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...

Monday 31 January 2011

Obama tells a green lie

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last week promised some mad things in painting his vision of “winning the future” by “encouraging American innovation”.

Just why America suddenly needs to offer 80 per cent of its citizens “access to high-speed rail” within 25 years is simply a mystery.

But this promise was flat-out a deceit and fool’s errand:

So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources. Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all—and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.

Oh, really? Environmental scientist Professor Roger Pielke Jr crunches the numbers:..."

Meet The Sceptics: another BBC stitch-up

Telegraph,James Delingpole
"Nine months ago, when I was at the Heartland conference in Chicago, I was approached by a louche, affable, dark-haired, public school charmer called Rupert Murray. With his friend Callum he was making a documentary about climate sceptics for the BBC and wondered if I’d like to take part. ......Because, yes, you guessed it, Murray’s documentary is another hatchet job. This time the man designated for the chop is Lord Monckton. ....Murray, it seems likely, had made up his mind what his angle was long, long before he inveigled his way into the sceptics’ circle and passed himself off as a decent fellow just trying to find out the truth. I’ll say one thing for him: he’s very plausible. I only twigged last week, when I rang him up to find out what his documentary would look like and how much I was in it. .....Anyway, at least I’m not in it, I don’t think. When Calum asked me to sign the release form for my interview, I said that I would quite like to see the programme beforehand. Funny, I haven’t heard from them since."

Queensland bracing for monster tropical cyclone Yasi

WUWT
"However, the circulation of Yasi is considerably larger and, if it maintains it intensity until landfall, could be one of the strongest and largest TCs to make landfall in Australia in the past century."

Sunday 30 January 2011

Sir Paul Nurse's big boo boo

Telegraph
"Presumably, though, being as Sir Paul Nurse got a Nobel prize in genetics that makes it OK? I mean, he’s a “scientist”, right. And President of the Royal Society. And – did I mention this before? – a Nobel prizewinner. So this must by definition mean that even when he’s wrong, he’s right?

Er, no. Actually not. Sir Paul Nurse, despite his Nobel prize, his presidency of the Royal Society and his PhD in whatever from the famous, world-renowned and much-loved University of East Anglia, is quite capable of making really basic, idiot’s-level mistakes about “climate science.” As he has just demonstrated, very publicly, on a BBC science documentary."

Saturday 29 January 2011

Record monthly snowfalls in the northeast

WUWT
"According to The Winter of 95-96: A Season of Extremes, National Climatic Data Center, Hartford typically receives about 45 inches (114 cm) of snow in an average winter. The record seasonal snowfall was 115.2 inches (293 cm) during the winter of 1995–1996. Compare that to January 2011 which has so much snow that roof collapses are becoming a concern. ......Hartford, Connecticut’s monthly snow approaching six feet!

An article of faith

Dr Richard North
"It has become enormously important for the Met Office to protect is own claim that it in some way predicted the severe weather at the beginning of the winter, so much so that it has become an article of faith that it was correct. To cement the lie, and with the help of the BBC's Roger Harrabin, the Met Office has been attempting to re-write history."

The Met Office winter forecast lie is finally nailed

Autonomous Mind
"A look at the information makes clear there is nowhere left for the Met Office to hide. The Met Office has been caught ‘cold’ lying about its winter forecast in a disgraceful attempt to salvage its reputation. Its claim that it forecast the cold start to the winter lays in tatters thanks to an exchange of emails between the department and the Cabinet Office.

As a result the Met Office is completely discredited. Also utterly discredited is the BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, who on the Met Office’s behalf used a column in the Radio Times (later carried in the Telegraph and the Daily Mail) to state that: ....."

How BBC warmists abuse the science

Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, is an expert in genetics, not climatology, writes Christopher Booker.(Telegraph)
"The timing was immaculate. Last Tuesday, across a two-page extract from the memoirs of Peter Sissons, the senior BBC newsreader, was the headline: “The BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots – I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent.” The previous evening the BBC had put out a perfect example of the zealotry which had made Mr Sissons, as a grown-up journalist, so angry. Horizon’s “Science Under Attack” turned out to be yet another laborious bid by the BBC to defend the global warming orthodoxy it has long been so relentless in promoting. "

Friday 28 January 2011

Britons going cold on global warming: Number of climate change sceptics doubles in four years

Daily Mail
"The number of climate change sceptics has almost doubled in four years, official research showed yesterday.A quarter of Britons are unconvinced that the world is warming following successive freezing winters and a series of scandals over the credibility of climate science.The figures suggest that a growing proportion of the public do not share the belief of all three major political parties and Whitehall – that climate change is a major and urgent challenge requiring radical and expensive policies."

Thursday 27 January 2011

Lockdown! Chaos after up to 19 inches of snow paralyses roads and airports on U.S. East Coast

Daily Mail
*Up to 19 inches of snow fell on parts of East Coast
*State of emergency called in New York City
*650,000 homes and business left without power at height of storm
*Thousands of airline passengers stranded as airports remain closed
*Schools across the region shut for a second day
*Obama's motorcade stranded for an hour in Washington

"Forecasters revealed today that New York is on course to be the snowiest in the city's history with a total of up to 38 inches, smashing the previous record of 27.4 inches dating back to 1925."

A levy to fix a flood of spending

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"JULIA Gillard’s flood levy proves how criminally wasteful Labor has been, and so do her cuts to green schemes.The Prime Minister’s levy will raise $1.8 billion of the more than $5 billion the Government expects to spend to fix flood damage in Queensland and Victoria.And, while Gillard wraps the levy in the flag, talking tearily of Australians looking after their mates, it’s designed not to save Queensland but her.Gillard’s most solemn election promise was to return the Budget blown by Labor to surplus by 2013.But even before the floods, Labor was in strife.

A Royal Bank of Scotland analysis noted: “The risk of a delayed return to surplus already seems possible in that the monthly Budget data show that the deficit was running an annual rate of $60 billion as at November.”You can guess why Gillard is out of cash by comparing the $1.8 billion she wants from her levy with the billions Labor once recklessly shovelled out."

The glaciers that are actually GROWING, not shrinking: Climate change not as catastrophic as scientists first thought

Daily Mail
"'It had been thought that more surface melting would cause the ice sheet to speed up and retreat faster, but our study suggests that the opposite could in fact be true,' said Professor Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment, who led the study."

Himalayan glaciers not melting because of climate change, report finds

Telegraph


"Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035."

