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 28 June 2014

Met Office model is sunk by its own data

Christopher Booker, Telegraph
We are familiar with how consistently the Met Office has, in recent years, been getting its seasonal and medium-term weather forecasts so spectacularly wrong. We recall that soaking “barbecue summer” of 2009; their “warmer than average” December 2010, which turned out to be the coldest on record; last year’s “drier than average winter”, which led to the wettest January ever; and many more....... 
One reason this is significant, as I noted last year, is that it yet again confirms how seriously the Hadley Centre’s forecasting strategy has been skewed – by the way its computer models are programmed to assume that a steady rise in CO2 levels must inevitably lead to rising temperatures. This is the core reason why it has been getting all those forecasts of “hotter summers” and “drier winters” so dismally wrong.
A second point of concern is that the same unquestioned assumption has been allowed damagingly to reshape the energy policy of so many governments, above all our own. Yet, such is the power of group-think, not one of our leading politicians, from Barack (“the science is settled”) Obama down, has had the independence of mind to question that flawed assumption.
A third lesson that might emerge from this is that we should recognise that the Met Office’s blind acceptance of this scientific error has – in view of the disastrous influence it exerts on public policy – become a national scandal. In that popular buzz-phrase, the Met Office, for which we pay £200 million a year, has shown itself to be “not fit for purpose”. Yet never, by politicians or even the media, has there been any proper attempt to call it to account."

Rigged ‘science’

Washington Times
The “Steven Goddard Real Science” blog compares the raw U.S. temperature records from the Energy Department’s United States Historical Climatology Network to the “final” processed figures, to demonstrate how the historical data have been “corrected,” using computer modeling.
The modifications made to the past temperature record had the effect of cooling the 20th century, which makes temperatures over the last 14 years appear much warmer by comparison. Such changes don’t square with history, which shows the decade of the 1930s the hottest on record. The Dust Bowl storms were so severe they sent clouds of debris from Texas and Oklahoma to the East Coast, even darkening the skies over the U.S. Capitol one day in 1934. .................
With the global warming scam unraveling before his very eyes, President Obama and his administration want action now. “The question is not whether we need to act,” says Mr. Obama. “The overwhelming judgment of science, accumulated and measured and reviewed over decades, has put that question to rest. The question is whether we have the will to act before it’s too late.”
Too late for what? The planetary thermometer hasn’t budged in 15 years. Wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes and other “extreme” weather events are at normal or below-normal levels. Pacific islands aren’t submerged. There’s so much ice the polar bears are celebrating.
Opinion polls show the public figured out that global warming was all hype years ago, but the judges still haven’t heard the news. The usually unflappable Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the Monday opinion, joined by the four liberal justices and assorted conservatives who agreed only in part, and disagreed in other parts of the opinion. The high court justices missed an opportunity to reverse the EPA premise that all humans are “polluters” because they exhale. It’s not supposed to be easy to dupe a judge, but the global warming scientists have done it."

Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas

NALOPKT
As most will be aware, Steve Goddard has been running a series of posts about the large and unexplained adjustments being made to the US temperature record by NOAA. ......
In other words, the adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013. Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C. So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming.
Note as well, that the largest adjustments are for the estimated months of March – December. This is something that Steve Goddard has been emphasising.  ........"

Skeptical of skeptics: is Steve Goddard right?

Judith Curry
Last week, the mainstream media was abuzz with claims by skeptical blogger Steve Goddard that NOAA and NASA have dramatically altered the US temperature record.  For examples of MSM coverage, see:

OK, acknowledging that Goddard made some analysis errors, I am still left with some uneasiness about the actual data, and why it keeps changing.  For example, Jennifer Marohasy has been writing about Corrupting Australian’s temperature record.
In the midst of preparing this blog post, I received an email from Anthony Watts, suggesting that I hold off on my post since there is some breaking news.  Watts pointed me to a post  by Paul Homewood entitled Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas.  "

The scientific method is at work on the USHCN temperature data set

WUWT
I’m talking about the claim made by Steve Goddard that 40% of the USHCN data is “fabricated”. which I and few other people thought was clearly wrong.  ........All of that added up to a big heap of confirmation bias, I was so used to Goddard being wrong, I expected it again, but this time Steve Goddard was right and my confirmation bias prevented me from seeing that there was in fact a real issue in the data and that NCDC has dead stations that are reporting data that isn’t real: mea culpa."

Friday 27 June 2014

The Greatest Climate Myths of All – Part 2.

WUWT
Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
In part one, I wrote “In the simplest of terms, every study that has attributed the recent warming of the 1980s and 90s to rising CO2 has been based on the difference between their models’ reconstruction of “natural climate change” with their models’ output of “natural climate change plus CO2.” However the persistent failure of their models to reproduce how “natural climate changed before,” means any attribution of warming due to CO2 is at best unreliable and at worse a graphic fairy tale.”

Like failed modeling results illustrated in Part 1, scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit published Attribution Of Polar Warming To Human Influence1. Again their models failed to account for the heat during Arctic’s earlier natural warming (black line), a warming climate scientists called “the most spectacular event of the century”. Their “natural models” grossly underestimated the 40s peak warming by ~0.8° C (blue line) and when CO2 and sulfates were added the warming event was cooled further (red line). So how much do we trust models’ attribution when they get climate change half wrong?  ...."

Eighty Years Ago, Eighty Percent Of The US Was In Drought

Real Science
People who say that droughts are getting worse, have absolutely no clue what they are talking about."

Daily Mail Compares Obama’s Climate Propaganda Vs. Real Science

Real Science
No doubt I will get an invitation to the White House to discuss this with the most transparent pro-science president in history."

--------------------------
Who Is Steven Goddard?


Obama mocks GOP global warming skeptics and says they 'pretend' they 'can't read' – but ignores new claims that the US has been COOLING since the 1930s

Daily Mail
  • The president spoke to a partisan audience of environmental activists on Wednesday night in Washington
  • He claimed GOP lawmakers believe global warming is real but won't admit it because they're afraid of 'a bunch fringe elements' in their own party
  • 'They ducked the question and said "Hey, I'm not a scientist",' Obama joked
  • Obama ignored new evidence that American scientists have been altering climate data for years
  • The US Historical Climatology Network has been adjusting its records by replacing temperatures with data fabricated by computer models

  • Monday 23 June 2014

    How much global warming is just fiddled data?

    Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
    Steven Goddard:

    Prior to the year 2000, NASA showed US temperatures cooling since the 1930?s, and 1934 much warmer than 1998…
    Right after the year 2000, NASA and NOAA dramatically altered US climate history, making the past much colder and the present much warmer. The [graphs] below shows how NASA cooled 1934 and warmed 1998, to make 1998 the hottest year in US history instead of 1934. This alteration turned a long term cooling trend since 1930 into a warming trend.
     


    Steven Goddard again:
    I’ve shown how NASA and NOAA have dramatically altered the US temperature record, and they are doing the same thing in other countries, like Iceland and Australia – almost always cooling the past, which creates the appearance of warming.

