

Critics say an influential prediction of a 6ft rise in sea levels is flawed

Jonathan Leake

Climate science faces a new controversy after the Met Office denounced research from the Copenhagen summit which suggested that global warming could raise sea levels by 6ft by 2100.

The research, published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, created headline news during the United Nations summit on climate change in Denmark last month.

It predicted an apocalyptic century in which rising seas could threaten coastal communities from England to Bangladesh and was the latest in a series of studies from Potsdam that has gained wide acceptance among governments and environmental campaigners.

Besides underpinning the Copenhagen talks, the research is also likely to be included in the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This would elevate it to the level of global policy-making.

However, the studies, led by Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of ocean physics at Potsdam, have caused growing concern among other experts. They say his methods are flawed and that the real increase in sea levels by 2100 is likely to be far lower than he predicts.

Jason Lowe, a leading Met Office climate researcher, said: "These predictions of a rise in sea level potentially exceeding 6ft have got a huge amount of attention, but we think such a big rise by 2100 is actually incredibly unlikely. The mathematical approach used to calculate the rise is simplistic and unsatisfactory."

The row comes just weeks after the so-called climategate affair when emails leaked from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit revealed how scientists tried to withhold data from public scrutiny...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...

That's I headline I hoped to read as I finally arrived back in snow-clad Britain. And so it did in the Daily Mail, but immediately to be refuted by the Guardian.
Welcome back to Global Warming politics! If only it could compensate for the cold temperatures outside. Ah, well.
..................................................................................................................................................................................

Mail On Sunday

The mini ice age starts here

By David Rose
10th January 2010

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.

However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.

Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.
Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.

Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.

He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’

As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.

Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.

The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view.

On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.

Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.

As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).

For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.

But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.

'They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.

'We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’

But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.

Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.

For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.

It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer.

'Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared.’

As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted.

Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole.

In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.

‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’

He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.

For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’

Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’

Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.

'This isn't just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while'But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.

'These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’

Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.

He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’

He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.

The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?

Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.

Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.

William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.

According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’

But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.

In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.

Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.

'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’

The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
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Leading climate scientist challenges Mail on Sunday's use of his research

Mojib Latif denies his research supports theory that current cold weather undermines scientific consensus on global warming

David Adam, environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 January 2010

A leading scientist has hit out at misleading newspaper reports that linked his research to claims that the current cold weather undermines the scientific case for manmade global warming.

Mojib Latif, a climate expert at the Leibniz Institute at Kiel University in Germany, said he "cannot understand" reports that used his research to question the scientific consensus on climate change.

He told the Guardian: "It comes as a surprise to me that people would try to use my statements to try to dispute the nature of global warming. I believe in manmade global warming. I have said that if my name was not Mojib Latif it would be global warming."

He added: "There is no doubt within the scientific community that we are affecting the climate, that the climate is changing and responding to our emissions of greenhouse gases."

A report in the Mail on Sunday said that Latif's results "challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy's most deeply cherished beliefs" and "undermine the standard climate computer models". Monday's Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph repeated the claims.

The reports attempted to link the Arctic weather that has enveloped the UK with research published by Latif's team in the journal Nature in 2008. The research said that natural fluctuations in ocean temperature could have a bigger impact on global temperature than expected. In particular, the study concluded that cooling in the oceans could offset global warming, with the average temperature over the decades 2000-2010 and 2005-2015 predicted to be no higher than the average for 1994-2004. Despite clarifications from the scientists at the time, who stressed that the research did not challenge the predicted long-term warming trend, the study was widely misreported as signalling a switch from global warming to global cooling.

The Mail on Sunday article said that Latif's research showed that the current cold weather heralds such "a global trend towards cooler weather".

It said: "The BBC assured viewers that the big chill was was merely short-term 'weather' that had nothing to do with 'climate', which was still warming. The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view."

Not according to Latif. "They are not related at all," he said. "What we are experiencing now is a weather phenomenon, while we talked about the mean temperature over the next 10 years. You can't compare the two."

He said the ocean temperature effect was similar to other natural influences on global temperature, such as volcanos, which cool the planet temporarily as ash spewed into the atmosphere reflects sunlight.

"The natural variation occurs side by side with the manmade warming. Sometimes it has a cooling effect and can offset this warming and other times it can accelerate it." Other scientists have questioned the strength of the ocean effect on overall temperature and disagree that global warming will show the predicted pause.

Latif said his research suggested that up to half the warming seen over the 20th century was down to this natural ocean effect, but said that was consistent with the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "No climate specialist would ever say that 100% of the warming we have seen is down to greenhouse gas emissions."

The recent articles are not the first to misrepresent his research, Latif said. "There are numerous newspapers, radio stations and television channels all trying to get our attention. Some overstate and some want to downplay the problem as a way to get that attention," he said. "We are trying to discuss in the media a highly complex issue. Nobody would discuss the problem of [Einstein's theory of] relativity in the media. But because we all experience the weather, we all believe that we can assess the global warming problem."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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How will the snow and ice affect the public's attitudes to climate change?

The UK's recent extreme weather will not alter the levels of uncertainty and cynicism that are already prevalent

Ben Page
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 January 2010

Will the prolonged snow and ice of this winter mean the public decide that climate change isn't happening after all, or will it perhaps reinforce worries about extreme weather? Probably neither.

For most people there remains little contention about the existence of climate change, even if not everyone is convinced it is solely man-made. Most of us (77%) already say we are concerned about it, but fewer than one in 10 see it as one of the major problems facing Britain. The recent weather is unlikely to change the minds of the 60% of the public who agree that "many leading scientists still question if human activity is causing climate change" – although most scientists actually do agree that climate change is man-made. The public hears more from the dissenting voices in the media.

And what of changing our behaviours? Just 13% think individuals should be expected to make significant lifestyle changes. For many people climate change is like death and taxes: inevitable, but not something worth thinking about too much.

As a result, perhaps just 4% strongly agree that action by people to reduce their carbon footprints is a "normal thing" where they live. In contrast, as many as three-quarters of us (77%) agree that they're concerned but "not prepared to make big sacrifices for the environment". The weather will not alter the levels of uncertainty and cynicism that are already prevalent. Most of us feel it is difficult to know which products are genuinely better for the environment, a figure which has remained high and stable over the past few years.

Whatever the weather, the public instead will want the government to do something: 68% agree the government should do more. There is strong backing, for example, for several of the ideas that emerged out of the Conservative's Quality of Life Blueprint, including tax differentiation based on car engine size and/or home energy performance, as well as a moratorium on airport expansion. In fact the only proposition that truly encountered strong public opposition was charging for parking at out-of-town shopping centres – but perhaps this is a step too far – or too personal and particular.

The issue will remain less about whether to intervene or not, and much more about which intervention. On some issues the potential for negative reactions is low, such banning incandescent lightbulbs. The same is not true of other interventions, particularly those that collide with some of the core features of modern lifestyles, like driving and flying.

Three factors explain the public's antipathy here: one, people like doing these things; second, there is a widespread belief that motorists and air passengers already "pay enough" to cover the environmental impact, and, finally, 59% of the public believe the government is using climate change as a back door way to raise taxes.

The challenge for any government, whatever the weather – though summer storms and floods might help them – is to establish a low-carbon framework for people that inspires rather than scares. However much it snows.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

+

"From Miami to Maine, Savannah to Seattle, America is caught in an icy grip that one of the U.N.'s top global warming proponents says could mark the beginning of a mini ice age!"

Oranges are freezing and millions of tropical fish are dying in Florida, and it could be just the beginning of a decades-long deep freeze, says Professor Mojib Latif, one of the world's leading climate modelers.

Latif thinks the cold snap Americans have been suffering through is only the beginning. He says we're in for 30 years of cooler temperatures -- a mini ice age, he calls it, basing his theory on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the world's oceans.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech...

Nice Bertrand Russell quote

I made this comment at the bottom of my advocacy essay on the sham of AGW four years ago, a paraphrase of Upton Sinclair, a hero of the progressives:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his government contract, research grant, tenure, publishing deal, reputation as an anti-capitalist, collegiate prestige or tax funding depends upon him not understanding."

It's down near the bottom just above the discussion of the Objectivist position on fact versus constructed reality.

http://earthintime.com/

I really should update. Gore has recanted much of his position and when questioned about this pending windfall from the cap and trade scam likes to get all huffy and proud over 'there is nothing wrong with promoting business interests.'

I swear Rand could not have invented "Al Gore." She just could not have put pen to paper.

What a man believes upon
grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires
of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact
which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and
unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If,
on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for
acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the
slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

Bertrand Russell


Joseph Bast does a preetty good job ef exposing the myth here

In the months and years ahead, many scientists who lent their
names and reputations to the global warming delusion — because they
trusted the IPCC and other institutions — will “come out of the closet”
and admit that, upon closer inspection, they were wrong and the theory
of global warming is either unproven or simply false.

Many prominent scientists have already debunked global warming
(see Lawrence Solomon’s book, The
Deniers, for profiles of some of them), and tens
of thousands more have signed petitions and resolutions protesting the
abuse of science in the global warming debate.

The histories of other “extraordinary popular delusions,” as Charles
Mackay labeled them in 1841, suggest it may take decades for
elite opinion to acknowledge the truth. Some very bright people will go
to their graves still believing in “global warming.”

But believing is not knowing, and that crucial difference both
caused and is spelling the end of one of the great delusions of our age.

Microfilm scanner

...why has it taken so long for these whalers to defend themselves from idiots?

Global Warming hit the UK hard overnight -17.7 c

"Will Gordon Brown ever be able to look the UK public in the eyes with a straight face when he dares to mention that we only have 50 days to save ourselves from a warming world!"(KASS Marcus). Short answer, absolutely he will. But the really sad part of this is that most Brit's will let him!!

Photograph linked from The "Telegraph"

My ass!

I've been snowed in and cannot get a flight back to the UK until Monday!

I will have little oppertunity to access the internet until then.

