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OBAMANATION CHRONICLES

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA: TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

2009 - 2010

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OBAMANATION CHRONICLES

‘The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.’ ~ Alexander Jablokov



VIDEO: Reagan Versus Obama Debate -- A MUST SEE video to show how Obama has attempted to ursurp America and remake America into Socialism. A WARNING TO AMERICA!!!


VIDEO: The Obama Deception HQ Full length version -- A MUST SEE VIDEO: IT CONDEMNS A "POWER ELITE" -- IT ASKS YOU TO QUESTION YOUR BELIEFS. (SITE NOTE: We are not quite ready to accept that Bilderberg Group is the center of the Power Elite. However, we are open to arguments.)




ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Environmentalists want the stimulus to include "green jobs" through alternative-energy development. In fact, environmental groups -- which tangled with the Bush administration over policies minor and major, including protections for air, water, wildlife, and forests and other public lands -- expect swift and sweeping action from Obama on nearly every issue that matters to them. Environmentalists expect Obama to "hit the reset button," as the Sierra Club's Josh Dorner put it, on a host of regulations that Bush weakened. They expect more input from scientists in framing environmental policy and more action from the Environmental Protection Agency in limiting greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling from last year. On the campaign trail, Obama pledged to regulate carbon emissions through a "cap and trade" system and to spend $150 billion over 10 years to boost alternative fuels.

The Obama-Biden comprehensive New Energy for America plan will:
  • Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.
  • Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined.
  • Put 1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars — cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon — on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America.
  • Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.
  • Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.

In Nov 2008, Obama said he would introduce "a federal cap and trade system to reduce America's emissions of carbon dioxide to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050." He said his administration would "invest" $15 billion a year in solar power, wind power, biofuels, nuclear power and clean coal to "save the planet" by creating 5 million new "green jobs". Critics responded with praise that Obama accepted the contributions that nuclear energy and clean coal, but criticized him for any faith in significant energy supplies from solar or wind energy. They said those technologies only survive anywhere in the world because they are currently fashionable enough to attract massive subsidies.

See Center for American Progress Action Fund for plan on Green Recovery. We believe this think tank will be well-listened to by Obama and Democratic Congress -- and often testify before Congressional subcommittees for their ideas. This is covered by A Strategy for Green Recovery: Stimulating the Economy Today by Rebuilding for Future Prosperity By Bracken Hendricks, Benjamin Goldstein (November 10, 2008).

However, the climate change skeptics on Capitol Hill are quietly watching a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation. While the new Obama administration promises aggressive, forward-thinking environmental policies, Weather Channel co-founder Joseph D'Aleo and other scientists are organizing lobbying efforts to take aim at the cap-and-trade bill that Democrats plan to unveil in January.

So far, members of Congress have not been keen to publicly back the global cooling theory. The global cooling lobby's challenge is enormous. Next year could be the unfriendliest yet for climate skeptics. Already, House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) has lost his gavel, in part because his peers felt he was less than serious about tackling global warming. The National Academy of Sciences and most major scientific bodies agree that global warming is caused by man-made carbon emissions.

But a small, growing number of scientists, including D'Aleo, are questioning how quickly the warming is happening and whether humans are actually the leading cause. Armed with statistics from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climate Data Center, D'Aleo reported in the 2009 Old Farmer's Almanac that the U.S. annual mean temperature has fluctuated for decades and has only risen 0.21 degrees since 1930 — which he says is caused by fluctuating solar activity levels and ocean temperatures, not carbon emissions. Data from the same source shows that during five of the past seven decades, including this one, average U.S. temperatures have gone down. And the almanac predicted that the next year will see a period of cooling. More than 31,000 scientists across the world have signed the Global Warming Petition Project, a declaration started by a group of American scientists that states man's impact on climate change can't be reasonably proven.


Global Warming -- CO2 Scam!!!

The argument propounded by the dubious United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Anthropogenic (human-induced) Global Warming (AGW) is willfully fraudulent. The report has been vigorously and critically undermined, scientifically denounced and found wanting from both notable scientists here and abroad. This runs counter one portion of the Obama-Biden "New Energy for America" plan that plans to "implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050."

In spite of this fact, it is likely that the new U.S. Democratic Congress and Administration will once again proclaim that they know better than we do about such things. Get ready for them to move surreptitiously under the guise of Global Climate Control in an effort to enhance their own legacies and pocketbooks. To be sure, the Left hears nothing but their own incestuous voices, despite the voices of clarity and reason that abound around them. And there are many, many distinguished dissenters against the charade of AGW.

Take for instance the Founder of the Weather Channel and eminent Meteorologist John Coleman who has stated:

There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind's activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces. Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call "Interglacial periods". For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period.... [where] the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming.

Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980's and 1990's as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where's the global warming?
There is an abundance of solid data to back these conclusions up. For example, new measurements from the NASA/ESA spacecraft Ulysses show that the sun's current period of low activity goes beyond an extended dearth of sunspots. Solar activity has dropped to the lowest levels since recording began some 50 years ago. Current experts, such as Veizer, Shaviv, and most recently Svensmark et al., and Patterson, suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. They convincingly argue that increased cosmic radiation acts as a catalyst for cloud formation in earth's atmosphere. This, in turn, leads to a general cooling of the world's climate if the pattern persists.

Ironically, during the 1970s while some (including NASA's James Hansen) were hysterically promoting the schizoid fears of a new ice age hitting the world in a few decades, a new frenzy over Global Warming and Climate Change was just beginning at Scripps Ocenaographic Institute in San Diego, CA. It was started by one of their most esteemed scientists Roger Revelle, the father of Oceanography. His work correlated the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2 (a laboratory defined greenhouse gas) to atmospheric warming. Revelle later moved to Harvard and encouraged his students, including Al Gore, to rehash the data. Since then the research methods have clearly gotten out of hand. Many avenues of research have proven repeatedly useless. Even Roger Revelle understood that there were greater variables at play than the trace gas of CO2.

Before he died, Revelle gave interviews and wrote letters stating that CO2 and its greenhouse effect did not warrant extreme countermeasures. He told Omni Magazine, in March 1984, that "CO2 increase is predicted to temper weather extremes" -- not cause them. One cannot argue that CO2 was a causative factor -- especially since CO2 was apparently following temperature trend -- not moderating it. It seems none of his followers, Gore in particular, heeded his words.

There is a huge problem with the idea that Carbon Dioxide, or CO2, is a globally polluting gas, much less one that causes climate change and global warming. Even though some data seemed to initially substantiate the AGW thesis, these ideas were later proven to be wrong. (Those derived from ice core data were especially damning.) Australian Climatologist Dr. David Evans has done yeoman's work on this issue.

Often forgotten in the argument is the fact that CO2 is only a trace component of the atmosphere. For every million molecules of other gases in the atmosphere (such as nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen), there are only 385 molecules of CO2.

It is a fact that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have varied widely over geological time. The peak was estimated to be some 20-fold higher than at present (+6,000 ppm) -- and the low about 200 ppm below today's. (Everyday office air concentrations often exceed 1,000 ppm CO2.)

Meteorologist John Coleman perspicaciously asks:

How can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? How can a trace element possibly be the cause of systemic Global Warming? It can't. That's all there is to it; it can't.... Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming.
Increased levels of CO2 has more likely benefited all life forms on the planet, summarizes Coleman. Many other scientists have come to the same conclusion.

Robinson, Robinson & Soon, in their cogent 2007 published research paper found here, provided empirical evidence that invalidates AGW alarmists hypotheses. They also found overwhelming support for the general benefits that are derived from natural global warming.

Here is the summary of their findings:

  • 1- A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and early 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth's weather and climate. There are no experimental data to support the hypothesis that increases in human hydrocarbon use or in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other green house gases are causing or can be expected to cause unfavorable changes in global temperatures, weather, or landscape. There is no reason to limit human production of CO2, CH4, and other minor green house gases as has been proposed.
  • 2- Predictions of catastrophic global warming are based on computer climate modeling, a branch of science still in its infancy. The empirical evidence - actual measurements of Earth's temperature and climate - shows no man-made warming trend. Indeed, during four of the seven decades since 1940 when average CO2 levels steadily increased, U.S. average temperatures were actually decreasing.
  • 3- Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO2 do not conform to current experimental knowledge.
  • 4- While major green house gas H2O substantially warms the Earth, minor green house gases such as CO2 have little effect.... The 6-fold increase in hydrocarbon use since 1940 has had no noticeable effect on atmospheric temperature or on the trend in glacier length.
  • 5- Solar activity and U.S. surface temperature are closely correlated...., but U.S. surface temperature and world hydrocarbon use are not correlated.
  • 6- We also need not worry about environmental calamities even if the current natural warming trend continues. The Earth has been much warmer during the past 3,000 years without catastrophic effects. Warmer weather extends growing seasons and generally improves the habitability of colder regions.
  • 7- Human use of coal, oil, and natural gas has not harmfully warmed the Earth, and the extrapolation of current trends shows that it will not do so in the foreseeable future. The CO2 produced does, however, accelerate the growth rates of plants and also permits plants to grow in drier regions. Animal life, which depends upon plants, also flourishes, and the diversity of plant and animal life is increased.
Dr. Michael Griffin, the new NASA Administrator, looks at climate change in a refreshingly contrarian fashion. He has stated:

To assume that [climate change] is a problem is to assume that the state of earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change.
There are other fundamental objections to the AGW theory:

  • (1) The infamous "Hockey Stick" statistical debacle, nicely summarized here, effectively cherry-picked data from tree rings to estimate temperature change over the past 1000 years. The report erroneously declared that the largest increases in world temperature occurred in the 20th century. These results could not be reproduced by anyone. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) later found the statistical methods first employed inappropriate and the findings bogus. (NOTE: In Nov 2008, more evidence showed the "Hockey Stick" data was erroneous.)
  • (2) The reported NASA temperature data glitch discovered by Canadian Computer Analyst Steve McIntyre that wrongly kicked all temperature records up several tenths of a degree was a severe setback for AGW modelers. This software "failure" was overseen by one of AGW's fiercest proponents, the notorious Dr. James Hanson. NASA's GISS and Hanson have recently come under fire again for poor data collection methods and questionable accuracy.

  • (3) As recently presented in American Thinker, Lord Monckton competently summarizes for us that many of the highly publicized AGW "facts" are simple documented anomalies of natural climate cycling -- designedly misrepresented for the cause of AGW.

    To wit: The Oceans are not catastrophically rising nor are they warming. In fact, the oceans have been cooling since 2003. The Snows of Kilimanjaro are not melting but ablating because of friction due to a cooling atmosphere and natural cooling trends. The world's 160,000 glaciers are not suddenly receding, but appear to be re-advancing, including those ice shelves in Antarctic and the polar ice sheets, all of which cycle regularly in ice mass.     Lord Monckton, a science-journalist, provides even more evidence here.

  • (4) Finally let us not forget the astute investigation of automated weather stations by US Meteorologist Anthony Watts. Watts painstakingly discovered that a large fraction of the nation's 1,200 stations have been wrongly sited in man-made heat-absorbing centers. (Examples include locations on rooftops, on slabs of heat absorbing concrete, next to air conditioners, diesel generators and asphalt parking lots, even at sewage treatment plants. Some are located in areas experiencing excessive nighttime humidity, and at non-standard observing The Earth has largely benefited by past warming cycle's and that these previous "warmings" had nothing to do with man's activities. These earlier natural cycles were not catastrophic events; they were, in fact, beneficial to all life forms. They provided warmer and longer growing seasons, more areas available for crops, etc. We know, for instance, that Greenland was once green, that Eric the Red planted and grew grapes in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada, that the Romans planted grapes in England, etc.

  • (2) Solar/Sun Spot activity is the originator of most climatic change and most weather patterns on Earth. It is king. There is no larger factor of influence. CO2 influence is negligible and pales in comparison. CO2 follows the trend of temperature; it does not cause it.

  • (3) Subordinate to solar activity alone, atmospheric water vapor/cloud formation and movement is the largest known variable that influences temperature changes in the atmosphere of the earth, and the earth's oceans. Water vapor in the atmosphere is around 1000-10,000 times as important as atmospheric CO2.


These three quintessential and pivotal factors are not even discussed in the UN's IPCC report. This exclusion should raise a red flag in any intelligent mind. That's why so many of us are yelling from the rooftops about the absurdity of the report itself!

Instead of a true and open discourse, we see the daily dribble from the MSM and various liberally usurped science journals, dishonestly and falsely alleging a "consensus" when there is none.

Indeed, arrayed against the arcane burlesque of the United Nations IPCC with its politically selected 2500 Scientists, of which a core group of 600 exists, and a relatively small number of mediocre "scientists" here and there across the American landscape who have suddenly found notoriety or grant money in the global warming cause, are 31,072+ legitimate and viable scientists (of which I am one) who signed the American Petition Project declaring the Global Warming Hypothesis bogus found here, here and here. We openly refute the UN's conclusions.

Here's the Petition Statement we dissenters signed in opposition:

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
Let me assure you that we're not in good humor, nor take it kindly to be slurred and ridiculed by taking the other side in this debate. And our numbers are still growing. Indeed, we're angry that the vast majority of American Scientists will not be heard by the media. We're dismayed over the fact that the Global Warming fiasco has become politically popular and expedient to those left-wing politicians and power-brokers whose sole aim is to literally tax everything with a carbon footprint and give them control over all life, hidden within their PC guileful pretence to save the planet. They wish to save no one but themselves.

And the tide turns further. Of the 2500 originally aligned scientists and putative authors of the UN's IPCC report some 500 are no longer faithful to Big Al's errand. Many of these scientists discovered that their individual findings and comments were willfully misrepresented. All participant conclusions were unilaterally changed to adhere strictly to the United Nations objective of building support for world taxation and rationing of industrially useful energy. Since the original IPCC report (and there have been some 4 others now formally issued), the defecting 500 scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. Approximately 100 of these scientists are now open defectors. Others are currently suing the UN for the misuse of their good names and research. It is difficult to see why a thinking person would even consider the IPCC report as legitimate.

The entire IPCC process is but obfuscation by the secular and atheist Left. It has allowed the Left to conflate the vanity of secular opinion with scientific and/or moral truth. There is an easy and immediate remedy for their debacle. Will Rogers stated it simply: "When you are in a hole ... stop digging.... Please!"

(Dr. Gregory Young is a neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England. He is currently involved with a privately funded think-tank engaged in experimental biophysical research.) (Source: American Thinker: Greg Young.)


December 2008

Branch Gorevidians Explain Harsh Winter (Dec 2008) This time of year, especially under the conditions much of the country is experiencing, we see people who are digging out from under tons of snow who are mocking "global warming." This ticks off global warming bureaucrats for two reasons: 1) They need to quickly develop alternative excuses (which they have), and 2) Your heavy winter clothing makes it more difficult for them to reach your wallet.

But a good global warmist wouldn't win an episode of Eco-Fear Factor unless he or she could explain how global warming can indeed bury us in snow (because, as you know, it never snowed before global warming started a few years ago). Here's the basis for the "blizzards caused by global warming" argument: NASA reported that 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion tons of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted at an accelerated rate since 2003. One blogger at the Daily Kos ("It is wise to study the ways of ones adversary") echoed other global warmists and explained our harsh winter:

When ice melts, the surrounding air or water cools down, basic thermodynamics. It would be ironic if that cooler air and water from excess northern melt were to work their way south a little farther and a little earlier in the season than they otherwise would have, and maybe even help fuel an occasional localized snow or ice storm, which right-wing climate change skeptics, especially those bearing a borderline pathological obsession with Al Gore, would then seize on as evidence that global warming is ... well not sure exactly.
Thermodynamics? Okay, good. Physics can explain all this. But what it can't explain is that thermodynamics doesn't know if it's summer or winter. If the melting ice is making the surrounding air cooler and making temperatures drop more in wintertime (in locations very far away), how come the same melting ice isn't making those same locations cooler in the summertime? Is the ice not melting in the summertime? Yes it is, according to satellite data. And if all that ice melt is cooling the surrounding air, shouldn't that lowered air temperature slow the melt instead of speed it up?

When the eco-left is using occasionally stifling summer heat (which, again, never happened until global warming started a few years ago) as evidence of global warming, where is this magical and far-reaching thermodynamic cooling? That must be the time of year that thermodynamics is on summer break. Al Gore, unfortunately, is never on break. (Source: American Thinker: Doug Powers.)


January 2009

ON ONE SIDE -- ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING:

It's time to pray for global warming (Jan 2009) If you're wondering why North America is starting to resemble nuclear winter, then you missed the news.

At December's U.N. Global Warming conference in Poznan , Poland , 650 of the world's top climatologists stood up and said man-made global warming is a media generated myth without basis. Said climatologist Dr. David Gee, Chairman of the International Geological Congress, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?"

I asked myself, why would such obviously smart guy say such a ridiculous thing? But it turns out he's right.

The earth's temperature peaked in 1998. It's been falling ever since; it dropped dramatically in 2007 and got worse in 2008, when temperatures touched 1980 levels.

Meanwhile, the University of Illinois ' Arctic Climate Research Center released conclusive satellite photos showing that Arctic ice is back to 1979 levels. What's more, measurements of Antarctic ice now show that its accumulation is up 5 percent since 1980.

In other words, during what was supposed to be massive global warming, the biggest chunks of ice on earth grew larger. Just as an aside, do you remember when the hole in the ozone layer was going to melt Antarctica ? But don't worry, we're safe now, that was the nineties.

Dr. Kunihiko, Chancellor of J apan's Institute of Science and Technology said this: "CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other ... every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so." Now why would a learned man say such a crazy thing?

This is where the looney left gets lost. Their mantra is atmospheric CO2 levels are escalating and this is unquestionably causing earth's temperature rise. But ask yourself -- if global temperatures are experiencing the biggest sustained drop in decades, while CO2 levels continue to rise -- how can it be true?

Ironically, in spite of being shown false, we must now pray for it. Because a massive study, just released by the Russian Government, contains overwhelming evidence that earth is on the verge of another Ice Age.

Based on core samples from Russia 's Vostok Station in Antarctica , we now know earth's atmosphere and temperature for the last 420,000 years. This evidence suggests that the 12,000 years of warmth we call the Holocene period is over.

Apparently, we're headed into an ice age of about 100,000 years -- give or take. As for CO2 levels, core samples show conclusively they follow the earth's temperature rise, not lead it.

It turns out CO2 fluctuations follow the change in sea temperature. As water temperatures rise, oceans release additional dissolved CO2 -- like opening a warm brewsky. To think, early last year, liberals suggested we spend 45 trillion dollars and give up five million jobs to fix global warming. But there is good news: now that we don't have to spend any of that money, we can give it all to the banks. (Source: Flint Journal: John Tomlinson.)

ON THE OPPOSITE NOTE -- PRO-GLOBAL WARMING:

Global Warming 'at Point of No Return' (Jan 2009) Global warming has reached the point of no return, a study published in the Tuesday (26 Jan) edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by a joint team of the U.S., French and Swiss researchers concludes. Even if the world reduces emissions of CO2 to the level before the industrial revolution, it will take at least 1,000 years to reverse the climate change effect that have already taken hold, AP on Sunday quoted the team as saying.

Dr. Susan Solomon of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research laboratory (NOAA) led the study. "People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years; that's not true," she said, adding the effects are well nigh irreversible. The reason can be found in the oceans, which slow down global warming effects by absorbing CO2 and heat. But their CO2 absorption is too slow to catch up with the excessive amounts of CO2 already in the atmosphere. Moreover, the oceans gradually release the captured heat, so once that happens global warming will accelerate, Solomon said. If CO2 is allowed to peak at 600 parts per million from current 385, icebergs in the polar areas will quickly melt, causing sea levels to rise by 0.4 to 1 m. If it goes up to 1,000 parts per million, sea levels will rise 2 m, inundating islands and coastal towns. (Source: Chosun Ilbo.)


February 2009

John Coleman: CO2 Warning a Scam (Feb 2009) Good Magazine had a terrific article by David Puner on John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel and his fight to debunk the CO2 Scam.

John Coleman has dedicated his life to studying weather and the science that creates it—so shouldn’t we at least hear him out?

If the debate over climate change is closed, why is John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, still trying to prove it’s all a scam?

Well over a quarter-million weathercasts—that’s the ballpark figure the 74-year-old founding father of the Weather Channel guesses he’s probably performed in his 55 years in the business. Today, as for the past 15 years, he’s chalked up another weathercast like it’s his job, because it is. This, he tells me, is the best time of his career.

Which seems odd, because in the past few years, he’s admittedly become mad as hell. Coleman is angry because he believes we have been brainwashed into thinking we’re ruining our own planet. He wants to let us off the hook, and give us some good news for a change, because, you see, John Coleman says that climate change is a scam.

If you consume mainstream media, odds are you’re not hearing much debate about climate change these days. We’re told the debate is effectively over. Scientists say so, too. It’s our consumption that continues to ruin our planet’s environmental health, so there’s no longer time to debate—it’s time to act. Every time we do anything, like flip on a light switch or charge an iPod or turn on the A/C, we’re contributing to the release of greenhouse gases, and so the oceans rise and that’s a problem for the polar bears and, well, you know—something like that. It may be difficult to explain, but we know the state of the environment is bad. Most recently, in fact, we were told that the effects of man-made climate change are all but irreversible. [McAuleys World - The debate over "Global Warming is hardly over - In fact 1000's of reputable Scientists dispute these theories]

John Coleman has dedicated his life to studying weather and the science that creates it—so shouldn’t we at least hear him out?
So, yes, the debate is over. And yet for some reason, somewhere outside the fray, the weather sage John Coleman decided it shouldn’t be. That we’d been hoodwinked. That it was still worth talking about. So a year and a half ago, determined he’d heard enough of the noise and the Al Gore and the polar bears, he threw his voice into the conversation.

When Coleman posted his first climate change brief online, he was surprised by the attention it got. “I thought I was the only one,” he says. “I started finding that there were plenty of people out there, it’s just that the media was ignoring them and the place to find them was on these little corners of the internet.” In May, 2008, an organization called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine released a petition at the National Press Club, with the signatures of 31,000 scientists rejecting the U.N. consensus of man-made climate change. 9000 of the names belong to Ph.Ds.

Encouraged, he delivered a speech last March at the International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) in New York where he said that Al Gore and others selling carbon credits should be sued for fraud. His hope, he said, was that the publicity from such a suit would potentially debunk climate change in a court room instead of waiting for the media to do its supposed due diligence.

So is he a crank—Willard Scott with an agenda that goes beyond hooky old-school weatherman shtick? Coleman’s life has been dedicated to studying and presenting weather and the science that creates it—so shouldn’t we at least hear him out? He thinks we should, and he has supporters. He says the science we’ve digested is erroneous.

Coleman saw An Inconvenient Truth on DVD and he says he made it all the way through, but “not without screaming.”

Among other things, it took drowning polar bears and the internet to get John Coleman firing on all cylinders. “Gradually there’s this build-up, this hysteria about global warming,” he says. “The Al Gore book comes out. The Al Gore movie comes out and starts winning awards. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gets headline news status and starts issuing its predictions. The media is clamoring aboard and the next thing I know, it’s headline news every day, everywhere. And I’ve been studying it, reading stuff, and looking at it, and can’t figure out what the heck they’re talking about.”

What “they” are talking about, and we have heard much about is that climate change is one of greatest challenges we face in our lifetime and that humankind is generally fucking up everything imaginable involving air, water, and land. John Coleman says it’s perpetrated by the media who loves it some Gore. “You’ve got Al Gore. You’ve got the environmentalists. And then all the networks come aboard, because they love gloom and doom, the-end-is-near,” he says. “From Y2K to killer bees—God, give us something to tell people their lives are coming to an end—cancer scare, HIV, whatever we’ve got—let’s go, Man, scare the hell out of people,” he says. “This is awful. Shame on them, scaring people. That’s deplorable.”

According to Coleman, the media is biased and sloppy and perpetuates the climate change myth. “Has Larry King called me? Oh no. Has 60 Minutes been interested in our side of the story? Oh no. 20/20? Oh no.” Coleman continues: “I’ve been totally ignored by ABC, NBC, CBS—put down by CNN.” He has been interviewed by FOX News and also by Glenn Beck, who, he says, “used me as part of his rant.”

Coleman seethed. Soon thereafter, he posted a missive on KUSI.com’s “Coleman’s Corner.”

“So I get indignant and I write that blog and throw it on the website,” he says. “That’s kind of totally absorbed my life since.”

Sitting at our table overlooking Montgomery Field, a regional airport, just a few miles north of downtown San Diego late last spring. With the distant whir of single-engine props in the background, John Coleman tells me that all anyone really needs to know about the climate change scam is carbon dioxide.

“Environmentalists, they think CO2 is a pollutant,” he says, and then makes an act of exhaling. “There’s a little pollution for you,” he says, and then points in the general vicinity of vegetation that isn’t looking all that vibrant (unless brown is vibrant). “See that bush beside you there? It’d be dead without CO2.” Without CO2, he says, “We wouldn’t have any food. Humans couldn’t exist. CO2 is vital to life.” He pauses for a moment and then raises his voice an octave. “My God! Calling that a pollutant? Ridiculous.”

Coleman acknowledges that carbon dioxide continues to build up in the atmosphere. In 1958, he says, the CO2 atmospheric level was 315 parts per million. Today CO2 is 385 parts per million—more than a 20 percent increase. If you’re making a case for a direct correlation between increased atmospheric CO2 levels and climate change, you’re saying the increased CO2 is causing changes in ocean chemistry, which in turn is changing the entire climate equation.

“It’s a trace. How does that destroy the planet?” says Coleman. “And they publish their papers and scream and the media says, Oh God, the end is near! And it’s all baloney; there isn’t anything to it. It turns out to be sheer folly. But it all comes back to CO2—they haven’t got anything else.”

“Have temperatures gone up? No. Is global warming sweeping the planet? No. Is the ice melting at the poles? No. Is there any proof that it’s creating significant impact? No. Can you produce a computer model that predicts that it will? Oh yeah, anyone can manipulate a computer model, and they have.”

Of course, the prevailing wisdom is that yes, temperatures have gone up, that ice is melting, and that the scientists assessing climate data aren’t doing so with malicious intent. Attempting to debunk those who are attempting to debunk climate change, as it turns out, is complicated.

Coleman gives speaking engagements he says are well received, but won’t accept invitations from the petroleum industry. “They all invite me, because they are so tired of being the bad boys of global warming. So they want to have me come tell them they’re not bad boys,” he says. “And they want to give me money.” Coleman says he’s pro-alternative energy, because it’s a natural progression—not because of climate change, he says. (Source: Good Magazine to read the rest of the article by David Puner.) (Source: McAuley's World.)


Media Credibility, Not Ice Caps, In Meltdown (Feb 2009) Eco-warriors and media hype aside, the fact is, as we head into 2009, that the world's ice mass has been expanding not contracting. Which will surprise evening news junkies fed a diet of polar bears floating about on ice floes and snow shelves falling into the oceans. But if a whole series of reports on ice growth in the Arctic, the Antarctic and among glaciers are right, then it is truth in the mainstream media (MSM) that's in meltdown not the polar ice caps.

The problem for the MSM is that it long ago nailed its colors to the climate alarmist mast. No ice cap meltdown, no rising waters. No disappearing islands, no reason for alarm. No alarm, no story. Worst of all having called yet another global apocalypse wrong: No credibility. So the MSM has a significant stake in running highly selective warm-mongering headlines. Not to mention disparaging those scientists who have the temerity to disagree as 'holocaust deniers' and 'pseudo-scientists'.

There's nothing more the climate alarmist media loves than a 'melting Arctic' ice cap story. So why not stories from the far larger expanse of ice that is the 'melting' Antarctic? Well it might have something to do with the fact that the Antarctic ice grew to record levels in 2007 - and continues to grow.

The Antarctic

Climate scientist Dr Ben Herman, past director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and former head of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona, notes that for the media, "What happens in the Arctic may be an indicator of what will happen in the rest of the world. How about what happens in the Antarctic then? Since its ice area has been increasing, is this also an indicator of what might be happening in the rest of the world?"

The FACT is that the majority of Antarctica has cooled over the past 50 years and ice coverage has grown to record levels. Take the well-publicized collapse of a 160 square mile block of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica in March 2008. For the alarmist media this was conclusive proof of the dramatic global warming effects. The Los Angeles Times ran, 'Antarctica Collapse' referring to the "rapid melt of the Wilkins Shelf". The Sydney Morning Herald ran 'Ice Shelf Hangs By a Thread' and the Salon online news site had the absurd headline 'Bye-bye Antarctica?' But Joseph D'Aleo, first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and Chief Meteorologist at Weather Services International, was more prosaic. On his IceCap website, D'Aleo wrote that the collapse was the equivalent, given the enormity of Antarctica, of "an icicle falling from a snow and ice covered roof." He added, "The latest satellite images and reports suggest the ice has already refrozen around the broken pieces. In fact the ice is returning so fast, it is running an amazing 60 percent ahead of last year when it set a new record." Noting the ludicrous media hype, D`Aleo laments, "Yet the world is left with the false impression Antarctica's ice sheet is also starting to disappear."

Dr Herman adds an apposite footnote: "It is interesting that all of the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) stories concerning Antarctica are always about what's happening around the western peninsula, which seems to be the only place on Antarctica that has shown any warming." Herman asks, "How about the rest of the continent, which is probably about 95 percent of the land mass, not to mention the record sea ice coverage recently."

Former Colorado State Climatologist and current senior scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Dr Roger Pielke Sr is severely critical of the "typical bias that many journalists have." Pielke notes, "The media has ignored the increase in Antarctica sea ice cover in recent years, with at present, a coverage that is one million square kilometres above average."

In December 2006, Dr Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London and Director for Polar Observation and Modelling, presented evidence that showed "Antarctic thinning was no more common than thickening". Wingham and his colleagues found that 72 percent of the Antarctica ice sheet was growing at the rate of 5 millimetres per year. Most significantly, Dr Wingham commits media heresy when he states: "That makes Antarctica a sink, not a source, of ocean water. According to their best estimates, Antarctica will 'lower global sea levels by 0.08 mm' per year."

Sacrilege.

Statistician Dr Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and professor at the Copenhagen Business School, observes the media covers only the "2 percent of Antarctica [that] is dramatically warming and ignores the 98 percent that has largely cooled over the past 35 years." Lomborg also rounds on Al Gore who "points to shrinking sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, but doesn't mention that sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is increasing."

And for those for whom the UN IPCC is the last word on all things climate, Dr Madhav L. Khandekar, retired Environment Canada scientist and an expert IPCC reviewer, says, "In the Southern Hemisphere, the land-sea mean temperature has slowly but surely declined in the last few years." He adds, "Several other locations in the Southern Hemisphere have experienced lower temperatures in the last few years" the result of "surface temperatures over world oceans slowly declining since mid-1998." Interestingly the very year the mean global temperature itself began a decline.

Fair enough. But the Arctic is melting, right? Sorry, it just ain't that simple. October 2008 saw the fastest Arctic sea ice extent growth ever recorded.

The Arctic

During October and November 2008 the extent of Arctic ice was 28.7 percent greater than during the same period in 2007. According to data published by the International Arctic Research Center (IARC/JAXA) October 2008 saw "the fastest ever growth" of Arctic Sea ice since records began. Not good news for doomsayers like Dr Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Dr Serreze had predicted an ice-free North Pole in the summer of 2008.

The Arctic has indeed undergone some warming in some areas, especially Greenland, a warming that culminated in a summer temperature high of 5 degrees C in 2007. The gradual melt has opened up the prospect of newly navigable seaways - and a rush for the Arctic's energy-rich deepwater reserves. The reality is, however, warming periods are nothing new to the Arctic. When the Vikings settled Greenland they grew crops in temperatures higher than those of today.

The media has also made much of the potential opening of the Northwest Passage. But it rarely mentions that similar weather patterns prevailed in the 1930s when two boats, the Nascopie and Aklavik, famously met up in the Passage in 1937. In October 2008, a study by Ohio University confirmed that current Arctic warming patterns mimic those in the 1920s-1940s. By July 2008 the Arctic ice had increased by nearly half a million square miles over the same first half year period in 2007. A NASA study published in the peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters in October 2007 had already noted that thinning Arctic ice was more likely the result of "unusual winds" that had blown "older thicker" ice into warmer southern waters. In other words, the Arctic warming experienced more recently could well be the result of the unusual strength of winds, not man-made warming.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center's own figures, world sea ice in April 2008 reached "unprecedented" levels for the month of April. The World Meteorlogical Organization (WMO) went to declare 2008 the coolest since 2000. Moreover, the WMO reports that the fall in the global mean temperature since 1998 is not just affecting the polar ice caps either, it is also affecting glaciers elsewhere.

The Glaciers

In October 2008, after a particularly bitterly cold Alaskan summer, glaciologists began reporting that Alaskan glaciers, particularly those at Glacier Bay where the shrinkage had mainly been had begun advancing for the first time in years. Glaciologist Bruce Molnia of the US Geological Survey said, "In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound." He adds "On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface in late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying did not become snow free until early August." In short, 2008 was the first time since record began that Alaskan glaciers did not shrink during the summer months.

In late November 2008, reports from Norway showed that Alaska's glacier experience was being replicated there too. Hallgeir Elvehoy of the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) reported that the magnitude of glacial growth appears to have been underway for two years. Glacier growth has also been reported from Canada and New Zealand.

The facts adduced here represent just the tip of an under-reported iceberg (no pun intended). The fact that the world's ice mass is expanding not contracting is plainly of seismic importance in the climate debate. But, in many of its parts, the Western media appears to have a stake in freezing out the truth - having sold its journalistic soul for a mess of warm-mongering alarmist pottage.

Peter C Glover is a British writer specializing in political and energy issues and is European Associate Editor at Energy Tribune and has been published widely on climate issues. (Source: American Thinker.)


March 2009

Global Warming: On Hold? (Mar 2009) For those who have endured this winter's frigid temperatures and today's heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful. But climate is known to be variable -- a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn't mean the planet is cooling.

Still, according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades. Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.

"This is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. "Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn't have one."

Instead, Swanson and colleague Anastasios Tsonis think a series of climate processes have aligned, conspiring to chill the climate. In 1997 and 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean warmed rapidly in what Swanson called a "super El Nino event." It sent a shock wave through the oceans and atmosphere, jarring their circulation patterns into unison.

How does this square with temperature records from 2005-2007, by some measurements among the warmest years on record? When added up with the other four years since 2001, Swanson said the overall trend is flat, even though temperatures should have gone up by 0.2 degrees Centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.

The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science -- identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snowstorm) from human-induced change. But just what's causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun's energy than usual back out into space.

"It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970's was due to a free variation in climate," Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again."

Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it's just a hiccup, and that humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us. "When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming," Swanson said. "Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive." (Source: Discovery.) (SITE NOTE: In May 2009, a report stated that a program to measure the temperature of the ocean through the use of buoys showed a "slight" DROP in temperatures -- when in actuality, the program expected an INCREASE to support the Global Warming theory. The findings were instantly relegated to the back pages as the media and everyone is committed to Obama's CO2 scam.)


Global Warming Protest in 20 degree weather and snow screwed up their photo op. (2 Mar 2009) Driving snow froze the hopes of organizers of "the biggest global warming protest in history" Monday in Washington. With the government on a two-hour snow delay and the speaker of the House unable to attend because her flight was grounded by inclement weather, shivering protestors gathered on the west front of the Capitol, the latest victims of a climatological phenomenon known by the scientific community as the Gore Effect.


Climate Change Lobby has Regrets about Obama Plan (Mar 2009) Jim Rogers is not happy with the Obama administration. Ever since the White House unveiled its costly climate program, the CEO of Duke Energy has been arguing the proposals amount to nothing more than a tax. Indeed.

