The AFP finds climate change in underground pipes

Angono Petroglyphs | Photo Credit: www.photobucket.com

When I read the headline "Climate Change threatens 5,000-year-old artwork in the Philippines" on a nAFP  article my first thought was that it must be about sea level rise threatening the ancient artwork which are carvings known as petroglyphs.  As I read the article I quickly realized my first assumption about sea level being the danger was incorrect when I came to this:

The carvings are in mountains about 90 minutes' drive from Manila that only a few decades ago were entirely forested.

Obviously sea level rise was not an immediate concern so I continued reading the article searching for the climate change which was "threatening" the artwork. The article was filled with interesting facts about the carvings including :

 The carvings were first documented by acclaimed Philippine artist Carlos Francisco in 1965 while he was leading a Boy Scout troop on a hike.

I also learned that the carvings were on land owned by a real estate developer who donated the hillside where the carvings are located back to the National Museum, which maintains them.  The article seems to imply a certain disappointment that more land was not set aside for the historic site since "upper-class" homes, a golf course and  a road are nearby but the "underfunded" museum is unable to adequately protect the 127  stone age carvings which are classified as national treasures.

However after reading the entire article I was unable to determine exactly what "climate change" was "threatening" these precious artifacts. Perhaps, I thought, I had missed something so I re-read the article and in order of their appearance here are all the listed dangers to the artwork.

...encroaching urbanisation, vandals and the ravages of nature are growing threats....
...But that has done little to stem the powerful tide of neglect....
...Wind and rain, as well as plant roots creeping through the stone, have also damaged the soft rock where the carvings are etched....
...vandalism is also a constant worry.

People have scrawled their names on the rock and there are slash marks on some carvings that archaeologists have determined were only made recently.

Mining at a nearby gravel pit a few years ago also shook the ancient site...

... new housing developments nearby would mean more underground pipes, which could weaken the hillside.

Nowhere in the article is there a connection between "climate change" in any of its alleged manifestations and the ancient Philippine carvings.

Interesting enough the carvings were put on an endangered list back in 1996 before the "ravages" of climate change were well understood.

The World Monuments Fund, a New York-based private group that works to protect historical sites, placed the Angono Petroglyphs on its list of endangered monuments in 1996 and has provided help in their preservation.

So I went to the World Monument Fund's web site in search of the "climate change" that was responsible for its inclusion on their list. Here is what they have to say about the dangers confronting these world archaeological treasures.

....Almost immediately after they were brought to public attention, the National Museum of the Philippines made several molds of the carvings. Subsequently, the site underwent cleaning and preliminary conservation during the 1980s. By the early 1990s, the Angono Petroglyphs were threatened by regional development pressure. After investigations, the importance of the site was fully recognized and measures were taken to protect the area and the carvings.

Although granted protection from total destruction, there was fear that new road construction and blasting into the hill behind the petroglyphs might have threatened the cave’s stability. The reshaped earth also raised concerns about the increasing threat of water damage to the site. Uncontrolled vegetation and fauna had causes erosion of the petroglyphs over time.

The website goes on to explain the wonderful work that the WMF has done to help protect the site, but nowhere in their history of involvement with ancient carvings as in the AFP story is there anything at all remotely resembling a "climate change" danger to the artwork.

Although this is an extreme example, it has become all too common in the world's media that there need be no true direct link to any real climate event let alone scientific evidence to "pin" climate change on negative occurrences.  If, as in this case, mankind's advancement plays a role in the event then it seems to be almost accepted media practice to just blame "climate change" knowing that an indoctrinated citizenry will translate it all to mean "man-made global warming caused this."

The debate is over

Over at Climate Etc. there is currently a post titled "Talking Past Each Other?" It is a discussion on a recent study about the dynamics of the climate change debate. To put it simply "Can't we all just get along"

Whenever I read these types of discussion it inevitably is about somehow bringing the sides together in order to discuss the science or the policies relative to the science. In other words "How can we debate the science like adults" or some such thing.

There is a very simple answer to this, you can't really debate the science, because it never has been a scientific debate, it's a political debate and always has been. The science part of global warming has always just been a means to an end for the political agenda behind it.

Scientist who are not heavily vested in the politics of global warming like to hide their heads in the sand and pretend that it is all about the science. However their actions or lack of actions show that they are no more  than "useful idiots" to those who have manipulated the climate science community into a political agenda. As long as they can keep the arguments on some sort of pseudo-intellectual plain they can ignore the cancerous puss which controls their profession. Or more likely they suffer from what Upton Sinclair so aptly observed:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

The climate science community is very good at not understanding that politics, not science is the driving force behind their field. If they really were worried about the scientific debate they would put a stop to the obvious propaganda that is so much a part of their science discipline. But they don't, more often than not they promote it without actual scientific evidence to support it, they just advance a narrative.

In the past week alone we have two very good examples of why this isn't science, it is an agenda.

From Grist today 3/11/11 at 11;00 AM

Today’s tsunami: This is what climate change looks like

As the tragedy in Japan is unfolding, global warming propagandist are writing articles tying it to global warming. From the above article:

So far, today's tsunami has mainly affected Japan -- there are reports of up to 300 dead in the coastal city of Sendai -- but future tsunamis could strike the U.S. and virtually any other coastal area of the world with equal or greater force, say scientists. In a little-heeded warning issued at a 2009 conference on the subject, experts outlined a range of mechanisms by which climate change could already be causing more earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic activity.

"When the ice is lost, the earth's crust bounces back up again and that triggers earthquakes, which trigger submarine landslides, which cause tsunamis," Bill McGuire, professor at University College London, told Reuters.

Melting ice masses change the pressures on the underlying earth, which can lead to earthquakes and tsunamis, but that's just the beginning. Rising seas also change the balance of mass across earth's surface, putting new strain on old earthquake faults, and may have been partly to blame for the devastating 2004 tsunami that struck Southeast Asia, according to experts from the China Meteorological Administration.

