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...

Wednesday 31 October 2012

Ten years too late, it’s good riddance to wind farms – one of the most dangerous delusions of our age

Daily Mail,Christopher Booker
"The ramifications of such a policy U-turn stretch in all directions, not least to Brussels, where our EU colleagues won’t be taken in for a moment by Mr Hayes’s disingenuous claim that Britain doesn’t need more onshore windfarms because we are now on course to meet our ‘renewables’ target without them. But nowhere will this announcement be greeted with more delirious surprise than in all those hundreds of communities across the land where outraged local protest groups have formed in ever greater numbers to fight the onward march of what they see as the greatest threat to Britain’s countryside for centuries."

Minister signals end of the wind farm: We can't pepper turbines across the country - enough is enough, declares energy minister

Daily Mail
"Onshore wind farms give other renewable energy sources a bad name, says Energy Minister John Hayes
Existing and planned sites are enough to meet environmental goals
Research into effects on house prices, noise levels and military radars has been commissioned, Mr Hayes told the Mail exclusively
Comments spark a furious coalition row, with Lib Dem Energy Secretary Ed Davey insisting 'I'm in charge'

Tuesday 30 October 2012

Has Man-made global warming been disproved? A Review of Recent Papers.

NTCTS
"In fact not one but seven recent peer-reviewed papers have revealed what would seem to be fatal flaws in global warming......The following papers clarify this uncertainty between forcings and feedbacks and show that the global warming science is not clear about the distinction or effects. The papers show the IPCC assumptions about the role of CO2 and water vapor, particularly in the form of clouds, are incorrect and that the IPCC conclusions about climate sensitivity are both exaggerated and wrong."

Monday 29 October 2012

Mann’s hockey stick disappears – and CRU’s Briffa helps make the MWP live again by pointing out bias in the data

WUWT
"Look at graph 5c, and you’ll see 20th century warmth matches peaks either side of the year 1000, and that for the TRW chronology 20th century warmth is less than the spike around 1750. This puts 20th century (up to 2006 actually) warmth in the category of just another blip. There’s no obvious hockey stick, and the MWP returns, though approximately equal to 20th century warmth rather than being warmer."

Sunday 28 October 2012

Npower price rises

Npower
"New government schemes. We are now having to pay more in taxes to carry out new government environmental and social schemes than ever before. There are a number of schemes (such as ECO and Green Deal) that we are obliged to support and we’ll continue to keep you informed about these schemes and how you could benefit from them if you are eligible."

British Gas "Of the £80 rise, British Gas said £50 will go on "non commodity" costs, such as the cost of delivering energy to homes, meeting Government environment policies such as the Renewables Obligation and other social costs, such a feed in tariffs."(Telegraph)

John O'Sullivan: Michael Mann Retracts False Nobel Prize Claims in Humiliating Climbdown

Climate Realists
"But not only has Mann opened up a can of worms in the DC courts, he’s also rendered himself liable to full misconduct investigations by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and PSU for academic misrepresentation. No wonder that as of yesterday (Saturday October 27 2o12) the university began the task of ridding itself of their crestfallen ‘hockey sticker’s’ fake claims."

Saturday 27 October 2012

Lord Patten is the last man I'd choose to clean up the BBC

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" Apart from a desire to award each other grotesquely inflated salaries, one of this elite’s most alarming traits has been the contempt they show for the BBC’s legal duty, under its Charter, to report on the world with “due accuracy and impartiality”. There is an ever-longer list of issues on which the BBC has a clear “party line”, which it pushes with shameless disregard for balance. A year ago, I published a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the consequences of a deliberate decision by the BBC’s top brass in 2006 to throw all its prestige into propaganda for climate-change alarmism. ...Patten has long been a global-warming zealot. Last year he endorsed an absurd report for the Trust which called on the BBC to show more bias on climate change, rather than less. "

UK climate change department takes over 3000 flights at a cost of over £1.3m

The Commmentator
"The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has spent over £1.3 million on 3,114 domestic and international flights between 2010 and 2012, according to information obtained from a freedom of information request. In 2010/2011, the DECC spent £658,422.52 and in 2011/2012, the department spent a further £683,287.20 on travel. The most expensive flight taken was in 2011/2012 from London to Tokyo at a whopping cost of £6,402.13. The second most expensive was a trip to Cape Town from London, £5,395 and the third most expensive flight was £5,156 from London to Santiago. A current first class ticket to Tokyo from London with British Airways is £6,674.00. The most expensive flight in 2010/2011 was from London to Cancun (£5,791.50) where it is thought that government officials attended the 'conference of the parties', otherwise known as the climate change conference where many activists also travelled to by plane."

