Climategate

"Carbon (Dioxide) trading is now the fastest growing commodities market on earth.....And here’s the great thing about it. Unlike traditional commodities markets, which will eventually involve delivery to someone in physical form, the carbon (dioxide) market is based on lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no-one. Since the market revolves around creating carbon (dioxide) credits, or finding carbon (dioxide) reduction projects whose benefits can then be sold to those with a surplus of emissions, it is entirely intangible." (Telegraph)

This blog has been tracking the 'Global Warming Scam' for over ten years now. There are a very large number of articles being published in blogs and more in the MSM who are waking up to the fact the public refuse to be conned any more and are objecting to the 'green madness' of governments and the artificially high price of energy. This blog will now be concentrating on the major stories as we move to the pragmatic view of 'not if, but when' and how the situation is managed back to reality. To quote Professor Lindzen, "a lot of people are going to look pretty silly"


PS: If you have arrived here on a page link, then click on the HOME link...

Saturday 31 July 2010

GISS global temperature trend is warmed up by weighting land data still more.

Hide the decline
"GISS global temperature trend are warmed up by weighting land data still more.

The simple task of combining Land surface temperature with Sea surface temperatures has become an odd complex algorithm for GISS. It seems that they weight land data more and more during the 20´ieth centure leading to extra heat added to the GISS global temperatures."

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Follow up on GISS ”land” temperatures
"3 odd appearances in GISS temperature data. Just odd or is there logic and sound explanations?"

Arctic Sea Ice Melt This July Slowest On Record – “Death Spiral” Is Dead

P Gosselin – NoTricksZone
Climate News from Germany in English

"At the end of June I recall seeing lots of headlines in the newspapers about a record Arctic sea ice melt occurring. Words like ”alarming” and ”unprecedented” were used liberally. The reports were splashed with pictures of polar bears for added effect.

One month later the media are completely silent. As the following graphic shows, this July’s Arctic sea ice melt was the slowest since this dataset has been kept. "

Another Junk Science Article confusing UHI, AGW, and Weather

The Hockey Schtick
"Another alarmist junk science article, Manhattan Heat Waves Sign of City Scorchers to Come, confuses the urban heat island effect (UHI), "anthropogenic" global warming (AGW), and seasonal weather to spin a tale of more frequent and intense "city scorchers to come."

Friday 30 July 2010

Now it’s a Phytoplanktonic panic

WUWT
"..Yesterday, Joe Romm reported :

Nature Stunner: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton”
“Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic.”

That sounds scary. Does it make any sense? Phytoplankton thrive everywhere on the planet from the Arctic to the tropics. One of the primary goals of this year’s Catlin expedition was to study the effect of increased CO2 on phytoplankton in the Arctic. They reported:

Uptake of CO2 by phytoplankton increases as ocean acidity increases

That sounds like good news for Joe! We also know that phytoplankton have been around for billions of years, surviving average global temperatures 10C higher and CO2 levels 20X higher than the present."

Global Sea Surface Temperature Update: The Cooling Continues

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
"Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) measured by the AMSR-E instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite continue the fall which began several months ago. "

New German/Russian Temperature Reconstruction Shows No Correlation With CO2

P Gosselin – NoTricksZone
Climate News from Germany in English

"A new temperature reconstruction carried out by a team of German/Russian scientists has yielded interesting results. It finds no correlation over the last 400 years between atmospheric CO2 and the temperature in the Arctic regions studied."

Thursday 29 July 2010

Recent News from Antarctica

World Climate Report
"We have featured Antarctica many times in our essay series, and despite a million claims that “the icecaps are melting,” we continue to find no end of articles in major journals building a case for the opposite."

Global Temperature And Data Distortions Continue

Canada Free Press
"..So where are the stories coming from? It goes back to the manipulation of temperature data by the two main generators the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) and the Hadley Climate Research Unit (HadCrut). They use data provided by individual countries of the World Meteorological Organization. This is supposedly raw data, but in fact it has already been adjusted for various presumed local anomalies. "

H/T Climate Depot

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Multiple episodes of Antarctica Record Warming 3-4°C Higher than Present (The Hockey Schtick)

Recent Site Visitors

Man-made warming of Australia detected

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"JoNova notes a little overheating at the Bureau of Meteorology:

The BOM claim their adjustments are random and neutral. Yet when Ken looked at the raw data from Australia’s 100 high quality rural sites, the adjustments increased the trend in the raw data by 40% — from a 0.6°C rise over 100 years, to 0.85°C over 100 years.

In an email to Ken, Dr David Jones, Head of Climate Monitoring and Prediction, National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology, made a clear claim that the adjustments had no real effect:

“On the issue of adjustments you find that these have a near zero impact on the all Australian temperature because these tend to be equally positive and negative across the network (as would be expected given they are adjustments for random station changes).”