----------------
New science on Himilayan glaciers shows debris fields to be a regulating factor in melting (WUWT)

Wednesday 26 January 2011

On being stitched up

Dr Richard North
"Well over three thousand comments on the Dellersblog about the Paul Nurse stitch-up ....The core issue is that he was interviewed by Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, for around three hours, on camera, for the Horizon programme, which purported to argue the case for greater trust of science, claiming that science was "under attack".What was very clear, though, was that the producers then "cherry picked" a tiny segment of the interview that gave them the line they wanted to present to the audience. That itself is a major issue and one might have thought that an intelligent, semi-adult discussion might then have responded by at least remarking on this phenomenon."

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Nursing Climate Science’s Bruises

"Although it was advertised as a discussion about an ‘attack on science’, the film is dominated by the climate change debate. ....Nurse goes after the deniers, who he suspects are responsible for undermining public trust in science.This takes Nurse to the home of outspoken climate sceptic and Telegraph journalist, James Delingpole, who disputes the existence of the consensus, and its value to science. The film has clearly been constructed around this moment,..." (Ben Pile)

Victory in wind farm fight

Northumberland Gazette
"A WINDFARM villagers fear would devastate the countryside has been rejected by county councillors.The scheme at Park Head, Wingates, near Longhorsley, now goes to a public inquiry, which will report to a Government minister as energy company RES UK and Ireland appealed last November against the council’s failure to determine the matter earlier.County Planning and Environment Committee members on Tuesday heard the company had failed to provide adequate background and they unanimously refused permission because of lack of information.The company wants to build nine 127metre turbines – twice the height of Durham Cathedral – surrounding Rayburn Lake to generate 16.2MW to 27MW.Objectors say these would dominate the landscape and tower over grade I listed Netherwitton Hall, one of the finest early Georgian buildings in the North."

ED: Small victories help

Turbines scaled down

“We have to go down the route of some alternative kind of energy, but what worries me is we know for a fact that there could be 40 applications for windfarms waiting to come out and we could be surrounded by them.”

No, and Pakistan’s floods weren’t global warming, either

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Remember how last year’s floods in Pakistan were immediately sold by alarmists as a sign of global warming? ......How often now have you seen this pattern? First some weather event is immediately and noisily cited as proof or evidence of global warming, and the later news that it’s no such thing then gets barely reported. "

Can we afford 'Carbon Tax' while the world starves...?

ED: While governments around the world waste BILLIONS of public money on the 'Global Warming' / 'Climate Change' scam the worlds population has exploded, and needs feeding...

Food prices to rocket by 50% as global hunger epidemic causes riots and famines(Daily Mail)
ED: Warmists, never shy of scaremongering...
"As the world gets more crowded and more wealthy, demand for food, water and energy will soar.At the same time, climate change will increase the risk of droughts, floods and crop failures – creating a ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages and above-inflation rises in prices."
Really?...
"Archer Daniels Midland (America’s largest agribusiness) has successfully lobbied for ethanol requirements for gasoline, and the resulting demand for ethanol may already be contributing to large increases in corn prices and associated hardship in the developing world (not to mention poorer car performance). "
(Richard Lindzen,Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology )

Tuesday 25 January 2011

The alarmists have taxed our creduility once too often

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"THIS year we face two new taxes, one to deal with the floods, the other to deal with global warming that was supposed to leave our dams empty.It’s not just the floods but the new taxes that prove the global-warming alarmists have made fools of us.Consider: the Gillard Government now threatens us with a “carbon tax” to “stop” the warming we were told would give us endless drought, but also a levy to deal with the floods we got instead.

Hello?

More fool taxpayers for ever having believed the warming preachers who so profited from the greenhouse scare.But more fool us if we now believe their latest claims that they predicted we’d actually have a third of Queensland under water, the Murray-Darling Basin in flood and dams overflowing after a year of heavy rain and a summer only Noah would love.Just hear those brazen I-told-you-so’s. There’s Greens leader Bob Brown, of course, pretending the Queensland floods followed his script, and even blaming our coal miners for them: ..."

The BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots, says Peter Sissons... and I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent

Daily Mail
"For me, though, the most worrying aspect of political correctness was over the story that recurred with increasing frequency during my last ten years at the BBC — global warming (or ‘climate change’, as it became known when temperatures appeared to level off or fall slightly after 1998).

From the beginning I was unhappy at how one-sided the BBC’s coverage of the issue was, and how much more complicated the climate system was than the over-simplified two-minute reports that were the stock-in-trade of the BBC’s environment correspondents. ....On one occasion, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in 2009, the science correspondent of Newsnight actually informed viewers ‘scientists calculate that he has just four years to save the world’. What she didn’t tell viewers was that only one alarmist scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, had said that."

Five Reasons the Planet May Not Be Its Hottest Ever

Climate Realists
"On Thursday the U.N.'s weather agency announced that 2010 was a milestone, the warmest year on record, in a three-way tie with 2005 and 1998. "The 2010 data confirm the Earth's significant long-term warming trend," said Michel Jarraud, the World Meteorological Organization's top official. He added that the ten warmest years after records began in 1854 have all occurred since 1998. But how reliable is the data? Here are five good reasons some scientists are skeptical of these claims."

What’s overheated are the “hottest year” claims

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"There’s a huge difference between “hottest year” and “equal warmest”, especially when the difference between 2010 temperatures and 1998, 12 years earlier, was not statistically significant. The WMO states that two-hundredths of a degree separated 2010, 2005 and 1998, and that means that these high points are rather well spread over the 12 years, so much so that you would think the temperature was nearly flat."

Monday 24 January 2011

Oh no, not another unbiased BBC documentary about 'Climate Change'…

Telegraph
"As I’ve reported before, the Warmist bias of the Royal Society has become such a standing joke that last year 43 of its fellows wrote in to complain. Under its two previous presidents, Lord May and Lord Rees, it has tossed aside its traditions of lofty neutrality and eagerly embraced a new role as political activist for the green lobby.

Perhaps there was a time when this made some kind of warped sense. But with no ‘global warming’ since 1998, a succession of bitter winters, scandals cropping up every day about everything from Met Office incompetence to skullduggery in the EU carbon trading business, growing doubts in the scientific community about the validity of climate models, demands in the US for law suits against dodgy client scientists, and increasing public scepticism, it is only a matter of time before the AGW industry collapses and all those people who associated themselves with it suddenly look very foolish."

Greens be dammed, we need protection

Herald Sun (Australia)
"Now their loopy pronouncements carry weight, which is why the week's sport was to kick Bob Brown after he demanded coal barons pay reparations for the floods because, by his voodoo logic, burning coal caused climate change that led to all the rain.His junior, Sarah Hanson-Young, has escaped censure for sins of logic just as egregious. Even while acknowledging the Wivenhoe Dam was holding back water that would have flooded countless more Brisbane homes, she was claiming dams don't prevent floods. .....Greenies never waste an opportunity to push their ideological scare-barrow, that man-made climate change causes all natural disasters and we must urgently close down our coal industry and slash CO2 emissions.

