I hope all of our politicians who seek to still push NZ's Kyoto's obligations read Canada's environment minister, Peter Kent's, reasons for Canada leaving Kyoto. These comments, as reported in The Press today, are stunning:

Quote:

Kent had said previously that signing the Kyoto Protocol ... was one of the previous government's biggest blunders ...Kent said the move saved Canada US$14 billion in penalties for not achieving its Kyoto targets. "To meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the equivalent of either removing every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car and vehicle of every kind from Canadian roads, or closing down the entire farming and agriculture sector and cutting heat to every home, office, hospital, factory and building in Canada" ... He said [withdrawing] 'allows us to continue to create jobs and growth in Canada.'

And our politicians still keep us in this - mind numbing.

Canada is out of Kyoto: http://www.smh.com.au/environm...

Canada has announced it is pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environm...

Time for our new government to make such a clear, decisive decision, and not leave our farming sector in limbo-land.

'Modest' gains as UN climate deal struck

"Countries agreed a deal today to push for a new climate treaty, salvaging the latest round of United Nations climate talks from the brink of collapse...

Greenpeace International's executive director Kumi Naidoo said: "Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that's put off for a decade.

"This could take us over the two degree threshold where we pass from danger to potential catastrophe."

Also agreed at the Durban talks was the establishment of a green climate fund to channel billions of pounds to poor countries to help them cope with impacts of global warming such as floods and drought - but no sources of money were found."

[With the world economy collapsing - funny that!]

...loved it.

Almost as good as Cameron as the Manneken.

Full coverage over at CFACT - Committe for a constructive tomorrow

London, 7 December 2011

Olam International Ltd. and Rainforest Alliance have teamed up to produce the world’s first “climate-friendly cocoa” in Ghana.

“This collaboration with Olam offers an ideal opportunity to stop the deforestation of this sensitive area so that we can protect biodiversity in standing forests while at the same time planting 100 hectares of native tree species for carbon sequestration in the fight against climate change.”

Farmers will be trained to develop the capacity to assess the risk that climate change poses to their livelihoods and to design and implement adaptation plans for their farms and at landscape level with farmers associations.

The mid-term goal of this programme is to ensure that the climate-friendly farm level practices are escalated and replicated to a landscape and forest management level.

Public support for tackling climate change declines dramatically

Survey shows 17% fall in number of people who would pay 'much higher prices' for 'sake of the environment'

"There has been dramatic decline over the past decade in the public's support for tackling climate change in Britain. Backing for higher green taxes and charges has waned and scepticism about the seriousness of the threat to the environment has increased.

The British Social Attitudes survey shows that in 2000 43% of the population would pay "much higher prices" for "the sake of the environment". Last summer support fell to just 26%, with the poorest sections of society most reluctant to save the planet with their cash.

Over the same period the public has become much more sceptical about the science behind climate change. In 2010 37% said many claims about environmental threats were "exaggerated", up from 24% in 2000.

Alison Park, research director of the survey, said that the two factors that loomed large in the public's mind appeared to be the financial crisis which made people much less likely to be able to sacrifice cash or taxes. She also said that "climategate" claims about the veracity of scientific claims in 2009 had also damaged the case of proponents of global warming theories."

New Zealand carbon price collapses on top of collapse in European carbon price. A completely artificial market dreamed up in the minds of bureaucrats, that even the proponents say achieves nothing in terms of climate change, and it's collapsing in New Zealand on top of a collapse of the carbon price in Europe.

http://www.sharechat.co.nz/art...

Stuff up of governmental proportions as usual. Who'd a thought that would ever happen

http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
Climategate (Part II)
A sequel as ugly as the original.
Dec 12, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 13 • By STEVEN F. HAYWARD

The new batch of emails, over 5,300 in all (compared with about 1,000 in the 2009 release), contains a number of fresh embarrassments and huge red flags for the same lovable bunch of insider scientists. It stars the same cast, starting with the Godfather of the CRU, Phil “hide the decline” Jones, and featuring Michael “hockey stick” Mann once again in his supporting role as the Fredo of climate science, blustering along despite the misgivings and doubts of many of his peers. Beyond the purely human element, the new cache offers ample confirmation of the rank politicization of climate science and rampant cronyism that ought to trouble even firm believers in catastrophic climate change.

[Have they just inadvertently invalidated their own hypothesis? Where is that dangerous runaway warming they promised?]

Carbon dioxide emissions show record jump

Latest research on carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels shows they have increased by half in the last 20 years

"Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased by half in the last 20 years, giving the world much less chance of avoiding dangerous climate change, according to new data.

The research was published as lead negotiators were arriving at the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, where prospects of a new global treaty on climate change appeared to have stalled, with deep divisions between developed and developing countries.

Last year, emissions from burning fossil fuels rose by 5.9%, bringing the total rise since 1990, the baseline year for calculating emissions under the Kyoto protocol, to 49%, an average rate of increase of about 3.1% a year.

Prof Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, and an author of the research, said the data showed that little had been achieved in the past two decades in reducing the risks from climate change.

"There have been efforts to use more renewable energy and improve energy efficiency but what this shows is that so far, the effects have been marginal," she said. "We need to do something about the 80% of energy that still comes from burning fossil fuels."

She said the problem was urgent, as the chances of holding global temperature rises to less than 2C above pre-industrial levels (which scientists regard as the limit of safety) beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible, were dependent on emissions peaking by 2020 at the latest.

Governments meeting in Durban this week are focusing on a new treaty that, if it can be achieved, would not come into force until 2020. "That would be too late, unless strong actions are taken in the meantime," said Le Quéré.

Some governments and policy advisers have been advocating a different approach to the climate negotiations, suggesting that a system of voluntary reductions in emissions undertaken by national governments and industries could be more effective than a "top-down" global treaty. But this so-called "bottom up" approach did not appear to be working currently, Le Quéré said, as efforts to cut emissions so far had made little impact outside Europe, where emissions have been successfully reduced."

Durban Climate Change Conference 2011 opens in disarray

"As delegates arrived in the coastal South African city of Durban on Sunday, dark skies gave way to thunder and lightning storms and torrential rain which waterlogged parts of the city’s conference venue and swept away tin shacks in townships on the outskirts of the city, killing eight people.

On Monday, many of the estimated 15,000 delegates packed into the main hall for the opening session, only to be kept waiting for 40 minutes by South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma.

Aides to the president blamed the president of Chad, saying Mr Zuma arrived on time but was forced to wait for him.

The 17th Conference of the Parties summit represents the last chance for developed nations to sign up to a second term of the Kyoto Protocol, which specifies legal limits for their carbon dioxide emissions, before it expires at the end of next year...

The European Union led a positive charge to revive Kyoto, saying it would sign up for a second term. But it stipulated that the world’s two biggest polluters, the United States – the sole developed country to shun Kyoto – and China – still classed as a developing country – should also agree to legally-binding emissions cuts before 2015.

Artur Runge-Metzger, the EU’s negotiator at the summit, said both developing and developed countries had to make firm commitments to emissions caps this year or risk the public “losing confidence in this travelling circus”.

The US said that China signing up to a such a deal was a “basic requirement” for its own participation but even then, it offered no guarantees.

Meanwhile China and the G77 group of developing nations said that they would insist on developed nations signing a second Kyoto term before agreeing to any global deals themselves.

Canada has already said it will not commit to a second term and yesterday it emerged that it could withdraw before the original deal expires. The country’s national broadcaster said it would be announced next month that Canada will withdraw from the protocol – a move its Green Party warned would make it a “global pariah” at Durban.

Within the European Union grouping, which speaks at the summit with one voice, cracks were already beginning to emerge after the publication of a report suggesting the UK was backing a controversial plan by Canada to extract oil from swampland – something the EU has made clear it is against because of the levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Those watching the talks begin said it was an inauspicious start. “It is headed towards a real impasse in Durban, frankly, there is no way to gloss over it,” one veteran participant said.

“There are very few options left open to wring much out of the meeting unless the position of these major countries softens considerably.”

David Attenborough is accused of climate change sensationalism by Lord Lawson

Lord Lawson has accused David Attenborough of sensationalism and alarmism over the environment.

The former Tory chancellor, who is a climate change sceptic, said the broadcaster’s claims about global warming were sheer speculation.

In the final episode of his natural history series Frozen Planet, which is broadcast next Wednesday, Sir David is expected to suggest the Arctic could be free of ice by 2020.

In a piece written for Radio Times, Lord Lawson said: ‘Sir David Attenborough is one of our finest journalists and a great expert on animal life. Unfortunately, however, when it comes to global warming, he seems to prefer sensation to objectivity.

‘Had he wished to be objective, he would have pointed out that, while satellite observations confirm that the extent of Arctic sea ice has been declining over the past 30 years, those satellite observations show that overall, Antarctic sea ice has been expanding over the same period.’ ...

The former Conservative minister said: ‘Two things are clear. First, that Sir David’s alarmism is sheer speculation. Second, that if there is a resumption of warming, the only rational course is to adapt to it, rather than to try (happily a lost cause) to persuade the world to impoverish itself by moving from relatively cheap carbon-based energy to much more expensive non-carbon energy.’

It has already been revealed that the BBC is offering Frozen Planet to broadcasters in other countries without the controversial climate change episode.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, most populations of polar bears are declining.

Sir David has been vocal about his concerns over climate change for many years and in 2006 he warned that the issue was the biggest challenge facing the world.

He has said: ‘If we do care about our grandchildren then we have to do something.’

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

The Great Global Warming Fizzle

The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.

How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.

The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece . . .

Searchable database of all hacked emails:

http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php

H/T: "What's Up With That?" climate blog.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

Climategate II: the scientists fight back

The first Climategate made scientists dive for cover, refusing to comment. This time, they held a press conference.

"Same “scandal”. Same timing. Similar material. But so far, at least, a very different impact. The second release of so-called Climategate emails this week has, at least initially, turned out to be a damp squib, particularly compared to the first.

The anonymous hacker who released some 5,000 new emails from the University of East Anglia earlier this week, two years almost to the day after the first batch went viral, could have been forgiven for expecting much the same effect. After all, they were again being made public just a few days before crucial climate negotiations begin – this time in Durban, last time in Copenhagen. And some of the publicised excerpts seemed just as damaging, if not more so.

Climate sceptics were quick, in the words of Myron Ebell of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, to hail strong evidence of “a conspiracy to provide a scientifically misleading assessment of the case for catastrophic global warming”. Senator James Inhofe, who pioneered the now nearly universal hostility of senior Republican politicians to action on climate change, cited them as “one more reason to halt” Obama’s “global warming agenda”. And commentators predicted they would derail the Durban talks, opening on Monday.

Yet the public response seems to have been nothing more than a yawn. The emails dropped out of the news within a couple of days. And Google’s record of trends for searches and news coverage of Climategate, which went through the roof two years ago have scarcely registered a blip.

This could still change. Some truly shocking revelation, or something that can be made to look like one, may yet emerge from all those documents. And no one should ever understate the ability of climate scientists to shoot themselves in the foot. But so far it is a far cry from 2009 when Prof Phil Jones’s apparent admission of using “a trick” to “hide the decline” set the world on its ear."

I don't think this second e-mail scandal will have the same impact as last time, especially as it seems to be from the same batch.

We'll see.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Image via Wikipedia

A new batch of 5,000 emails among scientists central to the assertion that humans are causing a global warming crisis were anonymously released to the public yesterday, igniting a new firestorm of controversy nearly two years to the day after similar emails ignited the Climategate scandal.

Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.

UN chief slams rich nations' plans to delay climate change treaty

"The United Nations' environment chief has slammed plans by the world's richest nations to put off a global treaty on climate change to 2020, saying the proposals were "very high risk".

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN environment programme, said postponing an agreement – which was meant to be signed in 2013 – to the end of this decade was a "political choice" rather than one based on science.

The Guardian revealed this week that most of the world's rich economies have quietly decided to shelve plans for a global agreement on climate change to take effect within the next few years, instead pushing for an agreement by the end of 2015 or 2016, and coming into effect until 2020. Scientists and economists have said this plan risks leading to catastrophic and irreversible climate change.

Steiner is the first senior UN official to speak out against the plans, which will be aired next week at the latest round of UN climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa.

He said: "Those countries that are currently talking about deferring an agreement [to come into force] in 2020 are essentially saying we are taking you from high risk to very high risk in terms of the effects of global warming. This is a choice – a political choice. Our role, working with the scientific community, is to bring to the attention of the global public that this is the risk that policymakers and governments will expose us to."

UNEP's chief scientist, Joseph Alcamo, highlighted the potential dangers of putting off an operational agreement until the end of this decade. "Every year it becomes more difficult to keep within 2C [of warming above pre-industrial levels – the limit of safety, according to scientists, beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible]."

He said: "Every year, we build more power plants. Every year, we build more buildings that are not efficient. Every year, our options [to avoid climate change] get less and less."

Niklas Hoehne, of the consultancy Ecofys, said: "What's important is that the effect [of increasing emissions] is cumulative. The more we wait the more we have to do, and the less we do before 2020, the more reductions [in emissions] we have to do beyond 2020 – and the longer we wait, the more expensive that becomes."

Steiner was also scathing about the proposal, which is gaining currency in some quarters, that a global climate agreement is not necessary, because companies and governments will reduce emissions by themselves without the pressure of an international commitment. This would not happen, he said. "The world has no option but to reach a binding agreement. If we don't have a global agreement, we become captive to the narrow self-interest of countries who only see the competitive advantage rationale in whether to act [on emissions] or not."

Correction: Marcus, that's the norm from The Guardian, a paper for white liberals with their heads up their arses.

It was one from the Daily Telegraph and two from the Guardian.

Marcus, that's the norm from The Independent, a paper for white liberals with their heads up their arses.

Climategate 2? More UEA hacked emails

Dr Simon Lewis, Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds, said it was all about politics.

“This latest email leak, again on the eve of important international climate talks, is about politics. Yet the shadowy, undemocratic group trying to influence these international talks will fail. I sat through two weeks of talks in Copenhagen after the first email release and heard them mentioned only once. This new leak will have a similarly limited impact. Governments know that climate science reports signed off by over 190 countries, each with their own scientists, cannot be unduly influenced by a single scientist or a small group. These emails are irrelevant."

Failure to catch climate email hacker is the real scandal

Attacks on climate scientists are the real 'climategate'

I pissed myself laughing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

...will have the same impact as last time, especially as it seems to be from the same batch.

The liberal media are already saying, "move along here - nothing new to see. This is just a conspirarcy to disturb the new climate conference."

Reminds that a few weeks ago someone was saying that a new scandal was the end of Nancy Pelosi.

Well, she's still around and no more controversy to see.

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

Fresh round of hacked climate science emails leaked online
A file containing 5,000 emails has been made available in an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of 2009's similar release

A fresh tranche of private emails exchanged between leading climate scientists throughout the last decade was released online on Tuesday. The unauthorised publication is an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of a similar release of emails on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009.

The initial email dump was apparently timed to disrupt the Copenhagen climate talks. It prompted three official inquiries in the UK and two in the US into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists' handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced.

Norfolk police have said the new set of emails is "of interest" to their investigation to find the perpetrator of the initial email release who has not yet been identified.

The emails appear to be genuine, but the University of East Anglia said the "sheer volume of material" meant it was not yet able to confirm that they were. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages. The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.

In the new release a 173MB zip file called "FOIA2011" containing more than 5,000 new emails, was made available to download on a Russian server called Sinwt.ru today. An anonymous entity calling themselves "FOIA" then posted a link to the file on at least four blogs popular with climate sceptics – Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, TallBloke and The Air Vent. The same tactic was used in 2009 when the first 160MB batch of emails were released after being obtained – possibly illegally – from servers based at the University of East Anglia, where a number of the climate scientists involved were based . . .

