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 30 June 2012

OK, we got 2012 wrong – but trust our forecast for 2100

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" Much fun has been had in contrasting the Met Office’s forecasts of our weather during the past three months with what actually transpired. Its prediction on March 26 “slightly favoured drier than average conditions for April-May-June”, with April as the driest month. This forecast, the Met Office assured us, was based on “observations, several numerical models and expert judgment”. What happened, as we know, was that we have had more rain than at any time since records began in 1766, with the wettest April and June in 100 years.
What is timely to recall, however, is the admission made to MPs in March 2010 by Professor Julia Slingo, the Met Office’s chief scientist, that the “numerical models” used by the Met Office to make its short-term weather forecasts are exactly the same as those “we use for our climate prediction work”.
The Met Office’s projections of future climate change are viewed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with total reverence. So the £33 million super-computer which failed to predict the wettest April in more than a century is one of those on which the IPCC relies for its predictions of what the weather will be like in 100 years’ time. It is hard to know which has become more discredited in the past two years, the UK Met Office or the IPCC, both of which rest their faith on computer models as dodgy as one of those proverbial nine-bob notes."

Friday 29 June 2012

Solar Pie-in-the-Sky

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
"The article expressed not one iota of skepticism about the solar plant being completed on time or within budget. Nor did it mention the rather salient fact that Cloncurry’s population is a mere 2,400 people. So here we are 4.5 years later. How did things work out? Is Cloncurry a shining example of the clean, green, renewable future to which we should all aspire? Is the entire community humming along on “free energy” harvested from the sun? I’m afraid not. Three years after that news story appeared, the project was abandoned. According to a follow-up news clipping “significant reflective glare issues” – and possible adverse health impacts – had been identified (backup link). In January of this year, the project was resurrected briefly. But the new design would have cost the same $7 million and only powered a fifth of the town. Last month, the Queensland government withdrew financing, thus saving taxpayers a pile of money."

Rainy weather breaks UK record for three months to June

BBC
"The figure was confirmed on a second day of disruption after torrential rain doused parts of the country leaving thousands without power. Transport and schools were also affected after Wales, the Midlands, north-east England, Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland were deluged. Even without the latest storms, this is the second wettest June since 1910. Up to 27 June, total UK rainfall was 130.1mm - just 6mm short of the 2007 record. It is already the wettest June on record for Wales, with 186.3mm of rain this month, compared with the previous record of 183.1mm set in 1998. The Met Office confirmed it had been the wettest April-June period in the UK since 1910."

Carbon taxes: They just don’t work

JunkScience
"In Europe’s carbon-taxing nations, GHG reductions reflect high-wage job losses in sectors that governments have exempted from energy taxes in the unrealized hope of curbing those job losses. Total employment (both public and private sector) in Sweden crashed to almost 12 per cent below 1990 levels in the seven years after Sweden’s carbon tax was first introduced. Sweden’s job count only squeaked back up to 1990 levels in late 2007, before falling off again. ....... In Europe, governments have applied high energy taxes only to energy demand they feel is certain to grow in spite of the new taxes. This is about scoring new government revenues, not emission reductions."

Thursday 28 June 2012

Whatever Happened To Climate Change Crisis?

GWPF
"Once upon a time, climate change and global warming (supposedly the same thing), were or was as a major challenge to the planet and our civilization. It predicated a massive change of the global energy system away from dirty, dangerous and expensive fossil fuels. Everything from nuclear power and wind farms to landfill methane gas recovery, solar power plants and electric cars and bicycles was in vogue. Anything not needing oil or seeming not to, was a great emerging and breaking business opportunity, seized on not by dozens, but by hundreds of hedge funds. Most of which are gone, today. In retrospect we have to ask why this mass illusion, the transition to “a new ecological society” imploded and fell off the teleprompters, off the front pages, and out of the seemingly endless TV special reports on threatened polar bears and collapsing ice cliffs. How could this all disappear so fast?"

Michael Mann's Hissy Fit Shows Why Global Warming Alarmists Fear Debate

Forbes
"The Michael Mann hissy fit, I advised the government official, likely had little to do with the other speaker’s credentials. From my own experience with Mann and other politically driven global warming alarmists, they will go to great lengths to avoid appearing on the public stage in a format that requires them to debate or defend their alarmist assertions in the presence of scientists who actually focus on facts rather than scare tactics. I nevertheless gave the government official a list of highly qualified skeptical scientists and wished him good luck with his upcoming conference. “Don’t be surprised, however, if Mann refuses to take the stage with any of these scientists, or anybody else who will ask him challenging questions on the panel,” I predicted. “I know that scientists are supposed to encourage and celebrate critical thinking and open debate, but alarmists like Mann are scientists in only the loosest sense of the term.”