Yet it may emerge that it was this very preoccupation with climate change that caused authorities to take their eye off the ball.Leaked emails from a Wivenhoe Dam engineer, published in The Australian last week, suggest the Brisbane floods were caused by water released too late from an overfull dam.If the water had been released before the dam had reached 190 per cent capacity, some experts claim Brisbane could have avoided the worst of the floods.But so convincing have been the expert pronouncements that we are facing a future of endless drought, the idea of releasing precious drinking water must have been anathema to Wivenhoe's managers."

Sunday 23 January 2011

Novaya Zemlya effect

the Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE
"Very shortly, reports of the town of Ilulissat having seen the sun two days earlier than usual after the darkness of winter, have been presented as the result of “melting ice caps” that “have lowered the horizon allowing the sun to shine through earlier“.

Of course this was unsubstantiated speculation, starting from the simple fact that in the direction of the rising sun (due South, in these days in Ilulissat) there is no ice to melt. There have been a few theories on the “inexplicable” phenomenon. The simplest one by far, is the Novaya Zemlja Effect."
---------------------------
"The Novaya Zemlya effect is a polar mirage caused by high refraction of sunlight between atmospheric thermoclines. The Novaya Zemlya effect will give the impression that the sun is rising earlier than it actually should (astronomically speaking) and depending on the meteorological situation the effect will present the sun as a line or a square (which is sometimes referred to as the "rectangular sun"), made up of flattened hourglass shapes. The mirage requires rays of sunlight to have an inversion layer for hundreds of kilometres (at least 400 km), and depends on the inversion layer's temperature gradient. The sunlight must bend to the Earth's curvature at least 400 km to allow an elevation rise of 5 degrees for sight of the sun disk.

The first person to record the phenomenon was Gerrit de Veer, a member of Willem Barentsz' ill-fated third expedition into the polar region. Novaya Zemlya, the archipelago where de Veer first observed the phenomenon, lends its name to the effect."(Wikipedia)

UK Government Goes MAD: Plans to Airlift Fish to “Cope With Global Warming”.

hauntingthelibrary
"Thus, even though temperatures in the UK have shown no discernible change from normal, despite Co2 emissions going up and up, the government is spending a fortune in taxpayer’s money to fund 100 reports on how we’re going to cope."

Saturday 22 January 2011

What “consensus”, Kimo Sabe?

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"If 1 billion Indians won’t buy man-made global warming, our own efforts to “stop” it will look even more pitiful.

Jairam Ramesh, India’s Environment Minister:

There is a groupthink in climate science today. Anyone who raises alternative climate theories is immediately branded as a climate atheist in an atmosphere of climate evangelists. Climate science is incredibly more complex than [developed countries] negotiators make it out to be… Climate science should not be driven by the West. We should not always be dependent on outside reports.

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We’ll spend billions to stop 0.001 degrees of warming by 2050
"I have set out this calculation to show how certainly it is known that all attempts to cut CO2 emissions will expensively fail."

‘Beijing Jim’ Hansen: Sea Level Rise of Many Metres This Century “Almost Dead Certain”

hauntingthelibrary
"You gotta hand it to the guy, despite almost every single one of his prognostications turning out to be wrong, he doesn’t bat an eyelid but just right on going. And they keep letting him.The latest escapade from Beijing Jim involves a paper he’s writing which says it’s “almost dead certain” that the sea will rise by a multiple number of metres this century. ..."

Signs Of Strengthening Global Cooling

NoTricksZone
"The entire planet has stopped warming since 1998 and, more significantly, has started to cool since 2003. Instead of warning people of cooler weather for the next 30 years, there’s still the distinct false sense of expectation of unprecedented warming. People and governments are being urged to go entirely in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons – and at a potentially horrendous price."

The costs of the EU's Galileo satellite system are still skyrocketing

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"Last week brought further embarrassments to the two biggest and most megalomaniac projects the EU has ever undertaken. One was the suspension of its vast carbon trading scheme, the chief component of its drive to fight global warming, after it was discovered that internet hackers had stolen carbon emission permits worth £35 million. .......
Criminal gangs have for some time been targeting the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which forces electricity firms and other large concerns to pay £80 billion a year for the right to continue emitting CO2. In 2009, Europol uncovered a massive VAT racket involving carbon permits which had robbed EU taxpayers of five billion euros in real money, one of the biggest frauds in history. In 2010 it exposed the theft of another half a billion euros in Italy alone, with police investigations still continuing in nine other countries, involving raids on hundreds of offices all over Europe.

What is new about the latest revelations, which have led to the suspension of the ETS for at least a week, is that the criminals have moved on to the electronic theft of millions of the permits themselves. "

A copy of that cold winter forecast

Bishop Hill
"When the kerfuffle over the Met Office's winter forecast blew up, I wrote to the Quarmby team to see if they had actually received a copy of the Met Office's cold-winter forecast, which was apparently sent to the Cabinet Office. It is alleged that the forecast should have provided sufficient warning to the government machine to ensure that everyone was ready for what happened in December.

Today, rather later than I expected, the Quarmby team have responded and have helpfully provided a copy of the forecast:"

ED:read the comments on this blog :-)
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Government vs Met Office forecast row heats up(Autonomous Mind)
"Mr Maude: The Met Office provide the Government with regular updates throughout the year to inform short, medium and longer term planning. In late October, the Met Office advised that temperatures during November and December were likely to be average or colder. This information was shared with Departments as part of a wider review of winter preparedness."

Friday 21 January 2011

Warmist whoppers...

Looking at the 'the world is warming' whoppers...

Last year was the coldest in Britain since 1986, according to the Met Office, although the rest of the world experienced one of the hottest years on record. (Telegraph)
"The Met Office said that as a whole the world was 0.50 (0.9F) hotter than the long term average of 14C (57.2F), making it the second hottest on record after 1998. The US National Weather Service NOAA and Nasa, that collect their data in slightly different ways, both think 2010 is one of the hottest years on record. "

ED: now look at the UHI panel below....


....and have a look at this. "MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Professor Carter says the last 150 years have been among the coolest in the past 10,000 years of the Earth's history."