Perhaps there are good reasons for all these corrections. But if Ken’s analysis is right, the adjustments themselves account for a third of the reported warming trend in Australia. "

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Australian warming trend adjusted UP by 40% (Jo Nova)

Big Green Government

Guido Fawkes

"How do bureaucrats save their jobs? They re-invent themselves as green advocates. You can imagine Sir Humphrey explaining to the minister that instead of sacking a few dozen burdens on the taxpayer, he can redeploy them as green advocates. It’ll cost more, but it’ll be green… When is a quango not a quango? When it is an “Office”. In this case the new Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV), “a cross Whitehall team dedicated to taking forward” green initiatives. So far the only initiative they have come up with is a £50 million taxpayer subsidy to middle and upper-class greens who can get £5,000 off the purchase of an expensive electric car. That £5,000 will end up directly in the profits of foreign electric car manufacturers. The Foreign Office now has a Climate Change twitterer, no really. We are supposed to be getting small government and a Big Society. We’re actually getting a Big Green Government… "

Response to George Monbiot: Why 'Amazongate' matters

Guardian
"George Monbiot should be calling the IPCC to account for its unreferenced rainforest claims, rather than attacking its critics...."

Profits of doom

Times HE
"Climate change is serious business - in more ways than one. Martin Cohen describes how capitalist 'bootleggers' have co-opted the environmental 'Baptists' to fulfil their raison d'etre - making money. Thanks to the 'greenwash', the solutions could be worse than the problems ....So BP has a representative at the top of the Earth Institute. The European Commission funds offices for Friends of the Earth and the WWF. The UK government supports climate-change research. Have the poachers turned gamekeepers? Yes - although it might be more precise to say that the bootleggers have become Baptists. Everywhere, the bootleggers can be seen walking around in black, spouting biblical prophecies of doom - and growing ever richer in the process. "

H/T Bishop Hill

Reviewing Last Month’s Forecasts of Doom

WUWT
"Way back in June, The Guardian wrote up an excellent summary of the official forecasts of doom.

Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Centre Data Centre (NSIDC) report today that Arctic sea ice – frozen seawater that floats on the ocean surface – is now at its lowest physical extent ever recorded for the time of year, suggesting that it is on course to break the previous record low set in 2007.

The chances of that happening are pretty close to zero.

Global surface temperatures may also be at a record high, according to leading climate scientist James Hansen and colleagues at the National Aeronautic Space Administration (Nasa).

If they keep adjusting temperatures upwards, they may eventually get to that point. But they are in a rush against time, because there is a strong La NiƱa building."

Is New Scientist making things up?

Bishop Hill
"New Scientist has published a rather remarkable leader to go alongside its interview of Phil Jones:

For years, ruthless climate sceptics have harassed scientists, drowning them in freedom of information requests and subjecting them to vicious personal attacks. Climategate was merely the public face of this insurgent war. In that hostile climate, some scientists fired off personal emails that occasionally lacked decorum. The CRU accepts this. When will their opponents apologise for their own excesses?

It would be interesting to see whether the leader writer at New Scientist can explain from where they got the idea that CRU had drowned under FoI requests. This was not the finding of the inquiries. The Information Commissioner specifically told the Parliamentary Inquiry that the level of FoI requests was nothing out of the ordinary:

I am also bound to say that I think a figure of around 60 [requests] has been mentioned. That does not strike me as being an absolutely huge number...I do recall one example—I think it involved Birmingham City Council—where an individual made about 200 requests about a particular allotment site in Birmingham and how that was being developed. ...."

Wednesday 28 July 2010

We need to talk about wind farms…

Telegraph
"“Energy prices may rise by a third,” says our disastrous secretary of state of energy and climate change Chris Huhne. Rubbish. They’re going to rise by a hell of a lot more than that before he is finished. Alternative energy, let us never forget, is just that: an alternative to energy. Wind power and solar power are so risibly inefficient that the only way they can ever be economically viable is with lashings and lashings of taxpayer subsidy. Nuclear power would be much more effective but Huhne has effectively ruled it out. Why? Because in Huhne’s bizarre Weltanschauung, it’s OK for the taxpayer to subsidise low-carbon energy that doesn’t work (wind, solar) but not low-carbon energy that does work (nuclear)."

Has any minister in history seemed more hopelessly unfit to do his job?

Daily Mail
"Yesterday, after Mr Huhne issued his first annual statement on Britain's energy future, it was clear that we should all be very, very concerned about the future of Britain.As was only too predictable, the overall theme of Mr Huhne's message was that 'climate change is the greatest global challenge we face'.We must do everything we can and more to cut down very drastically on our 'carbon emissions', as we are now legally committed to do by the Climate Change Act - at a cost of £18 billion a year. ....The Huhne solution to producing Britain's energy is naivete verging on madness.But, most disturbingly of all, Mr Huhne is so infatuated with wind power that he seems to have convinced himself that, in cash terms, it is 'intensely competitive' with other means of making electricity. .....It is hard to recall any minister of the Crown in history who has seemed in practical terms more hopelessly unfitted to do his job than Mr Huhne.Here is the man we all need to be capable of getting his head round a few very basic, practical realities, such as how much electricity does Britain require to keep its computer-dependent economy functioning, and what are the cheapest, most effective ways of supplying it.Yet on every single count it seems he has not even got to square one in knowing how to do that job."

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Muir Russell Findings No Solace for the EPA

MasterResource
"While the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency would surely love to use the findings of the Independent Climate Change Email Inquiry (aka the Muir Russell report) to brush aside the many challenges mounted, in response to the Climategate email scandal, to the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public’s health and welfare (a finding which enables the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions), they’ll find little in the Muir Russell report to help in their defense.

Well, I should qualify that. They’ll find little scientifically to help their defense. Politics is another matter."