Will Gordon Brown ever be able to look the UK public in the eyes with a straight face when he dares to mention that we only have 50 days to save ourselves from a warming world!

France's constitutional court has thrown out the carbon tax scheme that was to come into effect this week. An embarrassing setback for the big man Sarkozy. The ruling, however, can't be said to be a victory for anti-alarmists. Seems like the court ruled the carbon tax taxed the wrong folk. The Guardian reports:

Nicolas Sarkozy's dreams of putting France on the frontline of the fight against
global warming were in disarray today, after his flagship carbon tax was ruled
unconstitutional two days before it was due to come into effect.

In an unexpected and embarrassing blow, the court responsible for ensuring the
validity of French legislation rejected the reform as ineffective and unfair.

It ruled that rather than being the revolutionary measure Sarkozy promised, the tax
would have let off many industrial polluters, while placing a disproportionately
heavy burden on ordinary households.

"The large number of exemptions from the carbon tax runs counter to the goal of
fighting climate change and violates the equality enjoyed by all in terms of public
charges," said the constitutional council in its eleventh hour ruling last night.

WSS

Happy New Year. I am away for the next 10 days!
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WSJ

DECEMBER 22, 2009,

Good Science, Bad Politics

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

By HANS VON STORCH

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://online.wsj.com/article/...
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BBC Newsnight

"One of the problems underlying the climate change debate is that whatever the majority of scientists say about global warming a lot of people remain sceptical about whether climate change is really man made.

So Newsnight decided to invite two top scientists round to Justin Rowlatt's house and challenge them to prove the case for global warming in a kitchen filled with members of the public and people who had been in the BBC Top Gear audience."

Watch Here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/pro...
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Reversing retailers' open door policy hinges on public campaign

Close the Door wants shops to shut their doors in winter and save huge amounts of energy – who are the worst offenders?

Leo Hickman guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 23 December 2009

Just one more shopping day left till Christmas. I'll certainly drink to that. But come Boxing Day, many of us will be out there again, elbows primed and credit cards at the ready, to do battle for the "bargains" on offer in the sales.

This means that our shops will only be closing their front doors for one day over this festive period. Which is a pity, because of all the winter gripes that Scrooges such as myself like to mutter and moan about, it's the issue of shop doors being left open that causes a hefty slice of anguish.

Why do our high streets collectively waste so much heat by leaving their front doors open? It's an issue that comes up every winter, but is never seemingly addressed seriously by politicians and retailers, let alone resolved. The shops claim that an "open door" policy attracts customers. Furthermore, it would take all the shops to leap at once and collectively shut their doors, otherwise whoever went first would lose customers to their rivals.

But there are at least signs of a fightback by irritated customers. The Close the Door campaign announced this week that research has begun at the University of Cambridge's Engineering Department to establish just how wasteful the open door policy can be, and that other countries are interested in receiving the study's findings...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

The Spectator

Alex Massie

Tuesday, 22nd December 2009

George Monbiot isn't everyone's cup of char, not least in these parts. I don't write much about climate change because the subject* bores me and so I'm happy for Monbiot to promise that the end of the world is just around the corner and I don't spend too much time worrying about it. I suspect, for what little it's worth, that he's an anti-Cassandra: wrong but believed.

Anyway, I do write about American politics so I feel confident in saying that Monbiot doesn't appear to know anything about the realities of life in Washington. In his Guardian column this week he complains that Copenhagen was a dud and that:

The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama.

"The man elected to put aside childish things proved to be as susceptible to immediate self-interest as any other politician. Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal that outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation: either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown.

[...] Why would he do this? You have only to see the relief in Democratic circles to get your answer. Pushing a strong climate programme through the Senate, many of whose members are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the energy industry, would have been the political battle of his life. Yet again, the absence of effective campaign finance reform in the US makes global progress almost impossible."

Oh please. If Monbiot is really concerned about reducing carbon emissions he should be thankful that Copenhagen didn't produce a treaty. Ratifying a treaty would require 67 votes in the Senate and there is, frankly, no way that's going to happen. Getting to 60 will be enough of a battle; 67 is impossible.

Nevertheless, Monbiot prefers to believe in unicorns.

Then again, what can one say to a man who seems to think that the President need only snap his fingers to have Congress, even when controlled by his own party, come to heel? It doesn't work like that and, as we've seen with health care, the final decision-making power is vested in the moderate centre - the 60th least liberal Senator - it is not held by the left. If Monbiot doesn't appreciate this it's time he did; if he does, he shouldn't mislead his readers...

http://www.spectator.co.uk/ale...
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Christmas Day drivers warned over icy roads

Icy conditions that have caused chaos on the roads continue over Christmas period as cold weather lingers

Haroon Siddique and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 December 2009

Icy conditions that have caused chaos on the roads and disrupted holiday travel plans could continue well into Christmas Day, the Met Office has warned, with millions of people facing Christmas away from their loved ones.

Fresh travel warnings have been issued predicting an 80% or greater probability of "widespread icy roads" in north-east and south-west England, Wales and most of Scotland, lasting until late on Christmas morning. There is also a moderate risk of heavy snow in Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland on Christmas Day.

Snowfall in parts of Scotland is likely to reach 5cm to 10cm and in Northern Ireland more than 5cm of snow is expected, particularly in the west. The Met Office forecast offers little comfort for motorists who have been delaying their journeys in the hope conditions on the roads would improve. It said there was also a moderate risk of widespread icy roads in Yorkshire and Humber, London and the south-east and the Midlands.

The AA said roads were expected to be "very busy and dangerous due to snow and black ice" and advised motorists to delay non-essential trips.

David Grunwell, from the Highways Agency, said conditions were "very challenging"...

Most of the major UK airports reported delays and cancellations on Christmas Eve, with easyJet grounding 16 flights. The bad weather axed a number of train services from Glasgow Central station, while engineering works meant disruption in other areas. A broken-down train at Guiseley resulted in delays in Yorkshire between Ilkley and Leeds/Bradford Forster Square.

There were lengthy queues at the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, in London where police helped to control the crowds. Eurostar resumed services on Tuesday after a three-day suspension following tunnel breakdowns.

The company was running about two-thirds of its normal daily services between London and Paris and Brussels. A spokeswoman said anyone with tickets for 19-23 December could travel and they were "hoping to get everyone away for Christmas".

The lowest temperature on Christmas Day is forecast to be in Tarbet, in Scotland, where it is expected to reach -9C in the early hours. Temperatures will reach negative figures in other parts of southern Scotland, the north-east and Wales, according to the Met Office...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2...

...probably the book has only just been released in the US.

Anyway, it has much better damaging effect coming out post-Copenhagen and post-climategate
...........................................................................................................................................

I posted it here (third article down):

http://www.solopassion.com/nod...

“Mr Vale, an architect who specialises in sustainable living, said: "There are no recipes in the book. We're not actually saying it is time to eat the dog.
"We're just saying that we need to think about and know the (ecological) impact of some of the things we do and that we take for granted."
He explained that sustainability issues require us to make choices which are "as difficult as eating your dog".

Gregster comment on it here:

http://www.solopassion.com/nod...

Was all over the news here in the U.S. yesterday.

...I posted it a few months ago.

When quizzed the author said that he did not mean people should literally eat their dogs.

He said he was just trying to get attention for his book, which he definitely did.

..turn off the lights?

[Meaning- even animals are in the firing line.] Yes we heard that horrific tirade by the gruesome Kiwi enviro-Nazis. Wasn't long ago.

Have the New Zealand list denizens heard of this? (news.yahoo.com link)

(Apologies if it's already been cited and I missed it.)

Looks as if it's a real book. (amazon uk link)

~~~

Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man's best friend

Man's best friend …
by Isabelle Toussaint and Jurgen Hecker – Sun Dec 20, 3:23 pm ET

PARIS (AFP) – Man's best friend could be one of the environment's worst enemies, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.

But the revelation in the book "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living" by New Zealanders Robert and Brenda Vale has angered pet owners who feel they are being singled out as troublemakers.

The Vales, specialists in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington, analysed popular brands of pet food and calculated that a medium-sized dog eats around 164 kilos (360 pounds) of meat and 95 kilos of cereal a year.

Combine the land required to generate its food and a "medium" sized dog has an annual footprint of 0.84 hectares (2.07 acres) -- around twice the 0.41 hectares required by a 4x4 driving 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) a year, including energy to build the car.

To confirm the results, the New Scientist magazine asked John Barrett at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, Britain, to calculate eco-pawprints based on his own data. The results were essentially the same.

"Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat," Barrett said.

Other animals aren't much better for the environment, the Vales say.

[....]

~~~

Financial Times

Climate change alliance crumbling

By Fiona Harvey in London, Amy Kazmin in New Delhi, Geoff Dyer in Beijing and Jonathan Wheatley in Sao Paulo

December 22 2009 22:23

Cracks emerged on Tuesday in the alliance on climate change formed at the Copenhagen conference last week, with leading developing countries criticising the resulting accord.

The so-called Basic countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – backed the accord in a meeting with the US on Friday night, and it was also supported by almost all other nations at the talks, including all of the biggest emitters.

But on Tuesday the Brazilian government labelled the accord “disappointing” and complained that the financial assistance it contained from rich to poor countries was insufficient.

South Africa also raised objections: Buyelwa Sonjica, the environment minister, called the failure to produce a legally binding agreement “unacceptable”. She said her government had considered leaving the meeting.

“We are not defending this, as I have indicated, for us it is not acceptable, it is definitely not acceptable,” she said.

There was even harsher criticism from Andreas Carlgren, environment minister of Sweden, current holder of the rotating European Union presidency, who proclaimed the Copenhagen accord “a disaster” and “a great failure”.

These responses contrasted with praise of the accord from India and China, and may presage problems for the United Nations in keeping the fragile alliances formed in Copenhagen together. The UN wants to sign a legally binding treaty by the end of 2010, but will struggle if countries repudiate the accord.

