Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Viscount Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’ (PJM Exclusive)

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/viscount-monckton-on-global-warminggate-they-are-criminals-pjm-exclusive/2/

The man who challenged Al Gore to a debate is furious about the content of the leaked CRU emails — and says why you should be, too.

November 23, 2009 - by Christopher Monckton
Page 1 of 2 Next ->This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I am angry, and so should you be.

What have the mainstream news media said about the Climategate affair? Remarkably little. The few who have brought themselves to comment, through gritted teeth, have said that all of this is a storm in a teacup, and that their friends in the University of East Anglia and elsewhere in the climatological community are good people, really.

No, they’re not. They’re criminals. With Professor Fred Singer, who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute. But I won’t be holding my breath: In the police state that Britain has now sadly become, with supine news media largely owned and controlled by the government, the establishment tends to look after its own.

At our expense, and at the expense of the truth.

Inhofe Says He Will Call for Investigation on "Climategate" on Wash Times Americas Morning

Saturday, November 21, 2009

The Death Blow to Climate Science

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog

By Tim Ball, Canada Free Press

Global Warming is often called a hoax. I disagree because a hoax has a humorous intent to puncture pomposity. In science, such as with the Piltdown Man hoax, it was done to expose those with fervent but blind belief. The argument that global warming is due to humans, known as the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) is a deliberate fraud. I can now make that statement without fear of contradiction because of a remarkable hacking of files that provided not just a smoking gun, but an entire battery of machine guns.

Someone hacked in to the files of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) based at the University of East Anglia. A very large file (61 mb) was downloaded and posted to the web. Phil Jones Director of the CRU has acknowledged the files are theirs. They contain papers, documents letters and emails. The latter are the most damaging and contain blunt information about the degree of manipulation of climate science in general and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in particular.

Climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists

Dominant names involved are ones I have followed throughout my career including, Phil Jones, Benjamin Santer, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Jonathan Overpeck, Ken Briffa and Tom Wigley. I have watched climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists. This small, elite, community was named by Professor Wegman in his report to the National Academy of Science (NAS).

I had the pleasure of meeting the founder of CRU Professor Hubert Lamb, considered the Father of Modern Climatology, on a couple of occasions. He also peer reviewed one of my early publications. I know he would be mortified with what was disclosed in the last couple of days.

Jones claims the files were obtained illegally as if that absolves the content. It doesn’t and it is enough to destroy all their careers. Jones gave a foretaste of his behavior in 2005. Warwick Hughes asked for the data and method he used for his claim of a 0.6C temperature rise since the end of the nineteenth century. Jones responded, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” He has stonewalled ever since. The main reason was because it was used as a key argument in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports to convince the world humans caused rapid warming in the 20th century. The emails obtained are a frightening record of arrogance, and deception far beyond his 2005 effort.

Another glimpse into what the files and emails reveal was the report by Professor Deming. He wrote, “With publication of an article in Science (in 1995) I gained sufficient credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said. “We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” The person in question was Jonathan Overpeck and his even more revealing emails are part of those exposed by the hacker. It is now very clear that Deming’s charge was precise. They have perverted science in the service of social and political causes.

Professor Wegman showed how this “community of scientists” published together and peer reviewed each other’s work. I was always suspicious about why peer review was such a big deal. Now all my suspicions are confirmed. The emails reveal how they controlled the process, including manipulating some of the major journals like Science and Nature. We know the editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver, was one of the “community”. They organized lists of reviewers when required making sure they gave the editor only favorable names. They threatened to isolate and marginalize one editor who they believed was recalcitrant.

Total Control

These people controlled the global weather data used by the IPCC through the joint Hadley and CRU and produced the HadCRUT data. They controlled the IPCC, especially crucial chapters and especially preparation of the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM). Stephen Schneider was a prime mover there from the earliest reports to the most influential in 2001. They also had a left wing conduit to the New York Times. The emails between Andy Revkin and the community are very revealing and must place his journalistic integrity in serious jeopardy. Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.