    Jennifer Marohasy:


    I’ve since come to understand that the annual average temperature for 2013, which the Bureau claimed was a record, is in fact a wholly contrived valued based on modeling of temperatures, rather than the averaging of actual recorded values."

    Using Thermometer Data Is Now Considering Data Tampering

    Real Science
    I have been accused several times in the last 24 hours of data tampering and cherry picking, because I use the the entire unaltered, measured HCN data set.
    Only altered, fabricated data which reverses the measured US cooling trend is considered acceptable by climate alarmists."

    Scientists at two of the world’s leading climate centres - NASA and NOAA - have been caught out manipulating temperature data to overstate the extent of the 20th century "global warming".

    Breitbart

    Scientists at two of the world’s leading climate centres - NASA and NOAA - have been caught out manipulating temperature data to overstate the extent of the 20th century "global warming".

    The evidence of their tinkering can clearly be seen at Real Science, where blogger Steven Goddard has posted a series of graphs which show "climate change" before and after the adjustments.
    When the raw data is used, there is little if any evidence of global warming and some evidence of global cooling. However, once the data has been adjusted - ie fabricated by computer models -  20th century 'global warming' suddenly looks much more dramatic.
    This is especially noticeable on the US temperature records. Before 2000, it was generally accepted - even by climate activists like NASA's James Hansen - that the hottest decade in the US was the 1930s.

    Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog

    Project Syndicate
    " If the world is to solve the climate-change crisis, we will need a new approach. Currently, the major powers view climate change as a negotiation over who will reduce their CO2 emissions ........Second, “decarbonizing” the energy system is technologically complicated.  ........Decarbonizing the world’s energy system requires preventing our production of vast and growing amounts of electricity from boosting atmospheric CO2 emissions. .......Fighting climate change does depend on all countries having confidence that their competitors will follow suit. "

    Oh dear.....

    PS: "Even if you pile crazy assumption upon crazy assumption, you cannot even manage to make climate change cause minor damage" (Matt Ridley, Financial  Post)

    Saturday 21 June 2014

    Did Newsweek Really Claim Antarctic Sea Ice Is Melting?

    The Federalist
    Antarctic sea ice is undergoing dramatic long-term expansion despite a Newsweek article this week claiming the opposite. Newsweek’s false claim continues a long track record of global warming alarmists inventing false narratives to deceive the public on climate change.  ........The lesson to be learned from Newsweek’s Antarctic sea ice shenanigans is global warming alarmists continue to believe truthfulness can and must be sacrificed to advance their “greater goal” of global warming activism. It is no wonder the public no longer pays attention to their unending litany of alarmist propaganda."

    EPICA Ice Core Analysis: Nowhere Do We See Temperature Lagging CO2

    NoTricksZone
    Nowhere here do we see any indication that CO2 is driving temperature. "

    The Rage of the Climate Central Planners

    Jeffery Tucker
    I have no interest in taking on the science of climatology but every time I’ve looked into this in depth, I’ve found that the consensus is far more loose than people like Krugman would suggest. Real scientists do not have the intensity of certainty that the politicians and pundits demand they have.
    Discerning cause and effect, cost and benefit, problem and solution, in a field that touches on the whole of the social and natural science — come on. We are kidding ourselves if we think there is just one way to look at this.
    If you want tolerance and humility, and a willingness to defer to the evidence and gradual process of scientific discovery, you will find it among those who have no desire to manage the world from the top down.
    What can we say about those who want to empower a global coterie of elites to make the decision about what technologies we can use and how much under the guise of controlling something so gigantically amorphous and difficult to measure, detect, and precisely manage as earth’s surface temperature?
    This is a level of chutzpah that surpasses the wildest fantasies of any socialist planner.
    Even without knowing anything of the literature, without having read any of the best science on the topic, anyone with knowledge of the politics of science and the politics of public policy can know this much: this is not going to end well.
    And perhaps this explains the incredible intolerance, belligerance, and stunning dogmatism of those who are demanding we shut down the free market in order to accommodate their wishes.
    They really can’t allow a debate, because they will certainly and absolutely and rightly lose.
    When that is certain, the only way forward is to rage.
    Which is precisely what I expect to happen in the wake of what I’ve just written."

    Junk Science Week: IPCC commissioned models to see if global warming would reach dangerous levels this century. Consensus is ‘no’

    Financial Post
    Even if you pile crazy assumption upon crazy assumption, you cannot even manage to make climate change cause minor damage

    The debate over climate change is horribly polarized. From the way it is conducted, you would think that only two positions are possible: that the whole thing is a hoax or that catastrophe is inevitable. In fact there is room for lots of intermediate positions, including the view I hold, which is that man-made climate change is real but not likely to do much harm, let alone prove to be the greatest crisis facing humankind this century.
    After more than 25 years reporting and commenting on this topic for various media organizations, and having started out alarmed, that’s where I have ended up. But it is not just I that hold this view. I share it with a very large international organization, sponsored by the United Nations and supported by virtually all the world’s governments: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself.
    The IPCC commissioned four different models of what might happen to the world economy, society and technology in the 21st century and what each would mean for the climate, given a certain assumption about the atmosphere’s “sensitivity” to carbon dioxide. Three of the models show a moderate, slow and mild warming, the hottest of which leaves the planet just 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than today in 2081-2100. The coolest comes out just 0.8 degrees warmer.
    Now two degrees is the threshold at which warming starts to turn dangerous, according to the scientific consensus. That is to say, in three of the four scenarios considered by the IPCC, by the time my children’s children are elderly, the earth will still not have experienced any harmful warming, let alone catastrophe."

    Gavin Getting His New Job Done

    Real Science
    Gavin has jumped into his new job at GISS of generating fake global warming data for the White House, and has made May the warmest on record globally. Never mind that May, 2014 was an average month, much cooler than 1998 and 2010 – and May temperatures have actually been in decline for 16 years. That isn’t what the boss wants to see.   ..........GISS May temperatures are diverging from RSS at a phenomenal 2.1ºC per century. "

    The scandal of fiddled global warming data

    Christopher Booker, Telegraph
    When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
    Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century."