However, Todd Stern, US special envoy for climate change, noted that more than 100 countries had backed the accord, including the EU, Australia, Japan, the African Union and the Alliance of Small Island States.

China hit back at claims from the UK and other developed countries that it vetoed two key targets in the accord, and thus scuttled a more ambitious deal. Jiang Yu, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, called criticism from Ed Miliband, the UK’s climate secretary, “plainly a political scheme” to provoke disagreement among developing countries...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c945...
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From The Times

December 23, 2009

The inconvenient truth about climate change

Carl Mortished: World business briefing

Forget what you have been told: Copenhagen was a great success, a triumph of diplomacy, a game-changing event on which the world must now build. This is the view in Delhi and in Beijing, where Premier Wen Jiabao has been puffing China’s “important and constructive” role at the Climate Change talks. Jairam Ramesh, the Indian Environment Minister, boasted that he had thwarted attempts to impose binding targets for carbon reduction on India.

If this seems to make no sense (and that’s the view of Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, who squarely blamed China for wrecking the final agreement), it is because we are deluding ourselves over what Copenhagen was about.

Mr Miliband did not attend the same conference as his counterpart, Mr Ramesh. Nor did Gordon Brown or President Obama. They came to Copenhagen to assert the moral authority of the West. The leaders of the Free World came to Copenhagen as the self-appointed guardians of the planet, guarantors of the Earth’s environmental integrity.

The Chinese snubbed Mr Obama. The President thought he was at Copenhagen to talk about Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth”, the subject of the former vice-president’s film about global warming. But the Chinese and the Indians attended a different conference, the same conference that failed in Cancún in 2003, in Hong Kong in 2005 and in Geneva last year. Those world trade talks were “scuppered” by the intransigence of developing nations in the face of attempts by America to assert political power. Such talks, whether about trade or climate, war or peace, will continue to fail until we recognise a second inconvenient truth: China is now in charge...

http://business.timesonline.co...
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"Tim Montgomerie, of grassroots website, Conservative Home, urged sceptics to still to give money to protect poor countries from “extreme weather” even if they don’t believe its origins are man-made. “You don’t have to believe that climate change is man-made to agree that many developing countries could do with help in protecting their people from hurricanes, flooding and other natural disasters,” he said."

Skeptics should contribute to any agency that will assassinate the poor countries' corrupt leaders and assist the natives' conversion to Capitalism. And many of our leaders are morally in the same territory - the cross hairs should be on them too. Is there a gradation of immorality?

None of that surprises me...the Left's dissatisfaction with Obama is, once again, reminiscent of the disappointment with weakness of the Social Democrats that enabled a Hitler. Watch this space...

The hard left are in a tizzy after Copenhagen, turning on their own and eating their own babies.

Even Monbiot is at it:

"So what happens now? That depends on the other non-player at Copenhagen: you. For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn't do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions on to the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero. Where are you?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm...
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Copenhagen's failure belongs to Obama

The American president has been uniquely placed to lead the world on climate change and squandered every opportunity

Naomi Klein
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009

...I understand all the arguments about not promising what he can't deliver, about the dysfunction of the US senate, about the art of the possible. But spare me the lecture about how little power poor Obama has. No president since FDR has been handed as many opportunities to transform the US into something that doesn't threaten the stability of life on this planet. He has refused to use each and every one of them. Let's look at the big three.

Blown Opportunity No 1: The Stimulus Package
When Obama came to office, he had a free hand and a blank cheque to design a spending package to stimulate the economy. He could have used that power to fashion what many were calling a Green New Deal – to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. Instead, he experimented disastrously with reaching across the aisle to Republicans, low-balling the size of the stimulus and blowing much of it on tax cuts. Sure, he spent some money on weatherproofing, but public transport was inexplicably short-changed while highways that perpetuate car culture won big.

Blown Opportunity No 2: The Auto Bailouts
Speaking of the car culture, when Obama took office he also found himself in charge of two of the big three carmakers, and all of the emissions for which they are responsible. A visionary leader committed to the fight against climate chaos would obviously have used that power to dramatically re-engineer the failing industry so that its factories could build the infrastructure of the green economy the world desperately needs. Instead Obama saw his role as uninspiring downsizer-in-chief, leaving the fundamentals of the industry unchanged.

Blown Opportunity No 3: The Bank Bailouts
Obama, it's worth remembering, also came to office with the big banks on their knees – it took real effort not to nationalise them. Once again, if Obama had dared to use the power that was handed to him by history, he could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn't tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it's harder than ever to get a loan.

Imagine if these three huge economic engines – the banks, the car companies, the stimulus bill – had been harnessed to a common green vision. If that had happened, demand for a complementary energy bill would have been part of a coherent transformative agenda.

Whether the bill had passed or not, by the time Copenhagen had rolled around, the US would already have been well on its way to dramatically cutting emissions, poised to inspire, rather than disappoint, the rest of the world.

There are very few US presidents who have squandered as many once-in-a-generation opportunities as Obama. More than anyone else, the Copenhagen failure belongs to him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm...
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BBC News

Friday, 18 December 2009

"The government's former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, has alleged that the hacking of climate change emails was a tactical move by powerful "agencies" to disrupt the Copenhagen summit.

Emails between scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit suggested that some scientists were exaggerating data to steer conclusions about global warming in one direction.

Sir David made the comments on BBC's Newsnight. Cliff Saran, technology editor of Computer Weekly, analyses the allegations."

Listen here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi...
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From The Times

December 22, 2009

Conservatives to push Senate over US climate Bill

Sam Coates

Senior Conservatives are to lobby Republicans in the US Senate to persuade them to back a climate emissions Bill. As the Tory leadership struggled to prevent party sceptics from dominating the environmental argument after the Copenhagen summit, David Cameron pledged to continue the work started in Denmark in trying to find a legally binding climate change agreement.

He said: “We should be thankful for the small things that have been achieved like the 2C limit on temperature rises and the good work on rainforests.

“But it’s disappointing overall because there are no carbon reduction targets, the details on help for poorer countries to tackle global warming is vague and it’s not a legally binding treaty. We need now to step up the work to get that done.”

If his party gains power in May, he could face a critical climate change summit in Bonn four weeks after the election.

Tory environment ministers believe that they can play a role nudging moderate Republicans to support the Bill.

The Bill is stalled until President Obama completes his healthcare reforms. Mr Obama’s failure to produce legislation to reduce carbon emissions before the Copenhagen summit began was a key reason for its failure...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...

Do you think it is any wonder at all that BNP-Paribas is all over this green nonsense?

(BNP-Paribas , exclusive financiers extraordinaire of the UN Oil for Food scam.)

Or, that Rajendra K. Pachauri, Chairman, Intergovernmental panel on climate change, is rubbing elbows with
BNP Paribas at events like the Paris Conference of The Long Term Investors Club?

Can you blame smart people for taking advantage of the current Madness of Crowds, and leaping into the water with jaws wide open?

There is only one remarkable feature of any of this, and that is, they aren't even -trying- to hide it from anybody. The corruption is totally bullet-proof.

From The Times

December 21, 2009

Gordon Brown calls for new group to police global environment issues

Ben Webster, Francis Elliott

A new global body dedicated to environmental stewardship is needed to prevent a repeat of the deadlock which undermined the Copenhagen climate change summit, Gordon Brown will say tomorrow.

The UN’s consensual method of negotiation, which requires all 192 countries to reach agreement, needs to be reformed to ensure that the will of the majority prevails, he feels.

The Prime Minister will say: “Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries. One of the frustrations for me was the lack of a global body with the sole responsibility for environmental stewardship.

“I believe that in 2010 we will need to look at reforming our international institutions to meet the common challenges we face as a global community.” The summit failed to produce a political agreement among all the countries. Delegates instead passed a motion on Saturday “taking note” of an accord drawn up the night before by five countries: the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Daily Telegraph

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

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.

20 Dec 2009

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

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

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

From The Sunday Times

December 20, 2009

The Copenhagen farce is glad tidings for all

Dominic Lawson

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

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

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

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

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Washington Times

Sunday, December 20, 2009

EDITORIAL: Obama's cold day in Denmark

The White House is being outmaneuvered by Red China

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

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

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

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com...
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Copenhagen: The last-ditch drama that saved the deal from collapse

In the end it came down to frantic horse trading between exhausted politicians. After two weeks of high politics and low cunning that pitted world leaders against each other and threw up extraordinary new alliances between states, agreement was finally reached yesterday on an accord to tackle global warming. But the bitterness and recriminations that bedevilled the talks threaten to spread as environmental activists and scientists react to what many see as a deeply flawed deal.

John Vidal and Jonathan Watts
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009

The Copenhagen accord was gavelled through in the early hours of yesterday morning after a night of extraordinary drama and two weeks of subterfuge. It is a document that will shape the world, the climate and the balance of power for decades to come, but the story of how it came into existence is one of high drama and low politics.

Amid leaks, suspicion, recriminations and exhaustion, the world's leaders abandoned ordinary negotiating protocol to haggle line-for-line with mid-level officials. An emergency meeting of 30 leaders was called after a royal banquet on Thursday evening because of the huge number of disputes still remaining.

China and India were desperate to avoid this last-minute attempt to strong-arm them into a deal. The Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh's plane mysteriously developed a problem that delayed his arrival. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao simply refused to attend, sending his officials instead. In a collapse of protocol, middle-ranking officials from the two countries negotiated line by line on a text with Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Germany's Angela Merkel and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Gordon Brown felt the only way to overcome the logjam was for leaders to descend into the detail and take on officials. Yet there was still no agreement by 7am on Friday.

"I thought it was meltdown," said Ed Miliband, Britain's secretary of state for energy and climate change. Brown returned to the fray, cranking out 13 amendments designed to overcome the objections of the developing nations and press home Europe's desire to commit to a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050 and a determination to make the process legally – not just "politically" – binding on all parties. Both goals were rejected by China and India, which had formed a strong alliance...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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BBC News

Sunday, 20 December 2009

China and Indonesia welcome Copenhagen summit deal

Asian giants China and Indonesia have hailed the Copenhagen UN climate summit outcome, despite its cool reception from aid agencies and campaigners.