CO2 never was a problem and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing. It is a very sad day for science and especially my chosen area of climate science. As I expected now it is all exposed I find there is no pleasure in “I told you so.”...

The Day Global Warming Stood Still

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog

Investors Business Daily Editorial

Climate Change: As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. Maybe Al Gore can Photoshop something before December.

It will be a very cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers. The climate show-and-tell in Copenhagen next month will be nothing more than a meaningless carbon-emitting jaunt, unable to decide just whom to blame or how to divvy up the profitable spoils of climate change hysteria.

The collapse of the talks coupled with the decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put off the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill, the Senate’s version of Waxman-Markey, until the spring thaw has led Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the leading Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, to declare victory over Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and the triumph of observable fact over junk science.

“I proudly declare 2009 as the ‘Year of the Skeptic,’ the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard,” Inhofe said to Boxer in a Senate speech. “Until this year, any scientist, reporter or politician who dared raise even the slightest suspicion about the science behind global warming was dismissed and repeatedly mocked.”

Inhofe added: “Today I have been vindicated.”

The Ada (Oklahoma) Evening News quotes Inhofe: “So when Barbara Boxer, John Kerry and all the left get up there and say, ‘Yes. We’re going to pass a global warming bill,’ I will be able to stand up and say, ‘No, it’s over. Get a life. You lost. I won,’” Inhofe said.

Now we have the German publication Der Spiegel, which is rapidly becoming the house organ for climate hysteria, weighing in again with the sad news that the earth does not have a fever so we really don’t have to throw out the baby with the rising bath water.

In an article titled, “Climatologists Baffled By Global Warming Time-Out,” author Gerald Traufetter leads off with the observation: “Climatologists are baffled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years.” They better figure it out, Der Spiegel warns, because “billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.”

We are told in sad tones that “not much is happening with global warming at the moment” and that “it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.” But how can it be that the earth isn’t following all those computer models? Is the earth goddess Gaia herself a climate change “denier”?

The article gloomily notes that a few weeks ago Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research pointed out that the earth had in fact only warmed 0.07 degree Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degree Celsius predicted by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

An even more inconvenient truth, according to the British experts, is that when their figures are adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Nino and La Nina, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degree Celsius. No, that’s not a typo.

As if that weren’t enough, it seems hackers broke into the computer network run by the Hadley Climate Research Unit, removing 61 megabytes of e-mails and data.

While we don’t condone theft, the hacked data and e-mails have spilled onto the Web and reveal something startling: The scientists at Hadley, one of the world’s leading climate change study centers, aren’t scientifically objective at all.

Indeed, in e-mails, they boast of twisting scientific data to suit their views and to “hide” the truth. At one point, a scientist actually gloats over the death of global warming skeptic John L. Daly, saying, “In an odd way, this is cheering news.”

If true, this is massive scientific fraud.

To add to the warm-mongers’ woes, patron saint Al Gore, the man who claimed to have invented the Internet, might also have claimed the discovery of Photoshop. Dr. Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, formerly with NASA, has taken a look at the pictures used to illustrate Gore’s new book, “Our Choice: A Plan To Solve the Climate Crisis.”

Gore Photoshopped NASA imagery of the earth for the fold-out cover photo, adding four hurricanes at once, including one spinning in the wrong direction next to Florida and, in a physical impossibility, one on the equator next to Peru. Somewhere in the process, the island of Cuba was deleted.

It is the warm-mongers who are spinning in the wrong direction. We win. You lose. Get a life. See editorial here.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Skeptics Handbook II! Global Bullies Want Your Money

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/11/skeptics-handbook-ii-global-bullies-want-your-money/

Finally, Part II in the Skeptics Handbook series – the bluster and bluff, the deceit, and the money. Enjoy & Share.

pdf version of The Skeptics Handbook II.