    CO2 Good; Climate Change Bunk; Greens are Raging Extremists, says Greenpeace Co-Founder

    James Delingpole, Brietbart
    Patrick Moore, a Canadian environmentalist who helped found Greenpeace in the Seventies but subsequently left in protest at its increasingly extreme, anti-scientific, anti-capitalist stance, argues that the green position on climate change fails the most basic principles of the scientific method.
    "The certainty among many scientists that humans are the main cause of climate change, including global warming, is not based on the replication of observable events. It is based on just two things, the theoretical effect of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, predominantly carbon dioxide, and the predictions of computer models using those theoretical calculations. There is no scientific "proof" at all."
     Moore goes on to list some key facts about "climate change" which are ignored by true believers.
    1. The concentration of CO2 in the global atmosphere is lower today, even including human emissions, than it has been during most of the existence of life on Earth.
    2. The global climate has been much warmer than it is today during most of the existence of life on Earth. Today we are in an interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age that began 2.5 million years ago and has not ended.
    3. There was an Ice Age 450 million years ago when CO2 was about 10 times higher than it is today.
    4. Humans evolved in the tropics near the equator. We are a tropical species and can only survive in colder climates due to fire, clothing and shelter.
    5. CO2 is the most important food for all life on earth. All green plants use CO2 to produce the sugars that provide energy for their growth and our growth. Without CO2 in the atmosphere carbon-based life could never have evolved.
    6. The optimum CO2 level for most plants is about 1600 parts per million, four times higher than the level today. This is why greenhouse growers purposely inject the CO2-rich exhaust from their gas and wood-fired heaters into the greenhouse, resulting in a 40-80 per cent increase in growth.
    7. If human emissions of CO2 do end up causing significant warming (which is not certain) it may be possible to grow food crops in northern Canada and Russia, vast areas that are now too cold for agriculture.
    8. Whether increased CO2 levels cause significant warming or not, the increased CO2 levels themselves will result in considerable increases in the growth rate of plants, including our food crops and forests.
    9. There has been no further global warming for nearly 18 years during which time about 25 per cent of all the CO2 ever emitted by humans has been added to the atmosphere. How long will it remain flat and will it next go up or back down? Now we are out of the realm of facts and back into the game of predictions.

    The Washington Post verifies ‘the pause’ in global warming

    WUWT
    Jason Samenow sends word of a new article in WaPo that does some of the same sort of surface temperature analyses we see right here on WUWT. Seeing what a good job Matt Rogers did in his defense against claims of cherry picking, statistical significance woes, and Trenberthian masking, it made me wonder; “How long before he gets called into the chief editors office at WaPo and reassigned to be the correspondent covering Botswana?”

    Yes, there is a pause, and the Washington Post now admits it. UPDATE: But not Obama

    Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)

    The US Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works held a hearing this week on global warming and invited as witnesses four former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency. Senator Jeff Sessions asks:

    The President on November 14th 2012 said, ‘The temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted, even ten years ago.’ And then on May 29th last year he also said - quote - ‘We also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or ten years ago.’
    So I would ask each of our former Administrators if any of you agree that that’s an accurate statement on the climate. So if you do, raise your hand.

    Monday 16 June 2014

    Tampering With Long Term Climate History

    Real Science
    I normally focus on NASA and NOAA altering the temperature record of the past 150 years, but once in a while it is a good idea to remember that the same alteration is being committed with the long term temperature record too. As of 1990, the IPCC showed that the MWP was much warmer than the 20th century.   .......But facts don’t matter in modern climate science. It is about keeping politicians like Barack Obama happy, so after the year 2000 they simply erased the MWP and created the hockey stick."

    On entering the climate arena

    Bishop Hill
    These findings were presented at a small conference at one of the major learned societies. You must remember that I am not a climatologist or bona fide weather expert, and approached this topic from a purely statistical point of view. I mentioned that according to the proxy record the temperature was considerably lower that it has been and that it is decreasing. I then proceeded to comment on the lag between temperature and carbon dioxide and explained that it seemed 'incorrect' to blame temperature rises on CO2 when clearly the CO2 rises lag temperature increases, also noting that you can't really develop a mathematical time-dependent model that allows CO2 to force temperature rise, when the temperature has stopped rising up to 1000 years prior to the CO2 rising. There must be something 'missing' that we don't understand.   ...."

    Another example of ‘team science’ suppression

    WUWT
    Over the past decade, we have seen many examples of what would be categorized as” team science” when it comes to suppressing ideas that are considered inconvenient or contrary to belief systems in climate science. Over at the blog Bishop Hill, one such example was illustrated today by an academic who describes himself as a statistician, who attracted the attention of “team science” by simply doing a straightforward and honest statistical analysis on ice core data.
    He and his students did an analysis on Vostok ice core data, eliminated noise and seasonal variation, did the usual tests for statistical significance, noted what they had discovered and presented it to”a noted society”. The response of the society was shocking to say the least, so much so that this statistician considered leaving academia. Here are some excerpts: ......"

    Sunday 15 June 2014

    The Debate is finally over on “Global Warming” - Because Alarmists Won't Debate

    The Hockey Schtick

    Fired for ‘Diverging’ on Climate: Progressive Professor’s fellowship ‘terminated’ after WSJ OpEd calling global warming ‘unproved science’
    Fired for ‘Diverging’ on Climate: Progressive Professor Dr. Caleb Rossiter's fellowship ‘terminated’ after WSJ OpEd calling global warming ‘unproved science

    I don’t want go raving around, making absurd statements like President Obama, UN Secretary General Ban, or World Bank President Kim.  Obama has long been delusional on this issue, speaking of a coming catastrophe and seeing himself as King Canute, stopping the rise in sea-level.  But he really went off the chain in his state of the union address this year.  “For the sake of our children and our future” he issued an appeal to authority with no authority behind it: 

    We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it's too late."

    There is no judgment of science, overwhelming or other, that human-induced warming has led to any of the events cited.  In fact, there is little conclusive science on the causes of these extreme events at all, except to say that like their predecessors at earlier times in recorded history, they require rare coincidences in many weather building blocks and are unpredictable.

    Then Obama pulled out the IPCC’s illogical last refuge, the hoary claim that “the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15.”  That record started in 1860, when a 150-year warming began that even the IPCC concedes had nothing to do with industrial emissions in its first 75 years.  At the high point of a warming period you will of course have a concentration of high years!  And of course this trivial claim says nothing about the cause of the warming, or the temperature in previous warm periods, of which we would probably find quite a few since the end of the Ice Age 15,000 years ago, if we had always had today’s measuring devices.  (A 100,000 year oscillation in our orbit of the Sun from perfect circle to five percent elliptical drives temperatures up and down on the order of 20 degrees, and we happen to be at the high end right now.)  

    Ban, in a speech on the “Threat of Climate Catastrophe,” recently warned that “if we continue along the current path, we are close to a 6 degree increase.  You all know the potential consequences:  a downward global spiral of extreme weather and disaster; reversals in development gains; increases in displacement; aggravated tensions over water and land; fragile States tipping into chaos.”  Actually, the IPCC’s models, which are fundamentally mathematical data-fitting exercises with little real-life scientific basis, predict a 4 degree rise at most over 100 years, but actual temperatures have been running at about one-third of that rate in the 30 years since the models first made that prediction.  

    Kim tells us: “If we do not act to curb climate change immediately we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planet.”  That’s sort of like the CRU’s David Viner saying in 2000, a decade before two winters of dramatic snowfall on England’s green and pleasant land: “Children just aren't going to know what snow is.”  Acting for children is definitely a big theme here: an analyst at a left-leaning think-tank wrote about yelling out the names of Obama’s children when subjecting herself to arrest as part of a campaign to block the Keystone oil pipeline.  Fortunately the World Bank has not followed another hip American campaign and tried to reduce today’s 400 parts of carbon dioxide per million in the atmosphere to 350, which would require an end to all industry on earth for 100 years.  The Bank still funds power plants based on coal and gas.  Coal is an inexpensive African resource that can be scrubbed with modern technology to eliminate the real pollution, which is not carbon dioxide but sulfur dioxide, and gas has nearly no dangerous residue when burned.  ...."