Friday 26 October 2012

Mike’s Nobel Trick

NoTricksZone
"In the latest development, in what appears to be peculiar attempt to give himself gravitas, the insecure Dr. Mann claimed in his suit that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution as an IPCC scientist, when the Nobel Committee awarded the prize to the IPCC and Al Gore in 2007. That claim is false. Just how did he try to pull it off? Easy: he used Mike’s Nobel Trick. It goes as follows: ...."

Michael Mann’s False Nobel Claim

NRO
"This morning, I called the Nobel Committee in Norway and asked whether Michael Mann had won a Nobel Peace Prize. The answer was a pretty emphatic “No.” Here is the call ..." (h/t Climate Depot)

Autumn just turned white: First snow in England falls in Northumberland as temperatures dip to a very chilly -2C

Daily Mail
"Temperatures as cold as Moscow today as chill of winter hits the north-east Parts of Scotland could see up to 5cm of snow and north-east up to 2cm Sleet and hail showers to affect parts of Lincolnshire and East Anglia"
From the comments: "It is not global warming/climate change whatever it is called today, that we do not get. We are just not silly enough to believe that it is man made and we have to be punished by paying yet more tax !! Yes, be sensible about the care of the planet but trying to fool the gullible into thinking we can change what Mother Nature does is just beyond ridiculous. - JN Wiltshire , Wiltshire, 26/10/2012 13:11"
And ...In Edmonton Alberta we have had the 2nd coldest October on record. Today we have snow and -6C !! and we are located at Lat. 53.53 the same as Manchester So what happened to "Global Warming" ? Patrick Dowling Edmonton>........; I'm in the Prairies too, -4C & snowhere today, overnights of -15c forecast this weekend, now that's a "little chilly"! - amazonianblonde , farfaraway, Canada, 26/10/2012 17:37"

Thursday 25 October 2012

An ill wind blows from wind turbiines

WUWT
"Newsbytes from the GWPF, Lies, Damn Lies And Green Statistics"

New study finds growth of Antarctic sea ice accelerated 53% since 2006

The Hockey Schtick
"ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2012) — The steady and dramatic decline in the sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean over the last three decades has become a focus of media and public attention. At the opposite end of Earth, however, something more complex is happening."

Why did PBS FRONTLINE electronically alter the signature of one of the world’s most distinguished Physicists in their report “Climate of Doubt’?

WUWT
"The signature is that of Dr. Edward Teller, from the signature card he turned in which can be seen on the very top of the Oregon Petition Project web page here. Clearly, Hockenberry was familiar with the project, citing it, and showing web pages linking to it. With that background at his disposal, there’s simply no way he could not have known that this was anybody but Dr. Teller on that card."
Heartland comments on FRONTLINE ‘Climate of Doubt’
"The quality of the program starts to deteriorate at about the 20-minute mark. Notorious global warming alarmists Gavin Schmidt, Katherine Hayhoe, Andrew Dessler, and Ralph Cicerone are presented as representative of the mainstream scientific community, which they are not. Rather than use the program to put an end to the myth of scientific consensus on this complex issue, Hockenberry repeatedly invokes the discredited myth of a 97 percent consensus. Evidence in support of that claim is farcical. The issue of what role, if any, consensus should play in science is not addressed at all."

Wednesday 24 October 2012

AGW Arctic Sea Ice Propaganda in 4 Easy Steps

sunshinehours.wordpress.com

Recent Site Visitors....

Solar Industry Meltdown – Intersolar China 2012 Tradeshow CANCELLED Due To “Difficult Market Conditions”!

NoTricksZone
"How many billions in stimulus packages were pumped in to prop up this industry? Now the bubble has popped and consumers are left with higher electric rates and a solar rust belt. In the meantime former solar executives are likely retired and living high on the hog, relaxing on diesel-fuel powered yachts – paid for by “stimulus” dollars. This has got to be one of the biggest scams of all time."