It’s unthinkable. Big Government has spent $79 billion on the climate industry, 3000 times more than Big Oil. Leading climate scientists won’t debate in public and won’t provide their data. What do they hide? When faced with freedom-of-information requests they say they’ve “lost” the original global temperature records. Thousands of scientists are rising in protest against the scare campaign. Meanwhile $126 billion turned over in carbon markets in 2008 and bankers get set to make billions.

Twenty pages of concise commentary and cartoons:
The short synopsis of how we paid to find a crisis.
The one flaw that wipes out the catastrophe. (They can be right about carbon but wrong about water… and that eliminates two-thirds of their predicted warming.)
Nine behaviours of the real deniers — there are lots of ways to deny the evidence.
How carbon dioxide greens the world, why clouds dominate the climate, and if carbon didn’t cause the recent warming, what else might have?
The short summary of the baseless hockey stick graph, with a devastating map of the vast array of peer reviewed information that demonstrates just how brazen the Hockey Stick “re-interpretation” of history was.
How you can create a compelling crisis in a graph in six simple steps.
The Checklist: How do you tell a scientist from a non-scientist? (A Skeptic from an Unskeptic?)
“Bullying is their root strength. Take it away from them and they will crumble.”...

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/

By James Delingpole Last updated: November 20th, 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...

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Researcher speaks up on pressure to conform

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate

Nov 18, 2009

By Carl Wieland

According to Thomas Bouchard, a US psychologist famous for his research on twins raised apart, even scientists with good reason to believe that the majority are wrong can be silenced. The reason is the huge pressure to conform, the “powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters.”

Bouchard, being interviewed in the journal Science on his retirement, cited the example of Larry Summers who resigned as president of Harvard University after an outcry over his saying that discrimination alone doesn’t account for women’s lower representation in math-based disciplines.

“Nowadays, I’m sure there are people who are not publishing stuff on sex differences,” Bouchard says, adding that he sees self-censorship as a “great danger”, where data is not published because it does not fit the prevailing belief system. “I talk about those things in my class all the time - that males and females have different interests; in a sense, females have a broader and richer view of life. There are a lot of people who simply won’t talk about those things. Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists.” (Emphasis added.)

A New York Times article about Bouchard’s views cited the case of economist Robert Shiller, an expert on house prices. While an advisor to the US Federal Reserve, he became deeply concerned about the bubbles developing in the US housing and stock markets. But rather than shout from the rooftops in warning the Fed, he expressed his views “very gently”. He said he “felt vulnerable”, because deviating too far from consensus “leaves one feeling potentially ostracized from the group, with the risk that one may be terminated.”

The New York Times article goes on to say that “conformity and group-think are attitudes of particular danger in science because progress often depends on overturning established wisdom”. Bouchard was not suggesting that forming a consensus view was wrong, but the problem lay in the peer-pressure silencing of critics, saying that his field has “whole domains we can’t talk about”. The NY Times article says that if “the brightest minds on Wall Street got suckered by group-think into believing house prices would never fall”, who knows about such bandwagons as global warming, saying sarcastically, “You mean it might be harder to model climate change 20 years ahead than house prices 5 years ahead? Surely not - how could so many climatologists be wrong?”

Science journal editor admits: Peer review censors against-the-trend papers

The editor of Science journal, Bruce Alberts, was recently interviewed on Australia’s ABC Radio National The Science Show by presenter Robyn Williams:

Robyn Williams: Of course you’ve got a tremendous overview of the published papers, not only in your own journal but in other journals. Out of 1,000 papers on climate change, how many can you remember that go against the trend? Any?

Bruce Alberts: Well, I get lots of complaints from people who want to publish papers saying climate change doesn’t exist, but they have a hard time getting their papers published because they don’t pass peer review. So there are actually very few papers that get published in the peer review literature that seriously challenge in any way the basic hypothesis. As in evolution, there are always things you don’t understand, and the creationists use those things you don’t understand, the ‘missing links’, to challenge the whole idea of evolution. In the same way some people use the few things we don’t understand (we never understand everything) to challenge the whole idea of climate change. It’s not a valid way of talking about science.

