Questions Swirl Around U.N.'s Climate Auditors

By Gene J. Koprowski
- FOXNews.com

A little-known group called the InterAcademy Council has been made the voice of authority on the credibility of climate change, leaving critics scratching their heads -- and some key questions unanswered.

Acknowledging the rising tide of public skepticism toward global warming, the United Nations announced on March 10 that the IAC would act as an independent reviewer for its climate-science arm, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But a week later, the IAC remains a mystery, and it still hasn't explained who will be on the review panel or how the panel will operate.

And if it knows, it isn't saying. "The IAC expects to begin its IPCC review shortly and issue a report by August 31. There is no other statement," Anne Muller, program coordinator at the IAC, told FoxNews.com.

The IAC was founded in 2000 as an advisory body for the U.N. and the World Bank. Hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in the Netherlands, the organization's Web site indicates that it focuses on a range of issues, from examining "climate change and genetically modified organisms to the crucial challenge of achieving sustainability."

But in the decade it has existed, the IAC has accomplished little relevant to climate change -- the four major reports it has produced have focused on topics ranging from African agriculture to the role of women in science -- leading some experts to voice concerns that its review ultimately will be a whitewash, designed to silence them and provide cover for politicians...

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech...
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European emission trading rocked by scandal over recycled carbon permits
Carl Mortished From: The Times March 18, 2010

EUROPE'S emissions trading system was in uproar yesterday amid a mounting scandal over "recycled" carbon permits.
Two carbon exchanges were forced to suspend trading as panic hit investors fearful that they had bought invalid permits.

BlueNext and Nord Pool, the French and Nordic exchanges, suspended trading in certificates of emission reduction (CERs) when it emerged that some had been illegally reused.

Concern that used and worthless permits were circulating caused the spot price of the certificates to collapse, from €12 ($17.87) a tonne of carbon to less than €1.

The scare erupted after Hungary said last week that it had sold two million CERs submitted by Hungarian companies to satisfy their carbon emission allowances under the EU's emission trading system (ETS).

Carbon permits submitted by companies every year to the national register are usually cancelled.

However, Hungary exploited a loophole that allows CERs - which are issued not by European Union governments but by the United Nations under its Clean Development Mechanism - to be traded...

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

Climate change adverts 'simplistic tools'

Government adverts that used nursery rhymes to warn of climate change have been branded by experts as 'simplistic communication tools' that have set back the fight against global warming back by several years.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
18 Mar 2010

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that the adverts created on behalf of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and based on the children's poems Jack and Jill and Rub-A-Dub-Dub made exaggerated claims about the threat to Britain from global warming.

The ruling is a further blow to the Government's efforts to raise awareness of the threat of global warming following the "climategate" scandal and questions about the United Nations's presentation of the risks of global warming.

Two posters juxtaposed adapted extracts from the nursery rhymes with prose warnings about the dangers of global warning.

One began: "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There was none as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought." Beneath was written: "Extreme weather conditions such as flooding, heat waves and storms will become more frequent and intense."

Ed Gillespie, the co-founder of Futerra Sustainability Communications, said it was "rubbish communication" that has given climate change sceptics another opportunity to cast doubt on the science...

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

I saw the headline a couple days ago and wondered what idiot was saying that --

HOW CARBON GASES ‘HAVE SAVED US FROM A NEW ICE AGE’ --

which buys into the same claims with a reverse supposed result.

Didn't get around to looking at the item until now.

I see: James Lovelock. Fits.

Ellen

... this for unmitigated silliness, in my inbox just now:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT
Paul West, +1 (541) 359-1886, media@empowermentinstitute.net
Kelly Stachowicz, City of Davis, +1 (530) 757-5602

Davis, California starts race to become America’s first carbon neutral city

» David Gershon and Mitch Sears are available for interviews.

DAVIS, CA - The city with the nation’s first bike lanes and climate specific energy efficiency ordinance is teaming up with former Olympic Torch Relay director and Earth Run organizer David Gershon to achieve the impossible. By unanimous vote of its city council, Davis, California is going all the way on global warming–total carbon neutrality by mid-century.  

Davis, home to the University of California Davis, is located near Sacramento and has a population of over 65,000. Gershon, author of Social Change 2.0, has enlisted 300 American cities to go on the Low Carbon Diet set forth in his best-selling book by the same name.

Using the State of California’s 20 percent reduction goal as its starting point, the city has set an equally ambitious short-term target to cut the community’s carbon emissions by up to 50 percent by 2013. To get there, the city hopes that its Cool Davis campaign will eventually engage 75 percent of households to go on David Gershon’s Low Carbon Diet: A 30-day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds, and stay on it.  The program encourages households to tailor a carbon diet following simple to implement actions and a peer-support group called EcoTeams.

Its hopes are founded on the remarkable results of the Davis pilot program, which proved that a reduction of 5,500 pounds per household is possible. Households using Gershon’s do-it-yourself carbon diet in similar Cool Community campaigns across the country have cut their emissions by up to 35 percent in a matter of months. One of the benefits of the program is that any type of household–large or small, owner or renter–can participate and customize a plan.  

“We have proof of concept and the means to scale it up,” says David Gershon, author of the Low Carbon Diet and Social Change 2.0. “When it comes to cutting carbon, the action is at the local level, and the city of Davis is leading the way. Since half of America’s carbon footprint is at the residential level, Cool Community campaigns are a powerful and doable way for America get on a low carbon path.”

“As a city where 75 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions are coming from residential sources, it was a no brainer,” said Mitch Sears sustainability director of the City of Davis. “When you pair the carbon reduction results Gershon is getting with the innovative Cool Community strategy and tools he offers to scale them up, Low Carbon Diet is by far the most cost-effective option for our city budget.”

Bold, large-scale social change initiatives are not new to David Gershon. He literally ran onto the world stage when he organized the First Earth Run. The 86-day global torch relay for peace at the height of the cold war engaged the participation of tens of millions of people in 62 countries, including heads of state, and was witnessed by over a billion more worldwide.

Dubbed the best bicycle town in America, Davis boasts the country’s top rated year-round farmers market, is home to the US Bicycling Hall of Fame, and was the first city in America to adopt an ordinance requiring energy efficiency tailored to the local climate, a local law that would later influence California’s famous Title 24, the first state law of its kind in America.

Early results from other Cool Community campaigns pilot programs are also achieving reductions once thought impossible without new technology.

Cool Portland, the campaign’s first pilot program, more than doubled its goal of cutting carbon emissions by 10 percent per household, realizing an average reduction of 22 percent, or 6,700 pounds. 

Citizen-led EcoTeams, peer-support groups of 5 to 8 households, in Vermont similarly reduced their carbon footprint by 23 percent.

Rochester, New York launched a Low Carbon Diet Challenge that achieved an average reduction of 10,828 pounds for every participating household. As a result, community organizers and city officials are scaling up a Cool Rochester campaign to engage 40,000 households and reduce their community’s carbon footprint by one billion pounds. 

Cool Mass, the first statewide Cool Community campaign, launched last fall. The first communities to sign on are Boston, Braintree, Brookline, Dedham, Hingham, Hull, Milton, Newton, and Winchester, which represent almost a million of the state’s residents.

For more information on the city of Davis’ Low Carbon Diet Challenge, go to CityofDavis.org and search “low carbon diet.”

» David Gershon and Mitch Sears are available for interviews.

Daily Express

HOW CARBON GASES ‘HAVE SAVED US FROM A NEW ICE AGE’

Thursday March 11,2010
By Donna Bowater

MAN-MADE carbon emissions are staving off a new ice age, says a leading environmental scientist.

Climate-change expert Dr James Lovelock says the greenhouse gases that have warmed the planet are likely to prevent a big freeze that could last millions of years.

In a talk at London’s Science Museum Dr Lovelock said the balance of nature was in charge of the environment.

He said: “We’re just fiddling around. It is worth thinking that what we are doing in creating all these carbon emissions, far from being something frightful, is stopping the onset of a new ice age.

“If we hadn’t appeared on the earth, it would be due to go through another ice age and we can look at our part as holding that up.

“I hate all this business about feeling guilty about what we’re doing.

“We’re not guilty, we never intended to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s just something we did.”

Dr Lovelock’s comments come in the wake of the scandal at the University of East Anglia where leaked emails suggested climate change data had been manipulated. ..

http://www.express.co.uk/posts...
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US to lobby for endangered species listing for polar bear

Melting sea ice in the Arctic will kill thousands of bears in coming years, the US says, and continued commercial trade must not be allowed to make the situation worse

David Adam, environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010

It is a familiar story in the climate change debate. The US government is at odds with the rest of the world and, despite criticism, wants other countries to change their minds and fall in line behind Uncle Sam.

This time, the tale comes with an unexpected twist. This weekend, the US will warn that the threat from climate change to the survival of the polar bear is so great that the world must grant it the highest possible protection.

At the meeting of the international body that regulates trade in animals, the US will push for a total ban on the sale and movement of polar bear products that are used for furs, rugs and taxidermy. Melting sea ice in the Arctic will kill thousands of bears in coming years, the US says, and continued commercial trade must not be allowed to make the situation worse. Other countries, including US neighbours and keen polar bear traders, Canada, disagree...

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

having the UN investigate the IPCC is like having Morgoth investigate Sauron.

From The Times

March 10, 2010

UN to review errors made by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility.

A team of the world’s leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming.

The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world’s leading national science academies, including Britain’s Royal Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The review will be led by Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the Interacademy Council and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Save the planet. But maybe not right now

Doomsaying precludes the possibility of ingenious solutions – and indicates a morbid vanity that we must be the saviours

Martin Wainwright
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 March 2010

Isn't it welcome to have Ian McEwan as an advocate for a little optimism in the climate change debate? His hope, expressed in his new novel Solar, that humanity will prove ingenious enough to solve the problem through the skill of coming generations is a welcome change from those who portray our descendants as helpless victims of our "excess".

Their injunctions to "save the world for our children and grandchildren" fly in the face of history, which repeatedly shows how progress – from the wheel to the internet – transforms the world picture as time marches on. The doom brigade has its moments, such as the collapse of the classical world in Europe, the Black Death and the first world war, but they are exceptions to learn from. And we have learned.

Not to the extent of mastering clairvoyancy, however. Like miserabilism, a constant in human behaviour is the inability of Today to successfully imagine Tomorrow. The archive of prophecy and science fiction contains some good guesses, but in general the seers get it wrong. Which of my grandparents, addressing me in the 1950s, could possibly have foreseen today's IT? Which of my grandparents' grandparents had a notion of the bicycle or national parks?