Gina Rinehart saves the world

Telegraph
"The environmental industry, on the other hand, is completely unregulated and, as it has shown time and time again, feels no obligation towards truth, decency or transparency – not least because of its sanctimonious belief that its cause is so just that however many lies it tells the noble end more than justifies the means. We have seen examples of this in everything from its exaggeration of the (virtually non-existent) threat to the world's polar bear population to the way (as reported by Donna Laframboise) its grey literature (ie propaganda) has done much to subvert the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change's reports. Good. Now we've sorted that one out we're in a better position to understand the significance of Gina Rinehart's move on Fairfax Media, as reported in today's Telegraph:...."

Tuesday 26 June 2012

Soak up the sun while you can! Hottest day of June tomorrow set to be followed by more rain, say forecasters

Daily Mail
"This month is already the third wettest June on record, Met Office figures show, with 122.3mm of rain putting it just behind the second wettest June, in 1912, which saw 124.5 mm of rain and a little way off the wettest June, in 2007, which saw 136.2 mm."

Everything You Know About Paleoclimate May Be Wrong

GWPF
"Ice samples pulled from nearly a mile below the surface of Greenland glaciers have long served as a historical thermometer, adding temperature data to studies of the local conditions up to the Northern Hemisphere's climate. But the method -- comparing the ratio of oxygen isotopes buried as snow fell over millennia -- may not be such a straightforward indicator of air temperature."

Sunday 24 June 2012

MPs have no idea how to meet the 'carbon' target they voted for

Telegraph, Christopher Booker
"The great global warming scare has long been dying on its feet, but that sad fiasco of a conference in Rio last week saw it finally dead and buried. “It’s pathetic, it’s appalling,” wailed a spokesman for WWF, one of the thousands of green activists who flew to Rio, many at taxpayers’ expense, to see the last rites read over their lost dream. Their cause has even been abandoned by one of its most outspoken champions, the green guru James Lovelock of “Gaia” fame, who now admits that the warming scare was all a tragic mistake, and that talk of “sustainable development” is just “meaningless drivel”.

Most Britons No Longer Believe Climate Change Is Man-Made

Climate Realists
"Less than half the public believe climate change is man-made, according to a new poll. The YouGov survey for The Sunday Times reveals just 43% think human activity is making the world warmer. This compares with 55% when the same question was asked in 2008. The number who believe the world is not becoming warmer has risen from 7% to 15%."

UN Reaps Sustainability Pledges Worth $513 Billion in Rio

Bloomberg
"The summit in Rio in 1992 led to treaties on global warming, deserts and biodiversity. This year’s gathering, the UN’s biggest ever, had 45,300 delegates from more than 180 nations. It produced a non-binding document, with nations agreeing to keep talking about still-undefined “sustainable development goals.”

Saturday 23 June 2012

Rio+20 Earth Summit is a washout

Telegraph
"It is always a bad sign when a UN conference ends on time: if anything substantive is at stake, these unwieldy gatherings of 190 governments invariably overrun, only reaching resolution in the early hours of the morning. So it says much about the inconsequentiality of the agreement in Rio that it was finalised even before the meeting began."

Sustainable Development: The latest UN scare

WUWT
"The real “stakeholders” – the world’s poorest people – were barely represented at Rio+20. Their health and welfare, dreams and aspirations, pursuit of justice and happiness were given only lip service – then brushed aside and undermined. The proceedings were controlled by bureaucrats who do not know how to generate new wealth, generally oppose efforts by those who do know, and see humans primarily as consumers and polluters, rather than as creators and innovators, protectors and stewards."

Thursday 21 June 2012

What on earth are they smoking at Rio?

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"... Because that’s what this conference and so many of its kind are really about, right? Having meetings to have meetings, and to raise the cash for more meetings where everyone is a hero and all hold hands to go ommmm. Oh, excuse me, the hat is being passed around again: ..."