* * * * * * * * *

http://files.sinwt.ru/download...

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

http://climateaudit.org/

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com...

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/

Wind farms are useless, says Duke

The Duke of Edinburgh has made a fierce attack on wind farms, describing them as “absolutely useless”.

"In a withering assault on the onshore wind turbine industry, the Duke said the farms were “a disgrace”.

He also criticised the industry’s reliance on subsidies from electricity customers, claimed wind farms would “never work” and accused people who support them of believing in a “fairy tale”.

The Duke’s comments will be seized upon by the burgeoning lobby who say wind farms are ruining the countryside and forcing up energy bills.

Criticism of their effect on the environment has mounted, with The Sunday Telegraph disclosing today that turbines are being switched off during strong winds following complaints about their noise.

The Duke’s views are politically charged, as they put him at odds with the Government’s policy significantly to increase the amount of electricity generated by wind turbines.

The country has 3,421 turbines — 2,941 of them onshore — with another 4,500 expected to be built under plans for wind power to play a more important role in providing Britain’s energy.

Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, last month called opponents of the plans “curmudgeons and fault-finders” and described turbines as “elegant” and “beautiful”.

The Duke’s attack on the turbines, believed to be the first public insight into his views on the matter, came in a conversation with the managing director of a leading wind farm company.

When Esbjorn Wilmar, of Infinergy, which builds and operates turbines, introduced himself to the Duke at a reception in London, he found himself on the end of an outspoken attack on his industry.

“He said they were absolutely useless, completely reliant on subsidies and an absolute disgrace,” said Mr Wilmar. “I was surprised by his very frank views.”

The truth will out on Labor's carbon scam

"THE whitewash begins. Now that the carbon tax has passed through federal parliament, the government's clean-up brigade is getting into the swing by trying to erase any dissent against the jobs-destroying legislation.

On cue comes the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which this week issued warnings to businesses that they will face whopping fines of up to $1.1m if they blame the carbon tax for price rises.

It says it has been "directed by the Australian government to undertake a compliance and enforcement role in relation to claims made about the impact of a carbon price."

Businesses are not even allowed to throw special carbon tax sales promotions before the tax arrives on July 1.

"Beat the Carbon Tax - Buy Now" or "Buy now before the carbon tax bites" are sales pitches that are verboten. Or at least, as the ACCC puts it, "you should be very cautious about making these types of claims".

There will be 23 carbon cops roaming the streets doing snap audits of businesses that "choose to link your price increases to a carbon price".

Instead, the ACCC suggests you tell customers you've raised prices because "the overall cost of running (your) business has increased".

It's all very Orwellian: the tax whose name cannot be spoken. We are already paying for the climate-change hysteria that has gripped Australia for a decade. Replacing even a portion of our cheap, coal-fired power with renewable energy is hellishly expensive. It also requires costly adaptation of existing infrastructure."

Ban Ki-moon calls for climate fund to be finalised at Durban

"The global economic crisis is no excuse for countries to delay an international fund to help countries combat the effects of climate change, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has said.

Speaking at a conference in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka yesterday, Ban called on governments to make a concerted effort at the forthcoming Durban climate summit to establish the $100bn Green Climate Fund, which was first agreed at Copenhagen in 2009.

"Governments must find ways – now – to mobilise resources up to the $100bn per annum as pledged," he said. "The fund needs to be launched in Durban. An empty shell is not sufficient. Even in this difficult time we cannot afford the delay."

The fund has proved politically contentious, with governments from developing and developed nations repeatedly clashing over the scale of the fun [is that a typo or intentional? - Marcus], how the new finance will be raised, and how it will be distributed.

The Durban summit will also address the thorny issue of how to impose emissions reduction targets once the Kyoto Protocol expires next year.

Fears are mounting that any failure to agree a new deal could see the Kyoto Protocol lapse, removing binding emissions targets for many countries and the regulatory backbone for international carbon markets, which could be thrown into disarray once the legal basis for trading is removed."

[As if we haven't heard that one before, in five years time it will be "another five years".]

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

"The world is likely to build so many new fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

Anything built from now on that produces carbon will continue to do so for decades to come, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this infrastructure is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.

"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, told the Guardian. "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."

Every month now counts: if the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that "carbon budget", according to a new analysis by the IEA, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing."

Marcus:

It's been about two years since the Climategate emails scandal. To what extent do you think that episode was successfully whitewashed/buried/'weathered?' A succession of MMGW alarmist friendly authorities have rushed in after the fact and declared 'nothing to see here, folks.' As well, now two years have passed, and memories fade.

Are they back in business, simply by waiting this out?

Certainly not here. I mean, in the court of broad public opinion. Is it almost as if Climategate never happened at this point?

We have an entire generation now used to video game sensibilities; you wait it out long enough, and your 'life' is automatically restored to 100% after a mortal hit...

And still...no mid altitude Greenhouse effect signature in the satellite sounder or weather balloon data, as their own theory demands. This, to me, is some of the most damning evidence that supports doubt of this theory.

Long term GW, no doubt.

Greenhouse effect induced GW? No evidence, from any source, much less man.

MMGW? No convincing evidence or determination if man's net contribution is warming or cooling; any such signature, even if it exists, is lost in the noise of natural variability.

All the evidence points inevitably to solar effects, with the exception of virtual reality: -some- of the alarmist ensemble runs of uncalibrated and uncalibratable computer models that assume CO2 dominates H20, the Sun, the Oceans, clouds...

Different impact in northern and southern polar regions => solar. (Inclined orbit + Perihelion + varying impact of winter freezing and summer melting means we should -expect- differences in N/S poles if the cause is primarily solar.)

Observed trends on Mars polar caps => solar.

Observed GW trends mainly at surface, not mid altitudes=> solar, not greenhouse effect.

H20 dominates CO2 as a greenhouse gas. The argument that it 'leaves the atmosphere quickly' is balanced precisely by the argument that it also 'enters the atmosphere quickly.' Our thin, wispy atmosphere is dominantly buffered by our massive oceans(with their of order 1000 year thermal memories). 99.9% of the earth's atmospheric thermal mass is tied up in our oceans, as massive integrators of solar heating and cooling trends.

The only question is, at what point in any of that does H20 not dominate CO2 as a greenhouse gas?

And yet... read the Wiki page on ClimateGate; it has been effectively whitewashed by the True Believers.

Climate change scientist faces lie detector test

"It's the next step in "Polarbeargate" – one of two scientists whose report on dead polar bears in the Arctic helped make the animal a potent symbol of climate change has been asked to take a lie detector test as part of an investigation by US agents.

The 2006 report from American wildlife researchers Jeffrey Gleason and Charles Monnett told of dead bears floating in the Arctic Ocean in 2004, apparently drowned, and focused attention on the vulnerability of the animals to the melting of the Arctic ice, which they need for hunting. Widespread references were made to the dead bears and they figured in the film An Inconvenient Truth, made by Al Gore to highlight the risks of global warming.

But earlier this year, allegations were made within the US Department of the Interior that acts of scientific misconduct might have been committed in relation to the report, and the Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) began an inquiry.

Mr Monnett, who works for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, a Department of the Interior agency, became the focus of the inquiry and was interviewed several times by OIG agents; in July he was suspended.

The OIG said the suspensions followed concerns about a research contract he had been involved in awarding, and not his polar bear article. But some pressure groups alleged the episode represented political interference with science and was a witch-hunt, or at least an attempt to intimidate researchers whose studies might affect the politics of climate change. The issue became known in some quarters as "Polarbeargate".

25th Oct. By Alan Caruba at Tea Party Nation

“.. The fading of global warming from the political agenda is a mostly American phenomenon,” wrote Rosenthal, apparently unaware that the European Union is about to collapse because several of its member nations are so deeply in debt that makes the U.S. look like a paragon of prudent fiscal policy. Rosenthal appears to be unaware of the rapid political changes occurring across the northern tier of African nations called the Maghreb and elsewhere throughout the Middle East.

Like the urchins “occupying Wall Street”, Rosenthal chides Americans who “prefer bigger cars and bigger homes. We value personal freedom, are suspicious of scientists, and tend to distrust the kind of sweeping government intervention required to confront rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

Since when is valuing personal freedoms, many of which are protected by the Constitution, and being suspicious of those scientists who have been claiming we’re all going to die, or questioning sweeping government intervention anything other than a deeply embedded American tradition and a very good idea under any circumstance?"

Animals 'shrinking' due to climate change

Polar bears are shrinking because of the impact of climate change on their natural habitats, along with many other animals and plants, researchers say.

"Rising global temperatures and changes in weather patterns have knock-on effects which are already stunting the growth of a wide range of species.

The change could have a major impact on the expanding human population, with major food sources like fish likely to reduce in size and crops expected to grow smaller and less reliably than today.

Species which are unable to adapt quickly enough are at risk of extinction as ecosystems shift dramatically, altering the balance of food and other resources needed for survival.

Researchers argue that warmer and drier weather causes plants and animals to reach smaller sizes, while more variable rainfall levels raise the risk of failed crop years.

Over the past century animals including toads, tortoises, blue tits, Soay sheep and red deer have all started to reduce in size, they said.

Lower levels of sea ice have even resulted in polar bears getting smaller, according to a report in the Nature Climate Change journal...

Reduced food supplies are likely to mean that animals at the top of their food chains – including humans [such as Al Gore] – will grow to smaller sizes, have fewer offspring, and be more vulnerable to disease, they added..."

...are just shouting at Windmills like Don Quixote.

Good one

Windmills are part of the holy grail of liberal insanity. They believe if we just put up enough windmills we can generate enough power to run the world or at least all of the consumer electronics owned by the unwashed anarchists of Occupy Wall Street.

But Houston, we have a bat problem. Literally.

From the Tribune Democrat:

LILLY — Night operation of the windmills in the North Allegheny Windpower Project has been halted following discovery of a dead Indiana bat under one of the turbines, an official with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday.

The finding marks only the second location where an Indiana bat has been found dead under a wind turbine. Two Indiana bats were found under turbines in the Mid-west, said Clint Riley, supervisor for Fish and Wildlife’s Pennsylvania field office.

“While finding the dead bat is not good news for any of us, it does show the monitoring works,” Riley said from his State College office.

The find is significant because the Indiana bat is an endangered species and is protected by the federal Endangered Species Act.

The 35-windmill farm was built by Gamesa Energy USA in Portage, Washington and Cresson townships in Cambria County and extends across the line into Blair County.

It became operational in September 2009 and was purchased by Duke Energy in July 2009, spokesman Greg Efthimiou said.

Okay. The windmill will not be operated at night. The windmill is not going to be operated when there is no wind. What exactly is the purpose of this program anyway?

What is going to happen if left wing lunatics like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi actually make us dependent on this junk for our power.

Oops. Dead bat. Have to shut down at night. What about the people who need power? What about air conditioning and heating for homes? What about other electronics at homes? What about for businesses? What about for emergency services or hospitals?

I have some bad news for the Democrats. 90% or more of the species that have ever wandered this earth are extinct. That is nature. Some species thrive and some do not. I for one shed no tears that the T-Rex is extinct.

Here is a novel idea. Let’s go back to coal, gas and nuclear production of electricity. Those programs work much better than wind turbines and they do not kill nearly as many bats.

James Hansen has already made a killing over the swindle.
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"In November 2009, thousands of leaked emails between Dr. Mann and other "warmists"---scientists responsible for the global warming hoax, revealed nothing less than a massive fraud.

Flash forward to a freedom of information (FOI) request by Chris Horner on behalf of American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center. Despite stonewalling for years, Dr. Mann’s former employer, the University of Virginia complied in May 2011, agreeing to release Dr. Mann’s computer files containing the data he had kept hidden for more than a decade.

Serendipitously, a similar FOI issued to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has revealed the level of financial gain received by another key player in the global warming hoax, Dr. James Hansen, a longtime NASA employee and the man credited with generating the hoax with testimony before a congressional committee in 1988. He has been the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies since 1981

It turns out that in 2010 alone he received “between 236,000 and $1,232.500 in outside income”! When you add in all the awards and speech fees Dr. Hansen has received over the years it is a tidy sum while he exploited his taxpayer-funded position. The agency had resisted disclosing this information for years, but as a federal employee Dr. Hansen waives privacy interests as a condition of employment."

Cold U.K. winters from low solar activity

"Various media such as BBC, Reuters, Australia's ABC, The Daily Mail, The Independent, and others admit that the solar activity has an impact on the weather...

Richard Black of BBC writes that the authors "emphasize" that this finding can have no consequences for "global warming", something that appears at the end of the Nature abstract as well. Wow. It's pretty impressive what preposterous propositions zealous and biased people are ready to write down in their effort to defend the indefensible (including their indefensible grants).

There exists absolutely no reason why such effects – which can lead to freezing winters at various places including the U.K. – would exactly average out once we calculate their impact on the global mean temperature and its changes within decades etc. One may hypothetically see a cancellation at one time scale but it won't extend to other timescales.

Quite on the contrary, the Milankovitch (astronomical) cycles show that e.g. the ability of ice sheets near the Arctic Circle to grow is actually essential for the evolution of the global mean temperature at longer time scales; this is exactly the reason why ice ages and interglacials have alternated; this is the algorithm to calculate why the global mean temperature was changing the way it was changing. Even if the heat is "just" being redistributed from one place to another, it's extremely important where the heat actually is if you want to know something about the Earth's future ability to accumulate heat.

But the "global mean temperature" is viewed as a holy cow that must be "decoupled" from everything else and controlled by the human sins and by the evils of industrial capitalism. This is a key dogma that dishonest pseudoscientists want to protect. This dogma is false but even if it were right, it could have no sensible implications for rational policymaking because for the British, the actual weather in Great Britain is more important than some abstract and partly ill-defined global mean temperature. Similar propositions hold for everyone else in this world, whether he is a human or an animal. The idea that the whole world should "team up" and take care of a "shared global mean temperature" is a preposterous hardcore collectivist conspiracy theory. Everyone who suggests that people should view the global mean temperature as an important thing is a hardcore Marxist."
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Global warning: climate sceptics are winning the battle

"Climate sceptics are winning the argument with the public over global warming, the world's most celebrated climate scientist, James Hansen of NASA, said in London yesterday.

It is happening even though climate science itself is becoming ever clearer in showing that the earth is in increasing danger from rising temperatures, said Dr Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and is widely thought of as "the father of global warming" – his dramatic alert about climate change in US Senate hearings in July 1988 put the issue on the world agenda.

Since then he has been one of the most outspoken advocates of drastic climate action, and yesterday he also publicly criticised Germany's recent decision to abandon its new nuclear power programme, formerly a key part of German climate measures, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan earlier this year."

Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?f...

By Alan Caruba

The notion that the Environmental Protection Agency uses “science” to justify their regulations is false, just like most of the claims they issue on various aspects of the nation’s environment. Their favorite scam is to estimate the number of deaths they will prevent with some new draconian regulation.

The EPA is the American equivalent of the Gestapo, a ruthless enforcement agency with a very Green agenda that is opposed to the use of many beneficial chemicals, every form of energy, and the right of people to be left alone.

At the top of its list of priorities is the destruction of the nation’s economy with special attention to all forms of energy production. Manufacturing anything comes next, followed by afflicting the nation’s vast agricultural sector. The EPA insists that dust is a pollutant. You can’t farm without generating DUST.

To understand the threat the EPA poses it is necessary to understand that proposed Clean Air regulations are based on the claim that “global warming” is real, is happening, and is caused primarily by carbon dioxide (CO2). The claim is utterly without any scientific merit..

There is NO global warming. At least not the kind Al Gore lies about.

The North and South Poles are not melting; they gain and lose ice in a perfectly natural cycle that has been going on for billions of years. The polar bears are not disappearing. Drilling for oil in ANWR will have zero effect on the caribou. Et cetera!