Beijing's foreign minister said it was a new beginning, and Indonesia's leader said he was pleased with the result.

Earlier, US President Barack Obama defended the accord he helped broker with China and other main powers.

The non-binding pact, called the Copenhagen Accord, was not adopted by consensus at the summit in Denmark.

Instead, after two weeks of frantic negotiations, the 193-nation conference ended on Saturday with delegates merely taking note of the deal...

Germany will host the next climate change conference in six months in Bonn, to follow up the work of the Copenhagen summit.

The final outcome is supposed to be sealed at a conference in Mexico City at the end of 2010.

US President Barack Obama defended the deal after arriving back in Washington on Saturday, describing it as "the foundation for international action in the years to come".

The Copenhagen Accord is based on a proposal tabled on Friday by a US-led group of five nations - including China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

It was lambasted by some delegations when put to a full session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the summit.

A few developing countries said it was a cosy backroom deal between rich nations that violated UN democracy and would condemn the world to disastrous climate change.

Before the summit, China for the first time offered to limit its greenhouse gas output.

It pledged to reduce its carbon intensity - use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output - by up to 45%, although critics said this would not necessarily lead to any overall cut in its emissions.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci...
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Daily Telegraph

Copenhagen accord keeps Big Carbon in business

The Copenhagen summit achieved its main aim, to maintain the carbon-trading system established by the Kyoto Protocol, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker
19 Dec 2009

...Copenhagen was not about global warming but money. The cash that Hillary Clinton so dramatically plonked on the table, rising to $100 billion by 2020, which includes the £1.5 billion offered by Gordon Brown (money which of course he hasn't got) and which like a crazed gambler he last week upped to £6 billion (even more money he hasn't got), was merely a "sweetener" to persuade the developing countries to maintain the money-machine set in motion by Kyoto.

This is the new global industry based on buying and selling the right to emit CO2, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year, which through schemes such as the UN's Clean Development Mechanism and the EU's Emissions Trading System is making a small minority of people, including Al Gore, extremely rich.

The only really concrete achievement of Copenhagen was to win agreement to the perpetuating of those Kyoto rules that have created this vast industry, which has two main beneficiaries. On one hand are that small number of people in China and India who have learnt how to work this system to their huge advantage. On the other are all those Western entrepreneurs who have piled into what has become the fastest‑growing commodity market in the world.

The part played at Copenhagen by all the tree-huggers, abetted by the BBC and their media allies, was to keep hysteria over warming at fever pitch while the politicians haggled over the real prize, to keep the Kyoto system in place...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...

Rich and poor countries blame each other for failure of Copenhagen deal

Wealthy nations accused of bullying tactics to get developing countries to sign 'death warrant'

John Vidal in Copenhagen
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 19 December 2009

The blame game over the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks started last night with countries accusing each other of a complete lack of willingness to compromise.

The G77 group of 130 developing nations blamed Obama for "locking the poor into permanent poverty by refusing to reduce US emissions further."

"Today's events are the worst development for climate change in history," said a spokesperson.

Pablo Solon, Bolivian ambassador to the UN, blamed the Danish hosts for convening only a small group of countries to prepare a text to put before world leaders. "This is completely unacceptable. How can it be that 25 to 30 nations cook up an agreement that excludes the majority of the 190 nations."

But rich countries said that developing countries had wasted too much time on "process" rather than the substance of the talks. An epic stand-off over whether to ditch the Kyoto protocol's legal distinctions between developed and developing countries and their obligations to cut their emissions caused a huge delay to the negotiations...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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Daily Telegraph

Copenhagen climate conference: global warming talks meltdown

The Bella Centre in Copenhagen looks more like the aftermath of a particularly messy house party rather than the place where 120 of the most powerful men and women have just met to discuss saving the planet.

By Louise Gray, in Copenhagen
19 Dec 2009

The largest gathering of world leaders in recent history began with hope and excitement as President Barack Obama himself swept into town.

He said America was ready to fight climate change by cutting greenhouse gases as long as other countries also cut their emissions - and crucially agree to being monitored by the outside world.

“Yes we can!”

Umm, actually no we can’t.

It soon became clear that China was not signing up to any treaty that allowed other countries to snoop around in their dirty emissions laundry.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao reportedly left for his hotel in a huff and suddenly the whole conference was plunged into chaos.

Despite two weeks of hardcore talks it now seemed like the world could not agree after all – or rather the two main superpowers would not agree.

Negotiations were cancelled and thousands of delegates wandered the corridors looking confused and rather sad...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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From The Times

December 19, 2009

Copenhagen cuts corners on climate change safeguards

Ben Webster and Sam Coates in Copenhagen

Key safeguards on climate change were sacrificed yesterday as world leaders struggled to achieve a compromise at the Copenhagen summit.

The final text of the deal merely repeated a previous commitment to limit the global temperature increase to 2C without explaining how countries would achieve that.

It said that “deep cuts in emissions” would be required but failed to set out what they would be. All the targets that had appeared in various drafts were deleted from the final text, indicating the depth of the disagreement among the 192 countries.

They agreed to set “emission reduction targets” across their economies before February 1, but this was a sign of failure because they had all come to Copenhagen with pledges on cutting emissions. Many of the pledges were conditional on other countries making comparable efforts and, despite two weeks of talks, there was clearly too little trust that others would shoulder their share of the burden.

A commitment to turning the “Copenhagen accord” into a legally binding treaty within a year was deleted from the final text...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Chinese debate positive side of global warming

Dynasties were more prosperous' when weather was warm

Steph Davidson, National Post
Published: Friday, December 18, 2009

Academics in China are debating whether global warming could benefit rather than harm the country, with some historical climatologists believing the country did better during warmer periods.

They point to studies that show a drop in temperature and desertification accelerated the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.

"With the cold temperatures there was a drought in Mongolia. Since people were eating livestock, which fed on the grasslands, they needed to go south," Xie Zhenghui of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' International Center for Climate & Environmental Sciences told the Los Angeles Times...

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/ne...
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...to think the world-wide green communism agenda dreamed up in Copenhagen might have been derailed by a communist country, China?

Of course, I have no illusions that our deluded leaders will let matters rest, even if there is no deal.

Sadly I think they are beyond the pale in terms of ever letting the facts, reason or voter disapproval get in the way of this great gravy-train of doom.

From The Times

December 18, 2009

Leaders to agree to climate change deal - but it will fall short of UN minimum

Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Sam Coates

A global deal to address climate change is likely to be agreed today but the commitments it contains on cutting greenhouse gases will fall short of the minimum target set by the UN’s science body.

The European Union is preparing to increase its commitment on cutting emissions as part of an endgame at the Copenhagen summit which will see other countries making similar concessions.

A pledge yesterday by the United States to contribute to a $100 billion (£60 billion) annual climate protection fund appeared to have won sufficient support from developing countries, which are desperate not to walk away empty-handed from the summit.

President Obama, who will join 120 other heads of state in Copenhagen today, may announce a specific financial contribution to make up for not improving on the emissions target he announced last month.

Another big obstacle to a deal was swept away when the US and China appeared to agree a compromise on the issue of independent scrutiny of emission reductions reported by each country. China accepted the need for transparency but stopped short of saying that it would abide the findings of any external audit of its emissions.

Gordon Brown will present the deal as a success but gloss over the fact that the total emissions reductions pledged by developed countries are below the level recommended by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Better to have no deal at Copenhagen than one that spells catastrophe

The only offer on the table in Copenhagen would condemn the developing world to poverty and suffering in perpetuity

Naomi Klein
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 December 2009

...Europe, he says, fully understands how much money will be made from carbon trading, since it has been using the mechanism for years. Developing countries, on the other hand, have never dealt with carbon restrictions, so many governments don't really grasp what they are losing. Contrasting the value of the carbon market – $1.2 trillion a year, according to leading British economist Nicholas Stern – with the paltry $10bn on the table for developing countries for the next three years, Stilwell says that rich countries are trying to exchange "beads and blankets for Manhattan". He adds: "This is a colonial moment. That's why no stone has been left unturned in getting heads of state here to sign off on this kind of deal … Then there's no going back. You've carved up the last remaining unowned resource and allocated it to the wealthy."...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm...
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They call this a consensus?

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

Published: Saturday, June 02, 2007

"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled."

So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.

Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent...

Read more: http://www.financialpost.com/s...

Australia's ABC network broadcast a Lateline discussion between arch-alarmist George Monbiot of the Guardian and arch-skeptic Ian Plimer. Plimer is the author of Heaven and Earth. There is a bit of history† between these two gents, with extreme snark reminding me of certain exchanges here . . .

It is a very snappy, and sometimes uncomfortable exchange.

Three parts of the ABC show via Youtube:

WSS

_________

† the link is to correspondence between the two. There is following material at Chris Colose's blog, here. Among the other online resources examining Plimer's claims are a point-by-point critique of the debate questions Plimer put to Monbiot at wikia.ocm.

See here.

"It was truly shocking to arrive at a climate action rally in Copenhagen and literally see a sea of red flags and banners with hammers and sickles,” says CFACT President David Rothbard. “I don’t believe most environmentalists are secretly communists, but it interesting to see that many communists believe the green agenda is the best path toward socialist policies.”

Some marchers wore hats saying, “Save the Planet. Scrap Capitalism.” One marcher said, “We fight for a socialist society and a socialist program for the climate. I believe in international solidarity in socialism. That’s the way forward.”

The meeting of the world's greatest thugs, murderers and cannibals. All they need now is the Hammer and Sickle, Swastikas and Heil Chavez salute (Oh, yeah, they've already done that!).

How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today's Economy

He even mentions Rand a few times, favorably, in contrast to turncoat Greenspan.

ABC News

Chavez, Morales, Mugabe lash out at Copenhagen

Thu Dec 17, 2009

Firebrand leaders Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Robert Mugabe turned up the heat at the UN climate talks, dumping the blame for global warming squarely at the feet of capitalism.