Interesting that against-the-trend papers on anthropogenic global warming are treated with the same disdain as papers critical of evolution. And note that Bruce Alberts’ final sentence above attempts to define against-the trend papers as “unscientific”, thus with one fell swoop removing them from scientific discourse.

See here why this resistance or inertia brought on by peere presssure makes it hard to bring sanity back to science here and expanded on here.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Global Warming: Natural or Manmade?

http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-natural-or-manmade/

“Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. This website describes evidence from my group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution.

Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that the only way they can get their computerized climate models to produce the observed warming is with anthropogenic (human-caused) pollution. But they’re not going to find something if they don’t search for it. More than one scientist has asked me, “What else COULD it be?” Well, the answer to that takes a little digging… and as I show, one doesn’t have to dig very far.

But first let’s examine the basics of why so many scientists think global warming is manmade. Earth’s atmosphere contains natural greenhouse gases (mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane) which act to keep the lower layers of the atmosphere warmer than they otherwise would be without those gases. Greenhouse gases trap infrared radiation — the radiant heat energy that the Earth naturally emits to outer space in response to solar heating. Mankind’s burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal, petroleum, and natural gas) releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this is believed to be enhancing the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect. As of 2008, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 40% to 45% higher than it was before the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800’s.

It is interesting to note that, even though carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth to exist, there is precious little of it in Earth’s atmosphere. As of 2008, only 39 out of every 100,000 molecules of air were CO2, and it will take mankind’s CO2 emissions 5 more years to increase that number by 1, to 40.

The “Holy Grail”: Climate Sensitivity Figuring out how much past warming is due to mankind, and how much more we can expect in the future, depends upon something called “climate sensitivity”. This is the temperature response of the Earth to a given amount of ‘radiative forcing’, of which there are two kinds: a change in either the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth, or in the infrared energy the Earth emits to outer space.

The ‘consensus’ of opinion is that the Earth’s climate sensitivity is quite high, and so warming of about 0.25 deg. C to 0.5 deg. C (about 0.5 deg. F to 0.9 deg. F) every 10 years can be expected for as long as mankind continues to use fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. NASA’s James Hansen claims that climate sensitivity is very high, and that we have already put too much extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Presumably this is why he and Al Gore are campaigning for a moratorium on the construction of any more coal-fired power plants in the U.S.

You would think that we’d know the Earth’s ‘climate sensitivity’ by now, but it has been surprisingly difficult to determine. How atmospheric processes like clouds and precipitation systems respond to warming is critical, as they are either amplifying the warming, or reducing it. This website currently concentrates on the response of clouds to warming, an issue which I am now convinced the scientific community has totally misinterpreted when they have measured natural, year-to-year fluctuations in the climate system. As a result of that confusion, they have the mistaken belief that climate sensitivity is high, when in fact the satellite evidence suggests climate sensitivity is low.

The case for natural climate change I also present an analysis of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which shows that most climate change might well be the result of….the climate system itself! Because small, chaotic fluctuations in atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems can cause small changes in global average cloudiness, this is all that is necessary to cause climate change. You don’t need the sun, or any other ‘external’ influence (although these are also possible…but for now I’ll let others work on that). It is simply what the climate system does. This is actually quite easy for meteorologists to believe, since we understand how complex weather processes are. Your local TV meteorologist is probably a closet ’skeptic’ regarding mankind’s influence on climate.

Climate change — it happens, with or without our help.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Climate Change: Who Are The Deniers Now?

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate
Nov 16, 2009

By Dr. Tim Ball, Canada Free Press, November 16, 2009

“When you point your finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you.” Anonymous

Finger pointing rarely includes facts, especially in the climate debate. The first finger said we were global warming skeptics, but was turned back when it was explained all scientists are skeptics.

The second finger claimed we were climate change deniers. It was turned back because the opposite is true; we’re telling the public about the extent and speed of natural climate change. As Copenhagen nears, it’s evident no agreement is possible so rhetoric, and alarmism abound. Finger pointing has a new form, being a denier is now a disease. They never consider the failure is due to facts proving the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis wrong. With the left it is always someone else’s fault.