Mr. Rogers belongs to the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, about 30 companies that decided to [cooperate on] global warming legislation. The group demanded a "cap-and-trade" system, figuring they'd craft the rules so as to obtain regulatory certainty, with little upfront cost. At the time, Mr. Rogers explained: "If you don't have a seat at the table, you'll wind up on the menu."

"People are learning," says William Kovacs, vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which has been cautious about embracing a climate plan). "The Obama budget did more to help us consolidate and coalesce the business community than anything we could have done. It's opened eyes to the fact that this is about a social welfare transfer system, not about climate."

Truth is, any cap-and-trade system is a tax, even if Mr. Obama's plan has only started to force business proponents to admit it. The government sets a cap on how much greenhouse gas can be emitted annually. Companies buy and sell permits that allow them to emit. Customers bear the price of those permits.

But the political question was always how that first batch of permits would end up with companies. Corporate support rested on the belief they'd be "allocated," for free. (Source: WSJ Online.) It didn't take long for the pols to figure out they could auction off permits and spend the loot. President Obama's auction bonanza would earn the feds $650 billion in 10 years, according to the administration's budget estimate -- and that's a low, low, low estimate.

The CO2 wars have begun (Mar 2009) Presumably following White House directions, the EPA is ready to issue an "Endangerment Finding" on carbon dioxide, paving the way for regulations to control CO2 emissions. But with over one million "major stationary sources," a full-blown application of the Clean Air Act would be the equivalent of an atomic bomb directed at the US economy — all without any scientific justification. Hence there is speculation that the White House strategy is to use the threat of EPA regulation to force Congress to take action.

Is this just a bluff — and how will Congress respond, in view of the financial meltdown, failure of emission-trading in Europe, and Chinese refusal to cut CO2 emissions? The answer seems to be: "Not this year!"

An endangerment finding that CO2 is detrimental to "health and human welfare" must be based on scientific facts — and they will certainly be disputed. Furthermore, in July 2008 the EPA issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and there have been many negative comments to which the EPA must respond — under threat of litigation. (Source: IBD.)

After George F. Will wrote a column in Jan questioning the faulty premises and apocalyptic predictions of global-warming alarmists, he caught holy heck from America's "eco-pessimists." He and his editors at The Washington Post were blasted with thousands of angry e-mails, most of which challenged Will's assertion that global sea ice levels have not been dramatically reduced by man-made global warming, as environmentalists claim, but are essentially the same as they were in 1979. Will, who had used data from the Arctic Climate Research Center as his source, also was accused of multiple inaccuracies by The New York Times' Andrew Revkin. Will wrote a second column defending his data and returning fire at Revkin.

•Q: What disturbs you most about this global warming consensus that seems to be pretty widespread and doesn't seem to be eroding?

•A: Well, I think it is eroding, in the sense that people sign on to be alarmed because it's socially responsible ... (and because it makes them feel good). But once they get to the price tag, once they are asked to do something about it, like pay trillions of dollars, they begin to re-think.

I've never seen anything quite like this in my now 40 years in Washington. I've never seen anything like the enlistment of the mainstream media in a political crusade -- and this is a political crusade, because it's about how we should be governed and how we should live; those are the great questions of politics. It is clearly for some people a surrogate religion. It's a spiritual quest. It offers redemption. But what it also always offers, whether it is global cooling or global warming, is a rationale for the government to radically increase its supervision of our life and our choices. Whether the globe is cooling, whether it's warming, the government's going to be the winner and the governing class will be the winner.

Now, it seems to me there is a 100 percent certainty that at any moment the planet is warming or it is cooling. That's what it does. There are cycles well-recorded through history. The climate was once warm enough for Greenland to be called "Greenland" for a reason -- the Vikings farmed there. There was a time when the planet was so cold that Eskimos landed in Scotland in their kayaks. There was "The Little Ice Age." There were warm periods -- we've been through this before. What's different now is that we have a media addicted to hysteria and we have enormous political and financial stakes in convincing people that vast shifts of power and resources should be given to the government to combat climate change. The prudent people in this refer to "climate change" so whatever happens they can say, "See, we told you." (Source: Pittsburg Tribune.)
Then we have the comments of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is telling Europeans that the Bush administration neglected the problem of global climate change. Speaking to several hundred young professionals at the European Parliament on Friday, Clinton was asked by a Belgian man what the Obama administration intended to do to address the problem and whether it sees energy security as linked to global climate change. Clinton said the administration puts a high priority on cooperating globally to solve the climate change problem. She noted that she has appointed a special envoy to climate talks that are due to begin in December in Denmark. And she said the United States in the past had been negligent in its responsibilities to control the emissions that cause climate change. (Source: AP.)

Thus the wars have started with people on both sides heaving stones -- and the Obama administration starting to talk about the "Global Warming" on the international stage with his cap-and-trade strategy. As for Al Gore when critics try to engage him on the questionable status of global warming -- he simply refuses to answer questions.

Gallup: Increased Number Think Global Warming Is "Exaggerated (Mar 2009) Gallup Polls stated some heartening news that the US Public is coming to its senses. Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject. As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38% vs. 30%. Now, according to Gallup's 2009 Environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimated, 41% vs. 28%.

Apart from these findings about news coverage of global warming, the March 5-8 poll shows in a similar vein that Americans are a bit less concerned about the seriousness of global warming per se than they have been in recent years. Six in 10 Americans indicate that they are highly worried about global warming, including 34% who are worried "a great deal" and 26% "a fair amount." Overall worry is similar to points at the start of the decade, but is down from 66% a year ago and from 65% in 2007.

Altogether, 68% of U.S. adults believe the effects of global warming will be manifest at some point in their lifetimes, indicating the public largely believes the problem is real. However, only 38% of Americans, similar to the 40% found in 2008, believe it will pose "a serious threat" to themselves or their own way of life. This fear that global warming will pose a serious threat in one's lifetime steadily expanded from 25% in 1997 to 40% in 2008. The drop this year to 38% is not statistically significant; however, it is the first time since 1997 that the rate of concern has not increased.

Americans generally believe global warming is real. That sets the U.S. public apart from the global-warming skeptics who assembled this week in New York City to try to debunk the science behind climate change. At the same time, with only 34% of Americans saying they worry "a great deal" about the problem, most Americans do not view the issue in the same dire terms as the many prominent leaders advancing global warming as an issue. Go to the article for all the charts. (Source: Gallup Polls.)


The Clear and Cohesive Message of the International Conference on Climate Change (Mar 2009)

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth." -- from the Oregon Petition, signed by over 31,000 scientists
United by that conviction, over 800 scientists, economists, and policy makers arrived in New York City last Sunday to attend the Heartland Institute's 2nd Annual International Conference on Climate Change. They came to talk a wide range of subjects, from climatology to energy policy, from computer climate models to cap-and-trade, from greenhouse gas (GHG) effects to solar irradiation. But most of all they came to help spread the word that the answer to the question posed by this year's theme -- Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis? -- is a resounding NO.

Sunday's keynote speakers wasted no time making that point. Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus scolded those whose alarmist opinions are driven by profits from writing and speaking fees, carbon trading and investments in non-carbon fuel products. And policy makers who blindly accept hyped Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publications as the final word in climate science. In truth, says Klaus, there is no fixed relationship between CO2 and temperatures, as clearly illustrated by the wavering heat trends of the 20th century, despite the steady rise in CO2.

The American Thinker article goes on to show speaker after speaker stating that Global Warming was NOT an effect of Human CO2 intervention. But the key point is that Obama has set America on the road to investing trillions of dollars in this erroneous belief.

California Congressman Tom McClintock offered examples of just how global warming is damaging his state --- all in the form of radical construction blocking, agriculture crippling, resource wasting legislation the warm-mongers have gotten through to fight it. Here's a beauty -- a homeowner can be fined $1000/day for refusal to cut down his trees if they block a neighbor's solar panels, but also faces fines if he cuts them down or clears brush for fire preventive purposes. And Gov. Schwarzenegger – who just proposed the largest tax increase in history to make up for funds lost by his failed green policies -- wants Cal-E-Fornia to be "an example to the country."

Bennie Peiser, founder and editor of the fabulous CCNet, explained the political backlash European greenies are experiencing. And it's pretty bad -- Labor and Green parties are seeing the amalgamation of the recession and failed Kyoto-inspired energy policies driving their core voters away. Lawrence Solomon offered more examples of overseas carbon regulation disasters, declaring Kyoto the greatest single destroyer of the environment, especially in the third world.

And speaking of bad GHG accords, Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Chris Horner explained how liberals could sneak Kyoto II through the Senate by changing it from a treaty to an executive agreement. Treaties require a 2/3 Senate vote, and the Gore brigade knows damned well they'd never pull that one off. But with a little legislative sleight-of-hand, the vote required could be lowered to 3/5. And Horner warned in detail against an even slicker trick that would place it on the fast track, making it both amendment and filibuster proof – thereby requiring only 50% plus one.

Needless to say, the regressive tax increase which is Cap and Trade (CAT) was also a popular target. CEI director Myron Ebell proclaimed John McCain's loss last November to actually be good news, as McCain is the biggest supporter of CAT in the Senate and actually claims that energy rationing would be a net benefit to the economy. Ross Mckitrick blasted the idea of CAT systems with predetermined carbon caps as betraying a complete lack of faith in their design. If the goal is to force down carbon output, then a "truth-based" floating cap determined by temperature is called for. Suggesting we force down caps regardless of temperature response is a sign that they don't believe their own rhetoric.

Dave Kreutzer warned that analytical models predict estimated aggregate losses to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $4.8 trillion and job losses in the manufacturing sector of nearly 3 million by 2029 if CAT were imposed under S. 2191. That's over and above the million manufacturing job losses economists predict will occur even if we do nothing. On Thursday, Easterbrook responded to a NY Times piece suggesting his positions are aligned with those of Obama's science advisor -- John Holdren:

"[Holdren] wants carbon cap and trade that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to curb 'global warming' that the PDO shows isn't going to happen in the next several decades (no matter what the cause). The PDO data shows conclusively that global cooling is going to continue for several decades, causing increasing demands of energy and resources (while population escalates), but if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on cap and trade (as Holdren is pushing), we will have little left with which to handle the real problems of increasing demands on dwindling resources. Holdren's path will lead to a real global catastrophe."
And the losses will extend beyond the monetary. Professor Arthur Robinson, author of the afore-quoted Oregon petition, revealed the true reasons we import 30% of our energy, even though "one Palo Verde Nuclear Installation in each state results in $200 billion net export of energy." Robinson says there are those who would prefer that 30% grow much larger, encouraging higher energy prices and ultimately – rationing. And quickly advised -- once we become victims of rationing in the west we lose our all of our freedoms, but energy deprivation in third world countries will lead to the loss of tens of millions of lives.

And Monckton took on another deadly green scheme as only his Lordship can:

"Their biofuel scam, a nasty by-product of their shoddy, senseless, failed, falsified, fraudulent 'global warming' bugaboo, has turned millions of acres of agricultural land from growing food for humans to growing fuel for automobiles. If we let them, they will carelessly kill tens of millions more by pursuing Osamabamarama's stated ambition of shutting down nine-tenths of the economies of the West and flinging us back to the Stone Age without even the right to light fires in our caves."
Such, as Kreutzer so perfectly described it, is the true "cost of accomplishing nothing." Speaker after speaker talked of bad data collection practices and bad conconclusions drawn from erroneous data. The all emphasized: "There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis." The very next day Gallup announced the results of a new poll finding that a record-high 41% of Americans now believe the seriousness of global warming is being exaggerated by "mainstream reporting." That's up 11% in just three years -- despite our sometimes involute and ever media-mocked message. (Source: American Thinker: Marc Sheppard.) (SITE NOTE: Recommend reading Spectator: Melanie Philips on the bunkum that the global warming folks have come up with and the contradictory evidence that debunks their doom-and-gloom predictions to raise the hysteria levels.

The sickening part of this Global Warming argument is how you watch Obama and his ilk "spin" things so they can get their political agenda passed. The severe winter in the US was PROOF that the Global Warming hocus-pocus didn't have much weight. Record snowfall and throughout the east coast power outages from massive freezes. It was self-explanatory to anyone LIVING THROUGH THE WINTER. But then the spring thaws come and because the severe winter had frozen the soil to such a depth, the spring runoffs were horrendous. In the north in Iowa there were horrific floods -- and OBAMA NEVER SHOWED UP. (What a Bastard of a President to completely ignore their suffering ... but the people of the Midwest who weren't supporters of Obama in the first place, didn't give a damn.) But in March 2009, there were again massive floods in North Dakota well-above flood stage because of the run-offs. The same conditions that the Midwest encountered because of the severe winter happened in North Dakota -- and flooding was massive. But this time, Obama's budget with his cap-and-trade included was before Congress. Suddenly he's sending his people to North Dakota and calling it an example of -- you guessed it -- Global Warming. What a hypocrite -- who has so much disdain for the American people's intelligence that he will spout off on 26 Mar 2009 about how the flood was caused by Global Warming.)


April 2009

More Americans Believe Global Warming Natural Versus Man-made (Apr 2009) Despite years of hysterical, Al Gore-loving media hype that humans are destroying the planet by emitting too much carbon dioxide, more Americans now believe global warming is being caused by long-term planetary forces rather than man's activities.

This represents a stunning reversal in the past twelve months, and is likely a function of a recent global cooling that has thwarted efforts by climate alarmists to convince citizens that the warming trend that began in the mid-'70s was going to continue forever if the world didn't immediately stop burning fossil fuels.

Now, according to Rasmussen Reports, those believing man can actually control the planet's thermostat have plummeted in number: (Source: NewsBusters.) (SITE NOTE: The Rasmussen poll that the change in numbers for the global warming theory support is possibly due to the severest winter on record in many parts of the nation. In Colorado, they had 30 inches of snow in April. The news in Antartica is that the ice is GROWING. Reports everywhere show that water levels are FALLING. It also is being pointed out to the populace that the global warming theory is just that -- a theory, but is one not substantiated by emperical evidence. In fact, numerous news stories have been written recently about the shobby "evidence" used in some of the studies. It also helped that 30,000 scientists don't buy the global warming theory. THE BOTTOMLINE: OBAMA'S CAP-AND-TRADE IS BASED ON GLOBAL WARMING SUPPORT. There may be trouble ahead.)


May 2009

Quiet Sun May Trigger Global Cooling (May 2009) Could reduced sunspots be tied to temperatures on Earth? That's what has astrophysicists and meteorologists wondering as the sun enters a prolonged "quiet period," a deviation from the usual 11-year sunspot cycle in which the dark blobs on our star's surface ebb and flow, reports National Geographic News.

And there may be a link to global warming — or, in this case, cooling. Current theories link an earlier solar quiet time to the "Little Ice Age," a cold snap that lasted from about 1300 to 1800 in Europe and North America. During such "solar minimums," as they're called, the sun dims a bit, magnetic activity is reduced and solar storms are fewer. No one knows how long each will last until it's over.

The Maunder Minimum, a period of extremely low sunspot activity from about 1645 to 1715, coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, when Dutch canals regularly froze during the winter. This past January, the Dutch canals again froze, for the first time in 16 years.

But scientists say it may be too early to tell if this solar minimum will really have a prolonged effect. "There are many uncertainties," Jose Abreu, a doctoral candidate in Switzerland, tells National Geographic News. "We don't know the sensitivity of the climate to changes in solar intensity. In my opinion, I wouldn't play with things I don't know." (Source: Fox News.)

Will Widespread Global Cooling Reports Freeze Al Gore Media Credibility? It is "an inconvenient truth" for Al Gore that the world is currently experiencing some of the coldest weather in decades. Just how cold? How about snow in Saudi Arabia in May according to this report?

According to a story in the Saudi Gazette and sourced to the American News Agency, the Associated Press, snow fell in Al-Baha city, to the south-west of Riyadh, on Tuesday. Torrential rain poured down on Al-Baha accompanied by gusty winds. The nearby mountains received some snow too. It covered the valley areas and the forests of Al-Zaraeb and Khayrah, according to the report.
If this were the only such report, it could be written off as just an isolated incident of freak weather. Unfortunately for Al Gore's credibility there have been widespread reports of unseasonably cold weather from many sources including a story yesterday in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about a "year without summer." (Source: Newsbusters.) (SITE NOTE: It snowed in Montana in JUNE and crops are suffering from COLD stress. People are having a hard time believing in Global Warming with the weather phenomena this year. Another incident in New Jersey with hail/snow in June (WCBS-TV.) )





June 2009

ICCC Three Brings Climate Reality To Washington DC (Jun 2009) A mere twelve weeks had passed since he gaveled the close of the second International Conference on Climate Change in NYC. Yet last Tuesday found Joseph Bast already delivering the opening speech to its follow-up event, again featuring an elite group of scientists, economists and politicians gathered to discuss climate science and policy. But this time he stood in DC’s Washington Court Hotel, just blocks away from the chamber in which Democrats will soon attempt to pass the very legislation compelling this urgent session – the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade bill.

While both public opinion and the planet’s climate have cooled these past three months, the Left’s green fever has taken a desperate turn in the opposite direction. In April, EPA chief Lisa Jackson made good on her promise to pursue endangerment status and subsequent pollutant regulation of CO2 and five other greenhouse gases, an act likely crafted to coerce accelerated legislative action. It worked -- just weeks ago, such legislation -- the American Clean Energy Security Act (HR 2454) -- cleared its first hurdle by passing Waxman’s own House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Considering the bill’s meritless substance, potential influence on a future global accord, and outrageous price tag (hundreds of billions of dollars annually) the Heartland Institute recognized the need to once again remind the world of the “widespread dissent to the asserted ‘consensus’ on the causes, consequences, and proper responses to climate change” and that “immediate action to reduce emissions is not necessary.” Hence, an abbreviated (single day) ICCC III: Scientific Debate and Economic Analysis was quickly organized -- and Bast was now addressing over 250 attendees who came to hear and spread the vital message.

Bast wasted no time attacking the consensus canard and cited the mainstream media’s (MSM) success in keeping the existence of tens of thousands of scientists that dispute the notion of manmade global warming mostly secret as its foundation. He likened anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hysteria to the type of crowd madness that 19th century writer Charles MacKay coined as “an Extraordinary Popular Delusion,” in which even highly intelligent people can get swept up in a fad or idea which in retrospect was obviously false.” Such crowd madness led to debacles such as the 1920’s Florida Land Boom, the uranium crash of the 1950’s and, of course, the 2001 portfolio-decimating Dot Com bubble burst. Not a bad analogy, as AGW fits both the group-think and greed-driven special-interest-group rewarding aspects associated with all such folly.

And the fiery madness is fueled by a number of complicit and self-serving groups. First and foremost, the thousands of scientists that depend upon government grants to fund their climatology research, which would disappear should they fail to find either a human connection to or some new negative impact of climate change. Then there are the environmental organizations that depend upon sounding the alarm to keep the donation coffers full. And the journalists who see a “free ride” to nab front-page newspaper positions by echoing the alarmists. And the Capitalists who see, well – capital, prompting huge corporations to jump on board to exploit renewable energy subsidies and R&D grants from the federal government. Meanwhile, politicians see a great opportunity to posture about “knowing something about science” and to appear concerned for the long term and about public health and environment. And that, explained Heartland’s president and CEO, is what we’re up against in battling the bad-legislation-breeding hysteria.

With that, Joe introduced MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who explained the allure of spreading the alarm felt by climate scientists over the past 20 years. It’s no surprise that alarmists are more easily published and better funded than their colleagues. But the professor added that pro-AGW work that would normally be regarded as weak can suddenly earn its author unwarranted authority. And that they whose specialties lie outside common physics can still receive funding by relating their specialty to GW. These factors artificially swell the number of scientists who “support alarmist views.”

And with it, the claim of consensus, which as former astronaut Harrison Schmitt would later explain, usually reveals an absence of fact.

IPCC’s Faulty Models are Driving Faulty Policy

Addressing the scientific debate, Lindzen drew the line between the mostly accepted issues (CO2’s rise from 280ppmv to 380ppmv since start of industrial age, global mean temperature anomaly increase of 0.5-0.8°C in that time, etc) and those in conflict, such as whether the warming is sufficiently large to exclude natural origin and are the proposed policies of relevance to climate per se. Lindzen insists that the public discussion conflates the non-serious with the serious issues “to the detriment of significant meaning,” and offers Gore’s slide show as an example of “this intentional and misleading confusion.”

Lindzen explained why the process behind the U.N’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) claim of man’s responsibility for the warming since 1954 is “an embarrassment.” First they created a number of models which could not “reasonably simulate known patterns of natural behavior (such as El Niño (ENSO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO)), claiming that such models nonetheless accurately depicted natural internal climate variability.” Then, when those models failed to replicate the warming episode from the mid seventies through the mid nineties, they proclaimed it proof that “forcing was necessary and that the forcing must have been due to man.” And they relied upon those same “existing poorly performing models” which are fraught with “errors in the feedback factors” to make their argument that “sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 could be anything from 1.5 to 5°C based on the claimed range of results from different models.”

What we see, then, concludes Lindzen, is that the very foundation of the issue of global warming is wrong.

S. Fred Singer added that once you recognize that we’re dealing with natural and not human forces all the to-do about this is nonsense. Attempts to mitigate CO2 -- which is not a pollutant – are pointless, very expensive and completely ineffective. They’ll have no effect on the climate and in fact will have little effect on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Singer challenged the IPCC for proof of its claim that AWG was 90-99% certain, and to respond to the many “disputed and unsolved problems.” These included the true figure for climate sensitivity, whether water vapor and clouds represent positive or negative feedback, the impacts of natural forcings (internal oscillations, volcanism and solar), atmospheric CO2 residence time and rate of sea level rise (SLR), which Singer states has been an unalarmingly constant 7 inches per century for 3000 years.

He highlighted the U.N’s intellectual dishonesty by projecting graphs from early IPCC reports that included the Little Ice Age (LIA) and Medieval Warm Period (MWP) then those from TAR (IPPC Third Assessment Report) in which they both mysteriously vanished. Another graph depicted temperatures decreasing over the past 10 years while CO2 climbed, meaning “the relationship is meaningless” – a point repeated by several speakers over the course of the day. And addressing the models, Singer showed slide after slide in which he plotting observed v. projected temperatures and the latter always trended significantly higher. The IPCC’s explanation: Maybe there’s something wrong with the observations.

Above the laughter this elicited, Singer explained that the observations used were those published by the IPCC itself.

Carbon Dioxide is not the culprit

When Solar expert Willie Soon took the stage, he insisted that CO2 is not an “air pollutant,” but rather food for plants and marine life. And that its atmospheric levels are controlled by temperature and other biological/chemical variables -- not the other way around (quipped the astrophysicist: Lung Cancer does not cause smoking). But most of all, a magical CO2 knob for controlling weather and climate simply does not exist.

Soon pondered the possible effect that forcing down CO2 levels may have on plants and ergo the food supply, and this observer couldn’t help pondering the Ethanol debacle (that would later be addressed by Christopher Monckton). Soon also questioned CO2’s GW involvement based upon the absence of winter warming in places like Salt Lake City where a phenomenon called the CO2 Urban Dome is caused by an “ineffective CO2 sink during nighttime and during winter” when the biosphere is less active. As a result, a chart of SLC CO2 levels from 2002-to-present show winter swings as high as 600 ppmv (current average is around 380). Yet there’s never been any rise in winter temperatures there. Hmmm.

On the other hand, graphs Soon displayed plotting Solar Total Irradiance against Arctic, Greenland and even Sun-Royal Oak, MD surface temperatures in the past century are remarkably well aligned. As was Willie’s final graph plotting Sunshine Duration against Japanese and Northern Hemisphere Temperatures over the same period. Hmmm again.

Soon was the first, but actually not the last, presenter to offer this apropos quote from Einstein:

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”
And Dr. Roy Spencer’s lunchtime lesson on climate “feedbacks” emphasized why policy makers should heed Einstein’s wisdom. Were warming due only to CO2, it would be a non-issue. But all climate models exhibit “Positive Feedback” (responses to the warming by clouds, water vapor, etc) -- some by moderate and others by catastrophic amounts. IPCC models use an algorithm whereby CO2-caused warming causes a decrease in clouds, which lets in more sunlight and leads to more warming.

But Spencer offers another possibility -- perhaps weak warming actually increases clouds, letting in less sunlight and leading to less warming. After all, PDO phasing appears to correspond to periods of cloud cover and thereby both warming and cooling. Now, the IPCC believes in Positive Cloud Feedback because warmer years often coincide with fewer clouds than cooler years. But, asks Spencer, just how do they know that warming causes less clouds rather than less clouds (perhaps caused by a change in ocean circulations) causes warming? The answer – they don’t. And this mix-up can cause “The Illusion of Positive Feedback” (aka a “sensitive” climate system).

Spencer analyzed this in a 2008 IPCC-model-expert reviewed paper he coauthored titled Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Demonstration [PDF]. Any guesses why Spencer’s press release on the paper generated not one inquiry?

Here’s Spenser’s: The “mix-up” means that AGW is a false alarm (0.6°C by 2100 instead of 3.0°C). But then what has caused the warming in the past 100 years? Perhaps the climate can warm all by itself. All you need is to alter cloudiness by 1% (an amount technology can only recently determine) for an extended period of time and you’ve got global warming or global cooling. In other words: The system forces itself. In fact, Spencer believes that a full 75-80% of warming could be due to cloudiness changes due to PDO.

To drill the point home, Spencer repeated loudly: Without positive feedback manmade global warming becomes a non-issue.

John Theon, who 12 weeks prior had this to say about James Hansen, “I think the man is sincere, but he is suffering from a bad case of megalomania,” reminded us that his former employee’s alarming 1988 Senate testimony was “an embarrassment to NASA” as it did not reflect the agency’s policy. It did, however, prompt the now famous NY Times headline Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate. The former NASA supervisor also challenged the “unprecedented warming” lie by reminding us why now-frozen Greenland was so named (it was quite warm there during the MWP). He then disputed the credibility of the “peer review” process and used Mann’s Hockey Stick (MBH98) debacle as the perfect example. Theon subscribes to the warming oceans expel CO2 and cause atmospheric elevation theory (the reverse of the alarmist claim that CO2 drives the warming) and submitted a compelling example: Open a cold can of soda and watch it get flat as it approaches room temperature.

Craig Idso took on the alarmist issue of reef destruction from carbon-driven ocean acidification, explaining that rising CO2 and water temperatures have not been anywhere near as catastrophic to corals as models predicted – the sea-life simply adapts. In fact, the growth rate of modern corals is 31-34% greater than that of ancient specimens. And policymakers should be paying much more attention to real world observations than to theoretical projections. Idso’s conclusion summed it up well: Rising CO2 levels are not the bane of the biosphere, but actually the boon.

Bad Data, Bad Reporting, and False versus Real Dilemmas

Anthony Watts, editor of the fabulous WUWT, reported the latest data in his ongoing evaluation of highly-critical upstream temperature data collection – and the results are nothing less than startling. His team found more than half of the 1,221 stations audited to be inaccurate by at least 2°C. These discrepancies were attributed to various data corrupting violations, including stations located on dark albedo gravel or directly in proximity to hot AC exhaust (both of which bias readings to the upside).

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) rules dictate stations be at least 100 feet away from heat sources and radiative surfaces and the number of stations disregarding this metric (90%) is breathtaking. Watts also discussed how “smoothing” adjustments are used by both the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and NOAA to “homogenize” station data to that of surrounding stations. This actually makes temperature increase appear even steeper. In fact, Watts displayed a graph depicting NOAA’s adjustments to raw temperature data between 1940 and 1999 to be 0.5°F to the positive. That accounts for almost one half of the 1.2°F warming over the last century – think about that.

And this -- Cato’s Patrick Michaels explained the Climate of Extremes being used to promote AGW, and with it -- Waxman-Markey, by offering the false dilemma of either “There’s no such thing as Global Warming” or “We’re all going to die.” Such extremes even exist among alarmists, with Al Gore warning of a 1 meter SLR in 10 years while the IPCC puts the rise at 1.26 inches. He disproved overstatement examples of drought extent, California fire causes and other climate “catastrophes” that are reported without fact-checking. And he deftly debunked the “Robins in the Arctic” myth that there is no Eskimo word for Robin, as, before global warming-caused bird migration, Eskimos had never seen one. The MSM and many politicians (including John McCain) have floated that fallacy as a sign of unprecedented warming. Guess what? Michaels found plenty of Eskimo language references to the birds in literary quotes dating back to 1913.

Bob Carter warned that the real climate change problem is that of natural weather and climate events, and that these shift by locale. Nobody lives in a world climate. For instance, while New Zealand and San Francisco run high risks of earthquakes and volcanic eruption, other regions face a greater chance of suffering the effects of wildfires and hurricanes.

Plan A – The IPCC plan – will obviously not stop climate change. Even if we could force CO2 abatement through heavy taxation, the current logarithmic decreasing curve of CO2’s warming effect proves it would be meaningless. Even if we doubled and redoubled, that warming is not going to be dangerous. Our Plan B must therefore be preparation for and adaptation to real natural climate change. Thusly, hypothetical human-caused climate change, should it occur, is automatically accommodated. Will 2020 be more like the LIA or the MWP?

The truth is – affirms Carter -- no one really knows. Cap and Trade is Cap and Tax

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis), who insists that C&T be called what it really is – cap-and-tax, believes this administration is bent on signing a treaty in Copenhagen in December and he fears they’ll do so simply for the sake of signing a treaty rather than insisting that the treaty be a good one – which means of world wide application and not significantly hurting the American economy. But their messages are mixed. On May 27th Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said we may accept targets for reducing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in an international treaty even if China doesn’t. Yet just a month earlier, Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the imperative that any agreement include significant commitments from all nations. Asks the congressman -- What is American Policy on the issue?

For the record, Sensenbrenner doesn’t oppose carbon mitigation. He does, however, strongly oppose cap-and-tax, and believes emissions should be reduced through technology (which the notorious intellectual-property thieves in China expect us to share). And as the lone Republican to accompany Pelosi’s delegation to China a few days before, what he heard from all China interlocutors, from top on down, is that the Chinese will never go along with an international treaty that mandates the reduction of GHG, but will instead reduce GHG their own way. They demand that the developed world contribute 1% of GDP (that’s 140B from US) to a U.N controlled fund to help with their GHG reduction.

So then -- We’d borrow $140B a year from the Chinese to give the Chinese $140B a year. Readers can imagine the laughter this one induced.

Furthermore, the economic impact of C&T would be devastating. In his state (which relies on coal-fired plant for 67% of its power), he predicts a 170% increase in electric rates, 130% in natural gas rates and between 8 and 10 dollars gas at the pump. That’s not a typo.

The congressman warned that there’s no way American industry can compete against India and China if energy costs are raised so high. He refers to the idea as “economic unilateral disarmament.” And he further warns that the very same people who push the bill the most (Pelosi, Markey, Waxman, Kerry, etc) will be the ones who bring utility executives before Congress to berate them for raising rates to pay for the carbon offset credits. And they will also be the first to complain when manufacturing jobs disappear completely when whatever we have left goes to China and India.

He calls it a “Cynical political game” which will have “devastating economic consequences.” He emphasized that “we need to inform the people this is not a free lunch but a very expensive one so that we can beat this in the Congress.”

When Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) took the podium, he opened with one of the event’s funniest lines: “I know a little bit about science. I know there are protons, electrons, neutrons … and MORONS.” His presentation was rich with personal anecdotes, including of an in-your-face encounter with Jacques-Yves Cousteau and a group of students. Overhearing the pupils being lectured that “within 10 years the oceans will be dead black goo,” the congressman decided to challenge the French oceanographer’s prediction. Rohrabacher’s reenactment of Cousteau’s arrogant “because I say so” reply marvelously lampooned the “Case closed, no more questions” attitude of the Gore and his fellow alarmists.

But on a more serious note, Rohrabacher posed a few questions he feels must be answered before taxes are raised and lives are controlled. For instance, why do AGW charts tend to use an 1850’s baseline? Could it be because that’s when the LIA ended? And what’s the big deal about a few degrees temperature rise from such historic lows? Good question, indeed.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok) all but assured us that Waxman-Markey would never pass the Senate. Sure, Pelosi will pass anything, so it’s likely to get through the House. And Reid has promised to bypass the Senate committee process and take the bill straight to floor. But it won’t pass the Senate, where the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the 2003 Lieberman-McCain, the 2005 McCain-Lieberman and the 2007 Lieberman-Warner were all defeated. They simply will not pass a bill that doesn’t include developing nations.

Let’s hope that the congressman from Wisconsin and the Senator from Oklahoma are both correct in their assessments. Economist David Tuerck, who believes that cap-and-trade can be done right, delivered a more detailed, albeit rushed, analysis of why Waxman-Markey is C&T done wrong. Borrowing from a similar term used to describe bad science he referred to the bill as “junk economics.”

And so, apparently, was Spain’s approach.

You may recall that in January of this year, Obama held out the energy policies of Spain as a shining example of how successful a “government-aided” cap-and-trade plan could be. On Tuesday, Dr. Gabriel Calzada shredded that model. The Spanish economist revealed the devastating 18 percent “green unemployment” such policies have created. And the “green bubble” inflated by a perpetuating yet unsustainable cycle of government subsidies for “green jobs,” ($771,000 for each – also not a typo) which in reality result in a net loss of two traditional jobs for every green one created. Not to mention the fact that the majority of these “green” jobs are temporary in nature, further decimating the Spanish workforce as they sunset. And while the government continues to pump more money into inadequate power sources, energy prices skyrocket, driving industry to cheaper ground, and the job market to even lower levels.

The Marshall Institute’s Jeff Kueter called Waxman-Markey a path to energy rationing, and ultimately rationing of food and even regulation of food choices. And the doctor wisely reminded us that:

‘We’ve walked this road before – It doesn’t end well.”
And Finally -- Lord Christopher Monckton

Once again, Heartland recruited the Mariano Rivera of conference closers to deliver the final pitch. And once again, Monckton charmed the crowd right out of the bullpen, this time with a hysterical Pelosi quote:

“How lucky the United States is to have reserves of natural gas, because otherwise we’d have to depend on fossil fuels.”
Now, it appears that Joe Bast asked his Lordship to refrain from calling the alarmists “Bed-wetters,” so he instead referred to them as “people who have difficulty containing certain very personal bodily functions when they are [horizontally inclined].” Anyway -- The day before yesterday, those people called it “global warming.” Yesterday they called it “climate change.” Today they call it “energy security” and tomorrow – thanks to those in this room -- they will call it what it is – absolute rubbish.

He displayed and intellectually destroyed the now alarmist staple graph of 19th and 20th century global mean temperatures which has appeared everywhere from AR4 to Al Gore’s film to the recent EPA CO2 pollution ruling. Monckton calls the statistical technique behind its steep rise in the past 50 years – particularly relating to the selection of endpoints for drawing linear-regression trends -- entirely bogus and states that no respectable scientist or authority would ever have used it. Of course, IPCC has a record of employing flim-flam visuals – as the famous “Hockey Stick” graph which dishonestly obliterated both the LIA and the MWP in an effort to label modern warming “unprecedented” attests.

He then took on Kofi Annan’s recent grotesque claim of 300,000 deaths per year caused by GW.

“How dare the UN ignore the unprecedented food riots in a dozen regions over the past 18 months, riots directly caused by widespread starvation, directly caused by the doubling of world food prices, directly caused by the millions of acres of agricultural land that no longer grow food for starving people that need it, but instead grow biofuels for automobiles that don’t, directly caused by a global scam, directly caused by the UN’s lunatic policy of bad science, false alarm, and pre-emptive cringe?”
There is a clear cooling trend in the data, yet GW is killing 300,000 people a year? And the MSM unquestionably reported this as fact.