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Piers Corbyn: "The Claim 2010 is '2nd warmest year on record' - is delusional, irrelevant & disingenuous – the last gasp of the failed global warming cult” (Climate Realists)

Urban Heat Island

NoTricksZone
"Most of the surface temperature data that goes into the averages, whether world-wide, or here in the U. S., come from airports. In the U. S., the number is 121 out of 134 stations. "
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ED: ...and here's more

Airports A Tarmac Tale (E.M.Smith) 18 Nov. '10

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The Rewritten Past (E.M.Smith) 13 Dec. '10

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UAH and UHI (WUWT) 16th Dec '10
"Note: clearly satellites can see urban heat, as demonstrated by this recent paper unveiled at the 2010 AGU meeting by NASA. See: Satellites Image the Urban Heat Islands in the Northeast. It can also be demonstrated that the UHI biases the thermometers upwards. As cities grow, so does the increased bias."
--------------------------------
3% of Earth’s landmass is now urbanized (WUWT) 23rd Dec '10
"This study, from 2005, is not one I’ve covered here before, but I thought it was relevant to have a look at as a logical followup to the recent announcement from NASA at AGU that satellites have identified strong UHI signatures in cities. The vast majority of the world’s surface weather stations used to monitor climate are in urban areas, many in the GHCN for example are at urban airports. "

Thursday 20 January 2011

Analysis: EU carbon theft knocks dream of global market

Reuters
"The EU on Wednesday halted spot trade for one week after the theft of emissions permits worth up to 30 million euros ($40.2 million) and said on Thursday that the new problem could be resolved cheaply and swiftly.

But the theft, possibly a concerted hacker attack, added to clouds gathering around the global future of carbon markets. The latest in a string of scandals, it added to factors discouraging other countries from adopting similar cap and trade systems. ....The EU thefts follow other scandals to derail the carbon market in the past two years, including the re-sale of used offsets, VAT fraud, hacking and an email phishing attack."

IPCC Nobel Laureates Lack Scientific Credibility

Donna Laframboise
"IPCC insiders say many of those who shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize have weak scientific credentials. They were chosen because they are of the right gender or come from the right country. .....Even though the Peace Prize is not a science award, there’s nothing stopping an activist group from employing a little sleight-of-hand, from implying that anyone connected to the IPCC is ipso facto a “Nobel laureate.” In this case, the gullible media fell for it.

Since everyone involved with the IPCC (except the expert reviewers) is now technically a “Nobel laureate” – and may well get described as such by journalists – just how awkward could this matter become? Actually, rather awkward indeed."

Wholesale plunder

Dr Richard North
"Earlier reports on the EU carbon trading suspension were talking about €7 million-worth of permits going missing. Latest reports, however, are telling us that the actual figure now is €28 million – and that is only what has come out of the woodwork.

Despite the intangible nature, of the permits – they are all, selling permission to emit carbon dioxide – this is real money, which is going to come out of our pockets one way or another. "

These rains are driving warmists crazy

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"By the way, there’s now only seven years to go before we know whether Farrelly was right to warn that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream dead by 2018. So far it’s not looking good. For Farrelly, I mean. "

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So the warmists must be wrong about that drought or these floods
"And reported without a skerrick of scepticism by The Age, that Bible of Global Warming:

It’s not drought, it’s climate change, say scientists

Melissa Fyfe

August 30, 2009 "

---------------------------------

Did Wivenhoe’s operators check the dam levels over the weekend?

"That may be so, but the point is that negible releases were made over the weekend, leaving the dam dangerously full by Monday, and leading to huge and panicky releases from Tuesday that helped to flood Brisbane. That suggests no decision-making on the weekend. "

European carbon market suspended over fraud fears

Telegraph
"This is not the first challenge to the credibility of the €90bn annual market in carbon allowances. Under the flagship scheme, companies need permits to emit carbon dioxide as part of the global fight against climate change and polluters are granted a certain number of emissions allowances that can be traded. ......But it has been plagued by fraud, with Europol estimating that carbon trading criminals trying to play the system may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries during 2009. Fraudulent traders mainly from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland pocketed an estimated €5bn. Carbon allowances are particularly susceptible to fraud because they are high value, intangible and easily moved between different countries. "

Euro Carbon Market Fraud – trade suspended

WUWT
"The suspension follows allegations that 475,000 carbon credits worth €7m were stolen in a hacking attack on the Czech carbon register. It appears that the intangible allowances were bounced between eastern European countries before disappearing without a trace."

Wednesday 19 January 2011

AAAS withdraws “impossible” global warming paper

WUWT
"A study warning that the planet would warm by 2.4C by 2020, creating deadly consequences for the global food supply, is being debunked as false and impossible.

The study came from a little-known, non-profit group based in Argentina, called the Universal Ecological Fund. An embargoed copy of the study appeared on Eurekalert!, a news service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that’s followed by many journalists."
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Global Temps to Rise 2.4c in Nine Years Claims Former IPCC Chief.
(HauntingTheLibrary)

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The Uses and Abuses of a Nobel Prize
(Donna Laframboise)
"What the unidentified journalists who wrote this news story didn’t make clear is that Canziani is not a Nobel laureate in the normal sense of that term. He is a recipient of the Peace Prize by virtue of the fact that he worked on an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. His Nobel is the exact same Nobel that was awarded to Al Gore.

This particular honour was bestowed not for scientific excellence but for helping to raise awareness about climate change. "

If warming caused these floods, why didn’t warmists predict them?

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"A word to the global warming extremists who now claim that these floods in south-eastern Queensland are proof of man-made warming.

Two years ago Queensland’s warmist Office of Climate Change issued this report on what the state should expect from global warming, and not once did it mention floods. It did predict a slight increase in “extreme” weather events in the north, but not in the south of the state where the worst floods have occurred. Elsewhere it has warned of a slight increase in rainfall during extreme events, but overall it predicted less rain, and not these months of more. "

How it Works: Drive up Food Prices By Demanding Biofuel, Then Blame Global Warming.

hauntingthelibrary
"For years, for years, the warmists banged on and on about the need to switch from taking oil out of the ground to renewable sources, such as ethanol, derived from corn. They got their way. The American Congress mandated that a certain amount of fuel must come from corn ethanol, come what may.

And what happened? What do you think would happen? The mandate meant that vast quantities of perfectly good corn was diverted from the world’s food supply and turned into ethanol for what even environmentalists now admit were “very marginal” gains:"

Same news, different century

WUWT
"They say those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Read this article in the Vancouver Sun, May 1982, and tell compare to the sorts of news stories we are seeing today about the same topic with the same overhyped warnings:"

Tuesday 18 January 2011

Recent Site Visitors....

'Global Warming' Did Not Cause Brisbane Floods

SPPI
"Scientists agree that the Brisbane floods are a consequence of the unusually severe la Niña phase of the el Niño Southern Oscillation, a naturally-occurring four-year cycle of warming and cooling of the world’s oceans, starting in the equatorial eastern Pacific and carried around the globe by the thermohaline circulation of ocean currents.