Police suspect two of carbon credit fraud worth CZK 378m

PDM
"The Czech anti-corruption police have accused two men of 378 million crowns worth of tax evasion linked to carbon credits trade, for which they would face up to ten years in prison, if convicted, the police spokesman Jaroslav Ibehej writes on their website." (h/t Tom Nelson)

Tuesday 23 October 2012

A scientist's open mind snaps shut

Quadrant Online
"Cory ignores the roll-call of American scientists, 31,000 to date, who have rejected the CAGW hypothesis. Even allowing for the credibility issues in all such petitions, there is obviously a reputable and substantial group of her global science peers who do not subscribe to her “climate-majority” views. This formidable body of scholars, she asserts, has “poor understanding”, a la anti-vaccination nuts, and is degrading public debate. She also seems unaware of her crushing non-sequitur. She argues that the media should respect only the views of the “huge majority” of warmists. Then without pausing for breath she says that “science is not political” but based on “observation, hypothesis, challenge and proof”. So what is the media meant to do if it comes across scientific findings that, say, Antarctic ice is increasing (despite the globe allegedly warming strongly), that the Roman and Medieval warmings were higher than the 20th century warmings (giving our CO2 warmists an obvious question to answer), or, dare I mention it, that there has been no statistically significant warming for the past 16 years? Would the President of the Australian Academy of Science prefer that such findings be suppressed by a compliant media?"

Monday 22 October 2012

German Windpark Operator Rakes In $3 Million For Power That Was Never Produced

NoTricksZone
" German law still requires the power companies to pay green producers for the energy that they would have produced had they not been asked to shut down. Therefore solar panel and windfarm operators get money whether they produce or not. No risks!"

Scottish tourism chiefs admit wind farms will 'drive holidaymakers away'

Daily Mail
"Murdo Fraser, Tory convener of the Holyrood energy and tourism committee, said: ‘This is a significant development in the fight against the SNP’s wind farm obsession. If wind farms will damage tourism in one area of Scotland, this is surely the case the country over.’ There are as many as 2,700 turbines north of the Border and seven applications a day are made to councils to erect more. Wind farm developers can cash in on £400million in subsidies paid in Britain every year – huge payments which have been cut by only 10 per cent by the Scottish Government in its drive to provide 100 per cent of electricity through renewable energy by 2020."

Get orf our land! (or how my village blew away a 140ft turbine)

Daily Mail
"....Our crack team had spotted any number of serious flaws in the planning application. Nearly every conservation body going had raised objections, including English Heritage. Quite why the planning officer had decided to override these objections – and in a protected landscape area too – was a mystery. A mystery, it turned out, that the council’s planning committee found as baffling as we did. At a packed meeting – preceded by a demonstration by the village’s placard-wielding children – we were first astonished, then almost tearful with gratitude, as one by one the members of the planning committee at Daventry District Council stood up to say how appalled they were that such a blight was even being considered in an area so beautiful and unspoilt. They rejected the idea by nine votes to one. I’d love to end the story at the glorious pub celebration where jubilant villagers – many of whom had never met until we were united through struggle – toasted the wisdom of those councillors and the power of local democracy. But sadly I can’t. Since then I’ve heard the landowner is going to appeal against the decision and try to force through a wind turbine that no one (except him) wants and which will disfigure our neighbourhood. Our community’s plight is by no means an unusual one. Something has gone badly awry with both our energy policy and our planning laws. Is anyone at Westminster listening?"

Sunday 21 October 2012

Victims of propaganda ?

Editorial:
Propaganda: Ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect (Websters)
Daily Mail -'Pensioners living the real 'Good Life' cut energy bills to tiny amount after researching ways to cut usage'
"Although their initial motivation was to save money, as the couple learnt more about global warming they became increasingly concerned about their own impact on the environment. Mr Fish added: ‘The science is quite clear - for the world to halt climate change it needs a 100 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide by 2050.
" On the couple’s decision to give up travelling by planes, Mrs Fish, 79, a retired music teacher, said: ‘We don’t want to feel we are killing people while we travel.’
Ed: Shame Al Gore does not believe in it....