    Obama Flunks his Climate Science 101 at University of California, Irvine

    James Delingpole, Breitbart

    Denying climate change is like saying the moon is made of cheese, President Obama has said in his latest attempt to persuade an unconvinced world that "global warming" is the most urgent crisis of our time.

    Obama was speaking to a crowd of around 30,000 at a commencement ceremony at the University of California, Irvine. Justifying the extravagance of his metaphor he said: "I want to tell you this to light a fire under you."
    Here are some lines from his speech which explain why those present would be better off ignoring their pyromaniacal president's entreaties. ..."

    Exposed: The Horrific Cost and Utter Pointlessness of Obama's War on Carbon Dioxide

    James Delingpole, Breitbart

    Here is the Obama administration's green strategy reduced to one damning equation.

    19 million jobs lost plus $4.335 trillion spent = a reduction in global mean temperature of 0.018 degrees C.
    Yes. Horrifying but true. These are the costs to the US economy, by 2100, of the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory war on carbon dioxide, whereby all states must reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity generating plants by 30 per cent below 2005 levels. ....."

    Caleb S. Rossiter Fallout: Academics Worldwide Condemn “Dark Age” Intellect Of Institute For Policy Studies

    NoTricksZone
    There’s plenty of controversy swirling around the fellowship termination of Caleb S. Rossiter, adjunct professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics and School of International Service, American University. Read the background here at Climate Depot.
    The stated mission of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is to put “ideas into action for peace, justice, and the environment“. These are noble aims, but can be achieved only by finding good solutions, solutions that can be reached only through open, honest discussion.
    I was interested in getting reaction from other leading scientists, journalists and academics on the matter, and so I sent e-mails asking them to comment. Much to my satisfaction, most of them replied. Their comments on the Rossiter fellowship termination follow. ....."

    Obama and the abusive analogy

    Bishop Hill
    I would have thought that someone who was trying to deal with an existential crisis would have been moving heaven and earth to unite people rather than divide them. Using fallacy - and abusive fallacy to boot - makes him look more like someone who sees global warming as a useful wedge issue than someone who really thinks he is trying to save the planet."

    Overwhelming Majority Of Scientists Who Make Their Living Off Global Warming Research – Prefer To Keep Their Funding

    Real Science
    “I’m not a scientist either,” Mr. Obama told this young audience, “but we’ve got some good ones at NASA. I do know the overwhelming majority of scientists who work on climate change, including some who once disputed the data, have put the debate to rest.”
    At Commencement, Obama Mocks Lawmakers Who Deny Climate Change – NYTimes.com
    What the president is saying is that he is making up statistics about a group of people he doesn’t know much about, and that he understands those people generally keep their mouth shut because they like to keep their funding and job – and avoid McCarthyite attacks like Richard Tol and others have faced.

    Denying climate change is like saying the moon is made of cheese, argues Obama as he takes on global warming deniers at commencement speech

    Daily Mail
    • Obama gave the commencement address at UC Irvine on Saturday
    • He says Congress is 'full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence' of climate change
    • While in Orange County, the president also attended a closed-door fundraiser at the Laguna Beach home of Getty oil heiress Anne Earhart
    ---------------------------------------------------
    From The Comments:
    What an idiot...no one is denying climate change, it's been around since the beginning of time, we are just denying global warming or whatever else you like to call it these day just to tax the people until the pips squeak. It's a massive con and you are part of that con. Just go away Obama...no one is listening to the illegal in the White House any more.
    ---------------
    It's as if Climategate never happened. Stop the insanity, you controlling progressives.
    ---------------
    I'm probably not a "denier" since weather changes all the time, however, I am old enough to remember that in the 1970's we were all going to "freeze to death in the dark". And, anyone who disputed that era's "science" was booed off the stage. 
    ---------------
    Denying climate change is like saying the moon is made of cheese, argues Obama as he takes on global warming deniers at commencement speech ~~~~~~> Ah the anti-science liberal Democrats, no significant warming in 17.5 years and they're still demanding massive new taxes and regulations to fight the non existent warming.

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

    The man is a plank, we all know there is climate change its been happening for billions of years and will go on changing long after the human race has burnt itself out. What most intelligent people now realise is that we are being lied to about the cause of climate change for the benefit of global taxation.






    Saturday 14 June 2014

    Michael Mann's six new lies

    The Reference Frame
    BillMoyers.com interviewed the world's most notorious fraudulent climate fearmonger Michael Mann about

    Six Things Michael Mann Wants You to Know About the Science of Global Warming.
    Well, they mostly spoke in such a way that Michael Mann preached and BillMoyers.com obediently listened so I shouldn't have called it an interview.

    His text is rather incredible. As Roger Pielke Jr observed five years ago, if Michael Mann did not exist, the skeptics would have to invent him.

    According to Mann's latest tirade, everyone would be a fearmonger and a demagogue like himself if the public became more familiar with six propositions – various would-be facts and ideas. What are they? Are they true?

    New study suggests a temperature drop of up to 1°C by 2020 due to low solar activity

    WUWT
    From the HockeySchtick:  A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics finds long solar cycles predict lower temperatures during the following solar cycle. A lag of 11 years [the average solar cycle length] is found to provide maximum correlation between solar cycle length and temperature. On the basis of the long sunspot cycle of the last solar cycle 23, the authors predict an average temperature decrease of 1C over the current solar cycle 24 from 2009-2020 for certain locations."

    Geoscientist explains why man-made CO2 is not the driver of global warming

    The Hockey Schtick
    Dr. Ole Humlum, Professor of Geosciences at the University of Oslo, has published a summary and reply to comments on his groundbreaking paper demonstrating why man-made CO2 is not the driver of global warming. Dr. Humlum summarizes the main findings of his paper at a Norwegian website for geologists:

    Shining a light on the true cost of our energy

    Christopher Booker, Telegraph
    More than once last year I explained why Ofgem, the National Grid and our Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey were so confident that, despite the continued closure of proper power stations and the ever-growing number of unreliable wind farms, they will still be able to keep our lights on.
    Their solution, although they were remarkably reluctant to shout about it, lies in what they call the “demand-side balancing reserve”: in other words, paying colossal sums to firms either to reduce their electricity use or to call on thousands of diesel generators.
    The firms rushing to cash in on this bonanza are much more open about how this is intended to make up for the unreliability of those useless wind farms.
    At least, last week, Mr Davey did slip in a reference to it in a speech on Britain’s energy future. The way the lights would stay on, he coyly admitted, would be by “rewarding volunteer businesses” either to “reduce their use of National Grid-supplied electricity” or “by switching to on-site generation rather than relying on the grid”.
    Those fossil fuels really are extremely useful, so long as you don’t shout about it – or admit how much it is costing."