Even a simple change in the weather can dramatically affect the earth beneath our feet:

Putting aside the typically sick opportunism, is that really science? I guess so the writer is quoting a scientist who actually promotes such nonsense. Does the so called consensus scientific community ever condemn such unscientific speculative crap? On occasion a scientist might decry such overblown outlandish claims, but on the whole they go pretty much unchallenged by the consensus community. They allow this sort of science (?) to be promoted in the name of climate change science because it serves their purpose, in swaying public opinion, so they think. That is not science, that is politics. If they seriously wanted to stop this kind of reporting, they could, but they don't.

The other day NOAA scientist came out and reported:

Natural Causes Drove Russian Heat Wave, Study Finds

However back last year as the event was going on it was reported this way:

 Aug. 12, 2010

Climate experts agree: Global warming caused Russian heat wave

Did scientist come forward to squelch this speculation? On the contrary, from the story itself:

Russia’s heat wave simply would not have happened without the influence of fossil fuel pollution on our atmosphere. University of Texas climate scientist Michael Tobis is “hazarding a guess” that “the Russian heat wave of 2010 is the first disaster unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change”:

But right now I feel like hazarding a guess. As far as I understand, nothing like this has happened before in Moscow ... The formerly remarkable heat wave of 2001, then, is “the sort of thing we’ll see more of” with global warming. But it may turn out reasonable, in the end, to say “the Russian heat wave of 2010 is the first disaster unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”

Meteorologist Rob Carver, the Research and Development Scientist for Weather Underground, agrees. Using a statistical analysis of historical temperature records, Dr. Carver estimates that the likelihood of Moscow’s 100-degree record on July 29 is on the order of once per 1,000 years, or even less than once every 15,000 years -- in other words, a vanishingly small probability. However, those tiny odds are based on the assumption that the long-term climate is stable, an assumption that is no longer true.

Like Dr. Tobis, Carver believes that manmade global warming has fundamentally altered weather patterns to produce the killer Russian heat wave. “Without contributions from anthropogenic climate change,” Carver said in an email interview with the Wonk Room, “I don’t think this event would have reached such extremes or even happened at all”:

So, not only did Dr. Carver or Dr. Tobis attempt to squelch speculation without scientific proof, they promoted it. The so called consensus community seldom acts scientifically at all. How do you have a scientific debate with people who do not operate as scientist?

Since even before the infamous day in June of 1988 when a US Senator left the windows of a Senate Hearing Room open  in order to make James Hanson's testimony "hotter", the global warming debate has been nothing but politics, For the deluded to believe that this has anything to with science only goes to show how successful the progressives have been.

The  IPCC has been shown without a doubt to be an agenda driven entity with predetermined outcomes to their science, fully willing to use unscientific methods and studies to promote their agendas. And intelligent people are still talking about debating the science?

The debate is over, the political movement behind global warming is what needs to be debated...and destroyed, for the good of mankind.

The missing link

This article is perhaps one of the most contradictory and deceptive I've ever read and that is saying a lot. The whole article is a prime example of double speak from the very beginning. Note the headline all emphasis mine.

Climate Change, Food Safety Linked

Changing climate could make food more dangerous, add to the malnourishment of millions, and change even what we eat


By Joel N. Shurkin, Inside Science News Service

Now I am not the brightest guy in the world but even I know that there is a world of difference between something being linked to something as compared to something could cause something. Perhaps Joel will clarify this seeming contradiction.

(ISNS)—Global warming has the potential to make what we eat more dangerous and expensive, and the world already is feeling the effects, according to experts.

 OK, thanks for that clarification Joel. But just as the difference between link and could has quite a gulf in meaning, the idea that something with a potential to cause harm is already causing that harm is a bit of a contradiction isn't it? It is like saying that the hoodlum has the potential to kill people and the five homicide victims are feeling the effects of that potential.

A quartet of scientists reporting during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington last weekend said the issues of food safety are poorly understood, but the inference from what is known is distressing.

So now we can begin to understand the confusion. The primary sources for this story do not really have a good understanding of the subject matter, so they'll make inferences and this is how modern science takes a potential danger and create a  link.

They fear that global warming would lead to increased levels of contamination of food, from chemicals and pesticides to crop pests and fungal pathogens, as well as faster spreading of diseases such as cholera and shellfish poisoning. These issues could also force changes in diets as some foods become less available or more dangerous and increase food prices in a world where they are already rising and causing civil unrest.

I am not a grammar expert as I am sure you can tell, but in the above paragraph, couldn't the would be could ? I believe that would could be replaced with could without changing the meaning...couldn't it? Regardless of whether it is would or could, I still do not see the link so prominently featured in the headline. But the scientist are afraid so let's carry on.

Discussions about the link between climate change and food safety are only now beginning, said Sandra Hoffman of the Department of Agriculture, and the science is not clear.

AH HA ! The link is back. Still no actual link but we have a discussion on the link! Is a discussion of link higher on the scientific proof ladder than potential ? I would suspect so since these folks are meeting in Washington to discuss the link and pretty much anything that comes out of Washington is potentially dangerous to society and food safety is a potential danger to society so there in lies the link.

While poor countries, particularly in the tropics and subtropics and the impoverished everywhere will fare the worst, according to Ewen C. Todd, of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich., the threat is not restricted to the developing world.

There are 38.4 million cases of food poisoning in the U.S. every year, mostly from noroviruses, the pathogen best known for affecting cruise ship passengers. Of those victims, 72,000 people are hospitalized and 1,600 die. Salmonella, a bacterium, now is the leading cause of food-related death.

Yes very good but where is the link?

Scientists know that for every degree the ambient temperature rises above 6 degrees Celsius—or 43 degrees F—temperature in an area, the occurrence of food-borne salmonella poisoning increases by 12 percent.

 Ah, you scientist I knew you would (could) do it. You took something you know could happen and you connected it to something you theorize will happen and created a link to something that has not yet happened. How diabolically ingenious of you and our intrepid journalist Joel. The potential is the link! But to show that you have facts on your side you need to have a real world example. So stick it to....uh give it to us.

The dangers can readily be demonstrated, Todd said. In 2005, lettuce grown in Spain and shipped to Finland caused 56 cases of salmonella poisoning. The cause was traced to farmers using untreated water for irrigation. They had to do so, they told authorities, because a drought, likely produced by climate change, restricted their access to clean water.