Monckton then had fun with Steven Chu’s absurd suggestion that painting rooftops and roads white would have the same effect on global warming as taking all the cars in the world off the world's roads for 11 years, and, again, the MSM’s uncritical reporting of it. First scientifically – 75% of Earth’s surface is covered in water or ice, leaving 25%. Of which maybe 2% has roofs or roads on it. At most then we can paint 0.5% of the Earth’s surface. But most of the buildings and roads are not in the tropics where most of the sunlight arrives and needs reflecting back. Added to other pitfalls he delineates, Monckton estimates the paintfest will forestall a whopping 0.1% of GW. Of course the media was nonetheless eager to report the plan without attempting to verify its efficacy.

Then there’s the fiscal problem. Calculating the amount of paint required to be 168 Trillion sq. meters of paint divided by 10 sq. meters per liter to give you 17 Trillion liters of paint, which even if you go to Wal-Mart and get it at a dollar a liter, you’re spending $17 Trillion Dollars to save 0.0008 to 0.008 F° of GW by 2100. And that is a Bargain compared to the Markey-Waxman Bill.

And here’s why.

To prevent just 2.0°F of warming, we must forgo 2 to 20 trillion tons of CO2 emissions. The annual W/M cuts are 5 of the 6 billion tons being emitted, so the cooling per year that will be achieved will have saved 0.0005-0.005 F° per year. At that rate it would take between 1600 and 16000 years to prevent the 8°F predicted by the UN till 2100. At the $180 Billion a year the administration has leaked -- the cost of this modest proposal will be 300 to 3000 Trillion Dollars. “And it won’t start to work till we’re well into the next Ice Age anyway. If then.”

He then questioned how the warming a given increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration would cause is derived. And why it wasn’t mentioned in either of the past 2 IPCC reports. And made a rather technical yet easy to follow argument why the IPCC’s central estimate of climate sensitivity (3.3°C) is off by nearly an order of magnitude. And warned that:

“Whether or not any binding but pointless targets for curbing CO2 emissions are decided upon at Copenhagen, one policy they will all agree upon. The UN’s climate panel will be given new powers – at first, mere powers of monitoring, but increasingly powers of intervention and eventually of legislation.

As Maurice Strong, Jacques Chirac and their ilk had always intended, the IPCC will emerge after Copenhagen as the prototype and nucleus of a world government. We have already seen this in the EU. We have learned the hard way that supranational government is never democratic government. Nor is it honest. Nor is it cheap.

Yet the highly-placed conspirators who seek to ride the climate scare to world domination have reckoned without one thing. You. You are here, and you will not let the truth go. Thanks to you, it is becoming evident that the rent-seeking promoters of this great boondoggle, through the very scientific ignorance that they had sought to exploit in others, have merely deluded themselves.

In the end, it will be here, in the United States, that the truth will first emerge in all its glory. Not in Europe, for we are no longer free. Not in Russia or China, for they have never been free. Not in the Middle East, for while militant Islam endures it can never become free.”
And then this brilliant citizen of Great Britain placed more faith in the American spirit than do most American Liberals:

“It is the people of the United States who will surely lead and inspire the world once more in this dark hour that might have become a new dark age. You must not and you will not fail.”
Parting Thoughts

Many thanks to the folks at Heartland for boldly and adroitly bearing the torch once again. I, for one, exited Tuesday’s proceedings more confident in the failure of both the American and Copenhagen boondoggles than when I arrived.

Inhofe believes Obama needs to carry some type of victory with him to the December summit, and that it won’t be an American C&T bill. The Senator also assured us that the EPA threat isn’t going work, as Obama won’t want his fingerprints on such regulation should the projected economic devastation materialize, and that the Senate can “easily stall it until we get a different president.” Let’s hope he’s right: The failure of Waxman-Markey would leave the American delegation with nothing more than the “promise of US regulation” with which to pressure China and India. Good luck with that, guys.

Therefore, the defeat of HR 2454 is key. For all of the reasons expressed by Tuesday’s brilliant speakers -- plus this one: While Waxman-Markey would attempt to cut US carbon emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the EU is seeking to lower them to 20 percent below 1990 levels by that year. And according to an MIT study, Waxman-Markey “could cost the average household more than $3,900 per year.” Imagine the potential “negative feedback” effects an international accord might have on Waxman-Markey’s already destructive emission goals.

At ICCC II, Monckton asserted that “There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis” and that therefore “the correct policy response to the non-problem of climate change is to have the courage to do nothing.”

His declaration twelve weeks to the day later that we “must not fail” accurately underscores the urgency of exacting such courage from our policymakers.

Reality must prevail. This bill must die. (Source: American Thinker: Marc Sheppard.)





July 2009

Media in bed with Global Warming William Tate: Journalists protest Global Warming spin cycle (Jul 2009) Even journalists are beginning to revolt at tactics the government is now using to spin the Global Warming myth. Controversy erupted this week at the World Conference of Science Journalists over the National Science Foundation's "underwriting" of media projects. It turns out that the NSF, which is heavily invested in propagating the Global Warming party line, has been quietly producing content for news outlets, content which the casual observer might not recognize for the propaganda it is.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the NSF's Jeff Nesbit was met with "consternation" at the London conference for "attempting to 'disguise' publicity as objective reporting." As stated earlier, the NSF is a major player in the Global Warming cult, having funded studies which claim that, despite cooling temperatures, warming is inevitable this century, and that it will impact everything from vintners who produce Pinot Noir to the world's largest freshwater lake in Siberia. The NSF provides about twenty percent of all federal funding for scientific research. It is now also providing media outlets with content, such as the below from U.S. News & Report:

NSF Releases Comprehensive Report on Global Impacts of Climate Change Agency proposes to double climate research portfolio in 2010 Posted May 14, 2009

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has released a report on global climate change, entitled "Solving the Puzzle: Researching the Impacts of Climate Change around the World," that describes how, over nearly 60 years, NSF-funded researchers have found signs of a changing climate in nearly every corner of the globe, from the icy expanses of Earth's polar regions to its equatorial ecosystems.
The article does note, "content provided by the National Science Foundation." However, there is no such disclaimer posted for the Discovery Files podcasts available there, one of which states:

"the time for just talking about Global Warming is over. The good news is that action now could stabilize the threat of climate change." The NSF also provides content to LiveScience, which published a piece in February announcing the agency's request for a budget increase, doubling funding for "basic research" over the next decade, and

"Making climate change research and education a priority. The budget supports research to improve our ability to predict future environmental conditions and to develop strategies for responding to global environmental change. The budget establishes a climate change education program to help develop the next generation of environmentally engaged scientists and engineers."
It is not clear from the report if the budget increase would also include more content to be placed in media outlets. This particular article states that it was written by LiveScience staff; still senior editor Robin Lloyd conceded that accepting other content produced by the NSF as other articles isn't "ideal." According to the CJR, she admitted, "We are throwing up their press stuff."

Although some of the NSF's propaganda activities are more traditional, such as underwriting PBS science programming, how can news organizations objectively cover a government agency for which said outlets are also "throwing up their (the NSF's) press stuff"? It should be pointed out that the journalists who objected at the London conference -- many of whom are Global Warming true believers -- were not complaining about the NSF's promotion of Global Warming, but rather, as the CJR reported, "that the NSF is dangerously blurring the lines between journalism and PR."

But it still could be a step in the right direction. The late Michael Crichton, in an appendix to his novel, State of Fear, compared the 'science' behind man-made Global Warming to the similarly questionable research behind eugenics, the specious theory floated a little over a century ago that the human gene pool was being weakened by supposedly inferior peoples, leading eventually to a supposedly-scientific basis for Adolf Hitler's evils. Crichton pointed out that eugenics was once supported by the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council and that opponents of this "psuedoscience" were called reactionary and shouted down. Crichton quoted Ute Deichman's Biologists Under Hitler:

"Scientists, including those who were not members of the (Nazi) party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state."
In other words, in order to get funding, scientists played along voluntarily. Another theory advanced by the Nazis was the Big Lie:

"(T)he broad masses ... more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods"
A big part of telling the Big Lie was using propaganda. Neither Crichton meant then -- nor I mean now -- to imply that supporters of Global Warming are racist, or totalitarian, or even evil. Rather, Crichton intended his analysis, based on three years of research, as a warning of the dangers of mis-using science as a crutch to prop up political ambitions. My warning is similar. Just as scientists were wrong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to jettison scientific principles for a popular theory. Journalists, and journalistic organizations, are now wrong to sacrifice ethics for the current hot scientific craze. Pun intended. (Source: American Thinker: William Tate.)


August 2009

Energy workers rally against climate plan (Aug 2009) Local energy workers jammed a downtown Houston theater today to protest climate change legislation that the U.S. Senate will take up in the coming weeks. The Energy Citizens rally, promoted by some major energy companies and business organizations as well as the Greater Houston Partnership, is the first of several such events planned in 19 states in the coming weeks. About 3,500 people, or 1,500 more than expected, filed into the facility, many donning yellow T-shirts that were being handed out that read "I'm an energy citizen." Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane Jr. was the keynote speaker.

Organizers of the event, billed as a dialogue on energy and the environment, told the Chronicle on Monday that legislation the U.S. House passed last spring will destroy millions of U.S. jobs and raise costs without reducing greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change. “It's a dangerous piece of legislation,” said James Hackett, chairman and CEO of Anadarko Energy, which is busing employees to the event. Hackett said he supports reducing greenhouse emissions and developing alternative sources of fuel. “But I do think there's a virtual reality that's being portrayed to most American citizens about how quickly we get there and how we get there,” Hackett said.

The rally is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. at the Verizon Wireless Theater downtown, with doors open at 11:30. The climate change bill the House passed earlier this year sets a steadily decreasing cap on emissions from factories, power plants and other industrial sources and lets companies trade any excess emissions allowances. The price of those emissions allowances would most likely be passed on to consumers. The measure also would set up a system for creating extra allowances, called offsets, through other projects that reduce emissions, and would include incentives for renewable energy sources and home and business energy efficiency.

But opponents say the bill won't reduce greenhouse gas emissions because it doesn't secure promises from developing nations, like China and India, to put controls on their growing emissions. It also makes no mention of encouraging nuclear power generation, which some rally organizers believe will be key to meeting the country's electricity needs without creating more greenhouse gases, and doesn't discuss a role for natural gas, which typically has lower carbon emissions than other fossil fuels.

Opponents also say the cost of the legislation is ill-timed in a weak economy. A study released by the National Association of Manufacturers last week says the law would cost 1.8 million to 2.4 million jobs by 2030 and would cost each U.S. household up to $1,248 a year by 2030. Other estimates of annual household costs have differed — $83 per year according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration; $88-$140 according to the Environmental Protection Agency; and $175 a year projected by the Congressional Budget Office.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, both major party nominees — Republican John McCain and Democratic winner Barack Obama — said they favored a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. One of the scheduled speakers at today's event, National Black Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Harry Alford, said his organization has been on the record against such a bill since 1996 when it opposed the Kyoto Treaty that led to the emissions trading system now operating in Europe.

Chevron has invited Houston employees and retirees to participate in the event, and will provide transportation, so they can be part of the policy discussion, said spokesman Scott Walker in an e-mail. “Chevron supports a national climate change program that is transparent, promotes energy efficiency and conservation measures, treats all participants fairly and protects our economy and energy security,” he said.

Shell Oil has been outspoken in support of climate change legislation, and is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which has supported a cap and trade program. Shell is “neither encouraging nor discouraging participation in the rally,” spokesman Bill Tanner said. The Greater Houston Partnership is “still in the process of formulating an official position on the cap and trade plan in the energy legislation,” according to a release concerning the event, but is encouraging dialogue because of the legislation's potential effect on the region. (Source: Chron.com.)


September 2009

Video: Obama claims the US did nothing on emissions before 2009 (Sep 2009) Barack Obama spoke to the UN this morning on the topic of climate change, in part to take credit for pushing the US towards the state-run energy paradigm that Europe has begun to regret. After the obligatory "no one before us had the wisdom to think we could change the weather" opening, Obama makes a couple of odd — and eminently refutable — claims about his presidency:

VIDEO: Obama -- We can reverse climate change


Thank you very much. Good morning. I want to thank the Secretary General for organizing this summit, and all the leaders who are participating. That so many of us are here today is a recognition that the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. Our generation's response to this challenge will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it — boldly, swiftly, and together — we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe.

No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change. Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent droughts and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive. On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees. The security and stability of each nation and all peoples — our prosperity, our health, and our safety — are in jeopardy. And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out.

And yet, we can reverse it. John F. Kennedy once observed that "Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man." It is true that for too many years, mankind has been slow to respond or even recognize the magnitude of the climate threat. It is true of my own country, as well. We recognize that. But this is a new day. It is a new era. And I am proud to say that the United States has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in our history.
As The Anchoress points out, this is simply untrue. In the first place, we succeeded through partnership with the private sector where Europe and Kyoto did not in 2006, when we grew our economy and reduced our carbon emissions by 1.3%:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped slightly last year even as the economy grew, according to an initial estimate released yesterday by the Energy Information Administration.

The 1.3 percent drop in CO{-2} emissions marks the first time that U.S. pollution linked to global warming has declined in absolute terms since 2001 and the first time it has gone down since 1990 while the economy was thriving. Carbon dioxide emissions declined in both 2001 and 1991, in large part because of economic slowdowns during those years.

In 2006 the U.S. economy grew 3.3 percent, a fact President Bush touted yesterday as he hailed the government's "flash estimate" that the country's carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 78 million metric tons last year.
What's more, while Europe pursued the completely ineffective Kyoto strategy, the US worked to engage the world's biggest polluters in a joint program that seriously addressed both emissions and economic growth:

In a surprise move that caught Europe's smug moralists and the environmental movement's noisy extremists flatfooted, the United States announced in Vientiane, Laos, last week that it was joining five other nations – China, India, Japan, South Korea and Australia — in a new pact that offers a refreshing and effective alternative route to tackling the problem of climate change.

While given short shrift by the puzzled media, this is a big deal, in many ways.

First, it breaks the climate-change deadlock. This is the agreement that responsible scientists and public officials have been seeking since the failure of the Kyoto Protocol became evident at the global warming conclave in Delhi two years ago. Call it "Beyond Kyoto" – Way Beyond Kyoto.

Second, the new deal was negotiated and settled without the involvement of the United Nations or the European Union – a clear message from the United States that multilateralism does not have a single definition. In fact, according to The Guardian newspaper, the agreement – called the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate — was kept secret by President Bush from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, an uncompromising champion of Kyoto, during last month's G8 meeting" in Scotland.
The net result of these policies? Instead of imposing a $1700 cost burden per American household and costing the US 3.5% of its GDP by 2050, Bush grew the economy — and increased tax revenues as a result:

An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.

On Tuesday, White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year's levels and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago. The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts and making it easier for both the administration and Congress to finesse the big run-up in spending over the past year.

Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could actually decline this year.
Tax cuts and pro-growth policies actually increased the economy while reducing carbon emissions, something that Europe has yet to match. Perhaps that success should be the model of future programs for curbing emissions, although the need for it becomes less and less certain every year. At the very least, someone should inform the President of them, because once again, White House research has left him ignorant at the podium. (Source: Hot Air.)


October 2009

No deal on crucial issues as UN climate talks end (Oct 2009) The United States was heavily criticized Friday at the U.N. climate talks in Bangkok for failing to offer emission cuts or financing for developing countries — both considered crucial to reaching a global warming pact this year. The Bangkok talks ended just as it was announced that President Barack Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, for among other things strengthening the U.S. role in combatting climate change. U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said he hoped the award would spur progress when the U.S. delegation arrives in Copenhagen in December for crucial climate negotiations. Obama is set to received his award in Oslo on Dec. 10 — just days after the climate talks start. "I hope this encourages him to come to Copenhagen with an ambitious target," de Boer said. "We need that."

Earlier, the Americans took a beating from environmentalists and poor nations for failing to commit to deep emissions cuts and to provide financial aid to poorer nations. "The developing nations are justifiably angry at the lack of progress, about the lack of credible offers by the United States, by the European Union and by Japan," said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Jonathan Pershing, the head of the American delegation, said the United States wanted a deal in Copenhagen but he admitted "it would be extremely difficult for the U.S. to commit to specific numbers in the absence of legislation from Congress." In the U.S., which rejected the Kyoto Protocol because it exempted countries such as India and China from obligations, a bill that passed the House of Representatives would reduce emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels — about 4 percent below 1990 levels — by 2020. The Senate is considering its own bill that would cut emissions 20 percent.

Negotiations have been deadlocked for months and delegates have raised doubts whether a new climate pact to rein in greenhouse gases can be reached by the time world leaders gather in Copenhagen. The pact would replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Shayam Saran, India's special envoy for climate change, told reporters said he was "dismayed" that developed nations hadn't announced plans for deep emissions cuts at the Bangkok meeting, as he had been expecting.

Most countries want a new climate pact that includes measures limiting temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, a level necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. But so far, there is no consensus on how to reach that goal. Industrialized nations have pledged emission cuts of up to 23 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 — far short of the 25 to 40 percent cuts scientists and activists say are needed to keep temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Only Norway announced a new target at the Bangkok meeting, saying it would reduce by 40 percent, up from a previous commitment of 30 percent, by 2020. Developing countries have said they want to do their part but have refused to agree on binding targets and want to see more ambitious cuts by the industrialized nations. They won't sign any deal until the West guarantees tens of billions of dollars in financial assistance. "This week has witnessed a very regretful and unfortunate development which has demonstrated without a doubt the lack of seriousness of the developed countries," Lumumba Di-Aping, chairman of the developing block of nations known as the G-77 and China, told reporters. "We have witnessed one developed country after another making pronouncements that literally amount to the discarding and killing the Kyoto Protocol." (Source: AP.0


Antarctic Warming, but ice NOT melting as predicted Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Levels in Satellite Era (Oct 2009) Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history. Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season.



Figure 1. Standardized values of the Antarctic snow melt index (October-January) from 1980-2009 (adapted from Tedesco and Monaghan, 2009).
The silence surrounding this publication was deafening.

It would seem that with oft-stoked fears of a disastrous sea level rise coming this century any news that perhaps some signs may not be pointing to its imminent arrival would be greeted by a huge sigh of relief from all inhabitants of earth (not only the low-lying ones, but also the high-living ones, respectively under threat from rising seas or rising energy costs).

But not a peep. But such is not always the case—or rather, such is not ever the case when ice melt is pushing the other end of the record scale. For instance, below is a collection of NASA stories highlighting record high amounts of melting (or in most cases, simply higher than normal amounts in some regions) across Greenland in each of the past 3 years, as ascertained by Marco Tedesco (the lead author of the latest report on Antarctica):

NASA Researcher Finds Days of Snow Melting on the Rise in Greenland

“In 2006, Greenland experienced more days of melting snow and at higher altitudes than average over the past 18 years, according to a new NASA-funded project using satellite observations….”

NASA Finds Greenland Snow Melting Hit Record High in High Places “A new NASA-supported study reports that 2007 marked an overall rise in the melting trend over the entire Greenland ice sheet and, remarkably, melting in high-altitude areas was greater than ever at 150 percent more than average. In fact, the amount of snow that has melted this year over Greenland is the equivalent of more than twice the surface size of the U.S…”

Melting on the Greenland Ice Cap, 2008 “The northern fringes of Greenland’s ice sheet experienced extreme melting in 2008, according to NASA scientist Marco Tedesco and his colleagues.”
And lest you think that perhaps NASA hasn’t had any data on ice melt across Antarctica in past years, we give you this one:

NASA Researchers Find Snowmelt in Antarctica Creeping Inland

“On the world’s coldest continent of Antarctica, the landscape is so vast and varied that only satellites can fully capture the extent of changes in the snow melting across its valleys, mountains, glaciers and ice shelves. In a new NASA study, researchers [including Marco Tedesco] using 20 years of data from space-based sensors have confirmed that Antarctic snow is melting farther inland from the coast over time, melting at higher altitudes than ever and increasingly melting on Antarctica’s largest ice shelf.”
But this time around, nothing, nada, zippo from NASA when their ice melt go-to guy Marco Tedesco reports that Antarctica has set a record for the lack of surface ice melt (even more interestingly coming on the heels of a near-record low ice-melt year last summer). So, seriously, NASA, what gives? If ice melt is an important enough topic to warrant annual updates of the goings-on across Greenland, it is not important enough to elucidate the history and recent behavior across Antarctica? (These are not meant as rhetorical questions)

Reference Tedesco M., and A. J. Monaghan, 2009. An updated Antarctic melt record through 2009 and its linkages to high-latitude and tropical climate variability. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L18502, doi:10.1029/2009GL039186. (Source: World Climate.)

Why Antarctica Isn't Melting Much -- Yet (Jan 2010) Antarctica is warming, but not melting anything like as much as expected. In fact, during the continent's summer this time last year, there was less melting than at any time in the 30 years that we have had reliable satellite measurements of the region.

A look at the effects of global warming in Antarctica.

The apparent contradiction is explained by the seasonal pattern of warming, say two glaciologists writing in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union. The continent's winters and springs have warmed most, but it is still too cold in these seasons for anything to melt. Melting in Antarctica happens almost entirely in the summers, which have warmed very little, say Andrew Monaghan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and Marco Tedesco of the City College of New York.

John King of the British Antarctic Survey, based in Cambridge, warned against misinterpreting the lack of summer warming. "Climate change denialists will use this work as evidence that Antarctica is not warming, despite the authors saying their works show no such thing," he said.

Summer Meltdown

Every year is different, says Tedesco. "In 2005, we had summer melting occurring inland as well as over the coastal ice shelves, and over areas up to 2,500 meters [about 8,000 feet] above sea level." And even during the exceptionally low melt of last summer, ice on the Antarctic peninsula, which stretches out towards South America, continued to melt. The Wilkins ice shelf, which is attached to the peninsula, has been collapsing rapidly since February 2008.

The continent's huge ice sheets contain enough frozen water to raise sea levels globally by almost 200 feet. Tedesco and Monaghan say the main factor in how much they warm each summer is the strength of the winds that circle the continent.

Circumpolar winds act as a barrier to warm air. They have become stronger over the past four decades, effectively sealing off most of the continent each summer from the effects of global warming. The circumpolar winds appear to have strengthened because the ozone layer in the stratosphere has thinned. This has made the lower stratosphere cooler and generated stronger winds beneath.

Antarctica is Melting

But Tedesco warns that as the ozone hole heals in the coming decades, the winds will weaken, the continent will become much warmer in summer – and melting will increase. (SITE NOTE: THE AHA...We're Global Warming Proponents -- and the Earth is still warming despite the fact that our dire predictions of the antarctic melt and seas rising did NOT come true.) (Source: ABC News.)

Antarctica and the Myth of Deadly Rising Seas (Jan 2010) On Monday, scientists from the Norwegian Polar Institute reported that they'd measured sea temperatures beneath an East Antarctic ice shelf and found no signs of warming whatsoever. And while the discovery's corollaries remain mostly blurred by the few rogue mainstream media outlets actually reporting it, the findings are in fact yet another serious blow to the sky-is-falling-because-oceans-are-rising prophecies of the climate alarm crowd.

For years now, alarmists have insisted that Antarctica is thawing thanks to man-made global warming. They warn that such melting of a frozen continent containing 90 percent of all the ice on the planet would inevitably lead to a cataclysmic sea level rise (SLR). Scary stuff, indeed.

However, there are several problems with their assertions, not the least of which is that all evidence of melting selectively focuses on the only area of the continent satellite evidence confirms is warming -- the western region in general, and the Antarctic Peninsula in particular.

But as ICECAP's Joe D'Aleo observed in 2008 [PDF], the relatively small area of the peninsula offers an extremely poor representative sample, as it juts out well north of the mainland into an area of the South Atlantic well known for its "surface and subsurface active volcanic activity." And in the greater scheme, adds D'Aleo, "the vast continent has actually cooled since 1979."



Figure 1. Antarctic Temperature Trend 1982-2004 from Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors flown on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. Red indicates areas where temperatures generally increased during that period, and blue shows where temperatures predominantly decreased.

Still, carbo-chondriacs blame the "collapse" of ten ice shelves in and around the peninsula on melting of the underside of the ice by global-warming-fueled rising ocean temperatures. And they insist that their models are spot-on in predicting that unless mankind stops pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, it's only a matter of time before the entire continent melts. The effect of such an event, they caution, would be nothing short of a civilization-ending, 57-meter SLR -- a vision normally reserved to biblical fables or the wild imagination of Al Gore.

Of course, narrowly isolated melting doesn't support the hypothesis of widespread polar warming necessary to kindle such horrific images of metropolises submerged by anthropogenic impropriety. That's why locating and denouncing diminishing ice east of the Transantarctic Mountains ranks high on every green-funded researcher's to-do list. And that's also why it would appear that NPI scientists thought they had hit the jackpot when their models calculated that the ice shelves at Dronning Maud Land along Antarctica's northeastern border should be melting at the same rate as those farther west.

So last November, a team from NPI set out to investigate the status of just such a locale -- the Fimbul Ice Shelf. Their stated primary mission: to determine whether ice masses on the shelf are indeed currently on the decline.



Figure 2. This graphic from the project’s website denotes the area of the Fimbul Ice Shelf within the red rectangle. That's the peninsula on the western border of the Weddell Sea, where a number of ice shelves, most recently the Wilkins Ice Shelf, have collapsed into the ocean, fueling unwarranted alarm about runaway melting and sea level rise.

Last month, the expedition drilled its first borehole into the 250-to-400-meter-thick floating ice in order to study the melting and ocean circulation underneath. But readings revealed by the instruments they lowered into the water below were not quite what was anticipated.

In fact, contrary to the warmer, ice-melting temperatures predicted by models, NPI oceanographer and project leader Ole Anders Nøst reported that "the water under the ice shelf is very close to the freezing point." Furthermore, there seemed to have been no change in almost five years:

We observed a roughly 50 meter deep layer of water with temperatures very close to the freezing point, about -2.05 degrees, just beneath the ice shelf. The highest observed temperature was about -1.83 degrees close to the bottom. The temperatures are very similar to temperature data collected by [equipment attached to] elephant seals in 2008 and by British Antarctic Survey using an autosub below the ice shelf in 2005.

Nøst concluded that "This situation seems to be stable, suggesting that the melting under the ice shelf does not increase."

As to the ocean circulation models that incorrectly showed "warm deep water flowing in under the ice shelves," Nøst admitted that "as this is not observed, the models are most likely wrong and should be improved."

Translation: In contrast to model forecasts, Antarctic ice shelf collapse still appears to be isolated to a very tiny area in the western region of a continent otherwise experiencing continued glacial and ice shelf advancement.

And that fact certainly casts further serious doubt on the U.N.'s most recent century-end SLR predictions. Last year, the 18- to 59-centimeter estimate that appeared in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was increased to a full two meters, based entirely on fears of accelerated glacial melting in Greenland and Antarctica. Keep in mind that since the prolonged cold snap of the Little Ice Age ended in 1850, the global rate of SLR has remained essentially steady at approximately seven inches per century, due largely to thermal expansion.



Figure 3. SLR since 1880 courtesy of globalwarmingart.com

Reality check time: Does anything in this chart suggest to you that SLR might increase over tenfold -- as the IPCC now predicts -- this century?

As such, is it any wonder that alarmists now claim that even a few degrees of warming will ignite enough accelerated liquefying of the petatons of Earth's surface ice to render the planet barely inhabitable by land-dwellers?

In fact, it was just months after the release of AR4 that the Union of Concerned Scientists offered these hyperactive projections to the 2007 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali:

Sustained warming of [2°C above pre-industrial levels] could, for example, result in the extinction of many species and extensive melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets—causing global sea level to rise between 12 and 40 feet.
Readers should be aware that the WAIS sheets UCS referred to are not to be confused with aforementioned ice shelves. While melting "sheets," which predominately lie above bedrock, might contribute to SLR, the ice "shelves" float atop the water and therefore have ostensibly the same impact on SLR frozen as they would melted. There has, however, been concern expressed that melting glaciers might flow faster toward the ocean if unencumbered by the barricading effect of the shelves.

Now, even the notoriously alarmist U.K. Met Office admits that the complete Greenland meltdown to which they'd attribute a seven-meter SLR "would take thousands of years" even if temperatures were to continue to climb. It's therefore quite logical to assume that the majority of the predicted SLR is expected to originate in Antarctica.

And yet, other than select ice shelves (which again are already afloat and would have no further impact upon SLR) in one minuscule area soaking in water warmed by volcanic activity, Antarctica isn't melting at all. And with air temperatures averaging consistently below zero and water temperatures barely above freezing -- even in summer -- nothing in the foreseeable future suggests it might...not even should temperatures, which have been falling since 1998, nonetheless rise to the mostly arbitrary yet internationally alarmist-approved [PDF] catastrophic level of 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

In fact, despite the IPCC insistence that global warming will be most prevalent at the poles, southern-hemisphere sea ice area has remained virtually unchanged since satellite sensors and analytical programs were first capable of measuring it in 1979.



Figure 4. Southern Hemisphere sea ice area has remained virtually unchanged for over thirty years.

So perhaps when the green-gospel-pronouncing IPCC releases its Fifth Assessment Report, tentatively due for 2014, contributors and lead authors alike might carefully consider the NPI findings, the steady rate of SLR over the past 150 years, and the overall resilience of Antarctic ice before formulating their next soggy doom-and-gloom prophecy. (And don't forget this undeniable fact: Across the continent, the 2008-2009 southern hemisphere summer hosted the lowest Antarctic ice melt in thirty years.)

Surely were these people bound by scientific concerns exclusively, there'd be no doubt whatsoever that they’d do just that.

Marc Sheppard is environment editor of American Thinker and editor of the forthcoming Environment Thinker.(Source: American Thinker.)



SEAS WARMING -- Giant, Mucus-Like Sea Blobs on the Rise, Pose Danger (Oct 2009) As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says (sea "mucus" blob pictures). And the blobs may be more than just unpleasant. Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season's warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs (Mediterranean map). Now, due to warmer temperatures, the mucilages are forming in winter too—and lasting for months. (SITE NOTE: The "blob" is not new having been reported in 1729. What is important is that it is spreading -- and has been seen in Alaska as well.)

Until now, the light-brown "mucus" was seen as mostly a nuisance, clogging fishing nets and covering swimmers with a sticky gel—newspapers from the 1800s show beach-goers holding their noses, according to study leader Roberto Danovaro, director of the marine science department at the Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy. But the new study found that Mediterranean mucilages harbor bacteria and viruses, including potentially deadly E. coli, Danovaro said. Those pathogens threaten human swimmers as well as fish and other sea creatures, according to the report, published September 16 in the journal PloS One.

Blobs Born of "Marine Snow"

A mucilage begins as "marine snow": clusters of mostly microscopic dead and living organic matter, including some life-forms visible to the naked eye—small crustaceans such as shrimp and copepods, for example. Over time, the snow picks up other tiny hitchhikers, looking for a meal or safety in numbers, and may grow into a mucilage.

The blobs were first identified in 1729 in the Mediterranean, where they're most often seen. The sea's relative stillness and shallowness make the water column more stable, providing ideal conditions for mucilage formation.

For the new study, Danovaro and colleagues studied historical reports of mucilage in the Mediterranean from 1950 to 2008. Outbreaks, they discovered, were more likely when sea-surface temperatures were warmer than average.

Swimming Into "Mucus"

In 1991, Italian marine biologist Serena Fonda Umani swam alongside a mucilage—the mass is too dense to swim inside—in the Adriatic Sea, an arm of the Mediterranean. She remembers diving about 50 feet (15 meters) down when she got the sensation of a ghost floating over her—"sort of an alien experience." Umani, a co-author of the new study with Danovaro and Antonio Pusceddu, of the Polytechnic University of Marche, has also dived into marine snow—the mucilage's precursor. She described it like swimming through a sugar solution. Out of the water, the dried "sugar" stiffened her hair and stuck to her wetsuit. "The suit was impossible to wash totally, because it was covered by a layer of greenish slime," said Umani, of Italy's University of Trieste. "It was a nightmare."

Few people would purposely swim into a mucilage, said Farooq Azam, a marine microbiologist at the University of California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "If you were not familiar with this—and especially if you were familiar—you wouldn't want to go near it," said Azam, who was not involved in the new study. A giant odiferous blob drifting offshore is "certainly not the seascape that one goes to the beach [for]," Azam added.

Public Health Hazard

Eager to see if the blobs' side effects extend beyond ruined wetsuits, Umani and colleagues sampled coastal waters and mucilage from the Adriatic in 2007. The warm, shallow sea is like a "big bathtub," Scripps's Azam said—an ideal natural laboratory for studying the blobs. The study team discovered that the blobs are hot spots for viruses and bacteria, including the deadly E. coli. Coastal communities regularly test for E. coli, and its presence is enough to close beaches to swimming. Study leader Donavaro said, "Now we see that … the release of pathogens from the mucilage can be potentially problematic" for human health. People who swim through mucilage can also develop skin conditions such as dermatitis, he added.

Suffocated by Blobs

Fish and other marine animals that have no choice but to swim with mucilages are most vulnerable to their disease-carrying bacteria, which can kill even large fish, the study says. The noxious masses can also trap animals, coating their gills and suffocating them, Danovaro said. And the biggest blobs can sink to the bottom, acting like a huge blanket that smothers life on the seafloor.

Mucilages Going Global?

Mucilages aren't a concern for just the Mediterranean, Danovaro added. Recent studies tentatively suggest that mucus may be spreading throughout oceans from the North Sea to Australia, perhaps because of rising temperatures, he said. "It's a good example [of what will happen if] we don't do something to stop climate warming," Danovaro said. "There are consequences [if] we continue to deny the scientific evidence."

Beyond warm temperatures, it's still not exactly clear what drives the blobs' formation, Scripps' Azam pointed out. For instance, no one knows why the dead marine matter in the blobs doesn't decompose. "It's important we do find out" what's driving the rise of the blobs, Azam said, "for the sake of the rest of the worlds' oceans." (Source: National Geographic.)


What happened to global warming? (Oct 2009) Average temperatures have not increased for over a decade This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on? Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming. They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this? During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun. But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences. The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature. And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees. He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures. He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month. If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

Ocean cycles

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores. According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated. The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too. But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down. These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles. Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along. They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature. But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.

The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new. In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models. In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling. What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years. Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers. But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

So what can we expect in the next few years?

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly. It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998). Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely. One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up. (Source: BBC.)


Obama hits out at climate 'naysayers' (Oct 2009) US President Barack Obama on Friday hit out at naysayers he blamed for peddling "cynical" claims that global warming is a myth to derail a landmark climate change bill in Congress. Obama warned that the closer the Senate came to passing legislation which has already cleared the House of Representatives, the more opponents would resort to underhand tactics. (SITE NOTE: Funny, we are watching the Obama global warming supporters doing "underhand tactics" -- not the reverse. They are even up to staging hoaxes.)

"The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized," Obama warned in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But I think it's important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we'll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we're engaged in. "There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy," Obama said, a day after the release of a poll showing fewer Americans see solid evidence of global warming. "There are going to be those who... make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary."

Climate legislation was introduced in the Senate only at the end of September, three months after the House passed its version of the bill. Prospects for the legislation are uncertain, but in recent weeks some prominent Republicans have signaled they will support the move to cut US emissions and introduce a cap and trade system for polluters.

Administration officials have already warned that the legislation will not pass before a UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December -- a delay hampering hopes of a major new international treaty to combat global warming. Obama argued that the fight against climate change was not just necessary for the health of the planet, but should also spur a new range of green jobs and technologies that could unleash economic growth and promote energy independence. "From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to produce and use energy," he said. "The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy, I am convinced of that, and I want America to be that nation."