    Friday 13 June 2014

    The lowdown on Obama’s climate change policy


    If you were to believe the ABC or Fairfax, Obama is introducing the world’s best climate change policy which somehow puts Australia to shame.  Sure.
    The truth is very different.  Having been thwarted in his attempt at introducing an ETS, including by plenty of Democrats in Congress, Obama has opted for the extremely inefficient approach of regulation – in other words, direct action.
    And if you listen too much to the head of the EPA, you would believe you were in church listening to a sermon being delivered by a Baptist preacher rather than a serious regulator."

    More climate McCarthyism

    Bishop Hill
    Climate Depot reports another sad case of climate McCarthyism, this time from the USA:
    Dr. Caleb Rossiter was “terminated” via email as an “Associate Fellow” from the progressive group Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), following his May 4th, 2014 Wall Street Journal OpEd titled “Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change,” in which he called man-made global warming an “unproved science.” Rossiter also championed the expansion of carbon based energy in Africa.  Dr.  Rossiter is an adjunct professor at American University. Rossiter holds a PhD in policy analysis and a masters degree in mathematics."

    Professor’s fellowship terminated for speaking out on global warming in the Wall Street Journal

    WUWT
    From Climate Depot: Fired for ‘Diverging’ on Climate: Progressive Professor’s fellowship ‘terminated’ after WSJ OpEd calling global warming ‘unproved science’
    Professor’s fellowship ‘terminated’ after WSJ OpEd declaring ‘the left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false’. Prof. Caleb Rossiter: ‘Just two days after I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for Africa to be allowed the ‘all of the above’ energy strategy we have in the U.S., the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) terminated my 23-year relationship with them…because my analysis and theirs ‘diverge.’
    IPS email of ‘termination’ to Rossiter: ‘We would like to inform you that we are terminating your position as an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies…Unfortunately, we now feel that your views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of U.S. policy to Africa, diverge so significantly from ours’

    It’s climate apostasy again: Institute for Policy Studies terminates skeptic who cares about Africans more than climate modelers

    JoNova (Australia)
    No dissent over any point allowed. There shall be no other God than Carbon Reduction and the holy climate models!
    The religious climate cult followers have shunned a long term member for the sin of saying the unthinkable. Caleb Rossiter, masters in Mathematics, was a fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies for 23 years until last month when he wrote  these heinous lines in the Wall St Journal:
    I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.”
    Furthermore, he out-greened the greens by actually caring about life expectancy of Africans. ....."

    Thursday 12 June 2014

    Public Suffering ‘Apocalypse Fatigue’ From Climate ‘Cultists’ – EPA’s ‘symbolic’ regs: ‘There is no claim that the [EPA] regulations will affect climate change’

    Climate Depot
     Steven F. Hayward of The Weekly Standard: 'Environmentalists surely hope that once the EPA’s authority is firmly established and the regulations are up and running, a 30 percent reduction can be ratcheted up to 50 percent, then 75 percent, and so forth, reaching 100 percent at some point—all on the authority of the EPA alone. Congress can be completely bypassed.' 


    There is no claim that the regulations will affect climate change. If anyone bothers to run full compliance with the new regulations through one of the computer climate models, the temperature difference in the year 2100 would be perhaps .02 degrees Celsius. It would be novel if a reporter had the wit to ask the White House how much warming will be prevented in the year 2100 by the full implementation of the new EPA policy, and then sit back and enjoy the tap dancing."

    EPA leaves out the most vital number in their fact sheet

    WUWT
    The EPA highlighted what the plan would achieve in their “By the Numbers” Fact Sheet that accompanied their big announcement.
    For some reason, they left off their Fact Sheet how much climate change would be averted by the plan. Seems like a strange omission since, after all, without the threat of climate change, there would be no one thinking about the forced abridgement of our primary source of power production in the first place, and the Administration’s new emissions restriction scheme wouldn’t even be a gleam in this or any other president’s eye.
    But no worries.  What the EPA left out, we’ll fill in.
    Using a simple, publically-available, climate model emulator called MAGICC that was in part developed through support of the EPA, we ran the numbers as to how much future temperature rise would be averted by a complete adoption and adherence to the EPA’s new carbon dioxide restrictions*.
    The answer? Less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius by the year 2100.
    0.018°C to be exact.
    We’re not even sure how to put such a small number into practical terms, because, basically, the number is so small as to be undetectable.
    Which, no doubt, is why it’s not included in the EPA Fact Sheet."

    The temperature forecasting track record of the IPCC

    WUWT
    Concluding comments
    • To achieve alignment of the HadCRUT4 reality with the IPCC models the following temperature corrections need to be applied: 1990 +0.5; 2001 -0.6; 2007 +0.6; 2014 -0.3. I cannot think of any good reason to continuously change the temperature datum other than to create a barrier to auditing the model results.
    • Comparing models with reality is severely hampered by the poor practice adopted by the IPCC in data presentation. Back in 1990 it was done the correct way. That is all models were initiated in 1850 and used the same CO2 emissions trajectories. The variations in model output are consequently controlled by physical parameters like climate sensitivity and with the 164 years that have past since 1850 it is straight forward to select the models that provide the best match with reality. In 1990, it was quite clear that it was the “Low Model” that was best almost certainly pointing to a low climate sensitivity.
    • There is no good scientific reason for the IPCC not adopting today the correct approach adopted in 1990 other than to obscure the fact that the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 is likely much less than 1.5˚C based on my and others’ assertion that a component of the Twentieth Century warming is natural.
    • Back in 1990, the IPCC view on climate sensitivity was a range from 1.5 to 4.5˚C. In 2014 the IPCC view on climate sensitivity is a range from 1.5 to 4.5˚C. 24 years have past and billions of dollars spent and absolutely nothing has been learned! The wool has been pulled over the eyes of policy makers, governments and the public to the extent of total brain washing. Trillions of dollars have been misallocated on energy infrastructure that will ultimately lead to widespread misery among millions.
    • In the UK, if a commercial research organisation were found cooking research results in order to make money with no regard for public safety they would find the authorities knocking at their door."

    Wednesday 11 June 2014

    Australian BOM “neutral” adjustments increase minima trends up 60%

    JoNova(Australia)
    Billions of dollars, climate models, predictions, and hundreds of press releases depend on the BOM records of Australian temperatures. There were so many inconsistencies, inexplicable adjustments and errors that we put in a Senate request for the ANAO to audit the records. In response, to dodge the audit, the BOM dumped its HQ (“high quality”) dataset entirely, and established a new “best practise” ACORN dataset.
    Independent volunteer auditors have been going through the ACORN records — thanks especially to Ken Stewart who is publishing his findings on his site as he works through the set. He’s analyzed 84 out of  104 sites, and finds that ACORN is just as bad as the HQ set. At Kenskingdom he shows that so far, the adjustments used to create the official Australian temperature record increase the warming trend by13% for maxima and a whopping 66% for minima. (Note the caveats in the conclusions below.)
    The raw Australian data suggest the nation warmed by 0.6 °C over the last century. The BOM adjustments lift that to 1.05 °C."

    The US Hurricane Drought in USA Today

    Roger Pielke's Blog
    The main point of the piece is that we shouldn't let the past 9 years of abnormally low hurricane activity lull us into a sense of complacency.  It is only a matter of time before the long streak with no US Cat 3+ and Florida hurricanes is broken."