With our vast reserves of coal and natural gas, the U.S. does not lack for the ability to generate electricity or to refine oil for transportation.

If you want to stay warm this winter, you better hope that utilities keep producing the electricity for your home or apartment’s heating system. Fifty percent of that electricity is produced by cheap, abundant coal and the EPA is hell bent to shut down as many coal mines as possible, leading in turn to the shutdown of utilities that burn coal. Natural gas accounts for just over twenty-four percent of electricity generation and it need hardly be said that the EPA is wary of fracking, the technology to access it.

Blowing the Whistle on the EPA

The big news—the kind even the mainstream media was unable to ignore—was that the EPA’s own inspector general has released a report accusing the agency of cutting corners regarding the “science” cited to justify its effort to declare CO2 a “pollutant.”

Simply stated, without CO2 all life on Earth dies.

It is a gas that plants use for their growth. From a blade of grass to a giant redwood, all depend on CO2, as do all the crops grown coast to coast. Enormous quantities of corn and wheat are grown that contribute to the U.S. economy, feeding both livestock and humans in wondrous ways. Take away vegetation and the animals die. Take away the animals that grace our dinner plates and we die.

Absurdly, the EPA says it is a “pollutant”, a dangerous hazard to our health.

No, the most dangerous hazard to our health is the EPA.

The EPA insists on ignoring all the other natural sources of CO2 as well as the fact that it constitutes less than one percent, 0.038 percent of the atmosphere. The oceans of the world gather it, store it, and release it. The EPA, though, says that when man is involved, it is pure evil.

Mind you, every human exhales about six pounds of CO2 every day. The fact is that the air Americans inhale daily is clean is due to the agency’s early efforts to mitigate some abuses. Those were the days before the EPA abandoned a rational, fact-based approach to its stated objectives. One of its legacies is the idiotic required inclusion of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline. Made from corn, it actually produces more CO2 to produce and use.

The EPA effort to regulate CO2 came along with the invention of the global warming hoax that claimed CO2 was “trapping” the Earth’s heat. That is why CO2 and others are deceptively called “greenhouse” gases (GHGs). Manufacturing everything from a donut to megawatts of electricity emits GHGs.

Finally, even the EPA’s inspector general blew the whistle on the utterly deceitful way the EPA arrives at its justification for a vast matrix of regulations that has been stifling the economy for years. The IG has charged that the EPA did not meet its own guidelines for peer review to ensure the integrity of the science stated.

Anyone who has been following the rise and fall of the global warming hoax knows that “peer review” has become a highly corrupted practice. Real peer review is critical to the integrity of any scientific study. When major science journals abandoned the peer review process to publish gibberish about global warming, they put all other new scientific studies at risk.

As Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted, the EPA’s regulation of CO2 emissions would require “230,000 full-time employees to produce 1.4 billion work hours to address the actual increase in permitting functions” that would result if the EPA is allowed to get away with this scandalous hoax. It would cost an estimated $21 billion per year. By contrast, the EPA’s budget request for fiscal year 2012 is $8.973 billion.

The EPA claims that the Clean Air Act gives it the power to regulate CO2, but it does not. It was never intended to, but the Supreme Court in one of its more idiotic rulings opened the door for the EPA claim. In his dissent from Massachusetts v EPA, Justice Antonin Scalia quipped that, as defined by the Court, “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies as an ‘air pollutant’”

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) pointed out that “The EPA’s determination has led to a mountain of Clean Air Act regulations that could cost over a million jobs.” It is noteworthy that Sen. Barrasso said, “EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has regularly assured Congress and the American public that its finding is based on sound scientific practices.” It isn’t. Jackson “should testify immediately,” said Sen. Barrasso, “the American people deserve the truth.”

The EPA has been short on the truth about all of its claims for four decades and needs to be shut down in order to let a truly science-based agency replace it with strict congressional oversight and limitations.

The time is long overdue to pull the plug on the Environmental Protection Agency.

22 September 2011

Maldives government complains of spoof atlas omission

By Charles Haviland

BBC News, Colombo

The government of the Maldives has complained after the UK's Daily Telegraph website carried a satirical blog post saying the island nation is to be omitted from the Times Atlas of the World.

The supposed omission was said to be due to impending climate change.

The low-lying islands of the Maldives are at risk from rising sea levels.

The spoof blog post was taken seriously by several media outlets in the Maldives.

The Telegraph blog post was written by a climate change sceptic, James Delingpole.

On Monday, scientists said the new edition of the Times Atlas had exaggerated the scale of ice-cover reduction in another part of the world, Greenland.

Mr Delingpole's blog said the next edition of the famous atlas would continue what he called its "Climate Change alarmism", by completely erasing some very low-lying areas - the Maldives, Tuvalu and "major parts of Bangladesh".

He quoted a fictitious "spokesman" for the atlas as saying that in map-making, "emotional truth" was more important than actual truth.

Some Maldivian websites and newspapers took the satirical blog seriously.

An opposition politician sent out a mass text message blaming the Maldives' president for the country's omission from the map, because he'd staged events such as an underwater cabinet meeting...

Times Atlas To Print New World Map Without Tuvalu, Maldives, Manhattan etc

James Delingpole
September 20th, 2011

Following its controversial decision to produce a map suggesting that Greenland has lost 15 per cent of its ice cover in the last twelve years – a loss rate disputed by most credible scientists: and even, amazingly, the Guardian agrees on this – the Times Comprehensive Atlas Of The World has decided to take its new role as cheerleader for Climate Change alarmism a step further. In its upcoming 14th edition, unconfirmed rumours suggest, it will completely omit Tuvalu, the Maldives and major parts of Bangladesh in order to convey the "emotional truth" about "man made climate change."

"All right, it may not be strictly geographically accurate to say the Maldives and Tuvalu will definitely have disappeared in about ten years time when our next edition appears," said Times Atlas spokesman David Rose. "But did you see that picture of the Maldives cabinet holding a meeting underwater? If the Maldives government says the Maldives are drowning, they must be drowning. And frankly I think it's despicable, all those deniers who are saying it was just a publicity stunt, cooked up by green activist Mark Lynas, to blackmail the international community into giving the Maldives more aid money while simultaneously trying to lure green Trustafarians to come and spend £1500 a night in houses on stilts with gold-plated organic recyclable eco-toilets made of rare earth minerals from China. Why would a government lie about something as serious as climate change?"...

Scientists know after 'Himalayagate' that one big error can cloud a thousand truths

Poul Christoffersen
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 21 September 2011

Over the past few days, climate scientists and polar researchers from across the world have rallied, mobilised and responded to a massively incorrect press statement by HarperCollins, the publisher of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. According to HarperCollins, the atlas is "turning Greenland 'green' because the new edition has had to erase 15% of Greenland's once permanent ice cover".

The press release issued last Thursday quickly spread across the global news, leaving many scientists flabbergasted. How on earth could the Times Atlas obtain such high number? The Greenland Ice Sheet contains 2.9m cubic kilometres of ice – enough to raise the sea level by 7 metres if it were to melt. A 15% reduction in size would be about a 1-metre rise – enough to cause flooding over a third of the Netherlands.

Since flooding of this magnitude has not taken place in recent years, scepticism was immediate in the glaciological community. Something must have gone seriously wrong when the new map of Greenland was compared against the previous version from 1999.

What happened next is something new. Scientists from around the world quickly expressed their frustration with the questionable claim.

Jeffrey Kargel from the University of Arizona wrote on the cryolist, an email distribution list used by many students, researchers and academics, that "a number like 15% ice loss … is simply a killer mistake. This is not a scientific error, but it could be perceived as one."

Graham Cogley, a professor of geography at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, replied "the claims here are simply not backed up by science", and concluded "this pig can't fly".

At the Scott Polar Research Institute, seven scientists including myself issued a press statement on the University of Cambridge website explaining "a 15% decrease in permanent ice cover since the publication of the previous atlas 12 years ago is both incorrect and misleading. A sizable portion of the area mapped as ice-free in the atlas is clearly still ice-covered." Journalists at the Guardian and many other news outlets immediately picked up these concerns.

Meanwhile, scientists from across the world continued the exchange of emails via the cryolist. Ted Scambos, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said: "I'm worried that the importance of the changes that are going on will be lost on the public, because the true value of what the ice sheet has lost compared to this 15% number sounds very small."

And he is right, because the true loss of permanent ice in Greenland from 1999-2011 is about 0.1%. This sounds miniscule. Why worry?...

The substantial consequences of making inaccurate or exaggerated claims in the climate change debate came to light after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change incorrectly stated in their last assessment report, that Himalayan glaciers could vanish before 2035. Although this mistake was not made within the actual assessment of the physical science basis of climate change, the unravelling of this mistake nonetheless lasted more than a year and was damaging not just to the IPCC, but the wider scientific community.

In the aftermath of what is often referred to as 'Himalayagate', scientists are well aware that one big error can cloud a thousand truths. This is why the science community tackled the Times Atlas mistake swiftly and effectively.

Yesterday, HarperCollins issued a press statement retracting the claimed magnitude of ice loss, but maintained that they stand by their maps. But to scientists, the representation of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the latest atlas, without explanatory text, will continue to be misleading.

• Dr Poul Christoffersen is a lecturer at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge

Collapse of solar power giant an embarrassment for Obama administration

Republicans are investigating why the White House approved a half-billion-dollar loan guarantee for a solar panel manufacturer that it was citing as a model for creating "green jobs" but which subsequently went bankrupt.

By Toby Harnden, Washington
15 Sep 2011

The company Solyndra was lauded by President Barack Obama but later left the US government liable for $528 million (£334m) of taxpayer money. Republicans in the House of Representatives are investigating whether the guarantee was rushed through so that an event featuring Vice President Joe Biden could be held.

Solyndra was a major presence in Washington and spent millions of dollars on lobbying. Its executives raised thousands of dollars for Mr Obama and Democrats in Congress. The fallout from the collapse of the California-based company is an embarrassment to the White House at a time when Mr Obama is promoting his new jobs plan.

The congressional panel examining the loan released emails that appeared to show that senior staff at the Office of Management and Budget were reluctant to conduct "rushed approvals" of loan guarantees.

"We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews and have the approval set the date for the announcement rather than the other way around," said unnamed aide in an email to Mr Biden's office.

Mr Obama cited Solyndra as an example of how the economic stimulus bill would create jobs. When it filed for bankruptcy, saying it couldn't compete with foreign manufacturers of solar panels, 1,100 employees were laid off...

From Calder's Updates. There is a good summary of the role of the Sun in cloud seeding which is not allowed for in the warmists' computer models.

"Retracing those 14 years, what if physics had functioned as it is supposed to do? What if CLOUD, quickly approved and funded, had verified the Svensmark effect with all the authority of CERN, in the early 2000s. What if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had done a responsible job, acknowledging the role of the Sun and curtailing the prophecies of catastrophic warming?

For a start there would have no surprise about the “travesty” that global warming has stopped since the mid-1990s, with the Sun becoming sulky. Vast sums might have been saved on misdirected research and technology, and on climate change fests and wheezes of every kind. The world’s poor and their fragile living environment could have had far more useful help than precautions against warming.

And there would have been less time for so many eminent folk from science, politics, industry, finance, the media and the arts to be taken in by man-made climate catastrophe. (In London, for example, from the Royal Society to the National Theatre.) Sadly for them, in the past ten years they’ve crowded with their warmist badges into a Hall of Shame, like bankers before the crash."

Climate change concern tumbles in US and China

Damian Carrington
Tuesday 30 August 2011
guardian.co.uk

If, like me, you think urgent global action is needed to avert the worst impacts of global warming, then you will also agree that global opinion is crucial: political will is created directly out of public pressure.

So a new global survey suggests the glass is two-thirds full. Sixty nine percent of citizens in 51 nations around the world are concerned about climate change, and that two-to-one majority is essentially unchanged over the last four years. But there's less cheer in the details of the survey, conducted by Nielsen and available here (first link, free registration required).

The global climate negotiations, still the only real game in town, are dominated by the US and China. The Nielsen survey finds that less than half of Americans (48%) are concerned about global warming, compared to 51% in 2009 and 62% in 2007. With 14 point fall in 4 years, one can see why Republican climate sceptics feel comfortable rejecting the idea that every nation on earth (including their own) has accepted: that human activities are causing climate change and that the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions is pressing.

More surprisingly perhaps, opinion in China is also on the slide. Concern fell from 77% in 2009 to 64% in 2011, putting it back nearer to 2007's figure of 60%...
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Al Gore likens climate change sceptics to racists

Al Gore, the former US vice president, has predicted that in years to come people who are sceptial about climate change will be seen in the same way as racists.

30 Aug 2011

In an interview on UStream, Mr Gore likened the debate over climate change to the Civil Rights movement in the US in the 1960s.

He said that in order for climate change advocates to secure action over global warming they must "win the conversation" against deniers.

"I remember again going back to my early years in the South, when the Civil Rights revolution was unfolding, there were two things that really made an impression on me," he told Climate Reality Project collaboator Alex Bogusky.

"My generation watched Bull Connor turning the hose on civil rights demonstrators and we went 'Woah! How gross and evil is that?'."

He remembered how society marginalised racists and said climate change sceptics must be defeated in the same way.

"There came a time when... racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural.

"Then there came a time when people would say, 'Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong...

Obama approves oil pipeline from Alberta tar sands to Texas coast

Campaigners disappointed as White House says 1,700-mile pipeline will not cause significant environmental damage

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 August 2011

The Obama administration gave an important approval yesterday to a controversial pipeline that will pump oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the Texas coast.

In a blow to campaigners, who have spent the last week at a sit-in at the White House, the State Department said the proposed 1,700-mile pipeline would not cause significant damage to the environment.

The State Department in its report said the project – which would pipe more than 700,000 barrels a day of tar sands crude to Texas refineries – would not increase greenhouse gas emissions. It also downplayed the risks of an accident from piping highly corrosive tar sands crude across prime American farmland.

Campaigners accused the State Department of consistently overlooking the potential risks of the pipeline.

"The State Department… failed to acknowledge the true extent of the project's threats to the climate, to drinking water and to the health of people who would breathe polluted air from refineries processing the dirty tar sands oil," Friends of the Earth said in a statement.

But Kerri-Ann Jones, the assistant secretary of state, rejected the charges. She argued that other government agencies had still to sign off on the project...

.. why would the scientists presume the aliens to be unwilling to altruistically assist earthlings avoid the oncoming calamity?

...are watching from afar with a disapproving gaze - one has to ask - wouldn't it be simpler for them to share their CO2 free technology with us rather than dirty, polluting destruction?

Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 August 2011 19.04 BST

"It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain."

Here's another (ex-) meteorologist peddling self-serving lies. This prick tries to con us into the global warming causing cooling malarkey.

"This explains why the frequency of cold outbreaks in both hemispheres matches that of heat waves. This apparent paradox can explain why, as various distinguished scientists have commented, the extremes of weather (caused by global warming!) which are observed, are becoming more frequent and severe."

From Forbes comes this story:

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Steve Jones tells the BBC: don't give 'denialists' so much air-time

In his report for the BBC Trust, Steve Jones actually attacks the BBC for having too little global-warming bias.

By Christopher Booker
23 Jul 2011

...Jones also falls for the long-discredited statistic that “97 per cent of climate scientists believe in man-made global warming”. This was shown to have originated in a master’s degree thesis and was based on a sample of just 77 climate specialists who volunteered their views in an online survey.

In recycling various familiar propaganda points beloved by upholders of the orthodoxy, Jones seems not to have engaged with the subject in any way. But he is not the first eminent scientist to fall flat on his face when he has stepped out of his own field of expertise to act as a cheerleader for the warmist cause.