H/T Climate Depot

Pat Sajak solves manmade global warming

WUWT
"Manmade global warming, like so many other social and economic issues, has become hopelessly politicized. Each side has dug in its heels and has accused the other of acting irresponsibly and dishonestly. For the believers, the other side has become the equivalent of Holocaust deniers; and for the doubters, the other side has become a cult intent on manipulating mankind to remake the world in some sort of natural Utopian image. ......Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology."

Monday 26 July 2010

West Virginia - The State Global Warming Forgot

SPPI
"A survey of the West Virginia temperature record reveals that temperature anomalies were stable or fell from 1905 to 2009. Raw data from a set of meteorological stations show cooling at the rate of ?0.6±0.2 ĀŗC/century, while United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) Version 2 adjusted records for the same station set yield no change, 0.0±0.2 ĀŗC/century. For the 1998-2009 interval the average temperature anomalies of the station set declined at rates of ?6.8±3.6 ĀŗC/century and ?4.8±3.6 ĀŗC/century, respectively for the raw and USHCN Version 2 adjusted data"

Seven Eminent Physicists Skeptical of AGW

WUWT
"Seven Eminent Physicists; Freeman Dyson, Ivar Giaever (Nobel Prize), Robert Laughlin (Nobel Prize), Edward Teller, Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg all skeptical of “man-made” global warming (AGW) alarm."

Saturday 24 July 2010

Climate change and freedom of information

Catallaxy Files (Australia)
"This case study provides evidence that there is a culture of antagonism towards anyone who may wish to make independent apprai sa ls of information relating to climate change and particularly if it relates to variations in global temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions. This is shown through both the CRU emails and the approach to Mr Holland’s request to the Met Office. The reluctance to comply with the Fol legislation does not result from bureaucratic misunderstanding of relatively recently enacted legislation. Instead it stems from an antagonism by institutional climate scientists towards those who may wish to independently examine evidence for climate change and its causes. The dangers revealed lie both in operating an effective Fol system, and openness and transparency in an area of immense scientific importance.
Governments around the world have relied on the outcome from these scientific assessments to justify far reaching economic interventions. This makes it all the more important for the climate research community through the Met Office to make this information publicly available including to Mr Holland under the FolA...."

Desperate days for the warmists

Christopher Booker, Telegraph
"Warmists may be winning the big grants, but they're not winning the argument.....Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future "such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent". He didn't explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago. ...."

Friday 23 July 2010

Luckily, Gillard isn’t really doing anything to stop global warming

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"I’m not sure whether to damn Gillard for trying to fool people that she’s doing big things about global warming or praise her for actually not: "

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Julia Gillard Lays Out Her Approach to Climate Policy (Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog)

Thursday 22 July 2010

Skeptic Magazine Reviews Alarmist Book

The Hockey Schtick
"Skeptic Magazine review by James N. Gardner of The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps ...... The pessimist would argue that the mountain of geological evidence assembled and expertly presented by Ward points to precisely the opposite conclusion — that what happened in the past can and will happen again regardless of what human beings do.What seems incontrovertible from Ward’s compelling narrative is that, irrespective of the precise causal interplay of human-induced and natural factors, the Earth’s deep history offers ample evidence that the atmospheric conditions on this planet are likely to continue to fluctuate dramatically, with potentially dire consequences for the biosphere. From the mysterious Permian extinction 250 million years ago, in which 96% of all marine species went extinct, to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years which killed off the dinosaurs, the story of our planet’s long environmental history is a tale of repeated episodes of dramatic change that have threatened the very survival of complex life.In the face of this overwhelming evidentiary record, only a cock-eyed optimist would contend that what is past is not prologue."

I come to bury Schneider not to praise him

Telegraph
"Stephen Schneider – who recently died of a heart attack, and God rest his soul – was the Stanford university Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change who in the 1970s was warning us all of an imminent ice age. Then, without a flicker of shame or embarrassment, Schneider flipped and became an equally fervent advocate of Man Made Global Warming. "

More on Oxburgh's eleven

Bishop Hill
"..Well, now we know who the redactions were. The contact through with the Royal Society was through Martin Rees - we knew that already. The other redaction, the other person consulted about whether the sample of papers was reasonable, was...Phil Jones.

Now, whichever way you look at it, this is a funny question to put to the accused if one's objective is a fair trial. I mean, what could Jones say? "You've picked all my bad papers"? And of course Jones must have known that the sample was not representative."

Wednesday 21 July 2010

Media blitz

Bishop Hill
"In the comments, I am asked if there is a coordinated programme of stories in the media on warmist themes. I think the answer may well be yes.Ben Webster's "Sceptics funded by big oil" story in the Times the other day was very peculiar: with no obvious news value it looked exactly like a PR piece. Then there was the BBC's travesty of an article about the melting (that isn't) on Everest.Today we have this toe-curlingly awful piece in Nature, in which a series of oceanographers are lined up to say that there was nothing in the Climategate emails.I wonder if anyone is still taking this kind of thing seriously?"

Fantasy Island

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog
"Tim Yeo, chair of the UK Parliament's Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, has issued a pamphlet (PDF) that indicates that UK Conservatives are just as out-of-touch on climate policy as was Labor. .....UK climate policy continues to serve as a leading case for why climate policies need to be rethought. "

Tuesday 20 July 2010

It don't mean nuffink

Dr Richard North
"Now it is the turn of South America to suffer unusual cold, if by no means as severe. But, according to recent reports, at least 175 people have died in the coldest winter in recent years, officials in six affected countries are saying.