    CO2 won’t produce famine

    Climate Change Dispatch
    In a March opinion piece in the New York Times (“Lessons from the Little Ice Age”), historian Geoffrey Parker—author of Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century—suggests the desperate climate of the years 1600 to 1700 is a template for a collapse of civilization in the twenty-first century. But there’s one massive flaw in his theory: The past cultural collapses have almost all occurred during “little ice ages,” not during our many global warmings.
    The seventeenth century was part of the 550-year Little Ice Age, the most recent of at least seven “little ice ages” that have befallen the planet since the last full Ice Age. Studying sediment deposits in the North Atlantic, Gerard Bond of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found such centuries-long little ice ages at 1300 AD, 600 AD, 800 BC, 2200 BC, 3900 BC, 7400 BC, 8300 BC, and perhaps at 9100 BC. These global Dansgaard-Oeschger disasters have arrived on a semi-regular basis some 600 times over the past million years.
    Each of these icy epochs blasted humanity with short, cold, cloudy growing seasons, untimely frosts, and extended drought along with heavy and violent rains. Naturally, crops failed. Cities full of people starved to death, repeatedly, with seven collapses in Mesopotamia, six each for Egypt and China, and two for Angkor Wat. The early cultures gave the illusion of continuity—the Nile and the Yangtze always had at least a little water to use for irrigation, for example. However, little ice age hunger and disease drove human and animal migrations across thousands of miles and over continents, leading to huge invasions such as that of the Huns in Europe’s Dark Ages, and the collapse of kingships and ruling dynasties around the globe. "

    Tuesday 10 June 2014

    Why Automatic Temperature Adjustments Don’t Work

    WUWT

    The automatic adjustment procedure is almost guaranteed to produce spurious, artificial warming, and here’s why.  ....."

    Great Moments In Climate Forecasting

    Real Science
    Ten climate forecasts which demonstrate that the world’s leading government climate experts have absolutely no clue what they are talking about."

    Antarctic Sea Ice Continues To Blow Away Records

    NALOPKT
    Antarctic sea ice has set a new record for May, with extent at the highest level since measurements began in 1979. At the end of the month, it expanded to 12.965 million sq km, beating the previous record of 12.722 million sq km set in 2010. This year’s figure is 10.3% above the 1981-2010 climatological average of 11.749 million sq km.
    The lowest extent on record was 10.208 million sq km in 1986."

    Australia And Canada Form Climate Realist Alliance

    GWPF
    But both leaders stressed that they won’t be pushed into taking steps on climate change they deem unwise.
    “It’s not that we don’t seek to deal with climate change,” said Harper. “But we seek to deal with it in a way that will protect and enhance our ability to create jobs and growth. Not destroy jobs and growth in our countries.”

    Anthony Kelly: Climate Policy And The Poor

    GWPF
    This paper aims to show that the measures currently being taken to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels are directly harming the poor, both in the developing and in the developed world."

    Giant Of Geology/Glaciology Christian Schlüchter Refutes CO2…Feature Interview Throws Climate Science Into Disarray

    NoTricksZone
    This post is about an interview by the online Swiss Der Bund here with Swiss geology giant Christian Schlüchter titled: “Our society is fundamentally dishonest“. In it he criticizes climate science for its extreme tunnel vision and political contamination."

    WAIS outlet glacier being melted by magma – not co2 global warming after all

    Tallbloke
    Phys.org finds a nice way of saying the doomsters have completely misunderstood the reason why the West Antarctic Ice Sheet outlet has been thinning. New research finds hotter than previously thought geothermal activity underneath the glacier. This means the animated model showing massive WAIS recession by 2350 Cabot Institute director Prof. Rich Pancost was scaring the punters with down at SPRI last week is junk science:
    Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it’s being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "

    Britain must join our combined front against 'unhealthy' action on climate change, says Australia PM

    Telegraph
    Tony Abbott pushes for “conservative alliance” between Britain, Australia, Canada and India to limit "unwise" climate change action and resist carbon pricing"


    Saturday 7 June 2014

    Richard Lindzen In Mannheim, Germany Portrays IPCC Climate Models As Fudged…Extreme Weather Claims “Pure Propaganda”

    NoTricksZone
    Overall Lindzen slams the IPCC models, claiming they act like they have everything all figured out, when in reality they do not. On ocean cycles and their important interaction with the atmosphere, Lindzen says at the 23.00 min. mark: “No models gets those things in a reasonable manner.”

    USHCN 2.5 – How Much Of The Data is Estimated?

    Sunshine Hours
    I’ve been dabbling in the USHCN data to see how much is Estimated and how much is Real. You can read more here.
    This is California (Nevada is there because of the shape of California) for the 12 months of 2013. The red stations (with name and elevation) are Estimated. The blue stations (no name to save space) are “real“.
    For just California December 2013, 18 out of 43 are Estimated. The Estimated stations average 8.12C and the “Real” stations average 7.02.     ..."
    Christopher Booker, Telegraph
    Scarcely noticed over here was a remarkable speech made the other day in Brussels by Professor Anne Glover, pictured, the chief scientific adviser to the European Commission. As reported on the Continent under the headline: “Twisting facts to fit the political agenda”, she launched into a trenchant attack on how the Commission routinely ignores scientific evidence when this contradicts some “political imperative” it has decided on for other reasons, such as pressure from lobby groups. On a whole range of issues, it has then hired reports from lavishly paid consultants to come up with the arguments it needs to support its political agenda."

    Why Climate Change Doesn’t Scare Me

    WUWT
    Despite the increasingly shrill insistence by climate alarmists that we face an imminent  catastrophe, reason and evidence continue to indicate otherwise. Both the theoretical understanding of anthropogenic global warming (a.k.a. climate change) and the empirical evidence remain highly uncertain, tainted by dubious claims and manipulations."

    Thursday 5 June 2014

    Unprecedented: Parts of Lake Superior covered in ice almost a week into June

    The Washington Post
    It first arrived in late November and refuses to go away.  It’s the ice on Lake Superior and  there’s never been so much this late in the year, in 40 years of records."

    EPA’s next wave of job-killing CO2 regulations

    WUWT
    The very term “carbon pollution” is deliberately disingenuous. The rules do not target carbon (aka soot). They target carbon dioxide. This is the gas that all humans and animals exhale. It makes life on Earth possible. It makes crops and other plants grow faster and better. As thousands of scientists emphasize, at just 0.04% of our atmosphere, CO2 plays only a minor role in climate change – especially compared to water vapor and the incredibly powerful solar, cosmic, oceanic and other natural forces that have caused warm periods, ice ages and little ice ages, and controlled climate and weather for countless millennia.
    The terrible disasters that the President and other climate alarmists attribute to fossil fuels, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are creatures of computer models that have gotten virtually no predictions correct. That should hardly be surprising. The models are based on faulty assumptions of every size and description, and are fed a steady diet of junk science and distorted data. We shouldn’t trust them any more than we would trust con artists who claim their computers can predict stock markets or Super Bowl and World Series winners – even one year in advance, much less 50 or 100 years.
    The models should absolutely not be trusted as the basis for regulations that will cripple our economy.
    Contrary to model predictions and White House assertions, average global temperatures have not risen in almost 18 years. It’s now been over eight years since a category 3-5 hurricane hit the United States – the longest such period in over a century. Tornadoes are at a multi-decade low. Droughts are no more intense or frequent than since 1900. There were fewer than half as many forest fires last year as during the 1960s and 1970s. Sea levels rose just eight inches over the last 130 years and are currently rising at barely seven inches per century. There’s still ice on Lake Superior – in June! Runaway global warming, indeed.
    This is not dangerous. It’s not because of humans. It does not justify what the White House is doing."