His fellow geneticist Sir Paul Nurse fronted an extraordinarily shoddy BBC programme which was not only dishonest in its caricatures of the views of sceptics, such as the distinguished US astrophysicist Dr Fred Singer, but endorsed various scientific howlers, such as a claim that human activity contributes seven times more CO2 to the atmosphere than natural causes (when the true figure is just 3 per cent).

Similarly, the former chief scientific adviser to the government, Sir David King, showed himself way out of his depth when he was stoking up alarm over warming for Tony Blair in 2004.

Sir David, a surface chemist, perpetrated the nonsensical claim that the last mass extinction, “55 million years ago”, was caused by soaring CO2. The extinction of the dinosaurs came at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, and no one, apart from Sir David, has blamed it on CO2.

His successor, Sir John Beddington, an applied population biologist, is only the latest of those held up as “scientists” to pronounce on climate. Yet, outside their own specialism, these scientists have no more authority than the proverbial man in the pub...
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Climate change, fake charities, Nazis and Chris Huhne

Daniel Hannan
July 24th, 2011

...AGW campaigners often assert that their opponents are in the pay of Big Energy. And it’s certainly true that Brussels is a honeypot for lobby groups of every kind. Yet by far the most intense lobbying in advance of the vote came not from Big Energy, but from Greenpeace, Christian Aid and the WWF.

It’s a funny thing. Internet discussion groups are often dominated by people who believe that large multi-national organizations are subverting the democratic process. Yet they rarely notice the most flagrant examples of such organizations, namely the giant NGOs.

A few weeks ago, during Christian Aid Week, I contributed a small sum through a church auction to what I imagined to be that organization’s main work, viz the alleviation of poverty. Shortly afterwards, Christian Aid started badgering me on the issue of climate change. Surprised, I looked at its website, where I found that, rather than building schools or distributing medicines, Christian Aid is mainly interested in lobbying against free trade.

It is, of course, perfectly reasonable – admirable, indeed – to campaign for causes that you deem important. I just wonder how many donors to Christian Aid are making the mistake that I made, believing that they are contributing to charitable rather than political activity.

You can see the attraction from the point of view of the NGOs. High-profile lobbying work is what gets them noticed, and brings in more donations. Building orphanages in Africa, by contrast, is hot, tiring and expensive. Nor is this phenomenon confined to NGOs: given enough time, the primary function of any bureaucracy becomes the employment of its employees.

What is perhaps most surprising is the extent to which these various mega-charities-cum-lobbyists receive money from the EU. I have touched before on Oxfam, the NSPCC and others. Now I learn that Christian Aid has been given an astonishing €27,109,352.12 by the European Commission over the past four years.

You see how it works? The EU hands €27 million to a lobby group, which in turn lobbies for the EU to be given more powers. Remember this the next time such a group asks you for a donation.

I've said it here - they will blame global warming for cooling.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

By Doug Powers

• July 12, 2011 08:00 PM

Because the world isn’t paying attention generously enough, Al Gore is leaving behind the “Alliance for Climate Protection” and replacing it with the Climate Reality Project:

Former Vice President Al Gore launched a new campaign Tuesday aimed at exposing the “full truth, scope, scale and impact of the climate crisis.”

The campaign, the Climate Reality Project, is organizing a Sept. 14 event and presentation focused on extreme weather and climate change.

For the event, Gore will unveil a new presentation modeled after the one he gave in his film “An Inconvenient Truth.” Twenty-four different people will deliver the presentation in 24 time zones around the world.

Great, that means it’s going to snow on September 14th.

Gore’s renewed push is in no small way an attempt to address growing number of people who aren’t buying what Al is selling:

NEW YORK, July 11 (UPI) — Three-quarters of Americans say natural disasters are on the increase, but fewer than ever believe the climate is heating up, a new poll finds.

[...]
Only 44 percent say they “believe the theory” that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the Earth, down from 51 percent in 2009 and 71 percent in 2007, but most movement has been into the “not sure” column.

That’s why Gore has the “it’s colder because of global warming” angle covered too, which has turned the entire movement into a raucous self-parody. Under the rules of “science” as set by Al Gore, there is no climate model that does anything other than prove him correct, and people have caught on.

But there’s too much potential money in it to stop now. The UN recently put the price tag of “greening” the entire world by 2050 at $76 trillion. That’s a lot of loot. Connect the dots.

La Niña blamed for east African drought

Environmentalists call for the development of early warning systems to help countries prepare for adverse weather

By IRIN, part of the Guardian development network guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 14 July 2011

As parts of the Horn of Africa experience their driest periods in 60 years, pushing the numbers needing aid to beyond 10 million, some have been quick to blame climate change.

But no single event can be attributed to climate change, which involves long-term (decades or longer) trends in climate variability. There is, however, consensus in attributing the drought to the particularly strong La Niña event. The impact of climate change on the intensity and frequency of La Niña and El Niño in future is unknown.

IRIN spoke to two experts, an environmentalist and a scientist, who have worked extensively in the region.

Philip Thornton, a senior scientist who works part-time with the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the University of Edinburgh-based Institute of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, has done some pioneering work on projections of climate-change impact in eastern and southern Africa.

He told IRIN via email that projections of the climate change impact in east Africa were "a problem" as the authoritative inter-governmental panel on climate change's (the IPCC) fourth assessment report "indicated that there was good consensus among the climate models that rainfall was likely to increase during the current century.

"But work by other climate scientists since then suggests that ... certain Indian Ocean effects in east Africa may not actually occur.

"Some people think that east Africa is drying, and has dried over recent years; currently there is no hard, general evidence of this, and it is very difficult as yet to see where the statistical trends of rainfall in the region are heading, but these will of course become apparent in time."

The IPCC's fifth assessment report will be released in 2014...
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Water saving devices in the toilet will help UK fight climate change says Government adviser

Households should be encouraged to fit nozzles on taps and put water saving devices in the toilet, the Government’s climate change adviser has warned.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
14 Jul 2011

In its second report on coping with global warming, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) said the UK is not prepared for the increased risk of extreme weather events.

The damning report found that 16,000 houses are built on flood plains across England every year, despite the risk of events like the 2007 flood.

Three out of four coastal authorities saw an increase in development in areas with eroding coastlines, meaning homes are in danger as sea levels rise.

Five out of six councils had recently increased the areas of land paved over, making the risk of flooding worse as water is not absorbed into the soil.

Lord Krebs, Chair of the Adaptation Sub Commitee, said local authorities must take the risk of climate change more seriously or face higher costs in the future.

He also said water-saving must be taken more seriously in order to cope with drought. Parts of East Anglia are already in drought and if there is a dry cold winter there could be hosepipe bans across the country next year.

Lord Krebs called for water meters to be installed in all homes over the next decade. He also said water companies and Governments agencies should be offering more advice on water saving devices.

This can include fitting aerator nozzles to taps and putting a “hippo” or other deplacement device in the toilet to reduce flush...

Gillard puts future on the line with radical plan for Australian carbon tax

Emission-cutting scheme to target country's 500 worst polluting companies

Alison Rourke in Sydney
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 July 2011

The Australian government has unveiled one of the world's most ambitious schemes to tackle climate change, a plan to tax carbon emissions from the country's worst polluters.

After a bruising political battle to win support for the measure, the prime minister, Julia Gillard, said on Sunday that from July next year, 500 companies would pay $23 (£15) a tonne for their carbon emissions in the largest emissions trading scheme outside Europe.

The government predicts that by 2029 the plan will lead to a reduction in emissions equivalent to taking 45m cars off the road. The government will fix the tax for three years, before moving to a market-set price in 2015.

"It's time to get on with this; we are going to get this done," said Gillard.

Australia generates more carbon pollution per head than any other developed country, thanks to its heavy reliance on coal-fired power stations. With a population of 22 million, Australia is responsible for 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. By comparison, Britain, with nearly three times the population, produces just 1.7%.

The package is expected to pass votes in both houses of parliament before the end of the year, but Gillard faces a furious backlash over the scheme, which 60% of the population opposes. Her government is the most unpopular in 40 years, and analysts say her political future depends on her ability to sell the tax to voters...
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The Phoenix dust storm shows that, whatever the weather, it's always 'climate change'

Rain or shine, drought, flood or dust-storm, the warmist faith decrees that all 'freak weather events' are man-made, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
09 Jul 2011

Inevitably, when a huge dust storm from the surrounding desert engulfed the city of Phoenix, Arizona, last week, it did not take long for environmentalists to cite it as the kind of “freak weather event” that will become commonplace with “climate change”.

Sceptical blogs, such as Watts Up With That, gleefully responded with pictures going back to the 1950s of similar storms (or “haboobs” as they are known) engulfing Phoenix, on several occasions, and other parts of the West. The EU Referendum blog reproduced, from the Congressional Archive, terrifying images of the storms in the Dust Bowl of the southwestern United States in the 1930s.

One of the more touching features of our global warming zealots is their remarkable ignorance of history. As their religion crumbles, they clutch ever more desperately at any “extreme weather event” to support their sad creed. Hot or cold, dry or wet, droughts, heatwaves, floods or record falls of snow are all inevitably cited as evidence of mankind’s “disruption of the climate” – even if cussed old Mother Nature has produced such things hundreds of times before...

EU votes against reducing carbon emissions by 30%

European Green MEPs' carbon emissions ambitions downgraded as Conservatives dilute proposals

Fiona Harvey guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 5 July 2011

The European parliament on Tuesday rejected a key report that would have toughened the EU stance on greenhouse gas emissions, after political wrangling that wrecked hopes of a compromise.

A rebellion by the UK's Tory MEPs helped to swing the vote against a tougher target on how much carbon emissions should be cut by 2020, but was not decisive, according to insiders.

The vote does not put an end to green campaigners' hopes of a more ambitious emissions reduction target – a higher cut of 30% by 2020 on 1990 levels rather than 20% – as the issue will continue to be debated, but is a setback.

The political wrangling involved a series of amendments, proposed by Conservative groupings of MEPs, that would have weakened the resulting resolution to an extent that was not acceptable to the Green MEP grouping.

Greens in the parliament will now try to push for the tougher target in future votes, and through the involvement of member states and the European commission...
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Man-made climate change evidence 'hidden' by sulphur emissions

Cutting down on pollution from Chinese coal plants could actually make the earth become warmer, according to a new study.

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent
04 Jul 2011

Exponents of global warming have struggled to explain why temperatures have declined in recent years instead of rising in line with the significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers now claim that sulphur emissions from power plants in China are blocking sunlight and having a cooling effect on the atmosphere, cancelling out the effect of global warming.

The impact of the sulphur emissions has combined with a cooler stage of the sun's cycle and a change from the El Nino to the La Nina weather system in the South Atlantic has kept temperatures artificially low, the experts argued.

If true, this could mean a change in the Sun's 11-year cycle along with measures to refine Chinese coal boilers will cause temperatures to rise significantly.

But sceptics of man-made climate change said the researchers "tweak an out-of-date climate computer model and cherry-pick the outcome to get their desired result"...

I got this one T-BOed, and it's not even called that over here.
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Animal lovers' anger at killing of polar bear for TV show

Animal lovers are outraged that a Channel 4 programme will be screening butchered polar bears as family entertainment and are calling for a boycott of the show tonight.

30 Jun 2011
Animal rights and welfare campaigners have called for viewers to switch off the programme and have accused the series makers of ‘glorifying the needless killing of an iconic species.’

The BAFTA-award-winning series Inside Nature's Giants returns with a feature-length Arctic special in search of the world’s largest land carnivore the polar bear tonight and the producers have blown up a blizzard of protest.

An outraged spokesman for Animal Aid said: ‘Do Channel Four viewers really want to see a polar bear being hunted down and killed just so they can see his insides?

‘Local Inuits may hunt polar bears for food but this programme will do nothing more than glorify the needless killing of an iconic species that is in serious danger of becoming extinct.

‘Scientists already know the dangers facing polar bears so why are they not using their talents to benefit these animals instead of simply bringing gratuitously gory and sadistic images into our living rooms?’

Jan Creamer, Chief Executive of Animal Defenders International, said: “We are very concerned with the message that this program is pushing.

‘Previous episodes have had presenters similarly dissecting elephants, lions and tigers, and while the producers will inevitably emphasise the educational role of such programs, there remain some uncomfortable questions...
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Electricity companies switch from gas to coal

Increased use of coal for electricity generation undermines UK effort to fight global warming

Terry Macalister guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 30 June 2011

Britain's electricity generators have been beefing up their use of coal and turning their back on more carbon-friendly gas, in moves that undermine government efforts to fight global warming.

Statistics from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) show power providers used 8% more coal for electricity production in the first quarter of this year and 21% less gas.

The "big six" energy companies, which include British Gas parent group Centrica, Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) and RWE npower, are already under fire for allegedly overcharging customers.

The Decc figures also show the total amount of electricity generated by wind and other renewable sources over the 12 months of 2010 was 25,734 gigawatts – only 2.2% up on the year before.

Renewable energy accounted for 3.3% of total UK energy consumption, an increase of only 0.3 percentage points over 2009, although its contribution to electricity output rose from 6.7% to 7%.

There was also a worrying picture for Britain's balance of payments, with domestic production of oil and gas from the North Sea falling heavily. Oil output was down 15.5% in the first quarter of 2011 on the same period in 2010, while imports of oil and oil products shot up fourfold, to 4m tonnes...

Outrage as Lord Monckton calls Australian climate change adviser a Nazi

Lord Monckton, the outspoken British politician, has prompted outrage in Australia after labelling the government's chief climate change adviser a fascist, likening him to Hitler

Lord Monckton speaks from the lecturn at the conference in Los Angeles

By Bonnie Malkin, Sydney
23 Jun 2011

Speaking at a conference in Los Angeles, Lord Monckton, an ardent climate change sceptic, claimed that Professor Ross Garnaut held fascist views.

During the presentation he stood in front of a projection of a swastika next to a quote from Prof Garnaut that read: "The outsider to climate science has no rational choice but to accept that, on the balance of probabilities, the mainstream science is right in pointing to high risks from unmitigated climate change."

"That's a fascist point of view," Lord Monckton told the audience. "That you merely accept authority without question. Heil Hitler, on we go."

Lord Monckton, a one-time adviser to Baroness Thatcher, is renowned for his belief that humans are not damaging the climate. His latest comments stunned Australians from both sides of politics.

Julia Gillard, the Australian prime minister, whose Labor government is currently trying to bring in a carbon tax on big polluters, said the remarks were "grossly inappropriate".

Greg Combet, the climate change minister, said Lord Monckton was an extremist who believed climate change was a global communist conspiracy.

Labor MPs called on opposition leader Tony Abbott, who himself once declared that climate change was "absolute ----", to cancel a speech he is due to give at the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC) conference in Perth next week, where Lord Monckton will also be appearing.

Mr Abbott refused to pull out of the conference, but agreed that Lord Monckton's comments were "offensive and over the top" and said he had no plans to meet him.

Malcolm Turnbull, the shadow communications minister, went further, saying the deputy leader of Ukip was a "professional vaudeville artist" who made inflammatory comments to ensure coverage of his outlandish views in the press.

While Prof Ross Garnaut responded by saying that anyone who used the symbols of Nazism in such a way put themselves "outside the boundaries of civilised discourse", organisers of the conference have declined to revoke Lord Monckton's invitation...
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Saving the planet will destroy the economy

Christian Kerr From: The Australian June 25, 2011

MARGARET Thatcher's one time right-hand man Nigel Lawson is not so much a climate sceptic as sceptical of the necessity for action, let alone the ways we are tackling climate change.

Lawson will be in Sydney in six weeks to expound his views at a public debate on the proposition: "We need a carbon tax to help stop global warming."

The combatants themselves should raise temperatures. The former British chancellor of the exchequer and energy secretary will lead a negative team comprising former Keating government minister Gary Johns and University of Adelaide geologist and author of the sceptic's bible Heaven and Earth, Ian Plimer.