Scientists also agree – for it is a matter of record – that floods of similar severity have struck the east coast of Australia before: twice in the 19th century and most recently in 1974. These earlier floods could not have been caused by manmade “global warming”, because there was not enough of it to make any difference at that time."

Responses to Trenberth's AMS Bile E-mail Written by Eschenbach, Motl & McIntyre

SPPI (PDF) Download Here

Warmists: 'We can't win the game, so let's change the rules'

Telegraph,James Delingpole
"Eschenbach wrote his post in response to a bizarre speech prepared by Dr Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which he intended to deliver to the American Meteorological Society. Trenberth is the arch-warmist perhaps best known for writing the Climategate email which went:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t."

Unequivocal Equivocation – an open letter to Dr. Trenberth

WUWT
"This essay from Willis appeared on WUWT overnight Saturday while I slept. After reading it this morning, I decided to make it a sticky at the top of WUWT (I also added the open letter reference) because it says everything that needs to be said about the current state of affairs in climate science and the skeptic position. I ask readers not only to read it, but to disseminate it widely at other websites and forums. Hopefully, the right people will read this. Thanks for your consideration, and thank you, Willis."

“100 metres” Williams is already four metres down in four years

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"The red dot marks the date that Williams claimed the seas could rise 100 metres this century, or a metre a year on average, thanks to man-made warming.

If the rest of the century is like the four years that followed, he’ll be about 99.98 metres short."

Titter ye not, it's an Inconvenient Sooth

Daily Mail
"According to the historian Edward ­Gibbon, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was brought about largely by the ­decadence and arrogance of the ruling elite. Now a new theory has been put forward by modern scientists. They blame, wait for it, ­climate change. ......Funny, I don’t remember global warming being mentioned in relation to the fall of Rome when I was at school. If this is true, it will have profound implications. We’ll have to rewrite Up Pompeii, for a start."

-------------------

Was climate change responsible for the rise and fall of the Roman Empire?
(Daily Mail)

Queensland To Stay Wet For Decades

E.M.Smith
"The point? La Nina impacts on Australia cluster in roughly 30 year groupings (that ‘ol 60 year PDO ‘cycle’ – though it isn’t a pure cycle)."

Monday 17 January 2011

Richard Lindzen: A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action

GWPF
"In view of the above, one may reasonably ask why there is the current alarm, and, in particular, why the astounding upsurge in alarmism of the past 4 years. When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself."
Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the GWPF's Academic Advidory Council

Government vs Met Office forecast row heats up

Autonomous Mind
"‘…were likely to be average or colder.’ That in no way reflects the Harrabin claim that the Met Office predicted it was likely Britain would face ‘an extremely cold winter’."
H/T Climate Realists

Lies, damned lies and BBC 'Climate Change' reporting

Telegraph,James Delingpole
ED: have a look at the vid and more....

H/T Dr Richard North

Sunday 16 January 2011

More Unsubstantiated Global Warming Hype

WUWT
"There’s nothing wrong with funding your favorite research with government grants. However, when that funding is used as a basis for political propaganda, such as advocating for political responses to climate change, a significant line has been crossed by the researcher, his or her employers and the funding agency itself."

That dam

Dr Richard North
"Thus, the Wivenhoe dam management had plenty of warning that this rain was on its way and had been so for weeks. Yet the policy of the Queensland Government was to keep the dams full because of their advice from the likes of Tim Flannery et al. This was that, because of global warming, Queensland was going to remain in drought. "

Saturday 15 January 2011

What was the role of warmists in the Queensland flood disaster?

Australia was told to prepare for droughts as a result of climate change, and let its guard against flooding, writes Christopher Booker (Telegraph)
"Ever more alarming facts are emerging to show how Brisbane’s floods were made infinitely worse by cockeyed decisions inspired by the obsession of the Australian authorities with global warming. Inevitably, the country’s warmist lobby has been voluble in claiming that such a “freak weather event” (as the BBC called it) is a consequence of man-made climate change. But far from being an unprecedented “freak event”, the latest flood was nearly a foot below the level of one in 1974 and 10 feet below the record set in 1893. "

The drought that warmists said might “never break” just did

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"The warmists who once claimed the drought was caused by global warming are now claiming they predicted these floods.

Which reminds me. What is one of the leading warming catastrophists, David Jones, now saying? Let’s check: ..."

Bogus claims on Australian and Brazilian floods from ABC and Dr. Richard Sommerville

WUWT
"The headline of course is sensational, they really didn’t put any thought or research into the Brisbane, QLD flooding, they simply drew a conclusion and found somebody to support it with a soundbite. I’ve seen plenty of examples of this style of crappy TV news journalism in my career. Professor Somerville apparently couldn’t be bothered to do a little historical research before claiming the floods in Queensland were connected to “global warming”, neither could ABC News."

Friday 14 January 2011

A good read from:P Gosselin's Climate Science News And Free Commentary From Germany

NoTricksZone
"New Esper Study Confirms Warm Periods Lead To Prosperity, Cold Periods To Death And Misery – Climate Extremes Were Greater In the Past"

Are these floods really just a warmist’s “event”?

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"Warmists are now claiming they predicted these floods, with The Age - that Bible of the Left - running two we-told-you-so pieces today. .......But this self-justification is curious.

First, warmists have insisted for years that the drought - which affected large parts of now-flooded Queensland - was in fact evidence of global warming, and we should expect fewer dam-flling rains: "

------------------
Towns evacuated, major river warnings issued as floods sweep Victoria

'Why will no one listen to us any more?' wails AGW propagandist

Telegraph
"Bob Ward is sad. Very, very sad. “Why won’t anyone listen to us any more?” he wails at the Guardian’s Komment Macht Frei."

----------------
Questions may be asked (Dr Richard North)

Green journalists lament the lack of overwhelming coverage of global warming in the liberal media

WUWT
"I’ll give you a very easy answer: it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and so far, it’s been historically cold. And, the media should be more wary about using such vitriolic language like “denier” considering the explosive connotation that the term implies.

They are all constipated about the lack of overwhelming coverage of 2010, and the sizzling planet (we’re talking about hundredths of degrees here): Read about NASA’s press release below…"

Thursday 13 January 2011

Brisbane Floods in Historical Context

Roger Pielke, Jr.
"The graph above shows flood peaks in Brisbane from 1841 to 2011. The data comes from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, which published this chart in November 2010. I added the red bar showing the peak of the current flood at the same location -- at about 4.5 m -- found at this site at the Bureau of Meteorology.