    Cook scores 97% for incompetence on a meaningless consensus

    JoNova (Australia)
    Abstract
    A claim has been that 97% of the scientific literature endorses anthropogenic climate change (Cook et al., 2013. Environ. Res. Lett. 8, 024024). This claim, frequently repeated in debates about climate policy, does not stand. A trend in composition is mistaken for a trend in endorsement. Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook׳s validation test shows that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results cannot be reproduced or tested."

    Wednesday 4 June 2014

    The pause continues – Still no global warming for 17 years 9 months

    WUWT
    According to the RSS satellite data, whose value for May 2014 has just been published, the global warming trend in the 17 years 9 months since September 1996 is zero (Fig. 1). The 213 months without global warming represent more than half the 425-month satellite data record since January 1979. No one now in high school has lived through global warming. ..."

    No Warming For 18 Years Has Convinced Climate Experts That CO2 Is Even More Dangerous Than Before

    Real Science
    CO2 has increased by 10% over the last 18 years, with no warming. This complete lack of correlation has convinced climate experts that CO2 is even more dangerous than they previously believed."

    Some Perspective on the US EPA Carbon (Dioxide) Regulations

    Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog

    The so-called climate benefits of the regulations are thus essentially nil, ......The US carbon regulations won't influence future extreme weather or its impacts in any detectable way. Hard to believe I felt compelled to write that."
    ED: I bracketed (Dioxide) in the title to remind everyone it is NOT 'Carbon'
    it is Carbon Dioxide

    Climatologist Dr. David Legates: "Droughts in the United States are more frequent and more intense during colder periods"

    The Hockey Schtick
    Dr. David Legates, Professor of Climatology, University of Delaware, has filed today his requested statement to the Environment and Public Works Committee of the US Senate. Dr. Legates finds 
    "My overall conclusion is that droughts in the United States are more frequent and more intense during colder periods. Thus, the historical record does not warrant a claim that global warming is likely to negatively impact agricultural activities." 
    "Given the limitations of the models not only in predicting global air temperatures but also in estimating precipitation and soil moisture conditions, it seems that a more reasonable approach is not to rely on the model prognostications; but rather, to focus on policies that allow for adaptation to the observed variability in precipitation and soil moisture. Droughts that have happened in the past are likely to occur again, and with likely similar frequencies and intensities; thus, preparation for their return is a better strategy than trying to mitigate them through draconian CO2 emission control policies."
    Dr. Legates concludes with his experiences with post-normal climate science, Climategate, the Mann hockey stick, and silencing of dissenters & Lysenkoism prevalent in climate science today.

    Climate science hopelessly politicized. Geological Society of Australia gives up on making any statement

    JoNova (Australia)
    So much for the consensus.  In 2012 The Geological Society of Australia (GSA) was one of the few associations to make a slightly skeptical position on climate. For poking their heads above the parapet they’ve had years of headache and debate, and finally have issued a statement saying they have given up entirely on putting out any statement. The debate is so furious and divisive that no position could be agreed on. (I wonder exactly how many of their members are fans of climate models? Was this the work of just a few zealous believers?) I think I’ve hardly ever met a geologist who wasn’t somewhat skeptical."

    AGU: Enforcing the consensus

    Judith Curry
    JC comments:  Without making a personal judgment regarding the merits of Asten’s proposal or the suitability of his article for Eos, there are two things here that greatly concern me.
    The first is that the AGU Policy Statement on Climate Change is being used as a rationale for editorial decisions in AGU publications.  My displeasure about the AGU policy statement on climate change is discussed in these two previous posts:
    The letter from the Editor to Asten realizes my worst fear about the AGU statement on climate change:  that it will be used as a basis for making editorial decisions to reject papers or to not even send them out for review.
    The second is this statement:  “I understand that you have a perspective that does not align with the consensus presented in AGU’s position statement.”   There is nothing in Asten’s submitted essay that is overtly ‘skeptical’; rather he is arguing that AGU needs to facilitate a broader spectrum of scholarship and dialogue on this topic.  However, if you google ‘Michael Asten’, he clearly shows up as a scientist that is skeptical of climate change.  It seems that the Editor of Eos also did the same googling, identified Asten as a skeptic, which motivated the content of the Editor’s letter.  So this was as much about the ‘person’ as about the content of Asten’s essay.
    And finally, this isn’t just some naive, rogue editor.  After all, the editor engaged in “thoughtful and lengthy consultation with colleagues and AGU staff”
    I received the initial email from Michael Asten about this on May 16.  With Asten’s permission, I forwarded his email to Peter Webster, who is President of the AGU Atmospheric Sciences Section and a member of the AGU Council.  He asked me to hold off on a blog post, while he tried to get the AGU to deal with this issue internally.  He sent emails to the AGU leadership, voicing his concerns about using the AGU policy statement as a basis for rejecting an article, and requesting permission to send an email to the Council voicing his concerns about AGU’s editorial policies in this regard.   He was denied permission to communicate with the Council regarding this issue, and was told that he had no standing to communicate with the Eos editor over this matter since he was not an author on the paper in question. (note Peter Webster gave me permission to report on this interaction with the AGU leadership).
    Apart from the extremely disturbing editorial process, the concerns raised in Asten’s essay are important ones – he is concerned that the scientific dialogue on climate change at the AGU is too narrow, and  about the impact of this on graduate students and young scientists.
    I am a member of the AGU, and am currently a member of the Fellows Committee that selects Fellows for the Atmospheric Sciences Section.  In the near term, I will remain a member of the AGU and I am highly supportive of Peter Webster’s efforts to work within the organization to effect change.  But I am increasingly conflicted about my membership in the AGU, with its irresponsible advocacy that is compromising its own core values."

    Monday 2 June 2014

    EPA's carbon planning emulates communism

    The Reference Frame
    The word "pollution" in that sentence is a piece of a dirty toxic propaganda, of course. In reality, they talk about CO2 which is no pollution in any sense – it is a natural gas that unavoidably accompanies a big part of the essential economic activities in the modern world and that is the primary source of the biological material within plants – and therefore also animals.

    By 2030, the coal burners have to emit 30% less carbon dioxide than in 2030, and so on. Will they? Is that possible? I don't know. America may need much more coal in 2030 than it needs today and it will emit more CO2 emissions because it's not economically feasible to filter it; America may need much less coal due to the fracking boom and other, known or unknown technological alternatives and other reasons. What's more important is that the stupid green brains don't know the answer at all. These people exhibit a hardwired hardcore communist way of thinking, or the lack of it."