The cold has been worst in southern Peru, where temperatures in higher altitudes of the Andes dropped to -23°C. Since the beginning of last week there, 112 people have died of hypothermia and flu. Argentina recorded the coldest temperatures in ten years. Sixteen people froze to death and 11 died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty heaters.

In Bolivia, 18 people died, in Paraguay five and two each in Chile – where heavy snow has been seen (pictured) - and Uruguay. Nine people died of the cold in southern Brazil. Thousands of cattle also froze to death on their pastures in Paraguay and Brazil. There are no stables for the animals as temperatures usually do not drop that low.

.....Meanwhile, there is a heatwave in parts of Russia, and the worst drought in more than a century. In Moscow, it's hotter than in European and African resorts. The heat has caused asphalt to melt, boosted sales of air conditioners, ventilators, ice cream and beverages, and pushed grain prices up.

Environmentalists, silent about Mongolia, silent about the cold in South America and silent about the record cold and snow in Russia over the winter, are blaming the abnormally dry spell on climate change."

China Makes Western CO2 “control” Pointless

E.M.Smith
"In recent news we had that China has surpassed the USA as the worlds largest energy consumer. It’s now the “Big Boy” on the block. All the proposed CO2 “control” treaties to date have given a ‘free pass’ to the poor underdeveloped world on the theory that they needed special favors to ‘catch up’ to the evil west that had suppressed them. Well, folks, China is now the “Big Boy” on the block. Not some little backwater nobody striving to get their first light bulbs and flush toilettes. If you want to “control” CO2 emissions, you absolutely must include China. And that is just not going to happen."

175 people killed in South America cold spell

Trend News
"At least 175 people have died in the coldest winter in South America in recent years, officials in six affected countries said, dpa reported.The cold was worst in southern Peru, where temperatures in higher altitudes of the Andes dropped to minus 23 degrees Celsius. Officials said Monday that since the beginning of last week 112 people died of hypothermia and flu.Argentina measured the coldest temperatures in 10 years. Sixteen people froze to death and 11 died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty heaters.In Bolivia, 18 people died, in Paraguay five and two each in Chile and Uruguay. Nine people died of the cold in southern Brazil.Thousands of cattle also froze to death on their pastures in Paraguay and Brazil. There are no stables for the animals as temperatures usually do not drop that low.Several regions in Bolivia and Peru closed schools until the end of the week and larger cities opened emergency shelters for homeless people.Electricity and gas networks are operating at capacity limits in many of the affected regions. Argentina reported natural gas shortages in several provinces.The poorest population groups are worst affected by the cold spell with their homes poorly equipped to deal with the cold, lack of heating and access to health care."

H/T Climate Depot

Monday 19 July 2010

Times environment correspondent wins coveted 'Biggest front page non story in history of journalism' award

Telegraph
"Have you seen the front page story in today’s Times? It’s a cracker! Oil giant gave £1 million to fund climate sceptics, it says. .....Third, as Donna Laframboise is one blogger among many to have noticed, the total amount of money that goes into funding Climate realism is a drop in the ocean compared to the amount paid by governments, left-leaning NGOs and, yes, even Big Oil companies to fund Climate alarmism. ....According to estimates by Jo Nova, US government spending on climate research and technology since 1989 has amounted to around $79 billion. According to Dr Richard North, the amount squandered in the same period by the EU on climate funding amounts to $100 billion.

Sunday 18 July 2010

United States Halts Gravy Train for British Global Warming Unit

Canada Free Press
"The Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia (CRU), the hub of the climate controversy over leaked emails discrediting research into man-made global warming, has been dealt a heavy blow from a key funding source: the U.S. Department of Energy.

Under the header, ‘US halts funds for climate unit’ (July 18, 2010) The Sunday Times report reads, “The American Government has suspended its funding of the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit (CRU), citing the scientific doubts raised by last November’s leak of hundreds of stolen emails.”

Will 2010 Stay Hot? And Joe Bastardi: Return To 1970s Cold

P Gosselin – NoTricksZone
Climate News from Germany in English

"With all the talk about heat waves and alleged record high global temps, one could be led to think that manmade global warming is real and that we’d better install the mercury lights made by Philipps and use electricity made by GE wind generators, and invest in green commodities packaged by Al Gore. .....Now let’s look at the southern hemisphere. The following 3 graphics show the forecast for the week ahead, July 17 – 24. Do you see any heat waves in South America? I wonder if we’ll get any press releases on the extreme cold gripping South America? And have we heard anything about Antarctic sea ice almost reaching a record high? "

Miskolczi's Death Knell on the Greenhouse Theory

The Hockey Schtick
"Former NASA physicist Ferenc Miskolczi's new peer-reviewed paper places a well-deserved death knell on the crumbling greenhouse gas theory of man-made global warming, stating:

The data negate increase in CO2 in the atmosphere as a hypothetical cause for the apparently observed global warming. A hypothesis of significant positive feedback by water vapor effect on atmospheric infrared absorption is also negated by the observed measurements. Apparently major revision of the physics underlying the greenhouse effect is needed.