Nowhere is safe from marching white monsters

johnogroat-journal
"..Those who want wind farms see only the pound signs and have no understanding of the value of a wild Highland landscape like this one or how 20 or 30 giant turbines will turn it into yet another industrial site. Places in this world which have not visibly been trampled and subdued by man are increasingly rare. Already, up on the Scaraben ridge, the Sudoku grid of the Boulfruich intrudes jarringly into the eastward view. Absolutely nowhere in Caithness is safe from the marching white monsters. ....So what will Caithness be like in a few years’ time? I can guarantee that one day the doctrinaire pro-wind farm position of the Scottish Government will simply collapse in the face of economics. Scotland simply can’t survive with the most expensive and unreliable electricity in Europe when everyone else uses cheap nuclear, fracking-gas and even coal."

Update and confirmation of ‘Global warming stopped 16 years ago’ aka ‘the pause’

WUWT
"...The Met Office now confirms on its climate blog that no significant warming has occurred recently: ‘We agree with Mr Rose that there has only been a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century.’

The REALLY inconvenient truths about global warming. Last week we explosively revealed a 16-year 'pause' in rising temperatures - triggering a bitter debate. You decide what the real facts are...

Daily Mail
"Last week The Mail on Sunday provoked an international storm by publishing a new official world temperature graph showing there has been no global warming since 1997. The figures came from a database called Hadcrut 4 and were issued by the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University. We received hundreds of responses from readers, who were overwhelmingly critical of those climate change experts who believe that global warming is inevitable. But the Met Office, whose lead was then followed by climate change campaigners, accused The Mail on Sunday of cherry-picking data in order to mislead readers. It even claimed it had not released a ‘report’, as we had stated, although it put out the figures from which we drew our graph ten days ago. ...."

Saturday 20 October 2012

It is wind power that will send our bills sky-high

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"What Mr Cameron clearly hasn’t realised is that the main reason why our energy companies need to charge us ever more for electricity lies in his own Government’s deluded policies. He and his colleagues prattle on about how, over the next eight years, we need to spend £100 billion on building 30,000 useless, unreliable and grotesquely subsidised wind turbines. They want to see billions more spent on giant pylons and interconnectors, to carry power from the remote onshore and offshore wind farms where it is generated to the places where it is needed. Then, as even Mr Davey has finally admitted, further billions will need to be spent on new gas-fired power stations – not only to fill the gap left by all the coal-fired and nuclear plants that are due to close, but also to provide ever more expensive, “carbon”-emitting back-up for the times when the wind drops and our turbines are scarcely functioning"

Friday 19 October 2012

President Obama’s Taxpayer-Backed Green Energy Failures

The Foundry
"So far, 36 companies that were offered federal support from taxpayers are faltering — either having gone bankrupt or laying off workers or heading for bankruptcy. This list includes only those companies that received federal money from the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy and other agencies. The amount of money indicated does not reflect how much was actually received or spent but how much was offered. The amount also does not include other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies, which push the amount of money these companies have received from taxpayers even higher." (h/t Climate Depot)

Arctic refreeze fastest ever

WUWT
"After all of the news about a minimum record ice extent last month, this is interesting. As we know when water loses its ice cover, it allows a lot of heat to radiate into space as LWIR. many predictied that as a result of the extra open ocean surface, we see a very fast refreeze in the Arctic. It appears they were right. In fact, this is the fastest monthly scale refreeze rate in the NSIDC satellite record going back to 1979. .....Arctic Sea Ice Extent has increased by 43.8% since the minimum was reached. Extents are in millions of sq km.

Thursday 18 October 2012

Obama Unites Global Warming Alarmists, Skeptics In Presidential Debates

Climate Change Dispatch
" “When Obama talks about energy without mentioning climate, he ignores the fundamental basis of his energy policy.” ........President Obama’s unprecedented renewable energy subsidies, combined with unprecedented restrictions on conventional energy production and use, make no sense outside the realm of global warming policy. Wind power and solar power, the crown jewels of Obama’s American electricity agenda, are substantially more expensive than the coal and natural gas power that produces most of America’s electricity. Forcing Americans to directly subsidize these economic losers on the front end and then forcing them to purchase this more expensive energy on the back end is a sure-fire way to weaken our economy and weaken our nation."