So farmers using untreated water caused salmonella poisoning and through a series of unproven assertions and connections from this cause we are able to trace the poisoning back to it's likely source, your car. Don't you feel terrible! You, YOU decadent SUV owners are responsible for Spanish farmers poisoning Finnish vegetarians! Or at least you are a potentially likely link in the crime.

Another possible effect of climate change is in the news now. One of the reasons for the unrest in Egypt and Asia has been rising food prices caused by stressed ecosystems on the land and in the ocean, Todd said.

Do you hear that ! It is not the US Federal Reserve Bank with their Quantitative Easing driving global inflation. NO, it is not even a host of dictatorial Third World despots who keep their citizens locked into repressive political and economic systems to maintain their own power and wealth. NO it is you and your gluttonous decadent lifestyle spewing forth your CO2 as if it was the breath of life instead of the poison that is responsible for creating unrest and revolution throughout the globe. Have you no shame ?!

Ray Knighton, also of the USDA, said changing climate affects food production. Drought can cause a loss in plant vigor, making plants more susceptible to disease; floods and heavy rains favor the growth of fungal pathogens on leaves, and many disease-causing organisms can spread in changing wind currents.

"Greenhouse gasses and atmospheric pollutants change plant structure and the ability of the plant to defend itself against pathogens," he said.

 There you have it, carbon dioxide which plants breathe, which they can not live without...is killing them. The more of that poisonous stuff you spew into the atmosphere, the faster they will die. Worse yet if you add more water to the plants along with the carbon dioxide you kill them even faster. 

Most scientists believe climate change is producing more severe storms and these apparently help spread diseases.

Ah, the most scientist ploy, how familiar is that? Most scientist this, most scientist that. Did Joel go out and interview all scientist on the matter to determine the poll numbers on this belief of most scientist? Apparently he did in order to make such a statement, right?

One classic example is Asian soybean rust, spores that cause gold speckles on the light green leaves and eventually kill the plant. The spores spread from Asia to Africa then to South American and finally the United States. The spread in the U.S. was unusually fast and wide. It turns out the spores were riding on the winds of hurricanes from the Gulf of Mexico, Knighton said.

I am sorry, can you take this anymore, I'm having a hard time here. It appears that the inferred link is that climate change causes more hurricanes (not proven) which caused these spores to ride the winds from South America to the United States. May I point out that the spores first had to get from Asia to Africa. I guess they rode a train, then to South America, by cargo ship, or did they catch a plane? Then and only then did they catch the winds of a hurricane to visit us here in the United States. At least they did not sneak across the border. This is their link?

That has huge implications for how food-borne diseases are monitored and the need for a sensitive network for tracking pathogens, he said.

Which of course will require vast sums of tax payers money to finance the monitoring of hurricane winds to stop illegal spore entry into the country,

Vibriosis, which comes from seafood, is known to increase with rises in the temperature and salinity of the oceans, said Hoffman. It peaks in the heat of summer. One species of the vibrio bacteria causes cholera. As temperatures rise, the implication is that the spread of vibriosis also will rise.

I thought we were supposed to be worried about the oceans becoming more acidic? Now we are to worry about it becoming more saline? Is an implication  a link or is it just a potential ? I guess we'll need a taxpayer funded discussion to decide.

Increased water temperatures also can lead to increased mercury contamination of fish by 30-50 percent for every increase in degree Celsius, said Cristina Tirado of the University of California at Los Angeles. Desertification, another probable result of climate change, increases pesticide concentration in plants, she said. Flooding leads to soil contamination, and even biofuel production could be affected

 The hits just keep on coming don't they, previously carbon dioxide mixed with water through flooding was the problem, but desertification and pesticides are now the problem. I guess the implication is that climate change will cause farmers to use more pesticides to contain the spores riding the hurricanes into desert areas...or something. Don't get me started on biofuels.

The danger of food poisoning could mean people change what they eat, Tirado added, avoiding foods grown where climate change has altered the path of germs and potentially increasing the price of food. One and a half billion people already pay 80 percent of their income for food and an increase in food prices would mean "more hunger and less money for health care and education."

Well that is a concern, you saw what happened to those Finnish vegetarians! I guess the solution would be to divert food crops and burn down rain forest to produce more biofuels for our cars. That is bound to help the people who are living on the edge of starvation.

The scientists admitted a contradictory effect of climate change: the possibility that some areas, particularly in the north, not now able to grow extensive crops, will warm up and begin to grow more food. Additionally, the cause and effect between climate change and food security is not well-defined.

Excuse me, I thought a link was exactly the proof of cause and effect. But then again I am not a government scientist in discussions with other scientist or even a journalist, what do I know.

Part of the problem, Hoffman said, is that data on the incidence of foodborne disease is imprecise and hard to come by.

So how do we have the link? Let's check out that headline again

Climate Change, Food Safety Linked

Yes that is what this journalistic abortion was about, the link between climate change and food safety. Certainly as we reach the end of this obvious case of journalistic malpractice, Joel will tie it all together for us and show us the link.

"There is significant uncertainty about all of this," Hoffman admitted. "We don't know what direction those cumulative effects will be." That uncertainty, she said, will make difficult to design an effective adaptation policy.

 Well there you have it, a link is defined as uncertainty . Just thought you would want to know for future use in your daily life.

Who will save the Tacos

I am sure the climate science community is working overtime  to explain the snow that has disrupted their warming world which is so perfectly reflected in shades of red upon their computer generated world of make believe. The problem though is not so much the white whipping through the landscape of their discontent, it is the cold.


It is all well and good to gratuitously inform the great unwashed masses who are not privy to the secret wisdom of the computer powered elites that we, the little people, are just not smart enough to understand something as complex as the climate.


"Of course in a warming world their will be more moisture in the air, hence more snow" snickers our betters as they punch  their predetermined assumptions into the super computers we have bought for them, that they may keep us at bay,


 "Oh foolish children,  of course there will still be bouts of cold in the warming world and because you refuse to unplug your cell phone chargers, blizzards are your just punishment."


"But what", one so foolishly may question "about the cold in Mexico?"