Here is how a BoM report (PDF) following the 1974 flood described the historical context, and offered a prescient warning"

Karoly’s “global warming” - wetter, drier, worse, better, whatever

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"The beauty of global warming theory, as espoused by Karoly, is that whether it’s dry or wet, global warming is to blame.

And the other odd thing is that neither the drought nor the floods allegedly made worse by global warming need to be worse than anything seen before to have Karoly hail them as corroboration of his ideology.
UPDATE

Associate Professor Stewart Franks of Newcastle University writes to the ABC to protest its repeated use of an alarmist who may say what it wants to hear, but is not actually an expert:

Dear Mr Uhlmann

I would like to protest the repeated interviews with Prof David Karoly with regard to the Queensland floods.Since 2003, I have published a number of papers in the top-ranked international peer-reviewed literature regarding the role of La Nina in dictating Eastern Australian floods.There has been no evidence of CO2 in affecting these entirely natural processes, irrespective of their devastating nature. Why is it then, that someone without any publication nor insight in this key area of concern for Australia is repeatedly called upon to offer his personal speculation on this topic?

This is not a new problem with Prof. Karoly.
..."

Small mercy - not as bad as 1974, after all

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"There will be plenty to discuss once the immediate emergency is over, such as the failure to predict this flood, the failure to predict its likelihood, the failure to build dams to mitigate the flooding, and the failure to properly warn residents.

And add this:

A SECRET report by scientific and engineering experts warned of significantly greater risks of vast destruction from Brisbane River flooding - and raised grave concerns with the Queensland government and the city’s council a decade ago.
But the recommendations in the report for radical changes in planning strategy, emergency plans and transparency about the true flood levels for Brisbane were rejected and the report was covered up.

The comprehensive 1999 Brisbane River Flood Study made alarming findings about predicted devastation to tens of thousands of flood-prone properties, which were given the green light for residential development since the 1974 flood. The engineers and hydrologists involved in the study warned that the next major flood in Brisbane would be between 1m and 2m higher than anticipated by the Brisbane town plan.

The study highlighted how the council had permitted the development of thousands of properties whose owners were led to believe they would be out of harm’s way in a flood on the scale of 1974."

Wednesday 12 January 2011

The dance of the trolls

Dr Richard North
"To achieve these ends, the troll will adopt a number of techniques and characteristics, the most potent of the latter being sheer persistence. It is always there, always ready to post, always ready to challenge unwary supporters, it will normally be able to wear down casual visitors, or frighten them off with the intensity of their peremptory demands."

Land fizzing like soda pop: farmer says CO2 injected underground is leaking

Winnipeg Free Press
"A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world's largest carbon capture and storage project says greenhouse gases seeping from the soil are killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken soda pop......Since 2000, Cenovus has injected about 16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide underground to force more oil from an aging field and safely store greenhouse gases that would otherwise contribute to climate change.

But in 2005, the Kerrs began noticing algae blooms, clots of foam and multicoloured scum in two ponds at the bottom of a gravel quarry on their land. Sometimes, the ponds bubbled. Small animals — cats, rabbits and goats — were regularly found dead a few metres away.

Then there were the explosions.

"At night we could hear this sort of bang like a cannon going off," said Jane Kerr, 58. "We'd go out and check the gravel pit and, in the walls, it (had) blown a hole in the side and there would be all this foaming coming out of this hole."

Now 30 believed dead

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"The disaster is extraordinary:

THE nation confronts its worst flood disaster in living memory, with 30 people believed dead and 90 missing in southeast Queensland.

The wall of water bearing down on Brisbane threatens to engulf thousands of homes and put more people at risk.

What I cannot understand is this: how was the possibility of such a danger not forseen, when climate experts and the Government claim they can predict the climate 100 years from now? How did this week’s rain come as such a surprise, when we now spend billions more on computer models predicting the future?

------------------

Culpable Greens (SlattsNews,Australia)
"Imagine if Greens had been around 200 years ago. There’d be no roads, agriculture, bridges, docks or housing. Pretty soon there would have been no settlers. There certainly would not have been gentrified inner suburbs where ignorant elites do all in their power to halt progress elsewhere."

USA Is Frozen and Snowed Under

E.M.Smith
"But here I’m going to add a Freeze Level map. It’s pretty clear that the whole place is frozen until you reach somewhere near the water…"
-----------------------------
Nearly 70% of the USA is covered in snow (WUWT)
"Meanwhile, New York City declares a weather emergency due to snow."

--------------------------------
Snow extends to cover 69% of lower 48 states; 49 of all 50 states have snow
(Denver Weather Examiner)

Ocean Acidification: Chicken Little of the Sea Strikes Again

WUWT
"As global warming morphs into climate change and global climate disruption and anthropogenic CO2 emissions give way to stochastic variability, clouds, the Sun, cosmic rays and our oceans as the primary drivers of climate change, environmental extremists are raising a new CO2-driven ecological disaster scenario to hysterical levels: Ocean acidification. "

-------------------------
'Everything dead by tomorrow!' warns Zoological Society of London (Telegraph)
"Lest you think I’m having a gratuitous dig at a perfectly decent, political neutral organisation that just runs London and Whipsnade zoo, have a look at their website. The ZSL is in it up to the neck in the field of deep green propaganda. Here, for example, is its heavily politicised junk-science in action on coral reefs:"

Tuesday 11 January 2011

Recent Site Visitors.....

Another green catastrophe

Dr Richard North
"But the issue here – as it was with the horrendous bush fires in Victoria in 2009, is that the disaster could by and large have been prevented, or the effects reduced, but for Greenie intervention. ......But the real story is bizarre, another classic example of the greenies forcing major distortions in policy which cost money we haven't got and eventually kill people. Increasingly we see that the obsession with global warming is not a risk-free option. It costs money we can't afford, and lives. This must stop."

Sceptics ask: Is the UK government’s climate propaganda machine finally falling apart?

Climate Change Dispatch
"Just when you think things are as inanely silly as they can be, they raise the stakes. It’s a game of double or nothing in the race to the bottom. The close common interests of three big government agencies is fragmenting and instead of skeptics launching the FOI’s, this time, the BBC is."

CO2 sequestration ‘splodes in Saskatchewan

WUWT
"A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project says greenhouse gases that were supposed to have been injected permanently underground are leaking out, killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken-up soda pop."

Toowoomba drowns

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun(Australia)
"The costs are astonishing:


THE financial toll of the Queensland floods -- predicted to cost $6 billion and leave a $5bn clean-up bill -- is expected to soar further.

Yesterday’s flash floods engulfed the urban areas of Toowoomba and Gympie and threatened to hit Brisbane.