Miskolczi's analysis of 61 years of data shows that there has been no change in the infrared "heat-trapping" ability of IR-active "greenhouse gases" over the period, in stark contrast to claims of the "greenhouse effect" that "heat-trapping" should increase in direct relation to the concentration of "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere. Since the concentration of CO2 has steadily risen over the 61 year period, while the imaginary "heat-trapping" has not, the theory of anthropogenic global warming is empirically falsified."

Saturday 17 July 2010

My Global Warming Skepticism, for Dummies

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
"I receive many e-mails, and a recurring complaint is that many of my posts are too technical to understand. This morning’s installment arrived with the subject line, “Please Talk to Us”, and suggested I provide short, concise, easily understood summaries and explanations “for dummies”.

Friday 16 July 2010

North reports the Press Complaints Commission to the Press Complaints Commission

Telegraph
"I’d say North’s case is watertight. What the PCC did was force the Sunday Times to apologise for running a true story and then force it correct it with an untrue one. At the very least the PCC ought to force the Sunday Times to apologise for its apology.

Will this happen? Well, after three official whitewashes into Climategate I have long since lost what little faith I had in the liberal Establishment’s capacity to do anything other than cover up its incompetence, corruption and skullduggery. So I doubt the PCC will be any different."

Global Warming Theory: False in Parts, False in Totality

Canada Free Press
"...The degree to which the IPCC and their supporters have fooled the world is amazing. As Jean-Francois Revel said: “How is it possible for a theory, which is false in its component parts, to be true as a whole.” In the case of ‘official’ climate science he could add that many parts of the whole are simply omitted. He explained the mentality that has pervaded the AGW supporters when he wrote, “A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence” His book titled, The Flight from Truth: The Reign of deceit in the Age of Information” tells it all. "

H/T Climate Depot

BRRRR ... mercury plunges to bone-chilling record -6.8C

Wanganui Chronicle (New Zealand)
"Georgina Griffiths from NIWA said these temperatures were taken about 120cm off the ground,so the ground temperatures would have been much colder."Wanganui had -2.9 degrees, so you're looking at about a six-degree frost." The Waimarino region has also been very cold, with -4.2C recorded in Ohakune on Saturday. .....Ms Griffiths said the central North Island chill was nothing compared to that in Central Otago, where clear, cold nights have meant frost 20 days in a row.So cold has it been down south that the famous curling festival, the bonspiel, has been held recently - only the third time in 14 years that the ice on the Idaburn Dam has been thick enough to hold it."

Thursday 15 July 2010

Climatewash

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Clive Crook may be a warmist, but is honest enough to describe whitewash when he sees it: 'I am for a carbon tax. I also believe that the Climategate emails revealed, to an extent that surprised even me (and I am difficult to surprise), an ethos of suffocating groupthink and intellectual corruption…'....The Economist, which initially played down the scandal, is almost as astonished by the refusal of the Climategate inquiries to examine the science: .......Financial Review journalist Mark Lawson has had enough of this madness. From the blurb for his new book, A Guide to Climate Change Lunacy: ...."

Wednesday 14 July 2010

Tuesday 13 July 2010

A detailed rebuttal to Abraham from Monckton

WUWT
"I don’t have a dog in this fight, as this is between two people with opposing viewpoints, but I’m happy to pass on this rebuttal from Christopher Monckton, who writes:

Professor Abraham, who had widely circulated a serially mendacious 83-minute personal attack on me on the internet, has had a month to reply to my questions.

I now attach a) a press statement; b) a copy of the long letter in which I ask the Professor almost 500 questions about his unprovoked attack on me; and c) the full subsequent correspondence. I’d be most grateful if you would circulate all this material as widely as you can. The other side has had much fun at my expense: without you, I can’t get my side heard, so I’d be most grateful if you would publicize this material.


Links to both Abraham’s and Monckton’s presentations follow.

I’ll let readers be the judge.

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Don't mess with Monckton (Telegraph)
"...I don’t expect Abraham will be able to rebut many of Monckton’s rebuttals. But if he can’t it’s going to prove very expensive for him. Monckton is currently requesting an out-of-court settlement of $110,000 payable to one of his favourite charities."

As low as it goes

NZHerald (New Zealand)
"Is this as cold as it will get this year? Quite likely, yes.Overnight lows have plummeted this week with lows getting nearer to -10 in some parts of Central Otago.Air temperatures dropping to -5 and -6 have also been recorded along the Otago and Canterbury coastlines this weekend, affecting big centres such as Dunedin and Timaru while similar temperatures have been recorded around the North Island's Central Plateau. ...Last year will be remembered for the massive snow falls in the North Island and lower South island - this year, without a doubt, it will be from the big rainfalls. Some farmers I've spoken to are saying it's the wettest they've encountered in 30 years."

Monday 12 July 2010

What unprecedented warming?

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"Geology journal discusses the recent scare claims about “unprecedented” warming on just one small part of an otherwise cooling continent:

Rapid warming and consequent ice-shelf collapse have focused attention on the glacial record of the Antarctic Peninsula.... Moreover, the data indicate that present reduced ice extent on the western Antarctic Peninsula is not unprecedented and is similar to that experienced during at least three periods in the last 5600 yr."