This is true of scientists as much as of the more general type of wise person. Science is too often mistakenly treated in the way that history was by those 19th-century Germans who thought that one day the whole truth could be set down. Certainty is not absolute. Scientists are ambushed by novelty – see Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein – as often as the rest of us...

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

The Weekly Standard

The meltdown of the climate campaign.

BY Steven F. Hayward
March 15, 2010

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress...

http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
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Rise in UK carbon emissions disputed by report

Soil deposits of CO2 'not fuelling global warming yet – but will in future'

Juliette Jowit
The Observer, Sunday 7 March 2010

A major study for the UK government has cast doubt over claims that rising temperatures are causing soil to pump greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further fuelling global warming.

In 2005 it was reported in the science journal Nature that over the past 25 years 100m tonnes of carbon dioxide had been released by the soil of England and Wales. The figure cancelled out all emissions cuts in the UK since 1990.

However, a national survey of the soils of Great Britain, funded by the department for environment food and rural affairs, claims to have found no net loss of carbon over approximately the same period.

Scientists have now proposed that a special study group, with an independent statistical expert, should examine why the reports differ and which result is more likely to be correct.

The latest questions follow weeks of claims that predictions about the impacts of climate change have been overstated or miscalculated, including the melting of Himalayan glaciers, and separate allegations of bias based on leaked emails from scientists at the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia...

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

A dubious defender of the scientific faith

Some of America’s top ”warmist” scientists are planning a counter-attack on the “climate sceptics”.

By Christopher Booker
06 Mar 2010

Some of America’s top ”warmist” scientists, demoralised at how their faith is being discredited, are planning a counter-attack on the “climate sceptics”, according to the Washington Times. “We’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” says Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University.

As for “well-funded”, a new study by Jo Nova suggests that, in the US alone, the $79 billion (£52bn) of state funding for pro-warming research in the past 20 years outweighs the money given to climate sceptics by 3,500 to one. As for Prof Ehrlich, he is best known for his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb which, as well as catastrophic climate change, predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s. He also forecast that by 1980 the average age of death in the US would be 42, due to pesticides. Sounds like just the man to restore our faith in true “science”...

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

March 5, 2010

95 per cent chance that Man is to blame for global warming, say scientists

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The evidence that human activity is causing global warming is much stronger than previously stated and is found in all parts of the world, according to a study that attempts to refute claims from sceptics.

The “fingerprints” of human influence on the climate can be detected not only in rising temperatures but also in the saltiness of the oceans, rising humidity, changes in rainfall and the shrinking of Arctic Sea ice at the rate of 600,000 sq km a decade.

The study, by senior scientists from the Met Office Hadley Centre, Edinburgh University, Melbourne University and Victoria University in Canada, concluded that there was an “increasingly remote possibility” that the sceptics were right that human activities were having no discernible impact. There was a less than 5 per cent likelihood that natural variations in climate were responsible for the changes.

The study said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had understated mankind’s overall contribution to climate change. The IPCC had said in 2007 that there was no evidence of warming in the Antarctic. However, the panel said that the latest observations showed that man-made emissions were having an impact on even the remotest continent.

The panel assessed more than 100 recent peer-reviewed scientific papers and found that the overwhelming majority had detected clear evidence of human influence on the climate...

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

From The Times

March 2, 2010

Prof Phil Jones, climate scientist, admits sending ‘awful’ e-mails

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The integrity of climate change research is in doubt after the disclosure of e-mails that attempt to suppress data, a leading scientific institute has said.

The Institute of Physics said that e-mails sent by Professor Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had broken “honourable scientific traditions” about disclosing raw data and methods and allowing them to be checked by critics.

Professor Jones admitted to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee yesterday that he had “written some very awful e-mails”, including one in which he rejected a request for information on the ground that the person receiving it might criticise his work.

In a written submission to the committee, the institute said that, assuming the e-mails were genuine, “worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context”.

The e-mails contained “prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, it added.

The institute said that it was concerned by suggestions in the e-mails that Professor Jones and other scientists had worked together to prevent alternative views on global warming from being published. It said: “The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers.”

The institute said that doubts about the veracity of climate science could be overcome if scientists were required to make all their data “electronically accessible for all at the time of publication [of their reports]”...

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

4 March 2010

The money trail

Joanne Nova

Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the "deniers", the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times have changed.

Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil's supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.

The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it's chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are unwittingly helping giant finance houses.

Money for Sceptics: Greenpeace has searched for funding for sceptics and found $23 million paid by Exxon over 10 years (which has stopped). Perhaps Greenpeace missed funding from other fossil fuel companies, but you can be sure that they searched. I wrote the Climate Money paper in July last year, and since then no one has claimed a larger figure. Big-Oil may well prefer it if emissions are not traded, but it's not make-or-break for them. If all fossil fuels are in effect "taxed", consumers will pay the tax anyhow, and past price rises in crude oil suggest consumers will not consume much less fuel, so profits won't actually fall that much.

But in the end, everyone spends more on carbon friendly initiatives than on sceptics-- even Exxon: (how about $100 million for Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project, and $600 million for Biofuels research). Some will complain that Exxon is massive and their green commitment was a tiny part of their profits, but the point is, what they spent on sceptics was even less.

Money for the Climate Industry: The US government spent $79 billion on climate research and technology since 1989 - to be sure, this funding paid for things like satellites and studies, but it's 3,500 times as much as anything offered to sceptics. It buys a bandwagon of support, a repetitive rain of press releases, and includes PR departments of institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the Climate Change Technology Program. The $79 billion figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, and is not adjusted for inflation. In other words, it could be…a lot bigger...

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashe...
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They write this as if it's a bad thing....
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'Tory madrasa' preaches radical message to would-be MPs

Candidates trained by rightwing group that rubbishes NHS, dismisses global warming and backs waterboarding

Robert Booth
The Guardian, Saturday 6 March 2010

Tory parliamentary candidates have undergone training by a rightwing group whose leadership has described the NHS as "the biggest waste of money in the UK", claimed global warming is "a scam" and suggested that the waterboarding of prisoners can be justified.

At least 11 prospective Tory candidates, an estimated seven of whom have a reasonable chance of winning their seats, have been delegates or speakers at training conferences run by the Young Britons' Foundation, which claims to have trained 2,500 Conservative party activists.

The YBF chief executive, Donal Blaney, who runs the courses on media training and policy, has called for environmental protesters who trespass to be "shot down" by the police and that Britain should have a US-style liberal firearms policy. In an article on his own website, entitled Scrap the NHS, not just targets, he wrote: "Would it not now be better to say that the NHS – in its current incarnation – is finished?"

Blaney has described the YBF as "a Conservative madrasa" that radicalises young Tories. Programmes have included trips to meet neo-conservative groups in the US and to a shooting range in Virginia to fire submachine guns and assault rifles.

The group's close ties to the Tories were cemented this week when the Conservative party chairman, Eric Pickles, and the shadow defence secretary, Liam Fox, spoke at the annual YBF parliamentary rally at the House of Commons, which was chaired by Blaney...

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

Hurricane Katrina victims to sue oil companies over global warming

Victims of Hurricane Katrina are seeking to sue carbon gas-emitting multinationals for helping fuel global warming and boosting the 2005 storm.

04 Mar 2010

The class action suit brought by residents from southern Mississippi, which was ravaged by hurricane-force winds and driving rains, was first filed just weeks after the August 2005 storm hit.

"The plaintiffs allege that defendants' operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries in the United States caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming," say the documents seen by the AFP news agency.

The increase in global surface air and water temperatures "in turn caused a rise in sea levels and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina, which combined to destroy the plaintiffs' private property, as well as public property useful to them."

More than 1,200 people died in Hurricane Katrina, which lashed the area, swamping New Orleans in Louisiana when levees gave way under the weight of the waves.

The suit, claiming compensation and punitive damages from multinational companies including Shell, ExxonMobile, BP and Chevron, has already passed several key legal hurdles, after initially being knocked back by the lowest court.

Three federal appeals court judges decided in October 2009 that the case could be heard. However, in February the same court decided to re-examine whether it could be heard this time with nine judges...

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

As seen at Not PC.

the Olympic torch in Vancouver."

Just heard that announcement on the NPR station I sometimes listen to during the midnight to five a.m. stretch when classical music is played. At five a.m. news comes on.

Didn't listen to the rest of the story.

Ellen

Daily Telegraph

UKIP would ban Al Gore film in schools

Al Gore's global warming film would be banned in schools under plans by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to court the climate sceptic vote.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
25 Feb 2010

The party, that has traditionally campaigned on the anti-European Union vote, launched a manifesto for the environment.

Following a number of scandals around the science of climate change, UKIP are promising to launch a Royal Commission led by a High Court judge to investigate whether global warming is man-made.

Pending the results of the commission, the party, that has no MPs at the moment, have promised to build new fossil-fuelled power stations to meet energy demands and scrap subsidies for wind farms. Global warming 'propaganda' like the Al Gore film Inconvenient Truth will be banned in schools and public authorities will not be allowed to spend money on climate change initiatives.

A recent poll found the just one in five people believe climate change is man-made, compared to one in three a year ago.

The survey of 1,000 people found people over 65 were more likely to be sceptical.

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, the UKIP climate change spokesman, said his party was the only opportunity to vote against the climate change consensus...

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

Pen Hadow hit polar bear with a saucepan

Explorer Pen Hadow has told how he fought off a polar bear with a saucepan.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
25 Feb 2010

The first man to trek to the North Pole solo said he has had 30 to 40 close calls with polar bears on annual expeditions to the Arctic.

But the closest encounter was 20 years ago when a curious animal poked its head into his tent. Unable to reach a gun in time, Mr Hadow used the nearest weapon which was a dirty saucepan from the previous night's supper.

"I think it was the noise of the vibrating saucepan catching the eyebrow of the bear that scared it away," he said. "I was enormously relieved."

Mr Hadow warned of the dangers of polar bears at the launch of his latest project to measure the effects of global warming on the Arctic...

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

Bali-Hoo: U.N Still Pushing for Global Environmental Control

Thursday, February 25, 2010
By George Russell

Despite the debacle of the failed Copenhagen climate change conference last December, the United Nations is pressing full speed ahead with a plan for a greatly expanded system of global environmental governance and for a multitrillion-dollar economic transfer scheme to ignite the creation of a "global green economy."