Historic low temperatures in US southwest places focus on global climate change

Low temperatures caused natural gas shortages in New Mexico while, south of the border, Mexico faces significant crop damage and food price hikes.


by Kent Patterson

I know, I know what you're thinking, OK Kent we'll play the game......."How cold was it"?

The images and news reports from Chihuahua, New Mexico and Texas were gripping. Last week's sub-zero temperatures grew sheets of ice on the walls of unheated homes. Water lines froze and burst, wells clammed up, natural gas shortages left towns without heat and the normal functioning of schools, business and factory production was thrown into chaos. On both sides of the US-Mexico border, governors issued disaster declarations and troops were called out to assist with emergency relief.  

"We can call this historic", said Dave Novlan, meterologist for the National Weather Service in the border town of Santa Teresa, New Mexico.  

In neighboring Ciudad Juarez, a city already battered to the bone by extreme criminal violence and economic crisis, 90,000 families were reported without water the first weekend of February. Next door, in El Paso, Texas, the city water utility took the extreme step of ordering residents not to shower, wash cars and clothes and otherwise restrict water usage until further notice 

In Aldama, Chihuahua, nearly three dozen animals-parrots, snakes, crocodiles and a monkey, froze to death at a private zoo, while the epic freeze was suspected in the death of a $30,000 giraffe at a zoo in Clovis, New Mexico. 

As an old Mexican saying goes, "Crazy February" had come to town. 

WOW Kent, that is cold! When you have to bring out that "Crazy February" saying, you know it's cold. I had no idea giraffes were so cheap though. Tell us more how cold was it?

 Across the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, at least 19 people were reported dead from cold weather-related incidents by February 3, even before the temperatures took more turns downward. By the end of the first week of February, four additional victims were reported in the state of Tamaulipas, which also borders Texas. 

Of the 19 Chihuahua victims, nine reportedly succumbed from carbon monoxide poisoining, six from hypothermia and four from burns. In a non-lethal fire, Ciudad Juarez firemen unable to overcome frozen water lines were forced to watch the historic building housing the Lion's Club burn down.  

Earlier, in January, a broad swath of northern and central Mexico shivered in the cold. Even in the tropical port of Puerto Vallarta, where thousands of Canadian and US "snowbirds" pass the winter along with migratory humpback whales every year, unusually low nightly temperatures had residents and visitors snuggling up in sweaters and coats.  

In northwestern Mexico, more than 1.3 million acres of grain, vegetable and fruit crops were reportedly damaged or destroyed in the most recent bout of extra cold weather. One farmer assessed the situation as a "total loss." 

 Mexico's Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries counts on an additional $100 million in disaster compensation funds this year. The federal agency considers Mexico among the most vulnerable nations to impacts from climate change in the Americas. 

But Mexico's potential crop losses came at a time when a kilo of staple corn tortillas was already fetching ten or more pesos, or one-fifth the amount of the daily minimum wage. In 2011, some economists warn of further rising food prices in the months ahead  

Probing slightly beyond the emergency nature of the extreme weather, which by most accounts was the most severe spell since the 1950s or 1960s, some mass media outlets spoke about an archaic infrastructure or the inability of the New Mexico Gas Company, for example, to supply enough energy to freezing residents, 32,000 of whom were stranded without gas heat for days on end.  

Questions were raised about the liability of the private company for customers' broken water lines, as well as company exports of New Mexico-produced gas to outside markets while residents were deprived of a vital heating source- almost as if the Land of Enchantment was a classic energy colony.

Now in all seriousness, this is a serious situation. We have people dieing, extreme property damage, economic and agricultural devastation on a massive scale, certainly somebody is taking this cold weather in unexpected places seriously...right?

 But almost without fail, US and Mexican media coverage had one thing in common: no mention of how human-induced climate change might be responsible for the Deep Freeze of 2011. Indeed, media attention soon focused on Super Bowl Sunday and Christina Aguilera's interesting interpretation of the National Anthem. 

The climate change omission extended into government and business circles. Annette Gardinier, New Mexico Gas Company president, insisted the freeze was a "50-year weather event" not experienced since 1971 and 1911, and an emergency situation of similar magnitude was "unlikey" to happen again.

In an Internet article, however, Santa Fe resident Subhangar Banerjee noted the link between Artic warming and the predictions of climate scientists of "more frequent and severe intensity winter storms" arising from "human made climate change." 

Oh, I see, Kent like most of the Pavlovian media has determined that this massive cold spell which is destroying the infrastructure, the economy, and reeking havoc on his region  is the result of man made global warming. Of course he can not say global warming, that would be just so.... naive, so common.  So Kent goes for the "human-induced climate change". But wait there is more:

Banerjee also cited other evidence of climate change in New Mexico, including the massive die-off of pinon trees since the turn of the century, and the record high temperatures of 100 degrees that were registered in the normally cool state capital of Santa Fe last June and July. In contrast, February temperatures in Santa Fe plunged to -40 with the wind chill factor thrown in, according to Banerjee. "This is my way of saying it's too cold for New Mexico," he wrote.  

"Crazy February" arrived just as Congressman Fred Upton (R-Mi) rolled out legislation designed to prevent the US Environmental Protection Agency from limiting greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change by the world's leading scientists.  

Overall estimates of economic losses stemming from this month's ongoing emergency or cost projections from similar future catastrophes were not immediately reported. 

Meantime, the second week of February kicked in with more cold weather chilling the greater borderlands. In a statement, the US Federal Emergency Managenent Agency's Region 6 assured residents it was working hard with local counterparts to prepare for yet another "round of snow and ice." Federal officials urged residents of New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma to have an emergency kit ready and stay on the alert for advisories from the authorities. 

Kent Patterson is the editor of Frontera NorteSur, a news service of New Mexico State University.

Oh yes that uppity Upton, he is going to be responsible for even more frozen pipes in New Mexico and tortilla shortages in Mexico. If they don't let the EPA regulate that greenhouse gas stuff they'll have to extend the winter storm emergency warnings down into Guatemala or maybe even Venezuela. Maybe a little ice will clear the sulfur from Hugo's nose.


You see the absurdity of this don't you? Please tell me you see the absolute insanity that the mad scientist have wrought upon us. Frozen pipes in New Mexico  and frigid weather in tropical  Porte Varade are the result of Man Made Global Warming.