Deep into Amazonian Mud

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog
"..We can conclude unambiguously that the citation of Rowell and Moore by the IPCC was improper as it was not only "grey literature," but also devoid of scientific support for the claims that it advanced that were repeated in the IPCC. ....The bottom line here? The IPCC did indeed make a claim in its report that is unsubstantiated in the literature that it cited in support of the claim. Further, the specific claim being made also appears to be unsubstantiable -- that is, there is nothing in the literature to support the specific claims being made. "

Sunday 11 July 2010

Amazongate: why it matters

Telegraph
"The IPCC made a false claim in its most recent assessment report, passing off the propaganda of environmental activists as peer-reviewed science. Instead of admitting the truth and retracting its false claim, the IPCC and its sympathisers went into entirely characteristic cover-up mode. Activist scientists like Daniel Nepstad obfuscated; other activist scientists like Dr Simon Lewis of Leeds University exploited the ignorance and pro-Warmist bias of the Press Complaints Commission to bully an entirely unnecessary retraction of a true story on the subject by the Sunday Times; activist journalists like George Monbiot then boasted that they had been vindicated – a claim that was excitedly repeated throughout the ecotard blogosphere and among ecotard cheerleaders like the BBC. All of this energy in defence of a great, stinking lie.

Now the magnificent indefatigable Dr North and the mighty Booker have exposed that great, stinking lie. When the definitive history of the climate wars is eventually written, they will emerge as figures as towering in their greatness as Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick."

Sea Ice News #13

WUWT
"This summer we have had confirmation that Arctic ice behaviour has everything to do with wind. During June, winds were circulating clockwise in an inwards spiral, which caused ice extent to diminish and ice concentration to remain high. Around July 1, the patterns reversed and we have seen counterclockwise winds pushing ice away from the pole. As a result, ice area/extent has scarcely changed and instead we see a gradual decline in average ice thickness. ......In other words, the widely claimed polar meltdown continues to be nothing more than bad fiction.

Saturday 10 July 2010

Parliament misled over Climategate report, says MP

WUWT
"Parliament was misled and needs to re-examine the Climategate affair thoroughly after the failure of the Russell report, a leading backbench MP told us today.

“It’s not a whitewash, but it is inadequate,” is Labour MP Graham Stringer’s summary of the Russell inquiry report. Stringer is the only member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology with scientific qualifications – he holds a PhD in Chemistry.

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How independent was the panel? (The Register)
"Muir Russell's team heard only one side of the story, failing to call witnesses who were the subjects of the emails - Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit is mentioned over one hundred times in the archive - who may have given a different perspective. Nor was any active climate scientist supportive of climate change policy but critical of the CRU team's behaviour - Hans Storch or Judith Curry, let alone the prominent sceptics, for example - summoned. Stringer feels their presence would have provided vital context.

University of East Anglia Vice Chancellor Edward Acton

The panel included Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet and a vocal advocate of mitigation against climate change (in 2007 he described [3] global warming "the biggest threat to our future health") and Geoffrey Boulton a climate change advisor to the UK government and the EU, who spent 16-years at the University of East Anglia [4] - the institution under apparently 'independent' scrutiny.

In several areas the CRU academics were given the benefit of the doubt because a precedent had been set - often by the academics themselves.

The British establishment has a poor record of examining its own conduct. The 1983 Franks Report into events leading up to the Falklands Invasion exonerated the leading institutions and decision-makers, so too did the Hutton Report into the Invasion of Iraq.

For Stringer, policy needs to be justified by the evidence."

Amazongate: At last we reach the source

Christopher Booker, Telegraph
"The IPCC's attempts to hide the truth about its exaggerated claims on the deforestation of the Amazon have ended in defeat......Last week, after six months of evasions, obfuscation, denials and retractions, a story which has preoccupied this column on and off since January came to a startling conclusion. It turns out that one of the most widely publicised statements in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a claim on which tens of billions of dollars could hang – was not based on peer-reviewed science, as repeatedly claimed, but originated solely from anonymous propaganda published on the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group.

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The source of Amazongate (Dr Richard North)
"..the WWF have now been forced to admit that its source of information about the Amazon, on which the IPCC relied, was an anonymous tract on the webpage of an obscure Brazilian advocacy group – illustrated here and called Fire in the Amazon. This webpage is not based on any known or identified research and is not peer reviewed."

Friday 9 July 2010

Never mind the Climategate whitewash – what about our new £50 billion annual climate bill?

Telegraph
"So the Sir Muir Russell inquiry into Climategate was, pretty much, a whitewash. But then we’d already guessed that. The danger with all these official cover-ups – reported with salivating glee by the Warmists’ drooling useful idiots in the Mainstream Media – is that they distract from the main point.

And the main point, at least as far as British taxpayers are concerned is this: under the terms of the 2008 Climate Change Act we are the only country in the world legally committed to making swinging reductions in CO2, the harmless trace gas which helps plants grow and which we really need more of not less in order to soften the blow of the imminent global cooling.

How much is this lunacy going to cost us? The figure which used to be quoted was £18 billion per annum. Apparently this has now more than doubled.

The new figure our glorious Coalition intends to squander – every single year for the next 40 years – is £50 billion, all in order to deal with a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

Wednesday 7 July 2010

IPCC “one sided”

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"..The wording of a statement on between 3000 and 5000 more heat-related deaths a year in Australian cities had suggested that all of the projected increase would be the result of climate change, whereas most of it would be caused by the rising population and an increase in the number of elderly people. "

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We're shocked, shocked!(Dr Richard North)
"Following the release of over 1,000 e-mails and other material from the University of East Anglia's (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU, the so-called Independent Climate Change Email Review, headed by Muir Russell, has concluded of the unit's scientists that "their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt". Furthermore, the review found nothing in the e-mails to undermine IPCC reports.