In other words: Copenhagen without the authority — yet — of Copenhagen.

The world body even has chosen a time and a place for the culmination of the process: a World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, the 20th anniversary of the famed "Earth Summit" that gave focus and urgency to the world environmentalist movement.

The 2012 summit date is significant for another reason: It marks the end of the legal term of agreement for the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, which includes carbon reduction targets, and provided the legal basis for an international cap-and-trade market for carbon, centered in Europe. The U.S. first signed then backed away from the Kyoto deal without ratifying it; until its apparent collapse, the comprehensive Copenhagen deal was intended to include the U.S. and supplant Kyoto with a new, legally binding regime.

The new Rio summit will end, according to U.N. documents obtained by Fox News, with a "focused political document" presumably laying out the framework and international commitments to a new Green World Order...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0...

From The Times

February 24, 2010

Met Office: we must check 150 years of climate data

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

More than 150 years of global temperature records are to be re-examined by scientists in an attempt to regain public trust in climate science after revelations about errors and suppression of data.

The Met Office has submitted proposals for the reassessment by an independent panel in a tacit admission that its previous reports have been marred by their reliance on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

Two separate inquiries are being held into allegations that the CRU tried to hide its raw data from critics and that it exaggerated the extent of global warming.

In a document entitled Proposal for a New International Analysis of Land Surface Air Temperature Data, the Met Office says: “We feel it is timely to propose an international effort to reanalyse surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation.”

The new analysis would test the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal”.

The World Meteorological Organisation said the Met Office proposal had been approved in principle this week by delegates at a meeting in Antalya, Turkey.

The IPCC has come under attack in recent weeks after it emerged that its latest report contained a number of errors, all of which overstated the severity of the threat posed by climate change. The most glaring error was a claim that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Most glaciologists believe it would take another 300 years for the glaciers to melt at the present rate...

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

Rajendra Pachauri to defend handling of IPCC after climate change science row

Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will defend his handling of a crisis that has shaken the world's faith in his organisation at a meeting of environmental leaders in Bali.

By Geoffrey Lean, in Bali
24 Feb 2010

He will try to save his job and shore up support for the IPCC in the wake of the discovery of errors in its latest report.

He is attending a special closed meeting of environment and climate ministers in the fringes of the annual assembly of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Governing Council, the biggest such event since Copenhagen climate summit that ended in confusion and recriminations last December.

The governments are publicly backing Dr Pachauri, who they re-elected unopposed less than 18 months ago - the EU said last night that he had “done a good job, in general” and “deserves full confidence”. However privately, officials have expressed a wish that he will decide to step down before long.

The IPCC was engulfed in crisis when it emerged that it had relied on unsubstantiated reports from environmental groups to make a headline-grabbing prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayas would disappear by 2035.

Dr Pachauri's robust response to counterclaims that that the glaciers were not melting so rapidly - which he dismissed as “voodoo science” – only increased pressure on his position.

The row added to the furore surrounding the publication e-mails from the University of East Anglia that suggested scientists were trying to conceal data that questioned the case for man-made global warming.

Last weekend, Dr Ralph Cicerone, the President of the US National Academy of Sciences warned “there is a feeling that scientists are suppressing dissent, stifling their competitors through conspiracies”.

Dr Pachauri is not expected to face direct calls for his resignation at the Bali meeting. Governments cannot unseat him before October when the IPCC meets in South Korea and even then would find it hard unless he resigned, something he has repeatedly refused to do...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Reject sceptics' attempts to derail global climate deal, UN chief urges

Ban Ki-moon urges environment ministers to reject attempts by sceptics to undermine negotiations by exaggerating shortcomings in Himalayan glaciers report

Associated Press
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 February 2010

The UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, today urged environment ministers to reject attempts by sceptics to undermine efforts to forge a climate change deal, stressing that global warming poses "a clear and present danger."

In a message read by a UN official, Ban referred to the controversy over mistakes made in a 2007 report issued by the UN-affiliated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which have been criticised by climate sceptics.

Despite the failure to forge a binding deal on curbing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions at a UN conference in Copenhagen last December, Ban said the meeting made an important step forward by setting a target to keep global temperature from rising and establishing a program of climate aid to poorer nations.

"To maintain the momentum, I urge you to reject last-ditch attempts by climate sceptics to derail your negotiations by exaggerating shortcomings in the ... report," Ban said in the statement read at the start of an annual UN meeting of environmental officials from 130 countries on the Indonesian resort island of Bali...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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Labor in denial as ETS fairyland fractures

Paul Kelly, Editor-At-Large

From: The Australian February 24, 2010

THE Rudd government stares down the gun barrel of one of the greatest policy and political retreats of the past generation that confounds its election strategy and its policy credibility.

"Cap and trade in America is dead, the idea is completely dead," Chicago-based global economist, David Hale, participant in the Australian American Leadership Dialogue and a long-time personal friend of Kevin Rudd, told The Australian this week. "The Democrats in the coal-burning states have effectively vetoed a cap-and-trade scheme and Republican gains in the mid-term congressional elections will only make it even more improbable. Cap and trade has been totally submerged in America's economic problems and unemployment near 10 per cent."

Hale says the US confronts a dual crisis of economics and governance with climate change relegated to a minority issue. "America seems crippled by the fiscal crisis," he says.

"There is no remote sign of a political consensus about where we are going and my fear is that America is becoming ungovernable. The separation of powers in the US system is the real problem. It means we don't really have government policy, the way you do in Australia. We just have outcomes. There is no government control of the legislature to achieve its program. I think we are heading for some dark moments over the next few years."

Australians, unable to comprehend the scale of this sentiment, should refer to the Pew Research Centre report on the US in late January showing global warming rated the lowest priority, the last out of 21 issues, behind even moral decline, immigration, trade and lobbyists.

Only 28 per cent said global warming was a priority for the US compared with the economy, the highest rating, at 83 per cent, followed by jobs at 81 per cent. (While energy rated 49 per cent or the 11th priority in the US, this usually pertains to energy security, not cap-and-trade laws).

Describing voter sentiment, the Pew Centre says: "Such a low rating is driven in part by indifference among Republicans: just 11 per cent consider global warming a top priority compared with 43 per cent of Democrats and 25 per cent of independents."

The latest decisive shift in Australian business opinion comes from the Australian Industry Group and its chief executive, Heather Ridout. "I think the political consensus on climate change both domestically and internationally is now fractured," Ridout tells The Australian. "The emissions trading scheme is on life support. Copenhagen fell well short of expectations."

The AI Group national executive meets today and Ridout's comments leave only one conclusion: the responsible path for corporate Australia is to engage with the Rudd government to find an alternative strategy. Frankly, nobody, including the Rudd government, seems cognisant of what this involves. Ridout says: "Importantly, the way forward is not clear. As an organisation we will operate on the principles that we have already outlined. We continue to believe that a market-based approach is essential. Any scheme must take into account the competitiveness of Australian industry and the current international situation only reinforces this argument."

The Rudd government is stranded without any apparent game plan on its most important first-term policy (outside its response to the global financial crisis). It is rare for a national government to face this predicament in its first term. Labor seems unable to abandon its ETS yet unable to champion its ETS; it cannot tolerate the ignominy of policy retreat yet cannot declare it will take its beliefs to a double-dissolution election; it remains pledged to its ETS yet cannot fathom how to make its ETS the law of the land. Such uncertainties are understandable, yet they are dangerously debilitating for any government. In such a rapidly shifting policy and political climate, even fallback positions risk being rendered obsolete. As Ridout says, the way forward is not clear...

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

just a reminder, i've linked it before:

Time lapse of arctic ice:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/200...

this is a video you are pretty much expecting to see drastic and scary ice reduction over the last several decades. Didn't happen!

Daily Telegraph

Barack Obama's climate change policy in crisis

President Barack Obama's climate change policy is in crisis amid a barrage of US lawsuits challenging goverment directives and the defection of major corporate backers for his ambitious green programmes.

By Philip Sherwell in Washington
20 Feb 2010

The legal challenges and splits in the US climate consensus follow revelations of major flaws in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which declared that global warming was no longer scientifically contestable.

Critics of America's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are now mounting a series of legal challenges to its so-called "endangerment finding" that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health.

That ruling, based in part on the IPCC's work, gave the agency sweeping powers to force business to curb emissions under the Clean Air Act. An initial showdown is expected over rules on vehicle emissions.

Oil-rich Texas, the Lone Star home state of Mr Obama's predecessor George W Bush, is mounting one of the most prominent challenges to the EPA, claiming new regulations will impose a crippling financial toll on agriculture and energy producers.

"With billions of dollars at stake, EPA outsourced the scientific basis for its greenhouse gas regulation to a scandal-plagued international organization that cannot be considered objective or trustworthy," said Greg Abbott, Texas's attorney general...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
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Independent

Scientist admits climate errors were 'embarrassing'

By Steve Connor, Science Editor, in San Diego

Monday, 22 February 2010

One of President Barack Obama's leading scientific advisers has criticised the UN body overseeing the science of climate change, describing the errors and sloppy mistakes which have affected public confidence in climate science as "an embarrassment".

Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said that the fundamental science of climate change had not been affected by the errors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and the "totality" of the scientific assessments was still sound.

"[The IPCC] has had a wake-up call and it is taking steps to address the mistakes that were made and to ensure that they don't happen again," Dr Lubchenco said. "I think it is important to recognise there were errors ... but that those errors are very few relative to the thousands of conclusions that are in the report."...

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
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Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report's author now says true estimate is still unknown

David Adam
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 February 2010

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study "strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results". The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

Siddall said that he did not know whether the retracted paper's estimate of sea level rise was an overestimate or an underestimate...

In a statement the authors of the paper said: "Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.

"One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes."

In the Nature Geoscience retraction, in which Siddall and his colleagues explain their errors, Vermeer and Rahmstorf are thanked for "bringing these issues to our attention".

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

Independent

Scientists hit by climate doubt fallout

By John von Radowitz, Press Association

Saturday, 20 February 2010

...Speaking about "transparency and integrity in science" today at the world's biggest science conference in San Diego, California, Dr Cicerone said there had been a loss of public trust in climatology that appeared to be spreading.

Polls conducted in the US had shown that people now had a worse opinion of scientists than before.

Addressing the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), he said: "I think the damage has spilled over to other kinds of science. I don't think it's fair, but we have to address our fundamentals in any case as we improve science. Let's do it, and I hope we can set a new level of transparency and trust."