 It never ends.

The Age of Unreason

The Australian newspaper The Age has an article titled Climate change adding to severity written by a Birdie Smith. Obviously this is a piece written about some new peer reviewed scholarly work done by climate researchers....not.

In the article Birdie does everything possible to tie cyclone Yasi to global warming/climate change while simultaneously destroying the foundation for that assertion. All emphasis are mine, remember the title of the article is "Climate change adding to severity" which leads immediately to the opening sentence:

Yasi may be Queensland's third cyclone in five weeks but it is not a symptom of a warming planet.

Well OK then, end of story, right? Nope

What can be attributed to global warming are some of the conditions that have contributed to the cyclone's severity - namely the record-high sea surface temperatures.

''Extremely warm waters are potentially fuelling those cyclones,'' said Andrew Ash, director of CSIRO's Climate Adaptation Flagship. ''The conditions are there to potentially make these events more extreme or more intense.''

The Coral Sea, where cyclone Yasi formed, is about 28.5 degrees. The high ocean temperatures, which generate more evaporation and a better source of energy for cyclones, coincide with a very strong La Nina event - part of natural climate variability - bringing moisture to north-eastern Australia.

 Far be it of me to question how something which can potentially cause severer cyclones can actually be attributed to doing so. Either it is potential or attributable, I believe the two propositions are not compatible. Birdie the writer of the story attributes while Ash the scientist only says the higher SST's have the potential to cause more severe cyclones. Why is Ash not willing to go as far as Birdie? Well the rest of the article pretty much shows why and why the entire article is more an excercise in alarmist propaganda than objective journalism.

''This [La Nina] event is close to the strongest on record,'' Dr Ash said yesterday.

''It's very similar to the event in 1917-18 and interestingly we had two very large cyclones in early 1918 associated with that strong La Nina event.''

So as it turns out what we are experiencing is "very similar" to an event which occurred 93 years ago. Which reconfirms that whole natural variability thing which  Birdie is so intent on downplaying is not new but in fact a fairly well documented natural cycle. It is as if anything pre-CO2 mania was natural but everything post-CO2 mania is due to your SUV.  An objective journalist might have put this event in historical context

Climate indicators of the El Niño and Southern Oscillation (ENSO), including tropical cloud amount, the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), trade winds and Pacific sea surface and sub-surface temperatures, all remain well in excess of La Niña thresholds. Most have exceeded these thresholds since the middle of 2010. The average August to December SOI (+21.1) has only been exceeded by the La Niña of 1917-18 (+24.4), with the 1975-76 La Niña value (+18.8) ranked third. Several other indices also suggest the La Niña events of 2010-11, 1975-76, 1917-18, 1955-56 and possibly 1988-89, rank closely in terms of the strongest events on record. 

During La Niña events, tropical cyclone numbers are typically higher than normal during the November to April period, while Wet Season temperatures are often below average, particularly in areas experiencing excess rainfall.

Note that the current conditions though outside the norm are, from a historical context, sandwiched between ENSO events not attributable to the modern global warming/climate change hysteria. Which the scientist are well aware of yet Birdie fails to either investigate or ignores in his narrative article.

Now if you think thus far we have been subjected to double speak, it only gets worse:

The combination has prompted authorities to warn of a horror cyclone season, with the weather bureau predicting up to six cyclones.

Neville Nicholls, from Monash University's school of geography and environmental science, said that even without the warming seas, La Nina events usually brought with them more active tropical cyclones.

So the high SST and the strong La Nina are combining to create "a horror cyclone season". Ouch this is bad I am sure glad we have Birdie and the climate science specialist to warn us of these impending disasters, or do we?:

Dr Nicholls, who specialises in the factors that affect cyclone activity from year to year, said the theory of a strong La Nina equating to an active tropical cyclone season did not play out as clearly when looking at longer-term data.

''From a naive point of view, warmer sea surface temperatures should lead to more active cyclone seasons but that's not what the decades-long data shows,'' he said. 'This is impossible for scientists to understand at the moment, but it means that there is something else at play.'"

Are you following this?  Remember the entire purpose of this article is to explain to us naive laymen all that the scientist know about how global warming is affecting cyclones yet when it comes down to it, it is " impossible for scientists to understand at the moment but it means that there is something else at play.", Like maybe natural variability and historically verifiable climate cycles ?

Climate change expert Michael Raupach, a CSIRO scientist and co-chairman of the independent research network Global Carbon Project, said no individual event could be linked to climate change.

He said that in general terms, climate change would increase the probability of extreme events, including events that depend on high sea surface temperatures.

So what are we left with here ? Basically that warmer Sea Surface Temperatures fuel stronger cyclones, granted. But is Yasi attributable to global warming ? No, Is Yasi's severity attributable to global warming? Well according to the scientist potentially in general terms it would increase the probability of it, which is a far cry from directly attributing Yasi or it's severity to global warming.

Birdie has done a masterful job in helping us naive laymen to understand why we are now living in the age of unreason, or even common sense.

Just another OOPS

Not too long ago

Spiegel 11-13-2009

A Warming Arctic

Greenland's Ice Sheet Melting Faster than Ever

By Christoph Seidler

Everyone knows that the ice sheet on Greenland is melting. But new research shows it is disappearing much faster than previously thought. The findings could mean that ocean levels are also rising more quickly....

Science Daily 11-13-09

Greenland Ice Cap Melting Faster Than Ever

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2009) — Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, reports a new study in Science....

The Times 11-13-2009

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster than ever, data shows

Hannah Devlin

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, according to the most detailed observations to date. Until now scientists had been unable to establish whether the loss of the ice sheet had speeded up significantly since the 1990s. Using two independent measurement techniques, the latest study reveals that the melting accelerated rapidly over the period 2000-2008....

UK Telegraph 11-13-2009

Greenland ice cap disappearing at rate of 300 Lake Windermeres a year

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent

The Greenland ice cap is melting at triple the rate of just a decade ago – shedding the equivalent of nearly 300 Lake Windermeres a year and threatening millions of homes with flooding, claim British scientists.