The affirmative will be put by two former opposition leaders, John Hewson and Mark Latham, backed by University of NSW climatologist Benjamin McNeil.

Lawson says it is scientifically established that increased carbon dioxide emissions will warm the planet, but adds, "it is uncertain how great any such warming would be and how much harm, if any, it would do". He urges governments "to consider the damaging economic impact of blindly following the climate change agenda".

He dismisses as "complete nonsense" the argument that Australia has a special responsibility as a carbon-intensive economy and big coal producer to show global policy leadership...

Huhne under fire for hitting out at green law 'deregulation zealots' who want to bin costly red tape

By Jason Groves

21st June 2011

Chris Huhne was facing a backlash from Tory MPs and business last night after hitting out at ‘zealots’ who want to stem the tidal wave of costly new green laws.

The Energy Secretary attacked Conservative colleagues as ‘right-wing ideologues’ for questioning the value of some environmental regulations.
In a speech, he said it was ‘nonsense’ that key green legislation, including the flagship Climate Change Act, had been included in a Government review of red tape. This aims to slash unnecessary laws to boost the economy.

He said tackling climate change was a ‘new area’ where more regulations would be needed, not less.

Sources close to Mr Huhne suggested he had the backing of Business Secretary Vince Cable.

But he is likely to face opposition from some Tory Cabinet ministers who do not believe the environment should be treated as a special case.

Former Tory Cabinet minister Peter Lilley said: ‘All regulations should be looked at constantly to see if they are necessary. If Mr Huhne wants environmental regulations to be off limits it suggests he knows many of them would be revealed to be very poor if they were looked at closely.’

A spokesman for business group the Institute of Directors urged ministers to keep environmental laws within the review – and suggested Mr Huhne was wrong to label critics of red tape as ‘zealots’...
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UK says Poland blocked EU deal on CO2 emissions

22 June 2011

The UK government has sharply criticised Poland for blocking an EU effort to set a higher target for cuts in CO2 emissions.

"I'm deeply disappointed that the only country in the EU that could not accept a good compromise on how we can move Europe to a low carbon economy was Poland," said UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne.

The EU is committed to a 20% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020, from 1990 levels.

But there are now calls for a 30% cut.

EU environment ministers discussed a European Commission roadmap to 2050 on climate and energy, which sets out how the EU can move to a competitive low-carbon economy and cut CO2 emissions.

But there was no agreement to set more ambitious CO2 targets at the talks in Luxembourg on Tuesday.

Poland is poised to gain more influence over EU negotiations when it takes over the rotating six-month EU presidency on 1 July...
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Ban Ki-moon elected for second term as UN leader

The 192-nation UN General Assembly on Tuesday elected Ban Ki-moon for a second term as the global body's secretary general.

22 June 2011

The assembly unanimously backed the former South Korean foreign minister. His second five-year term will start on January 1 and run through to 2016.

A smiling Ban bowed to ambassadors and diplomats gathered at UN headquarters who backed the reappointment through applause without a vote.

Outspoken in faulting the leaders of Arab countries facing protests, but criticised himself by some human rights groups, Ban, 67, has been certain to win reelection for several months.

He declared his candidacy two weeks ago and was given formal backing by the UN Security Council on Friday. With no challenger to force a contest, the 192-member General Assembly confirmed the new term by consensus.

Ban has said climate change – a topic the United Nations struggled with during his first five years – is his top challenge. He has called the battle against global warming "the most important priority" for mankind...

If these mirrors contain nano particles of aluminum, the human race could go collectively stupid when that crap gets into our brains.

--Brant

IPCC 'considering sending mirrors to space to tackle climate change'

Reflective aerosols would be sent into space under a series of radical “geo-engineering” measures being considered by the UN climate science body to tackle climate change, leaked documents disclose.

16 Jun 2011

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) papers, leaked ahead of a key meeting in Peru next week, outline the series of techniques in which scientists hope will manipulate the world’s climate to reduce carbon emissions.

Among the ideas proposed by a group of 60 leading scientists from around the world, including Britain, include producing “lighter coloured” crops to reflect sunlight, blasting aerosol “mirrors” into the stratosphere and suppressing cirus clouds.

Other suggestions include spraying sea water into clouds as another reflection mechanism, depositing massive quantities of iron filings into the oceans, painting streets and roofs white and adding lime to oceans.

Experts suggested that the documents, leaked from inside the IPPC to The Guardian, show how the UN and other developed countries are “despairing” about reaching agreement by consensus at the global climate change talks.

But the newspaper reported that scientists admit that even if the ideas theoretically work, they could cause irreversible consequences...
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Climate change panel in hot water again over 'biased' energy report

By Oliver Wright, Whitehall Editor

Thursday, 16 June 2011

The world's foremost authority on climate change used a Greenpeace campaigner to help write one of its key reports, which critics say made misleading claims about renewable energy, The Independent has learnt.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the UN in 1988 to advise governments on the science behind global warming, issued a report last month suggesting renewable sources could provide 77 per cent of the world's energy supply by 2050. But in supporting documents released this week, it emerged that the claim was based on a real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years – and that the lead author of the section concerned was an employee of Greenpeace. Not only that, but the modelling scenario used was the most optimistic of the 164 investigated by the IPCC.

Critics said the decision to highlight the 77 per cent figure showed a bias within the IPCC against promoting potentially carbon-neutral energies such as nuclear fuel. One climate change sceptic said it showed the body was not truly independent and relied too heavily on green groups for its evidence.

The allegations are particularly damaging as they represent the second controversy to hit the IPPC in a matter of years. In 2009, a tranche of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit were leaked two weeks before the crucial Copenhagen climate summit. Climate change sceptics said they showed scientists manipulating data to talk up the threat of global warming, as well as trying to suppress their critics...

Climate change should be removed from the national curriculum

Climate change should be removed from the national curriculum, the government adviser conducting a review of the syllabus for five to 16 year olds in England has claimed.

Tim Oates said schools ought to choose whether or not to teach the subject as he called for the curriculum to “get back to the science in science”.

Mr Oates, whose review will be published later this year, told a newspaper the syllabus should be stripped back to focus on core areas of scientific knowledge such as gravity and oxidation.

He said teachers should instead be able to make individual choices about what topics are relevant for them to cover.

"We have believed that we need to keep the national curriculum up to date with topical issues, but oxidation and gravity don’t date," he said.

"We are not taking it back 100 years, we are taking it back to the core stuff.

"The curriculum has become narrowly instrumentalist."

Mr Oates, who is director of research at exams agency Cambridge Assessment, told The Guardian: "The national curriculum shouldn’t ever try to keep up with those, otherwise it would keep changing."

He said the topics that engaged children in science changed dramatically every year and the curriculum should not try to keep up with that.

His comments mark a shift in approach to the curriculum, which under Labour expanded significantly to include scientific “issues” as well as scientific knowledge.

Under the current curriculum, children aged between five and 11, are taught that they should care for the environment.

By the time they reach secondary school age students are taught how human activity and natural processes can lead to environmental changes.

They also learn about the ways the natural world should be protected.

Climate change has featured in the national curriculum since 1995...

Climate change action: Yes lobby versus No lobby

Here are the key arguments for and against taking climate change action in Australia.

By Bonnie Malkin, Sydney
06 Jun 2011

For:

Julia Gillard, the prime minister, wants to bring in a carbon tax that will charge big polluters a fixed price for each tonne of carbon that they emit. This would give way to an emissions trading scheme within three to five years...

Ms Gillard has said she will use the billions of dollars raised by the carbon tax to compensate low-income families who are disadvantaged by a rise in food or petrol prices that could result from the tax on industry.

Those who back the scheme maintain that action on climate change is overdue and essential to safeguard the future of the country and the region. They also claim that failing to put a price on carbon now will cost the country more in the long run.

Against:

Tony Abbott, the leader of the opposition Liberal-National Coalition who once declared that climate change was “absolute ****”, is fiercely opposed to the scheme, arguing it will result in job losses, damage the coal industry and send businesses flocking out of Australia.

Instead, Mr Abbott has proposed a policy of “direct action” to combat carbon emissions, which involves a 5 per cent reduction in emissions by means of creating a fund to provide incentives for industry and farmers to reduce emissions and through measures like storing carbon in soil; planting 20 million trees over the next decade; and providing rebates to homes for installation of solar cells.

The government’s proposed carbon tax is also unpopular with most high-polluting industries. The powerful coal industry has urged Canberra to “go back to the drawing board” because the plan would cost jobs and send investment overseas unless coal miners were exempt or heavily compensated.

Not doing harm is no longer enough – companies must actively do good

Levi's contract factories are now obliged to support the UN Millenium Development goals, thanks to campaigners

Posted by
Oliver Balch for the Guardian Professional Network
Monday 23 May 2011
guardian.co.uk

Most marketing folk would kill for the global brand recognition of Levi Strauss. As three-letter monikers go, 501s compete with 007 (aka James Bond) and 999. The brand values automatically register with the public: classic, hard wearing, dependable.

Consumers love iconic brands. So do campaigners. That's a problem for companies when it comes to managing their reputations. Advocacy groups have nothing like the marketing budgets of today's mega-brands. So how do they get their message out? They leverage off the back of the big guns.

And so it is that anti-corporate campaigns like ExxposeExxon (formerly StopEsso), WalMart Watch and Dirty Dow have proliferated over the last decade or so. In each case, the activist groups and their supporters have legitimate concerns about the specific companies in question. Climate change in the case of Exxon, for example. Or WalMart's anti-union policies...

With annual revenues of about $4.4bn, Levi has similar clout in the apparel industry. The "no harm" policy of old is no longer good enough. Suppliers will have to actively promote workers' rights or risk losing Levi's business. Most of these suppliers work with multiple clothing companies. And thus the net spreads.

Over 90% of Levi's suppliers accepted its first terms of engagement twenty years ago. Anderson says: "We discovered that we'd set a new standard. Before long, our terms of engagement became the new normal. Almost every apparel company with a global supply chain established their own version."

The hope is that this latest iteration will prompt a similar take-up across the industry. Change won't happen overnight. Levi's can expect campaign groups to hold it to account.

The same goes for their competitors. The response that there's nothing wrong in their supply chain will no longer suffice. Large apparel companies must ready themselves for the harder question: what are they doing to make things better?
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Australian sea levels to rise by three feet unless climate change is halted

Sea levels will rise by more than three feet by the end of the century making severe coastal flooding a common factor of life in Australia if urgent action is not taken to limit climate change, a key report by a panel of climate scientists has found.

By Bonnie Malkin, Sydney
23 May 2011

The Australian Climate Commission's first report found that many of the nation's major cities, particularly Sydney, faced a serious threat from rising sea-levels.

The report, titled "The Critical Decade", aims to end the continuing debate in Australia about the seriousness of climate change and defuse political wrangling over the government's climate policy, which has polarised voters.

"This is the critical decade. Decisions we make from now to 2020 will determine the severity of climate change," said the scientists, whose report was handed to Julia Gillard, the prime minister.

"To minimise this risk, we must decarbonise our economy and move to clean energy sources by 2050. Carbon emissions must peak within the next few years and then strongly decline."

Australians are the biggest per capita carbon emitters in the world, thanks to an addiction to coal-powered electricity and a booming coal export market. Currently, the country is responsible for about 1.5 per cent of mankind's greenhouse gas pollution.

But trying to limit emissions has become a sensitive political issue that has already helped to contribute to the downfall of one prime minister – Kevin Rudd – and is making life increasingly difficult for Miss Gillard.

Miss Gillard wants to bring in laws that impose a price on every tonne of carbon emissions from major polluters from 2012, but she is facing strong opposition from her rivals in the Liberal Party, some of whom do not believe that climate change is man-made...

Australia to set tax on carbon gas

Tuesday, 17 May 2011

A planned tax on carbon gas emitting industries in Australia would be far below a recommended price that might have forced polluters to switch to greener technology, the government said today.

The still-undetermined starting tax, expected to be announced in July, would be "well south" of 40 Australian dollars (US$42) a metric ton (AU$44 a U.S. ton), Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said.

A consultant to the government described that amount as the tipping point where the tax would force power generators to switch from coal to cleaner gas technology, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

"There are other views in the electricity-generating industry about what would happen at different price scenarios," Combet told reporters. The consultant's report will be made public Wednesday.

Australia is one of the world's worst greenhouse gas polluters per capita because it relies heavily on its abundant coal reserves for electricity.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced in February that a carbon tax will be applied to Australia's biggest industrial polluters from July 1, 2012...

But Gillard's Labor Party does not hold a majority in either parliament chamber so will need the support of independents and the minor Greens party to make the tax a reality.

Australia and the United States had been the only industrialized countries to refuse to accept reduction targets on carbon emissions until the center-left Labor Party was elected in Australia in 2007. But Labor's attempts to pass such legislation have failed.

The main opposition party opposes the tax, arguing it would add to the cost of living for ordinary Australians.

The government says the revenue received from the tax will be paid back to low-income householders as compensation for the price rises.
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US school board teaches 'the controversy' on global warming

Board member explains why his Californian school district voted to include 'multiple perspectives' on science of global warming

Posted by
Leo Hickman Tuesday
17 May 2011
guardian.co.uk

A school board in California has attracted headlines over the past few days for voting unanimously that a new environmental science class starting this autumn must include "multiple perspectives" on the science of global warming.

Four board members of the Los Alamitos Unified School District voted to list the class - which was taught to 15,000 public school students across California in 2008-09 (pdf of class description) - as a "controversial topic", meaning the teacher must explain to the board annually how opposing views are to be taught.

Echoing similar efforts at school boards in other US states, the move has been criticised by some commentators. One parent of a pupil at Los Alamitos Unified School told the Orange County Register: "There is consensus in the field that we have global warming happening, it is getting warmer and it is related to what we are doing to the planet. That is not in dispute in the scientific community. It is in dispute in the political community. This is a science class. Teach science."

The drive to "teach the controversy" on global warming in the school district has been led by Dr Jeffrey Barke, a medical doctor based at Newport Beach and school board member...

Greenpeace too political to register as charity: NZ court

By Paul McBeth

May 9 (BusinessDesk) – Environmental lobbyist Greenpeace of New Zealand Inc. is too involved in political causes to register as a charity, the High Court has ruled.

Justice Paul Heath turned down an appeal last Friday that Greenpeace could register with the Charities Commission after the body rejected its 2010 application.

Justice Heath said Greenpeace’s political activities can’t be regarded as “merely ancillary” to its charitable purposes and that the commission was correct in disqualifying it for registration over the potentially illegal activities.

Though the pursuit of peace could be “worthy,” that didn’t necessarily make it charitable, he said.

“The commission was correct in holding that non-violent, but potentially illegal activities (such as trespass), designed to put (in the eyes of Greenpeace) objectionable activities into the public spotlight were an independent object disqualifying it from registration as a charitable entry,” Justice Heath said in his judgement.

“In qualitative terms, the charitable purposes of Greenpeace could be met without resort to the type of political activities that deny its right to registration.”

In November last year, Greenpeace claimed its stated objectives of promoting disarmament and peace weren’t central to its goals, and that based on a public benefit test it was a charitable entity.

Justice Heath rejected that assertion, saying “the extent to which Greenpeace relies on its political activities to advance its causes means that the political element cannot be regarded as ‘merely ancillary’ to Greenpeace’s charitable purposes.”....
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Vince Cable and Chris Huhne clash over carbon emissions

Allegra Stratton
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 9 May 2011

The business secretary, Vince Cable, has clashed with his Lib Dem cabinet colleague Chris Huhne by telling him he will not support carbon reduction targets recommended by the government's independent climate change advisory body.

David Cameron will decide next week whether to accept the proposals by the Committee on Climate Change for a fourth carbon budget, covering the years 2023 to 2027, championed by Huhne, the energy secretary.