Dr Cicerone is himself a distinguished climate scientist. In 2001, he led a National Academy of Sciences study on the current state of climate change and its impact on the environment and human health.

He was highly critical of the IPCC's handling of its mistake, which resulted in an embarrassing retraction after being brought to light by New Scientist magazine.

The body admitted that "clear and well-established standards of evidence" had not been properly applied. However, it insisted the glitch did not undermine the large body of evidence showing that human activity was causing climate change.

A number of senior experts have since said it is unrealistic to suppose that the mighty Himalayan glaciers could vanish within a few decades.

Dr Cicerone pointed out that the IPCC was widely viewed as the foremost authority on climate change, adding: "the greater the stature of the institution, the harder the fall".

He said: "The IPCC could have gone public with all the information and said, 'Here's what happened and we screwed up'.

"It didn't and I think that hurts the reputation of the institution."

Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society, said two particular aspects of climate science made it difficult to communicate to members of the public. First, it was "diffuse and international", and secondly it was "remote in time".

"The consequences will only affect the next generation and not us," he told the meeting. "These are the two features that make it hard to get the public exercised about the need to do something about climate change."

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
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Yvo de Boer's resignation compounds sense of gathering climate crisis

Despite his steady hands at the helm of climate talks, de Boer was losing his touch and navigated into rancorous territory

Mark Lynas
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 February 2010

...Whether de Boer himself should shoulder any of the blame for the Copenhagen debacle is arguable. Most of the responsibility for the conduct of the negotiations, which were marked by poor organisation, suspicion, bitterness and almost absurd levels of chaos on the final night, rests with the hosts Denmark. But the secretariat also appeared powerless to navigate past procedural blocking tactics employed by Sudan and other retrogressive developing nations, suggesting a creeping lack of confidence on the part of the UN. De Boer seemed to be losing his touch.

Even after Copenhagen was finally over, things continued to deteriorate. It was unclear what, if any, legal standing the accord actually had given that it was only "noted" by the Conference of Parties rather than adopted as a decision. And a 31 January deadline for countries to decide whether they wanted to be "associated" with the accord was allowed to slip, while governments continued to be confused as to what, if anything, they were supposed to be sending the secretariat.

In the meantime, the prospects for a legally binding new treaty being agreed at Cancun, at the next major UN climate meeting in December, seem to recede by the day. The only countries that support a new round of Kyoto targets are those that would not be bound by them — namely the developing countries.

Even the EU, Kyoto's most stalwart supporter during the Bush era, is now backing away. The more logical idea of tying the world's biggest emitters – China, the US, the EU, Russia and India, in descending order – into a single, fair framework for emissions reduction seems even less plausible, given the current political mood.

All in all, the next few months look grim. There is now no serious prospect of Obama getting legislation through the Senate, this year, or possibly ever. Following the sustained attack by climate deniers on both individual scientists and the IPCC, public confidence in climate change as an urgent issue is also steadily eroding, further reducing the room for manoeuvre by politicians. The next round of intermediate negotiations, due to start in Bonn on 31 May, look set to take place in a poisonous atmosphere of bitterness and rancour.

No wonder Yvo de Boer wanted to get out.

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

Penguins in Antarctica to be replaced by jellyfish due to global warming

Rising temperatures in the oceans around Antarctica could lead to the continent's penguins being replaced by jellyfish, scientists have warned.

19 Feb 2010

The results of the largest ever survey of Antarctic marine life reveal melting sea ice is decimating krill populations, which form an integral part of penguins' diets.

The six-inch-long invertebrates, also eaten by other higher Southern Ocean predators such as whales and seals, are being replaced by smaller crustaceans known as copepods.

These miniscule copepods, measuring just half a millimetre long, are too small for penguins but ideal for jellyfish and other similarly tentacled predators.

Huw Griffiths, a marine biologist, said the shifting food web, coupled with shrinking ice sheet breeding grounds, could seriously affect the world's favourite Antarctic animal.

Mr Griffiths, of British Antarctic Survey (BAS), said: ''Marine animals spent millions of years adapting to the freezing, stable conditions of the Antarctic waters and they are highly sensitive to change.

''The polar oceans are rich in biodiversity. But if species are unable to move or adapt to new conditions they could ultimately die out.

''Copepods are 120 times smaller than krill, which is inevitably going to affect all the things that feed in that area.

''Penguins, sea birds, whales are all used to catching large items of prey. But creatures with tentacles - like jellyfish are going to have more food value out of smaller prey.

''This kind of predator will do better in this warmer environment...

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

“You can’t get anything right,” he said, “unless you get the polar bear right.” Snake Snape.

The bid irony on nuclear is that arch-Greenie France depends on a splendid chain of nuclear facilites for about 80% of its power. They don't have the waste problem, either. One of their facilities is purpose-built to process the waste from the others and transform it to a second type of fuel.

NY Times

Environmental Advocates Are Cooling on Obama

By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: February 17, 2010

WASHINGTON — There has been no more reliable cheerleader for President Obama’s energy and climate change policies than Daniel J. Weiss of the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

But Mr. Obama’s recent enthusiasm for nuclear power, including his budget proposal to triple federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors to $54 billion, was too much for Mr. Weiss.

The president’s embrace of nuclear power was disappointing, and the wrong way to go about winning Republican votes, he said, adding that Mr. Obama should not be endorsing such a costly and potentially catastrophic energy alternative “as bait just to get talks started with pro-nuke senators.”

The early optimism of environmental advocates that the policies of former President George W. Bush would be quickly swept away and replaced by a bright green future under Mr. Obama is for many environmentalists giving way to resignation, and in some cases, anger...

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

Yvo de Boer quits climate change body

The UN's top climate change official, Yvo de Boer, has resigned in the latest blow to the debate over global warming.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
18 Feb 2010

As Secretary General of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Mr de Boer was in charge of negotiating a new international deal to stop global temperature rise.

However after four years in the post he has decided to step down to go and work for global accounting firm KPMG.

The former Dutch civil servant insisted he had been planning to stand down for some time but already there are questions over the nature of his departure and his possible replacement.

Many blamed Mr de Boer for the failure of the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen that ended in a weak accord.

His departure will also be a blow to the UN at a time when the science behind climate change is increasingly under fire after a series of scandals...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Time to clean up: UN study reveals environmental cost of world trade

Political pressure is growing to make big businesses pay for the damage they cause to the environment

Juliette Jowit
The Guardian, Friday 19 February 2010

Political pressure is mounting to make businesses pay for the damage they cause to the environment, and the latest UN study assessing the impact of the world's biggest companies is almost certainly the first stage in a concerted campaign to calculate how much damage is caused, what it is worth and ultimately how it can be stopped.

Another report due later this year, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, led by the economist and UN special adviser Pavan Sukhdev, will be another significant step towards this goal.

Sukhdev has already warned that damage to the environment will cause the global economy to decline by 7% by the middle of the century if it is not stopped.

Hilary Benn, the UK's environment secretary, last month called on political leaders to find a way to put a price on biodiversity in the same way as they are doing for climate change following Lord Stern's landmark report in 2005.

"The report prepared by Sukhdev can do for our understanding of the natural world what Nick Stern did for the understanding of the economic impact of climate change," Benn said.

Amid growing momentum for more limits on operations, taxes and fines, investor groups such as the US-based Ceres, which represents more than 80 funds managing more than $8tn (£5tn) of assets, are lobbying hard for companies to monitor, report and reduce their impact before they are forced to by legislation. So far, however, reporting is patchy and hard to compare...

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

“On an issue which affects our economy, our security and the future of our planet, we cannot continue to be mired in the same old debates between left and right.”

On the building of a new reactor.

He's right but for all the wrong reasons. He is right only by chance, even on this decision, which gets around Congress.

The cheek of him showing concern for "our economy." It does improve "security" a little, especially if they build more, by providing a reliable source. And by standing up to environmentalists, we might see more common sense decisions. (I can't help wondering whether he gets a kickback.)

"The future of our planet." Not in the way he intended it, CO2 emissions and fossil fuels being a non-problem. A developed future though, yes. A kick in the teeth for greenies.

"We cannot continue to be mired in the same old debates between left and right." That's not bad, but an outdated view which takes no account of freedoms curtailed by either.

... blaming Global Warming for lack of snow. Where are they now?

http://www.breitbart.tv/flashb...

WSJ

FEBRUARY 16, 2010.

The Continuing Climate Meltdown

More embarrassments for the U.N. and 'settled' science.

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously...

http://online.wsj.com/article/...
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From The Times

February 17, 2010

Barack Obama grants funds for first new US nuclear plants in 30 years

Tim Reid, Washington

President Obama reignited the debate over nuclear power yesterday when he announced loan guarantees to build the first reactors in the US since the Three Mile Island disaster of 1979.

Mr Obama, who is determined to press on with his clean energy agenda after his global warming legislation stalled in Congress, announced $8 billion (£5 billion) in government guarantees for the first plant. The measure does not need congressional approval.

He acknowledged that there were concerns among environmentalists about nuclear power, especially over safety and nuclear waste, but said: “On an issue which affects our economy, our security and the future of our planet, we cannot continue to be mired in the same old debates between left and right.”

America’s clean energy future, he added, is one “in which we are exporting homegrown technology instead of importing foreign oil”. “We’ll have to build a new generation of safe, clean nuclear plants in America,” he said...

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

Climategate: University of East Anglia professor considers 'correction to paper'

The academic at the centre of the "climategate" scandal, Prof Phil Jones, has said he will consider submitting a correction to his controversial work on global warming.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
16 Feb 2010

Prof Jones, head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), published a key paper on climate change based on temperature records from weather stations in China.

However, following criticism of his research, Prof Jones has admitted that some of the paperwork underpinning his research has been lost.

In an interview with Nature, the magazine that published the original piece in 1990, he said the loss of the data was "not acceptable".

Asked if he would submit a correction to the scientific journal, he said: "I will give that some thought. It's worthy of consideration."

Questions were first asked about Prof Jones's research after thousands of emails were stolen from CRU. Critics claim they show he was resisting freedom of information requests on the source of the Chinese data.

Research by Prof Jones, including the Nature paper, was used by UN body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as part of a seminal 2007 report on the danger of man made global warming...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
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Tajikistan facing water shortages and climate extremes, report warns

Falling supplies due to rising temperatures and retreating glaciers could spark conflict between water-stressed countries in the region, says Oxfam

John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 February 2010

It has been occupied by the Russians, the Mongols, the Turks, the Arabs and the Uzbeks, the Chinese, as well as Genghis Khan. But the ancient, mountainous state of Tajikistan, which has been at the crossroads of Asian civilisations for over a thousand years, is in danger of being overwhelmed by water shortages, rising temperatures and climate extremes.