Obama, who reversed the global warming skepticism of the previous Bush administration, made his remarks a day after a new poll showed the number of Americans who believe climate change is real had fallen in the last year. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found 57 percent of Americans see "solid evidence of warming," compared to 71 percent in April 2008, and 77 percent in August 2007. The increase in the number of Americans with doubts about climate change came across the political spectrum, though it was particularly pronounced among independents. (Source: AFP.)


WTF??? Dump the raw data so how can you prove the Global Warming hypothesis? Govt-Funded Research Unit Destroyed Original Climate Data (Oct 2009) In the wake of a revelation by a key research institution that it destroyed its original climate data, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) petitioned EPA to reopen a major global warming proceeding.

In mid-August the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) disclosed that it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature data set because of an alleged lack of storage space. The CRU data have been the basis for several of the major international studies that claim we face a global warming crisis. CRU’s destruction of data, however, severely undercuts the credibility of those studies.

In a declaration filed with CEI’s petition, Cato Institute scholar and climate scientist Patrick Michaels calls CRU’s revelation “a totally new element” that “violates basic scientific principles, and “throws even more doubt” on the claims of global warming alarmists.

CEI’s petition, filed late Monday with EPA, argues that CRU’s disclosure casts a new cloud of doubt on the science behind EPA’s proposal to regulate carbon dioxide. EPA stopped accepting public comments in late June but has not yet issued its final decision. As CEI’s petition argues, court rulings make it clear that agencies must consider new facts when those facts change the underlying issues.

CEI general counsel Sam Kazman stated, “EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data. But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable. If EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”

Among CRU’s funders are the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy – U.S. taxpayers. (Source: CEI.)


November 2009

New Zealand Climate Science Coalition caught lying about temperature trends (Nov 2009) The latest story exciting the denialosphere is being put about by Anthony Watts and is based on a "news alert" from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. (Note: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition contains no actual climate scientists.)

The New Zealand Government's chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn't there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain's CRU climate research centre. ...
Gareth Renowden explains how the NZCSC concocted their result -- they made the NZ warming trend go away by treating measurements from different sites as if they came from the same site. Now that might be simple incompetence, but they also claim that NIWA won't explain how they adjust the data for site changes, and as Renowden says:

Nothing in the station histories? It's all there for anyone who can be bothered to look, or to ask politely. But Treadgold and the NZ CSC have no excuse, because the NZ CSC were told about this information at least two years ago, the last time they tried to make a fuss about "adjusted data". In other words, Treadgold and whoever in the NZ CSC helped him with the data are being more than economical with the truth, they are lying through their teeth....
I wonder how many of the folks accusing NIWA of cooking their data will correct their posts? (Source: Science Blogs.)

VIDEO: CNN downplays the furor over the pirated CRU emails -- 5 DAYS AFTER THE STORY BROKE. BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Suzanne, how about the timing of all of this. Yes, we are talking about hundreds of e-mails and documents spanning just about a decade here among prominent climate scientists and they have been hacked fanning really debate over whether some scientists my have exaggerated their case for manmade climate change.


(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BALDWIN: So when a reputable climate research institute has its computer server hacked and hundreds of its private e-mails made public, the news gets around fast, especially from groups that don't believe the global warming consensus. One e-mail attributed to the research center's director had this cryptic excerpt referring to the, quote, trick of adding in the real temps to each series to hide the decline in temperature. Because there's very little context in that e-mail and the others, it's hard to know what they will all add up to. A climate research unit in question posted a message calling this e- mail hack job mischievous and saying it is helping the police to confirm. Senator James Inhofe for many years has portrayed this data showing the warming trend as a hoax and sees the e-mails as evidence. SEN. JAMES INHOFE (R), OKLAHOMA: I'm pleased by the vast and growing number of scientists, politicians, reporters, all over the world who are publicly rejecting climate alarmism, alarmism. This is those who want to scare people into some kind of action, you know. The water is going to rise up. The world is coming to an end. BALDWIN: But the White House energy czar points to the 2,500 climate scientists all around the world who agree the climate is warming and that these e-mails aren't changing that. (SEE PREVIOUS STORY OF 30,000 scientists wanting to sue Gore for his "BAD SCIENCE".) As for the American public, according to a "Washington Post"/ABC News poll out this week, the number of Americans who believe global warming is happening is down from 80% to 72% from last year, down but still a large majority.)

VIDEO: Russia Today does a better job of reporting than CNN which is downplaying the issue




ARTIC ICE IS GROWING... BUT WAIT. THE ARTIC ICE IS "REALLY" DISAPPEARING BECAUSE OF SEAS WARMING (EL NINO) AND WINDS (NOT MAN-MADE C02) ... BUT THE "ROTTEN ICE" IS GROWING ... SO WHAT DOES ALL THIS CONFLICTING DATA MEAN??? 'Rotten' Arctic sea ice duping satellites, multi-year ice virtually gone: expert (Nov 2009) One of Canada's top northern researchers says the permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared. Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multi-year frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin "rotten" ice which can't support the weight of the bears."It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multi-year sea ice - the whole world thought it was multi-year sea ice," said Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea. "Unfortunately what we found was that the multi-year (ice) has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice." (SITE NOTE: See Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Levels in Satellite Era (Oct 2009). The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history. This Nov 2009 news report in effect discredits the use of satellite imagery in the ARTIC that ice is growing, while the Oct 2009 news article uses satellite imagery for ANTARCTIC ice is NOT melting. SOMEBODY IS BLOWING SMOKE!!! And I don't know who!!!)

Permanent ice, which is normally up to 10 metres thick, was easily pierced by the research ship, said Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic science at the University of Manitoba. The team finally reached what it thought was stable ice, only to watch a crack appear just as researchers were preparing to descend onto the floe. "As I watched, over the course of five minutes, the entire multi-year ice floe broke up into pieces," Barber said. "This floe was 10 miles across. Something that's twice the size of Winnipeg, it just broke up right in front of our eyes."

The ice is unable to withstand battering waves and storms because global warming is rapidly melting it at a rate of 70,000 square kilometres each year, he said. Multi-year sea ice used to cover 90 per cent of the Arctic basin, Barber said. It now covers roughly 19 per cent. Where it used to be up to 10 metres thick, it's now two metres at most.

The findings, which are soon to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, comes as a shock to experts worldwide. Although northern sea ice hit a record low in 2007, researchers believed it was recovering because of what they were seeing on satellite images. But the satellites the experts relied on were misleading because the rotten ice looked sturdy on the surface and has a similar superficial temperature, Barber explained. "The satellites give us only part of the story. The multi-year ice is disappearing and it's almost all gone now from the northern hemisphere."

The deterioration has far-reaching consequences for the North and its iconic mammal. Polar bears that rely on the permanent ice to survive the summer have fewer and fewer places of refuge, Barber said. "Polar bears are being restricted to a small fringe of where this multi-year sea ice is. As we went further and further north, we saw less and less polar bears because this ice wasn't even strong enough for the polar bears to stand on."

The lack of sea ice may be good news to some who want to see the North opened to industry. Without thick ice blocking the way, ships can more easily gain access to the Arctic's natural resources. "We were doing almost the same speed we'd do in open water through what we thought was multi-year sea ice," Barber said. "Transportation and all the issues of navigation across the pole all become very real when you no longer have any multi-year sea ice."

But opening the Arctic to international shipping could have an impact on the ecosystem if freighters bring with them new contaminants and species, he added. Barber said the sea ice is virtually beyond repair and it would take years of cold weather to restore the Arctic to its former state. "I think we're on our way to an Arctic ice cover that will be seasonal and not perennial." (Source: Canadian Press.)

Arctic climate changing faster than expected (Feb 2010) Climate change is transforming the Arctic environment faster than expected and accelerating the disappearance of sea ice, scientists said on Friday in giving their early findings from the biggest-ever study of Canada's changing north.

The research project involved more than 370 scientists from 27 countries who collectively spent 15 months, starting in June 2007, aboard a research vessel above the Arctic Circle. It marked the first time a ship has stayed mobile in Canada's high Arctic for an entire winter. "(Climate change) is happening much faster than our most pessimistic models expected," said David Barber, a professor at the University of Manitoba and the study's lead investigator, at a news conference in Winnipeg.

Models predicted only a few years ago that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by the year 2100, but the increasing pace of climate change now suggests it could happen between 2013 and 2030, Barber said. Scientists link higher Arctic temperatures and melting sea ice to the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

The Arctic is considered a type of early-warning system of climate change for the rest of the world. "We know we're losing sea ice -- the world is all aware of that," Barber said. "What you're not aware of is that it has impacts on everything else that goes on in this system." The loss of the sea ice is taking away areas for the region's mammals to reproduce, find food and elude predators, said Steve Ferguson, a scientist with the Canadian government who took part in the study. Whale species previously not found in the Arctic are moving into the region because there is less sea ice to restrict their movements. Climate change is also bringing more cyclones into the Arctic, dumping snow on the sea ice, which limits how thick it can get, and bringing winds that break up the ice, Barber said.

The study is part of the International Polar Year, a large scientific program focused on the Arctic and Antarctic. The scientists have not yet produced conclusions, but they expect to publish dozens of academic papers.

The cost of the Arctic's rapid melt will be $2.4 trillion by 2050 as the region loses its ability to cool the global climate, the U.S.-based Pew Environment Group said on Friday. The group released a report showing the Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet.

Both the Canadian government and the oil and gas industry are keenly interested in the possible environmental impact of development further north in the Arctic, said professor Louis Fortier of Laval University. Currently, development is focused on mainland regions such as the massive gas fields in the Mackenzie River Delta on the Beaufort Sea. But receding ice levels may make the wider Arctic more accessible to ships and make drilling in more areas possible.

"Conclusions will come later, but ... up to now there's no indication that the impacts would be larger (further north) than elsewhere in the Arctic," Fortier said. (Source: Reuters.)


December 2009

BUT WAIT THE ANTARTIC ICE IS MELTING FAST WHICH SUPPORTS THAT NATURAL CAUSE OF GLOBAL WARMING (OZONE LAYER)...BUT WAIT, ANTARTIC ICE IS GROWING... W. Antarctic melt to have big impact on rising sea (Dec 2009) Melting ice in West Antarctica could add tens of centimeters to rising sea levels over the next century, according to a report by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) on Tuesday. Global sea levels are estimated to rise by a total of 1.4 meters (4 feet 7 inches) by 2100. "We can see the West Antarctic glaciers are shrinking at a rate fast enough to contribute to a sea level rise of 1.4 m by 2100 but it will be no more than that," SCAR executive director Colin Summerhayes told reporters at a media briefing in London. "We are ruling out some of the more extreme sea level rises (forecast) for the next 100 years. Those are unrealistic in light of all we know about ice shelves."

A U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2007 forecast a sea level rise of 18-59 cms (7-24 inches) by 2100 but did not take into account the possible increasing melt of Greenland and Antarctica. A study last week forecast global sea levels to rise by up to 2 meters by 2100. The 400-page SCAR report is based on evidence from 100 scientists from 13 countries and is the first comprehensive review of the impact of rapid global warming on Antarctica. Published on the 50th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty to safeguard Antarctica as a peaceful international space, the report comes six days before the start of a U.N. summit in Copenhagen where world leaders hope to thrash out a new climate treaty.

OZONE HOLE

A hole in the ozone layer has protected much of Antarctica from the effects of global warming, but 90 percent of glaciers along the Antarctic Peninsula have been lost, the report found. Sea ice has actually increased by 11 percent around the Antarctic since 1980 due to stronger winds, changes in atmospheric circulation and the isolating effect of a hole in the ozone layer.

However, sea ice is declining around the Antarctic Peninsula as stronger winds bring warm, wet air into the region. Warmer water heats glaciers from underneath, causing them to break up. By the late 21st century, greenhouse gases are expected to double while the ozone hole should heal. The net effect will be strengthening winds and sea ice will decrease by a third. "Over the next 100 years sea ice is going to decrease. Ice is increasing at the moment but it won't be like that when the ozone hole goes and we will lose 33 percent of sea ice," Summerhayes said.

One effect will be on the ocean's ecosystem. Krill, a food source for penguins, whales and fish, will likely halve. Corals, algae and other species could become extinct as they fail to adapt to warmer sea temperatures and increased ocean acidity. Alien species could thrive and invaders, such as stone crabs from South America, could severely impact the ecosystem. (Source: Reuters.)

WHO DO WE BELIEVE? Are the Polar Caps Really Melting Due To Global Warming? NO! (Dec 2009) We came out of a 'little ice age' around 1850 and the temperature has increased slightly due to this, but nothing abnormal is happening. Global warming alarmists will tell you the polar caps are melting. This isn't exactly true. The University of Illinois keeps the sea ice data. As you can see from the chart below, Arctic ice is decreasing.



However, Antarctic ice is currently increasing.



When you combine the two charts into a global sea ice chart, you can see sea ice has been very stable for the last 150 years.



(Source: Bluegrass Pundit.)

AND THE GLACIERS WORLDWIDE ARE GROWING -- NOT MELTING. THE HIMALAYAN GLACIERS DISAPPEARING BY 2035 IS A AGW FRAUD!!! Himalayan glaciers melting deadline 'a mistake' (Dec 2009) The Himalayas hold the planet's largest body of ice outside the polar caps The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says. J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years. He is astonished they "misread 2350 as 2035". The authors deny the claims.

Leading glaciologists say the report has caused confusion and "a catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology". The Himalayas hold the planet's largest body of ice outside the polar caps - an estimated 12,000 cubic kilometres of water. They feed many of the world's great rivers - the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra - on which hundreds of millions of people depend.

'Catastrophic rate'

In its 2007 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. "Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035," the report said. It suggested three quarters of a billion people who depend on glacier melt for water supplies in Asia could be affected.

But Professor Cogley has found a 1996 document by a leading hydrologist, VM Kotlyakov, that mentions 2350 as the year by which there will be massive and precipitate melting of glaciers. "The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates - its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2350," Mr Kotlyakov's report said. Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and "misread 2350 as 2035". "I do suggest that the glaciological community might consider advising the IPCC about ways to avoid such egregious errors as the 2035 versus 2350 confusion in the future," says Mr Cogley. He said the error might also have its origins in a 1999 news report on retreating glaciers in the New Scientist magazine.

The article quoted Syed I Hasnain, the then chairman of the International Commission for Snow and Ice's (ICSI) Working group on Himalayan glaciology, as saying that most glaciers in the Himalayan region "will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming". Scientists say Himalayan glaciers need more study

When asked how this "error" could have happened, RK Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the IPCC, said: "I don't have anything to add on glaciers." The IPCC relied on three documents to arrive at 2035 as the "outer year" for shrinkage of glaciers. They are: a 2005 World Wide Fund for Nature report on glaciers; a 1996 Unesco document on hydrology; and a 1999 news report in New Scientist. Incidentally, none of these documents have been reviewed by peer professionals, which is what the IPCC is mandated to be doing.

Murari Lal, a climate expert who was one of the leading authors of the 2007 IPCC report, denied it had its facts wrong about melting Himalayan glaciers. But he admitted the report relied on non-peer reviewed - or 'unpublished' - documents when assessing the status of the glaciers.

'Alarmist'

Recently India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh released a study on Himalayan glaciers that suggested that they may be not melting as much due to global warming as it is widely feared. He accused the IPCC of being "alarmist". India says the rate of retreat in many glaciers has decreased in recent years.

Mr Pachauri dismissed the study as "voodoo science" and said the IPCC was a "sober body" whose work was verified by governments. But in a joint statement some the world's leading glaciologists who are also participants to the IPCC have said: "This catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology... has caused much confusion that could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected."

Michael Zemp from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich also said the IPCC statement on Himalayan glaciers had caused "some major confusion in the media". "Under strict consideration of the IPCC rules, it should actually not have been published as it is not based on a sound scientific reference. "From a present state of knowledge it is not plausible that Himalayan glaciers are disappearing completely within the next few decades. I do not know of any scientific study that does support a complete vanishing of glaciers in the Himalayas within this century."

Pallava Bagla is science editor for New Delhi Television (NDTV) and author of Destination Moon - India's quest for Moon, Mars and Beyond. (Source: BBC.) (SITE NOTE: Other articles of US and European glaciers growing have also appeared within the past week.)

Melting Himalayan Glaciers Another Fraud by AGW Proponents (Jan 2010) A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: “If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.”

The IPCC’s reliance on Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: “Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis. “Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole massif.” The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with the New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%. The report read: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower. Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: “Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”

Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. “I am not an expert on glaciers.and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about,” he said. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.

Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public. The lead role in that process was played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC’s finding. He traced the IPCC claim back to the New Scientist and then contacted Pearce. Pearce then re-interviewed Hasnain, who confirmed that his 1999 comments had been “speculative”, and published the update in the New Scientist. Cogley said: “The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”

Pearce said the IPCC’s reliance on the WWF was “immensely lazy” and the organisation need to explain itself or back up its prediction with another scientific source. Hasnain could not be reached for comment. The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific concensus over climate change. It follows the so-called climate-gate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried to prevent other researchers from accessing key date. Last week another row broke out when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were likely to rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely. (Source: Times UK.) (SITE NOTE: In Jan 2010, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for his resignation over the error and said no action would be taken against the report's authors, The Associated Press reported. He expressed regret that the doomsday prediction was included in the report but said the mistakes should not obscure the fact that glaciers are melting at an alarming rate. (Sphere.com.)



THE SEAS ARE NOT RISING -- BULLCRAP ... IT IS USING SKEWED FIGURES Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told' (Dec 2009) If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.

•For more information, see Dr Mörner on YouTube (Google Mörner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview "Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud"; or email him – morner@pog.nu – to buy a copy of his booklet 'The Greatest Lie Ever Told'

Fined, frozen and now jailed

The Marine Fisheries Agency was certainly onto a winner when it enlisted the aid of the Assets Recovery Agency in its ruthless war against our fishermen. In December 2007 Charles McBride and his son Charles, from Kilkeel in Northern Ireland, were fined £385,000 for under-declaring catches of whitefish and prawns in the Irish Sea, threatening the loss of their homes and boat. But the Assets Recovery Agency, using powers designed to recover money from drug dealers, also froze all their assets. To pay the fines, the McBrides tried to borrow against their assets. Now, for this effort to pay the fines, Liverpool Crown Court has sentenced the two men to two and three months in gaol for “contempt of court”.

Blown away

The Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, timed his jibe impeccably last week when he said that opposing wind farms is as “socially unacceptable” as “not wearing a seatbelt”. Britain’s largest windfarm companies are pulling out of wind as fast as they can. Despite 100 per cent subsidies, the credit crunch and technical problems spell an end to Gordon Brown’s £100 billion dream of meeting our EU target to derive 35 per cent of our electricity from “renewables” by 2020.

Meanwhile the Government gives the go-ahead for three new 1,000 megawatt gas-fired power stations in Wales. Each of them will generate more than the combined average output (700 megawatts) of all the 2,400 wind turbines so far built. The days of the “great wind fantasy” will soon be over. (Source: Telegraph UK.)




PLEASE NOTE: The red and blue trend lines at the top and bottom were added for emphasis, and do not appear in the original table. Original source is here: http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm

UN: HOTTEST DECADE EVER ... BUT BASED ON COMPROMISED CRU DATA AND NASA WON'T RELEASE ITS DATA FOR VERIFICATION. WHY? BECAUSE IT ACTUALLY GOT COOLER THIS PAST DECADE. WHO DO YOU BELIEVE??? This decade 'warmest on record' (Dec 2009) The first decade of this century is "by far" the warmest since instrumental records began, say the UK Met Office and World Meteorological Organization. Their analyses also show that 2009 will almost certainly be the fifth warmest in the 160-year record. Burgeoning El Nino conditions, adding to man-made greenhouse warming, have pushed 2009 into the "top 10" years. (SITE NOTE: The problem is that El Nino is not being given credit for the warming of the seas and changing weather patterns, while proponents of Global Warming are trying to give ALL the credit to man-made C02 emissions.)

The US space agency Nasa suggests that a new global temperature record will be set "in the next one or two years". (SITE NOTE: But NASA for the past two years will NOT release the data it used to come to this conclusion under the FOIA. The Congress has requested the Inspector General of NASA to investigate the stonewalling.)

World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Met Office scientists have been giving details of the new analysis at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. The WMO said global temperatures were 0.44C (0.79F) above the long-term average. "We've seen above average temperatures in most continents, and only in North America were there conditions that were cooler than average," said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud. "We are in a warming trend - we have no doubt about it." Mr Jarraud emphasised that the final analysis would not be complete until early next year; but the UN agency always issues a summary during the annual climate negotiations in order that delegates have the latest information. (SITE NOTE: The problem is the "latest data" is based upon CRU data that may have been intentionally skewed and NASA data which cannot be corroborated. The NOAA data is unknown.)

The WMO uses three temperature sets - one from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and two from the US, maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and the space agency Nasa. Asked whether the controversy surrounding e-mails hacked from CRU could have any bearing on the results, Mr Jarraud replied that all three datasets showed the same result. Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office made the same point: "The datasets are all independent, and they all show warming," she said. (SITE NOTE: The pattern emerging is one of alarmists having to ‘adjust’ the data because it shows there is no man-made warming, per their own highly vaunted climate models. The same models that have produced all the dire predictions of pending doom. One thing you NEVER do in science is ‘adjust’ the data to meet your desired outcome. And one thing you also NEVER do is trust those whose careers and credibility rest on producing a desired outcome to do the verification and validation of their own theories. (Source: Strata-Sphere.)


The Warmest Decade (SITE NOTE: This follows the "hockey stick" projections now being of Prof Mann now being reinvestigated)


The Met Office figures indicate that the years since 2000 - the "noughties" - were on average about 0.18C (0.32F) warmer than years in the 1990s; and that since the 1970s, each decade has seen an increase of about the same scale. Although the Met Office has 1998 as the single warmest year, that coincided with strong El Nino conditions - the warming of surface waters in the eastern Pacific that releases heat stored in the deep ocean into the atmosphere, raising temperatures globally.

Now, after a period of La Nina conditions which depressed temperatures in 2008, another El Nino is developing; and it is this, combined with greenhouse warming, that is pushing temperatures upwards again, according to Dr Pope. She declined to give a forecast for the next few years - the Met Office is releasing that later during this summit. (SITE NOTE: This data is being contested by 30,000 scientists, but their voices are being stonewalled by the media and governments.)

But Nasa's GISTEMP unit - the division of the agency that maintains the temperature dataset - suggests further warming is coming, with the temperature record for an individual year likely to be set within the next year or two. (SITE NOTE: But NASA won't release the data for corroboration.)

Other researchers, though, believe it more likely that temperatures will remain stable for up to a decade as other natural cycles keep the ocean's surface relatively cool, with rapid warming likely after that.

Climate "sceptics" have claimed that temperatures have not been rising over the last decade. Of the two widely-used global temperature records, one - the UK HadCRUT3 record - shows an apparent plateau from 1998 to 2008. But climate scientists point out that this result is achieved by taking 1998 as the starting point. Taking, for instance, 1997 or 1999 as the starting point, they argue, produces a different result.

Free release

In a separate move, the Met Office has released data from more than 1,000 weather stations that make up the global land surface temperature records. The decision to make the information available is the latest consequence of the hacked e-mails affair. "This subset release will continue the policy of putting as much of the station temperature record as possible into the public domain," said the agency's statement. "As soon as we have all permissions in place we will release the remaining station records - around 5,000 in total - that make up the full land temperature record. "We are dependent on international approvals to enable this final step and cannot guarantee that we will get permission from all data owners." Mr Jarraud said that weather agencies belonging to the WMO had agreed in 1995 that they would, in general, make data "essential for the protection of life and property" freely available.

But some agencies did not release all their data, he said. "But whether they all release or not will not alter what we are saying, because the vast majority is already open." (SITE NOTE: The biggee is that CRU DESTROYED the baseline data sets -- or so they say -- and the conclusions are suspect. In addition, one of the three major contributors. NASA, will not release its data.) (Source: BBC.)

NASA pegs Noughties as hottest decade on record (Jan 2010) The past decade was the warmest ever on record, showing that global warming is "continuing unabated," according to a new report from NASA. New surface temperature figures released by the US space agency on Thursday show average global temperatures have increased by 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade throughout the past three decades. (SITE NOTE: Climate "sceptics" have claimed that temperatures have not been rising over the last decade. Of the two widely-used global temperature records, one - the UK HadCRUT3 record - shows an apparent plateau from 1998 to 2008. But climate scientists point out that this result is achieved by taking 1998 as the starting point. Taking, for instance, 1997 or 1999 as the starting point, they argue, produces a different result.)

According to NASA, 2005 was the warmest year on record since modern temperature measurements began in 1880. NASA's study indicates that despite 2008 being the coolest year of the decade, 2009 shares the title for second-warmest year ever, along with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007. (Apparently global warming has more #2's than Al Qaeda).

But the agency warns not to hold yearly temperatures as terribly important in the greater scheme of tracking a global warming trend. "There's substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle," commented the outspoken thermageddon prophet James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a statement. "But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated."

NASA said the figures show a "clear warming trend" on record, though there was a "leveling off" between the 1940s and 1970s. In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880, it claims. "That's the important number to keep in mind," stated Gavin Schmidt, a GISS climatologist. "In contrast, the difference between, say, the second and sixth warmest years is trivial since the known uncertainty — or noise — in the temperature measurements is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years."

The increased temperature in 2009 came despite an unusually nippy December in North America. According to NASA, high air pressures from the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream while increasing the north to south flow from the Arctic, causing cool air to flood down across the continent. "Of course, the contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 per cent of the world area, so the U.S. temperature does not affect the global temperature much," said Hansen. (SITE NOTE: But then it can try to explain the cold snap that hit the WORLD in Dec 2009-Jan 2010).

Unlike the UK Met Office Hadley Centre's measurements, NASA said it uses only publicly available data for its sources. The data comes from over a thousand meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research station measurements, the space agency said. It also provides information on how to repeat its analysis for armchair climatologists and skeptics playing along at home. (SITE NOTE: BUT NASA CONTINUES TO REFUSE TO RELEASE ITS DATA AND METHODOLOGY TO REACH ITS CONCLUSIONS CITING THE "PUBLICLY AVAILABLE" SOURCES -- and saying you can play along at home as though it is a simple process. FOIA requests continue to be made for the data. NASA emails have been released under FOIA. According to the NASA email, NASA's incorrect temperature readings resulted from a "flaw" in a computer program used to update annual temperature data -- and when surfaced by some petty comments flew.) (Source: Register UK.)

More Disturbing News Yes, the last decade saw global cooling, NOT warming (Dec 2009) The decade of 2000 to 2009 appears to be the warmest one in the modern record, the World Meteorological Organization reported in a new analysis on Tuesday. Does that mean that the past decade hasn't been cooling? No-of course not. Comparison of the red line in Fig. 1 with pre-1998 decades shows that the past decade is warmer, but the blue line shows cooling during the past decade-although the decade is warmer than previous decades, the climate did cool during the decade.



Figure 1. Atmospheric temperatures 1900 to 2009. The blue line shows global cooling for the past decade; the red line shows the length of the decade.

Thus, the claim that this proves no global cooling during the past decade is totally false. This is a difficult concept for non-scientists (and apparently some scientists!) to grasp. An analogy would be riding a bicycle up a long hill for a century, going over the crest of the hill and coasting downhill for a decade. Even though you have been going downhill for a decade, you are still higher up the hill than previous decades. (Source: American Thinker.)

More “Hide The Decline” From NASA GISS (Dec 2009) This is why real scientists share their data, algorithms and code for peer review, to ensure there is no crazy fudging of data. More and more people are out looking at the raw temperature record and comparing it to the man-made global warming (AGW) alarmists’ ‘adjusted’ data and discovering the same pattern. This time it comes from Brisbane Australia:


The pattern emerging is one of alarmists having to ‘adjust’ the data because it shows there is no man-made warming, per their own highly vaunted climate models. The same models that have produced all the dire predictions of pending doom. One thing you NEVER do in science is ‘adjust’ the data to meet your desired outcome. And one thing you also NEVER do is trust those whose careers and credibility rest on producing a desired outcome to do the verification and validation of their own theories. (Source: Strata-Sphere.) (SITE NOTE: Flopping AcesDr. William Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Science, commented on the on the CRU emails: "The Colorado scientist described by the Washington Post as “the World’s Most Famous Hurricane Expert” says the “ClimateGate” e-mails from the United Kingdom that revealed possible data manipulation are evidence of a conspiracy among “warmists,” those who believe man’s actions are triggering possibly catastrophic climate change. (Source: Fox Nation.)


From the Desk of Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton:

NASA emails Released on Controversy of 2000-2006 data When NASA Scientists Attack (Jan 2010) It has not been a good month for the global warming crowd. A few weeks ago, I told you about the "Climategate" scandal, where thousands of emails and documents, hacked from a prominent climate research center, painted global warming scientists in a most unfavorable light. The emails provided hard evidence that scientists pushing the global warming agenda conspired to squash the dissenting opinions of rival scientists, going so far as to try to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications.

Well this week, Judicial Watch released its own set of emails and documents obtained from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). And once again, global warming scientists do not come off well.

This particular set of documents relates to a controversy that erupted in 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen McIntyre exposed an error in NASA's handling of raw temperature data from 2000-2006 that exaggerated the reported rise in temperature readings in the United States. What happened when NASA corrected the error? The new data apparently caused a reshuffling of NASA's rankings for the hottest years on record in the United States, with 1934 replacing 1998 at the top of the list. (Kind of makes it harder to argue the planet is getting warmer when the hottest year on record in the US was 75 years ago.)

These new documents, which our intrepid investigators obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), include internal Goddard Institute emails detailing attempts by NASA scientists to deal with the media firestorm resulting from the controversy. Of particular interest are emails involving GISS head James Hansen. In one exchange, for example, Hansen tells a reporter from Bloomberg that NASA had not previously published rankings with 1998 atop the list as the hottest year on record in the 20th century.

Email from Demian McLean, Bloomberg to Jim Hansen, August 14, 2007: "The U.S. figures showed 1998 as the warmest year. Nevertheless, NASA has indeed newly ranked 1934 as the warmest year..."

Email Response from James Hansen to Demian McLean, August 14, 2007: "...We have not changed ranking of warmest year in the U.S. As you will see in our 2001 paper we found 1934 slightly warmer, by an insignificant hair over, 1998. We still find that result. The flaw affected temperatures only after 2000, not 1998 and 1934."

Email from NASA Scientist Makiko Sato to James Hansen, August 14, 2007: "I am sure I had 1998 warmer at least once on my own temperature web page..." (Email includes temperature chart dated January 1, 2007.)

(This issue also crops up in email communications with New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin a little over a week later.)
According to the NASA email, NASA's incorrect temperature readings resulted from a "flaw" in a computer program used to update annual temperature data. Hansen, clearly frustrated by the attention paid to the NASA error, called McIntyre a "pest" and suggested global warming doubters "should be ready to crawl under a rock by now." Hansen also suggests that those calling attention to the climate data error did not have a "light on upstairs."

Many will debate whether the mishandling of the data was an honest mistake, or a purposeful attempt to exaggerate the global warming crisis. But in the least, these documents ought to be embarrassing for NASA, especially given the recent Climategate scandal. Needless to say, NASA has an obligation to be completely transparent with its handling of temperature data. And here's an idea: Instead of insulting those who point out mistakes, maybe NASA scientists should try to engage the public in an open, professional and honest manner. Just a thought. (Source: Email -- Judicial Watch: 16 Jan 2010)


HOTTEST DECADE? MASSIVE GLOBAL COLD SNAP COOLS GLOBAL WARMING At Least 16 Die as Huge Snowstorm Batters U.S. (Dec 2009) A gigantic storm dumped more than a foot of snow across much of the Midwest and New England as it marched eastward Wednesday, creating blizzard conditions, burying cars under huge drifts and providing ammunition for a massive campus snowball fight in Wisconsin. Even more snow fell in some areas, with 16 inches reported in Des Moines and nearly 19 inches just south of Madison, Wis. Gusts of up to 50 mph created snow drifts between 8 and 15 feet tall and even knocked down a two-story Christmas tree in downtown Champaign, Ill.

The storm was blamed for at least 16 deaths, most in traffic accidents. Hundreds of schools canceled classes, power was knocked out to thousands of people from Missouri to New York and hundreds of flights were canceled. In the Twin Cities, where about 6 inches of snow fell and the wind chill dipped to minus 9 degrees, Kent Barnard eased a massive orange snowplow into traffic in the suburb of Arden Hills on Wednesday morning. He dropped the right wing of the plow down onto the shoulder, making a grinding sound as the wing sent out a spray of snow. "You gotta watch it because some people try to sneak up around you," Barnard said. "They'll see that big orange flashing truck coming and go, 'I don't want to get caught behind that thing."'

The storm felt like a rude surprise after an unseasonably warm and dry November in parts of the region. The massive system is the first major blast of wintry weather for many parts of the Midwest. "I've been dreading this day," said Kim Brust, shoveling the sidewalk in front of his Minneapolis home before sunrise Wednesday. "I was starting to enjoy the global warming."

While an inconvenience for many, others took an opportunity to play. At least 3,000 University of Wisconsin-Madison students took advantage of an unplanned day off and hurled snowballs at each other in a massive melee. Classes had been canceled for the first time in 19 years due to more than a foot of snow and blizzard-like conditions. Some came holding trays as shields. Others were bundled up to protect themselves from the below-freezing temperatures and winds that gusted to more than 20 mph. Several went shirtless, though, while at least one had on pajamas. "I figured with the day off, there was no better way to spend it than with a snowball fight," said Matt Moerel, 19, of Vadnais Heights, Minn.

Many New England residents braced for bone-chilling winds after digging out from a foot or more of snow. But Gavin Graham, 8, of Concord, N.H., spent two hours sledding. "It was really good sledding. The snow was puffy, and that was really good because we had little jumps already made," he said. "It was awesome having the day off from school."

Up to 7 inches of snow fell in northeast Pennsylvania and 50 mph winds were recorded near Pittsburgh. High winds knocked down part of an abandoned four-story brick building in New Castle. By the time the storm moves off the Maine coast Thursday night, it may have affected as much as two-thirds of the country, said Jim Lee, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Des Moines. The storm also brought heavy rain and flooding to parts of the South.

In the West, pounded by the storm's rain and snow earlier this week, wind chills as low as minus 40 degrees swept across portions of southern Montana. The biting wind also moved across Wyoming and South Dakota, according to the National Weather Service. Winds were expected to diminish Wednesday evening across the Midwest and blizzard warnings were nearly over. But dangerously cold conditions were to follow with temperatures falling to near or below zero overnight.

In northern New York, up to a foot fell on Wednesday and more than 3 feet was expected by the week's end. Areas in Maine and New Hampshire received up to a foot of snow, and warnings about winds of 40 mph to 50 mph were issued for coastal areas of Maine for Wednesday night, said Dan St. Jean, a National Weather Service Forecaster in Maine. (Source: Fox News.) (SITE NOTE: More blizzards in the north and heavy rains in California and the south continued into December. On 18 Dec it was reported that major storm was expected to bury the Washington region Saturday with what forecasters said could be the largest snowfall to hit the area in six years and the greatest December accumulation in more than 70 years. Accumulations of 15 inches or more in the city and up to 24 inches in parts of the Blue Ridge Mountains were possible, according to the National Weather Service. The snow was expected to cause significant disruptions for shoppers, travelers and revelers on the last weekend -- and biggest shopping day -- before Christmas. Maybe some people in Congress can get serious about Global Warming as they are buried in snow. The blizzard is expected to affect the entire east coast.)