UK Guardian  1-26-2011

Greenland ice sheet is safer than scientists previously thought

New study overturns fears that increased melting could lubricate the ice sheet, causing it to sink ever faster into the sea...


.********

This is just a small sampling of the reporting on the original stories. What is really pathetic is some of the original reporting on the story back in 2009. Here is a typical example from the Telegraph story.

Such is the change in the vast ice sheet that the loss of weight is actually changing its affect on the earth's gravitational pull, the study in Science claims.

One gigaton could provide enough water for 17 million people in Britain and is the volume of Lake Windermere, the country's biggest water mass.

The melting rate has been accelerating over the last decade and has more than tripled since the early 1990s.

While scientists cannot say that all the melting is caused by climate change, they believe this is "very, very compelling evidence" that man-made global warming is affecting the world's ice sheets.

It could cause major coastal flooding could happen every five years – instead of every hundred.

About 1.2 billion people live in coastal areas around the world and they could be "devastated" by the rise in sea levels if the ice cap, which covers 1.71 million kilometres.

Professor Jonathan Bamber, the lead author at Bristol University, said: "When you put it into context how much ice is melting each year is very alarming.

"One gigaton is the same as a billion tonnes of water. Four of them could provide the domestic water supply for the whole of the UK.

"What is very worrying is that the speed of melting is increasing. Ice caps are like supertankers. Once they start moving in one direction is takes a lot to stop them."(emphasis mine)

I guess they will all be writing major retractions to their previous reporting....oops I forgot I was talking about the world media elites. 

Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts

FROM-Forbes

Larry Bell,

The media owe us better coverage on the climate than alarmism.

As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming "Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed"? Or "NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril"? Or even anything bad that isn't blamed on anthropogenic (man-made) global warming--of course other than what is attributed to George W. Bush? (Conveniently, the term "AGW" covers both.)

Remember all the media brouhaha about global warming causing hurricanes that commenced following the devastating U.S. 2004 season? Opportunities to capitalize on those disasters were certainly not lost on some U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change officials. A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced "Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity."

But there was a problem. Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim--not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin. After receiving no replies, he publicly resigned from all IPCC activities. And while the press conference received tumultuous global media coverage, Mother Nature didn't pay much attention. Subsequent hurricane seasons returned to average patterns noted historically over the past 150 years, before exhibiting recent record lows with no 2010 U.S. landfalls.

Much global warming alarm centers upon concerns that melting glaciers will cause a disastrous sea level rise. A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water "racing to the sea." Commentators urgently warned that continued recession would be catastrophic.

Helheim's "erratic" behavior reported then was recently recounted again in a dramatic Nov. 13 New York Times article titled "As Glaciers Melt, Science Seeks Data on Rising Seas." Reporters somehow failed to notice that only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed. Satellite images revealed that by August 2006 Helheim had advanced beyond its 1933 boundary.

According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern. Although Greenland has recently been experiencing a slight warming trend, satellite measurements show that the ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year. Temperatures only recently began to exceed those of the 1930s and 1940s when many glaciers were probably smaller than now. (We can't be certain, because satellites didn't exist to measure them.)

A recent study conducted by U.S. and Dutch scientists that appeared in the journal Nature Geoscience concluded that previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double. Earlier projections apparently failed to account for rebounding changes in the Earth's crust following the last Ice Age (referred to as "glacial isostatic adjustment").

Nils-Axel Morner, head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, argues that any concerns regarding rising sea levels are unfounded. "So all this talk that sea level rising, this comes from the computer modeling, not from observations. ... The new level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years. ... But they [IPCC] need a rise, because if there is no rise, there is no death threat ... if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there 'must' be a focus on global warming. ... That is really bad, because you start asking for the answer you want to get."

Studies by the International Union for Quaternary Research conclude that some ocean levels have even fallen in recent decades. The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.

Other world climate alarm bells chimed when it was reported in the media that September 2007 satellite images revealed that the Northwest Passage--a sea route between the U.K. and Asia across the top of the Arctic Circle--had opened up for the first time in recorded history. (This "recorded history" dates back only to 1979 when satellite monitoring first began, and it should also be noted that the sea route froze again just a few months later (winter 2007-2008).

The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before. Diary entries of a sailor named Roald Amundson confirm clear passage in 1903, as do those of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Arctic patrol crew that made regular trips through there in the early 1940s. And in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand). The errors were attributed to faulty sensors on the ice.

But these aren't the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.

Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children's book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be "easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer." Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it's mostly their parents' fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.

Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don't we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?

Weekly columnist Larry Bell is a professor at the University of Houston and author of Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax, which will be released on Jan. 1, 2011. It can be previewed at: www.climateofcorruption.com..

Why the BBC cannot be trusted on 'Climate Change': the full story

FROM-UK Telegraph

By James Delingpole

When the history of the greatest pseudoscience fraud in history -aka “Climate Change” – comes to be written, no media organisation, not even the Guardian or the New York Times, will deserve greater censure than the steaming cess pit of ecofascist bias that is the BBC. That’s because, of all the numerous MSM outlets which have been acting as the green movement’s useful idiots, the BBC is the only one which is taxpayer funded and which is required by its charter to adopt an ideologically neutral position.

How then has it managed to breach its social responsibility so frequently and flagrantly?...

Read entire article here

Duh....dumb...Dishonest

This article in the Daily Mail -H/T Climate Depot, further illustrate the absolute complete lack of common sense (not to mention the lack of scientific and journalistic integrity) that the global warming debate continues to inhabit. Let's Look at the article.

Environmentalists 'exaggerated' threat to tropical rainforests from global warming

By David Derbyshire

The threat to tropical rainforests from climate change may have been exaggerated by environmentalists, according to a new study.

Anyone surprised?

They believe that a wetter, warmer future may actually boost plants and animals living the tropics.

Researchers have shown that the world's tropical forests thrived in the far distant past when temperatures were 3 to 5C warmer than today.

Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama examined pollen trapped in rocks in Colombia and Venezuela before, during and after the PETM.

They found that the amount of plant-life in the forests increased rapidly during the warming event with new plant species evolving much more quickly than the older species became extinct.

What? plant life increased and evolved quicker in hotter climates! Stop the presses, the world is not coming to an end!