A report released today by Oxfam details fast-rising temperatures, melting glaciers in the Pamir mountains, increased disease, drought, landslides and food shortages. Temperatures plummeted to -20C for more than a month in 2008-09 – unheard of in what is, in places, a subtropical region – and temperatures in the south of the country near Afghanistan have risen several degrees above normal, said the report.

About 20% of the country's 8,492 glaciers are in retreat and 30% more are likely to retreat or disappear by 2050, said Ilhomjon Rajabov, head of the state's climate change department. The largest glacier, Fedchenko, has lost 44 sq km, or 6% of its volume, in the last 34 years.

"It is indisputable that glaciers in Tajikistan are retreating. It is also indisputable that if glaciers continue to retreat, and the country experiences more extreme weather, countless people will be dealt an even harder blow. Nearly 1.5 million people are already food-insecure and that figure will likely rise if climate change is not addressed. There could even be a dangerous ripple effect across Central Asia, with countries throughout the region potentially wrestling over dwindling water resources in coming decades," said Andy Baker, Oxfam Tajikistan's country director...

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

From The Times

February 16, 2010

How I made the Met Office admit its climate-change data was wrong

John Graham-Cumming

...Apart from seeing Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth I’d paid little attention to the science of global warming until the e-mail leaks from UEA last year.

I trusted the news stories about the work of the IPCC, but I thought it would be a fun hobby project to write a program to read the Met Office records on global temperature readings and draw the sort of graphs that show how it’s hotter now than ever before.

Since my training is in mathematics and computing I thought it best to write self-checking code: I’m unfamiliar with the science of climate change and so having my program perform internal checks for consistency was vital to making sure I didn’t make a mistake.

To my surprise the program complained about average temperatures in Australia and New Zealand. At first I assumed I’d made a mistake in the code and used a pocket calculator to double check the calculations.

The result was unequivocal: something was wrong with the average temperature data in Oceania. And I also stumbled upon other small errors in calculations.

About a week after I’d told the Met Office about these problems I received a response confirming that I was correct: a problem in the process of updating Met Office records had caused the wrong average temperatures to be reported. Last month the Met Office updated their public temperature records to include my corrections.

John Graham-Cumming is a programmer and author of The Geek Atlas.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...
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Climate scientists are losing ground against deniers' disinformation

The IPCC and scientific community urgently need to focus on rebuilding trust and could learn a few tactics from Barack Obama

Joss Garman
guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 February 2010

There's an incredibly powerful movement opposed to action on climate change. Without doubt it had more influence on the outcome of the climate negotiations in Copenhagen than many of the world's countries combined. Obama knew if he signed up to something that would truly deliver significant cuts in global warming pollution, he'd suffer a serious blow from this movement's army of activists and its allies in the Senate. This movement's ability to make Democrats pay a serious political price – just see what they helped to do in Massachusetts where the Democrat candidate lost a recent election – shows what raw activism can look like. The name of this world-changing movement?It's the Tea Party movement, coupled with its sophisticated echo chamber of right-wing shock jocks, culture-war keyboard commandos, and allies at Fox News, all pushing the scepticism line on climate change.

Over the last few years as climate campaigners such as myself have tried to mount a good rational argument, theirs has mounted a powerful disinformation campaign. In the last few weeks we have witnessed that effective campaign gain momentum and turn into a sort of global asymmetrical warfare, with criticism of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for its claims about the speed with which Himalayan glaciers are melting, personal attacks against its chairman Rajendra Pachauri and a persistent hounding of climate scientists and those reviewing the scientists.

Gold-standard scientific reporting from the IPCC , and indeed the value of scientific inquiry itself, is now under sustained assault from a motley assortment of cranks, ideologues and special interest voices intent on stopping the transition to a clean energy economy...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...
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Donald Trump: Climate campaigner Al Gore 'should be stripped of Nobel Peace Prize after record snow storms'

By Daily Mail Reporter
15th February 2010

Donald Trump has called for Al Gore to be stripped of the Nobel Peace prize he was awarded for campaigning on climate change.

The billionaire tycoon said record-breaking snow storms proved that the former US Vice-President was wrong on global warming, and that policies aimed at tackling carbon emissions were harming America's economy.

His comments follow a string of high-profile attacks on climate change advocates.

Scientists have been forced to defend themselves after embarrassing admissions that some of their evidence was faulty.

Gore has become one of the world's leading global warming activists since his documentary An Inconvenient Truth became a surprise hit in 2006. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

But Trump, who hosts the US version of The Apprentice, said the Nobel Committee should now strip him of the award following one of the worst ever winters in eastern America.

He said in a speech: 'With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore.'

He added: 'Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn't care less.

'It would make us totally non-competitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America's stupidity.'

A crowd of 500 at the businessman's Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, New York, stood up and cheered the remarks, the New York Post reported...

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

Now IPCC hurricane data is questioned

By Andrew Orlowski

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

Les Hatton once fixed weather models at the Met Office. Having studied Maths at Cambridge, he completed his PhD as metereologist: his PhD was the study of tornadoes and waterspouts. He's a fellow of the Royal Meterological Society, currently teaches at the University of Kingston, and is well known in the software engineering community - his studies include critical systems analysis.

Hatton has released what he describes as an 'A-level' statistical analysis, which tests six IPCC statements against raw data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Administration. He's published all the raw data and invites criticism, but warns he is neither "a warmist nor a denialist", but a scientist.

Hatton performed a z-test statistical analysis of the period 1999-2009 against 1946-2009 to test the six conclusions. He also ran the data ending with what the IPCC had available in 2007. He found that North Atlantic hurricane activity increased significantly, but the increase was counterbalanced by diminished activity in the East Pacific, where hurricane-strength storms are 50 per cent more prevalent. The West Pacific showed no significant change. Overall, the declines balance the increases...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
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Doubt fuels opposition to CPRS

Dennis Shanahan, Political editor

From: The Australian February 16, 2010

VOTERS have been turning off Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme at a faster rate than they have stopped believing in the existence of climate change.
Although Australians overwhelmingly believe climate change exists and it is at least partly a result of human activity, there has been a sharp rise in the percentage of people who do not believe in climate change.

The shift follows the collapse of the UN's climate change conference in Copenhagen in December and widespread publicity of false claims in the UN's 2007 climate change report.

In the week when the Rudd government made its latest attempt to pass an ETS through parliament, public opposition to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme jumped.

The Prime Minister remains committed to the ETS as a central part of the government's election strategy and continues to attack Coalition opposition to the CPRS.

According to the latest Newspoll survey, taken exclusively for The Australian last weekend, support for the CPRS fell from 67 per cent two months before the Copenhagen summit and before Tony Abbott became Opposition Leader, to 57 per cent.

In October 2008, support for the CPRS was at 72 per cent.

Since Copenhagen and the release of climate change scientists' emails casting doubt on their research and false claims being exposed in the UN's 2007 climate report, opposition to an ETS jumped from 22 to 34 per cent.

Since mid-December, Mr Abbott has been campaigning against the ETS as a "great big new tax on everything", while Mr Rudd has accused the Opposition Leader of believing climate change science is "absolute crap"...

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

From The Times

February 15, 2010

UN must investigate warming ‘bias’, says former climate chief

‘Every error exaggerated the impact of change’

Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor

The UN body that advises world leaders on climate change must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, according to its former chairman.

In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem.

Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.

The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report...

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

Daily Telegraph

UN global warming data skewed by heat from planes and buildings

Weather stations which produced data pointing towards man-made global warming may have been compromised by local conditions, a new report suggests.

By Heidi Blake
15 Feb 2010

The findings are set to cast further doubt on evidence put forward by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which claims the science supporting rising temperatures is unequivocal.

The report co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate sceptic, shows photographs of weather stations near heat-generating equipment which could be distorting their readings.

Some are next to air-conditioning units or on waste-treatment plants, while one sits alongside a waste incinerator. A weather station at Rome airport was found to catch the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.

Rising temperatures around the stations, which have been in use for 150 years, could also have been caused by urbanisation, the study claimed. One weather station at Manchester airport, which was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields, is now surrounded by heated buildings.

The IPCC used data from the weather stations to back up claims that greenhouse gases had already caused a 0.7C rise in temperature, and gave warnings that further warming of up to 6C by 2100 could have devastating effects on civilisation and wildlife.

But the panel has been mired in controversy since the leaking of emails from the climate change unit at The University of East Anglia, which appeared to show that data used to bolster the IPCC's claims had been manipulated...

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

Bangladesh rejects £60m of climate aid from UK

The Bangladeshi government objects to grant money being channelled through the World Bank, which it says will attach unfavourable "strings and conditions"

David Adam and John Vidal
guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 February 2010

The Bangladeshi government is refusing to accept a £60m donation from Britain to help it cope with the impact of global warming, because of a dispute over how the money will be provided.

Officials in the Department for International Development (Dfid) are insisting that the money, part of a pledge to provide developing countries with climate finance, is channelled through the World Bank. Bangladesh has objected to the role of the bank, which it says will attach unfavourable "strings and conditions".

Britain is expected to press Bangladesh to change its mind at a two-day meeting in the country starting tomorrow. If it refuses, the money may be withdrawn. The row comes days after Gordon Brown accepted a UN offer to co-chair an advisory group responsible for climate change financing.

"If this money is channelled through the World Bank and the IMF it will attract strings and conditions which are not favourable to Bangladesh", said a spokesman for the Bangladeshi government. "If the money goes [via the bank] then it does not go to its real purpose. [We] want it to go through the UN."....

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

Remember how when the Soviet Union collapsed it seemed like one day the lethal evil empire and then right before our eyes, it melted like the fictional Himalayan glaciers are doing in the fantasy of the alarmists.

I am going to enjoy this.

From The Sunday Times

February 14, 2010

World may not be warming, say scientists

Jonathan Leake

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama...

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

Climate scientists admit fresh error over data on rising sea levels

Latest embarrassment comes as key sceptic Benny Peiser backs down in row over fabricated quote

Robin McKie, science editor
The Observer, Sunday 14 February 2010

Climate experts have been forced to admit another embarrassing error in their most recent report on the threat of climate change.