Wednesday 17 October 2012

Still not settled

Quadrant Online (Australia)
"....If we look behind the carefully packaged and promulgated official assessments of the sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide we find a range of assumptions, assertions and approximations. There are many uncertainties and unknowns about the climate system and its future state. In its 1990 first assessment report the IPCC honestly concluded in the scientific assessment:
There is a greenhouse effect;
Adding carbon dioxide will enhance the greenhouse effect;
However we cannot be confident of the timing, magnitude nor regional impacts of such enhancement.
That statement is as true today as it was in 1990. Recent global temperature trends strongly suggest that the climate sensitivity is far less than the projections from computer models would have us believe, projections on which governments rely in the formulation of energy policy.
The availability and cost of energy are fundamental to the competitiveness of our industries and the lifestyles we enjoy. The Precautionary Principle may have once been justification for government intervention in energy policy but it is now time to reassess those interventions. The divergence between climate projections and reality suggest that the national and regional energy mix should not be constrained by climate considerations. Models that only approximately represent the climate system and for which there remains many knowledge gaps are proving misleading and inadequate as a basis for energy policy."

Tuesday 16 October 2012

Lüning/Vahrenholt Comment On HadCRUT’s 16 Years Of No Warming: “Tough Times Ahead For Climate Science”

NoTricksZone
"Recently the newest HadCRUT numbers were released; they extended up to August 2012. It turns out that everything that had been suspected was confirmed: The global temperature hasn’t risen in 16 years (see Figure below). This is a completely unexpected development when one considers how all the boldly confident forecasts from the IPCC predicted more warming."

Computers Incapable of Modeling Climate: Billions Wasted To Perpetuate Deception

Dr. Tim Ball
"Billions of taxpayers dollars are wasted on politically motivated climate science, most of it on buying and running computers incapable of modeling global climate. They’re incorrectly programmed so a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase to fulfill the saying “Garbage In, Garbage Out” (GIGO). In the real world, temperature increases before CO2, but the programmers need a political result. Naturally the temperature forecasts are consistently wrong, but that doesn’t matter. They claim they’re getting better and all they need are bigger, faster computers. It won’t and can’t make any difference, but they continue to waste money."

Wyoming experiences that “giant sucking sound” as new coal fired climate supercomputer is turned on

WUWT
"Did your lights dim yesterday? It might have been Trenberth’s “travesty calculator”. Readers may recall when I covered the announcement of the building of this new supercomputer: NCAR’s dirty little secret.."

Science Or Propaganda?

notalotofpeopleknowthat
"The UK Met Office display the above graph prominently on their website. It is the temperature plot, based on the long running CET (Central England Temperature series). The message is clear. Temperatures suddenly started climbing rapidly around 1980, a classic hockey stick. If you look closely, you will notice that the graph begins just before 1780. Yet the CET series actually began in 1659, so why did not the Met show the full graph? ........They have already been accused this week of “misleading the public”, following their release, with no publicity, of data showing that there has been no global warming for 15 years. It seems the Met are making a habit of such behaviour. As publically funded scientists, surely they have a duty to provide the public with the full, unadulterated facts, and not a highly distorted version that happens to support their agenda?" (h/t Climate Depot)

Monday 15 October 2012

The Met office responds to ‘Global warming stopped 16 years ago’

WUWT
"One wonders what the Met Office would say about the data if the many circular adjustments and artificial biases were removed from the data."

Sunday 14 October 2012

Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it

Daily Mail
"The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week. The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures. This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years. .....Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’."
Flawed science costs us dearly
And with the country committed by Act of Parliament to reducing CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050, a project that will cost hundreds of billions, the news that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years comes as something of a shock. ......Yet it has steadily become apparent since the 2008 crash that both the statistics and the modelling are extremely unreliable. To plan the future around them makes about as much sense as choosing a wedding date three months’ hence on the basis of a long-term weather forecast. ....."

Saturday 13 October 2012

But of course: You can't have a viable carbon dioxide hoax scam swindle rip-offset market without a fossil-fueled army of people constantly driving around measuring trees for $125 per hour

Tom Nelson
"..Independent verifiers can make $800 to $1,200 a day, according to Mr. Bubser. Scientific Certification Systems, Mr. Hrubes’s employer, which verified 4.2 million tons of carbon offsets around the world last year, added two foresters this summer, for a total of six."