Cold kills dozens of Fla. manatees -- 77 died of stress, topping previous record set last year (Jan 2010) More than 100 manatees have been found dead in Florida waters since the beginning of the year, mostly victims of a nearly two-week cold snap, state officials said Tuesday. The preliminary cause of death for 77 of the endangered animals is cold stress, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said. They were found from Jan. 1 through Jan. 23.

The Sunshine State saw unseasonably cold weather earlier this month that killed fish and stunned thousands of sea turtles as well as iguanas. "We are deeply concerned about these impacts on manatees and other fish and wildlife," FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto said in a statement. Officials say the numbers of dead manatees from the cold is a record for a single year. The previous record, set last year, was 56 deaths from cold stress. "Researchers continue to recover and examine carcasses, so the total is expected to rise; however, the rate should slow down as water temperatures warm," the commission said in a statement. Manatees tend to look for warmer spots once the water temperature drops below 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Temps were several degrees lower in waters off Florida earlier this month.

Exposure to cold likely contributed to the deaths of several newborn manatees, the commission added. Several manatees have been rescued from the cold, and researchers continue to respond to reports of distressed manatees, the commission said.

Power plants on the water have also helped out since they often have outlet pipes that warm the waters, attracting large numbers of manatees. Manatees are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act because of declining numbers over time. The state in 2009 counted 3,802 manatees. (Source: MSNBC.)

Arctic freeze and snow wreak havoc across the planet (Jan 2010) Arctic air and record snow falls gripped the northern hemisphere yesterday, inflicting hardship and havoc from China, across Russia to Western Europe and over the US plains. There were few precedents for the global sweep of extreme cold and ice that killed dozens in India, paralysed life in Beijing and threatened the Florida orange crop. Chicagoans sheltered from a potentially killer freeze, Paris endured sunny Siberian cold, Italy dug itself out of snowdrifts and Poland counted at least 13 deaths in record low temperatures of about minus 25C (-13F).

The heaviest snow yesterday hit northeastern Asia, which is suffering its worst winter weather for 60 years. More than 25 centimetres (10in) of snow covered Seoul, the South Korean capital — the heaviest fall since records began in 1937. In China, Beijing and the nearby port city of Tianjin had the deepest snow since 1951, with falls of up to 8in and temperatures of minus 10C. In the far north of China, the temperature fell to minus 32C. More than two million Beijing and Tianjin pupils were sent home and 1,200 flights were delayed or cancelled at Beijing’s international airport.

The same far-eastern weather system took its toll of Sakhalin, the Russian island off Siberia, which was hit by blizzards and avalanches. Farther west, in northern and eastern India, more than 60 people, mainly homeless, died of exposure. Thousands of schools were closed. In Uttar Pradesh, the state neighbouring Nepal, the authorities spent £1.3 million on blankets and firewood for needy households.

Western Russia suffered a deep freeze as snow swept across the Baltic and north-central Europe, leaving the worst devastation in Poland, where 13 people died, bringing the toll from the cold this winter to 122.

Up to ten skiers died or were missing in avalanches. The worst incident was in the Diemtig Valley in Switzerland on Sunday, when avalanches hit a group of skiers and then the rescuers who went to their aid. Eight people were pulled from the snow alive, but four died, including an emergency doctor, and three more were missing.

In Italy, emergency services struggled with rare cold and ice. Motorways in the northeast were closed and military helicopters were sent to Sicily with medical aid.

In the United States, heavy snow fell again on the northeast. In Burlington, Vermont, a record 33in of snow fell in a weekend storm. The previous record in a three-day period was set in 1969. Residents of the Northern Plains were warned to expect lethally cold temperatures of about minus 30C.

The icy conditions of Western Europe, which broke records in half a dozen countries in December, are expected to last for at least another week.

Guo Hu, the head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, linked this week’s conditions to unusual atmospheric patterns caused by global warming. Meteorologists were also trying to find a pattern in the heavy rains that have hit equatorial regions and the southern hemisphere in the past week. At least 20 people have been killed in flash floods in Kenya after torrential rains made thousands homeless.

In Australia, the authorities declared a natural disaster along the Castlereagh River as it peaked after torrential rain, forcing 1,200 residents to abandon their homes for high ground.

In Brazil, the death toll from flooding and mudslides over the past four days rose above 80.

Closer to home, forecasters have warned Britons to brace themselves for a freezing cold, bleak new year — this winter is set to be the coldest for more than 30 years. (Source: Times UK.)

Global Warming supporters tried to call the US record-breaking blizzard as a "spot effect" that was normal phenomena -- that is until the freeze turned global.

Europe: A cold but mainly dry, sunny day across England today. Lots of sunshine too will prevail across France after a frosty morning though some rain is expected in the far south. Heavy snow showers will affect western parts of Norway. Eastern Norway and much of Sweden will be bitterly cold but dry and bright while heavy snow falls across Finland, north west Russia and the Baltic States. Mainly dry across Belgium and Holland with just a few wintry showers. Heavier snow is likely across Denmark and the extreme north of Germany. (Source: Weather Online UK.)

China: Chinese weather forecasters extended cold alert warnings until Tuesday for many provinces blanketed by heavy snow and gripped by icy conditions. People were warned conditions could worsen because of strong winds, Xinhua reported. Forecasters said temperatures, already well below freezing, were expected to fall by up to 64 degrees Fahrenheit through Tuesday in central Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi province and in regions along the Yellow and Huaile rivers. Similar conditions were forecast for north and central areas, including northwest China, north China, Guizhou Province, Chongqing and some regions in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. (Source: UPI.)

India: Dozens of people have died in a cold wave sweeping through northern India, the country's state broadcaster Doordarshan says. The majority of deaths have happened in the state of Uttar Pradesh, according to media reports. (Source: BBC.)





Satellite Confirms That Global Temps Continue Decline Trend: A Minus 1.51°F Per Century Rate (Jan 2010) Read here. Despite climate model predictions, despite the IPCC climate experts, despite the Climategate data fraud, and of course, despite Al Gore and Obama, the global temperatures continued their long-term trend downwards. This decline is in the face of steadily rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Per the AGW hypothesis, temperatures should have risen in step with the CO2 increases. The exact opposite occurred as there was a negative (- 0.14) correlation between CO2 and temperatures. (Source: C3 Headlines.)







Global Warming Proponents: The Global Cold Snap is just a "blip" -- It's still warming (Jan 2010) Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida's orange groves and beaches. Whatever happened to global warming? Such weather doesn't seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesn't disprove global warming at all — it's just a blip in the long-term heating trend.

"It's part of natural variability," said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, "we'll still have record cold temperatures. We'll just have fewer of them." Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880. Scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes, such as heat waves, storms, floods, droughts and even cold spells. But experts interviewed by The Associated Press did not connect the current frigid blast to climate change. So what is going on?

Bending airflow

"We basically have seen just a big outbreak of Arctic air" over populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere, Arndt said. "The Arctic air has really turned itself loose on us." In the atmosphere, large rivers of air travel roughly west to east around the globe between the Arctic and the tropics. This air flow acts like a fence to keep Arctic air confined.

But recently, this air flow has become bent into a pronounced zigzag pattern, meandering north and south. If you live in a place where it brings air up from the south, you get warm weather. In fact, record highs were reported this week in Washington state and Alaska. But in the eastern United States, like some other unlucky parts of the globe, Arctic air is swooping down from the north. And that's how you get a temperature of 3 degrees in Beijing, a reading of minus-42 in mainland Norway, and 18 inches of snow in parts of Britain, where a member of Parliament who said the snow "clearly indicates a cooling trend" was jeered by colleagues.

The zigzag pattern arises naturally from time to time, but it is not clear why it's so strong right now, said Michelle L'Heureux, a meteorologist at the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The center says the pattern should begin to weaken in a week or two.

Typical weather ahead

Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for Weather Underground, a forecasting service, said he expects more typical winter weather across North America early next week. That will be welcome news in the South, where farmers have been trying to salvage millions of dollars' worth of strawberries and other crops.

On Miami Beach, tourists bundled up in woolen winter coats and hooded sweatshirts Wednesday beneath a clear blue sky. Some brazenly let the water wash over their feet and a few even lay out in bikinis and swimming trunks. A brisk wind blew and temperatures hovered in the 50s. "Last year we were swimming every day," said Olivia Ruedinger of Hamburg, Germany. "I miss that." (Source: MSNBC.)

VIDEO: Synopsis of the CO2 Scam by John Coleman




More Proof that CO2 Global Warming is a Scam Hungarian Physicist Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi proves CO2 emissions irrelevant in Earth's Climate (Jan 2010) For years now, we have been told that science is dedicatedly attempting to find out how the Earth’s Climate works. With all possible seriousness, the most publically vocal of these scientists, those working for the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), have for the last several years blamed the warming they “found” on Carbon Dioxide. With the release of the CRU (Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia) email database, it is very clearly apparent that the scientists involved with the IPCC were doctoring data to give a specific result. That result was designed to look as if CO2was causing climate change, warming the earth due to Human activities. It can be reported now that this theory has been solidly disproven by Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi and Dr. Miskolczi’s work will make history. Constants

To give context to this discovery, a short lesson in science is needed. The term “Constant” is very well known in science. Simply put it is a Variable (An equation is merely a mathematical sentence, the Variables are the words) that does not change; they are specific and represent solid concepts. You may have heard of Bohr’s Constant, Hubble ’s Constant, Avogadro’s Constant, there are many of them. There is a new Constant; one that has not been named, but if history is any guide it will be called the Miskolczi Constant, named for the physicist who discovered it.

A Constant we are all familiar with is the speed of light. Before Einstein and his famous theory of Relativity E=MC2, it was widely believed there was no limit on speed, just throw a rock from a speeding train and the speed will continue to add up. Einstein and his theory of Special Relativity put a specific limit on speed - the speed of light, beyond which nothing could go. There is a strict energetic limit, and we have recognized that for decades now. Before Miskolczi, it was generally thought that the greenhouse effect could be increased infinitely by adding more and more CO2 molecules into the air. Under the conditions prevailing on Earth, Miskolczi has proved that there is a limit to the greenhouse temperature that cannot be raised. Why is that? The IPCC has been telling us the exact opposite for years. Simple, because just as with Einstein’s E=MC2, there is a strict energetic limit as the Miskolczi Law proves.

Dr. Miskolczi’s Constant was discovered with a program that is the result of a project started 25 years ago in Hungary. It was then he began the process of writing a high-resolution radiative transfer program which would describe the Earth’s climate using the TIGR Global radiosonde archive of the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique, Paris database. With this information he was able to accurately describe mathematically how the atmosphere absorbs and releases heat using a long standing Equation called the Schwarzschild-Milne transfer equation to accurately calculate the Earths infrared optical depth. That is what Global climate is; the process by which Earth either holds onto or releases heat. The IPCC and the CRU scientists would have us believe that CO2 increases the heat the atmosphere holds on an infinite unlimited basis. That conclusion is absolutely false, and the CRU and the IPCC have had to falsify and invent data to make it appear that it does.

In reality water is so overwhelming abundant on Earth, it dominatingly, completely, and overwhelmingly governs the climate equilibrium of the Earth. It is 71% of the total surface area of the planet, 333 Million cubic miles (a cubic mile is an imaginary cube measuring one mile on each side) of water exist here, by far outweighing all other greenhouse gasses.

Can our climate undergo changes due to the addition of greenhouse gasses? Yes, but only under circumstances great enough to overwhelm the presence of 333 million Cubic miles of water, such as the impact of a large Asteroid and the tremendous heat it would add instantly. Carbon Dioxide is very far inside the greenhouse effect’s self-regulatory barriers. Amounts even double our current emissions, cannot overwhelm this equilibrium. Only the Sun has that immense amount of power, and only water exists in quantities large enough to effect such a change. As long as the sun’s activity is the “business-as-usual” fluctuations and there is water on Earth, CO2 cannot cause or increase global warming.

Equilibrium

In order to correctly understand why this is, it is necessary to recognize that what is important here is the equilibrium between the incoming energy from the sun (heating) and the outgoing longwave (infra red) energy (cooling). The 40% of the planet that is not cloud covered at any given time allows for solar radiation to be absorbed at the surface. The most effective form of cooling is the evaporation of water, which takes heat energy from the surface and puts it into the air. Clouds form which do three things: 1) create more cloud cover reflecting solar radiation away from the planet which also 2) releases heat into the very high upper atmosphere where it to is radiated out into space as the clouds condense into precipitation, and 3) drops much cooler water back down to the surface cooling things even further. This is an oversimplification for the sake of brevity and clarity, the interactions here are very complex as is the equation which describes it (the detailed mathematics can be found below in "The Saturated Greenhouse Effect Theory of Ferenc Miskolczi"). However, this does not change the simple fact that our planetary climate system is at equilibrium, and the Miskolczi Constant allows science to completely describe that equilibrium. For the first time, we can do so accurately with raw data, and match observed data with the results. No “hide the decline” needed when simply describing reality.

Climate scientist and fellow Hungarian, Dr. Miklos Zagoni in his paper “CO2 Cannot Cause any more “Global Warming”” dated December 2009 describes this discovery and its meaning. Dr. Zagoni beautifully sums it up all up:

“Since the Earth’s atmosphere is not lacking in greenhouse gases [water vapor], if the system could have increased its surface temperature it would have done so long before our emissions. It need not have waited for us to add CO2: another greenhouse gas, H2O, was already to hand in practically unlimited reservoirs in the oceans.”
Dr. Zagoni explains:

“Earth type planetary atmospheres, having partial cloud cover and sufficient reservoir of water; maintain an energetically uniquely determined, constant, maximized greenhouse effect that cannot be increased further by emissions. The greenhouse temperature must fluctuate around this theoretical equilibrium constant; [change] is possible only if the incoming available energy changes.”
(Source: Examiner.)

Saturated Greenhouse Effect Theory
Saturated Greenhouse Effect Theory


NOAA now says Stratospheric Water Vapor Decrease may explain drop in Surface Temperatures in past decade ... BUT WHAT HAPPENED TO HOTTEST DECADE??? Stratospheric Water Vapor is a Global Warming Wild Card (Jan 2010) A 10 percent drop in water vapor ten miles above Earth’s surface has had a big impact on global warming, say researchers in a study published online January 28 in the journal Science. The findings might help explain why global surface temperatures have not risen as fast in the last ten years as they did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Observations from satellites and balloons show that stratospheric water vapor has had its ups and downs lately, increasing in the 1980s and 1990s, and then dropping after 2000. The authors show that these changes occurred precisely in a narrow altitude region of the stratosphere where they would have the biggest effects on climate.

Water vapor is a highly variable gas and has long been recognized as an important player in the cocktail of greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, halocarbons, nitrous oxide, and others—that affect climate. “Current climate models do a remarkable job on water vapor near the surface. But this is different — it’s a thin wedge of the upper atmosphere that packs a wallop from one decade to the next in a way we didn’t expect,” says Susan Solomon, NOAA senior scientist and first author of the study.

Since 2000, water vapor in the stratosphere decreased by about 10 percent. The reason for the recent decline in water vapor is unknown. The new study used calculations and models to show that the cooling from this change caused surface temperatures to increase about 25 percent more slowly than they would have otherwise, due only to the increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

An increase in stratospheric water vapor in the 1990s likely had the opposite effect of increasing the rate of warming observed during that time by about 30 percent, the authors found.

The stratosphere is a region of the atmosphere from about eight to 30 miles above the Earth’s surface. Water vapor enters the stratosphere mainly as air rises in the tropics. Previous studies suggested that stratospheric water vapor might contribute significantly to climate change. The new study is the first to relate water vapor in the stratosphere to the specific variations in warming of the past few decades.

Authors of the study are Susan Solomon, Karen Rosenlof, Robert Portmann, and John Daniel, all of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colo.; Sean Davis and Todd Sanford, NOAA/ESRL and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado; and Gian-Kasper Plattner, University of Bern, Switzerland. NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources. (Source: NOAA.)


THE DEBATE IS NOT OVER!!! Is Global Warming a "Crock of S*%t?" (Feb 2010) -- Many scientists and the media warn that global warming is a man-made danger. But others argue that climate change is nothing new (Feb 2010) When Bob Lutz, vice-chairman of General Motors, said this in February 2008, it immediately became the most widely distributed quote regarding global warming on the Internet. After all, this was one of the major power players in the automobile industry, and he was implying that anyone who believed that global warming was real, man-made, and altering the planet was something akin to a moron. But the problem with that quote is that it's incomplete. I know. I was there.

It was at a small private luncheon at Cacharel in Arlington, Tex., when Lutz uttered those words. But the quote omits what he said next: "Don't misunderstand me, I'm not a climate denier." As he explained to those present, he simply questions the mindset that blames all the climate change of the past few decades on mankind.

Lutz's comments that day were far more balanced and thoughtful than anyone who heard that particular quote might believe. And therein lies the problem with the current discussions on global warming: The media have taken the position that the science is complete and settled. A unanimous agreement that global warming not only exists but is man-made—and we're almost past the point where we can still save the planet from it. Moreover, anyone who questions those absolute statements is quickly labeled a "Climate Change Denier." This label is intended to shame and discredit doubters, much like 500 years ago when church officials prosecuted anyone who preached the earth was not the center of the universe.

However, labeling to discredit someone by calling them a "denier" is a distorted and completely unjust position to take on such an important subject. In fact, virtually no one believes the earth has not gone through a period of unexplained warming. Therefore, the term "denier" is not just inaccurate, it's a complete and intentional mischaracterization of those wanting more open and honest scientific studies on the subject.

As for the position that the science is settled and there is no dissent, as Bob Lutz might say, "that's a crock of s*%t!"

Science Totally Not Settled

On Dec. 8, 2009, during the Copenhagen Climate Challenge, an open letter was sent to the U.N. Secretary General signed by close to 150 scientists involved in physics, climatology, meteorology, and geophysics. The opening two sentences say it all: "Climate change science is in a period of 'negative discovery'; the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field, the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled."

Lest we forget, only 36 years ago it was widely believed we were on the verge of the next Ice Age. As Gary Sutton reported in Forbes on Dec. 3 last year, "In 1974, the National Science Board announced: 'During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end … leading into the next ice age.'"

Given the money and reputations now at stake, it should not be surprising that over the past year a number of scientists have tried to rewrite the history of the 1970s. Even during that period, these scientists contend, the majority were already warning that a far warmer future was coming.

Could Warming Produce … Cooling?

Thirty-six years later there is still strong disagreement on what climate change really means for our planet. Some have postulated that warming temperatures will cause mass extinctions or uncontrollable migrations to better climates. Not least of the problems, they worry, might be that temperatures rising as much as 11 degrees over the coming century would cause crop failures, resulting in mass global outbreaks of starvation.

Other scientists, however, claim that this period of warming will melt the freshwater glaciers of the north, flooding the Atlantic conveyor belt that brings warmer water up from southern regions and disrupting that current. Their scenario gives us, you guessed it, a new Ice Age.

It's the huge disparity among scientists about our planet's climatic future that makes so many wonder how legitimate and accurate "global warming" science really is. If the science were settled, as is claimed, those 150 scientists wouldn't have felt the need to distance themselves—by signing that open letter to the U.N.—from "politicians and media personalities" who claim it is settled. Michael Crichton, the late author, pointed out in a lecture on this subject one line from the 2001 IPCC report on climate change, "… therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."

The fact is that no one can even agree on whether or not the highest temperatures recorded in modern times came in the 1990s or during the Dust Bowl days of 1934. One thing is for sure, in recent decades it certainly hasn't been as cold as it used to be—but even here few understand that the climate has been validated as turning much colder in the three decades after World War II. That's right: While the greatest expansion of economic societies and the most large-scale industrial growth was occurring, spewing untold amounts of greenhouse gases into the air, the climate was cooling worldwide.

Impact of the Little Ice Age

Now, if you go back 150 years, the climate has gotten much warmer since the Little Ice Age that existed between the 16th and 19th centuries. While today we view that era's history from a far more mythic position—mankind, rugged individuals all, simply yearned for a better life and therefore emigrated to places like America from Europe—that view ignores the physical, pragmatic reasons that drove so many to abandon their ancestral lands forever.

Climatologists well understand that the Little Ice Age's effects on crops left many individuals in Europe starving and ready to travel, especially during the latter part of that history of climate change. The suddenly much colder weather contributed to the Irish Potato Famine of 1845, for example, causing a wave of Irish immigrants to flee hunger for a better life in America. Similarly, a decade later, La Reunion, a small communist farming cooperative on the west bank of the Trinity River in Dallas, shut down and moved into town; in May of that year it was still too cold and the ground too hard to plant their crops. That just doesn't happen anymore in Texas.

True, temperatures once wrought great damage in the lives of individuals and societies, but it was extreme cold, not the heat, that hurt. Today the mean average temperature in Dallas is 65.4 degrees, while Boston comes in at 51.3 degrees. That's a wider temperature spread than any apocalyptic forecast on climate, yet people survive in both cities and actually thrive.

It should also be noted that anthropologists studying mankind and human activity during what's known as the Medieval Warm Period (approximately AD 800–1300) find that people were much like we are now. People were taller than in subsequent centuries; there was more massive construction activity, such as the great European cathedrals; there was a thriving wine industry in England and farming in Greenland.

Then came the Little Ice Age.

On that period's causes there is no scientific agreement even today, although many possible causes have been mentioned; among them are lower solar activity, known as the Maunder Minimum, and increased volcanic activity, shielding the planet from solar radiation. But it should be noted that there is even less agreement on what caused the warming period from 1850 to 1950.

Do Something, Even If It's Disastrous?

And so today we are being warned and exhorted that, unless serious measures are taken to reverse our contributions to greenhouse gases, humans have put the planet on an unsustainable course for potential crises right up to extinction. The irony is that, on the news, there is little agreement on what's caused massive shifts in the earth's temperatures over the past millennium, but complete agreement on what will happen in the future if we don't act fast.

Business and industry legitimately worry that if Draconian measures are put in place, everyone will suffer the consequent complete disruption to world economies. Certainly the concept of using cap and trade to raise energy prices to the point that it forces conservation has huge potential and many opportunities for fraud if not outright theft—and it would not actually reduce any country's emissions.

Der Spiegel, Dan Rather Reports, and The New York Times have all done articles on how this finance-driven concept "to save the planet" has already proved to have many serious deficiencies while billions of dollars exchange hands.

The real question is this: Why—when so many climatologists, meteorologists, and scientists today have come out and questioned not whether the climate is changing, but whether that change is primarily man-made—are the media claiming consensus and elected officials demanding action now? The proposed changes to our economic structure could easily upset and disrupt vast populations far more than another degree of warming, but the call for quick action continues.

A Species Able to Adapt

Seventy thousand years ago our race nearly went extinct, with only a few thousand homo sapiens alive at the time. Since that time the planet has undergone long periods when the climate changed dramatically, including the last major Ice Age, which peaked approximately 20,000 years ago. We have seen huge shifts in the weather, plagues, wars, floods, and centuries when crop failures were the norm—and today there are 6 billion of us on the planet. Apparently we are not that fragile.

But after two centuries in which technology and science were key to creating our modern world, we've put the quest for honest, open, and rigorous science on the back burner, because widely publicized and aired "pundits" blame the advancement of science and technology for putting the planet in danger.

Things on the planet are warmer than they used to be, just as in the 1970s things were colder than they once were. The industrial revolution and greenhouse gases were rising in both of these periods, so the spirit of impartial scientific inquiry demands that one look for other factors that may have changed in the equation.

That is not denying things are different from the way they once were. No. The people being labeled deniers are simply asking why the nearly 15% of respected scientists who don't agree with this climate hypothesis can't be heard or are quickly dismissed as quacks.

Weaknesses in Computer Modeling

Nor should one suggest we continue with lifestyles that are far more wasteful of energy than we need to be. Wasted energy is wasted money, so business logic should demand regular improvements in net energy use.

In the end, maybe the climate change evangelists are right and mankind is the reason the planet is warming. But if you read enough articles on the subject over a long enough period, you find that the factual weather data do not always line up with the scientific pronouncements that are being sold to us. For one thing, computer modeling is not all that accurate, nor do those machines have any more logic than what is programmed into them. In simplest terms, anyone who can program a relational database knows you can alter the code to where 2 + 2 = 4.25. The computer spits it out, but it's not true. Now extrapolate that out to where one is programming all of the factors known for weather, present, past, and future, and you understand the complexity is so great that no output from those programs can mean anything. It's called GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

Now, are you willing to bet the world's economies on that logic? If you are, you are putting more lives in danger than global warming has. For many, the scientific contrarians actually have the better argument. We should test their theories, too, and see if their science holds up any better than today's so-called consensus.

-- Note: Ed Wallace has never been involved with or accepted any compensation from any industry involved in energy. (This is the first of a multipart series of columns on global warming.) Ed Wallace is a recipient of the the Gerald R. Loeb Award for business journalism, given by the G. and R. Loeb Foundation, and is a member of the American Historical Society. His column leads the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's "Sunday Drive" section. He reviews new cars every Friday morning at 7:15 on Fox Four's Good Day, contributes articles to BusinessWeek Online, and hosts the top-rated talk show Wheels Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on 570 KLIF. (Source: Business Week.)



CLIMATEGATE

MAN-BEAR-PIG Is Dead!… Emails Prove Global Warming Junk Science Conspiracy -- GLOBAL WARMING JUNK SCIENCE PROVEN A CONSPIRACY—- ManBearPig Is Finally Dead! (Nov 2009) I'm serial! Recently "discovered" classified emails and files prove that the junk scientists behind the global warming movement knowingly perpetrated a fraud on the global community. The files were posted on the internet– HERE.

The Telegraph reported:

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be "the greatest in modern science". These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

"In an odd way this is cheering news."
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph's MPs' expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause. Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU's director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.)
There's more at the link.

This is the scientific scandal of the century.

Related… Scientists baffled after global temperatures refuse to rise.

More… Confirmed: The emails and files posted are legitimate.

Andrew Bolt is following the story… "So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science."

And this… "This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who's now blown the whistle."

The Climate Depot has several updates. One of the junk science perpetrators speaks out:

Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: "I'm simply not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping that the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."
(Source: Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft.)


Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'? (Nov 2009) If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be "the greatest in modern science". These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

"In an odd way this is cheering news."
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph's MPs' expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause. Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU's director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as: Manipulation of evidence:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP", even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?" "I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.""It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !"
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as "How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie" – Hadley CRU's researchers were exposed as having "cherry-picked" data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that's sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore's Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called "sceptical" view is now also the majority view. Unfortunately, we've a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it's a blow to the AGW lobby's credibility which is never likely to recover. (Source: Telegraph UK: James Delingpole.)


"Global Warming" SCAM - Hack/Leak FLASH (Nov 2009) Apparently a "Global Climate Center" was hacked and the contents have been posted to the Internet. A ZIP file exceeding 60MB and containing a huge number of emails and other documents has been posted worldwide.

Original speculation as to whether the files posted were legitimate or some sort of spoof appears to now be confirmed as legitimate:

"It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails."
I have not had time to read all of the material yet (there are over a thousand files involved!) but what I have skimmed looks VERY damning. Contained within the documents are what appear to be admissions of intentional tampering with data as well as intentional falsification of results to "show" man-made global warming. One of the emails says:

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
That is, to hide a decline in global temperatures. It gets better. Another message, this one allegedly from 2000:

It was good to see you again yesterday - if briefly. One particular thing you said - and we agreed - was about the IPCC reports and the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation agenda driven by organisations like the WTO. So my first question is do you have anything written or published, or know of anything particularly on this subject, which talks about this in more detail?
Oh, so it's not about the planet getting warmer, but rather is a convenient means of advancing an agenda that has already been pre-determined? Then there's this:

In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and forcing assumptions/uncertainties.
(Pardon the formatting, it's text-mode email 'yanno.)

Guess who that was addressed to? Michael Mann. You know, the (infamous and now discredited) "Mann Hockey Stick"?

Guess where that email originated? NASA.

Yes, I have the file. So do a few million other people.

There's enough evidence in there, in my opinion, of outrageously fraudulent conduct to make this the scandal of the 20th and 21st century. Sorry folks, there's no science here - this is, from what I see, a massive and outrageous fraud, and now that the documents have been confirmed as authentic it is time to pull the curtain down on this crap and start locking up all of the proponents - starting with AL GORE.

Here are some interesting "meta statistics" on the documents, and the number of times the words referenced appear:

  • Fraud: 79
  • Falsify: 6
  • Inflate: 14
  • Conceal: 5
  • Hide: 19

Just for starters. If you think that's bad, you might like this - from the file "ipcc-tar-master.rtf":

General Comments

The idea that climate without human intervention can only undergo "natural variability", and that "climate change" can only result from human activity is false and fallacious. It is in conflict with all that we know of evolution and geology. It is simply wrong to assume that " climate change" automatically implies human influence on the climate.

This fallacy is embraced by the Framework Convention on Climate Change, but the IPCC (Footnote to "Summary for Policymakers. Page 1) claim that they are prepared to accept "natural variability" as "climate change". They are, however, unwilling to accept the truth, which is that climate can change without human intervention. ....

47 out of 91 models listed in Chapter 9 assume that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing at the rate of 1% a year when the measured rate of increase, for the past 33 years, has been 0.4% a year. The assumption of false figures in models in order to boost future projections is fraudulent. What other figures are falsely exaggerated in the same way?
Update 12:58 - Oh oh.... From Phil Jones... and its recent:

From: Phil Jones
To: "Michael E. Mann" , "raymond s. bradley"
Subject: A couple of things
Date: Fri May 9 09:53:41 2008
Cc: "Caspar Ammann"
....

2. You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we've found a way around this.
And then there's this...

From: Phil Jones
To: "Michael E. Mann"
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil
One has to wonder: was the "way around it" (the FOI) mentioned in the first correspondence to intentionally destroy the emails requested? (Source: Market Ticker.)

Inhofe to call for hearing into CRU, U.N. climate change research (Nov 2009) The publication of more than 1,000 private e-mails that climate change skeptics say proves the threat is exaggerated has prompted one key Republican senator to call for an investigation into their research. In an interview with The Washington Times on Monday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) announced he would probe whether the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not." "[T]his thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with," Inhofe, the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said during the interview.

He added that it was "interesting" that the e-mails surfaced only weeks before an important climate change summit would bring world leaders to Copenhagen. Fueling Inhofe's concerns is last week's news that a blogger hacked into the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (Cru) and published about 1,000 e-mails and more than 3,000 private documents relating to climate change.

Some of those communications disparaged climate change skeptics and their views, while others contained conversations about how to best portray climate change research. The scientists have since insisted their e-mails were hardly deceptive and that their words were taken out of context. Still, their assurances have not settled the concerns of their biggest foes -- including Inhofe, who has long maintained global warming is a "hoax."

However, it is not immediately clear what Inhofe hopes to accomplish with his proposed hearing. U.S. lawmakers and scientists routinely cite IPCC evidence when discussing climate change legislation, but Congress can hardly force the United Nations to halt spending on a program over which it has no jurisdiction. Rather, Inhofe perhaps hopes to deal a symbolic blow to next month's climate change conference, at which IPCC is likely to play a major role. "The timing couldn't be better," said the Oklahoma Republican, who previously announced he would attend the December summit as a "one-man truth squad." "Whoever is on the ball in Great Britain, their time was good." (Source: The Hill.)


Obama's Science Czar John Holdren involved in unwinding "Climategate" scandal (Nov 2009) Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as "Climategate".

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU's unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms "a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people". "The files contain so much material that it is going to take some time t o put it all in context," says Ball. "However, enough is already known to underscore their explosive nature. It is already clear the entire claims and positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on falsified manipulated material and is therefore completely compromised. "The fallout will be extensive as material continues to emerge. Reputations of the scientists involved are already destroyed, however fringe players will continue to be identified and their reputations destroyed or sullied."

While the mainstream media is bending into pretzels to keep the scandal under the rug, Climategate is already the biggest scientific scandal in history because of the global policy implications. A throwback to the intro of the television series Dragnet, "Ladies and Gentlemen: "The story you are about to hear is true, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent", the innocent in Climategate have already been thrown to the ravening wolves.

"There is a multitude of small but frightening stories in the massive files," Ball writes. "For example I've known solar physicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon for a long time. I've published articles with Willie and enjoyed extensive communication. I was on advisory committees with them when Sallie suddenly and politely withdrew from the fray. I don't know if the following events were contributing factors but it is likely. "Baliunas and Soon were authors of excellent work confirming the existence of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from a multitude of sources. Their work challenged attempts to get rid of the MWP because it contradicted the claim by the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Several scientists challenged the claim that the latter part of the 20th century was the warmest ever. They knew the claim was false, many warmer periods occurred in the past. Michael Mann 'got rid' of the MWP with his production of the hockey stick, but Soon and Baliunas were problematic. What better than have a powerful academic destroy their credibility for you? Sadly, there are always people who will do the dirty work."

Indeed, Holdren's emails show how sincere scientists would be made into raw "entertainment".

How the deed was done

"A perfect person and opportunity appeared. On 16th October 2003 Michael Mann, infamous for his lead in the 'hockey stick' that dominated the 2001 IPCC Report, sent an email to people involved in the CRU scandal; "

 Dear All,

Thought you would be interested in this exchange, which John Holdren of Harvard has been kind enough to pass along…" At the time Holdren was Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy & Director, Program in Science, Technology, & Public Policy, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is now Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—informally known as the United States Science Czar. ""In an email on October16, 2003 from John Holdren to Michael Mann and Tom Wigley we are told:

""I'm forwarding for your entertainment an exchange that followed from my being quoted in the Harvard Crimson to the effect that you and your colleagues are right and my "Harvard" colleagues Soon and Baliunas are wrong about what the evidence shows concerning surface temperatures over the past millennium. The cover note to faculty and postdocs in a regular Wednesday breakfast discussion group on environmental science and public policy in Harvard's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences is more or less self-explanatory." The Wednesday Breakfast Group

"This is what Holdren sent to the Wednesday Breakfast group.

 "I append here an e-mail correspondence I have engaged in over the past few days trying to educate a Soon/Baliunas supporter who originally wrote to me asking how I could think that Soon and Baliunas are wrong and Mann et al. are right (a view attributed to me, correctly, in the Harvard Crimson). This individual apparently runs a web site on which he had been touting the Soon/Baliunas position." "The exchange Holdren refers to is a challenge by Nick Schulz editor of Tech Central Station (TCS). On August 9, 2003 Schulz wrote;

 "In a recent Crimson story on the work of Soon and Baliunas, who have written for my website [1 techcentralstation.com, you are quoted as saying: My impression is that the critics are right. It s unfortunate that so much attention is paid to a flawed analysis, but that's what happens when something happens to support the political climate in Washington. Do you feel the same way about the work of Mann et. al.? If not why not?" "Holdren provides lengthy responses on October 13, 14, and 16 but comments fail to answer Schulz's questions. After the first response Schulz replies, "I guess my problem concerns what lawyers call the burden of proof. The burden weighs heavily, much more heavily, given the claims on Mann et.al. than it does on Soon/Baliunas. Would you agree?" Of course, Holdren doesn't agree. He replies, "But, in practice, burden of proof is an evolving thing-it evolves as the amount of evidence relevant to a particular proposition grows." No it doesn't evolve; it is either on one side or the other. This argument is in line with what has happened with AGW. He then demonstrates his lack of understanding of science and climate science by opting for Mann and his hockey stick over Soon and Baliunas. His entire defense and position devolves to a political position. His attempt to belittle Soon and Baliunas in front of colleagues is a measure of the man's blindness and political opportunism that pervades everything he says or does.

"Schulz provides a solid summary when he writes, "I'll close by saying I'm willing to admit that, as someone lacking a PhD, I could be punching above my weight. But I will ask you a different but related question. How much hope is there for reaching reasonable public policy decisions that affect the lives of millions if the science upon which those decisions must be made is said to be by definition beyond the reach of those people?"