Three carbon budgets were set in 2008 but now the UK must agree a fourth as the government attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, compared with 1990 levels.

In a letter leaked to the Guardian, Cable tells his party's leader, Nick Clegg, and the chancellor, George Osborne, that he is "unable to give clearance to the proposal as it stands" and calls for an urgent cabinet meeting. In his letter, dated 19 April, Cable says the proposed carbon budget is not "cost effective" and asks for a Treasury impact analysis to be made available to all involved in the decision.

He writes: "Agreeing too aggressive a level risks burdening the UK economy, which would be detrimental to UK, undermining the UK's competitiveness and our attractiveness as a place to do business.

"I have a number of concerns about supporting the CCC's recommended level at this time.

"It is important that we strike the right balance between our pursuit to decarbonise the UK economy whilst ensuring that UK economic growth and employment is sustained."

His argument rests on a concern that Huhne's plan relies on the securing of a cap on emissions trading across Europe that may not materialise. If this were not achieved, the UK would be left cutting carbon emissions unilaterally, which would risk putting industry at a disadvantage compared with outside competitors and "could lead to significant fiscal costs"...

It is understood that Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, has also raised objections to the CCC's proposals.
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Offshore wind farm plans 'are a costly mistake': Climate experts demand rethink on turbines and more nuclear power

By David Derbyshire

9th May 2011

Ministers are backing the construction of too many expensive offshore wind farms too quickly, senior advisers on green policy warn today.

In a report into the future of energy, the influential Committee on Climate Change calls on the Government to scale back plans to build thousands of turbines off the coast of Britain.

Instead, the report calls for hundreds more wind turbines to be built onshore at a lower cost over the next eight years.

The committee also says renewable green power should play a central role in Britain’s energy policy and that the UK needs a new generation of wind farms, nuclear power plants and other sources of green energy to keep the lights burning.

The Coalition is planning a massive expansion of wind farms to meet tough EU climate change targets.

By 2020, the UK will have to generate 30 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind, wave and wood burning. Currently it produces only 3 per cent.

Many of the 10,000 new turbines will be built at sea, producing up to 13 gigawatts of electricity. The rest will be built in the countryside.

The Government claims the wind farms are needed to slash greenhouse gas emissions from coal, oil and gas-fired power.

But critics say the plan is too expensive, the turbines ugly and that the UK will become over-dependent on the variable power of the wind...

Jersey politician wants climate change out of plan

28 April 2011

Senator Sarah Ferguson calls climate change "pseudo-scientific dogma" which she said was already out of date.

The Island Plan sets out the government's policy on how Jersey should be developed over 10 years.

In an amendment to the island plan proposition, Senator Ferguson wants all climate change references taken out.

She said that if climate change references were kept in, the island would be saying it was willing to lower the standard of living and prevent poorer countries from having access to reasonably priced energy.

She said: "This Island Plan is intended to last for 10 years. If this is the case it is less than sensible to include pseudo-scientific dogma which is already out of date."
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Green schemes are 'wide open to major corruption'

Millions of pounds in grants and aid are being siphoned off by fraudsters, warns report

By David Connett and Chris Stevenson

Sunday, 1 May 2011

Corruption is threatening global steps to combat climate change, a new report from Transparency International (TI) warned yesterday. Billions of pounds will be plundered and wasted, it says, unless stronger measures are introduced against embezzlement and misappropriation.

The organisation warns that 20 nations most vulnerable to climate change – where millions in grants and aid will be targeted – are judged to be among the most corrupt in the world – and stronger oversight is needed to ensure the funds are properly spent. None of the countries, which include Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Egypt and Vietnam, scores higher than 3.6 on TI's influential Corruption Perception Index, where 0 is wholly corrupt and 10 "very clean".

Any siphoning off of green grants would undermine efforts to reduce the impact of climate change by developing projects such as wind farms or solar power plants, improving sea wall defences, irrigation systems and housing capable of withstanding natural disasters, says TI...

All countries are vulnerable: Britain is criticised for its failure to deal with so-called "greenwashing" marketing techniques used by companies to misrepresent how environmentally friendly their products are.

Also highlighted is America's failure to curb the influence of the "brown lobby" – the 2,000 registered oil, gas, coal and electricity lobbyists who spent an estimated $400m in 2009 compared with the green lobby's $22m.
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Has Mexico's climate aid really slowed carbon emissions?

Emilio Godoy for IPS guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 4 May 2011

While Mexico recently played host to a meeting for the creation of a Green Climate Fund, doubts have been raised over whether the millions of dollars in financing the country has already received in recent years have been effectively implemented to combat global warming and its consequences.

Over the last decade, the Mexican government has received significant sums in loans from multilateral institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and World Bank and the governments of Norway and Germany for climate change-related initiatives. Yet there has been no assessment of the environmental outcomes achieved through this increase in external debt...

At the conclusion of the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 16), held in the southeastern Mexican city of Cancún in December 2010, an agreement was reached to establish a Green Climate Fund, with a commitment from rich countries to deliver 30 billion dollars in financing by 2012 and 100 billion annually by 2020.

The money will be allocated to poor countries to help them adapt to the impacts of climate change and develop low-carbon economies. The World Bank will administer the Fund for the first three years in accordance with the standards of the Convention...

In a report entitled "Financing change without changing the climate", published Nov. 11, 2010, 10 non-governmental organisations assessed the correspondence between international financing and Mexican federal and sectoral programmes to confront climate change.

They found numerous inconsistencies, such as the high expenditure on nuclear energy and the construction of hydroelectric dams, considered rather inappropriate for curbing the effects of global warming...

Mexico's external debt currently stands at around 182 billion dollars, according to the Mexican Central Bank, one of the heaviest debt burdens in the region.

"Inevitably the devastating tornadoes that killed more than 300 people in the US prompted Newsweek to ask: “Is global warming responsible for wild weather?” The answer, it found, is “yes”.

Another Newsweek article cited “the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded”, killing “more than 300 people”, as among “the ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically”. But that article was published on April 28, 1975, when Newsweek listed the US tornado disaster of 1974 as one of the harbingers of disastrous global cooling, heralding the approach of a new ice age."

Christopher Booker

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AV referendum: why progressives must unite to vote yes

John Denham, Chris Huhne and Caroline Lucas explain why Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters must put aside party differences to change British politics

John Denham, Chris Huhne and Caroline Lucas
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 May 2011

You cannot build a fair society on an unfair politics. Britain consistently votes as a centre-left country and yet the Conservatives have dominated our politics for two-thirds of the time since 1900. On only two occasions in that long century – 1900 and 1931 – have the Tories won a majority of the votes. Instead, they have divided and ruled. No wonder David Cameron says the current system "has served us well".

For those who weren't well served by the Tory 20th century, fair votes matter. They matter for the millions of voters who suffered the worst excesses of the Thatcher government, despite more than 54% repeatedly voting against her.

They matter for the millions of progressive voters, supporters of the Lib Dems, Labour and the Greens among others, who want to be able to express their support for the party of their choice without feeling that they are wasting their vote or letting the Tories in. And they matter for the millions who do not bother to vote because safe seats mean they have no chance for a change.

Fair votes also matter in regions where one party wins nearly all the prizes. Don't be a Conservative voter in the north, or a Labour voter in the south, because your vote is less likely to count. In 2010 Labour won only 10 seats in the east, south-east or south-west regions, despite winning more than 1.6m votes there. The Conservatives' 1.3 million voters in the east returned 52 Conservative MPs. The 1.1 million Liberal Democrat voters in the south-east ended up with only four MPs. The 285,000 Green voters elected only one MP.

Indeed, even the Tories saw whole areas without MPs, with only one seat in Scotland and no seats in the five largest English cities outside London. This is a recipe not for a parliament that holds up a mirror to the nation, so that we can debate and resolve our differences, but one that deepens divisions and resentments. Progressive politics needs fairness – no more, no less – for Conservative voters too.

If first past the post ever had a heyday, it has long since gone. Back in 1950, most seats were a straight fight between Labour and the Conservatives and 85% of MPs won more than half of the vote in their constituency. Today, two-thirds of MPs have more people voting against them than for them.

No wonder the mother of parliaments is being spurned by her children. The collapse of communism in 1989 led to dozens of new democracies. None of them has settled on the British system of first past the post.

Even the old Commonwealth is turning its back. Australia adopted AV 80 years ago, and New Zealand recently adopted the German system. Canada is debating change. No major democracy has gone the other way and adopted first past the post.

Yes to Fairer Votes is backed by progressives across the country, including the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green party leaders, Operation Black Vote and countless faith and community leaders...

John Denham is Labour's shadow business secretary; Chris Huhne is the Liberal Democrat energy and climate change secretary; Caroline Lucas is leader of the Green party

Lobbyists who cleared 'Climategate' academics funded by taxpayers and the BBC

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor
23 Apr 2011

The little-known not-for-profit company works behind the scenes at international conferences to further its aims.

One of its key supporters headed the official investigation into the so-called "Climategate emails", producing a report which cleared experts of deliberately attempting to skew scientific results to confirm that global warming was a real threat.

Another scientific expert linked to the group came forward to praise a second independent investigation into the Climategate affair which also exonerated researchers.

Set up with the backing of Tony Blair, then the Prime Minister, and run by a group of British MPs and peers the organisation, Globe International, started life as an All Party Group based in the House of Commons.

It is now run as an international climate change lobbying group flying its supporters and experts club class to international summits to push its agenda. Last year, it said, it spent around £500,000 flying its supporters to these meetings.

It has also paid out at least £75,000 on travel for prominent UK politicians, including for its former presidents Elliot Morley, the ex-Labour environment minister now facing jail for expenses fraud, and Stephen Byers, the former Labour cabinet minister who was suspended from the Commons after he was filmed describing himself a "cab for hire" when offering to lobby his parliamentary contacts for cash.

Now Globe is planning a mass lobby of the United Nations Rio 2012 summit in Brazil, where world leaders will discuss climate change, by holding a World Summit of Legislators in the city to coincided with the event...
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What is the carbon footprint of the royal wedding?

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
26 Apr 2011

The international event will generate 6,765 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e), 12 times the annual emissions from the London palace or 1,230 times the annual emissions of the average UK household.

Most of the carbon is generated by international guests like David and Victoria Beckham flying in from Los Angeles and all those foreign Royals, as well as the transport used by the thousands of people expected to travel to London to see the couple wed.

Despite the Prince of Wales’s efforts to keep it green by providing local, seasonal food and flowers and turning off the lights, the food, drink and energy use also has a substantial footprint.

The total was estimated by Landcare Research, who have developed an internationally recognised method of counting carbon emissions.

Activities on the day of the wedding could be responsible for an estimated 2,808 tonnes of CO2e. Most is from the journeys of the 1,900 guests, of whom a quarter will come from abroad. Less than 13 tonnes is generated by accommodation, energy use, landfill and catering for the lunchtime reception and evening dinner at Buckingham Palace.

A further 3,957 tonnes of CO2e will be generated by the 400,000 people travelling on the tube and a further 200,000 arriving on national rail to watch the event in central London.

The analysts did not calculate the carbon footprint of the ceremony itself and said it was just a “fun exercise” to highlight how carbon can be cut down.

They also missed out any emissions from the millions of tons of bunting, cheap Union Jacks and confetti flooding the streets on the day or the flights of the international media.

Already the couple have done a few small things to limit their footprint. Kate’s ring is reported to be made from Welsh gold rather than minerals from an exploitative mine. Her dress could also be ethical if she chooses vegan silk and organic Fairtrade cotton, although the most low carbon option of wearing a second hand dress or reworking something vintage is unlikely.

However Prince William chose to take her abroad to Jordan rather than to have a stay at home honeymoon and he did propose in a long haul destination in Kenya.

The couple also declined to send virtual invitations or ask guest to wrap presents in reusable cloth rather than paper. Other advice on environmental weddings includes insisting appliances given as wedding presents are low energy, checking there are dual flush loos at the reception and asking guests to make jam or chutney instead of buying presents.

Although the royal couple are getting married near to plenty of tube stations, they have not asked guests to come by public transport or offset flights...

Met Office chief receives death threats from climate change sceptics

18 Apr 2011

John Hirst, chief executive of the controversial organisation, said he received the "unsavoury emails" after defending the Met Office stance on manmade global warming.

He brought up the frightening emails after climate change sceptics like TV presenter Johnny Ball complained that they were receiving threats to their life from extreme environmentalists.

Mr Hirst said it was 'crazy' to target individuals from either side of the debate and called for a 'calm and sensible' discussions about the politics of climate change.

It is not the first time Mr Hirst has been at the centre of controversy. He was criticised for receiving a pay package greater than the Prime Minister last year. At the same time the Met Office was under fire for failing to predict a wet summer in 2009 and a snowy winter in 2010.

Mr Hirst admitted the controversial forecasts and Met Office predications of dangerous climate change have made him a figure of hate...

In a wide-ranging talk Mr Hirst admitted the Met Office had played a part in the ''barbecue summer'' furore, because of its failure to translate scientific language into something the man or woman in the street could understand.

''We are used to getting jokes about the barbecue summer and people saying 'you're bloody useless','' he said.

''The best thing we can do is keep talking because it is very important. Without talking there is no progress.''

A Met Office spokesman confirmed Mr Hirst had received death threats made in a number of ''unsavoury emails'', but said they were ''isolated incidents'' and the organisation had not felt it necessary to involve the police.

''Emotions can run high at both ends of the climate change debate,'' he said.

''It is not confined to the Met Office. Around the time of Climategate there were many instances of people involved getting unsavoury emails.''...

Activists occupy oil rig in fight to prevent Arctic drilling

John Vidal in Sarkoy, Turkey
guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 April 2011

The fight to stop the global oil industry exploring the pristine deep waters of the Arctic has been dubbed the new cold war, and early on Friday it escalated as environmental activists from 12 countries occupied the world's second largest rig on its way from Turkey to Greenland to drill among the icebergs.

The protesters found the 52,000-tonne semi-submersible platform Leiv Eiriksson at around midnight, steaming due west at a stately six knots in the sea of Marmara, heading for the Dardanelle straits and the open Mediterranean. It took four more hours for Greenpeace to bring in its inflatables and a further 50 minutes in the choppy moonlit sea to intercept it.

Even from three miles away, the Chinese-built mobile rig, which specialises in drilling in extreme environments, looks huge. From 100ft away in the pale dawn light it is a 15-storey industrial castle, bristling with cranes, derricks, gangways, chains, spars, girders, pipes, helipads and radar. Just 10 years old, it is already rusting and its paintwork is streaked from years of drilling in harsh west African, north Atlantic and Asian waters.

The Greenpeace boats approached the vessel cautiously in the three foot swell, like fleas to the backside of an elephant. At exactly 5.31am, the 11 climbers began to leap on to its hull and headed for a ladder. The plan was to stop the vessel in its tracks not by taking over the bridge, but by radioing the captain and asking politely. Fat chance.

"This is Greenpeace, this is Greenpeace. I'm informing you that we have put climbers on your rig. I ask you stop your vessel", asked Korol Diker, a Turkish campaigner, on a VHF channel.

But the elephant barely registered. "I do not recognise you", came the captain's cutting reply and the Leiv Eiriksson steamed on.

Undaunted, the climbers made it to a gangway 80ft over the vessel's starboard stern. As four crewmen peered over the side from 30ft above them, and two more ambled over, seemingly unconcerned, the climbers made a cat's cradle of rope to hang banners and a tent from...

Activists are now expected to dog the progress of the slow-moving Leiv Eiriksson as it passes Greece, Italy, France and Spain on its passage through the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic. It is scheduled to stop in Britain to pick up supplies before the last leg of its journey to Greenland in June.

Twelve hours after boarding the Leiv Eiriksson, the 11 activists who had occupied a gangway 80 ft above the water were forced down by a gale as the vessel entered Greek waters. No arrests were made.