One lesson - dams don’t just harvest water cheaply but help protect from floods:

A BODY of floodwater larger than Sydney Harbour threatens Brisbane, with only the Wivenhoe Dam’s 2.3km-long earthen wall standing in its path…

Wivenhoe was rising fast, but it had the potential to go past 200 per cent capacity before overflowing. Cr Newman said the dam was doing its job but could not fully protect the city because of the dimension of the floods.

Premier Anna Bligh is grateful for the dam:

Without a doubt the Wivenhoe Dam has already saved Brisbane from a catastrophic flood in the next 48 hours but we have to keep releasing water from it so it can keep doing the job it’s doing."

Queensland floods: but at least the 'endangered' Mary River cod is safe, eh?

Telegraph
"I am sitting here in my home in South East Queensland, watching the news come in about the flooding everywhere. Entire suburbs around Brisbane and several smaller towns are either isolated by flood-waters or have been evacuated. Highways are cut everywhere.

People have been dying. So far about 20 people have died in the past week – nine just this morning when a deluge went through the Lockyer Valley. Most of them children. Another 70 are missing. One could put it all down to “just” weather.

Except EXACTLY the same floods occurred in EXACTLY the same places back in 1974, with much the same tragic loss of life and destruction of property."

Monday 10 January 2011

Keep on spinning

Bishop Hill
"THE term "climate change" could be replaced by "climate challenges" if a federal commissioned marketing study is taken onboard."

Beware, a call to the faithful by the Alarmists....

Sea levels will rise by at least 13ft in next 1,000 years, claim scientists (Daily Mail)

All aboard the Ark Hotel! Giant biosphere is a 'self-contained haven' in event of climate change flood disaster (Daily Mail)

And WUWT spots more...
Abandon all hope, ye who read this
"Climate change to continue to year 3000 in best case scenarios

New paper in Nature Geoscience examines inertia of carbon dioxide emissions"

Sunday 9 January 2011

Monckton skewers Steketee

WUWT
"Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false."

Saturday 8 January 2011

The Met Office fries while the rest of the world freezes

As the Met Office desperately tries to salvage its reputation, another of this 'warm' winter's ice disasters is unfolding in the Sea of Okhotsk, writes Christopher Booker.(Telegraph)
"First it was a national joke. Then its professional failings became a national disaster. Now, the dishonesty of its attempts to fight off a barrage of criticism has become a real national scandal. I am talking yet again of that sad organisation the UK Met Office, as it now defends its bizarre record with claims as embarrassingly absurd as any which can ever have been made by highly-paid government officials. "

Wind farms don't work in the cold: Why it's no use waiting for turbines to keep us warm as the snow returns

Daily Mail
"Britain’s wind farms almost ground to a halt during the coldest spells in December, it has emerged.As temperatures plunged below zero and demand for electricity soared, figures reveal that most of the country’s 3,000 wind turbines were virtually still, energy experts say.During some of the chilliest weather, they were working at less than one-hundredth of capacity, producing electricity for fewer than 30,000 homes.The National Grid was forced to compensate for the still, cold conditions by cranking up conventional coal and gas-fired power stations."

--------------
Shock. Shivering Britain realises wind power needs wind to work

Friday 7 January 2011

But, Penny, if the seas are cooling….

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"Climate Change Minister Penny Wong had an excuse worked out back in 2009, to explain why the world’s atmosphere had not warmed over the decade as the warmists had predicted.

No, no, no, she said when finally pressed for an explanation by Family First Senator Steve Fielding. The best evidence for global warming was not to be found in air temperatures but those of the seas:


(I)n terms of a single indicator of global warming, change in ocean heat content is most appropriate.

Small problem. The evidence even then suggested the seas weren’t actually warming. "

Start thinking cold, cold, cold and colder.

NoTricksZone
"In fact there is a risk that the whole world could be as unprepared as the UK was for this winter, and that for decades. And they won’t be able to say they weren’t warned!"
ED: P Gosselin's Climate Science News And Free Commentary From Germany is proving hard to not quote. Sorry, and thanks Pierre

Monbiot Jumps The Shark and Other Stories

Telegraph
"Which is why I’m so boundlessly grateful to men like Professor David Shearman, Professor of Medicine, University of Adelaide. You’ll find Professor Shearman listed here as one of the Authors and Expert Reviewers of Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Not someone considered by the IPCC to be a crank or a member of the lunatic fringe, then. ...So let’s have a closer look at where Prof Shearman stands on global governance and environmental affairs, shall we?"

Thursday 6 January 2011

All this water may wash away our dam madness

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Not a single new dam has been built to supply an Australian capital city since Melbourne’s Thomson Dam was hooked up in 1984 - with the sole exception of South-East Queensland ‘s Wyaralong dam, completed just in time for these recent rains to start filling it.

In that time:

- Every capital city on the mainland has been subjected to water restrictions

- NSW banned the Welcome Reef dam in 2002 in on environmental grounds.

- The Rudd Government banned a mega-dam on Queensland’s Mary River to “save” the lungfish.

- The Victorian Labor Government turned a dam reservation on the fast-flowing Mitchell River into a national park instead to stop any new dam.

- The Queensland and Victorian Labor Governments claimed global warming would dry up the rains anyway, making a new dam useless.

- Queensland built instead a $1.1 desalination plant, now mothballed because of the rains.

- Victoria built instead a $5.7 billion desalination plant, costing four times the price of a new dam for a third of the water.

With luck, these rains will be the cold shower we needed to snap out of this insanity."

Apocalyptic Enthusiasm And The Royal Society

GWPF
"On the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society we reflect on how it first successfully promoted science as a sober and reasonable force serving society by dampening the prevailing apocalyptic ‘enthusiasm’ at large in Restoration England, and how the Society’s relationship to fearful prognostations was recently reversed when it came to promote apocalyptic environmentalism. This reversal is indicated by the election of the Royal Society’s current president in 2005, shortly after he had published one of the most extremely apocalyptic books ever written by a scientist."

H/T Bishop Hill

Wednesday 5 January 2011

Hurricanes and global warming – still no connection

WUWT
"Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. sends word via email of a review of his new paper on ClimateWire, plus notes that Joe Romm “blows a gasket” about it.

That’s clear evidence that this paper is effective in refuting one of the most oft repeated climate hypes since Al Gore stood in front of a photo of Hurricane Katrina during his movie An Inconvenient Truth and said: ...."

Hot-air Gore runs out of puff

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Al Gore exploited the Hurricane Katrina disaster in his film An Inconvenient Truth to claim global warming was making hurricanes worse: .....Dr Roger Pielke Jr says the extensive evidence suggests Gore was wrong. Yet again.