IPCC Gives Up On Science, Makes Grey Literature Official

GWPF
"If the IPCC wanted to provide ammunition for climate change skeptics, they just handed over an entire arsenal. 'Grey' literature, which led to the "Glaciergate" scandal of 2010 when it was revealed that the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are losing ice (gone by 2035!) was stated as fact even though it was not based on evidence, will no longer be a problem for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Because they have declared that grey literature will no longer be grey - any information they choose to use will be considered peer reviewed just by being posted on the Internet by the IPCC."

Tuesday 19 June 2012

£75 million of taxpayer funding for environmentalist campaigns in the UK and the European Union

TPA
"We can today reveal the extent of the £75 million of taxpayer funding for environmentalist campaigns in the UK and the European Union since 1997. British taxpayers have paid for around £7.5 million of this budget. This money is spent on political campaigning which results in taxpayers paying twice: once for the grants handed out and then again with the higher prices that result when environmentalist groups successfully campaign for new taxes and regulations."

Global warming: second thoughts of an environmentalist

Telegraph
"Fritz Vahrenholt, one of Germany's earliest green energy investors, is not convinced that humanity is causing catastrophic global warming."

Revealed: how taxpayers fund climate change lobbyists

Telegraph
" A new report found Europe has given £75 million to green lobbying groups, including Friends of the Earth and Climate Action Network. It claims many of these groups campaign for new regulations that could lead to higher energy bills for British households. “Taxpayers pay twice: once for the grants, then again with the higher prices that result when environmentalist groups successfully campaign for new regulations,” the report said."

Monday 18 June 2012

NASA discovers Antarctica was pretty warm (at 7C) 20million years ago - however it did rain a lot

Daily Mail
"The team, including researchers from Louisiana State University and the University of Southern California, say the climate was suitable to support substantial vegetation - including stunted trees - along the edges of the frozen continent. By examining plant leaf wax remnants in sediment core samples taken from beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, the research team found summer temperatures along the Antarctic coast 15 to 20 million years ago were up to 11C warmer than today, with temperatures reaching as high as 7C. Precipitation levels also were found to be several times higher than today."

What fossil fuel subsidies?

Spectator
"To be clear, fossil fuel subsidies are not a good idea; that is why governments like ours don’t offer them. Fossil fuels are huge cash cows for every western government. When someone fills up their car with petrol, around sixty per cent of the pump price goes to the Exchequer. When an oil company drills in the North Sea and extracts a barrel the amount that the Treasury gets varies but it is invariably a substantial share of the price, and the sector was raided again at Budget 2011. The idea that fossil fuels are subsidised by the British government is silly. To the extent that there is support, it is for things like carbon capture and storage designed with environmental objectives in mind. ..."

Welcome to Fantasy Island!

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog
"I have in the past given the title of "Fantasy Island" to the UK for pursuing an impossible approach to carbon dioxide emissions reductions. Over the next week a much bigger island will take that title (yes, yes, it is a continent, but this is a fantasy!). On July 1, Australia's carbon tax comes into effect, which has already prompted a new round of cheering and critiquing."

Sunday 17 June 2012

It's no wonder the world's cooling on climate change

Daily Mail
"In the eternally moving battlefield of claim and counter-claim in the great climate change debate, even the fervently warmist Professor Phil Jones – of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – concedes that there has been no ‘statistically significant warming’ since 1995. In the simplest, human terms, therefore, no one younger than 14 years old has experienced global warming. So why does our Government go on acting as if it’s a major problem? Why all t hese hugely expensive commitments to ‘decarbonisation’ and ‘renewable energy’? Why all the eco-taxes on our holiday flights and wind-farms – if the supposed threat they were designed to avert now turns out to be unsupported by real-world evidence? It is not just ‘deniers’ who are asking these questions."

Hockey Stick Was Refuted Before Its Fabrication – Study Ignored – IPCC And Mann Took World On 10-Year Joyride

NoTricksZone
"Geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt found a Japanese tree-ring temperature reconstruction from 1995, one that should have been heeded by the IPCC and Michael Mann before they took the world on a 10-year joyride in the stolen car of “climate science”.

Saturday 16 June 2012

Sahara Climate Fluctuations Study Shows That Blaming Man For Climate Change Is “Completely Unscientific”

NoTricksZone
"...Contrary to what many may believe today, the climate of the Sahara desert is far from being steady. Rather, it has gone through profound cyclic changes over the last 10,000 years. For example it was much greener 8000 to 5500 years ago, a time when it was teeming with wildlife."