Just the Facts
Extreme left journalist George Monbiot ignored all the facts I provided when he was pointing a finger at me. He’s ignoring them again, which forces him to assume the deniers are at fault. He wrote, “There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.”

The sphere is expanding for several reasons.

- All evidence rejects the hypothesis that human CO2 is causing warming or climate change.

- Facts are gradually getting to the public despite obstructionism by journalists like Monbiot.

- Temperature projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are consistently wrong.

- Record cold temperatures are occurring everywhere.

- Motives of those pushing the need for reduction in CO2 are being exposed.

- Economic costs of a completely unnecessary action are emerging.

- If you shoot the messenger it changes the question to, “Who is the denier now?”

Denialism is defined as “the practice of creating the illusion of debate when there is none.” It’s a variation on “the science is settled” theme, but personalized to say you deny the facts that prove it’s settled. I experienced it this week and learned there’s no rational response. A person presented herself as a journalist writing an article on climate change. I don’t refuse interviews and assume the person is seeking balance. The article was about “denialism”, which the journalist claimed was a serious threat and I was a prime example. It evolved there was no balance, the journalist believed the science is settled and I was refusing to concede.

I explained how I am the antithesis of a denier. I explained how the scientific method was thwarted and the AGW hypothesis became fact before the research began. I was told this was clear evidence of my denial. As the chosen representative of denialism I wanted the facts and science I was supposedly denying. I asked what percentage CO2 was of greenhouse gases. The answer; “I ask the questions.” I ended the interview, an action that will probably appear as clear evidence of denial.

Leftist politicians are pointing the same fingers. Australian Prime Minister Rudd said in a recent speech, “climate-change skeptics, the climate-change deniers, the opponents of climate-change action are active in every country.”

He wrapped the charges in the standard environmentalist argument of the precautionary principle. Of the Australian opposition he said, “You are betting our jobs, our houses, our farms, our reefs, our economy and our future on an intuition on a gut feeling; on a political prejudice you have about science.”

It is the finger of guilt. What he denies is those impacts will occur if you implement his proposed climate-change action.

But who has the political prejudice?
Logic says it’s those who want to stifle debate, to silence individuals and groups. All I’ve ever sought is a full and open debate. It was what 59 fellow skeptics and I sought in a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister.

A new book with another twist accuses those trying to uncover the facts of a cover-up. I hesitate to give the book attention but as an example of the illogic, lies and nastiness in the climate change debate it must be exposed. James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore’s form of the denialism charge is in their book titled, “Climate Cover-Up” subtitled, “The Crusade to Deny Global Warming.” They’ve likely achieved a new low with two major errors in the title. Nobody denies warming; the issue is the cause. The word “crusade” implies a religious quest, but the real crusade is to force acceptance of the hypothesis by personal attacks. Scientists as skeptics were subjected to an inquisition as befalls non-believers.


Disclosure; I’m a victim of their attacks and accusations. The false information about me leaves little doubt the rest is equally questionable. I was a threat from the beginning because I identified the hoax early in a peer-reviewed article, “An Iconoclast’s View of Climatic Change” in the 1992 Canadian Water Resources Journal. The editor published but with the bizarre condition he provide the title. When I saw his choice I agreed because, unknown to him I already realized I was challenging a religion. Hoggan and Littlemore falsely linked me to the oil and energy industry. They said my failure to follow through on a lawsuit to stop their false information was proof of guilt. Truth is I could not afford to continue the action. Besides, Hoggan was supporting the person who made the false accusations. The book smears by suggestion, implies guilt by association, and uses various forms of ad hominem attacks. They don’t discuss the scientific facts.

Hoggan and Littlemore are major players in the attacks and real cover-up. It is their expertise. Hoggan is a master of spin who owns a large Public Relations company. Littlemore is a political journalist. Hoggan set up a web page called Desmogblog and hired Littlemore and Kevin Grandia, to produce material replete with personal attacks, while ignoring the science.