...UNEP should now be written INEPT

I liked that one as seen at Watts Up With That. See here. The warm mongers can no longer deny all the blatant lies from the corrupt UN. They too will know this as the second greatest swindle. The first being gods.

UN Embarrassed by Forecast on Climate Refugees

By Axel Bojanowski

Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones.

It was a dramatic prediction that was widely picked up by the world's media. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations University declared that 50 million people could become environmental refugees by 2010, fleeing the effects of climate change.

But now the UN is distancing itself from the forecast: "It is not a UNEP prediction," a UNEP spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The forecast has since been removed from UNEP's website.

Official statistics show that the population in areas threatened by global warming is actually rising. The expected environmental disasters have yet to materialize.

In October 2005, UNU said: "Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of 'refugee.'"

It added that "such problems as sea level rise, expanding deserts and catastrophic weather-induced flooding have already contributed to large permanent migrations and could eventually displace hundreds of millions."

In 2008, Srgjan Kerim, president of the UN General Assembly, said it had been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010. A UNEP web page showed a map of regions where people were likely to be displaced by the ravages of global warming. It has recently been taken offline but is still visible in a Google cache...

'Mother Earth' to be given same rights as humans under UN plan

By Catherine Eade
12th April 2011

Bolivia is drawing up a draft UN treaty which would give Mother Earth the same rights as humans, including the right to life, to pure water and clean air.

The South American country wants the UN to recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to 'dominate and exploit'.

It aims to establish 11 new rights for nature which include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

Bolivia's large indigenous population is ruled by Latin America's first indigenous president Evo Morales, who was elected in 2006.
Morales is an outspoken critic in the UN of countries which are not prepared to limit climate change by holding temperatures to a 1C rise.
Bolivia's ambassador to the UN, Pablo Salon, says his country seeks to achieve harmony with nature, and hinted that mining and other companies would come under greater scrutiny...

Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth

Law of Mother Earth expected to prompt radical new conservation and social measures in South American nation

John Vidal in La Paz
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 April 2011

Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities".

"It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all", said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. "It establishes a new relationship between man and nature, the harmony of which must be preserved as a guarantee of its regeneration."

The law, which is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009, has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities...

A lot of hot air: Wind farms 'working at just 21% of capacity'

Britain's wind farms produce far less electricity than their supporters claim – and cannot be relied upon to keep the lights on, a study from a conservation charity showed yesterday.

A damning report from the John Muir Trust found the UK’s heavily subsidised wind farms were working at just 21 per cent of capacity last year.

Yet the renewable energy industry claims their turbines work at 28 to 30 per cent efficiency on average.

The Trust also found that for extended periods all the UK’s wind turbines linked to the National Grid muster less than 20 megawatts of energy at a given point, enough power for fewer than 7,000 households to boil their kettles.
Stuart Young, author of the report, said: ‘Over the two-year period studied, the wind farms in the UK consistently generated far less energy than wind proponents claim is typical.

‘Sadly, wind power is not what it’s cracked up to be and cannot contribute greatly to energy security in the UK.’

The UK has more than 3,100 working wind turbines. According to the wind industry, they are capable of generating more than 5.2 gigawatts of electricity – enough for nearly three million homes.

Another 10,000 are planned for the next decade to meet EU climate change targets...

Global warming: 10 little facts

by Bob Carter

March 14, 2011

Control the language, and you control the outcome of any debate

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Ten dishonest slogans about global warming, and ten little facts.

Each of the following ten numbered statements reproduces verbatim, or almost verbatim, statements made recently by Australian government leaders, and repeated by their media and other supporters. The persons making these arguments might be termed (kindly) climate-concerned citizens or (less kindly, but accurately) as global warming alarmists...

1. We must address carbon (sic) pollution (sic) by introducing a carbon (sic) tax.

The argument is not about carbon or a carbon tax, but rather about carbon dioxide emissions and a carbon dioxide tax, to be levied on the fuel and energy sources that power the Australian economy.

Carbon dioxide is a natural and vital trace gas in Earth’s atmosphere, an environmental benefit without which our planetary ecosystems could not survive. Increasing carbon dioxide makes many plants grow faster and better, and helps to green the planet.

To call atmospheric carbon dioxide a pollutant is an abuse of language, logic and science.

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2. We need to link much more closely with the climate emergency.

There is no “climate emergency”; the term is a deliberate lie. Global average temperature at the end of the 20th century fell well within the bounds of natural climate variation, and was in no way unusually warm, or cold, in geological terms.

Earth’s temperature is currently cooling slightly.

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3. Putting a price on carbon (sic) will punish the big polluters (sic).

A price on carbon dioxide will impose a deliberate financial penalty on all energy users, but especially energy-intensive industries. These imaginary “big polluters” are part of the bedrock of the Australian economy. Any cost impost on them will be passed straight down to consumers.

It is consumers of all products who will ultimately pay, not the industrialists or their shareholders.

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4. Putting a price on carbon (sic) is the right thing to do; it’s in our nation’s interest.

The greatest competitive advantage of the Australian economy is cheap energy generated by coal-fired power stations.

To levy an unnecessary tax on this energy source is economic vandalism that will destroy jobs and reduce living standards for all Australians.

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5. Putting a price on carbon (sic) will result in lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Economists know well that an increase in price of some essential things causes little reduction in usage. This is true for both energy (power) and petrol, two commodities that will be particularly hit by a tax on carbon dioxide emissions.

Norway has levied a tax on carbon dioxide since the early 1990s, despite which a 15% INCREASE in emissions has occurred.

At any reasonable level ($20-50/t), a carbon dioxide tax will result in no reduction in emissions.

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6. We must catch up with the rest of the world, who are already taxing carbon dioxide emissions.

They are not. All hope of a global agreement on emissions reduction has collapsed with the failure of the Copenhagen and Cancun climate meetings. The world’s largest emitters (USA and China) have made it crystal clear that they will not introduce carbon dioxide tax or emissions trading.

The Chicago Climate Exchange has collapsed, chaos and deep corruption currently manifests the European exchange and some US states are withdrawing from anti-carbon dioxide schemes.

Playing “follow the leader” is not a good idea when the main leader (the EU) has a sclerotic economy characterised by lack of employment and the flight of manufacturers overseas.

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7. Australia should show leadership, by setting an example that other countries will follow.

Self-delusion doesn’t come any stronger than this.

For Australia to introduce a carbon dioxide tax ahead of the large emitting nations is to render our whole economy to competitive and economic disadvantage for no gain whatsoever.

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8. We must act, and the earlier we act on climate change the less painful it will be.

The issue at hand is global warming, not the catch-all, deliberately ambiguous term climate change.

Trying to prevent hypothetical “dangerous” warming by taxing carbon dioxide emissions will be ineffectual, and is all pain for no gain.

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9. The cost of action on carbon (sic) pollution (sic) is less than the cost of inaction.

This statement is fraudulent. Implementing a carbon dioxide tax will carry large costs for workers and consumers, but bring no measurable cooling (or other change) for future climate.

For Australia, the total cost for a family of four of implanting a carbon dioxide tax will exceed $2,500/yr* – whereas even eliminating all of Australia’s emissions might prevent planetary warming of 0.01 deg. C by 2100.

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10. There is no do-nothing option in tackling climate change.

Indeed.

However, it is also the case that there is no demonstrated problem of “dangerous” global warming. Instead, Australia continues to face many self-evident problems of natural climate change and hazardous natural climate events. A national climate policy is clearly needed to address these issues.

The appropriate, cost-effective policy to deal with Victorian bushfires, Queensland floods, droughts, northern Australian cyclones and long-term cooling or warming trends is the same.

It is to prepare carefully for, and efficaciously deal with and adapt to, all such events and trends whether natural or human-caused, as and when they happen. Spending billions of dollars on expensive and ineffectual carbon dioxide taxes serves only to reduce wealth and our capacity to address these only too real world problems.

Preparation for, and adaptation to, all climate hazard is the key to formulation of a sound national climate policy.

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Professor Bob Carter is a geologist, environmental scientist and Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

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Notes:

*Assuming a tax rate of $25/tonne of CO2, and Australia’s emissions being 550 million tonnes, indicates a total cost of $13.8 billion. Spread across a population of 22 million persons, that equates with $627/person/year.

Dan Denning

Your little hatchet job on Garnaut was truly disgusting. A funny little lit wonk writing an investment blog has the arrogance to make fun of all reputable scientific advice and its mouthpiece, in this case, Garnaut. The American believer in you is capable of believing anything that comes to mind, and in this blog you don't even have to justify yourself. I suppose you think the banning of CFCs to reverse the man made destruction of ozone in the atmosphere was also a plot by the ratbag scientists. Where will all this lead? Your article was a good example of pithy American believer nutterism. You are now on my ignore list.

Ross Flutter

"--Well Ross, at least you got one thing right. Garnaut, as the government's climate adviser, is little more than a mouthpiece for a predetermined position, and is probably being compensated for his efforts. His job is to produce a credible sounding and authoritative looking report that supports the government's position, preferably filled with a lot of impressive jargon, bullet points, charts, and footnotes.

--But if you're still reading, you should go back and read what we said again. Our criticism of Garnaut was that being an economist doesn't make one a climate change expert. This is nothing more than an argument from authority, which is a tried-and-true logical fallacy. As an American nutter, our view is that authority can stick it in its ear.

--Being a doctor doesn't make Garnaut right. Being in the majority doesn't make him right. What would make him right is if he had a winning argument. If he wants to win the argument about climate change, he should stop treating the Australian public like a bunch of ignorant children who need to be told what to do.

--Yet this is what he said recently, according to the ABC:
There's no doubt that there is a battle, an awful battle between ignorance and knowledge going on. It's a great contest between the academies of sciences of Australia ... the academies of science of all of the countries of scientific achievement on the one side, and the shock jocks of Australia on the other. We've had these battles before in the history of our civilisation. This battle will have quite a lot to do with the future prosperity of Australia, the future quality of our civilisation.

--Can't you just smell the condescension in that statement? This is an indirect way of saying, "Don't argue with me because I'm smart," or its corollary, "You should shut up because you're stupid."

--But have a look at the key points in Garnaut's latest update (number 8!) to his 2008 climate change report. This update is about nothing less than "Transforming the electricity sector." In this report, Garnaut concludes that, "the introduction of a carbon price is highly unlikely to threaten physical energy security." In other words, he's saying it won't put coal companies out of business. That's disputable (although many would find it desirable), but he adds this bit:

Nevertheless, it may be prudent to implement cost effective policy measures to assuage concerns about energy security and to improve the regulatory functions of the energy market. These measures include:

o The introduction of an Energy Security Council to implement measures to counter energy market instability regardless of the source; and
o The judicious provision of loan guarantees to high-emissions generators through the transition to carbon pricing.

--Did you get that? He doesn't think his reforms will put the power industry out of business. Why? Because he's going to form a committee with new powers to, you know, do things...and then have the government back-stop loans to keep newly unprofitable power companies from going out of business, if necessarry.

--Hmm. It seems like it would be easier to not introduce ‘reforms' that could put Australia's power companies out of business. But that would not be transformative. And the ultimate goal of the central planner and bureaucrat is to transform the nature of free markets so that everything flows through an elite bureaucracy of technocrats, of which Garnaut happens to be a high priest.

--But you have to give him credit. He does have faith. And strangely, he seems to have a lot of faith in the private sector to spontaneously generate technological improvements in response to a new carbon price introduced by the public sector. He says, "We need a lot of technological change, fast," as if it's like ordering, saying, a lot of fried chicken when you're hungry.

--This seems like a fairly academic (and unrealistic) understanding of innovation; a kind of "just in time" technology change which eliminates all the negative effects of your policy change. What's worse, Garnaut thinks that spending more money will magically produce the innovation required. Of course it's government money (your money). He writes that:

One potential driver of accelerated technological development in low-emissions technology is the recent increase in public investment in innovation following the Great Crash of 2008. The injection of substantial 'green' stimulus spending by governments within stimulus packages following the Great Crash reversed the 35-year decline in real terms in low-emissions energy research, development and demonstration (IEA 2010) and raises the prospect of significant breakthroughs. This may extend beyond breakthroughs in learning by doing to shifts in technological processes or shifts in the production function.

--Translation, "Garble garble blah blah blah. Spend more public money on innovation and you'll get the breakthroughs you need to make your policy workable or mitigate its wealth-destroying effects. Garble garble blah blah blah."

--It's important to point out that we're not making an ad hominem attack on Garnaut the man. We're merely raising two important points about how bad his ideas are. First, Garnaut has been selected as the point man on climate change to give credibility and authority to a report on a policy the government has already selected. There's nothing objective about his ‘expert' opinion.

--You might think of this as an argument, "From authority, with love." He seems likable enough. And he is a doctor. He's just the sort of guy to give covering fire to a government eager for more revenue and power over private and public life. But likable or not, the argument is from authority and for authority. And that should not be the basis of changing the cost of energy and the whole structure of production in the Australian economy.

--Our second important point is that Garnaut doesn't know as much as he thinks he does. Neither do we. Neither do you. He's only human in this regard. But perhaps he doesn't recognise it. A bit of self-knowledge (and modesty) wouldn't go amiss (yes , we aspire to this modesty as well).

--Specifically, he's making the text-book economic mistake made by central planners and government bureaucrats. Like most people with a great faith in planning, he's confident that his knowledge is complete and superior. But total knowledge in a complex and dynamic system is never possible. Friederich Hayek makes this point in his essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society (emphasis added is ours):

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources—if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

--Hayek's point, admittedly, is about planning in general, and prices. But the point remains: Garnaut is bulldozing through the climate change debate with pages and pages of predictions and prescriptions without complete knowledge of a) whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant, b) whether human beings are causing global warming, c) how the climate even changes over the long term.

--That is a lot of known unknowns. And it's a lot of ambiguity to sweep under the rug as you make even more sweeping changes to Australia's economy. But maybe we should just take his word for it and hope for the best. After all, with the government and a bunch of economists and academics in charge of the economy, what could possibly go wrong? You should shut up and do what you're told."

From the Daily Reckoning list.

Human Achievement Hour 2011

Saturday, March 26, 2011
8:30 pm – 9:30 PM

On March 26, some people will be sitting in the dark to express their "vote" for action on global climate change. Instead, you can join CEI and the thousands of people around the world who will be celebrating Human Achievement Hour (HAH). Leave your lights on to express your appreciation for the inventions and innovations that make today the best time to be alive and the recognition that future solutions require individual freedom not government coercion.

Human Achievement Hour (HAH) is a celebration of individual freedom and appreciation of the achievements and innovations that people have used to improve their lives throughout history. To celebrate Human Achievement Hour, participants need only to spend the hour from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm on March 26 enjoying the benefits of capitalism and human innovation: Gather with friends in the warmth of a heated home, watch television, take a hot shower, drink a beer, call a loved one on the phone, or listen to music.

You can also utilize one of man’s greatest achievements, the Internet, to join CEI’s in-house party, which will live stream right here at CEI.org beginning at 8:00 pm EST. You can use the chat function to tell us how you are celebrating human achievement in your neighborhood..
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Making light of the phony Earth Hour
By JOE WARMINGTON, Toronto Sun

March 24

It’s unclear how many GTA homes will partake in turning off their lights to honour Earth Hour Saturday.

But don’t count in the Menzies in the collective, self-imposed blackout!

“We will not be in the dark,” journalist and conservative commentator David Menzies said Thursday.

Instead, what you will find is a giant beacon in the sky emanating from his Richmond Hill street between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m.

“While everybody else has their lights off I will have every light in my house on,” said Menzies, as he prepared for his second installment in mocking the “phony” Earth Hour movement.

He’s also gone a step further.