NOW A WAVE OF WARMIST ALARM WASHES OVER THE BARRIER REEF

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" One global warming mini-scare has barely faded away – with the realisation that polar ice is not vanishing, the extent of Antarctic sea-ice having just broken all records – when the next arrives
A paper from the US National Academy of Sciences claims that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost half its coral in 27 years and could soon be all but gone. Nearly half this loss, apparently, is due to damage from the more frequent cyclones brought by man-made global warming. Much of the rest is caused by coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, fostered by warming seas.
One puzzle is that no one has noticed such a scary loss of coral before. (Even the researchers admit that undamaged coral is still growing at nearly 3 per cent a year.) Another is that the evidence indicates cyclones being more frequent in the past than recently. Similarly, rises and falls in that starfish population are a natural phenomenon, nothing new.
As yet another scarelet bites the dust, part of the explanation may lie in the fact that researching into the world’s largest coral reef has become a £130 million a year industry. Governments are not going to pay out that kind of money just to be told that nature is doing what nature does."

Snow causes havoc across eastern Australia

ABC
"About 470 properties in the Blue Mountains will remain without electricity overnight after a day of wild winds, rain and snow. At its height, snowfalls of 15 centimetres and wind damage cut roads and rail access to the upper Blue Mountains for more than six hours. The Bureau of Meteorology says snow falls have occurred right along the Great Dividing Range and as far north as Queensland's Granite Belt. The wild weather also affected Sydney's metropolitan area, with Sydney Ferries suspending services between Manly and Circular Quay due to big swells." ....video: 'Coldest in Canberra [for October] for 40years'

Friday 12 October 2012

Rise of the Deniers

The Australian
"Experts: Global warming means more Antarctic ice ...It's caused by man-made pollutants chlorine and bromine, which are different from the fossil fuel emissions that cause global warming. The hole makes Antarctica even cooler this time of year because the ozone layer usually absorbs solar radiation, working like a blanket to keep the Earth warm." ED: Just keeping the scam going

Snow blankets the greater Sydney region

ABC
"Goulburn residents woke to snow this morning, as did people in Katoomba, Mt Blackheath, Mt Victoria and Mittagong. There have been reports of snow in the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands, while Canberra has received 10 centimetres. Two major roads have been closed by the snow - The Great Western Highway in both directions at Wentworth Falls, and Bell's Line of Road at mt Tomah. Sydney Ferries has cancelled the Manly service due to the weather, and trains and buses have also been affected.
Yesterday, South Australia witnessed a once-in-a-century October snowfall." (h/t Climate Depot)

Now there's more ice at South Pole than ever (So much for global warming thawing Antarctica!)

Daily Mail
"Ice around the South Pole has expanded to cover a record area, scientists revealed yesterday – a month after saying that the North Pole had lost an unprecedented amount of its ice. Researchers say – rather confusingly – that both occurrences are down to the ‘complex and surprising’ effects of global warming. The record Antarctic sea ice cover was revealed in satellite images from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado."

Thursday 11 October 2012

Scientists find Antarctic ice is at record HIGH levels

Daily Mail
"Two weeks after a new record was set in the Arctic Ocean for the least amount of sea ice coverage in the satellite record, the ice surrounding Antarctica has reached its highest ever level. Sea ice extended over 19.44 million square kilometers (7.51 million square miles) in 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The previous record of 19.39 million kilometers (7.49 million square miles) was set in 2006."

Al Gore has thrived as green-tech investor

Washington Post
"Fourteen green-tech firms in which Gore invested received or directly benefited from more than $2.5 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks, part of President Obama’s historic push to seed a U.S. renewable-energy industry with public money. ......In last week’s presidential debate, Romney criticized the $90 billion that went to promote green technology, saying a number of businesses owned by Obama campaign contributors were winners." (H/T Climate Depot)

Europe’s Golden Age Of Coal & The Folly of Green Energy Policy

WUWT
"Europe is seeing a ‘golden age of coal’ thanks to cheap U.S. exports, said a senior gas analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA), an advisory body which last year proclaimed the world was heading for a ‘golden age of gas.’ Anne-Sophie Corbeau, senior gas analyst at the IEA, said gas was losing the battle in Europe’s power plants against cheap coal coming from the U.S., where the discovery of shale gas has left huge oversupply in unwanted coal."