    Global warming will give Britain warmer or drier summers, depending on what actually happens

    Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
    A landmark study by the Met Office and Newcastle University has identified how climate change could result in heavier summer rainfall, which in turn could increase the risk of flash flooding.
    But then again:
    A change in the North Atlantic current could lead to the end of soggy British summers, researchers have claimed.
    Recent studies of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a major warm current in the North Atlantic Ocean, have shown that it slowed down by up to 15 per cent in the past decade…

    An Appalling Lack of Truthfulness at the EPA

    CATO
    All along we have been saying that these reports are not scientific, but instead are purely political, documents. That became quite clear in last week’s congressional hearing testimony by Daniel B. Botkin, who once believed global warming was a terrible problem, but has since taken the opposite position.
    Perhaps there is no finer example of the politicization of “science” than what the “Indicators” report the EPA just handed us. ......For those who want a clearer image of the truth when it comes to the effect of global warming on trends in heat-related mortality across the United States, see the figure below, taken from a brand new study by Jennifer Bobb from the Harvard School for Public Health and colleagues. The graph shows the number of heat-related deaths (for every thousand overall deaths) that result from the daily temperature being 10°F above normal, from 1987 to 2005. The trend is strongly downward—in other words, fewer deaths are associated with heat. .......
    Not only is the risk from extreme heat declining, but so too are the actual numbers of people dying from extreme heat both in the United States and abroad (when properly standardized for demographic changes and population growth).
    This is opposite from what the EPA chart leads you to believe.
    The only way for the EPA to be so out of touch with the prevailing science is to be so on purpose.
    We can’t help but to think that purpose will be revealed today."

    Obama’s New Powerplant CO2 Rules: Guaranteed to Succeed (Retroactively)

    Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
    So, I’ve been thinking about how this new EPA power plant rule will play out.
    First of all, after an obligatory EPA 1-year comment period and then even more time for the states to decide how they might want to achieve the goals of the rule, it’s going to be after the next presidential election before we actually see substantial changes in coal-fired generation resulting from the rule.
    How convenient. Old plants are already being shuttered in favor of gas-fired plants, which are currently cheaper. So what’s the point of the new regulations?
    Well, what might well happen is this. Ten years down the road, “global warming” will turn out to be (surprise!) much weaker than predicted. Since we know the climate models that predicted much greater warming can’t be wrong, it must be those new EPA regulations back in 2014 that solved the problem!
    We really can control the climate system! We did something…and it worked…retroactively!
    It doesn’t really matter which came first, or what-caused-what. It didn’t matter for the ice core record of temperature changes coming before CO2 changes, and it won’t matter for this, either."

    Obama Plan Will Have Miniscule Global Impact…Der Spiegel: CO2 Will Keep Rising 1.1% Annually For Next 20 Years!

    NoTricksZone
    Obama’s newly announced actions to curb CO2 emissions by America’s coal fired power plants will do almost nothing to prevent global energy trends from progressing in the opposite direction, Spiegel writes."

    EPA admits alleged health benefits from CO2 regulation are from different regulations already in effect

    The Hockey Schtick
    President Obama and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy are selling their onerous regulations on CO2 from existing power plants by disingenuously claiming co-benefits of reduced asthma attacks and heart attacks:
    “in just the first year that these [CO2] standards go into effect, up to 100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks will be avoided — and those numbers will go up from there.”
    However, buried in the newly proposed rule which only regulates harmless & essential CO2 is the admission from the EPA that the alleged health benefits are from a different rule that has been in effect since February 16, 2012the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule. According to the EPA, "The EPA is closely monitoring MATS compliance and finds that the industry is making substantial progress."

    Thus, the new EPA regulations on CO2 will add nothing to the existing regulations on actual air pollutants that are already in place, accomplishing nothing for public health nor the climate. The attempts by President Obama and Gina McCarthy to claim the new regulations on CO2 will prevent "up to 100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks" per year are disingenuous and have no basis in fact.

    'Clean Energy' Ruined Spain; now Obama is Dragging the US Over the Same Green Precipice

    James Delingpole, Breitbart.com
    Spain was one of the first countries to buy heavily into the "clean energy" chimera and - from the mid-90s attracted billions of dollars' worth of local and foreign "investment" from rent-seekers attracted by the guaranteed 14 per cent per annum rate of return offered on solar park projects and the similarly huge subsidies for wind farms.
    But there was a problem. As should have been obvious from the start "clean energy" is - and almost certainly always will be - unviable in a free market. The limited energy it produces is next to worthless because it is only available when the wind blows or the sun shines - which is not necessarily when it is actually needed. Hence the need for all those government subsidies, without which not a single one of those renewable energy projects exist.
    By the time the Spanish government woke up to the problem, the damage was done. Green energy projects have cost it a staggering 200 billion Euros in subsidies, 56 billion Euros of which it has paid out, another 143 billion Euros it still owes but which its hard-pressed coffers cannot possibly spare. Successive administrations have tried to reduce the cost by drastically reducing subsidies - causing a wave of bankruptcies among local businesses foolish enough to have leapt aboard the green bandwagon. But this has only exposed the Spanish government to costly lawsuits by the various foreign investors which piled in to take advantage of the green energy scam."

    Obama tries to change the weather by burning US jobs

    JoNova  (Australia)
    Bad news for the environment. Obama has a plan. ......"

    President Obama Taking Climate Stupid To New Levels Today

    Real Science
    1. The new EPA regs will have almost no impact on CO2, because Asians are building new coal fired power plants at a rate which makes puts Obama’s plans in the noise.
    2. Despite a 10% increase in CO2 since 1996, there has been no warming. There is little or no correlation between rising CO2 and global temperature.
    His plans accomplish nothing other than hurting Americans."

    The EPA’s Political Futility

    WUWT
    The EPA’s own model, ironically acronymed MAGICC, estimates that its new policies will prevent a grand total of 0.018ºC in warming by 2100. Obviously, that’s not enough to satisfy the steadily shrinking percentage of Americans who think global warming is a serious problem.
    MAGICC tells us that the futility of whatever Obama proposes for existing plants will be statistically indistinguishable from making sure that there are no new coal-fired ones. In fact, dropping the carbon dioxide emissions from all sources of electrical generation to zero would reduce warming by a grand total of 0.04ºC by 2100. ......
    You’d think the administration would see not just how futile these policies are in addressing climate change but also how costly they are politically. Some compelling analysis of polls shows that the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 election because, under Democratic leadership, it passed cap-and-trade, which the Senate wisely stopped short of. In Australia, similar policies favoring cap-and-trade cost the Liberal party its leader in 2009 and subsequently sacked two Labour prime ministers, Keven Rudd and Julia Gillard.
    Is this really the road the administration wants to go down in 2014? If history is any guide, a pretty steep price will be paid on Election Day — all for policies that will have no measurable effect on climate change."