"We now know it was deliberately placed beyond the reach of the people by the group that he used to ridicule Soon and Baliunas. Holdren was blinded by his political views, which as his record shows are frightening. One web site synthesizes his position on over-population as follows, "Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens."

"Holdren has a long history of seeking total government control. He was involved in the Club of Rome providing Paul Ehrlich with the scientific data in his bet with Julian Simon. Ehrlich lost the bet. Holdren's behavior in this sorry episode with Soon and Baliunas is too true to form and shows the leopard never changes his spots," Ball concludes.

Meanwhile, even with an AWOL mainstream media, the Climategate snakes continue to slither out from under the rocks.

"Dr. Tim Ball is a renowned environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Ball employs his extensive background in climatology and other fields as an advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition, Friends of Science and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy." (Source: Canada Free Press.)

VIDEO: Dr Ball interview on CRU document release




Climate czar rejects doctored data claims (Nov 2009) Obama administration climate czar Carol Browner on Wednesday rejected claims that e-mails stolen from a British university show that climate scientists trumped up global-warming numbers, saying she considers the science settled. "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," said Ms. Browner, whom President Obama has tapped as his chief of policy on global warming. (SITE NOTE: And the opposite side says there are 30,000 scientists that claim her side's position is based on "bad science." And now, they say the papers prove that there was collusion -- including the Obama Science Czar.)

The e-mails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and have come to light over the past week. They appear to show scientists saying they've smoothed over data that doesn't back up their claims of warming, and pondering how to freeze out scientists who disagree with them. Release of the e-mails has energized skeptics ahead of next month's major global warming meeting in Copenhagen, which is supposed to set the framework for a new global treaty to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.

The White House said Wednesday that Mr. Obama will personally travel to Copenhagen to commit the U.S. to greenhouse gas reductions. The e-mails remain a point of debate, with skeptics pointing to several data sets that show the past few years have actually exhibited a cooling effect.

Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican, has called for an investigation into the e-mails, and says they confirm his long-held suspicion that climate claims are not supported by the actual data. Ms. Browner said the only people who still doubt global warming is happening and that humans are to blame are "a very small group of people who continue to say this isn't a real problem, that we don't need to do anything." She also said the e-mails are only trickling out, and that the entire set hasn't been released. Ms. Browner initially shrugged when asked about the e-mails, saying she didn't have a reaction. But when a reporter followed up, she said she will stick with the consensus of the 2,500 climate scientists on the International Panel on Climate Change who concluded global warming is occurring and is most likely being pushed by human actions. (Source: Washington Times.)

Emails NOT Hacked: Inside Job Steve Milloy: Climategate's Perry Mason Moment (Nov 2009) What's the real smoking gun among the emails allegedly "hacked" from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit? We'll get to that in a moment, but let's first address the alarmists' first line of defense — that the emails were stolen, and more than likely by some dastardly skeptic.

Since news of embarrassing, if not incriminating emails broke last Friday, it has become clear that the CRU computer system was not "hacked" and the emails were not stolen. In fact, the file containing the emails had been assembled by CRU staff in preparation for compliance with a Freedom of Information request. The file was then stored in a publicly accessible portion of the CRU computer network — making it just a matter of time before someone discovered it. Why the file was so stored may never be known, but that's not really what's important.

Nothing illegal or unethical was done to affect the file's release. Moving on.

Much has been written already about the now infamous "trick" to explain away recent global cooling, and the alarmists' conspiratorial machinations to silence their critics. But the real "mushroom cloud" among the emails comes from Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on global warming. In an October 14 email to fellow alarmist Tom Wigley, Trenberth plaintively writes:

How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
It's a Perry Mason moment.

First, by admitting that we "are nowhere close" to understanding atmospheric energy flows, the much-vaunted Trenberth has trashed all the climate models on which the gloom-and-doom IPCC forecasts are based. If energy flows in the climate system cannot be accounted for, then they cannot be modeled — and there can be no basis upon which to make predictions of future temperatures.

That's case closed, right there. But there's more.Two years ago, I privately surveyed U.S. scientists who participated in the IPCC's review of climate science. Trenberth was one of those who responded to the survey. One question asked:

Which best describes the role of manmade CO2 emissions in climate change?
Trenberth checked off the following answer:

Manmade CO2 emissions drive climate change, but other natural and human-related factors are also important.
So — while in October 2007 Trenberth seemed pretty convinced that he understood energy flows in the climate system, two years later he underwent such an about-face that he is now trying to get his colleagues to admit, at least privately, that they really don't know squat. It's not surprising that Trenberth had a hard time convincing Wigley, since Wigley's responses to the survey were extreme in terms of the significance of manmade CO2 emissions. On that same question, Wigley checked off this answer:

Manmade CO2 emissions are the principal driver of climate change.
Were the framing of CO2 as climate-culprit a TV drama, at this point Perry Mason would be cruising off into the sunset with Della Street in his gas-guzzling black 1957 Cadillac El Dorado convertible. But the magnitude of the global warming fraud is immense and widespread — too many politician/celebrity egos, corporate fortunes, and activist political dreams have too much invested in the scam to simply say "nevermind." They have no shame, and they will not go away. So our struggle against them will continue.

The difference now is that we are no longer The Skeptics. We are The Vindicated. (Source: Pajamas Media.)

How to Forge a Consensus (Nov 2009) The climatologists at the center of last week's leaked-email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of the some of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science, which is as certain as ever.

"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."

Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.

We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. His May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report: "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" does not "read well," it's true. (Mr. Mann has said he didn't delete any such emails.)

But the furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or even whether climatologists are nice people in private. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.

According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges that critics have lobbed at climatologists from outside this clique are routinely dismissed and disparaged.

This past September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who fact-checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds—including some in Mr. Mann's work—on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more-famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted to several colleagues in an email from March 2003, when the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal!"

The scare quotes around "peer-reviewed literature," by the way, are Mr. Mann's. He went on in the email to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board." In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, re-define what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views. It's easy to manufacture a scientific consensus when you get to decide what counts as science.

The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.

Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it. (Source: WSJ.)


Gore's Manipulation Allowed By Mainstream Media Climate Change Bias – Continues With CRU (Nov 2009) "It is a characteristic of all movements and crusades that the psychopathic element rises to the top." Robert Lindner How much longer will Al Gore get a pass from the mainstream media? A little bit longer if their failure to react to the devastating revelations of files hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia is a measure. Their behavior reflects how most, especially from the left, have abetted the scientists who deliberately perverted climate science.

We now know Gore's errors are based on the global warming fraud orchestrated by a few scientists centered round Phil Jones, Director of the CRU. Emails between those climate scientists, identified by Professor Wegman as publishing together and peer reviewing each other's work disclose the complete manipulation of climate science and the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Bishop Hill provides a useful summation of some of the outrageous comments and actions. What is missing is the nasty vindictive tone that permeates almost every item.

What are the mainstream media going to do? How can they ignore the biggest scandal in science history and then claim any credibility? We already have a strong indication because they either don't cover it or claim, like Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, there is nothing of consequence. No surprise because he was in direct communication with the CRU gang. Other left wing outlets have similar reports such as the Guardian in England and Harrabin at the BBC. Delingpole at the Telegraph identifies some vapid responses.

Gore Gets a Pass

Gore appears on TV or radio programs, but with tight terms of engagement. He appears alone, will not debate and likely defines the pattern of questions. He has no qualifications in the subject, has never published any peer reviewed papers, yet is given total credibility. Indeed, he is not even asked about it. He has produced material on climate with multiple errors but made no attempt to correct them. He attacks with slurs and invective anyone who dares to question his claims or the errors. Who are the flat-earthers now? He is never asked about the money he has made exploiting the errors. He is never asked about funding, affiliations or sponsors. He is never asked about his unjustified condemnation of the lifestyle of citizens while his is more profligate than theirs (carbon footprint). When asked it is usually done to allow him to gloss over the facts.

Despite this he obtains invitations to high-rated mainstream programs and is treated with deference and fawning attention by supposedly unbiased hard questioning media. He's allowed to puff, preen and pontificate from a position of moral superiority. His recent appearance on Larry King's program is a perfect example of unjustified pandering and lousy journalism.

Interviews are carefully selected to reduce any chance that he face people who know and understand the science. It's easily controlled on radio or television, but meetings are a bigger problem. Keynote speeches are relatively easy because it's normal to have no questions. Some groups are supposedly friendly and expect questions. Such was the case when Gore spoke to a recent meeting of Environmental Journalists. He expected only favorable questions. At the meeting Phelim McAleer, an independent documentary producer, confronted Gore about inaccuracies in "An Inconvenient Truth." Gore dodged the question and McAleer's microphone was disconnected when he pressed for an answer.

The media clip of the event played everywhere but apparently did Gore little harm among mainstream media. They also avoided the real story that Gore clearly assumed he would not be challenged. This is an absolute condemnation of the journalistic integrity of Environmental Journalists – punctuated by shutting down the microphone. McAleer appears naïve about the behavior of the mainstream media despite having witnessed the machinations within the science. He said, "What I am surprised at is at the conference of environmental journalists, the reactions of the journalists was to shut down the journalists and protect the politician."

Errors Remain Uncorrected

Gore is back on the circuit pushing his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. Apparently designed for Copenhagen, it offers solutions to the non-existent problem Gore falsely promoted. In all interviews Gore is at his arrogant best, an attitude reflected in a quote on a page at the start of his book. He quotes the Bible, Deuteronomy Chapter 30, Verse 19, "I'm offering you the choice of life or death. You can choose either blessings or curses." Clearly Gore sees himself as the one offering you the choice. This is not surprising as Shakespeare said, "Even the Devil can quote the scriptures in his arguments." In one interview about his book, "He points to pages on the spiritual dimension of climate change, the idea that God gave man stewardship over the earth, and that preserving it for future generations is a sacred obligation." But God also told us to tell the truth. Not only does Gore not tell the truth but he denies the truth. In a Newsweek interview he said, "Facts are not enough."

The definition of delusional is, "An idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument." You decide.

Unequal Treatment

People with views opposing Gore's are rigidly held to the truth, required to produce accurate facts and are quickly attacked for even the slightest error. Martin Durkin's documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle had one small error in the first release. It was immediately and viciously attacked. Durkin withheld the DVD version until that was corrected. Gore's errors are still uncorrected and he is still training apostles to show the movie and push his false message.

Opponents are rarely invited to mainstream media programs. When they are invited, their qualifications are immediately questioned. The nature of their participation in climate and publications are challenged. They're asked about errors they've reportedly made or been accused of making. Funding and income are prime targets. Guilt by association with individuals and groups are targeted.

Why isn't Gore challenged in a similar fashion? Have people confused the person with the office? He's no longer Vice President or a politician, yet he seems to get the privileges of the former and allowed laxity with the truth of the latter. He was given a free pass when he appeared before the Senate and Congress. He asked for an unprecedented 30 minutes and then violated the rules completely by submitting his testimony just 1 minute before his House appearance and a few hours before the Senate hearing instead of the required 48 hours.

Gore's Turn For the Hot Seat

It's time he was forced to answer questions. He is a private citizen and should be treated in the same way by the mainstream media. A court case would confront him with questions on which he cannot prevaricate. He'd probably decline to answer, but then he is exposed. A fraud charge is probably the best because he is acknowledged through his Oscar and Nobel Prize as the most renowned messenger of the scientific falsehoods. He, more than anyone, has perpetuated the myth that CO2 is causing climate change and falsely labeled it a pollutant. He was involved in a meeting at the White House in 1998 with Bill Clinton, Lord Brown of BP and Ken Lay of Enron, apparently laid out the strategy for carbon credits. He then, by all accounts, has profited as much as anyone from the carbon credit market.

Mr. Gore quotes the Bible, he should consider a public view of his actions in light of the following; "Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves." Matthew 7:15 (American Standard Bible).

"Dr. Tim Ball is a renowned environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Ball employs his extensive background in climatology and other fields as an advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition, Friends of Science and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy." (Source: Canada Free Press.)

Carbon Dioxide Lags Behind Warming Trends by 800 Years (Dec 2009) In the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", Al Gore argues that historically, when the levels of carbon dioxide rises that is cause the temperatures of earth to rise considerably. In his documentary, Gore explains that ice core records from the distant past proves this point. However, when the data is looked at in finer detail, it becomes obvious that temperature is driving the height levels of carbon dioxide not the other way around as Gore and his fellow watermelon political allies would like us to believe. I call them watermelon because they may be green on the outside, but they are red to the core on the inside. What we have found out by looking at the evidence is that the change in temperature has been followed by similar changes in the levels of carbon dioxide and methane by some 800 years. Check out the video clip of Al Gore, claiming carbon Dioxide causes the temperateness to get warmer, and then the proof that he is wrong: (SEE ARTICLE FOR VIDEO CLIP.)

Probably the most accurate explanation for this is that when the Ocean temperatures rise they release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus increasing the concentration levels that we see in the data. What most people do not understand is that the oceans contain much more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere, and when the water warms it releases carbon dioxide, and when the waters cool they absorb carbon dioxide which is why the carbon dioxide levels are so low during ice ages.

There is a vast amount of evidence that proves mankind is not responsible for the weather changes of the earth. All the evidence points to another fact also, and that fact is how the Global Warming hucksters have been swindling the citizens of America and around the world. For those who are willing to look at all the evidence, you will inevitably come away with the added knowledge that carbon is the cornerstone of all life on earth, and it is beneficial to our success and growth as a society, not a hindrance. Unfortunately, the facts are inconvenient truths to the leaders of this movement, and from reading the many comments by their followers it would seem that facts are inconvenient to them also. Some people are just born to followers, and regardless of what song the Pied Piper is playing they will continue to follow blindly.

As for me and my kind, we will continue to fight this scam with the truth, even if most of it is ignored by the MSM and the politicians, we will continue the fight. (Source: NORCAL Blog.)

VIDEO: John Coleman, Founder Of The Weather Channel And 30,000 Other Scientists Wanting To Sue Al Gore For Global Warming Fraud (Nov 2009) -- Threat of suing Al Gore because the media (ABC, MSNBC, CBS, Etc.) will not air their views and only Fox News is the only one who listens to them. They want to publicize the Global Warming Scam.




Penn State to Review Reports of Professor Mann, the "hockey stick" originator University Reviewing Recent Reports on Climate Information (Nov 2009) Professor Michael Mann is a highly regarded member of the Penn State faculty conducting research on climate change. Professor Mann's research papers have been published in well respected peer-reviewed scientific journals.

In November 2005, Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) requested that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) convene a panel of independent experts to investigate Professor Mann's seminal 1999 reconstruction of the global surface temperature over the past 1,000 years. The resulting 2006 report of the NAS panel (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676) concluded that Mann's results were sound and has been subsequently supported by an array of evidence that includes additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions.

In recent days a lengthy file of emails has been made public. Some of the questions raised through those emails may have been addressed already by the NAS investigation but others may not have been considered. The University is looking into this matter further, following a well defined policy used in such cases. No public discussion of the matter will occur while the University is reviewing the concerns that have been raised. (Source: Watts Up With That.) (SITE NOTE: Newsbusters stated: "Penn State University is investigating Michael Mann, its high-profile professor on the sending and receiving end of controversial e-mail messages recently obtained from a British Climate Research Unit. Mann, as one of the originators of the infamous Hockey Stick graph, is the climatologist at the very heart of the global warming myth. As the creator of "Mike's Nature trick," a particularly damning phrase used in one of the e-mail messages in question, Mann is also a key figure in ClimateGate.")

Historical video perspective: our current "unprecedented" global warming in the context of scale (Dec 2009) One of the favorite buzzwords of alarmists is "unprecedented" when talking about present day warming. Yah, the Earth's never, ever, been hotter, the "hockey stick" proves it, it's unprecedented, and its all your fault! Well, we've known it's unsubstantiated spin for quite a long time. NOAA apparently has too, because the data presented in this video is in fact from NOAA and is from the year 2000 on their website. But you don't see it publicized much. Why? Well, because it totally destroys claims of "unprecedented warming" in our present day.

The source of inspiration is from my post Hockey stick observed in NOAA ice core data. And the source of inspiration for that is from J. Storrs Hall, writing here.



WUWT reader "docattheautopsy" produced a YouTube video for us for distribution for which I'm grateful and you can see below. I've also produced an animated GIF which is done somewhat like a video, since not all blogs and websites can support video. Here is the low-res version at 480 pixels wide. As you go back in time, our "unprecendented" temperatures of the present day don't seem quite so large, when put in perspective of geologic time. (Source: Watts Up With That.) (SITE NOTE: In Feb 2010, Penn State all but exonerated Michael Mann of all charges on his research. Global Warming continues.)

VIDEO: Hockey Stick over time -- Shows that Warming periods starting 10,000 years ago when man-made C02 was non-existent.


VIDEO: Penn State Investigation of Mann


ClimateGate Scientists Cited in Report to White House and Congress (Nov 2009) Scientists involved in the growing ClimateGate scandal were cited in an October climate change report prepared for the White House and Congress. Titled "Our Changing Planet," the 172-page document was created by The U.S. Global Change Research Program along with the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, and was submitted as a supplement to President Obama's fiscal 2010 budget. ...

As such, its contents not only impact future and current legislation involving global warming, but also how tax dollars are spent to research and address it. The report began with an introduction by White House science czar John Holdren, a man directly involved in ClimateGate The subsequent chapters addressed a number of topics involving climate, and concluded with "Chapter References and Endnotes" where the following names appeared:

  • Phil Jones, Director of the British Climate Research Unit
  • Gavin Schmidt, NASA climatologist and climate modeler
  • Michael Mann, Penn State professor and author of the Hockey Stick graph
  • Benjamin Santer, Lawrence Livermore Lab climate modeler
  • Raymond Bradley, professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst
  • Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research
  • Peter Stott, climate scientist at the UK Met office
  • Tom Wigley, climate scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

To be sure, that papers by these scientists would be cited in such a report is by no means shocking. They have been preparing high-profile documents about global warming for years including for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In reality, it would have been shocking if this report DIDN'T include them.

However, what is disturbing is that America's news media haven't cross-referenced this high-profile report with all the names in the e-mail messages obtained from the computers of the University of East Anglia, and reported to the American people just how connected to the United States government these people are. Or would that be too much like journalism? Before you answer, consider how the press would be all over this report if the scandal involved policies advocated by leading Republicans that were not supported by the media, and the man in the White House was also a Republican. (Source: Newsbusters.)


Climate Change Scientists Admit Dumping Data (Nov 2009) Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA's Climatic Reearch Unit CRU was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building. (SITE NOTE: The point is that you cannot trust the output data if the input data is missing. The entire process and end figures becomes suspect.)

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data. In a statement on its website, the CRU said: "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenized) data." The CRU is the world's leading center for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible. (Source: Fox News.) (SITE NOTE: This story broke in Oct 2009 and went viral on the blogs -- but NOT in the mainstream media.)

Weird science: East Anglia CRU threw out their raw data (Nov 2009) When would scientists expecting the world to take them seriously throw out the raw data on which their conclusions are based? Probably at the same time that they e-mail each other to launch professional vendettas against skeptics and conspire to hide contradictory data. The University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit — already in a deep scandal over the e-mails released by either a hacker or a whistleblower that shows highly unscientific behavior behind the scenes — now admits they threw out the raw data on which much of their theories on anthropogenic global warming are based (via Fausta):

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. The UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation. The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
So now the only data that other scientists can check are those that have been, er, adjusted by UEA-CRU. Were those "adjustments" proper? Did they have a scientific basis for making those adjustments? Were there any gaps in the data?

We'll never know now, will we? And after the release of the e-mails that show UEA-CRU deliberately kneecapping other scientists who dared venture from the heterodoxy and discuss methods of hiding contradictory data and findings, it's hard to believe that this wasn't by design rather than carelessness. After all, without that raw data, the world would have to just take UEA-CRU's word for it — and until those e-mails got released, it seems that most people would have done so.

Now, though, even some AGW scientists say that the scientists involved in the UEA-CRU scandal have to go. One of the contributors to the UN IPCC effort, Dr. Eduardo Zorita, says that several of the people involved in the IPCC should be banned, the result of their credibility deficit. Climate Depot has Zorita's statement:

CRU files: Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process.

Short answer: because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.

A longer answer: My voice is not very important. I belong to the climate-research infantry, publishing a few papers per year, reviewing a few manuscript per year and participating in a few research projects. I do not form part of important committees, nor I pursue a public awareness of my activities. My very minor task in the public arena was to participate as a contributing author in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.

By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication. My area of research happens to be the climate of the past millennia, where I think I am appreciated by other climate-research 'soldiers'. And it happens that some of my mail exchange with Keith Briffa and Timothy Osborn can be found in the CRU-files made public recently on the internet.

To the question of legality or ethicalness of reading those files I will write a couple of words later. I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files. They depict a realistic, I would say even harmless, picture of what the real research in the area of the climate of the past millennium has been in the last years. The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.

These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the 'pleasure' to experience all this in my area of research.

I thank explicitly Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn for their work in the formulation of one Chapter of the IPCC report. As it distills from these emails, they withstood the evident pressure of other IPCC authors, not experts in this area of research, to convey a distorted picture of our knowledge of the hockey-stick graph.

Is legal or ethical to read the CRU files? I am not a lawyer. It seems that if the files had been hacked this would constitute an illegal act. If they have been leaked it could be a whistle blower action protected by law. I think it is not unethical to read them. Once published, I feel myself entitled to read how some researchers tried to influence reviewers to scupper the publication of our work on the 'hockey stick graph' or to read how some IPCC authors tried to exclude this work from the IPCC Report on very dubious reasons. Also, these mails do not contain any personal information at all. They are an account of many dull daily activities of typical climatologists, together with a realistic account of very troubling professional behavior.
Zorita's point is well taken. The bullying atmosphere in Academia on AGW has ruined the credibility of the effort — and not just at the University of East Anglia. Any PhD student in the field would have known on which side the bread would be buttered, and would be unlikely to commit career suicide by producing contradictory data. The actions of the IPCC authors created an atmosphere of groupthink, paranoia, and toadyism, not science or truth. Any results coming from this arena have to be entirely suspect.

The AGW movement has been exposed as a religious belief and a political cash cow, not science. (Source: Hot Air.)

The CRU's Criminal Conspiracy (Dec 2009) ClimateGate: Britain's Climate Research Unit now says it will release all its data. Does that include the data that have been shredded, deleted and denied publication? In a statement released Saturday by the University of East Anglia, where the CRU is located, it was announced that all unit data, including data that had been denied climate skeptics, would soon be released to prove this is much ado about nothing.

Unimpressed by the news is David Holland of Northampton, a grandfather with a background in electrical engineering, who is seeking prosecution of the CRU scientists involved in suppressing and even destroying climate data in violation of Britain's information disclosure laws. Mr. Holland filed a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office last week after the leaked e-mails included several Freedom of Information requests he himself had submitted to the CRU, requests that went nowhere, and the CRU scientists' private responses to them.

In one e-mail dateMay 26, 2008, one CRU scientist writes to a colleague who received one of Mr. Holland's requests: "Oh MAN! Will this crap never end?" Not only is it not about to end, it is hitting the fan as we speak. The CRU scientists, and we use that word reluctantly, had no fondness for transparency and full disclosure. In a December 2008 e-mail to Ben Santer, himself responsible for a controversial rewriting of the 1995 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, CRU director Phil Jones wrote: "When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half-hour sessions — one at a screen, to convince them otherwise."

In regard to one particularly pesky FOI request, Jones said: "About 2 months ago I deleted loads of e-mails, so have very little — if anything at all." Yet in an interview published last Tuesday in the Guardian, Jones told another story: "We've not deleted any e-mails or data here at CRU. I would never manipulate the data one bit — I would categorically deny that."

In one exchange, Jones tells Penn State's Michael Mann: "If they ever hear there's a Freedom of Information Act in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." He even asks Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about an IPCC assessment report: "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re: (the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report)?"

So much has been deleted that it may be impossible to release all the data and reveal the tangled web of manipulation. Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. In a statement on its Web site, the CRU said: "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality-controlled and homogenized) data." In other words, only the manipulated and doctored data are available.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, 'Trust us.' So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said. Jones and his ilk even went so far as to seek suppression of contrarian evidence in those much beloved "peer-reviewed" journals. When Climate Research published a skeptic's paper, Jones demanded the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor." Regarding another set of Gore disbelievers, Jones assured Dr. Mann, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!"

This is not consensus, nor is it peer-reviewed science. This is collusion and conspiracy to defraud, not only those providing grant money and research funding, but governments and taxpayers, particularly our own, of trillions of dollars to mindlessly pursue the greatest scam of the century, perhaps of all time. These charlatans deserve to be locked up. (Source: Investors.com.)

CRU scandal investigation broadens (Dec 2009) Until today, many assumed the investigation into Phil Jones' East Anglia CRU operation would be limited to the leak of the damning emails. Apparently, it is to be broader and will cover the reliability of the data spewed out by this group as well. The BBC reports: UEA has said the review will:

  • Examine e-mail exchanges to determine whether there is evidence of suppression or manipulation of data at odds with acceptable scientific practice which "may therefore call into question any of the research outcomes".
  • Review CRU's policies and practices for acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review and disseminating data and research findings, and "their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice".
  • Review CRU's compliance or otherwise with the UEA's policies and practices regarding requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) for the release of data.
  • Review and make recommendations about the management, governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds.

The inquiry will be headed by Sir Muir Russell, who is described as a "former civil servant." Let's see if Penn States' investigation into the work of Professor Michael Mann which didn't seem very serious when announced, will be broadened as well. (Source: American Thinker.) (SITE NOTE: In Feb 2010, Penn State all but exonerated Michael Mann of allegations. Global Warming continues.)

Climategate fallout continues as United Nations announces probe by Tony Hake, Examiner.com (Dec 2009) No longer able to ignore the scandal and its efforts to quell the furor failing, the United Nations has announced it will launch a probe into the release of more than a thousand emails from the world’s top scientists. The contents of the archive, illegally obtained and released on the Internet two weeks ago, have caused an uproar in the debate about manmade climate change.

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), initially dismissed the event saying the scientists involved could not have influenced the IPCC’s work. He said last week, “The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report.”

Today Pachauri reversed course and told BBC Radio that the UN will be conducting an investigation into the issues raised in recent weeks. “We certainly are going to take a look at the whole lot of it and then are going to take a position on it,” he said. “We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will certainly look into it in detail.”

Questions immediately arose about who will conduct the investigation and what the scope will include. As was seen in a poll released yesterday, Americans do not believe the UN is an honest broker in climate change discussions so an internal investigation is unlikely to do much to quiet dissent. The launch of a UN investigation is the third announced in the last five days. On Sunday, Penn State University announced it would conduct an investigation into Dr. Michael Mann and his role in the Climategate scandal. Mann in particular seemed concerned with controlling and preventing the publication of any papers that disagreed with the manmade climate change theory.

Britain’s University of East Anglia (UEA) which houses the Climate Research Unit (CRU) where the emails originated from has also announced its own investigation. The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, has stepped aside pending the results of the inquiry. Jones is arguably the central figure in the scandal having sent many emails that have fueled skeptics’ fires.

In terms of the IPCC, Jones commented that he wanted to prevent papers written by dissenters from being included in IPCC reports. “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones wrote to Mann. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer- review literature is!” (Source: Climate Realists.)

AGW meltdown: UK Met Office needs three years to review East Anglia data (Dec 2009) Consider the Brits on the sideline until 2012 on global warming. The Met Office will need three years to rebuild ground-based climate models while recompiling raw data from the past 160 years to replace the data that the University of East Anglia’s CRU destroyed years ago. They want to create an open and transparent full data set, but until then have to back down from any of the conclusions that relied on UEA-CRU’s models:

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.
The British government is attempting to silence the Met Office, however:

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.
But I thought they were interested in science, not political hackery!

The Met Office is taking the correct approach. The data on which they largely relied has not only been shown to have been corrupted by bias and corruption, it’s also been destroyed. Knowing the UEA-CRU’s credibility as a scientific effort has been compromised, real scientists would insist on recreating the data set in a thoroughly testable and transparent process before proceeding to use any of the conclusions reached from the previous work to form any more recommendations for action.

In fact, the UN, the UK, and the rest of the world should be insisting on the same approach — if they were interested in science in the first place. The UK’s efforts to quash the Met Office’s review, which is what scientists would demand in any other context, shows that the politicians aren’t terribly interested in whether AGW is scientifically supportable, or even true at all. They want the power that AGW hysteria gives them to seize control of private-industry production and the choices available to people now.

It’s the ultimate elitist entrée to statism, and they’re not going to let Climategate get in the way of it — even if the scientists themselves start balking at the political hackery surrounding AGW. (Source: Hot Air .)



Increase the scare; Increase the funding -- both ways: Nuclear Ice Age or Global Warming



Global mean temperature remains relatively constant




Media in bed with Global Warming stance Climategate Is a Liberal ‘News' Media Scandal, Too: Leftwing Media Have Been Covering Up for Radical Environmentalists for Decades” (Dec 2009) Two weeks ago, unnamed whistleblowers exposed years of e-mails from scientists working at Britain's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The CRU's Web site describes it as "one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change," but the e-mails paint the CRU as more of a political "war room" for radical environmentalists. (LINK: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/)

As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby observed Wednesday: "Assuming the e-mails are genuine, they are nothing short of scandalous. They reveal celebrated climate scientists apparently conspiring to corrupt the peer-review process, to suppress or finesse temperature data at odds with global-warming alarmism, to silence or discredit climate experts who criticize their work, and to hide or eliminate the raw data on which their own much-trumpeted claims have been based." (LINK: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/12/02/climategate_dissent_on_ice/)

Yet since the story broke, the MRC's Business & Media Institute (BMI) discovered just one broadcast news reference to the "Climategate" e-mail scandal, on ABC's This Week November 29; CBS and NBC have yet to inform their viewers. (LINK: http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2009/20091202135822.aspx)

Many are asking why the "news" media are so shamelessly covering up for these environmental radicals. The public ought not to be surprised. The media have been doing these radicals' dirty work for decades, as the Media Research Center has documented:.

  • # MRC's Free Market Project found that between January 1993 and October 1997 — a period leading up to the Kyoto conference that December — just 5% of global warming stories on the ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC evening newscasts mentioned the arguments of skeptical scientists, and 85% of stories did not even acknowledge the existence of scientific skeptics. (LINK: http://www.mediaresearch.org/press/1997/press19971201.asp)

  • # From January 20 through April 22, 2001, as liberals were condemning President George W. Bush for his failure to push ratification of the Kyoto treaty, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows completely excluded the views of global warming skeptics from their coverage, while just one story on CNN included a dissenter — a 97% skew in favor of the doomsayers. (LINK: http://www.mediaresearch.org/specialreports/2001/globalwarming.asp)

  • # In early 2007, as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was handed an Academy Award, the broadcast network morning news shows ramped up their global warming coverage. But skeptics were once again frozen out: MRC analysts found just 3% of stories contained any mention of dissent from Gore's approach to global warming — and even those were heavily stacked in favor of his "climate crisis" position. (LINK: http://www.mediaresearch.org/realitycheck/2007/fax20070419.asp)

  • # BMI analysts reviewed ABC, CBS and NBC's morning and evening news shows from July 1 through December 31, 2007. Once again, 80% of stories failed to acknowledge any dissent from the liberal orthodoxy on warming. CBS was the most lopsided, with 97% of its stories carrying only the alarmist perspective. (LINK: http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2008/GlobalWarmingCensored/Globalwarmingcensoredfulltext.asp)

More than 20 years ago, NBC's Andrea Mitchell admitted how the media had taken sides on global warming. "The networks have made that decision now, where you'd have to call it advocacy," Mitchell announced at a September 16, 1989 global warming conference held at the Smithsonian (later quoted in the Wall Street Journal). (LINK: http://www.mediaresearch.org/mediawatch/1989/watch19891001.asp)

When journalists become advocates, they inevitably fail to hold both sides accountable. If reporters had maintained an unbiased approach to global warming, they conceivably could have uncovered Climategate years ago. The question now is, will they admit the Left's global warming scandal even exists? (Source: Media Research.org: Richard Noyes.) (SITE NOTE: The BBC and the international news media on the other hand are NOT part of the coverup that American media is a part of.)



ABC and NBC FINALLY Acknowledge 'ClimateGate,' But Remain Undeterred: 'Science is Solid' (Dec 2009) More than two weeks after ClimateGate broke, ABC's World News finally got around to mentioning it on Sunday evening, but not to explore how the e-mails discredited leading scientists who insist mankind is causing global warming as, instead, ABC declared “the science is solid” and NBC assured viewers “the evidence is overwhelming that man is behind climate change.”

ABC reporter Clayton Sandell merely included, in a larger story about the Copenhagen conference, how “global warming naysayers are claiming that e-mails stolen from” East Anglia University “show climate scientists discussing how to fudge results to promote the idea that humans are altering the planet.” After failing to inform viewers of any specifics the e-mails revealed, Sandell, who didn't utter a syllable about them on Sunday's Good Morning America, concluded his World News piece:

The science is solid, according to a vast majority of researchers, with hotter temperatures, melting glaciers, and rising sea level providing the proof.
Over on the NBC Nightly News, following a shoddy Friday night story, Anne Thompson checked in from Copenhagen with a story on “cautious optimism that a political agreement can be reached on reducing carbon dioxide emissions,” before she repeated the usual hysteria about how “the Greenland ice sheet...is melting at an ever faster pace.” Only at the very end did Thompson raise “this scandal called ClimateGate,” offering the most-benign explanation of how “essentially, in those e-mails, some climate scientists seem to be suggesting that perhaps they're massaging the data.” But, she countered in citing the UN's Yvo de Boer:

When you look at the overall science and the fact that science from around the world has been reviewed by scientists around the world -- 2,500 by the UN -- he says the evidence is overwhelming that man is behind climate change. (SITE NOTE: A group of 30,000 scientists have been battling the media and government to present their case that Global Warming conclusions are NOT based on solid scientific methods.)
On Friday, NBC reported on ClimateGate, the first morning or evening ABC, CBS or NBC news program do to so, but only to see the disclosures as a threat to the global warming alarmist agenda. The BiasAlert item, “NBC Nightly News Takes Up ClimateGate, But Frets It Could 'Delay Taking Action,'” recounted NBC brought up ClimateGate in only in the most cursory manner, while:

[C]orrespondent Anne Thompson, a long-time ally of the environmental left, despaired the e-mails may end up “giving politicians from coal and oil-producing states another reason to delay taking action to reduce emissions. The government's leading scientist told Congress there is no time to lose.”
BiasAlert post from Rich Noyes on Sandell's Sunday GMA coverage: “ABC Remains Silent on ClimateGate; Claims ‘Growing Scientific Evidence' Supports Warming Theory.” Back on November 29, ABC's This Week roundtable briefly discussed ClimateGate, but GMA has yet to mention the topic and the couple of vague sentences on the December 6 World News is all that newscast has offered.

So far, the only broadcast network story to adequately summarize the revelations in the e-mails came -- coincidentally? -- on a newscast nearly 75 percent of Americans couldn't see. A 4 PM EST Saturday college football game telecast by CBS Sports (Alabama v Florida) meant no CBS Evening News on any EST or CST station, and not even all MST and PST affiliates carried it. (NB post on the story)

On that widely-bumped newscast (which is posted on CBSNews.com), however, Kimberly Dozier relayed:

The e-mails seem to show that some of the world's top experts decided to exclude or manipulate some research that didn't help prove global warming exists. Nineteen ninety-eight was the hottest year since record keeping began. But the temperature went down the next year and it's only spiked a couple of times since.