Wednesday 10 October 2012

Electric cars are worse for the environment

JoNova (Australia)
"When everything else about being Green turns out to be a pox on the environment, it’s no surprise that electric cars are too."

Tuesday 9 October 2012

Reef Alarmists Jump The Shark

Quadrant Online
"Personally, I suspect that the surest way to save the reef would be to cut funding for management and research by half and link future cuts or increases to the balance of economic and environmental outcomes. I have little doubt that would soon effect a miraculous recovery."

Monday 8 October 2012

Arctic Melting Due To Global Warming, But Antarctic Ice Growth Due To Ocean Currents, NSIDC Says

NoTricksZone
"....Spiegel reports: While sea ice at the north pole this summer disappeared like never before since satellite measurements began in the 1970s, sea ice at the south pole set a counter record: Never has so much ice surrounding Antarctica covered such a large area at this time of the year since satellite measurements began in the late 1970s.”

Sunday 7 October 2012

New paper shows sea levels around Australia have declined over the past 7000 years

The Hockey Schtick
"A new paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews is the "First synthesis of post-glacial sea level data around Australia in over 25 years," and shows that sea levels around Australia were from about 1 to 2.5 meters higher than the present 7000 years ago during the Holocene Thermal Maximum [which lasted 4000 years between 9000 to 5000 years ago]. The authors note that Australia is relatively stable techtonically and thus sea level data is not complicated by post-glacial isostatic and other adjustments, which would add considerable uncertainty to sea level reconstructions."

Saturday 6 October 2012

Dr Tim Ball: Obama’s Democratic Convention Climate Change Comments Fail Fact Checking.

Dr Tim Ball
" (Tim Ball) Many organizations “fact-check” economic claims of politicans at US election Conventions, but climate facts need scrutiny. In his Democratic convention speech President Obama said;
And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet-because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They are a threat to our children’s future and in this election you can do something about it.”
What is carbon pollution? Carbon, is a solid not a greenhouse gas. Do you mean CO2, a naturally occurring gas essential to plant life, and not a pollutant? It’s unclear because you say, incorrectly, it’s causing climate change. Projected warming and climate change due to CO2 only occurs in predetermined Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) computer models that exclude major mechanisms and whose projections are consistently wrong. ...."

Debunking climate propaganda earns you a 'fail’

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" Two weeks ago I described one of this year’s A-level General Studies papers which asked candidates to discuss various “source materials” on climate change. Drawn from propaganda documents wholly biased in favour of climate alarmism, these contained a plethora of scientific errors. I suggested that, if any clued-up students tore these “sources” apart as they deserved, they might have been given a “fail”.
Sure enough, an email from the mother of just such a student confirmed my fears. Her son is “an excellent scientist” who got “straight As” on his other science papers, but he is also “very knowledgeable about climate change and very sceptical about man-made global warming”. His questioning of the sources earned an “E”, the lowest possible score. His mother then paid £60 for his paper to be re-marked. It was judged to be “articulate, well-structured” and clearly well-informed, but again he was marked down with “E” for fail.
This young man’s experience speaks volumes about the way the official global-warming religion has so corrupted our education system that it has parted company with proper scientific principles. In his efforts to reform our dysfunctional exam system, Michael Gove should ask for this bizarre episode to be investigated."

Antarctic refuses to melt as the models insist

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Rob Massom from the Australian Antarctic Division and Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre in Hobart said this week: “The message is there is a lot of work to better understand what processes are occurring around Antarctica and the role of these processes in affecting sea ice.” Dr Massom said the most authoritative climate change models forecast a loss of up to 30 per cent of Antarctic sea ice by the end of the century, and did not indicate the present expansion."

Britain 'to be hit by 70s-style blackouts withing three years' and EU rules may also force up bills, warns Ofgem

Daily Mail
"Green rules coming from the EU threaten to plunge Britain into 1970s-style blackouts in three years and lead to energy bills doubling. Millions could be pushed into fuel poverty – having to choose between heating or eating – because Brussels diktats are closing power stations needlessly, the Government’s energy regulator warned yesterday. The plants that remain in Britain will not be able to keep up with demand by winter 2015, a dire report from Ofgem predicted."