Hoggan is Chair of the Board of the David Suzuki Foundation, a political environmental group that receives funding from oil and energy companies. With the twisted logic of true believers somehow this is not tainting and neither is money from government or any other agency. Hoggan’s clients include alternative energy companies, like Ballard Engineering, who benefit from showing CO2 is causing global warming or climate change, but somehow that is not a conflict. But none of that is important; the issue is the science and the facts, which they consistently ignore.

Knocked Out by the Facts
The final finger of denialism pointed so directly by Monbiot is, ironically, an eloquent description of his own position. The reason he writes, “There is no point in denying it: we’re losing” is because the fingers have curled into a fist and it is aimed right back at him and the other real deniers. As James Howell (1594 - 1666) said, “Burn not thy fingers to snuff another man’s candle.” See post here.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Gore's presentation on climate change draws 800 as 200 protestors gather outside

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/gore-s-presentation-on-climate-change-draws-800-59205.html

By George Bennett Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Updated: 9:27 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009

BOCA RATON — Confused Palm Beach County voters helped thwart Al Gore's 2000 bid to become president of the United States, but he was introduced as "president of the planet" when he returned here Saturday night to deliver an environmental lecture.

The former vice president spoke on climate change at the Mizner Park Amphitheater to a crowd of about 800. More than 200 protesters gathered across the street from the event, and their boos and chants could be heard inside the amphitheater as Gore began his presentation.

Gore lost Florida, and the White House, by 537 votes to George W. Bush in a 2000 as many Palm Beach County Democrats said they mistakenly voted for conservative Pat Buchanan because they were confused by the county's "butterfly ballot" design.

After losing the presidential race, Gore became arguably the world's most famous advocate for curbing carbon emissions, gaining eco-celebrity status with the film An Inconvenient Truth and winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

"It's an interesting twist of fate here in our own backyard that former Vice President Al Gore has taken on a new platform and is now a catalyst for world change," said Marci Zaroff, an "eco-entrepeneur" who introduced Gore.

"So, in essence, he's president of the people. He's president of the planet. And the work that he's doing is more important than any other work that could possibly be done."

Tickets for the event sold for $44 to $339, with proceeds going to the nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection that Gore chairs.

Gore began his remarks by calling climate change "the most dangerous problem we've ever faced. But it is also a tremendous opportunity for us to solve problems that have been neglected for a long time."

Organizers allowed the media to cover only the first few minutes of Gore's presentation.

In addition to his nonprofit advocacy, Gore is a partner in a venture capital firm that finances "sustainable" and alternative energy businesses, prompting some critics to accuse Gore of promoting environmental policies that will fatten his bank account.

"Cap & Tax — Don't Be Fooled: Al Gore Will Make billions," read a sign carried by Alan Tudor, who drove from Tampa to attend Saturday's protest.

"Gore's Favorite Green Product? Your money in his pocket," said another sign.

Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said Gore's investments are consistent with positions he has held for decades.

"Former Vice President Gore has made long-term investments in 'sustainable' companies, the vast majority of which are not directly involved with efforts to solve the climate crisis. He has also invested in some companies that have attempted and will continue to help solve the climate crisis. These are a reflection of his values," Kreider said in an e-mail.

"If he did not invest in technologies that he supported, these very same people would accuse him of being a hypocrite," Kreider said.

george_bennett@pbpost.com

Thursday, November 12, 2009

NCAR: Number of record highs beat record lows – if you believe the quality of data from the weather stations

http://wattsupwiththat.com/category/weather_stations/


I’ll have a lot more on this study later, but for now just a short rebuttal.

I believe this study is hopelessly flawed due to the fact that the authors take the data from the weather stations at face value without considering bias due to measurement error or siting error, both of which are rampant in the US surface station network.
Read the report.