Friday 15 June 2012

Study shows the Arctic was much colder while Earth was warmer during Eemian warm period

WUWT
"To address the question about how climate may develop in the future, earth scientists direct their attention to the past. They look for epochs with similar conditions to today. The major identified climatic processes are then simulated with numerical models to further test possible reactions of the Earths’ system."

Hansen's Climate Forecast Vs Reality

GWPF
"The temperature forecast modelled by the Hansen Group 25 years ago is off by about 150%. It is truly regrettable that precisely this modelling is still being viewed as a reliable forecast by our politicians."

Wednesday 13 June 2012

The longest, most high resolution, most inconvenient paleoclimate data that hasn’t been published

WUWT
"Images like the above don’t sell. With a clear MWP and no hockey stick, there’s no alarm, and no $$ coming in for “further studies”. In the Wake of the Gergis et al retraction, Steve McIntyre notes that one of the “screened out” datasets just happens to be the one with the best resolution and the greatest duration – the Law Dome Oxygen 18 data set (from Antarctica)"

Tuesday 12 June 2012

UK Government Endorses IPCC Secrecy

GWPF
"Greg Barker, the UK's minister of state for climate change, has endorsed the IPCC's decision that reviewers of the draft Fifth Assessment report should be unable to see lead authors' responses to their comments and critiques. This apparently would undermine the IPCC process. Reviewers are expected to work this out from the next drafts of the report. The UK government's rejection of transparency comes in the shape of written answers to questions posed by MP Chris Heaton-Harris:"

It's raining, it's pouring, that'll be the global warming...

Daily Mail
"Bill Giles, the nation’s favourite weatherman was in no doubt. Britain was burning up. Within 20 years, Dundee would soon be as balmy as Berkshire. France would be virtually uninhabitable, as the Dordogne turned into a desert. So convinced was Bill by the imminent threat of global warming that he was ripping up his English country garden in Oxfordshire and planting olive trees instead. That was back in 1996. To be fair to Bill, he wasn’t the only one suckered by the great global warming scam, although as a qualified meteorologist he should have known better. For the past 15 years we have been bombarded with ever more hysterical predictions about the momentous effect ‘man-made’ global warming would have on Britain. .....Taking advantage: Businesses have spotted a lucrative opportunity to cash in on everything from useless War Of The Worlds wind turbines to state-subsidised solar panels...."

Monday 11 June 2012

Jeremy Clarkson: Kaboom! It’s My Turn To Play Fantasy Climate Change

GWPF
"I think you’ll agree that this is a scary story. But I think the scariest part is that McGuire is actually employed by the government as an adviser. It actually takes him seriously. .....Soon we were reading about how carbon dioxide, an invisible, odourless gas, would cause London to drown in a sea of its own making, turn Italy into a desert and generate flies the size of toasters that would ravage Africa. Al Gore was the new HG Wells and your patio heater was a Dalek. One of the best stories to emerge from the period came from a chap called Bill McGuire, who is professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. Back in 1999, he said that one day a volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands would erupt and that this would cause a rock the size of the Isle of Man to crash into the sea. The immensity of the splash would generate a 500ft tsunami that in a matter of hours would decimate North America’s eastern seaboard and wipe all life from the Caribbean. It’s happened before, he said. And it will happen again. Sadly, in 2004, researchers from Southampton University concluded that, if La Palma’s volcano does erupt, it’ll cause nothing more than a bit of mud to slither into the Atlantic."

Exploding the “green jobs” myth

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"The great green job con summed up: It turns out that according to the administration, “green jobs” include: college professors teaching classes on environmental studies, clerks at bicycle repair shops, antique dealer employees, Salvation Army workers because they are selling used clothing, stores selling rare books and manuscripts, consignment shop workers, used record shop employees, garbage disposal workers, and even oil lobbyists if they are engaged in advocacy related to environmental issues."

When will we wake up to the real water scandal?

Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph
"As the rain pours down, our reservoirs fill and hosepipe bans are ended, we must not allow this Act of God – unforeseen, as usual, by the Met Office – to distract us from the utter shambles of our national water policy. ...Accordingly, no fewer than five major new reservoir schemes have been scrapped in south-east England alone, where the shortage of water is most severe – two of them last year by our Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman. In obedience to the EU’s guidelines, her White Paper “Water for Life”, full of references to “climate change”, was all about how we must cut down our water usage and use it more “efficiently”, not least by encouraging our largely foreign-owned water companies to make this “precious resource” more expensive. The fact is that, since the 1980s, we have spent so much – £67 billion in the period up to 2007 – on complying with the absurdly exacting requirements of three EU directives on water quality that we have spent less than a quarter of that sum on “infrastructure”, such as mending leaks."