An e-mail from 1999 shows scientists worked hard to demonstrate an upward trend. They talk of using a trick to hide the decline in global temperatures. It worked like this: when temperature readings gathered from studying tree rings showed what looked like a decline in temperatures from the 1980s to the present, the scientists added in measurements taken later by more modern instruments, which gave them the answer they wanted.
The MRC's Brad Wilmouth corrected the closed-captioning against the video to provide these transcripts of the stories on the Sunday, December 6 ABC and NBC evening newscasts:

ABC's World News:

DAN HARRIS: Tomorrow is the start of a huge global summit on what some people believe is the most important problem in the world, climate change. However, as this summit begins, climate change skeptics have been handed some real ammunition -- a scandal over leaked e-mails from key scientists. Clayton Sandell is at the summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, tonight.

CLAYTON SANDELL: Today, as delegates gathered here in Copenhagen, the U.N. climate chief put nations on notice, saying it's time to make real commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

YVO DE BOER, U.N. FRAMEWORK CONVENTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE: Well, time is up. Over the next two weeks, governments have to deliver a strong and long-term response.

SANDELL: Wealthy nations like the U.S. and developing countries like China and India are pointing fingers over who should be working hardest to cut emissions. Making cuts is difficult and expensive, meaning higher energy costs for average citizens in the middle of a global recession.

JEFFREY SACHS, THE EARTH INSTITUTE: We may get indignant in the U.S., "Oh, why aren't China and India and so forth doing their things?" but the rest of the world is saying, "What are you talking about? When are you going to show some leadership?" (SITE NOTE: The problem is that "leadership" means footing the bill. What is ludicrous to me is how the US foots the bill while China claims to be a developing country and has reduced standards -- yet owns the majority of the US debt which is going to get greater. Who's bs'ing who?)

SANDELL: This is the room where delegates from over 190 countries will gather on Monday. When President Obama comes here, he'll bring a proposal to cut U.S. emissions 17 percent by 2020, 83 percent by 2050. But the President faces new challenges in Copenhagen. Global warming naysayers are claiming that e-mails stolen from this research university show climate scientists discussing how to fudge results to promote the idea that humans are altering the planet. Today the U.N. admitted the scandal looks bad.

DE BOER: I actually think it's very good that what has happened is being critically addressed in the media because this, this process has to be based on solid science.

SANDELL: The science is solid, according to a vast majority of researchers, with hotter temperatures, melting glaciers, and rising sea level providing the proof. Clayton Sandell, ABC News, Copenhagen. (SITE NOTE: The problem is the media and Al Gore want to silence the 30,000 scientists that say AGW is NOT good science. Thus far the media has muzzled them -- refusing to publicize their efforts and the government ignores them. Their frustration is building and latest were remarks of suing Al Gore over his comments just to get publicity for the cause.)
NBC Nightly News:

LESTER HOLT: Now to that big summit on climate change that begins tomorrow in Denmark. More than 190 nations will be represented, and President Obama himself will attend at the end of the 12-day conference. Our chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson is already in Copenhagen, and she joins us now with a preview. Anne?

ANNE THOMPSON: Good evening, Lester, from rainy Copenhagen where there is actually some cautious optimism that a political agreement can be reached on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. And the reason is, is because in the last few weeks three of the biggest emitters in the world -- the U.S., China and India -- have all put specific proposals on the table promising to reduce their carbon footprints. The world is gathering in Copenhagen -- 192 nations coming to the capital of Denmark, a leader in cutting the emissions fueling climate change. Over the last two decades, Denmark has slashed its carbon footprint by 13 percent while growing its economy by more than 45 percent. Over the next two weeks, the nations of the world will try to find common ground here on how to reduce global warming and make commitments to change their carbon-burning ways. Yvo de Boer is the U.N.'s climate chief, and will play a key role in the upcoming talks.

YVO DE BOER, U.N. FRAMEWORK CONVENTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE: We know that the Himalayan glaciers are disappearing and that tens of millions of people in India and China rely on those glaciers for their drinking water supply. So what we have is basically a pretty small window of opportunity to change all of that. (SITE NOTE: THIS IS ERRONEOUS BASED ON FAULTY EVIDENCE...SEE Dec 2009 Article this topic.)

THOMPSON: One of the biggest changes is happening on the Greenland ice sheet. It is melting at an ever faster pace. Danish glaciologist J.P. Stephenson says changes in the atmosphere are changing the ice. (SITE NOTE: The problem is whether this is part of a normal cyclic action as Greenland once was a "green land" and the question whether this is an effect of man-made C02 or natural effects of El Nino and warming of the seas.)

J.P. STEPHENSON, GLACIOLOGIST: This place where we are standing used to be about 45 feet higher 10 years ago.

THOMPSON: The ice is going into the ocean raising sea levels, and that could cause some very expensive problems for coastal cities in the U.S. A new report from the World Wildlife Fund and the Alliance Insurance Group says an increase of some two feet in sea level could cause $2.8 trillion of damage in Miami, $1.8 trillion in the New York-Newark area, and $753 billion in New Orleans. In other places the problem is not enough water. Arizona is in the 15th year of a drought. Conserving water is now second nature in Flagstaff, a city of 65,000 people.

PROFESSOR ABE SPRINGER, NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY: Flagstaff has enough water to get it into the near future, but there are concerns about the supply out to the year 2050.

THOMPSON: And what are the concerns?

SPRINGER: To have enough water to supply potential anticipated future growth.

THOMPSON: Trying to balance the desire for economic growth around the world with the need to reduce emissions from the coal, gas and oil that helps fuel such growth is the challenge of Copenhagen.

Now, also under discussion here are those stolen e-mails from a British University that have made this scandal called ClimateGate. And, essentially, in those e-mails, some climate scientists seem to be suggesting that perhaps they're massaging the data. I spoke to Yvo de Boer about that. He said certainly the language in those e-mails looks bad. He's glad that both the U.N. and the university are investigating those e-mails, but he said when you look at the overall science and the fact that science from around the world has been reviewed by scientists around the world -- 2,500 by the U.N. -- he says the evidence is overwhelming that man is behind climate change.
— Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center (Source: Media Research Center.)




Review: E-mails show pettiness, not fraud -- Climate experts, AP reporters go through 1,000 exchanges (Dec 2009) (SITE NOTE: The only problem with this "unbiased report" is that the "reporters" have a vested interest to prove that the authors of the emails were NOT criminally liable. The "Climate Experts" are from the Global Warming community with a vested interest to limit the damage from the emails and Climategate because of what is at stake. The "moderate" climatologists just happened to also have contributed to the writing of the IPCC report -- a definite conflict of interest. In other words, the "journalistic report" was biased from the start.)

E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press. The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientists were keenly aware of how their work would be viewed and used, and, just like politicians, went to great pains to shape their message. Sometimes, they sounded more like schoolyard taunts than scientific tenets. The scientists were so convinced by their own science and so driven by a cause "that unless you're with them, you're against them," said Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also reviewed the communications. Frankel saw "no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very 'generous interpretations.'" (SITE NOTE: A fox declaring the other foxes innocent is not really an "unbiased" evaluator.)

Some e-mails expressed doubts about the quality of individual temperature records or why models and data didn't quite match. Part of this is the normal give-and-take of research, but skeptics challenged how reliable certain data was. The e-mails were stolen from the computer network server of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in southeast England, an influential source of climate science, and were posted online last month. The university shut down the server and contacted the police. (SITE NOTE: There is also the possibility that it was an inside whistle-blower as the data was first attempted to be posted on a Turkish server but rejected, then posted on the Russian server. The information was partially assembled for a FOIA request and available to an insider.)

Million words reviewed

The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters reading and rereading them — about 1 million words in total. (SITE NOTE: Does this mean that they were skilled evaluators of SCIENCE and EVALUATION CRITERIA? In other words, they are English majors evaluating scientific data. GET REAL!!! Do you expect climateologists to write articles for the Associated Press??? From this point on, the reporters "report" is worthless when it comes to scientific content. Their evaluation of LEGAL liability for skewing data and hiding "inconvenient" findings being excused because they were "overzealous" is NOT good reporting. To their credit, they stated: "As part of the AP review, summaries of the e-mails that raised issues from the potential manipulation of data to intensely personal attacks were sent to seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy." HOWEVER, the opinions say that they were simply playing politics -- and the ethics was still within bounds. Again remember this is an opinion that others may have different opinions of what is the "ethical boundary of scientific research.")

One of the most disturbing elements suggests an effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics skeptical of global warming. It is not clear if any data was destroyed; two U.S. researchers denied it. The e-mails show that several mainstream scientists repeatedly suggested keeping their research materials away from opponents who sought it under American and British public records law. It raises a science ethics question because free access to data is important so others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method. The University of East Anglia is investigating the blocking of information requests. "I believe none of us should submit to these 'requests,'" declared the university's Keith Briffa in one e-mail. The center's chief, Phil Jones, e-mailed: "Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them."

When one skeptic kept filing Freedom of Information Act requests, Jones, who didn't return AP requests for comment, told another scientist, Michael Mann: "You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting FOI requests for all e-mails Keith (Briffa) and Tim (Osborn) have written." Mann, a researcher at Penn State University, told The Associated Press: "I didn't delete any e-mails as Phil asked me to. I don't believe anybody else did." (SITE NOTE: Mann is under review by the Penn State University. What first started as only Mann's work an PSU was expanded to ALL materials that Mann contributed.)

The e-mails also show how professional attacks turned very personal. When former London financial trader Douglas J. Keenan combed through the data used in a 1990 research paper Jones had co-authored, Keenan claimed to have found evidence of fakery by Jones' co-author. Keenan threatened to have the FBI arrest University at Albany scientist Wei-Chyung Wang for fraud. (A university investigation later cleared him of any wrongdoing.) "I do now wish I'd never sent them the data after their FOIA request!" Jones wrote in June 2007.

In another case after initially balking on releasing data to a skeptic because it was already public, Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientist Ben Santer wrote that he then opted to release everything the skeptic wanted — and more. Santer said in a telephone interview that he and others are inundated by frivolous requests from skeptics that are designed to "tie-up government-funded scientists."

Contempt for contrarians

The e-mails also showed a stunning disdain for global warming skeptics. One scientist practically celebrates the news of the death of one critic, saying, "In an odd way this is cheering news!" Another bemoans that the only way to deal with skeptics is "continuing to publish quality work in quality journals (or calling in a Mafia hit.)" And a third scientist said the next time he sees a certain skeptic at a scientific meeting, "I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted." And they compared contrarians to communist-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Somali pirates. They also called them out-and-out frauds.

Santer, who received death threats after his work on climate change in 1996, said Thursday: "I'm not surprised that things are said in the heat of the moment between professional colleagues. These things are taken out of context."

When the journal, Climate Research, published a skeptical study that turned out to be partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, Penn State scientist Mann discussed retribution this way: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."

The most provocative e-mails are usually about one aspect of climate science: research from a decade ago that studied how warm or cold it was centuries ago through analysis of tree rings, ice cores and glacial melt. And most of those e-mails, which stretch from 1996 to last month, are from about a handful of scientists in dozens of e-mails.

Still, such research has been a key element in measuring climate change over long periods. As part of the AP review, summaries of the e-mails that raised issues from the potential manipulation of data to intensely personal attacks were sent to seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy. "This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds," said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. "We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here."

In the past three weeks since the e-mails were posted, longtime opponents of mainstream climate science have repeatedly quoted excerpts of about a dozen e-mails. Republican congressmen and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either independent investigations, a delay in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the Copenhagen international climate talks. They cited a "culture of corruption" that the e-mails appeared to show.

'Trick' reference explained

That is not what the AP found. There were signs of trying to present the data as convincingly as possible. One e-mail that skeptics have been citing often since the messages were posted online is from Jones. He says: "I've just completed Mike's (Mann) trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (from 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Jones was referring to tree ring data that indicated temperatures after the 1950s weren't as warm as scientists had determined. The "trick" that Jones said he was borrowing from Mann was to add the real temperatures, not what the tree rings showed. And the decline he talked of hiding was not in real temperatures, but in the tree ring data that was misleading, Mann explained. (SITE NOTE: We have shown that they intentionally LEFT OUT tree ring data from Mann's famous "hockey stick" design by graphically eliminating the trend that the earth was COOLING.)

Sometimes the data didn't line up as perfectly as scientists wanted. David Rind told colleagues about inconsistent figures in the work for a giant international report: "As this continuing exchange has clarified, what's in Chapter 6 is inconsistent with what is in Chapter 2 (and Chapter 9 is caught in the middle!). Worse yet, we've managed to make global warming go away! (Maybe it really is that easy...:)." But in the end, global warming didn't go away, according to the vast body of research over the years.

None of the e-mails flagged by the AP and sent to three climate scientists viewed as moderates in the field changed their view that global warming is man-made and a threat. Nor did it alter their support of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which some of the scientists helped write. "My overall interpretation of the scientific basis for (man-made) global warming is unaltered by the contents of these e-mails," said Gabriel Vecchi, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist.

Gerald North, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, headed a National Academy of Sciences study that looked at — and upheld as valid — Mann's earlier studies that found the 1990s were the hottest years in centuries. "In my opinion the meaning is much more innocent than might be perceived by others taken out of context. Much of this is overblown," North said. Mann contends he always has been upfront about uncertainties, pointing to the title of his 1999 study: "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties and Limitations." Several scientists found themselves tailoring their figures or retooling their arguments to answer online arguments — even as they claimed not to care what was being posted online. "I don't read the blogs that regularly," Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona wrote in 2005. "But I guess the skeptics are making hay of their (sic) being a global warm (sic) event around 1450AD."

'Good faith,' says one critic

One person singled out for criticism in the e-mails is Steve McIntyre, who maintains Climate Audit. The blog focuses on statistical issues with scientists' attempts to recreate the climate in ancient times. "We find that the authors are overreaching in the conclusions that they're trying to draw from the data that they have," McIntyre said in a telephone interview. McIntyre, 62, of Toronto, was trained in math and economics and says he is "substantially retired" from the mineral exploration industry, which produces greenhouse gases.

Some e-mails said McIntyre's attempts to get original data from scientists are frivolous and meant more for harassment than doing good science. There are allegations that he would distort and misuse data given to him. McIntyre disagreed with how he is portrayed. "Everything that I've done in this, I've done in good faith," he said.He also said he has avoided editorializing on the leaked e-mails. "Anything I say," he said, "is liable to be piling on." The skeptics started the name-calling, said Mann, who called McIntyre a "bozo," a "fraud" and a "moron" in various e-mails. "We're human," Mann said. "We've been under attack unfairly by these people who have been attempting to dismiss us as frauds as liars." (Source: MSNBC.)


CBS and NBC Trumpet UN Predictions About Warmest Decade Since 1850 (Dec 2009) CBS and NBC on Tuesday nightly eagerly pounced on the latest UN pronouncement about a warming world, without any regard for ClimateGate disclosures about manipulation of past data and without mentioning, as the AP noted, "the United States and Canada experienced cooler conditions than average." CBS anchor Katie Couric announced: "At the world climate conference in Copenhagen today, scientists said this decade is on track to become the warmest since records were first kept back in 1850."

NBC anchor Brian Williams touted "a big headline from that climate meeting going on in Copenhagen. The United Nations weather experts reported today this decade is on track to become the warmest since it started keeping records back in 1850. And 2009, they say, could rank among the top five warmest years ever." He proceeded to set up a piece about Peru: "Anne Thompson shows us a place where they say the climate crisis is right there for all the world to see, in the form of glaciers melting and threatening the supply of fresh water."

Couric recalled how "last night, Mark Phillips reported from the Maldives where rising seas could mean disaster, but there's a very different view in Greenland where melting glaciers could bring opportunity."

But first, Phillips recounted more disaster in Greenland:

There's no mystery about the affect global warming is having on the great glaciers of Greenland. More ice breaking off and floating out to sea than has ever been observed before.... Greenland's most active glacier now sheds enough ice each year to cover Manhattan almost a mile deep. Space imagery of the glaciers shows how it's been shrinking back over the years, supporting the scientific consensus that the Greenland icecap is thinning. The melt water causing sea levels around the world to rise. Levels that are feared may rise another two feet or more this century by the most widely accepted estimates. These mountain-sized bergs have been called the best evidence of global warming on the planet....
Phillips, however, saw "a silver lining in the climate change cloud" in economic opportunity for the fishing-based land: "Mining companies are lining up to explore the rich deposits of gold, copper and iron-ore that are becoming more accessible as the ice recedes from the coastal regions."

Thompson began her report on the Tuesday, December 8 NBC Nightly News:

Peru is a land of natural wonders. Its mystical Andes Mountains are home to most of the world's tropical glaciers. In the Cordillera Blanca, some three miles high, the 18,000-year-old glaciers are shrinking. Peruvian glaciologist Marco Zapata has spent three decades here, and he's stunned by the melt rate.

MARCO ZAPATA: The glaciers are depleting fast, so that means that the reserve of fresh water will disappear in the future.

THOMPSON: The most dramatic loss is visible in the Pastoruri glacier, now split in two. The shrinking of the Pastoruri Glacier has been fast and furious, losing 40 percent of its mass in just the last 13 years. The United Nations says the Andes glaciers could be gone by 2022, and with them their run-off. Climate change is to blame. The glaciers provide 85 percent of the fresh water for Peru's most populated area, and water generates 80 percent of the country's electricity. Peru's first environmental minister, Antonio Brack Egg, says the nation must take action now or risk water wars....
— Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center (Source: Media Research.) (SITE NOTE: This is in line with the State Department's remarks: QUESTION: How does the issue of the hacked email messages on climate change affect the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen? Are we concerned? Is this an attempt to undermine the conference? ANSWER: Nothing in those emails is cause to question the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is real and demands action. In fact, more than 2,500 scientists from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world's leading body for the assessment of climate change – have outlined the serious threat posed by climate change and the need for action. Beyond the science, there are plenty of other environmental and economic reasons for us to move aggressively toward a clean energy economy. We want to ensure that America can compete and win when it comes to the race for clean energy jobs. As the White House spokesman said today, the issue of the East Anglia emails should not slow the process on climate change "because the science is clear." (State Dept Brief 9 Dec 2009))

HOWEVER CNN Extensively Covers Viewpoint of Climate Change Skeptics (Dec 2009) CNN made a real, day-long effort on Monday to address the climate-change debate as a debate, giving skeptics of manmade climate change a series of chances to match the leftist view, especially during its evening programming. CNN is also the only U.S. TV news outlet so far to send an anchor to the Climate Research Unit at the center of the ClimateGate controversy.

International correspondent Phil Black's interview of Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent skeptic of the theory of manmade global warming, ran four minutes into the 6 pm Eastern hour. The "passionate skeptic on climate change," as Black referred to him, traveled to Copenhagen for the UN's climate change summit, and is one of the few skeptics of the theory of manmade climate change in attendance. The CNN correspondent actually compared belief in the theory to a religion at the beginning of his report: "Copenhagen's Bella Conference Center has become an international temple for thousands of true believers, people who have no doubt the planet is warming and humankind is to blame. But there are a few people here who do not believe."

Black included four sound bites from Monckton in his report, and two from manmade climate change believers- Rajendra Pachauri from the IPCC and Alex Steffen of the website WorldChanging.com:

MONCKTON: Most of the politicians don't know any science-

BLACK: Lord Christopher Monckton is one of them. He's a member of the British aristocracy and a passionate skeptic on climate change.

BLACK (on-camera): So you believe all of this is a colossal waste of time and money?

MONCKTON: There's no need for it.

BLACK: None?

MONCKTON: None whatsoever.

BLACK: There are a lot of people here who disagree with you.

MONCKTON: Yes, but they haven't studied the science, most of them-

BLACK (voice-over): Monckton says the planet is not getting hotter, its recent changes are natural, and there's science to prove it. He's among the skeptics who have been emboldened by the so-called 'ClimateGate' scandal. Monckton says e-mails hacked and leaked from an English university show climate scientists are fiddling with their figures and misleading the world.

MONCKTON: Those scientists have been fabricating, inventing, tampering with, altering, hiding, concealing and destroying data.

BLACK: The scientists who wrote the e-mails deny the allegations, but they have developed so much momentum they were addressed directly during the opening ceremony of the conference. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, who leads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, defended his organization against what he suspects is a direct attack.

DR. RAJENDRA PACHAURI, IPCC: The recent incident of stealing the e-mails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts, perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC. But the panel has a record of transparent and objective assessment stretching over 21 years, performed by tens of thousands of dedicated scientists from all corners of the globe.

BLACK: At this conference, Dr. Pachauri enjoys a clear majority of support among activists, analysts, delegates- well, pretty much everyone.

ALEX STEFFEN, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, WORLDCHANGIN.COM: It really has reached a point where climate skepticism has been pretty comprehensively debunked as a theory.

BLACK: Try telling that to Lord Christopher Monckton.

BLACK (on-camera): So what is your message to many thousands of people who have come here from around the world that surround us now?

MONCKTON: Go home, enjoy some quality time with your families- stop worrying about the climate.
Two hours later, Campbell Brown moderated two separate panel discussion segments with two climate change skeptics- Stephen McIntyre of the Climate Audit blog and Chris Horner, author of the book 'Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed;' as well as Professor Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, a proponent of the theory of manmade climate change. Anchor John Roberts also participated in the first segment, which was part of special coverage on Brown's program titled "Global Warming: Trick or Truth?" Other than the first segment at the beginning of the hour, this special coverage took up the 8 pm Eastern hour. A transcript of excerpts from the first segment:

BROWN: Stephen, let me start with you here. You're personally attacked in some of these e-mails. You're called everything from a 'bozo' to a 'moron' to 'the Joe McCarthy of climate change.' How do you characterize what's going on with the e-mails? Do you think this is an attempt to shut down criticism?

MCINTYRE: Sure they are. In discussion of the 'trick,' let's be quite frank about it: it was a trick. The tree ring records went down in the late part of the 20th century. Instead of disclosing that in the 2001 IPCC report, they didn't show the decline. In another document, the 1999 World Meteorological Report- that is the subject of the e-mail in question- they simply substituted temperature information for the tree ring information to show the record going up when it went down. There's nothing mathematically sophisticated about that.

BROWN: Let me go to Michael here. Michael- Professor, you were a recipient of some of the hacked e-mails in question. To a layperson, I mean- Stephen just gave us two examples there. To somebody like me who is not a scientist, it does look like these scientists cherry-picked certain bits of information to make the case.

OPPENHEIMER: There was no deception here. I mean, let's step back. From a scientific point of view, before this episode occurred, we knew the earth was warming, sea level was rising, glaciers are melting, the sea ice is retreating, the ocean is becoming more acidic, all due to the build-up of the greenhouse gases. Nothing in this episode changes any of that. Even if you think that the British group was somehow cheating, which I don't believe it was, you could throw them out, and there are three other groups, the Japanese group and two American groups, who've done analysis on the temperature data and reached the conclusion that Earth is warming and the warming is unique in climate history. So there's nothing here that changes the picture....

BROWN: One of the critics you just mentioned is Chris Horner, and Chris, I know you're not a scientist. You're an attorney. You're a longtime critic of this- a skeptic, and you have long argued that scientists are cooking the data. But, I mean, what's the motive for that?...

HORNER: Well, I don't argue that they're cooking the data. I named these guys names and I described what they were doing, relying in great part on Stephen McIntyre's terrific work, among others, in 'Red Hot Lies.' It's out there, and now we know, in their own words, what they were doing. And why is- well, you know, we'd have to perform brain surgery on these people, but the fact is scientists are people too, and they're subject to every human motivation, including tremendous amounts and increasing amounts of taxpayer funding, which increases with the alarm, as well as ideology, in the President's chief science adviser's case, an anti-population bent, and so on....

BROWN: But it's beyond this group. I mean, you're talking about other people who found very similar results.

HORNER: Let's talk about the falsified results. That's 'ClimateGate.' 'It's the fraud, stupid,' to oversimplify it, and that's what we're talking about. We don't have to keep changing the subject. It's not about locker room talk between scientists. It's the fraud. Stephen proved it. These people have admitted it.

BROWN: But Stephen, let me just go back to you, because I know you are a skeptic and you have raised questions. But you're- and tell me if my read is not accurate- your criticism is a little more nuanced than that. I didn't read you as saying fraud, but you tell me.

MCINTYRE: Yeah. You're right, my criticism is a lot more nuanced than that. There's no question that it's warmer now than it was in the 19th century. The battleground issue is whether it's warmer now than in the 11th century, and whether the data that we have enables you to say that with any degree of certainty. One of the e-mails in the 'ClimateGate' letters is from Keith Briffa [of the Climate Research Unit], who says it was his opinion that it was as warm a thousand years ago as it is today. That's something he doesn't say in the IPCC reports, and it's disquieting to read that in this correspondence....

BROWN [to Oppenheimer]: And let me get a bottom line sort of account from you, in your view.

OPPENHEIMER: Let me make two points. Number one is to the point of a massive fraud- individual scientists are people- big news. They're fallible. But if you accuse the scientific community of a fraud, you have to say that the 2,500 scientists that are part of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change are part of a massive conspiracy. You have to say that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which looked at this specific issue several times, is part of a conspiracy. You have to say that the Bush administration, which conducted its own review of climate change, is part of a massive conspiracy. I'm sorry, I don't buy that.
Later in the program, Brown featured another segment from Roberts with excerpts from his interview of Peter Liss, the interim director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (other excerpts from the interview were played earlier in the day during American Morning's slanted coverage of ClimateGate). Roberts also toured the CRU's facilities with Liss. The CNN anchor is the only major TV news anchor based in the U.S. to travel to the university to report on the ClimateGate scandal.

—Matthew Balan is a news analyst at the Media Research Center (Source: Media Research.)


CRU Computer Program for computing Global Warming Results NOT up to standard BBC Exposes 'Fudge Factor' in ClimateGate Global Warming Computer Programming Code (Dec 2009) Even the BBC didn't let this scoop get away. A segment on the Dec. 3 broadcast of BBC's "Newsnight," showed the implications of the story behind the so-called "ClimateGate" scandal are more than just e-mails concealing data, but an incompetence analyzing the data by way of faulty computer code. John Graham-Cumming, a British programmer known for the open source "POPFile email filtering program" explained how the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had wholesale problems with its computer programming analyzing climate change data, with billion, if not even trillions of dollars, on the line.

"This is the source code from the Climatic Research Unit," Susan Watts, science editor at the BBC explained. "John Graham-Cumming is a software engineer. He's not a skeptic on climate change, but he is shocked by what he's seen in the programming. He compared it with the code in the same language written by NASA."

Graham-Cumming criticized the CRU programming for its lack of professionalism and showed faults with it. "Well, if you look at the NASA stuff, it's really professional," Graham-Cumming said. "You can look at it, you can see the history. If you look at -- what's done here by these alleged CRU files - it's not the thing you'd expect to see in certainly a commercial industry. You would not see this sort of source code because it's not clearly documented. There's not audit history of what's happened to it. So it would be below the standard in any commercial software. "

According to the author of "The Geek Atlas," the programmer even included steps to skip over errors, which shows some of the data analyzed by the East Anglia CRU is completely neglected. "The programming language actually has a problem," Graham-Cumming said. "And they put in some code to deal with that error. Unfortunately, in doing so they produced another error. And the upshot of this is the error occurs - the underlying error, they will skip over data that they're trying to plot without any warning to the end user. So in some sense there is data that is being lost."

The programmer, unnamed in the BBC segment, even documented his lack of programming skills. "So in here, he says some things like, ‘Something is very wrong - it's my programming ability, isn't it,'" Graham-Cumming explained. "‘You know, once again, it's further confirmation my abilities are below what is required here.'" Watts questioned if someone was betting billions or trillions of dollars, should they "be comfortable with" it and Graham-Cumming explained it wasn't. "I don't think I would be comfortable with that because it is not obvious what it is doing, why it is doing it," Graham-Cumming said. "It needs to be made clear." (Source: Newsbusters.)



Emails that rocked climate change campaign leaked from Siberian 'closed city' university built by KGB (Dec 2009) Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit. An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia. The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders. (SITE NOTE: This is NOT new -- only a clarification of where in Russian. From the beginning everyone knew that the emails were first released on the Russian server. This is just more specific. The Russians confirm it came from their server, but state that the person who put it there was NOT Russian.)

The row erupted when hundreds of messages between scientists at the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world were placed on the internet along with other documents. The CRU is internationally recognised as one of the most important sources of information on the rise in global temperatures. Its data is relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which co-ordinates the world response to climate change. (Source: Daily Mail.)


UN: Leaked emails first to BBC then in Turkey then in Russia. UN says this a pro hit-job ... but AGW data still valid Climate e-mails were hijacked 'to sabotage summit' (Dec 2009) UN officials have likened the theft of e-mails from university climate researchers to the Watergate scandal, after claiming computer hackers were probably paid by people intent on undermining the Copenhagen summit.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the theft from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was not the work of amateur climate sceptics, but was a sophisticated and well-funded attempt to destroy public confidence in the science of man-made climate change. He said the fact that the e-mails were first uploaded to a sceptic website from a computer in Russia was an indication that the culprit was paid. “It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,” he said. “If you look at that mass of e-mails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data, but it’s a carefully made selection of e-mails and documents that’s not random at all. This is 13 years of data and it’s not a job of amateurs.” Mr van Ypersele said that publication of the e-mails had undermined efforts by the IPCC to convince the 192 countries at the summit, which begins today, that they needed to act fast on emissions. “We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators.” He rejected claims by sceptics that the e-mails showed efforts had been made to manipulate the data to exaggerate the warming trend. “It doesn’t change anything in the IPCC’s conclusions — it’s only one line of evidence out of dozens of lines of evidence.”

Achim Steiner, director of the UN Environment Programme, said that the theft of emails had echoes of Watergate — the burglary of the Democratic Party’s offices at the Watergate building in Washington DC in 1972. “This is not ‘climategate’, it’s ‘hackergate’. Let’s not forget the word ‘gate’ refers to a place where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so. So the media should direct its investigations into that.”

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that the stolen e-mails looked “very bad” and were fuelling scepticism, but said the media scrutiny was not unwelcome. Mr de Boer said: “I think it’s very good that what is happening is being scrutinised in the media because this process has to be based on solid science. If quality and integrity is being questioned, that has to be examined.”

This week the Met Office will release temperature data from 1,000 weather stations around the world in an attempt to shore up public confidence in its statements about the dangers of climate change. The raw data will be impossible for any non-expert to interpret. The Met Office is also planning “as soon as possible” to release the computer code it used to analyse the data. It is this analysis, by the Met Office in partnership with the University of East Anglia, that is at the centre of the controversy over the leaked e-mails.

The e-mails, which were sent over a 15-year period ending on November 12, first appeared on websites run by sceptics on November 17. Almost a month before they were posted on a website popular with climate-change sceptics, the hacked information was sent to a BBC weatherman who had expressed his doubts about climate science on his blog. The BBC has confirmed that Paul Hudson received some documents on October 12 but no story was broadcast or printed by Mr Hudson or the corporation.

Then, on November 17, someone hacked into realclimate.org, a website popular with climate scientists. The hackers put all the UEA e-mails and documents on the website, using a computer based in Turkey. The website’s owners responded quickly, shutting down the site within minutes. Finally, using a computer in Saudi Arabia, the hackers posted a link on the Air Vent blog. The link sent readers to a file that was stored on computers in Russia. Only then did others begin to pick up on the story. (Source: Times UK.) (SITE NOTE: The finger pointing of WHO did it continues in an attempt to deflect attention from WHAT was in the emails. Barbara Boxer claimed that the emails hacker needed to be investigated. Reports are surfacing wondering if the Russian secret service was the culprit. Thousands of emails, from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were first published on a small server in the city of Tomsk in Siberia. So-called ‘patriot hackers’ from Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service, the FSB, to attack websites disliked by the Kremlin, such as the “denial of service” campaign launched against the Kavkaz-Tsentr website, over its reports about the war in Chechnya, in 2002. Russia, a major oil exporter, may be trying to undermine calls to reduce carbon emissions ahead of the Copenhagen summit on global warming. (Source: Telegraph UK.) The end game is the same. Kill the messenger not the message. This is a high-stakes game and forces are out to discredit the hacker -- but the polls in the US seem to indicate that the bad press has now caused the public to distrust ALL AGW data -- and scientists in general.)


Now NASA Info under FOIA Attack Vitter, Inhofe Ask NASA Inspector General to Probe Possible Obstruction of FOIA Requests Seeking Climate Change Records (Dec 2009) (SEE This topic: Dec 2009 for NASA Erroneous Report on Global Warming)Two ranking Republicans are calling on the inspector general of NASA to investigate the agency’s “apparent obstruction of Freedom of Information Act requests.” Republicans on the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works had written to NASA’s inspector general requesting “all documents and records related to the communications or other interactions with the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).”

Afterwards, they became aware of “three separate FOIA requests made to NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The requests specifically ask for NASA’s “temperature record and agency emails concerning changes agency researchers made to the temperature record in 2007.” “It is our understanding that these FOIA requests have been outstanding for two years,” Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Science and Space, and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, wrote in a letter to Inspector General Paul Martin on Thursday. “We request that you investigate the reasons for the delay in not responding by the statutory deadline. This review should include all the communications between the requester and any employee of NASA or its subsidiary organizations concerning the FOIA requests,” they wrote. “If your Agency has administrative systems, e.g., tracking systems, for FOIA requests, please investigate why such systems failed to highlight or surface a delayed FOIA request and why internal controls have failed to ensure that statutory requirements for the FOIA requests were being met,” the senators wrote. (Source: CNS News.)


Russia Confirms from Russian Server, but not them. Hockey Stick Data Intentionally Masked on Charts. David Rose: Climate change emails row deepens as Russians admit they DID come from their Siberian server (Dec 2009)The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’. As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world. Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm’. Keith Briffa from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which plays a key role in forming IPCC assessments, urged caution, warning that when it came to historical climate records, there was no new data, only the ‘same old evidence’ that had been around for years. ‘Let us not try to over-egg the pudding,’ he wrote in an email to an IPCC colleague in September 2006. ‘True, there have been many different techniques used to aggregate and scale data - but the efficacy of these is still far from established.’

But when the ‘warmest for 1,300 years’ claim was published in 2007 in the IPCC’s fourth report, the doubters kept silent. It is only now that their concerns have started to emerge from the thousands of pages of ‘Warmergate’ emails leaked last month from the CRU’s computers, along with references to performing a ‘trick’ to ‘hide’ temperature decline and instructions to resist all efforts by the CRU’s critics to use the Freedom of Information Act to check the unit’s data and conclusions.

Last week, as an official inquiry by the former civil servant Sir Muir Russell began, I tried to assess Warmergate’s wider significance. The CRU’s supporters insisted it was limited. ‘In the long term, it will make very little difference to the scientific consensus, and to the way politicians respond to it,’ Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s Pro-Vice Chancellor and a former CRU director, told me. ‘I am certain that the science is rock solid.’ He admitted that his CRU colleagues had sometimes used ‘injudicious phrases’, but that was because they kept on being ‘diverted’ from their work by those who wished to scrutinise it. ‘It’s understandable that sometimes people get frustrated,’ he said.

The only lesson the affair had for him was that ‘we have got to get better in terms of explanation. Some scientists still find it quite it difficult to communicate with the public.’ Others, however, were less optimistic. Roger Pielke, Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, could in no sense be described as a climate change sceptic, let alone a ‘denier’.

‘Human-caused climate change is real, and I’m a strong advocate for action,’ he said. ‘But I’m also a strong advocate for integrity in science.’ Pielke’s verdict on the scandal is damning. ‘These emails open up the possibility that big scientific questions we’ve regarded as settled may need another look. 'They reveal that some of these scientists saw themselves not as neutral investigators but as warriors engaged in battle with the so-called sceptics. ‘They have lost a lot of credibility and as far as their being leading spokespeople on this issue of huge public importance, there is no going back.’