While not all situations with poorly sited weather stations affect trends, a weather station like this one at the University of Arizona’s parking lot in front of the atmospheric science department is represenative of the kinds of problems that would lead to an increased number of new high temperature records set

Above: official USHCN weather station, in the parking lot, Atmospheric Science Dept. University of Arizona, Tucson. Photo: Warren Meyer

Plus then there’s the error problem. For example we saw this summer that Honolulu set new record highs, but they turned out to be in error. The kicker is that NOAA let the records stand anyway! The problem is that a number of climate stations are at airports. Watch this NWS employee say on record that these airport weather stations are “placed for aviation purposes…not necessarily for climate purposes.”

So take this NCAR study with a grain of salt, since the authors did not address any of these issues.

From NCAR: Record High Temperatures Far Outpace Record Lows Across U.S.

BOULDER—Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

“Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.”...

Climate change 'sceptic' Ian Plimer argues CO2 is not causing global warming

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6553592/Climate-change-sceptic-Ian-Plimer-argues-CO2-is-not-causing-global-warming.html

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes and is not responsible for climate change, a scientist has claimed.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
Published: 2:54PM GMT 12 Nov 2009


Photo: PA Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from Adelaide University, argues that a recent rise in temperature around the world is caused by solar cycles and other "extra terrestrial" forces.

He said carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, widely blamed for global warming, is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes erupting.


"We cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes," he said. "It is a normal element cycled around in the earth and my science, which is looking back in time, is saying we have had a planet that has been a green, warm wet planet 80 per cent of the time. We have had huge climate change in the past and to think the very slight variations we measure today are the result of our life - we really have to put ice blocks in our drinks."

Most mainstream scientists agree that the recent warming period was caused by an increase in carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution.

However Prof Plimer said the world has experienced three periods of cooling since 1850 and furthermore carbon dioxide was increasing during many of those cooler periods.

"If we had only had warming, then there would be a connect between co2 and temperature, there is not," he added.

Prof Plimer has come under attack as a "denialist poster boy" whose theories are in danger of stopping the world from tackling the grave dangers of climate change.

But he said the scientists "frightening people witless by following the party line" are motivated by politics and research funding.

"They are taking advantage of the current situation. That is understandable. In previous times people got wonderful research grants in a war against cancer and they achieved a lot of money for that. Now we have a war on climate change and we have a huge number of people out there who have their career staked on it and are beneficiaries of this process."

Vicky Pope, Head of Climate Change Advice at the Met Office, said it is widely accepted that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has doubled in the last 200 years and as a result the globe is warming.

She said there are "natural variations" in temperature caused by the weather as well as natural phenomenon like El Nino and human effects like pollution, but overall the climate has been getting hotter and has reached its warmest period in recent years.

"The basic physics is that if carbon dioxide increases then the temperature goes up," she said.

A number of "climate change sceptics" will be giving talks in the run up to a key UN Summit in Copenhagen in December when the world is expected to agree an international deal to stop global warming.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Don’t buy those carbon credits just yet

http://www.icecap.us/

Nov 10, 2009
By David Freddoso, Washington Examiner

Democrats’ cap-and-trade climate change bill contains a provision that could suddenly render useless the carbon credits it creates, says Sen. David Vitter, R-La. Vitter will speak at a press conference later today on how the bill establishes emergency conditions requiring the president to step in and use all of his authority over relevant agencies to stop global warming. According to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which performs climate modeling analyses for the Department of Energy, the emergency conditions laid out in the bill would be triggered within months of its enactment.

The cap-and-trade bill—both the Senate version that passed the Environment and Public Works committee and the version that already passed the House—effectively declares a climate emergency if world greenhouse gas levels climb above 450 parts per million. (The number appears to have been chosen arbitrarily.) According to the Pacific Northwest National lab, which wrote in response to Vitter’s inquiries, the world’s air will hit that level of greenhouse gases next year, in 2010, if undeveloped nations do not accept carbon limits.

The result is a a scenario in which the law not only permits but in fact requires the president to �direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions...to address shortfalls” in emissions cutbacks.