Friday 8 June 2012

The Russian Shale Oil Revolution

Climate Change Dispatch
"I learned last week about another oil shale play that dwarfs it. It’s called The Bazhenov. It’s in Western Siberia, in Russia. And while the Bakken is big, the Bazhenov — according to a report last week by Sanford Bernstein’s lead international oil analyst Oswald Clint — “covers 2.3 million square kilometers or 570 million acres, which is the size of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico combined.” This is 80 times bigger than the Bakken. A play 80 times bigger like the Bazhenov would imply 1,920 billion barrels. That’s a preposterous figure, enough oil to satisfy all of current global demand for 64 years, or to do 5 million bpd for more than 1,000 years"

Farmers to be Paid to Stop Cows Farting? New Carbon Credit Plan Floated.

hauntingthelibrary
"Canadian farmers could soon be enjoying a lucrative new income from their cattle, if plans for a new “carbon credits” scheme are successful. ...."

Masters of Hypocrisy: the Union of Concerned Scientists

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
"..This, ladies and gentleman, is a textbook case of how cavalier climate activists can be with the truth. The UCS report smears General Electric for committing the unpardonable sin of matching trivial donations made by its employees. The fact that the UCS itself benefited from this exact same mechanism during those same two years at a ratio of 21 to 1 apparently caused them no concern. No one at the UCS, it seems, worried that the organization might be being a little unfair. Want to talk about hypocrisy ? The Union of Concerned Scientists are masters of it."

Tuesday 5 June 2012

Historical Imagery of Greenland Glaciers Lessens Sea Level Rise Alarm

WUWT
"A new study using historical images of glaciers in southeast Greenland to investigate glacier response to climate changes suggests that the recently observed acceleration of ice loss from Greenland may not be a long-term phenomenon."

Pressure To Go Green Is Leading to Higher Energy Prices

GWPF
"..The recent Uswitch report notes: Energy bills have more than doubled in the last 8 years – if this trend continues bills could reach £1,582 a year by 2015 and £2,766 by 2018. But almost six in ten people (59%) say that energy will become unaffordable in the UK if the average bill hits £1,500 a year, with the average household bill today already £1,252 a year."

Monday 4 June 2012

Official: the more scientifically illiterate you are, the more you believe in 'climate change'

Telegraph
" A US government-funded survey has found that Americans with higher levels of scientific and mathematical knowledge are more sceptical regarding the dangers of climate change than their more poorly educated fellow citizens. The results of the survey are especially remarkable as it was plainly not intended to show any such thing: Rather, the researchers and trick-cyclists who carried it out were doing so from the position that the "scientific consensus" (carbon-driven global warming is ongoing and extremely dangerous) is a settled fact, and the priority is now to find some way of getting US voters to believe in the need for urgent, immediate and massive action to reduce CO2 emissions."

Sunday 3 June 2012

George Osborne Demands Massive Cuts To Windfarm Subsidies

GWPF
"The Observer has learned that George Osborne is demanding cuts of 25% in subsidies, a reduction the industry says would "kill dead" the development of wind power sites. The Treasury's stance has put the chancellor at loggerheads with the Liberal Democrat energy secretary Ed Davey, whose party strongly supports more renewable energy."

Saturday 2 June 2012

Spot the conflict: GE owns NBC, the Weather channel and lots and lots of wind turbine factories

JoNova(Australia)
"How “Green” is GE I wonder? GE Australia explains that the company focus is so green they have a special word for it: “Ecomagination is GE’s business strategy to help meet customers’ demand for products that improve their bottom line and reduce their impact on the environment. This will also drive growth for GE that delivers for our investors.” How much money does GE make from green philosophies? I don’t know, but GE wind explains that their most widely used wind turbine has produced no less than 16,500 bird killing, bat chopping versions planted around the globe, though they don’t say it quite like that. They have big plans for it. Their “ecomagination commitments for 2010 – 2015″ are planned to “double R&D to $10 Billion…” So that’s just $2 billion a year that GE will spend on green R & D for the next 5 years? Remember, Exxon have been controlling this debate by funding deniers with a measly $2 million a year (which stopped years ago). It just puts things in perspective…"