In speeches greeted with occasional ripples of applause, the long-term critics of Western policy lashed out at what they called the hypocrisy of the world's wealthy elite.

Mr Chavez, the President of Venezuela, was one of the first world leaders to take the podium at the venue of the Copenhagen talks.

He seized the occasion to characterise newly-minted Nobel Peace laureate US President Barack Obama as a warmonger.

"I don't think Obama is here yet," said Mr Chavez.

"He got the Nobel Peace Prize almost the same day as he sent 30,000 soldiers to kill innocent people in Afghanistan."

Mr Obama, who picked up his Nobel last Thursday, is expected to arrive in Copenhagen on Friday for the climax of the 12-day world conference on climate change, according to the US delegation.

Mr Chavez, paraphrasing Karl Marx, said "a ghost is stalking the streets of Copenhagen... it's capitalism, capitalism is that ghost."

"The destructive model of capitalism is the eradication of life," he said...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/sto...
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From The Times

December 17, 2009

Chinese undermine hopes of Copenhagen climate deal

Sam Coates and Philippe Naughton in Copenhagen

China has indicated that it is likely to scupper a far-reaching climate deal at Copenhagen as Gordon Brown downgraded his ambitions for the outcome of the 192-nation summit on global warming.

The Prime Minister used a speech to ministers and fellow world leaders this morning to urge agreement around six broad principles, including preventing global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees on pre-industrial levels and cutting emissions from developed nations by 80 per cent by 2050. He also said that developing countries should show a "significant reduction from business as usual".

"Hurricanes, floods, typhoons and droughts that were once all regarded as the acts of an invisible God are now revealed to be the visible acts of Man," he said.

However, he acknowledged that a detailed agreement was unlikely to be drawn up this week and downgraded his timetable for a deal, suggesting that it should be reached within a year rather than the six months he previously pledged. His speech echoed downbeat comments from other delegations...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Daily Mail

Met Office 'manipulated climate change figures' says Russian think tank linked to President Putin

By Will Stewart
17th December 2009

An explosive new claim that the Meteorological Office in Britain 'manipulated' climate change figures has come from a leading Russian think-tank founded by a former adviser to Vladimir Putin.

As the Copenhagen summit comes to a climax on Friday, it was alleged that Siberian weather statistics were selected in a way that masks evidence not showing global warming.

The think tank strongly disputes the use of data from the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change which were released in a bid to diffuse the recent row over hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia.

The emails were seized upon by global warming sceptics as evidence that academics were massaging the figures.

The Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) claimed the Hadley Centre used statistics from weather stations in Russian and Siberia that fitted its theory of global warming, while often ignoring those that did not...

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

From The Times

December 16, 2009

If Obama signs anything at Copenhagen it should be seen as a bonus

Giles Whittell: Analysis

Belching carbon but laden with good intentions, Air Force One will take off tomorrow night for Copenhagen on one of the most delicate and daunting missions of President Obama’s first year in office.

His tasks divide into essentials and desirables. He must be able to argue on his return that the trip was worth it, and he must resist committing America to emissions targets that prove impossible to enforce. Those are the essentials. He would like to be hailed as a world leader on climate change, and the signs are that he would also, on a personal level, like to do what he can to stop global warming. Those are the desirables.

In the Obama bubble American politics comes first and the state of the planet second. That is not how he or most of the 20,000 delegates would wish it, but it is his — and their — reality.

It is a truth that Britain recognises. The deal being brokered by the British delegation would accept Mr Obama’s pledge to cut US emissions by 17 per cent relative to 2005 levels even though it is much less ambitious than European targets, but it is about much more than numbers: it recognises that if the President cannot turn his undertakings into law they are worth nothing.

By committing the US at Kyoto in 1997 to a carbon reduction scheme to which the US Congress was opposed, Al Gore raised expectations that were then dashed when the Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. The UN climate change talks have taken 12 years to recover...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Obama is not saviour of the world. He's still an American president

The reality is that this man must represent the contradictory interests of a country still way behind on climate change

Jonathan Freedland
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 December 2009

For the second time in just over a week, Barack Obama is on his way to Scandinavia, his mission once again to confront impossible expectations with a cold bucket of reality. Last week he was in Oslo to pick up a Nobel peace prize, apologetically explaining that in the real world away from Norwegian dreams he was a war president who had just escalated the US presence in Afghanistan. On Friday he will touch down in Copenhagen, this time required to offer his regrets that, despite the hopes he stirred round the world a year ago, he will not be able to pull out his pen and, at a stroke, sign the deal that saves the planet.

This is fast becoming Obama's role on the world stage: managing disappointment. The gap between what international opinion demands of him and what he can deliver widens with each passing month, and it falls to him to explain why. If he could be completely frank, he might well tell the climate activists in the Danish capital that, were it purely up to him, he would give them everything they desire. After all, he is the same man whose stump speech two years ago used to open with a declaration that "the planet is in peril". But it is not purely up to him. He has to represent the multiple, complex and contradictory interests of the country he now leads. His job is not saviour of the world. As the climate adviser to a 19-strong group of African nations puts it ruefully: "He's still an American president."...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm...
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Daily Telegraph

Copenhagen climate summit: Desmond Tutu calls for climate justice

Justice cannot wait for a deal to stop global warming at the Copenhagen climate conference, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
15 Dec 2009

The Nobel Laureate joined an “international climate hearing” organised by Oxfam that allowed 1.5 million “witnesses” to the damage caused by climate change around the world to make their case for action.

Witnesses included farmers in Uganda going hungry because of drought and families from Bangladesh affected by floods.

Archbishop Tutu said he has seen for himself the effects of climate change in his home country of South Africa.

“I too, stand before you as a witness. I have seen with my own eyes the changes in my homeland, South Africa. The Southern Cape is currently experiencing the worst drought anyone can remember. There is not enough food. There is too little water. The situation is becoming increasingly desperate,” he said.

Mary Robinson, former UN Commissioner for Human Rights, said climate change was “undermining human rights on an unprecedented scale.”

“International human rights law says that ‘in no case may a people be deprived of its means of subsistence’. Yet because of excessive carbon emissions, produced primarily by industrialised countries, millions of the world’s poorest people’s rights are being violated every day. This is a deep and global injustice," she said...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
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Daily Telegraph

Copenhagen climate summit: Prince Charles warns climate change will drive starvation and terrorism

The world has only seven years before climate change causes a “point of crisis” that will drive food shortages, terrorism and poverty, the Prince of Wales has warned.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent, in Copenhagen
15 Dec 2009

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the ministerial segment of the Copenhagen climate conference, the Prince said the “survival of the species” was in peril.

The talks have been dogged by walk-outs and protests as the poor world becomes increasingly frustrated at the lack of refusal by richer countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Yesterday Yvo de Boer, the head of negotiations, admitted things are moving “too slowly” as pressure grew on the world’s two biggest emitters China and the US to compromise over cutting carbon emissions and committing money to climate change.

Prince Charles said world leaders owe it to “our children and grand children” to make a difference.

“The future of mankind can be assured only if we rediscover ways in which to live as a part of nature, not apart from her,” he said. “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.”

He pointed out that climate change is a “risk multiplier”.

“Reducing poverty, increasing food production, combating terrorism and sustaining economic development are all vital priorities, but it is increasingly clear how rapid climate change will make them even more difficult to address,” he warned.

The Prince, who flew in by private jet, joined Arnold Schwarzenegger the Governor of California and Al Gore, the former US Senator, who also flew in to add impetus to the talks.

Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, is also working hard behind the scenes to “bash heads together” over key issues like the amount of money the rich world is willing to pay poor countries to help them reduce emissions...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Daily Telegraph

Copenhagen climate conference: Nick Griffin calls world leaders mass murderers

Nick Griffin has accused world leaders at the Copenhagen climate conference of the “biggest hoax in history” that will kill more people than the great famines under Stalin and Mao.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent in Copenhagen
15 Dec 2009

The leader of the British National Party and MEP is at the international summit as a representative of the European Parliament.

But he said global warming was a “hoax” designed to impose tax increases on the citizens of the world through putting up the price of energy.

He said world leaders and advocates of action on climate change such as Al Gore are “mass murderers” by supporting biofuels.

He said land for growing food is being taken to grow fuels for crops and it will cause starvation greater than the famines caused by Russian dictator Stalin during the 1930s and Chairman Mao in the 1950s.

"It is a crime against humanity which in future will be seen as an enormous man-made famine. Under Stalin 20 million people died, under Chairman Mao 30 million died. This will be the third and the greatest famine of the modern era and I regard that as a crime.”

However Mr Griffin’s own party would not give more money to the Third World.

“Britain is bankrupt. We cannot afford to go giving money to the third world,” he said...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Daily Express

Tuesday December 15,2009
By Martyn Brown

...The report, by the respected European Foundation, also argues that a higher level of carbon dioxide (CO2) – the main greenhouse gas – is not a problem because it helps to boost crop yields.

And it claims that the warming we are now experiencing is “mostly natural”, pointing to historic shifts in the climate such as when Vikings farmed on Greenland in medieval times.

Political analyst Jim McConalogue, who wrote the report, said: “This demonstrates how tenuous, improper and indeed false the scientific and political claims are for man-made global warming, from claims that climate change can be controlled by human activity to the proposition that CO2 emissions represent a severe threat to our way of life, when in fact there is little evidence to support any of these claims.”

He warned that the Copenhagen climate summit was likely to lead to “nonsensical targets” to reduce emissions, which would result in a “burdensome regulatory agenda”. After Copenhagen, voters around the world “will see what travesty has been done in their name, as foolish politicians and indifferent industry associations have engulfed their countries in emissions legislation”...

http://www.express.co.uk/posts...

See List Here:

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/...

From The Times

December 15, 2009

Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don't add up

Hannah Devlin, Ben Webster, Philippe Naughton in Copenhagen

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Daily Telegraph

Climate change is 'natural not man-made'

Climate change is "natural and not man-made", according to a report that lists "100 reasons why" to back the theory.