What more does the weather have to do to prove the warming alarmists wrong? And what will it take for the Nobel committee to strip Gore of his prize for serial exaggeration? "

BBC spins that Met Office got winter right, just kept it secret from public

Autonomous Mind
"There is absolutely no logical or rational basis for the Met Office publishing the probability map above, yet ‘secretly’ telling the government a completely different story. The Met Office not only published the map, it had meterologists speaking publicly about the map and setting an expectation of a very high probability of warmer than average winter, as I will explain…"

How the doomed Met Office tried to spin its way out of trouble

Telegraph
"It seems that the reason it didn’t provide an accurate forecast of this winter was not because it didn’t know bad weather was coming. It was because we were all so horrid last time it made a boo boo over the infamous “barbecue summer” that it decided it wouldn’t make its forecasts public any more.

Which means the real victim of this sorry story is not us (for having been misled about the extremity of cold we could expect this winter) but the poor old, much-put-upon, much-maligned, but basically splendid and well worth the £170 million it costs us every year Met Office."

Poisoning the children’s minds with climate scares:will that educational tide be on the turn in 2011

Climate Realists
"It seems to me that adults, and in particular professionals, have a moral responsibility to avoid such scaremongering, and in particular to protect school-age children from it. .....Unfortunately the alarmist-virus is out and into the educational bloodstream, threatening to produce more and more demoralised and frightened children. "

Tuesday 4 January 2011

Shock. Shivering Britain realises wind power needs wind to work

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"These experts realise only now that the when the wind don’t blow, the power won’t flow? Next they might even start worrying that solar power won’t work in the dark. "
---------------------------
Wind farms becalmed just when needed the most (Telegraph)

Met Office knew big freeze was coming but hushed it up

Daily Mail
"But we weren’t let in on the secret because the Met Office no longer publishes its seasonal forecasts due to the ridicule it suffered for predicting a barbecue summer in 2009.‘It did forecast in November that December would be bitter, but many of us may have taken the prediction with a truckload of salt.’

Last night the Met Office confirmed it had passed on the advice, but a spokesman denied that withholding it from the public was motivated by embarrassment.‘We did brief the Cabinet Office in October on what we believed would be an
exceptionally cold and long winter,’ she said. "

-----------
Blowing hot and cold: Embarrassed weathermen should have warned about big freeze

Monday 3 January 2011

Australian floods to last weeks

Telegraph
"Motorists were told to avoid flooded roads after a man drowned in central Queensland - bringing to two the official death toll in what state Treasurer Andrew Fraser called a "disaster of biblical proportions".

Floodwaters have brought most coal mining operations to a halt in Queensland - the state exporting the majority of the coking coal produced in Australia.

Anna Bligh, the state's premier, said recovery would take weeks. She said: "Given the scale and size of this disaster and the prospect that we'll see waters sitting for potentially a couple of weeks...we will continue to have major issues to deal with throughout January."

Who are the climate denialists now?

Quadrant Online
"In a world teetering on the edge of economic chaos with a huge population highly dependent on a healthy economy and severe winters not seen since the Little Ice Age, the ongoing obsession with global warming and decarbonisation is surreal. ....In these conditions, the ongoing obsession over AGW is looking more and more like a mental disorder, not unlike the mass manias of the Middle Ages. It seems an especially poor time to be insisting on failed prophesies calling for austerity and increased costs. In the likely prospect of severe hardship becoming manifest, angry mobs may be only too willing to accord full credit to false prophets."

H/T Bishop Hill


Pssst...Germany Passes Energy Tyranny Act – Will Force Energy Rationing. By P Gosselin

Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves public office, but will he 'be back'?

Telegraph
"His departure, which comes amid fears California could become insolvent, has prompted headlines in the US media such as "Hasta La Vista, Failure".

Yet it is thought Mr Schwarzenegger is keen to press on with efforts to reduce global warming, possibly taking on a role as an independent statesman akin to that of Al Gore, the former US vice-president. "

Punctured Pessimists

Matt Ridley
"Fox News has dug up some remarkable botched predictions about the environment. Most are familar but three were new to me: ....."

Sunday 2 January 2011

Crises in the East

Dr Richard North
"Since 30 December, Russian ships have been trapped by ice in the Sea of Okhotsk, part of the Gulf of Sakhalin, and rescue attempts have so far been frustrated. The drama, redolent of the 1983 ice crisis, apparently involves ten ships, including a research vessel and what are described as three "fishing boats". With crews totalling 400, it is more likely that these are factory or processing ships."

Bastardi and Corbyn reply

Autonomous Mind
"There is clearly an overwhelming case here for challenging the Met Office robustly about its assertion that it requires additional huge sums of money to purchase more supercomputing technology. The question is, will those who control our tax pounds undertake that challenge and stop our money being spent wastefully? Bastardi and Corbyn’s replies demonstrate that the fundamental difference between the Met Office and those meterologists who forecast with much greater accuracy is a matter of technique and approach rather than technology and processing power. The politicians need to understand this."

H/T Bishop Hill

Time Magazine and Global Warming

WUWT


"Nigel Rios writes in with a great compendium of Time Magazine covers that illustrate the history of that magazine’s global warming coverage from the 1970′s to the present. "

New paper – “absence of correlation between temperature changes … and CO2″

WUWT
"The main conclusion one arrives at the analysis is that CO2 has not a causal relation with global warming and it is not powerful enough to cause the historical changes in temperature that were observed. The main argument is the absence of immediate correlation between CO2 changes preceding temperature either for global or local changes. "

This winter is the Stalingrad in the ‘Climate War’; it will be long and hard, those who understand this winter will win.

Piers Corbyn, WeatherAction
"They will of course claim under their ‘data’ that 2010 was close to the warmest ever year. This is fraud. On that one should note that since 1950 the coldest decade in their data set was around 1971 to 80 for which there were the most weather stations, and that since then they removed 62% of stations so the decade 2001-2010 with the least number of stations becomes the warmest!" (Climate Realists)

Saturday 1 January 2011

Area Of Thick Arctic Ice Has Doubled In The Last Two Years

Real Science
"US Navy PIPS data shows that the area of ice greater than 2.5 metres thick – has doubled since the same date in 2008."

H/T Climate Depot

It's official: December WAS the chilliest in 120 years

Daily Mail
"If you thought December was the coldest you could remember, you were right... unless you are more than 120 years old.The benchmark Central England Temperature plunged to an average of -0.6c (30.9f) over the month, making it the second harshest December since records began in 1659."

------------------------
As we count the cost of the freeze, Government prepares for global warming (Telegraph)