The bill’s language places an unusually broad mandate upon the president to act in the event of this “emergency” situation.” In a letter to Vitter, EPA administration Lisa Jackson wrote that she does not know what her agency would do. �It is premature to describe exactly what additional actions EPA may take until such an analysis is conducted,” she wrote.

But declaration of this “climate emergency” could result in federal agencies denying all discretionary permits for carbon-emitting industries, and EPA itself could impose non-attainment status upon the entire United States. “In that context, the carbon credits won’t matter,” Vitter told me yesterday.

If a future president tries to go easy on industry, environmental groups are sure to litigate based on the clear language in the law, forcing his hand.

“This provision was not focused on to any significant extent during the House debate,” said Vitter. The climate change bill passed the House this summer, hours after hundreds of pages of amendments were added to it. Vitter said he plans to write industry leaders who are supporting the climate bill to ask whether they understand what the bill’s language would do.

Monday, November 09, 2009

Al Gore Encourages Civil Disobedience


http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate

By Oliver Burkeman, UK Guardian

Excerpts:
Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan To Solve The Climate Crisis, gives global warming deniers short shrift, and shows little concern for displays of political bipartisanship: he likens the doubters to the “birthers” intent on proving that Obama is a Kenyan - not just mavericks, but fantasists who inhabit a different version of reality.

“It’s important to change lightbulbs,” he says, in a well-burnished soundbite, “but more important to change policies and laws.” Or perhaps to break laws instead: peaceful occupations of the kind witnessed recently in the UK, he predicts, are only going to become more widespread. “Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play. And I expect that it will increase, no question about it.” People sometimes express incredulity that Gore, who was groomed for the presidency almost since birth, seems so resolved that he’ll never return to electoral politics. But here’s a vivid example of the benefits of life on the outside: how many serving politicians would feel able to come so close to urging people to commit trespass?

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Team of Scientists' Open Letter To U.S. Senators: 'Claim of consensus is fake'

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/3606/Team-of-Scientists-Open-Letter-To-US-Senators-Claim-of-consensus-is-fake

By Marc Morano – Climate Depot
The following letter signed by five physicists was sent to all 100 U.S. Senator's on October 29, 2009. The letter is reproduced in full below:

A GAGGLE IS NOT A CONSENSUS

You have recently received a letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), purporting to convey a “consensus” of the scientific community that immediate and drastic action is needed to avert a climatic catastrophe.

We do not seek to make the scientific arguments here (we did that in an earlier letter, sent a couple of months ago), but simply to note that the claim of consensus is fake, designed to stampede you into actions that will cripple our economy, and which you will regret for many years. There is no consensus, and even if there were, consensus is not the test of scientific validity. Theories that disagree with the facts are wrong, consensus or no.

We know of no evidence that any of the “leaders” of the scientific community who signed the letter to you ever asked their memberships for their opinions, before claiming to represent them on this important matter.

We also note that the American Physical Society (APS, and we are physicists) did not sign the letter, though the scientific issues at stake are fundamentally matters of applied physics. You can do physics without climatology, but you can't do climatology without physics.

The APS is at this moment reviewing its stance on so-called global warming, having received a petition from its membership to do so. That petition was signed by 160 distinguished members and fellows of the Society, including one Nobelist and 12 members of the National Academies. Indeed a score of the signers are Members and Fellows of the AAAS, none of whom were consulted before the AAAS letter to you.

Professor Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

Professor Fred Singer, University of Virginia

Professor Will Happer, Princeton University

Professor Larry Gould, University of Hartford

Dr. Roger Cohen, retired Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

List of 160 signers of the APS petition available at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u

Gore Cashes in on Global Warming Grants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy-environment/03gore.html

..The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr. Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years...

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Monckton on Glenn Beck video now available

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/30/monckton-on-glenn-beck-video-now-available/

In case you missed it live, Christopher Monckton spent an entire hour on the Glenn Beck program today on the topic of global warming, skepticism, and the Copenhagen Treaty.