In a background note – released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last night – the UN group said its 2007 report wrongly stated that 55% of the Netherlands lies below sea level. In fact, only 26% of the country does. The figure used by the IPCC included all areas in the country that are prone to flooding, including land along rivers above sea level. This accounts for 29% of the Dutch countryside.

"The sea-level statistic was used for background information only, and the updated information remains consistent with the overall conclusions," the IPCC note states. Nevertheless, the admission is likely to intensify claims by sceptics that the IPCC work is riddled with sloppiness.

The disclosure will intensify divisions between scientists and sceptics over the interpretation of statistics and the use of sources for writing climate change reports, disagreements that have led to apologies being made by both sides of the debate. Last week a key climate-change sceptic apologised for alleging that one of the world's leading meteorologists had deliberately exaggerated the dangers of global warming...

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

Daily Telegraph

African crops yield another catastrophe for the IPCC

One more alarming claim in the IPCC's 2007 report is disintegrating under closer examination, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker
13 Feb 2010

Ever more question marks have been raised in recent weeks over the reputations of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. But the latest example to emerge is arguably the most bizarre and scandalous of all. It centres on a very specific scare story which was included in the IPCC's 2007 report, although it was completely at odds with the scientific evidence – including that produced by the British expert in charge of the relevant section of the report. Even more tellingly, however, this particular claim has repeatedly been championed by Dr Pachauri himself.

Only last week Dr Pachauri was specifically denying that the appearance of this claim in two IPCC reports, including one of which he was the editor, was an error. Yet it has now come to light that the IPCC, ignoring the evidence of its own experts, deliberately published the claim for propaganda purposes.

One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.

The origin of this claim was a report written for a Canadian advocacy group by Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan academic who draws part of his current income from advising on how to make applications for "carbon credits". As his primary sources he cited reports for three North African governments. But none of these remotely supported what he wrote. The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years, cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, "agricultural production will more than double by 2020". Yet it was Agoumi's claim that climate change could cut yields by 50 per cent that was headlined in the IPCC's Working Group II report in 2007...

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

Daily Mail

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

By Jonathan Petre
14th February 2010

Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing

There has been no global warming since 1995

Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming...

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

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

Daily Mail Highlights:

> Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
> There has been no global warming since 1995
> Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

BBC Q&A with Phil Jones reveals:

> Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional.
> There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade.
> The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.
> This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.
> The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.
> The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.
> There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the parts most likely to be read by policy makers.

Watts Up With That critically annotates the interview.

... explain to us the difference between area averaged and mass averaged 'the' temperature. Then, when the professor does that, he can defend the rational of substituting imperfectly area averaged datasets to represent something he calls 'the' global temperature.

Unless he's at heart a professor of political science, in which case, he can just plain make shite up.

The surface temperature of a 1 sq ft column of water 10 feet deep is 72 degrees F.

The surface temperature of another 1 sq ft column of water 1000 ft deep is 60 degrees F.

Their correctly area averaged 'the' temperature is 66 degrees.

Their correctly mass averaged 'the' temperature is unknown, unless we have an accurate representation of the thermocline, not just 'now', but over time.

And, we don't. So, how could we possibly compare such 'the' temperatures over time? We can't. Better not go there, but we still need the funding, so keep dancing...

So, never mind what 'surface' stations are and are not being included in this voodoo nonsense, what 'the' Global temperature can he possibly be going on about in an atmospheric system that has 99.9%+ of its fluid thermal mass tied up in the oceans?

Sifting through the point data is mostly good for voodoo dances and pursuit of funding, period. Pure Al Gorian Cargo Cult science, a confluence of interests, mostly in search of tribal subsidy in one form or the other.

But relax; Al Gore once took 'a' course with Revelle...

If I were to renew my fight in this battle I would look into three things:

1) is there another place on earth where CO2 levels have scientifically been measured for at least three or four decades besides the Mauna Loa observatory. By the way, that station continues to report the same slope on their graph. The level of CO2 concentration at that station is increasing, but the rate of increase is NOT accelerating.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/c...

2) have the proxy data for temperature been extended to the current moment? Much of the disjoint in temperature is caused by looking at graphs that chart proxy measurement of temperature up to, say, 1980, but then jump off to actual instrument measurement thereafter. I would want to know if the identical proxy estimates have been updated.

3) i'd press home the burden of proof issue. The Alarmers are the ones positing the alarm. They must prove. Therefore, their raw data, computer model source code and the famous supposed peer-reviewed chain of papers must be highly visible, complete and transparent. "We experts say the world is frying and that's all we need to do is say it, and any denier has the burden of proving otherwise" must be assassinated as a stand. All rationals are qualified to challenge the Alarmer's facts and owed clear access.

Climate sceptics denounced by Brown as he launches climate change group

Gordon Brown has launched a new UN climate fundraising group, and says sceptics go 'against the grain' of science

Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 February 2010

Prime minister Gordon Brown today accused climate change sceptics of going "against the grain" of scientific evidence, as he launched a new group to raise billions of pounds for the fight against global warming.

Mr Brown will co-chair the United Nations High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing with Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi.

The group aims to raise $30bn (£19bn) over the next three years - rising to $100bn annually by 2020 – to help poor countries limit their contribution to global warming and adapt to its effects.

Cash raised from state and private sources will fund measures to halt deforestation, encourage low-carbon development and adapt to rising sea levels, extreme weather events and higher temperatures.

Despite the failure to reach a legally-binding compact at the Copenhagen talks in December, Mr Brown today said that he believed sufficient offers were on the table to meet some of the conference's key goals.

"66 countries have set out their plans or targets for climate change, covering 80% of global emissions," he said. "Already we can say that if promises are met, the accord will lead to a peaking of global emissions by or before 2020 and make it possible for us to hold the trajectory of global temperature increases to 2C."

Britain continues to support a legally-binding agreement at the UN conference in Cancun, Mexico, later this year, he said...

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

Daily Telegraph

Climate change sceptics 'playing Russian roulette with planet'

Critics of the science behind man-made global warming theories are playing "Russian roulette with the planet", the new head of the controversial unit at the centre of the "climategate" storm has warned.

12 Feb 2010

Prof Peter Liss, acting director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), said sceptics were endangering the lives of generations to come by making unsupported claims.

"The evidence is hugely for there being substantial climate change due to man's activities and if you want to argue against that case you have to produce some evidence."

Prof Liss spoke after the Norwich-based UEA launched an independent review of the CRU~s work.

An international furore erupted up after staff emails were stolen and posted onto the internet last year.

Climate sceptics believe they show data has been manipulated in favour of the case for man-made climate change - a claim strongly denied.

Prof Liss said: "This is not just some intellectual argument between people who think they know the answer, we are talking about the future of the globe.

"If you're on the climate sceptics side, you have to have really good evidence for your case because if you're wrong then the consequences for all of us and all our children and whoever comes after is hugely influenced...

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

Friday, 12 February 2010

Climate data 'not well organised'
By Roger Harrabin

Environment analyst, BBC News

Phil Jones, the professor behind the "Climategate" affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.

He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics - a decision he says he regretted.

But Professor Jones said he had not cheated over the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.

He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.

But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period.

These statements are likely to be welcomed by people sceptical of man-made climate change who have felt insulted to be labelled by government ministers as flat-earthers and deniers.

'Bunker mentality'

Professor Jones agreed that scientists on both sides of the debate could suffer sometimes from a "bunker mentality".

He said "sceptics" who doubted his climate record should compile their own dataset from material publicly available in the US.

"The major datasets mostly agree," he said. "If some of our critics spent less time criticising us and prepared a dataset of their own, that would be much more constructive."

His colleagues said that keeping a paper trail was not one of Professor Jones' strong points. Professor Jones told BBC News: "There is some truth in that.

"We do have a trail of where the (weather) stations have come from but it's probably not as good as it should be," he admitted.

"That's similar with the American datasets. There were technical reasons for this, with changing data from different countries. There's a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more."

His account is the most revealing so far about his decision to block repeated requests from people demanding to see raw data behind records showing an unprecedented warming in the late 20th Century.

Professor Jones said climate scientists needed to do more to communicate the reasons behind their conclusion that humans were driving recent climate change.

They also needed to be more transparent with data - although he said this process had already begun.

He strongly defended references in his emails to using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures.

These phrases had been deliberately taken out of context and "spun" by sceptics keen to derail the Copenhagen climate conference, he said.

And he denied any attempt to influence climate data: "I have no agenda," he said...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci...

http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/n...

Sharemarket operator NZX is signalling a $19.9 million hit to its balance sheet from a carbon trading business it has sold, blaming a lower priority given to carbon trading and "lack of a global political agenda around carbon."

The reduction is to the valuation on its balance sheet for a prospective 2012 performance payment from the sale of its TZ1 Registry business last year. It will appear as a reduction in the gain on disposition of assets.

"Macro conditions have moved against carbon trading compared with where the world was when the registry business was sold," NZX said in a statement after the sharemarket closed.

At least the NZX only lost $20 million. As a country we undergo the cost of an ETS on 1 July: what cost of that.

I read one article last year that suggested a $500 million dollar per annum increase in power bills. (Though that seems extraordinarily high: I must try and find the piece.)

Utah delivers vote of no confidence for 'climate alarmists'

The US's most Republican state passes bill disputing science of climate change, claiming emissions are 'essentially harmless'

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 February 2010

Carbon dioxide is "essentially harmless" to human beings and good for plants. So now will you stop worrying about global warming?

Utah's House of Representatives apparently has at least. Officially the most Republican state in America, its political masters have adopted a resolution condemning "climate alarmists", and disputing any scientific basis for global warming.

The measure, which passed by 56-17, has no legal force, though it was predictably claimed by climate change sceptics as a great victory in the wake of the controversy caused by a mistake over Himalayan glaciers in the UN's landmark report on global warming.

But it does offer a view of state politicians' concerns in Utah which is a major oil and coal producing state.

The original version of the bill dismissed climate science as a "well organised and ongoing effort to manipulate and incorporate "tricks" related to global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome". It accused those seeking action on climate change of riding a "gravy train" and their efforts would "ultimately lock billions of human beings into long-term poverty".

In the heat of the debate, the representative Mike Noel said environmentalists were part of a vast conspiracy to destroy the American way of life and control world population through forced sterilisation and abortion.

By the time the final version of the bill came to a vote, cooler heats apparently prevailed. The bill dropped the word "conspiracy", and described climate science as "questionable" rather than "flawed"...