So says Richard Black of the BBC and we are shocked, utterly shocked – that anyone could have thought that the review might have found otherwise. Its full 160-page report can be downloaded here, and you will immediately see what I mean. "

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'Climategate' professor gets his job back (Telegraph)

Tuesday 6 July 2010

Weather is not climate, and Australia is not warm

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)


Alice Springs:

An appeal has been launched for donations of blankets and dry bedding as rain forces people out of Alice Springs town camps on what is likely to be the town’s coldest day on record.

Sydney last week:

Sydney’s week of cold weather continues, with the city recording its coldest June morning since 1949 when temperatures dived to 4.3 degrees.

Adelaide:

Oppressive summer heatwaves are the normal weather-related bugbear for Adelaide residents but locals are currently shivering through their coldest week since 1982.

Perisher:

New South Wales (NSW) ski resorts were reveling in one of the best ever opening weekends, with plenty of natural snow and record levels of artificial cover.

Melbourne:

Melbourne has experienced its wettest June in nine years...

Inland:

DURING the coming days, heavy rain will spread across the country’s interior, with amounts expected to rival their July records in some locations."

Staggering ETS poll result

NZ Herald (New Zealand)
"..Take, for example, the incredible Emissions Trading Scheme that kicked in last week. Many of us can't quite work out how much it's going to cost us - but it is going to cost us...all of us. My power company told me the ETS would add an average $5 a month to my bill. Petrol prices, as if they weren't high enough already, will also go up in price. Let's not forget the increase in GST coming up too. .....WeatherWatch.co.nz ran a poll last week about the ETS. The question was simple. Do you support it? The answers were either "Yes", "No", or "I don't understand what the ETS is".

This poll has become one of our most popular polls ever but the results were the clearest we've ever had.
Do you support the ETS?

Yes - 2%

No - 97%

I don't know what the ETS is - 1%

Monday 5 July 2010

Catastrophism collapses

Financial Post
"G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy...These leaders’ collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.

Kevin Rudd, Australia’s gung-ho global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia’s conservative opposition leader, also gung-go on global warming, lost his job in an anti-global-warming backbencher revolt. The U.K.’s gung-ho global-warming leader during last year’s G8 and G20 meetings, Gordon Brown, likewise lost his job.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had vowed to “save the human race” from climate change by introducing a carbon tax by the time of the G8 and G20, was a changed man by the time the meetings occurred. He cancelled his carbon tax in March, two days after a crushing defeat in regional elections that saw his Gaullist party lose just about every region of France. He got the message: Two-thirds of the French public opposed carbon taxes.

Spain? Days before the G20 meetings, Prime Minister JosĆ© Luis RodrĆ­guez Zapatero, his popularity and that of global warming in tatters, decided to gut his country’s renewables industry by unilaterally rescinding the government guarantees enshrined in legislation, knowing the rescinding would put most of his country’s 600 photovoltaic manufacturers out of business. Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi similarly scrapped government guarantees for its solar and wind companies prior to the G8 and G20, putting them into default, too.

The U.K may be making the biggest global-warming cuts of all, with an emergency budget that came down the week of the G20 meetings. The two government departments responsible for climate-change policies — previously immune to cuts — must now contract by an extraordinary 25%. Other U.K. departments are also ditching climate-change programs — the casualties include manufacturers of electric cars, the Low Carbon Buildings Program, and, as the minister in charge put it, “every commitment made by the last government on renewables is under review.“ Some areas of the economy not only survived but expanded, though: The government announced record offshore oil development in the North Sea — the U.K. granted a record 356 exploration licences in its most recent round.

Support for global-warming programs is also in tatters in the U.S., where polls show — as in Europe — that the great majority rejects global-warming catastrophism. The public resents repeated attempts to pass cap and trade legislation over their objections, contributing to the fall in popularity of President Barack Obama and Congress. Public opinion surveys now predict that this November’s elections will see sweeping change in the United States, with legislators who have signed on to the global-warming hypothesis being replaced by those who don’t buy it."

H/T Climate Depot

See no evil

Dr Richard North
"A Dutch inquiry into the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report has produced its own report which has found "no errors that would undermine the main conclusions" on probable impacts of climate change. This is the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), which was asked by the Dutch parliament to carry out an inquiry after two mistakes were identified in the IPCC's 2007 report.

The Agency is a temple to warmism. One of its departmental directors is Dr Joop Oude Lohuis, a strong advocate of the Pachauri doctrine of eating less meat to avoid climate change, while one of the authors to this report, Bart Strengers, is also an IPCC contributor. It is about as tainted as it is possible to be - and it shows. "

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The Economist on Dutch IPCC Report (Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog)
"Perhaps the most worrying thing about the PBL report, though, is a rather obvious one about which its authors say little. In all ten of the issues that the PBL categorised as major (the original errors on glaciers and Dutch sea level, and the eight others identified in the report), the impression that the reader gets from the IPCC is more strikingly negative than the impression which would have been received if the underlying evidence base had been reflected as the PBL would have wished, with more precise referencing, more narrow interpretation and less authorial judgment. A large rise in heat related deaths in Australia is mentioned without noting that most of the effect is due to population rather than climate change. A claim about forest fires in northern Asia seems to go further than the evidence referred to—in this case a speech by a politician—would warrant.