Pollen from the chocolate family and passionflower plant family were found for the first time.
The extreme warm spell - called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum - saw global temperatures soar by 6C (11F) within a few thousand years.

The cause of the PETM is unknown.....

But the unknown doesn't fit the narrative now does it?

... However, some scientists believe it was triggered by the release of vast amounts of carbon dioxide from volcanic activity over a few thousand years.

Ah we knew our intrepid scientist couldn't let this get too far off the narrative, even if they don't know, so of course they choose to hypothesize out of thin air, excuse the pun- that it was caused by carbon dioxide. Wow what a surprise. But here is where we go from the typical dumb to the dishonest.

The injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere set off a spiral of events that warmed the climate and led to even more greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere, they say.

Now let's think real hard here, what is the excuse so often given by our climate science community of why global temperatures would not increase as expected? What is the natural event that these wizards of deception always point to as a mitigating factor that would over ride the demon CO2? Why of course we all know it is large volcanic explosions! In fact there is a great deal of scientific chatter about this a couple of examples;

Solar radiative forcing at selected locations and evidence for global lower tropospheric cooling following the eruptions of El Chichón and Pinatubo


Global Cooling After the Eruption of Mount Pinatubo: A Test of Climate Feedback by Water Vapor

And you got to love this little note from an article which has a section called  EXAMPLES OF GLOBAL COOLING IN THE AFTERMATH OF HISTORIC ERUPTIONS:


PINATUBO (1991) -- Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines on June 15, 1991, and one month later Mt. Hudson in southern Chile also erupted. The Pinatubo eruption produced the largest sulfur oxide cloud this century. The combined aerosol plume of Mt. Pinatubo and Mt. Hudson diffused around the globe in a matter of months. The data collected after these eruptions show that mean world temperatures decreased by about 1 degree Centigrade over the subsequent two years. This cooling effect was welcomed by many scientists who saw it as a counter-balance to global warming.

So volcanoes cool the atmosphere today but during the ancient PTM period, they warmed it, got it? Let's carry on to the bitter end of this article

The researchers believe the hotter, wetter conditions - and additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - boosted plant-life and increased biodiversity.

What is this sacrilege, additional carbon dioxide boosts biodiversity! Say it ain't so, this is too good to be true, a hotter wetter carbon dioxide rich world is good for life! They must be pulling our chain, this can't be!

The findings could shed light on man-made global warming caused by the release of carbon dioxide from burning coal and destroying forests.

Wait a minute, what just happened? I thought global warming and carbon dioxide was...was good for plant life and now it's destroying forests. Let's read those two paragraphs together again.

The researchers believe the hotter, wetter conditions - and additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (go that?) - boosted plant-life and increased biodiversity (got that?) So what do they derive from this?...The findings could shed light on man-made global warming caused by the release of carbon dioxide from burning coal and destroying forests.

So you see! The volcanoes millions of years ago that caused global warming now cause global cooling and the carbon dioxide produced by coal kills forests while the carbon dioxide produced by those once upon a time volcanoes boosted plant-life and increased biodiversity, got it?  Honest to goodness that is what they are saying.

'It is remarkable that there is so much concern about the effects of greenhouse conditions on tropical forests,' said Dr Klaus Winter of the institute.

Conservative computer models of climate change suggest the world will warm by at least 2C over the next century.

The computer models may be conservative, but the people feeding them sure ain't..sorry

'However, these horror scenarios probably have some validity if increased temperatures lead to more frequent or more severe drought as some of the current predictions for similar scenarios suggest."

Well being as history as revealed in the study that this article is about leads to the exact opposite conclusion the only logical thing to do is to create horror scenarios in order to keep the gravy train growing

British forest expert Dr Simon Lewis of Leeds University said warmer, wetter weather could boost rain-forests. However, if climate change led to more droughts, it could be disastrous for regions like the Amazon.

Well of course we have to throw in the "if climate change led to more droughts" what's a good horror or is it whore....never mind what is a good scenario without a bunch of ifs.

In the last five years, the Amazon has experienced two 'one in a century' droughts, he said.

'The 2005 Amazon drought was widely characterised as an unusual 1-in-100 year event, which caused tree deaths leading to rotting trees releasing over four billion tonnes of carbon dioxide,' he said.

'And now in 2010, another drought has stuck, which initial analyses show is more extensive than 2005, even though it is only five years later.

'These droughts are consistent with model projections showing a die-back of the Amazon, further accelerating climate change in a dangerous loop.

So why are you writing this story ? The study  found that in the past real world "hotter, wetter conditions - and additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - boosted plant-life and increased biodiversity" what is the point if your models are so much superior to the historical record why even bother?

'The new paper is useful, but doesn’t address present-day concerns of drought-impacts that affect the forest itself and the millions of people who live there.'

The speed of modern day man-made climate

Ah that's it, it's just about explaining away the reality of the world and the study so that the narrative can stay intact. Good job duh...dumb...dishonest-David Derbyshire

At Last, the Climate Extremists Try To Debate Us!

A desperate warmist movement tries vainly to debunk a Monckton lecture, but they're messin' with the wrong Viscount. "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you ... "

FROM-Pajamas Media

by Christopher Monckton

One of the numerous Goebbelian propaganda artifices deployed by the now-retreating climate extremist movement has been the careful avoidance of any debate with anyone on the skeptical side of the case who happens to know anything about climate science or economics.

As the extremists lose the argument and become more desperate, that is changing.

John Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at a Bible college in Minnesota, has recently issued — and widely disseminated — a hilariously mendacious 83-minute attempted rebuttal of a speech I delivered about the climate last October in St. Paul, Minnesota.

So unusual is this attempt actually to meet us in argument, and so venomously ad hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, delivered in a nasal and irritatingly matey tone (at least we are spared his face — he looks like an overcooked prawn), that climate-extremist bloggers everywhere have circulated them and praised them to the warming skies.

As usual though, none of these silly bloggers make any attempt actually to verify whether what poor Abraham is saying actually has the slightest contact with reality.