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

Washington Post

EDITORIAL: Global warming snow job

Climate-change pseudoscience is fraught with fraud

Record snowfall illustrates the obvious: The global warming fraud is without equal in modern science.

The fundamental problems exposed about climate-change theory undermine the very basis of scientific inquiry. Huge numbers of researchers refuse to provide their data to other scientists. Some referenced data is found not to have existed. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report that global warming activists continually cite invented a large number of purported facts. Consider a few of the problems with the U.N. report that came to light over the past few weeks.

• The Himalayan glaciers were supposed to disappear as soon as 2035. The United Nations didn't base this hysteria on an academic study. Instead, it relied on a news story that interviewed a single Indian glaciologist in 1999. Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist in question, says he was misquoted and provided no date to the reporter. The doomsday account was simply made up, and the United Nations never bothered to confirm the claim.

• Because of purported global warming, the world supposedly "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s." The U.N. cited one unpublished study to prove this. When the research eventually was published in 2008 after the IPCC report was released, the authors backpedaled: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

• Up to 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest was said to be at risk because of rising global temperatures. Again, the U.N. didn't cite any academic studies but merely one non-refereed report authored by two non-scientists, one of whom worked for the World Wildlife Fund, an activist organization.

• The U.N. dramatically claimed that 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level when the accurate portion is 26 percent.

Getting facts wrong and citing dubious sources isn't the worst of it. Rajendra K. Pachauri, the U.N.'s climate chief, remained silent when he knew information was false and denied he had been aware of the Himalayan glaciers error before the recent climate-change summit in Copenhagen, which made a big deal about this nonexistent crisis. He only grudgingly came partly clean when Pallava Bagla, a writer for the journal Science, pointed to e-mail correspondence from last autumn showing Mr. Pachauri already knew of the fraud.

Adolescent name-calling further exposes the weakness of the case for man-made global warming and how desperate the leaders of this cult are becoming. On Feb. 3, Mr. Pachauri defended the fudged IPCC report and slandered critics as "people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder. I hope that they apply [asbestos] to their faces every day." This nasty piece of work tries to redirect attention away from his phony science by blaming skepticism about climate change on "business interests" that "spread a lot of disinformation."

Man-made global warming theory isn't backed up by science; it's a hoax...

http://washingtontimes.com/new...
......................................................................................................................................

Daily Express

NIGEL LAWSON: IF CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, WE MUST ADAPT, NOT FIGHT NATURE

Sunday February 7,2010
By Julia Hartley-Brewer

NEVER before has the debate over global warming been so bitter or so public.

Climate change sceptics have been rubbing their hands with glee over the recent revelations about dodgy goings-on in the research laboratories and at the UN’s International Panel On Climate Change that suggest all is suddenly not so well with the ­theory of man-made global warming.

Some of the most alarmist claims about how the world is hurtling towards disaster unless we drastically curb carbon emissions have been shown to be nothing but, well, hot air. These damaging exposes may have shocked the ­public but were no surprise to Britain’s foremost ­climate change sceptic, Lord Lawson.

He was one of Margaret Thatcher’s most ­successful Chancellors and is father of TV chef Nigella. Now, at the age of 77, Lawson, has a new goal: to save the world from itself. His new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation aims “to bring reason, integrity and ­balance to a debate that has become seriously ­unbalanced, irrationally alarmist”.

As in Lawson’s best-selling book, An Appeal to ­Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, the foundation argues against the fashionable ­policy of drastically cutting carbon emissions .

You might think that a politician who left the frontbench almost two decades ago might be out of touch with public opinion but he seems rather better in touch with British voters than all three main party leaders.

While Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg have all signed up to the climate change agenda, polls show that only four out of 10 Britons accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is largely man-made; only a quarter believe climate change is the most serious problem facing the world; still fewer are in favour of the drastic economic measures required to tackle such a problem...

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

From The Times

February 12, 2010

Climate e-mail inquiry member resigns over his defence of researchers

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

A member of the panel set up to investigate claims that climate change scientists covered up flawed data was forced to resign last night, just hours after the inquiry began.

Philip Campbell stood down after it was disclosed that he had given an interview in which he defended the conduct of researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), insisting that they had done nothing wrong.

He said in a statement that he was stepping down to ensure that the ability of the review team to carry out its investigation would not be called into question.

The inquiry, led by Sir Muir Russell, was set up after stolen e-mails from the CRU scientists prompted accusations that they had been manipulating and concealing the data...

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

BBC News

Thursday, 11 February 2010

Climate change scientists losing 'PR war'

A Nobel peace prize-winning Welsh physicist says climate change scientists are losing "a PR war" against sceptics with vested interests.

Sir John Houghton said there were millions of internet references to a comment he never made which appears to to show him "hyping up" global warming.

A poll for BBC news suggests the number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising.

Sir John believes recent news stories may have contributed to scepticism.

He told BBC Wales' Dragon's Eye programme: "If you Google my name on the web and look for a quote, the quote you will find is one that goes like this.

"It says 'unless we announce disasters, no-one will listen'.

"I have never said that. The origin of the quote according to some of the people who write about it... [they] say it comes from the first edition of my global warming book, published in 1994.

"It does not appear in that book in any shape or form."

Sir John, who co-chaired the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) scientific assessment group for 14 years, received the Nobel peace prize in 2007 as part of an IPCC delegation.

He said most scientists were not very good at public relations and just wanted to get on with their work.

Asked if he believed climate change scientists were now in a "PR war" with sceptics, he said: "We are in a way and we're losing that war because we're not good at PR.

"Your average scientist is not a good PR person because he wants to get on with his science...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wal...

Here's a cheat-sheet for all the Climategates:

Stationgate: NASA GISS’ disappearance of 70 percent of temperature station data (many stations are still there) generates warming trend
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2...

Codegate: NASA GISS running different code from what it says it runs
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2...

Boliviagate: GHCN finds heat island on the snow-capped peaks of Bolivia — without using Bolivian data
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2...

Madagascargate: GHCN says data unavailable in electronic form — but anyone can easily find it
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2...

New Zealandgate: NZ climatologists generate warming trend from data which turn out to have actually disappeared
http://bethyada.wordpress.com/... and
http://briefingroom.typepad.co...

Hockeygate: Penn State climatologist Michael Mann invents a computer program that will generate a warming trend from random data
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/...

Hollandgate: Wild exaggeration of amount of the Netherlands below sea level
http://niklowe.blogspot.com/20...

Bootsgate: IPCC uses boot-cleaning guide to ‘prove’ Antarctic climate ‘clear vulnerability’
http://blogs.news.com.au/heral...

Glaciergate: Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035
http://climateaudit.org/2010/0...

Citegate: Greenpeace, WWF, et. al. provide ‘research’ to IPCC, which is then ‘reviewed’ by Greenpeace, WWF et. al. IPCC ‘expert editors’
http://jennifermarohasy.com/bl...

Amazongate: IPCC says global warming could deforest nearly half of the Amazon – based on WWF speculations regarding forest fire
http://www.climatechangefraud....

Disastergate: IPCC cites unpublished research about global warming causing increase in disasters. When published, the research denies the connection.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot....

FOIAgate: Hadley scientists broke UK FOI laws to avoid peer review of their work
http://offsettingbehaviour.blo...

Yamalgate: Russian heating trend based on rings of only one tree
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...

Russiagate: British Meteorological Office caught tampering with Russian climate data by cherry-picking station data
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/n...

Darwingate: US GHCN ‘adjusts’ data from Australia’s Darwin Airport to turn cooling trend into warming trend
http://wattsupwiththat.com/200...

Canadagate: NOAA uses only one Canadian station on a coastal island to represent all temperatures north of 65 degrees latitude
http://www.vancouversun.com/te...

Citing financial worries, the State of Arizona has backed out of a broad regional effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the West through a cap-and-trade system.

In an executive order issued last week, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, said a cap-and-trade system — which would impose mandatory caps on emissions and allow pollution credits to be traded among companies — would cripple Arizona’s economy.

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

Reminder: New Zealands Emission Trading Scheme starts this July. Mr Key has shown no desire to stop it.

...back in the 70's.

So to be clear, to address this, the meaning of Carbon EMission Allowances will flip by 180 degrees: industries will now have a yearly quota of carbon emissions that they must emit, and if they fall short, they will pay a tax. The greens, who are really reds, who so love the earth and its stable 'the' temperature, will immediately start advocating for unrestricted business and industry and growth, to save the planet from an icy grave. The only hope we have is to accelerate the burning of fossil fuels, to save the children from becoming popsicles.

Which according to the documentary that started this thread, was the birth of the whole MMGW movement to begin with.

Without skipping a beat, the carny hucksters will change the sign on those Carbon Emission Allowances, change a few 'shall not exceeds' to 'must exceed' and so on, and recommence with the carny hucksterism 'here is the latest calamity that proves once again that the world must hand over ownership of everyone's lives to a handful of pinhead politicos who once 'took a course' with Revelle...

Oh, please.

Thanks Kaspar, that was brill!
........................................................................................

Daily Express

GLOBAL WARMING TO BECOME GLOBAL COOLING, CLAIMS EXPERT

Monday February 8, 2010
By John Ingham

GLOBAL warming is set to become global cooling this century, a leading analyst claimed yesterday.

Professor Michael Beenstock said theories of climate change are wrong.

He warned climatologists have misused statistics, leading them to the mistaken conclusion global warming is ­evidence of the greenhouse effect.

He told London’s Cass Business School that the link between rising greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures is “spurious”, adding: “The greenhouse effect is an illusion.”

The economics professor from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said that just because greenhouse gases and temperatures have risen together does not mean they are linked.

He claims that the real cause of ­rising temperatures is the sun, which he says is at its hottest for over 1,000 years but is “beginning to stabilise”.

Professor Beenstock said: “If the sun’s heat continues to remain stable, and if carbon emissions continue to grow with the rate of growth of the world economy, global temperatures will fall by about 0.5C by 2050.”

Citing predictions by climatologists in the 1970s of a new Ice Age, Professor Beenstock said: “I predict that ­climatologists will look equally foolish in the years to come. Indeed, it may be already happening.”...

http://www.express.co.uk/posts...
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Senior Chinese climatologist calls for reform of IPCC

Lü Xuedu says Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a young institution that needs to strengthen its credibility

Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 February 2010

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be reformed to prevent political interference, improve research and reduce western bias, a senior Chinese climatologist has told the Guardian.