The Netherlands look more floodable, Asian glaciers more fragile. A suspicion thus gains ground that the way in which the IPCC sythesises, generalises snd checks its findings may systematically favour adverse outcomes in a way that goes beyond just serving the needs of policy makers. Anecdotally, authors bemoan fights to keep caveats in place as chapters are edited, refined and summarised. The PBL report does not prove or indeed suggest systematic bias, and it stresses that it has found nothing that should lead the parliament of the Netherlands, or anyone else, to reject the IPCC’s findings. But the panel set up to look at the IPCC’s workings by Dr Pachauri and Mr Ban should ask some hard questions about systematic tendencies to accentuate the negative."

How come we now have to go to the Chinese for the truth about global warming?

Telegraph
"Another day, another climate fraud whitewash – this time from a Dutch government inquiry, conducted by something called the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. ...Let’s just pause for a moment to consider what’s at stake here. According to the IPCC’s projections – not even predictions, mark you, just projections based on deeply unreliable, garbage-in-garbage-out computer models – the world is on course for a period of catastrophic, unprecedented, man-made global warming which can only be prevented by drastically cutting carbon emissions and destroying the global economy. This will cost us all at least $45 trillion and prolong the recession indefinitely. And an official Dutch investigation now finds that this is all fair and proper and right, even though none of these “projections” is remotely grounded in empirical observation, though the link between the trace gas CO2 and catastrophic global warming remains no more than theoretical, and though the Climategate emails revealed that those scientists most close to the heart of the IPCC process are at best unreliable and incompetent, at worst corrupt, fraudulent and more interested in political activism than in honest science.

So instead, for the truth, we have to rely on those traditional bastions of openness the Chinese. Says World Climate Report: "

Saturday 3 July 2010

'Climategate', 'Amazongate' - when will the truth be told?

Telegraph
"What are we to make of the efforts by the political and academic establishments to hold the line against all those revelations, such as "Climategate", which last winter rocked the authority of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The most obvious feature of the four official inquiries into the "Climategate" emails (a fifth report is due this week from Sir Muir Russell), is that not one has engaged with the central point at issue. This is the evidence from the emails and other documents confirming that the key IPCC scientists involved had been manipulating data to show temperatures having lately shot up to levels unknown in the past 1,000 years.

A familiar example was the IPCC's "hockey stick" graph, created by the American scientist Michael Mann, but shown by the statistics expert Steve McIntyre to be no more than a statistical artefact. Last week, a second inquiry by his own university cleared Dr Mann, again making no attempt to discuss the central issue. Instead, it merely asserted – while acclaiming him as "among the most respected scientists in his field" – that the techniques used to compile his graph were wholly acceptable. Similarly, McIntyre was startled last week to get a dismissive email from Lord Oxburgh, whose Science Appraisal Panel also avoided the crucial issue in its perfunctory five-page report, bizarrely claiming that "the science was not the subject of our study".

Thursday 1 July 2010

New Zealand sacrifices to save the world 0.04 per cent

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"New Zealand Prime Minister John Key had it right the first time, in 2005: I rise on behalf of the National Party to give the good news to the people of New Zealand—that is, the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill is a load of rubbish and the National Party will not be supporting it, for very, very good reasons indeed… ...Five years later: The world’s second national carbon trading scheme ramps up from Thursday with the inclusion of sectors covering half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions, but anger over the scheme could hurt the government. "

Oxburgh and the Jones Admission

Climate Audit
"...This morning, I received the following remarkable response:

Dear Dr Mcintyre,
Thank you for your message. What you report may or may not be the case. But as I have pointed out to you previously the science was not the subject of our study.
Yours sincerly,
Ron Oxburgh


Read it again. The “science was not the subject of our study”. Why would anyone have expected that science would be the subject of study of the Science Appraisal Panel? Well, there’s a good reason why they would. The University of East Anglia and Muir Russell said over and over again that the Science Appraisal Panel would, uh, “re-appraise” CRU’s “science”.

China’s 2,000 Year Temperature History

World Climate Report
"We constantly hear that the warmest years on record have all occurred in the most recent decades, and of course, we are led to believe this must be a result of the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. In most places, we have approximately 100 years of reliable temperature records, and we wonder if the warmth of the most recent decades is unusual, part of some cyclical behavior of the climate system, or a warm-up on the heels of a cold period at the beginning of the record. A recent article in Geophysical Research Letters has an intriguing title suggesting a 2,000 year temperature record now exists for China – we definitely wanted to see these results of this one."

....Comment found about 'Carbon Trading'

"How do you become a carbon analyst or carbon trader?"
"1. Suspend reason and critical thought.

2. Join and begin funding a global socialism organization. The United Nations will do. The more the merrier though.

3. Develop hyperbole about non-facts regarding climate change placing the blame on human activity.

4. Find a washed-up politician to promote your hyperbole, and to blame humanity.

5. Develop a funding structure for researchers who will support your hyperbole and blame humanity.

6. Personally engage in shredding the credibility of any scientist who may question the hyperbole, or may find other reasons to blame besides human activity.

Remember, the public is gullible. "