Climate science is complicated, and often the only way to make sense of raw data is through sophisticated statistical computer programs. The consequence is that most lay individuals - politicians and members of the public alike - have little choice but to take the assurances of scientists such as Davies on trust. He and other ‘global warmists’ often insist that when it comes to the IPCC’s main conclusions - that the Earth is in a period of potentially catastrophic warming and that the main culprit is man-made greenhouse gas emission - no serious scientist dissents from the conventional view.

Hence, perhaps, Gordon Brown’s recent comment that those who disagree are ‘behind-the-times, antiscience, flat-Earth climate sceptics’. In fact, there is a large body of highly-respected academic experts who fiercely contest this thesis: people such as Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a disillusioned former IPCC member, and Dr Tom Segalstad, head of geology at Oslo University, who has stated that ‘most leading geologists throughout the world know that the IPCC’s view of Earth processes are implausible if not impossible’.

These dissenters focus their criticisms on the IPCC’s analysis of the way the atmosphere works and the models it uses to predict the future. However, Warmergate strikes at something more fundamental - the science that justifies the basic assumption that the present warming really is unprecedented, at least in the past few thousand years.

Take the now-notorious email that the CRU’s currently suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, sent to his IPCC colleagues on November 16, 1999, when he wrote he had ‘just completed Mike’s Nature trick’ and had so managed to ‘hide the decline’. The CRU’s supporters have protested bitterly about the attention paid to this message. In the course of an extraordinary BBC interview in which he called an American critic an ‘****hole’ live on air, Jones’s colleague Professor Andrew Watson insisted that the fuss was completely unjustified, because all Jones had been talking about was ‘tweaking a diagram’. Davies told me that the email had been ‘taken out of context’ adding: ‘One definition of the word “trick” is “the best way of doing something”. What Phil did was standard practice and the facts are out there in the peer-reviewed literature.’

However, the full context of that ‘trick’ email, as shown by a new and until now unreported analysis by the Canadian climate statistician Steve McIntyre, is extremely troubling. Derived from close examination of some of the thousands of other leaked emails, he says it suggests the ‘trick’ undermines not only the CRU but the IPCC.

There is a widespread misconception that the ‘decline’ Jones was referring to is the fall in global temperatures from their peak in 1998, which probably was the hottest year for a long time. In fact, its subject was more technical - and much more significant. It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram.

It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report - the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century. There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick.

Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward. Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ - measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates. However, different proxies give very different results.

For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998. Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD - yet the Earth still warmed. Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America - who is now also the subject of an official investigation --was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.

Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple - I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’





Another British scientist - Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre - wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’. Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] - I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem. According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed - but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ - as simple as it was deceptive. All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase. On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated - but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines. ‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. ‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’

Since Warmergate-broke, some of the CRU’s supporters have claimed that Jones and his colleagues made a ‘full disclosure’ of what they did to Briffa’s data in order to produce the hockey stick. But as McIntyre points out, ‘contrary to claims by various climate scientists, the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values’. On the final diagram, the cut off was simply concealed by the other lines.

By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms. McIntyre by now was an IPCC ‘reviewer’ and he urged the IPCC not to delete the post-1961 data in its 2007 graph. ‘They refused,’ he said, ‘stating this would be “inappropriate”.’

Yet even this, Pielke told me, may not ultimately be the biggest consequence of Warmergate. Some of the most controversial leaked emails concern attempts by Jones and his colleagues to avoid disclosure of the CRU’s temperature database - its vast library of readings from more than 1,000 weather stations around the world, the ultimate resource that records how temperatures have changed.

In one email from 2005, Jones warned Mann not to leave such data lying around on searchable websites, because ‘you never know who is trawling them’. Critics such as McIntyre had been ‘after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone’.

Yesterday Davies said that, contrary to some reports, none of this data has in fact been deleted. But in the wake of the scandal, its reliability too is up for grabs. The problem is that, just like tree rings or ice cores, readings from thermometers or electronic ‘thermistors’ are open to interpretation.

The sites of weather stations that were once open countryside become built up areas, so trapping heat, and the type of equipment used changes over time. The result is what climate scientists call ‘inhomogeneities’ - anomalies between readings that need to be ‘adjusted’. But can we trust the way such ‘adjustments’ are made?

Last week, an article posted on a popular climate sceptic website analysed the data from the past 130 years in Darwin, Australia. This suggested that average temperatures had risen there by about two degrees Celsius. However, the raw data had been ‘adjusted’ in a series of abrupt upward steps by exactly the same amount: without the adjustment, the Darwin temperature record would have stayed level.

In 2007, McIntyre examined records across America. He found that between 1999 and 2007, the US equivalent of the Met Office had changed the way it adjusted old data. The result was to make the Thirties seem cooler, and the years since 1990 much warmer. Previously, the warmest year since records began in America had been 1934.

Now, in line with CRU and IPCC orthodoxy, it was 1998. At the CRU, said Davies, some stations’ readings were adjusted by unit and in such cases, raw and adjusted data could be compared. But in about 90 per cent of cases, the adjustment was carried out in the countries that collected the data, and the CRU would not know exactly how this had been done. Davies said: ‘All I can say is that the process is careful and considered. To get the details, the best way would be to go the various national meteorological services.’

The consequences of that, Stott said, may be explosive. ‘If you take Darwin, the gap between the two just looks too big. ‘If that applies elsewhere, it’s going to get really interesting. It’s no longer going to be good enough for the Met Office and CRU to put the data out there. ‘To know we can trust it, we’ve got to know what adjustments have been made, and why.’

Last week, at the Copenhagen climate summit, the Met Office said that the Noughties have been the warmest decade in history. Depending on how the data has been adjusted, Stott said, that statement may not be true. Pielke agreed. ‘After Climategate, the surface temperature record is being called into question.’ To experts such as McIntyre and Pielke, perhaps the most baffling thing has been the near-unanimity over global warming in the world’s mainstream media - a unanimity much greater than that found among scientists.

In part, this is the result of strongarm tactics. For example, last year the BBC environment reporter Roger Harrabin made substantial changes to an article on the corporation website that asked why global warming seemed to have stalled since 1998 - caving in to direct pressure from a climate change activist, Jo Abbess. ‘Personally, I think it is highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics who continually promote the idea that “global warming finished in 1998” when that is so patently not true,’ she told him in an email.

After a brief exchange, he complied and sent a final note: ‘Have a look in ten minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.’ Afterwards, Abbess boasted on her website: ‘Climate Changers, Remember to challenge any piece of media that seems like it’s been subject to spin or scepticism. Here’s my go for today. The BBC actually changed an article I requested a correction for.’

Last week, Michael Schlesinger, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois, sent a still cruder threat to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, accusing him of ‘gutter reportage’, and warning: ‘The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists ... I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’

But in the wake of Warmergate, such threats - and the readiness to bow to them - may become rarer. ‘A year ago, if a reporter called me, all I got was questions about why I’m trying to deny climate change and am threatening the future of the planet,’ said Professor Ross McKitrick of Guelph University near Toronto, a long-time collaborator with McIntyre. ‘Now, I’m getting questions about how they did the hockey stick and the problems with the data. ‘Maybe the emails have started to open people’s eyes.’

Yes, emails came from here - but we didn't do it, say Russians. Russian secret service agents admitted yesterday that the hacked ‘Warmergate’ emails were uploaded on a Siberian internet server, but strenuously denied a clandestine state-sponsored operation to wreck the Copenhagen summit. The FSB - formerly the KGB - confirmed that thousands of messages to and from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were distributed to the world from the city of Tomsk, as revealed by The Mail on Sunday last week. Now, it has emerged that IT experts specialising in hacking techniques were brought in by the Russian authorities following this newspaper’s exposure of the Tomsk link. They have gathered evidence about how and where the operation was carried out, although they are not prepared to say at this stage who they think was responsible.

A Russian intelligence source claimed the FSB had new information which could cast light on who was behind the elaborate operation. ‘We are not prepared to release details, but we might if the false claims about the FSB’s involvement do not stop,’ he said. ‘The emails were uploaded to the Tomsk server but we are sure this was done from outside Russia.’ The Kremlin’s top climate change official, Alexander Bedritsky, denied the Russian government was involved in breaking into the CRU’s computer system. ‘You can post information on a computer from any other country. It is nonsense to blame Russia,’ he said. (Source: Daily Mail UK.)


Russians Confirm "Inconvenient" Siberian Data left out -- Entire CRU findings need to be reevaluated James Delingpole: Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming (Dec 2009) Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages. Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap.

A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.

The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.

Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations. IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock. As Richard North says: This is serial.

UPDATE: As Steve McIntyre reports at ClimateAudit, it has long been suspected that the CRU had been playing especially fast and loose with Russian – more particularly Siberian – temperature records. Here from March 2004, is an email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann.

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Cheers

Phil
And here at Watts Up With That is a guest post by Jeff Id of the Air Vent

And here is what one of the commenters has to say about the way the data has been cherry-picked and skewed for political ends:

The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been done everywhere else. They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available. They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated, ignored length of data set. One the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done. The complete set of data show 1.4C rise since 1860, the CRU set shows 2.06C rise over the same period.
Not, of course, dear readers that I’m in any way tempted to crow about these latest revelations. After all, so many of my colleagues, junior and senior, have been backing me on this one to the hilt…. Oh, if anyone speaks Russian, here’s the full report. (Source: Telegraph UK: Jeff Delingpole.)





Now Chinese are Suspected of Email Leaks Chinese hackers linked to 'Warmergate' climate change leaked emails controversy (Dec 2009) The investigation into the so-called Warmergate emails - the leaked data from the University of East Anglia’s climate change department - took a new twist last night when The Mail on Sunday tracked the stolen messages to a suspect computer which provides internet access to China. The address used to post the emails is also on an international ‘black list’ which highlights suspicious behaviour on the internet. The revelation comes after the Russian security service, the FSB – the former KGB – authorised the release of confidential information that allowed us to retrace the route taken by the email traffic.

Revealed: How we broke the story that a computer company in Siberia was used to post the controversial emails

A computer company in Siberia was ultimately used to post the controversial messages - which cast doubt on the reliability of scientists’ global warming claims - on the internet. The revelation led to claims that the Russians were behind the release of the information. But, anxious to distance themselves from the leak, the FSB revealed how the data had been sent to Siberia from a computer in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The evidence passed to The Mail on Sunday now raises questions about whether Chinese hackers, backed by the communist regime, are the source of the emails. Supported by their government and its security and intelligence services, Chinese hackers have been at the centre of huge number of ‘cyber attacks’ in recent years, including attempted computer ‘break-ins’ at the House of Commons and Whitehall departments, including the Foreign Office. Earlier this year, MI5 chief Jonathan Evans warned 300 British businesses that they were under Chinese cyber-attack. The People’s Liberation Army is reputed to hold an annual competition to recruit the country’s best hackers.

Agenda: An Iceberg projection highlighting the Copenhagen UN summit shows the high level of political interest in climate change - and why scientists may be desperate to prove it is a man-made problem we can solve Last week, The Mail on Sunday traced the stolen climate change emails to a so-called Open Access server run by Malaysian telecoms giant Telekom Malaysia Berhad. The Malay government owns more than a third of the company and it supplies internet access to nearby China.

Last night, the company confirmed the leaked emails passed through Kuala Lumpur using its open relay mail server that can be accessed and used to forward mail by internet users without the need for a password. Company spokesman Saiful Azmi Matmor said: ‘We cannot divulge any confidential information about our customer accounts. However, we are aware of the international stories about the leaked emails and our technicians are looking into this matter now that you have drawn it to our attention.’ A source within the company said: ‘Because this is an open relay mail server, the emails could have been sent through it from anywhere in the world. It is just as likely to be someone outside Malaysia as someone within the country.’

The internet address used to post the messages is linked to several others used by the Chinese -- one is a Chinese environmental institute, the Research Institute of Forest Ecology and Environment Protection, based near Beijing. Several professors from this institute are regulars at climate change conferences where they have shared a platform with the University of East Anglia experts. After our enquiries in Malaysia began, the suspect computer links to China were suddenly cut. Scotland Yard and Norfolk Police are leading the investigation into the email theft at the University of East Anglia. (Source: Daily Mail UK.)


Frozen in Time -- Fact-based climate debate

Dec 17, 2009
By Lee C. Gerhard, IPCC Expert Reviewer

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen.

Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know:

  • • The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.
  • • Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.
  • • Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.
  • • There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.
  • • The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.

We also know a lot about Earth temperature changes:

  • • Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.
  • • The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.
  • • Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.
  • • Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.
  • • During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change.

Contrary to many public statements:

  • • Effects of temperature change are absolutely independent of the cause of the temperature change.
  • • Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows. Any increase in cost of damages by storms is a product of increasing population density in vulnerable areas such as along the shores and property value inflation, not due to any increase in frequency or severity of storms.
  • • Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years - extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes.
  • • The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records.
  • • Rate and magnitude of sea level changes observed during the last 100 years are within normal historical ranges. Current sea level rise is tiny and, at most, justifies a prediction of perhaps ten centimeters rise in this century.

The present climate debate is a classic conflict between data and computer programs. The computer programs are the source of concern over climate change and global warming, not the data. Data are measurements. Computer programs are artificial constructs.

Public announcements use a great deal of hyperbole and inflammatory language. For instance, the word “ever” is misused by media and in public pronouncements alike. It does not mean “in the last 20 years,” or “the last 70 years.” “Ever” means the last 4.5 billion years.

For example, some argue that the Arctic is melting, with the warmest-ever temperatures. One should ask, “How long is ever?” The answer is since 1979. And then ask, “Is it still warming?” The answer is unequivocally “No.” Earth temperatures are cooling. Similarly, the word “unprecedented” cannot be legitimately used to describe any climate change in the last 8,000 years.

There is not an unlimited supply of liquid fuels. At some point, sooner or later, global oil production will decline, and transportation costs will become insurmountable if we do not develop alternative energy sources. However, those alternative energy sources do not now exist.

A legislated reduction in energy use or significant increase in cost will severely harm the global economy and force a reduction in the standard of living in the United States. It is time we spent the research dollars to invent an order-of-magnitude better solar converter and an order-of-magnitude better battery. Once we learn how to store electrical energy, we can electrify transportation. But these are separate issues. Energy conversion is not related to climate change science.

I have been a reviewer of the last two IPCC reports, one of the several thousand scientists who purportedly are supporters of the IPCC view that humans control global temperature. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of us try to bring better and more current science to the IPCC, but we usually fail. Recently we found out why. The whistleblower release of e-mails and files from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University has demonstrated scientific malfeasance and a sickening violation of scientific ethics.

If the game of Russian roulette with the environment that Adrian Melott contends is going on, is it how will we feed all the people when the cold of the inevitable Little Ice Age returns? It will return. We just don’t know when. Read more here. (Source: ICECAP.) (SITE NOTE: The PR game played with the IPCC reports are now causing the myths to be demolished. Climategate is real -- though the media wants it to go away. However, the next step is when the Global Warming is taken to court -- because people are attempting to affect costly changes based upon the bad science reflected in the IPCC reports.)

CFCs gone and Global COOLING for next 50 years, but C02 rising...NO GLOBAL WARMING Five Decades Of Cooling Ahead (Dec 2009) Climate Change: A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years.

Much of the nation got a white Christmas this year, some in unprecedented quantities. A record-breaking storm deposited 12 to 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Many places set records for the most snow in a single December day as more than 50% of the U.S. was covered by the white stuff.

Scientists (and here we use the word loosely) at Britain's Climate Research Unit may have tried to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, but it's hard to hide two feet of snow. Their motto seems to be the immortal words of Groucho Marx: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?"

Qing Bin-Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy at Canada's University of Waterloo, is a believer in the value of drawing conclusions from observable data and not from selective data fed into computer models that are based on false assumptions and include "fudge factors." In a peer-reviewed paper published in the prestigious online journal Physics Reports, Lu, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Newcastle, reports that CFCs, the compounds once widely used as refrigerants, and cosmic rays, which are energy particles originating in outer space, are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Lu puts the start of the cooling trend at 2002 and writes that "the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming."

From 1850 to 1950, Lu notes, the recorded CO2 level increased significantly because of the Industrial Revolution; the global temperature stayed constant or rose only 0.1 degree Celsius.

"Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases ... decreased around 2000," Lu said. "Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate."Other reputable scientists have also predicted decades of cooling ahead to, er, varying degrees and for varying reasons. Earth's climate is affected by many things and is more complicated than the CRU computer models. (Source: Investors.com.)

Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major culprits for global warming (Dec 2009) Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth's ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.

In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

"My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century," Lu said. "Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming."

His conclusions are based on observations that from 1950 up to now, the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact. "Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000," Lu said. "Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate."

In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.

As well, there is no solid evidence that the global warming from 1950 to 2000 was due to CO2. Instead, Lu notes, it was probably due to CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays. And from 1850 to 1950, the recorded CO2 level increased significantly because of the industrial revolution, while the global temperature kept nearly constant or only rose by about 0.1 C.

In previously published work, Lu demonstrated that an observed cyclic hole in the ozone layer provided proof of a new ozone depletion theory involving cosmic rays, which was developed by Lu and his former co-workers at Rutgers University and the Université de Sherbrooke. In the past, it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth's ozone layer is depleted due to the sun's ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere. The depletion theory says cosmic rays, rather than the sun's UV light, play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone. In his study, published in Physical Review Letters, Lu analyzed reliable cosmic ray and ozone data in the period of 1980-2007, which cover two full 11-year solar cycles.

In his latest paper, Lu further proves the cosmic-ray-driven ozone depletion theory by showing a large number of data from laboratory and satellite observations. One reviewer wrote: "These are very strong facts and it appears that they have largely been ignored in the past when modelling the Antarctic ozone loss." New observations of the effects of CFCs and cosmic rays on ozone loss and global warming/cooling could be important to the Earth and humans in the 21st century. "It certainly deserves close attention," Lu wrote in his paper, entitled Cosmic-Ray-Driven Electron-Induced Reactions of Halogenated Molecules Adsorbed on Ice Surfaces: Implications for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change.

The paper, published Dec. 3 in Physics Reports, is available online at: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2009.12.002. (Source: In Sciences.)


Who You Gonna Believe? No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds (Dec 2009) Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase.

Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades. The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters. (Source: Science Daily.)

No rise in atmospheric carbon over the last 150 years: University of Bristol (Jan 2010) Science Daily reported on a new study from the University of Bristol released over the holidays that deserves to get wider attention. In contrast to claims from anthropogenic global-warming activists, this new analysis refutes one of the key principles of carbon-driven warming:

Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. …

To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.
The thumbnail argument for AGW is this: the CO2 emitted by industrialization over the last 150 years has accumulated in the atmosphere, along with other gases such as methane, warming the globe more rapidly than otherwise would have happened. The continuing emissions of CO2 from industrialized and developing nations will result in an exponential explosion of warming the longer it continues as the CO2 accumulates at faster and faster rates in the atmosphere, both because the previous emissions have not been absorbed and more people are emitting than ever. Therefore, we have to control emissions just to contain the damage, and it might already be too late!

Of course, that’s why everyone flew private jets to Copenhagen last month — in order to warn about carbon emissions.

If this University of Bristol analysis is correct, CO2 hasn’t been accumulating in the atmosphere at all. That means whatever warming we have experienced (and we have experienced warming) did not come from increased CO2 in the atmosphere. That would explain why we have experienced a cooling cycle for the last ten to twelve years despite an increase of CO2 emissions, albeit an increase at a slower rate than before. The new analysis completely destroys the AGW argument, because if CO2 is not accumulating in the atmosphere, it can’t be causing global warming.

No one doubts the necessity of curtailing particulate emissions into the air. If anyone did, the Beijing Olympics and the thick & chunky smog would have removed those doubts. Moving towards cleaner energy and renewables is a laudable goal and a necessary process. But succumbing to AGW hysteria and destroying the very economy that could produce that type of progress is not just absurd, it’s counterproductive to the goal. (Source: Hot Air.)


January 2010

And More FOIA Emails indicating Skewed Data Son of Climategate! Scientist says feds manipulated data -- Reporting points in coldest regions simply eliminated by U.S. agencies (Jan 2010) In a one-two series of Climategate aftershocks that assuredly will further rattle the global warming community, a report has been issued by U.S. researchers accusing government agencies of cherry-picking temperature readings used to assess global temperatures, and a series of embarrassing e-mails were released revealing what happened when a blogger dared to point out a mistake by NASA climate scientists.

The new report is from scientist Joseph D'Aleo and was highlighted in a report on global warming on KUSI television in San Diego. It comes only weeks after the tumultuous climategate e-mail scandal in Britain erupted, proving top global warming scientists manipulated data there. The report from D'Aleo, a retired climatologist who has been skeptical of global warming, contends climate data has been corrupted and skewed by "urbanization and other local factors such as land-use-land-cover changes and improper siting." He blamed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which he described as "seriously complicit in data manipulation and fraud."

The East Anglia e-mail leak focused on the work at the Climate Research Unit there, but the director there has confirmed "almost all the data" in the archive "is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center," D'Aleo said. But he noted that an analysis by San Jose computer programmer E.M. Smith of the data "found they systematically eliminated 75 percent of the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations." "The thermometers in a sense marched towards the tropics, the sea and to airport tarmacs," he said. For example, the report said the number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35 with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations plummeted.

Further, a vast majority of the climate stations reporting in the U.S. were either poorly or very poorly sited, taking temperature readings from paved driveways, in a waste treatment facility, on rooftops or near the exhaust from idling jet engines, rather than in open areas. Stations in such locations as the Andes and Bolivia have virtually vanished, meaning that temperatures for those areas now are "determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon."

"This of it this way," D'Aleo told the television station, "if Minneapolis and other northern cities suddenly disappeared but Kansas City and St. Louis were still available, would you think an average of Kansas City and St. Louis would provide an accurate replacement for Minneapolis and expect to use that to determine how Minneapolis' temperature has changed with any hope of accuracy?"

D'Aleo said that the coolest stations in a particular reporting period sometimes disappeared in the next. "This would indicate a deliberate attempt to create a warm bias on the part of NOAA because in calculating the average temperatures in this way it would ensure that the global average temperature for each month and year would now show a positive temperature anomaly," the report said. Such anomalies, it added, make climate reports based on those figures simply unreliable. "You can trust in the data that shows there has been warming from 1979 to 1998, just as there was warming the around 1920 to 1940. But there has been cooling from 1940 to the late 1970s and since 2001. It is the long term trend on which this cyclical pattern is superimposed that is exaggerated," the report said.

Meanwhile, Washington, D.C.-based government watchdog Judicial Watch has released several hundred pages of e-mails from U.S. government scientists reacting – sometimes with disdain and arrogance – when an independent investigator pointed out an error in their global warming statistics. When the mistake ultimately was corrected, the tables reflected slightly lower temperatures for years following 2000, and the reshuffled rankings revealed that several years from the 1930s were, in fact, warmer than during the last decade. That, of course, undercut arguments that the life of modern man is generating emissions that would, if left unchecked, eventually threaten life on earth because of melting ice caps, rising seas and climates too hot to support food production. In the British scandal prior to Christmas, purloined e-mails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, one of the world's premier global warming investigative organizations, included references to a "trick" to "hide the decline."

The NASA issue developed around 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen McIntyre exposed an error in NASA's handling of raw temperature data from 2000-2006 at its Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The issue was that temperature readings apparently weren't handled in a consistent fashion, leaving them open for challenge. Sometimes "raw" data was used, while other times it was adjusted for "time of observation." The mistake noted by McIntyre prompted the government agency to "re-process" data to eliminate an "artificial step" in the charts.

"Obviously, combining the uncorrected [data] with the [corrected] records for earlier years caused jumps in the records at those stations," a government e-mail responded. "The net effect averaged over the U.S. was an error of about 0.15C or less in the post-2000 years." However, 0.15 degrees Centigrade is one-third of a degree Fahrenheit, which could be considered a significant change in an overall climate average.

The e-mails show the impact was that while 1998 previously had a deviation of 1.24 degrees Centrigrade, that should have been 1.23 – bringing it below 1934. The lists for the highest deviations, the e-mails show, had listed 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921, 1931, 1999, 1953, 2001, 1990 and 1938. The new list was changed to: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939. Instead of simply correcting the errors, however, government scientist Jim Hansen responded by labeling McIntyre a "pest," and suggested that those who disagree with global warming "should be ready to crawl under a rock by now." "This e-mail traffic ought to be embarrassing for NASA," said Tom Fitton, chief of Judicial Watch, which obtained the documents under a Freedom of Information Act request. "Given the recent Climategate scandal, NASA has an obligation to be completely transparent with its handling of temperature data." "Instead of insulting those who point out their mistakes, NASA scientists should engage the public in an open, professional and honest matter," he said.

The hundreds of pages of documents concern what the government described as a "glitch" in official assessments of temperatures. Judicial Watch noted that a Bloomberg reporter had e-mailed to Hansen, "The U.S. figures showed 1998 as the warmest year. Nevertheless, NASA has indeed newly ranked 1934 as the warmest year…" Hansen responded, "We have not changed ranking of warmest year in the U.S. As you will see in our 2001 paper we found 1934 slightly warmer, by an insignificant hair over 1998. We still find that result. The flaw affected temperatures only after 2000, not 1998 and 1934." To which NASA scientist Makiko Sato told Hansen, "I am sure I had 1998 warmer at least once on my own temperature web page..."

Fitton told WND the e-mails reveal at "unflattering portrait of NASA scientists who, rather than deal forthrightly with their error, attacked those who called them on it." He said he would leave to scientific experts the exact analysis of the impact of the flaw. But he said the dispute – and the government's response – "calls into question other data that is being presented by NASA [and others] in the global warming community." "One has to wonder whether or not it would have been caught but for a diligent researcher," he said. "These are not everyday scientists in the private sector who can do whatever they want to do. These are government scientists trashing citizens and bloggers."

He said the e-mails make it appear the government didn't even want to engage in a discussion over the mistake – but for political, not scientific reasons. One of the newly revealed e-mails documents a government scientist writing about those who were questioning the government's mistake: "This seems to be a tempest inside somebody's teapot dome… It is unclear why anyone would try to make something out of this, perhaps a light not on upstairs? Or perhaps this is coming from one of the old contrarians? They can't seem to get over the fact that the real world has proven them to be full of malarkey! You would think that they would be ready to crawl under a rock by now!"

McIntyre's website comment on the e-mail revelation today was that, "If anyone is wondering whether e-mails by U.S. government employees are 'private' and 'personal' – an assertion sometimes made in respect to emails at CRU, an institution subject to UK FOI – the answer in respect to NASA GISS appears to be no."

The previous e-mails from East Anglia, posted online after a hacker found them, said, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Suggestions to suppress information also were documented at East Anglia, "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re (Assessment Report 4)? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment – minor family crisis." They also suggest how "warmists," as critics label those who believe in global warming, conspired to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer-review process. Myron Ebell, of the GlobalWarming.org website where "cooler heads prevail," had described the East Anglia e-mails as "shocking." "It's kind of interesting to learn that petty politics seems to be more prevalent in the scientific community than in the political community," he said.

The documents, he said, "raise a huge number of questions about the integrity of a lot of people in the alarmist community. "What I've seen there is a very strong effort to manage the issue by scientists and not as a scientific issue. It's very improper," he said. "One of the criticisms is that we need scientists to be scientists, and policy can be handled in public debate."

There also is an effort called the Peition Project which was launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered. The effort, assembled by Art Robinson, a research professor of chemistry and cofounder of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in 1973, now lists tens of thousands of qualified scientists who endorse this:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
WND also reported recently on the United Nation's summit in Copenhagen, which failed to produce a global carbon emissions agreement as advocates had sought. That meeting, instead, was simply about American money, according to Steve Stockman, a former Texas congressman who was in the Danish capital for the two-week event before Christmas. "It was about transferring the wealth of taxpayers," he said. "This has nothing to do with science."

Further, a Colorado scientist described by the Washington Post as "the World's Most Famous Hurricane Expert" said the East Anglia e-mails "are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well-organized international climate-warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years." The comment came from Colorado State University's William Gray, whose annual hurricane forecasts are the standard for weather prognostications. His work pioneered the science of forecasting hurricanes, and he has served as weather forecaster for the U.S. Air Force. He is emeritus professor of atmospheric science at CSU and heads the school's Department of Atmospheric Sciences Tropical Meteorology Project. He had forecast that U.S. researchers eventually would be caught by their own e-mails, too. "This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publicly funded climate-research groups of the U.S. and of foreign governments were ever made public," he said at the time. (Source: WND.)


MORE NASA AND NOAA SKEWED DATA...Caught Again NOAA & NASA Caught Manipulating Temperature Data (Jan 2010) Now the climate fraud that was first uncovered with the ClimateGate scandal that led to discoveries of manipulated data in New Zealand and Australia has now spread to the US with both NOAA and NASA being caught manipulating temperature data as well:

Smith has done much of the heavy lifting involved in analyzing the NOAA/GISS data and software, and he chronicles his often frustrating experiences at his fascinating website. There, detail-seekers will find plenty to satisfy, divided into easily-navigated sections — some designed specifically for us “geeks,” but most readily approachable to readers of all technical strata. Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe. Now, 75% represents quite a drop in sampling population, particularly considering that these stations provide the readings used to compile both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) datasets. These are the same datasets, incidentally, which serve as primary sources of temperature data not only for climate researchers and universities worldwide, but also for the many international agencies using the data to create analytical temperature anomaly maps and charts. Yet as disturbing as the number of dropped stations was, it is the nature of NOAA’s “selection bias” that Smith found infinitely more troubling. It seems that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were scrapped from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations. Consequently, post-1990 readings have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also by the anthropogenic heating influence of a phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI). For example, Canada’s reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. That’s right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left “one thermometer for everything north of LAT 65.” And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to its unusually moderate summers. (Source: WattsUp: Andrew Watts
Read the rest at the link, but this isn’t the first time that NASA’s GISS has been caught manipulating data.. (Source: ROK Drop.)


CRU's Climategate finally makes the news in Norwich (Jan 2010) Norwich’s flagship university was at the centre of a new row today after it emerged it broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny in the climate change row over stolen emails. The reputation of the University of East Anglia’s world renowned climatic research unit (CRU) was shaken to the core last year after emails posted on the internet from researchers including its director Prof Phil Jones appeared to suggest ways of avoiding freedom of information requests together with a “trick” to explain away an apparent fall in global temperatures.'

Police including a team from Scotland yard were called in to investigate amid speculation that the leaks were part of a smear campaign by climate change sceptics to discredit the UEA in the run up the Copenhagen summit last year.

Other theories were that the leaks were the work of a disgruntled insider angry at the way the university was handling FOI requests. The row has reverberated around the world and it emerged today the Norwich university breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) decided the UEA failed in its duties under the act but said it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late. (Source: Watts Up.)

NO LEGAL PENALTY FOR WITHHOLDING FOIA INFO IN UK Loophole in UK FOIA law will apparently allow CRU to avoid prosecution (Jan 2010) It appears that poorly crafted law is going to mean no prosecutions for any of the CRU collaborators in the now famous leaked emails and documents. This from The Bishop Hill blog:

I’ve just come off the phone to the investigations office at the Information Commissioner’s office. I had made a request for information to UEA that, while only peripherally related to Climategate, has now turned up some interesting new information.

My original request was from a couple of years ago, asking for any correspondence between the CRU’s Mike Hulme and the BBC in relation to a body called the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme (see here for some background on this story). The original response from UEA was that all Prof Hulme’s emails prior to 2005 had been lost, an admission that appears rather embarrassing in the light of CRU’s suggestion that they had lost some of their original temperature data.

However, when the Climategate emails were released I noticed several email from Mike Hulme predating 2005, which appeared to contradict the earlier assertion that all such emails had been lost. Intrigued, I wrote to the Information Commissioner asking that this be investigated and today I had my response.

First off, I was told that while there appeared to be a problem, I needed to be clear that there would be no prosecutions under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, regardless of the final outcome of the investigation. Although withholding or destroying information is a criminal offence under the terms of the Act, apparently no prosecutions can be brought for offences committed more than six months prior. As anyone who has made a UK FoI request knows, it can take six months to exhaust the internal review process before the ICO even becomes involved. The ICO can then take another six months before starting his investigation.
But there’s and interesting theory being proposed.

It seems quite clear that civil servants are able to withhold and destroy information without any consequences and it’s interesting to ponder how such a dramatic flaw can have found its way into the terms of the Act. Of course we in the UK are used to poorly drafted laws finding their way onto the statute books, but we might also consider the thought that Sir Humphrey might have knowingly inserted this crucial error, in order to ensure that when push came to shove he could keep things quiet without any concerns that he might find himself in hot water.

Conspiracy theory? Perhaps, but you have to admit, it’s a possibility.
I’m sure the collective of CRU is breathing a sigh of relief knowing this, however there may be other unforeseen repercussions coming from the investigation, and UEA may have other rules for professional conduct that may apply. (Source: Watts Up.)

CRU Phil Jones Hid CHINA Weather Data Leaked climate change emails scientist 'hid' data flaws (Feb 2010) Professor Phil Jones, who was director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Photograph: University of East Anglia Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up". The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN's embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades. Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates at least one senior colleague had serious concerns about the affair.

It also emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist.

The revelations come at a torrid time for climate science, with the IPPC suffering heavy criticism for its use of information that had not been rigorously checked – in particular a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 – and UEA having been criticised last week by the deputy information commissioner for refusing valid requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Guardian has learned that of 105 freedom of information requests to the university concerning the climatic research unit (CRU), which Jones headed up to the end of December, only 10 had been released in full. The temperature data from the Chinese weather stations measured the warming there over the past half century and appeared in a 1990 paper in the prestigious journal Nature, which was cited by the IPCC's latest report in 2007. Climate change sceptics asked the UEA, via FOI requests, for location data for the 84 weather stations in eastern China, half of which were urban and half rural.

The history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones and Wang's 1990 study, as it concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather the warming effects of expanding cities. The IPCC's 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that "any urban-related trend" in global temperatures was small. Jones was one of two "coordinating lead authors" for the relevant chapter.

The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang's work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. "Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?" he asked Jones. He continued: "Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?"

Jones said he was not able to comment on the story. Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more. "Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them."

In an interview with the Observer on Sunday Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, warned of the danger of a public backlash against mainstream climate science over claims that scientists manipulated data. He declared a "battle" against the "siren voices" who denied global warming was real or caused by humans. "It's right that there's rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there," he said.

Last week the Information Commissioner's Office – the body that administers the Freedom of Information Act – said the University of East Anglia had flouted the rules in its handling of an FOI request in May 2008. Days after receiving the request for information from the British climate change sceptic David Holland, Jones asked Prof Mike Mann of Pennsylvania State University in the United States: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4? Keith will do likewise. "Can you also email Gene [Eugene Wahl, a paleoclimatologist in Boulder, Colorado] and get him to do the same ... We will be getting Caspar [Ammann, also from Boulder] to do the same."

The University of East Anglia says that no emails were deleted following this exchange. (Source: Guardian UK.)

New Climategate Shocker: CRU's Phil Jones Hid Bad Numbers From Chinese Weather Stations (Feb 2010) Phil Jones, former head of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) who is in the who's emails are at the center of the climategate scandal is facing brand new claims of a cover-up. A Guardian investigation of of the thousands of emails and documents a hacked from the CRU found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and the documents relating to them have disappeared.

It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?

But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN's top climate science body.

It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.

The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.

Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York,[Yes my Alma Mater but I was not a science major] are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990.

That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to