Lü Xuedu, the deputy director general of the National Climate Centre and a Chinese delegate to the Copenhagen conference, said the use of flawed projections about the speed of melting of Himalayan glaciers and recent allegations that scientists blocked criticism proved there are problems with the way some IPCC documents are assessed and checked.

Although he stressed support for the IPCC, of which China is an active participant, Lü said the young institution needed to strengthen its credibility...

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

Head of UEA inquiry to outline scope of review into hacked climate emails

Sir Muir Russell will set out the remit of the inquiry into the fallout from the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia

James Randerson
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 February 2010

The senior civil servant conducting the inquiry into the fallout from the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia will today set out the inquiry's remit.

Sir Muir Russell was appointed by the university on 3 December to investigate allegations based on the contents of the emails. Many commentators had hoped that his inquiry would be completed quickly to draw a line under the affair and are dismayed that it has taken two months to formally begin.

The review was partly pre-empted by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in January. In a statement, the deputy information commissioner, Graham Smith, said the emails revealed that freedom of information (FoI) requests were "not dealt with [by the university] as they should have been under the legislation". He said it was not possible for the ICO to take action against the university because the alleged breach had occurred more than six months ago.

The Liberal Democrat MP Phil Willis, who chairs the parliamentary science and technology select committee - which is conducting its own inquiry into the hacked emails - described this as "an extremely serious charge".

The emails were disseminated widely on the web on 17 November after being hacked from the university's Climatic Research Unit. The identity of the hacker is unknown and the apparent theft of emails is being investigated by police...

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

..............................................................................................................................

Daily Telegraph

Lords fear public is losing confidence in climate change science

Leading scientists in House of Lords have warned that the study of climate change has been undermined by recent scandals.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
10 Feb 2010

Fifteen Lords, including the former head of BP Lord Browne of Madingley and the current President of the Royal Society Lord Rees of Ludlow, are concerned the public is losing confidence in the science after the so-called 'glaciergate' and 'climategate' scandals.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph the Lords and Richard Lambert, head of the CBI, call for more openness from scientific institutions to ensure that public confidence is restored.

"The controversies around climate science are disappointing, and threaten to undermine support for a global deal to reduce emissions," they warn. "Sceptics have seized the opportunity to claim that the whole edifice of climate change science is crumbling. This is far from the truth. The overwhelming body of peer-reviewed scientific evidence shows that climate change is happening and is very likely to be caused by human activity."

Lord Smith of Finsbury, Chairman of the Environment Agency, said "sloppy" emails sent by scientists from the University of East Anglia in a scandal known as "climategate" was being used by sceptics to cast doubt on the whole argument.

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

"There is no excuse for sloppy scientific work and expression," he said. "There is a need for rigorous testing of the evidence of climate change and what gets said about climate change." ...

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

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

NY Times

U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: February 8, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Telegraph

The Royal Society: The unstoppable spirit of inquiry

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

By Professor Martin Rees
09 Feb 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Telegraph

New errors in IPCC climate change report

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

By Richard Gray and Ben Leach
06 Feb 2010

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

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

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

Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.

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

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

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

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

February 7, 2010

Africagate: top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By David Rose

07th February 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pro-AGW Independent newspaper has taken that route.

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

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

By Jonathan Owen and Paul Bignell

Sunday, 7 February 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Donohue
http://earthintime.com

From The Sunday Times

February 7, 2010

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

Richard Girling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate makes money move in mysterious ways

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

By Christopher Booker
06 Feb 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

WSJ

Omitted: The Bright Side of Global Warming

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

By ANNE JOLIS

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

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

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

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

Friday, 5 February 2010

Climate scepticism 'on the rise'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
05 Feb 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed Pilkington in Nashville The Guardian,
Saturday 6 February 2010

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

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

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

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

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

India forms new climate change body

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

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
04 Feb 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO ONE BELIEVES US, ADMIT GLOBAL WARMING SCIENTISTS

Friday February 5,2010
By Mark Reynolds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Andrew Woodcock, Press Association

Friday, 5 February 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
04 Feb 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

i hope we all keep the pressure on.

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

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

Three choice quotes from the CRU emails:

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

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

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

Scoop reports "NIWA Unable To Justify Official Temperature Record"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Times

February 4, 2010

IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri under pressure to go over glacier error

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

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

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

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

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

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

February 2, 2010

Fury as Amazon rainforest dam approved by Brazil

Hannah Strange

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

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

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

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

Scientist in climate row speaks out

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

By Kunal Dutta

Wednesday, 3 February 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Washington Times

EDITORIAL: Osama and Obama on global warming

Discredited climate theories make strange bedfellows

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred Pearce guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 February

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

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

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

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

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

From The Sunday Times

January 31, 2010

UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim

Jonathan Leake

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damian Carrington
The Guardian, Monday 1 February 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Climate emails hacked by spies'

Interception bore hallmarks of foreign intelligence agency, says expert

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Monday, 1 February 2010

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

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

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

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

PM HAILS EMISSIONS 'TURNING POINT'

Monday February 1,2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Times

January 30, 2010

Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Simon Parry
31st January 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazongate: new evidence of the IPCC's failures

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

By Christopher Booker
30 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Obama writing Bin Laden's speeches too?

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

...Bin laden might be winning.

Thanks for the Kasper.

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

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

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

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
29 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Mail Foreign Service
29th January 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Times

January 28, 2010

Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data

Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Jonathan Leake

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, 27 January 2010

Temperature and CO2 feedback loop 'weaker than thought'

By Roger Harrabin
BBC environment analyst

'Comforting'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis - Are environmentalists bad for the planet?

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

From The Times

January 27, 2010

Science chief John Beddington calls for honesty on climate change

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Bolt

From: Herald

Sun January 27, 2010

ONCE global warming was the "great moral challenge of our generation". Or so claimed the Prime Minister.
But suddenly it's the great con that's falling to bits around Kevin Rudd's ears.

In fact, so fast is global warming theory collapsing that in his flurry of recent speeches to outline his policies for the new decade, Rudd has barely mentioned his "moral challenge" at all.

Take his long Australia Day reception speech on Sunday. Rudd talked of our ageing population and of building stuff, of taxes, hospitals and schools - but dared not say one word about the booga booga he used to claim could destroy our economy, Kakadu, the Great Barrier Reef and 750,000 coastal homes.

What's happened?

Answer: in just the past few months has come a cascade of evidence that the global warming scare is based on often dodgy science and even outright fraud...

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

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

John Cook
Wednesday 27 January 2010
guardian.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

January 27, 2010

Barack Obama to freeze spending amid drive to boost jobs

Giles Whittell in Washington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carbon Emission Reduction Allowances 'Marketplace.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dermatoscope

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

Wait....

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

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

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

In it?

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

IPCC denies newspaper claim that it overstated costs of natural disasters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

01/25/2010 07:33 PM

Save the Panel on Climate Change!

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

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

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

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

The IPCC Has Failed

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

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

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

The Glacier Error is not Unique

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Hewett, National affairs correspondent

From: The Australian January 26, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the UN Press Centre

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

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

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

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

Daily Telegraph

Pachauri: the real story behind the Glaciergate scandal

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

By Christopher Booker
23 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 25, 2010

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

David Charter in Brussels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackie Ashley
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 24 January

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

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

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

From The Sunday Times

January 24, 2010

UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

Jonathan Leake, Science and Environment Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified

By David Rose
24th January 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Times

January 23, 2010

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

Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big freeze could signal global warming 'pause'

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

11 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://earthintime.com

FT

UN abandons climate change deadline

By Fiona Harvey in London and Anna Fifield in Washington

Published: January 20 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLIMATE CHANGE EXPERTS SAY SORRY

Thursday January 21,2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama faces emissions U-turn with new Congress challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 20, 2010

UN climate chief admits mistake on Himalayan glaciers warning

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

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

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

Dr van Ypersele said this was not the case.

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

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

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

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

Angry Pachauri threatens to sue UK daily

20 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

JANUARY 20, 2010.

Michael Mann's Climate Stimulus

A case study in one job 'saved.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 17, 2010

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

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

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Times

January 18, 2010

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

Patrick Foster, Media Correspondent

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

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

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

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

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

The curious case of the expanding environmental group with falling income

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

By Christopher Booker and Richard North
17 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Mail

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

Richard Littlejohn

15th January 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ski resort shuts after 'too much snow'

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

By Simon Johnson
15 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday January 6, 2010
By Martyn Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Furedi From: The Australian

January 13, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global warming could turn Hull into the Venice of the North

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

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
15 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Mail

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

By Mail Foreign Service
12th January 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Climate is Changing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Patricia Adams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 10, 2010

Brrrr, the thinking on climate is frozen solid

Dominic Lawson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Andrew Hough

13 Jan 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 10, 2010

Climate change experts clash over sea-rise ‘apocalypse’

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

Jonathan Leake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mini ice age starts here

By David Rose
10th January 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How will the snow and ice affect the public's attitudes to climate change?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

Nice Bertrand Russell quote

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

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

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

http://earthintime.com/

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

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

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

Bertrand Russell


Joseph Bast does a preetty good job ef exposing the myth here

In the months and years ahead, many scientists who lent their
names and reputations to the global warming delusion — because they
trusted the IPCC and other institutions — will “come out of the closet”
and admit that, upon closer inspection, they were wrong and the theory
of global warming is either unproven or simply false.

Many prominent scientists have already debunked global warming
(see Lawrence Solomon’s book, The
Deniers, for profiles of some of them), and tens
of thousands more have signed petitions and resolutions protesting the
abuse of science in the global warming debate.

The histories of other “extraordinary popular delusions,” as Charles
Mackay labeled them in 1841, suggest it may take decades for
elite opinion to acknowledge the truth. Some very bright people will go
to their graves still believing in “global warming.”

But believing is not knowing, and that crucial difference both
caused and is spelling the end of one of the great delusions of our age.

Microfilm scanner

...why has it taken so long for these whalers to defend themselves from idiots?

Global Warming hit the UK hard overnight -17.7 c

"Will Gordon Brown ever be able to look the UK public in the eyes with a straight face when he dares to mention that we only have 50 days to save ourselves from a warming world!"(KASS Marcus). Short answer, absolutely he will. But the really sad part of this is that most Brit's will let him!!

Photograph linked from The "Telegraph"

My ass!

I've been snowed in and cannot get a flight back to the UK until Monday!

I will have little oppertunity to access the internet until then.

Will Gordon Brown ever be able to look the UK public in the eyes with a straight face when he dares to mention that we only have 50 days to save ourselves from a warming world!