15 Dec 2009

They include the controversial claim that there is "no scientific proof" that the rising levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (C02) are caused by human activity.

The report, by the European Foundation, also argues that increased levels of C02 are not a problem because it helps to boost crop yields.

It also points to historic shifts in the climate, such as when Vikings farmed on Greenland in medieval times, to argue that the warming we are now experiencing is "mostly natural".

Political analyst Jim McConalogue, who wrote the report, told the Daily Express: “This demonstrates how tenuous, improper and indeed false the scientific and political claims are for man-made global warming, from claims that climate change can be controlled by human activity to the proposition that CO2 emissions represent a severe threat to our way of life, when in fact there is little evidence to support any of these claims.”

He also warned that the Copenhagen climate summit was likely to lead to “nonsensical targets” to reduce emissions, which would result in a “burdensome regulatory agenda”...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Independent

Brown offers £1.2bn in a bid to break climate deadlock

Prime Minister unveils fresh fund to help the Third World combat global warming – as Prince Charles flies in to Copenhagen to open crucial phase of talks

By Andrew Grice and Michael McCarthy in Copenhagen

Tuesday, 15 December 2009

Gordon Brown is preparing to offer more money from Britain to help the world's poorest countries combat climate change in an attempt to break the deadlock at the Copenhagen summit.

Aides to the Prime Minister, who has already announced £1.5bn over the next three years for African and other nations affected by global warming, said he is also planning to contribute to a separate £15.3bn global fund to reduce deforestation. A payment of similar proportions would mean an extra £1.2bn coming from British taxpayers.

However the Prime Minister faces questions about how Britain will find the money when it has a £178bn budget deficit in the current financial year. The £1.5bn will come from the existing budget of the Department for International Development. Any top-up would be new money which would have to found despite the squeeze on public spending signalled in last week's pre-Budget report.

Mr Brown will travel to Copenhagen today, as will the Prince of Wales, who is due to give an impassioned speech when he opens the Presidents-and-Prime-Ministers section of the meeting, which will see 120 world leaders come together in the Danish capital between now and Friday...

http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
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Steven Chu pledges $350m clean tech fund to sweeten deal at Copenhagen

US energy secretary attempts to show Obama administration is serious about action on climate change

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 December 2009

The Obama administration tried to sweeten a climate change deal for developing countries today with the promise of a $350m fund for the development of new clean energy technologies.

The fund will be used to encourage the development of renewable energy projects such as wind and solar power and more energy efficient appliances in the developing world.

In an appearance at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the energy secretary Steven Chu likened the initiative to the breakthrough of seed technology which helped lift countries in Asia out of poverty. "We need a gamechanger like the green revolution was for agriculture," he said.

Chu's appearance before a packed hall at the US pavilion was part of an ambitious outreach effort by the Obama administration to persuade a sceptical international community it is serious about taking action on climate change. It comes amid rising rancour between rich and poor countries. The talks were suspended for five hours today, with negotiators from African and other developing countries accusing the Danish chair of ignoring their concerns...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

Daily Telegraph

Copenhagen climate summit: 'We must get our act together,' says Ed Miliband

Environment ministers must ''get their act together'' to put international talks to tackle climate change back on track and deal with unresolved issues, Ed Miliband has said.

By Rowena Mason, in Copenhagen
14 Dec 2009

Speaking in Copenhagen, the Climate Change Secretary urged delegates to make progress before national leaders arrive later this week.

He said: ''We need to collectively get our act together and move on and find ways in which we can solve the difficult issues, because these issues that I've mentioned can't all be left to leaders.

''It may be the case that some final issues remain when leaders arrive.

''I've always said the leaders' role in this process is incredibly important to get the final pieces of the jigsaw in place. But what we cannot do is leave a whole slew of issues to leaders.

''I think that the very clear message for negotiators and ministers is we need to get our act together and take action to resolve some of the outstanding issues that we face.''

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, has moved forward his arrival at the Copenhagen climate change summit two days early because talks are “moving too slowly”.

The Prime Minister has now twice pushed forward his appearance at the international summit, where disagreements have broken out between developed and developing countries over how much greenhouse gas emissions should be cut...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Independent

Sunspots do not cause climate change, say scientists

Key claim of global warming sceptics debunked

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Monday, 14 December 2009

Leading scientists, including a Nobel Prize-winner, have rounded on studies used by climate sceptics to show that global warming is a natural phenomenon connected with sunspots, rather than the result of the man-made emissions of carbon dioxide.

The researchers – all experts in climate or solar science – have told The Independent that the scientific evidence continually cited by sceptics to promote the idea of sunspots being the cause of global warming is deeply flawed.

Studies published in 1991 and 1998 claimed to establish a link between global temperatures and solar activity – sunspots – and continue to be cited by climate sceptics, including those who attended an "alternative" climate conference in Copenhagen last week.

However, problems with the data used to establish the correlation have been identified by other experts and the flaws are now widely accepted by the scientific community, even though the studies continue to be used to support the idea that global warming is "natural".

The issue has gained new importance in the light of opinion polls showing that nearly one in two people now believe global warming is a natural phenomenon unconnected with CO2 emissions. Public distrust of the accepted explanation of global warming has been exacerbated by emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which appeared to suggest that scientists were engaged in a conspiracy to suppress contrarian views.

Many sceptics who accept that global temperatures have risen in recent decades suggest it is part of the climate's natural variability and could be accounted for by normal variations in the activity of the Sun. Powerful support for this idea came in 1991 when Eigil Friis-Christensen, director of the Danish National Space Centre, published a study showing a remarkable correlation between global warming and the length of sunspot cycles...

Messrs Svensmark and Friis-Christensen stand by their studies and continue to believe there is evidence to support their sunspot theory of global warming, despite the doubts first raised by Laut.

"It's not a critique of the science or the correlations, it's a critique of person," Mr Friis-Christensen said. "It's a character assassination. [Laut] is not interested in the science, he's interested in promoting the idea Henrik did something unethical."

http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
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From The Times

December 14, 2009

Copenhagen stalls decision on catastrophic climate change for six years

Ben Webster, Environment Editor, in Copenhagen

The key decision on preventing catastrophic climate change will be delayed for up to six years if the Copenhagen summit delivers a compromise deal which ignores advice from the UN’s science body.

World leaders will not agree on the emissions cuts recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and are likely instead to commit to reviewing them in 2015 or 2016.

The delay will anger developing countries who, scientists say, will face the worst effects of climate change despite having contributed relatively little of the man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

A draft text published by the UN says that there should be a review in 2016, which could result in an “update of the long-term global goal for emissions reductions as well as of the adequacy of commitments and actions”.

The Times has learnt that negotiators from developed countries are planning to use the idea of a review to justify failing to agree the 25-40 per cent cut in the 1990 level of emissions by 2020, recommended by the IPCC...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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From The Sunday Times

December 13, 2009

Think tank: Do-gooder Gore has it all wrong

Tony Allwright

Halfway through the climate change conference in Copenhagen, and still nobody seems to be willing to address the Climategate science fraud scandal that is crumbling the foundations of the global warming narrative.

In their new book Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner also challenge that narrative. They suggest that warming isn’t caused by human-generated carbon dioxide, to the predictable outrage of numerous “global warm-mongers”.

The contribution of carbon dioxide (CO2) to (alleged) global warming has become such an accepted piece of conventional wisdom that few seem to question it any more. “The science is settled,” we are admonished. We must curtail our CO2 emissions — or else. So cars are taxed according to their emissions; carbon levies and taxes are imposed; carbon-trading schemes are created; green ministers spend taxpayers’ money to “offset” CO2 emitted jetting around the world; the British government plans legislation to force people to reduce their carbon footprints; and we should all turn vegetarian.

Yet science, unlike some scientists, screams out that man’s CO2 cannot possibly cause global warming. Consider the molecular physics — it’s not that difficult...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Washington Times

EDITORIAL: The tip of the Climategate iceberg

Misleading 'evidence' is central to the global-warming fraud

A skeptical public repeatedly has been told that questions about purported global warming are closed. "I think everybody is clear on the science. I think scientists are clear on the science ... I think that this notion that there's some debate ... on the science is kind of silly," said President Obama's Press Secretary Robert Gibbs when asked Monday about the president's response to the controversy. The flack was talking smack.

Contrary to the whitewash job conducted by propagandists, there are 450 academic peer-reviewed journal articles questioning the importance of man-made global warming. The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has collected more than 30,000 American scientists urging the U.S. government to reject the Kyoto Treaty, which pushes draconian measures to reduce carbon emissions. Much hay is made of 2,500 United Nations scientists who back Kyoto, but there are many more scientists with Ph.D.s among the 30,000 skeptics than there are among the oft-cited 2,500, most of whom are government bureaucrats without advanced degrees...

http://washingtontimes.com/new...
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Daily Telegraph

Jon Snow falls for Ed Miliband's figures

The climate change secretary was conservative, to say the least, in estimating the cost of his Climate Change Act on Channel 4 News, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
12 Dec 2009

A perfect reflection of the surreal nature of the "climate change debate" was the juxtaposition of two news items on the front page of the Telegraph website on Thursday. On the left was the headline "Met Office predict 2010 will be warmest on record". On the right was the story of how large parts of the US Mid- West had been brought to a halt, for the third winter running, by record-breaking blizzards.

The curious role of the UK Met Office, one of the leading promoters of climate change hysteria under its chairman Robert Napier, a former professional climate activist, has made it an international laughing stock. After its earlier prediction that 2007 would be "the warmest year on record', global temperatures plummeted by 0.7C, more than the entire net warming of the 20th century. Each year since then its winter and summer forecasts have been hilariously wrong (eg this year's prediction of a "barbecue summer"). And of course these forecasts were made with the help of a computer model – run by its Hadley Centre, in conjunction with the Climatic Research Unit now at the centre of the "Climategate" scandal – which is the same as the main one supplying temperature data to the UN' s IPCC...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...
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Daily Telegraph

Copenhagen climate summit: Carbon trading fraudsters in Europe pocket €5bn

Carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals pocketing an estimated €5bn (£4.5bn) mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland, according to Europol, the European law enforcement agency.