“I have rented four rotating Hollywood movie lights which will light up the sky for miles,” he said.

“I don’t need to give you my address because all you need to do is look to the sky.”

Last year the lights attracted people down to the darkened street, sans that one home.

“A lot of people who followed the lights came in and all they saw was a guy out with his kids having a barbecue,” he said laughing. “It went so well we are going to do it again.”

There will be no need for a flashlight at this springtime BBQ...

...then it must be good!
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George Osborne's plans are a disaster for the environment

George Monbiot
Wednesday 23 March 2011
guardian.co.uk

The "greenest government ever" has delivered the blackest budget in living memory. It provides a roaring incentive to use more oil, just as we might be heading towards an oil crisis. It has given the green light to the aviation industry to keep expanding, despite the government's promise to limit its impact. It has made a mockery of green investment. Perhaps most disturbingly, it has ripped up the social contract which has prevailed in this country since 1947, which ensured that developers, through the planning laws, were accountable to the people.

Let's begin with that last item, because everything about it is extraordinary. The first question is what on earth it is doing in a budget statement? The budget is supposed to concern the government's finances, where's the connection to planning legislation? The likely explanation is that the government has decided this is the best place to bury bad news; it is sneaking it through while we're distracted by the fiscal measures.

It describes the policy as "introduc[ing] a new presumption in favour of sustainable development, so that the default answer to development is 'yes'". Notice the slip up? It starts off as "sustainable development", creating the impression that Osborne is talking about solar panels and bird hides. Seven words later, you realise he means everything. It is, in other words, the opposite of sustainable. So much for the promise by the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, of more local control over development; this presents yet another barrier to communities trying to prevent Tesco from trashing their towns.

Osborne has abolished the fuel duty escalator, cut fuel tax for vehicles, frozen air passenger duty rates and dismissed – on the untested assumption that it would contravene international law – a tax on planes that would have discouraged airlines from running them half-empty. These measures send the clearest possible signal that he has no intention of reforming our planet-trashing, resource-guzzling transport systems, before they run into the wall of peak oil and climate change. This is populism of the crudest kind, which might delight the Mail and the Sun, but shows that, for all his talk of tough choices and difficult decisions, the chancellor is a chicken...

This budget is perverse, regressive, destructive, cowardly. It's a charter for corporations, which gives two fingers to the public interest. It demonstrates what many of us had suspected but had hoped was not true: that the government was lying when it promised to protect the environment.

Australian PM Julia Gillard sees approval dwindle on carbon tax U-turn

Australian opposition party predicts 'people's revolt', alleging massive price rises as businesses factor in carbon tax

Alison Rourke guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 16 March 2011

"Australia's prime minister, Julia Gillard, has seen her approval ratings slump to their lowest level since taking office, following her plans to introduce a carbon tax.

The poll, conducted by Nielson, puts Gillard's approval rating down 5% at 47%. Her opponent Tony Abbott, the Liberal leader has not benefited hugely from her loss of support – his approval rating slipped by just 3% to 43%, although the shift was not statistically significant.

"The new carbon tax is the most likely explanation for the change in attitudes towards her," said John Stirton from Neilsen polling. "It's being portrayed very much as something [that] will hit the hip pocket and also as a broken promise, so it's a double negative."

Last month a multi-party climate change committee set up by Gillard after last year's hung parliament published a framework for pricing carbon. Under it, the government would set a fixed price per tonne for a three- to five-year period starting in July 2012. It would be followed by an emissions trading scheme, where the market would set the price.

However, Gillard had expressly ruled out any carbon tax on the eve of the election: "There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead." That promise was repeated by senior figures in her team.

The conservative opposition leader, Tony Abbott, once a committed climate sceptic, has branded Gillard a liar. He predicted a "people's revolt" against the new tax and has vowed to fight it "every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month". He asserts that everything from petrol to groceries will skyrocket under the tax and has vowed to reverse it if he's elected in two-and-a-half years time.

His campaign is directed at "working families" and appears to be gaining ground. Another poll published on Tuesday shows support for a carbon price has fallen 11 points to 35% in the past month."

The 47-year-old Mr Zahradil is regarded as a protégé of Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, and shares his country's leader's deep scepticism of climate change,

Wish the Telegraph would use the correct terminology. We all know climate change happens, but warming and/or cooling caused by naughty Man is the (non) issue.

...these folks seamlessly switch between MMGW to GW to Climate Change, as needed.

To be soon followed by "Weather we don't particularly like" and eventually "Bad hair days."

This has been a classic march of the voodoo priests, dancing in front of the volcano, explaining the angry harvest gods just beyond the edge of jungle, as their preferred path to political persuasion.

Who is still buying their nonsense, a clear Plan B dreamed up during the heady land on their feet days of the "Rich vs. Poor" 1992 Rio Summit, so soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

They even drove away one of the founders of Greenpeace with their fabricated PolitSci-not-science nonsense.

Al Gore once 'took a course' and Mr. Light Dabbler in Science then led this parade of fools. It's been ... unsightly.

And, listening to this lightweight lifetime 'fundraising' expert drone about what is known 'on the science desk' is totally laughable.

(video) NPR officers compare deniers of climate change to birthers and flat earth believers

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Czech MEP elected leader of Tories in European Parliament

A Czech MEP and pronounced climate change sceptic has pipped a British Conservative to become the leader of the Tories' group in the European Parliament.

By Matthew Day,
09 Mar 2011

Jan Zahradil defeated Timothy Kirkhope, widely touted as the favourite to become chairman, and a Polish rival in a vote to find a new head of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group.

The group had gone to the polls after the previous chairman, Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, quit following a spectacular falling out with his Law and Justice party.

Although the Conservatives dominate the group with 25 MEPs Mr Zahradil may have won favour as a stopgap measure till the group votes again for a chairman at the end of the year.

The election of Mr Zahradil may also bring a period of calm to the group, which, mainly through its inclusion of the Polish Law and Justice party, had faced heated accusations that it housed xenophobic and homophobic factions. The allegations damaged the Conservative's image in Europe, and prompted some to question the wisdom of David Cameron's decision to help found the group in 2009.

The 47-year-old Mr Zahradil is regarded as a protégé of Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, and shares his country's leader's deep scepticism of climate change, which could set him at odds with the Conservative Party...

North Korea wants to trade carbon credits

Pyongyang hopes to earn hard currency by selling UN-backed carbon offsets from hydro-power projects

guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 March 2011

North Korea hopes to earn much-needed hard currency by selling UN-backed carbon offsets from a series of hydro-power projects, as the country faces sanctions over its nuclear weapons programme.

If approved and registered by the UN, these would be the first projects for North Korea under a scheme called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This allows developing countries to earn tradeable carbon credits for emissions reductions from clean-energy projects.

Some analysts questioned the demand for carbon credits from North Korea, with fears the money might be siphoned off to nuclear arms or other military projects.

The government has asked the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany, which focuses on humanitarian issues, to act as a go-between by working with UN-approved verification agency TUV Nord.

According to Bernhard Seliger, the foundation's representative in South Korea, North Korea is initially looking at trying to get approval for three hydro power plants of 7-8 megawatts (MW).

Seliger visited the three hydro-plant construction sites in the north-east corner of the country in January.

In a statement, TUV Nord confirmed the foundation had engaged their services...

'Hokey Pokey' politician dances into the limelight

03 Mar 2011

An Australian Senator uses the medium of dance to get her argument across during a debate on tax.

"Liberal Senator Mary Jo Fisher was so passionate about denouncing the government's climate change policy that she decided to choreograph her argument to the famous children's party song the Hokey Cokey, or the Hokey Pokey as she described it."

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Nasa Glory satellite launch fails

Friday, 4 March 2011

...Glory was launched on a three-year mission to analyze how airborne particles affect Earth's climate. Besides monitoring particles in the atmosphere, it will also track solar radiation to determine the sun's effect on climate change.

The $424 million mission is managed by the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Friday's launch came after engineers spent more than a week troubleshooting a glitch that led to a last-minute scrub.

Glory was supposed to study tiny atmospheric particles known as aerosols, which reflect and trap sunlight. The vast majority occurs naturally, spewed into the atmosphere by volcanoes, forest fires and desert storms. Aerosols can also come from manmade sources such as the burning of fossil fuel.

NASA suffered a mishap two years ago when a global warming satellite also destined to join the Earth-observation network crashed into the ocean near Antarctica after launching from the same kind of rocket that carried Glory. An accident board was formed to investigate and corrective action was taken to prevent future problems. A duplicate is now scheduled to fly from Vandenberg in 2013.

Hollywood broadcasting green

Solitaire Townsend, for the Guardian Professional Network
Monday 28 February 2011

UN secretary general Ban-Ki-moon caught Oscars fever last week when he gathered Hollywood moguls to discuss climate change. "Together we can have a blockbuster impact on the world," he entreated. Puns aside, he is absolutely right about the entertainment industry's impact on sustainability, but in the wrong way.

We consume enormous amounts of entertainment, estimated at between 28 hours a week to half our waking hours. Movies promoted with the full weight of the Hollywood marketing machine can infiltrate the minds of people who don't even see them. The animated hit Wall-E, and last year's Avatar both ignited environmental chitchat and reached places traditional green messages have never touched.

But it's a hard and potentially expensive game, for the movie industry, at least. During the UN's session the actor Don Cheadle, cautioned: "Most people on Friday night are not going out to see something that tastes like medicine. They want entertainment."

An eco-plot is no guarantee of success. Two eco-documentaries were up for Oscars in the feature documentary category; Gasland, which investigates the dangers of drilling for shale gas, and Waste Land, about the difficult life of rubbish pickers surviving on a Brazilian landfill. Neither won, and the documentary category could be considered the small-plain cousin of the gorgeous gongs; hidden among the glitter-fest,where the real money is.

So does Hollywood have a moral, or financial imperative for sustainability, like any other company?...

Participant seems to have the magic touch, to make money while making a difference. While other multinationals dig deep on sustainability, take responsibility for behaviour change and engage stakeholders, Hollywood seems to be the industry that CSR forgot.

Is producing more worthy fare the answer? Perhaps not. Behaviour change science suggests an alternative. When it comes to movies, TV fiction and even advertising, what you do can be as important as what you say. Peripheral processing is the way our minds pick up clues about behaviour from what we see. The campaign to ban smoking in movies, due to evidenced effect on teen acceptance of smoking, has been fighting this impact for years. And brands have been slaving at the prospect of loosened product placement in entertainment, because a can of drink shown in a movie can subconsciously affect sales.

So rather than more documentaries, what we need is "in-shot" recycling bins, characters driving hybrids and movie stars turning off lights when they storm out of a room. Incorporate these behaviours in movies and you normalise them.

To quote the most famous dramatist of all time, movies could be "the makers of manners".
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Barack Obama may be forced to delay US climate action

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 February 2011

Barack Obama may be forced to order a two-year delay in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) action on climate change to try to avoid a complete government shutdown, an environmental conference has been warned.

President Obama faces the prospect of a government shutdown by 4 March, with a funding gap leading to federal employees being sent home and government services temporarily closing down, unless he can reach a deal with Congress Republicans who are demanding a crippling $61bn (£38bn) in budget cuts. The house will begin debate on the spending bill on Tuesday following efforts at the weekend to avoid a government shutdown, with news reports suggesting Republicans might compromise on some of the cuts.

The Republican plan would destroy Obama's capacity to pursue his green agenda, cutting the budget of the EPA by 30%, and stripping funds for projects he has championed such as clean energy research and high-speed rail.

Obama may be forced to sacrifice the EPA's efforts to take the first steps this year towards regulating greenhouse gas emissions if it means he can continue funding the federal government for the next seven months.

"If I was predicting, I would say that he might sign a delay provision, to delay the EPA effort for two years or something like that. It probably depends on the particular circumstances," Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, told a conference at the Georgetown Climate Centre.

"I would bet that if it was a delay, and it was part of a money bill that was really important, he would sign it," she said...

House Republicans cut funding to UN climate science body

Funding ban to IPCC part of cuts package that would slash spending on environmental protection

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 February

America is to cut off all funding to the United Nations climate science panel under sweeping Republican budget cuts that seek to gut spending on environmental protection.

The funding ban to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – stripping $2.3m (£1.31m) from an international organisation that relies heavily on volunteer scientists – was among some $61bn (£38bn) in cuts voted through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Saturday.

If enacted, the cuts package would reduce spending on environmental protection by nearly one-third, or about $3bn (£1.85bn), advancing a key objective of the conservative Tea Party of dismantling government regulation.

The cuts also exhibit the strong hostility to climate science among the Tea Party activists with funding bans on the IPCC and a newly created climate information service under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – a reorganisation which was to be funded out of existing budgets.

The weekend budget measure was designed to fund the government through to September. But the White House and Senate Democrats say the cuts – which go far deeper than those put forward by Barack Obama last week – are extreme, setting the stage for a confrontation between Democrats and Republicans...
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Fraudsters targeting green businesses

Fraudsters are targetting sustainable businesses and green projects, according to accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

By Kara Gammell
20 Feb 2011

PwC is warning the rapid expansion of green business, including solar and wind power schemes and their associated industries, makes the ideal target for fraudsters - especially when the industries grow faster than the security systems that are put in place for protection.

Programmes such as the EU Emission Trading Scheme, worth nearly $120bn (£74bn), have grown to such a size that they are attracting the attention of professional criminals, and the protection that is in place cannot keep up with the developments.

A PwC report highlighted the seriousness of such threats, which was recently demonstrated by the closure of national carbon registries across the EU after a phishing scam and cyber attack led to a €45m (£38m) theft from several companies. Several are yet to reopen.

Jonathan Grant, of PwC’s sustainability and climate change (S&CC) practice, said the threat of traditional fraud in new and growing markets is increasing and companies must be vigilant about the risks.

He said: “Fraudsters are using the latest techniques to attack weak points in the system. These are old frauds applied to new markets.” ...
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Johnny Ball 'abused by environmentalists' over climate change denial

Veteran children’s television presenter Johnny Ball claimed today his career was being wrecked by environmentalists.

By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
18 Feb 2011

The 72-year-old said he had been subjected to a malicious harassment campaign after dismissing climate change as “alarmist nonsense”.

Mr Ball, who has built up a prolific public speaking career over the last decade, said his bookings had plummeted by around 90 per cent following abuse from environmental extremists.

In an interview, he told how websites had been set up in his name featuring pornographic images and a blogger wrote that he should “not be allowed near children”.

One imposter also attempted to cancel Mr Ball’s booking at a training day for maths teachers in Northampton next month, he said.

Police are now investigating the claims.

Mr Ball, who visits up to 100 schools, science festivals and teacher training events each year, told the Times Educational Supplement that the smears were a “criminal act aimed directly to damage me and my career”.

“Since notifying the police of these acts aimed at damaging my name and reputation, the offensive web links have quite amazingly disappeared,” he said.

“People have every right to make up their own minds on my stance on many issues regarding children.

“But to deliberately smear my name in ways that are clearly criminal is so very disappointing. I would hope it is not the way fair and sensible debate is going in this far more open, modern society.”

Mr Ball, father of TV and radio presenter Zoë, rose to fame in the 1970s and 1980s presenting science and technology programmes including Think of a Number, Johnny Ball Reveals All and Think Again.

He has also written books on maths, produced five educational stage musicals and regularly addresses groups of children and teachers.

But Mr Ball claimed his public speaking appearances have dried up following controversy over comments he made in 2009...

The latest research belies the idea that storms are getting more extreme.

Last week a severe storm froze Dallas under a sheet of ice, just in time to disrupt the plans of the tens of thousands of (American) football fans descending on the city for the Super Bowl. On the other side of the globe, Cyclone Yasi slammed northeastern Australia, destroying homes and crops and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter's fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December's blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world.

But is it true? To answer that question, you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. "There's no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather," adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher...
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