Friday 5 October 2012

Climate skeptics gaining ground in media

WUWT
"From the Institute of Physics , a surprising study being published by them, which not only measures the increase, but now has provided labels for type1 through type 3 skeptics. It seems they really don’t understand, but they are trying to quantify it anyway. I had to laugh at the inclusion of Anderegg et al (the 97% of climate scientists nonsense), which tell me they really haven’t a clue as to how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Should any of the authors read this post, be sure to read: What else did the ’97% of scientists’ say? to understand just how badly you’ve been duped."

Britain could run out of energy to power homes in just THREE years, gas and electricity watchdog warns

Daily Mail
"Ofgem also warned that uncertainty over the government's plans to revamp the electricity market meant it was unclear whether new, cleaner plants would be built to bridge the gap. The lack of spare capacity would leave the country little leeway if any plants were to suffer unplanned outages or if supply of power imports from Europe were disrupted. Nine UK-based coal and oil fired plants with a combined generating capacity of 11.5 gigawatts (GW) are due to close by 2015 or when they have completed 20,000 hours of operation for coal-fired power stations or 10,000 hours for oil-powered facilities, under EU legislation aimed at limiting emissions."

Thursday 4 October 2012

Want to make a paper more alarming and appealing to coverage? Blame the Romans for climate change

WUWT
"Just as we must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period, the inconvenient Roman Warm Period must also be dealt with, and here’s a novel way of doing it: claim that it was man-made. In a single stroke, the RWP is scrubbed from the list of “natural warmings” that the planet has experienced in recent history, helping the Cause by demonstrating that it too was anthropogenic. The ABC reports: ..."

Tuesday 2 October 2012

The theory that failed

JoNova (Australia)
"It takes only one experiment to disprove a theory. The climate models are predicting a global disaster, but the empirical evidence disagrees. The theory of catastrophic man-made global warming has been tested from many independent angles. The heat is missing from oceans; it’s missing from the upper troposphere. The clouds are not behaving as predicted. The models can’t predict the short term, the regional, or the long term. They don’t predict the past. How could they predict the future? The models didn’t correctly predict changes in outgoing radiation, or the humidity and temperature trends of the upper troposphere. The single most important fact, dominating everything else, is that the ocean heat content has barely increased since 2003 (and quite possibly decreased) counter to the simulations. In a best case scenario, any increase reported is not enough. Models can’t predict local and regional patterns or seasonal effects, yet modelers add up all the erroneous micro-estimates and claim to produce an accurate macro global forecast. Most of the warming happened in a step change in 1977, yet CO2 has been rising annually."

Recent Site Visitors....

Climate cheat sheet for the presidential debate

WUWT
"With the first presidential debate this Wednesday, and since both candidates have made recent high profile references to climate change and its impacts, perhaps this is a good time to review some basic climate change talking points that each candidates should have at his disposal."

Monday 1 October 2012

Environmentalism's bum steers

Quadrant Online (Australia)
The dictionary definition of sacred cow is — n informal a person, institution, custom, etc., unreasonably held to be beyond criticism. Ill-founded beliefs which would fail to pass critical examination are prone to seek shelter as sacred cows. The quasi-religious movement known as environmentalism maintains a virtual herd of such beasts in the lush pastures of their delusions."
..."The future of environmentalism
"All over the Western World economies are in trouble with productive activity struggling under a growing burden of bloated government and stifling bureaucracy for which environmentalism has provided a major impetus. In developing nations it has been estimated that as many as 30 million native people have been driven into landless poverty as conservation refugees. In the US, UK, Germany and Australia power grids are approaching the threshold of major blackouts as a consequence of decades long failure to invest in new capacity because of uncertainty and barriers imposed by environmental regulations. Meanwhile hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted on costly, inefficient and unreliable wind and solar farms which produce only trivial amounts of power and no measurable reduction in CO2 emissions. ...."

Ice Now Melts At Minus Ten Degrees

Real Science
"Alarmists continue to ignore the current record polar sea ice extent in Antarctica, and double their stupidity with claims that Arctic ice is melting. Temperatures around the Arctic “ice cap” are well below freezing, and new ice is forming very quickly. How is the ice melting at -10C? Idiotic comments about Arctic melt are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how sea ice works. Arctic ice comes and goes every year. All of the ice melts sooner or later, and gets replaced by new ice. That is why the ice is never much more than five years old."