By Rowena Mason
10 Dec 2009

The revelation caused embarrassment for European Union negotiators at the Copenhagen climate change summit yesterday, where they have been pushing for an expansion of their system across the globe to penalise heavy emitters of carbon dioxide.

Rob Wainwright, the director of serious crime squad, said large-scale organised criminal activity had “endangered the credibility” of the current carbon trading system.

“We have been talking to Europol over the last weeks,” said one EU senior delegate, after she was asked whether the European Union-run scheme was still viable. “We are making some fixes.”

Yesterday, the UK delegation released a paper calling for the “expansion of carbon markets”, in order to use the profits for a fund to help developing nations tackle climate change.

Suspicions about an unprecedented level of carbon crime over the last 18 months have led investigators to believe criminals are using “missing trader” techniques to buy up carbon credits elsewhere in Europe where there is a cheaper rate of VAT.

Then they sell on the credits in the UK, charging the domestic rate, and pocket the difference. This has been commonplace among trading of very mobile commodities across European borders, such as phones, computer chips and cigarettes.

British investigators made seven arrests earlier this year over a suspected £38m VAT scam...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Back to the bunker

The 'Climategate' emails have given new life to America's conservative sceptics – and they will be the biggest losers

John McQuaid
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 12 December 2009

Until recently, American conservatism's once-monolithic opposition to the very idea of global warming - based mostly, it sometimes seemed, on a common disdain for Al Gore - was starting to crack.

Outright denial – of the kind preached by Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe – was once the conservative movement's default position, and still is for many Republicans. The denialist camp even includes intellectuals such as George Will, who has penned a preposterous series of columns arguing, in essence, that climate change is a myth cooked up by scientists in service to a political agenda that will generate more grant money to produce more research into this mythical problem. In other words, a historically unprecedented worldwide scientific ponzi scheme.

Meanwhile, though, a steady stream of research reinforced the global scientific consensus, more real-world effects emerged in arctic regions and elsewhere, and even some Republican-friendly corporations began taking preemptive action. Even the Bush administration eventually conceded that anthropogenic climate change was real. So conservatives collectively began to pull their heads out of the sand - a little...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm...

Yes it is, but I still believe that billions of dollars will flow to the third world, possibily sparking wars, death and the decline of the west.

Don't forget they are already discussing the next summit post-Copenhagen.

These guys have a religious type zeal and wont let this thing drop.

Contrivance in Copenhagen

"From the opening ceremony's video of a little girl running from an earthquake to the promises of emissions reductions, everything taking place in Copenhagen is contrived. The outcome of climate talks -- no treaty, no emissions reductions -- was known in advance. And yet participants pretend there is an unfolding drama. As such, Copenhagen is history's first completely postmodern global event. It's a festival of phoniness. With the ambitions of Versailles but the power of Davos, Copenhagen creates a cognitive dissonance for its creators, which results in ever-more manic displays of apocalypse anxiety and false hope. In the end, Copenhagen tells us more about ourselves -- our post-American world, our fragmented media environment, and our hyper-partisanship -- than about any attempt to slow global warming."

[..]

"What makes Copenhagen the first postmodern global event is not simply that it lacks a relationship to reality, but that so many continue to project such faith that a solution lies close at hand onto an effort that has so abjectly and obviously failed."

This article (link below) explains "hide the decline."

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: Climate change emails row deepens as Russians admit they DID come from their Siberian server

Russian secret service agents admitted yesterday that the hacked ‘Warmergate’ emails were uploaded on a Siberian internet server, but strenuously denied a clandestine state-sponsored operation to wreck the Copenhagen summit.

The FSB - formerly the KGB - confirmed that thousands of messages to and from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were distributed to the world from the city of Tomsk, as revealed by The Mail on Sunday last week.

Now, it has emerged that IT experts specialising in hacking techniques were brought in by the Russian authorities following this newspaper’s exposure of the Tomsk link.

They have gathered evidence about how and where the operation was carried out, although they are not prepared to say at this stage who they think was responsible.

A Russian intelligence source claimed the FSB had new information which could cast light on who was behind the elaborate operation.

‘We are not prepared to release details, but we might if the false claims about the FSB’s involvement do not stop,’ he said. ‘The emails were uploaded to the Tomsk server but we are sure this was done from outside Russia.’

The Kremlin’s top climate change official, Alexander Bedritsky, denied the Russian government was involved in breaking into the CRU’s computer system.

‘You can post information on a computer from any other country. It is nonsense to blame Russia,’ he said.

Thank you Russia.

Here's the latest spin for pro-warmers:

Review: E-mails show pettiness, not fraud, Climate experts, AP reporters go through 1,000 exchanges

By Seth Borenstein, Raphael Satter and Malcolm Ritter

updated 12:18 p.m. ET, Sat., Dec . 12, 2009
LONDON - E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

...she lost her Teddy bear.

It fell in the hole.

And then, the tsunami came. Or, maybe it was a tornado. Or Hurricane. Whatever.

I just know, she lost her Teddy bear.

Just....won't you please save the world?

Now do you understand?

It's for the Teddy bear.

It got wet.

"Christopher Monckton berates a group of young activists for interrupting a meeting of climate sceptics in Copenhagen, calling them 'Nazis' and 'Hitler Youth'."

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From The Times

December 12, 2009

Copenhagen climate change summit in deadlock over rival texts

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The Copenhagen climate change summit is likely to end with two rival texts because the main countries cannot agree on the key question of how to share the burden of cutting emissions to a safe level.

The extent of the disagreement was exposed by the publication yesterday of two draft agreements, neither of which contained clear numbers or language on any of the most contentious issues, despite two years of negotiations before the summit.

The US refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has forced negotiators to work on two separate texts and there is now little chance of the twin-track process producing a single document. The negotiators from 193 countries are hoping that the early arrival at the summit of several leaders next Wednesday, including Gordon Brown, will help to break the deadlock.

The only issues on which agreement is close are a commitment to a three-year climate fund to help poor countries to adapt to global warming and a pledge to limit the global temperature increase to 2C, although without a clear plan for delivering it...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Copenhagen climate conference: Money talks

Editorial
The Guardian, Saturday 12 December 2009

Cash is the key to unlocking the grand climate bargain between the rich and poor world, as was apparent even before the brokering had got under way in Copenhagen. At the end of the first week of talking, this reality has become even starker, for a whole host of reasons.

For one thing, the first world is resisting moving things forward through the power of its own example. The European Council yesterday failed to make any immediate advance on its original offer of a 20% emissions reduction. This despite Gordon Brown's hope that Europe might soon firm up its more tentative talk of a 30% cut. In the absence of action, money will have to do even more of the talking. The indicative offers from developing countries are rather more encouraging – the environmental consultancy Ecofys suggests they are broadly in line with what the scientists demand – but these offers come with financial strings attached, making assistance still more important. Developing countries reject the rich world's tendency to brand such funds as aid, regarding them as reparations incurred by the globe's north for creating a problem which will do most damage in the south. The strength of the feelings showed, when a top negotiator on behalf of the poor countries dubbed Mr Brown worse than a climate-change denier for having squandered all the money on the banks...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm...
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WSJ

The EPA's Carbon Bomb Fizzles

DECEMBER 11, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

Far from alarm, the feeling sweeping through many quarters of the Democratic Congress is relief. Voters know cap-and-trade is Washington code for painful new energy taxes. With a recession on, the subject has become poisonous in congressional districts. Blue Dogs and swing-state senators watched in alarm as local Democrats in the recent Virginia and New Jersey elections were pounded on the issue, and lost their seats.

But now? Hurrah! It's the administration's problem! No one can say Washington isn't doing something; the EPA has it under control. The agency's move gives Congress a further excuse not to act...

http://online.wsj.com/article/...
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Ironically our 'fake' Christmas tree just arrived in the post today!
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Daily Telegraph

Ditch fake Christmas trees to save planet

People should shun fake Christmas trees and buy a real one if they care about the environment, according to a Government quango which has issued a "green guide" to the festive season.

By Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Editor
12 Dec 2009

Artificial Christmas trees, which have become increasingly popular over the last few years, have a carbon footprint at least ten times larger than a real tree.

Buying a 6 foot fake tree, made from plastic, is as damaging to the environment as toasting 5,222 slices of bread or driving 120 miles in an average-sized car.

The advice to shun the white, black, pink and glittery artificial trees that are being sold by supermarkets and department stores comes from the Carbon Trust, a Government-funded company which advises the public sector and businesses about how they can cut down on their carbon emissions.

Its advice about trees comes as part of some "top tips for cutting out our carbon impact over Christmas without cutting out the festive fun"...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...

Brown and Sarkozy move to fund climate aid with global banking tax

An EU summit in Brussels sought to boost the chances of a deal further by also pledging €2.4bn a year from January

Ian Traynor in Brussels
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 December 2009

An international campaign to force the financial sector to pay for saving the planet from global warming was boosted yesterday when France joined Britain in championing a new global regime of so-called Tobin taxes on financial market transactions. The billions in potential proceeds would be earmarked for long-term measures to tackle global warming.

Days before the Copenhagen climate change conference reaches its finale with the arrival of Barack Obama and more than 100 other world leaders, an EU summit in Brussels sought to boost the chances of a deal further by also pledging €2.4bn a year from January in "fast-track" funds to help the world's poor countries cope with rising seas, floods and famines.

The figure agreed saw Gordon Brown almost double Britain's pledge from £800m to £1.5bn, apparently making the UK Europe's single most generous donor.

The figure was higher than expected and part of a broader package from the industrialised countries around the world tipped to total €7bn a year for the next three years...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

The Met Office seems to be in a desperate panic at the moment to dampen any AGW scepticism.
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From The Times

December 11, 2009

Next year to be the world’s warmest on record, Met Office predicts

Ben Webster in Copenhagen

Next year is “more likely than not” to be the world’s warmest year on record and man-made climate change will be a factor, according to the Met Office.

It said that natural weather patterns would contribute less to next year’s temperature than they did in 1998, the current warmest year in the 160-year record.

El Niño effect, the cyclical heating of the Pacific Ocean, is much weaker than it was in 1998 but the Met Office expects the warming effect of greenhouse gas emissions to more than make up the difference.

It announced at the Copenhagen climate change summit that it expected the global average temperature next year to be almost 0.6C warmer than the 1961 to 1990 average. It forecast an annual average of 14.58C compared with 14.52C in 1998.

If the forecast proves correct it will be a significant blow to climate change sceptics, many of whom base their arguments on the fact that the temperature has not returned to the 1998 peak. Despite wrongly predicting a “barbecue summer” this year, the Met Office claims to have a good record of accurately predicting global temperatures...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Daily Telegraph

Copenhagen climate change: 'US should spend as much on global warming as war'

Poor countries have demanded that the US spends as much on tackling climate change as it does on warfare.

By Louise Gray, Environment correspondent and Rowena Mason in Copenhagen

The row between the rich countries and the developing world intensified at the Copenhagen summit, as China and its supporters blamed America for “endangering the world” by refusing to hand over more cash.

Developing nations are pushing for £120bn ( $200bn) to help them tackle the effects of global warming, which is double the amount of money currently on the table.

In a new twist to the negotiations, Lumumba di-Aping, chief negotiator of the China and the G77 group of nations, made a direct appeal to US politicians to reapportion cash currently set aside for global financial emergencies...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Has Ukip got more than it bargained for in recruiting Viscount Monckton?

If the climate sceptic is to be believed, Ukip has landed a Nobel laureate, member of the Lords, saviour of the forces and inventor of the universal cure

George Monbiot Thursday 10 December 2009
guardian.co.uk

Lucky old UK Independence party (Ukip). With great fanfare in Copenhagen, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley – the man who believes that action on climate change is a conspiracy to create a communist world government – announced this morning that he was joining them. He has made this momentous move, he tells us, because he has "become fed up with the hive mentality of British political discourse". British political discourse will doubtless miss him sorely, but does Ukip know what it is taking on?

I know that this party has become the last refuge of a marvellous collection of cranks and fabulists. In fact this seems to be its main role: care in the community for political eccentrics. But when even Rod Liddle, who is no friend of environmentalists, describes Monckton in his Spectator blog as a "swivel-eyed maniac", you can't help fearing that Ukip might be out of its depth...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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Daily Mail

Copenhagen climate change summit: The world is COOLING not warming says scientist Peter Taylor ... and we're not prepared

By Peter Taylor
11th December 2009

In his provocative book Chill, he warns that the world is cooling not warming and that solutions proposed at Copenhagen ignore the risks of a possible return of the Ice Age...

Like a magician who fools themselves but not audience, the Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) lobby have identified the wrong problem and the wrong solution.

Global cooling threatens disaster for humanity in the developed and developing world alike, yet the media and the scientific consensus ignores this peril.

The Climategate controversy revolves around whether warming has been real and why it has not persisted – but it misses the point.

Cycles are involved, not short-term trends, and many respected scientists, especially those in Russia and China, think that a cooling cycle is coming.

The AGW brigade have mistaken the current warm period for a trend caused by carbon emissions. But the detailed science says it could be natural and part of a cycle.

Behind the scenes at the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change there is no consensus – the dissenting views have been covered over in the summary documents for policy makers – and among UK and EU politicians it’s even worse, and criminally expensive for the British taxpayer...

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
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Nature will decide Earth's future

By Professor Bob Carter

The Daily Telegraph December 09, 2009

AS the core samples from deep underground pass through the logging sensor before me, the rhythmic pattern of ancient climate change is clearly displayed. Friendly, brown sands for the warm interglacial periods and hostile, sterile grey clays for the cold glaciations. And for more than 90 per cent of recent geological time the Earth has been colder than today.

We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent but welcome warm interludes. It is a 10,000 year-long period called the Holocene, during which our civilisations have evolved and flourished.

The cores tell the story that this period is only a short interlude during a long-term decline in global temperature - they also warn of the imminence of the next glacial episode in a series stretching back more than 2 million years.

Together with 50 other scientists and technicians, I am aboard the drilling ship Joides Resolution. JR, as it is affectionately known, is the workhorse of the Ocean Drilling Program, an international program that is to environmental science what NASA is to space science.

JR's drilling crew can retrieve cores up to 1km or more below the seabed and we are drilling today about 80km east of South Island in New Zealand. The ancient muds and sands that make up the sediment layers we pass through are the most important record of ancient climate that scientists possess. And they tell the tale that climate always changes...

http://www.dailytelegraph.com....
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Unfortunately this disgraceful piece of Danish Government propaganda shown at Copenhagen Conference is #6 on the viral video chart this week.

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It was quite obvious from early on that Scherk has thinly-veiled rage towards the ClimateGate scandal.

Bullshit. I think the scandal is a good thing for climate science, it sharpens the debate, and lifts the cover on what McIntyre and others wanted to have released via FOIA requests --this is the meat that the anti-AGW forces have wanted. I like that the CRU is under investigation, I like the IPCC inquiry, I like the inquiry at APS, and I like that folks behind the AGW barricades (at CRU and elsewhere) have to respond. It's an exciting story with long legs. That's how I led my comments, and I stand by them. In this thread, if you have a gander back, you will be hard-pressed to quote anything that resembles rage against the scandal, thinly-veiled or otherwise.

He referred to the the person who set up the website with the ClimateGate emails as a "concerned citizen", then linked to Gavin Schmidt's rebuttals on RealClimate, such as Schimdt's laugably stupid defense that the data was "hidden in plain sight.".

I posted a link to the searchable East Anglia emails, and I recommended people read the 'damage control' threads at RealClimate.org, and I posted a link to a 'hilight reel' and pointed to a 19 point 'explanation.' I don't know if you read any of the material linked. I think not. I think you might have missed this:

I again recommend the RealClimate.org site for the continuing discussion between (some of) the principals and the critics. ClimateAudit is down, probably due to server overload. The usually decent skeptic sites have made this a dance-around-the-bonfire moment rather than an opportunity to explain the devilry. It's not enough for the skeptic side to dance, they have to make the pitch to the mainstream media, and help the underfed public understand the issues.
And with that, I am off to read the final 833 emails at the site noted above.

He wanted to hear both sides of the story, you know, and RealClimate is the perfect place for that.

RealClimate is more-or-less the mouthpiece of the AGW side, and has the largest footprint. As I noted, several of the major contributors and guest writers at RC are named in or copied to or originated emails in the hacked files. RC usually has a hard-core moderation policy, but in the aftermath of the disclosures, the comment threads (some 3000 posts) burgeoned. Here was where the frontline of the AGW 'side' were responding to the skeptics. Do you recommend that folks here do not read those threads at RC, seriously?

Scherk always wants to hear both sides of this debate, continuously reminding us of that and the fact he's just an outside observer.

Michael, who doesn't always want to hear from all 'sides'? I suppose a fair inquiry would hear from only a single 'side'? I don't believe that's what you would recommend -- only reading and following skeptical views. You aren't suggesting that you are anything but an outside observer yourself, are you?

Yet, he seems to love to cite the number of scientists in favor of AGW and hack Ellen to death on this point. He veers off into the question of motivations, and criticizes, criticizes, criticizes--with his typical snark.

Three major points in my recent exchanges with Ellen -- the first, that while making note of this week's mailout by Austin et al, she didn't mention that the APS had rejected the petition. The second, that the nit and the grit were missing in her airy dismissals of nameless 'Thems.' Third, that I liked her discussion-starters.

Why not debate Ellen on the science, instead of diversionary issues?

I would love for someone, anyone here -- even you, Michael -- to get past the slogans and the sneers. That's the problem here, as I see it.

If Ellen is up for it and Scherk is up for it, I, for one, would definitely find THAT more entertaining and worthwhile.

Well, as Ellen drily puts it, she has been aware for a long time that I don't begin to know the science enough to debate. That closes this particular door.

Mind you, I'm not quite as good at divining competence as Ellen. I like her. She's smart. She's been around. Her husband's a physicist. She has been engaged. She's tough. I love tangling with her, because I always end up smarter. I think of any person here at SOLO, she is well-placed to make strong and detailed cases for her views, whether the motivations of AGW-believers, or the conceptual vacancy in "anthropogenic global warming."

But, can we really assess her competence except on her say-so, though? if she arrogates to herself the final verdict without laying out the case?

I guess we will have to accept that she could, if she wanted, answer anything we put up. I assume she knows her history, knows her Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius and Callendar, her Högbom, Chamberlin, Koch, Kaplan, Plass, Suess, Revelle, Bolin, Ericksson, Budyko and Keeling. I must assume that she is more than glancingly familiar with the long-drawn 'discovery' of AGW, its participants and their findings. Everywhere in there, Ellen, because She Knows The Science, could tease out for we dullardly SOLOists the warp and weave of mendacity and error that has led her investigations to conclude fraud.

Sadly, because I am not worthy of her attention on matters physical, we devolve into boilerplate. Ellen notes that there are "crucial debates occurring daily with scientific-community supporters of alarm." I presume these are quality debates that may or may not be of interest to me and other SOLOists. Perhaps none of us are smart enough to follow these crucial debates, and so won't be graced with the details.

Michael, you are a late-comer to discussion on AGW, I see. I have zero idea what your thoughts are. If they consist of more than blurts about about laughably stupid people, knaves, dogma, Ellen hacked to death, snark, diversionary issues, I would be surprised. So far, you source nothing, you quote nothing, and your observations are spurious. Can we expect a little more oomph from you too, or will you also curl your lip and drift from the stage?

WSS