One such is George Monbiot, a scribbler for the the Guardian, the British Marxist daily propaganda sheet. What is Monbiot’s qualification to write about climate science? Well, like Abraham, he’s a “scientist.” Trouble is, he’s a fourteenth-rate zoologist, so his specialty has even less to do with climate science than that of Abraham, who nevertheless presents himself as having scientific knowledge relevant “in the area.”

Here’s the thing. All of the sciences are becoming increasingly specialized. So most scientists — the snake-like Abraham and, a fortiori, the accident-prone Monbiot among them — have no more expertise in predicting or even understanding the strange behavior of the complex, non-linear, chaotic object that is the Earth’s climate than the man on the Clapham omnibus.

They pretend otherwise, of course. Almost four years ago, when I wrote a 2500-word article in the Sunday Telegraph pointing out that the notion of a very large climate warming attributable to future increases in CO2 concentration was scientifically ill-founded, Monbiot wrote a scathing 1800-word response in the Daily Kommissar, in which he made a dozen laughably elementary scientific errors.

Monbiot made the mistake of pretending that he understood the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, of which he had plainly not previously heard.

Here it was I who had the advantage: before writing the article in the Telegraph I had spent three months tracking the equation down, because — though it converts changes in the flow of radiation at a planetary surface to changes in temperature, and is therefore essential to discovering how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will deliver — the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 climate assessment reports do not mention it once.

And why not? Well, put simply, the equation shows that at the temperatures prevailing on Earth you need a very large increase in radiative flux to achieve a pathetically small increase in temperature. That’s not the sort of thing the climate extremists want known, so they carefully don’t mention it, which is one reason why puir wee Moonbat hadn’t heard of it.

Ever since I compelled the Daily Apparatchik to publish a letter from me correcting Monbiot’s invincible ignorance of elementary planetary physics and undergrad math, Monbiot has seized every chance to have a go at me whenever one of his climate extremist comrades asserted that I’d gotten something wrong.

And how he crows at the news of Abraham’s “evisceration” of my Minnesota speech.

Abraham’s approach is novel. He’s saying not that I got one thing wrong, but that I got just about everything wrong. A couple of pointers: first, it’s now June 2010, and I spoke in October 2009, almost eight months ago. I’ve made a lot of speeches since. Why has it taken Abraham so long to cobble together his ramblings?

The answer — and, as I shall show, it is the right one — is that his deliberately dishonest personal attack on my integrity and reputation is an ingenious fiction. He knows it, and he has therefore had to go to some elaborate and time-consuming lengths to do his inept and socially inadequate best to conceal the steps he has taken to hide the truth and make his nonsense look plausible.

Secondly, during the eight months of “investigation” (Abraham’s word) that he carried out, at no single point did he ever contact me to ask me to clarify one of the numerous references which, he said over and over again, were not clear in my slides. More...

That failure on his part to check with me when he could not find the sources of my data was clearly deliberate. He didn’t want to give me any advance notice that he was planning to launch a widely disseminated attack on me, because otherwise I might have pointed out his errors to him in advance, and that would have made it a great deal more difficult for him to get away with publishing them.

In a short space I won’t have time to cover more than a representative selection of Abraham’s errors (but a comprehensive rebuttal will be coming, I assure you). Let’s begin, though, with the question of sources.

“Monckton’s data don’t even agree with themselves”

Abraham says I displayed two graphs, both citing NOAA as the source, showing the downward global mean surface temperature trend since 2001, but — by an elaborate point-by-point comparison — he shows that the two graphs are slightly different from one another. Why, he asks, can’t I even make sure that my own data agree with themselves? His implication is that presenting temperature data is something that laymen really can’t be expected to get right.

What Abraham has done, here as elsewhere, is to wrench my data deliberately out of the context in which I actually (and accurately) presented then, and then to lie about it.

The truth is that the first graph, plainly labeled “scienceandpublicpolicy.org”, is the SPPI’s well-known global temperature index, compiled monthly from four separate global temperature datasets, as Abraham well knew because I explained in my talk. It was not a NOAA graph, and was not labeled as such. Naturally, therefore, it differed at some points from the NOAA graph.

Abraham went on and on about how a graph shouldn’t have been labeled with the name of an institution such as “scienceandpublicpolicy.org” unless it was that institution that had compiled the graph. That, of course, as he could have discovered if he had bothered — or rather, dared — to check, was indeed the institution that had compiled the graph, taking the arithmetic mean of the global temperature anomalies from the HadCRUt, NCDC, RSS, and UAH datasets.

But — and this was the point I made, though Abraham was remarkably careful not to say so — I had showed the SPPI’s four sources graph in testimony before Congress, to show that there had been global cooling for seven or eight years. Tom Karl, the director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, who had been present, had failed to admit after questioning from a leading congressman that global temperatures had indeed been falling for the best part of a decade. He had wriggled and waffled.

So the congressman had asked me to write proving my result, and I had done so by intentionally preparing the second graph from Tom Karl’s own NCDC — as he was the subject of the questioning. The graph was labeled as such, and also showed a pronounced downtrend in global temperatures.

Abraham knew this, because I had said so in my talk.

But he also knew that practically no one watching his 83-minute presentation would go to the lengths of looking up what I had actually said. He knew he could get away with a flagrant and deliberate misrepresentation — provided that at all points he was careful never to consult me while planning and circulating his attack.

“Monckton’s data are not properly sourced”

Even when the source is in fact plainly stated on my slides, Abraham is prone to say I have not provided the source. I had shown a graph, which I had said was compiled by satellite, of temperatures at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, where there has been no warming for 30 years.

The graph was plainly labeled “UAH”.

Which, as a mere Bible college lecturer in fluid mechanics might not know, but anyone with any real knowledge of climate science would of course know — is the University of Alabama at Huntsville, one of only two organizations producing regularly published satellite-based global temperature records.

Another instance: Abraham said I had done a search because I was bored, and had found that between the beginning of 2004 and the beginning of 2007 just 539 papers containing the search phrase “global climate change” had been published, and that not one of them had provided any evidence for any catastrophic consequence of any anthropogenic warming anywhere. However, he had searched Google Scholar and had found 628,000 references, a few of which, he said, showed catastrophic consequences of “global warming.”

The truth is entirely different. First, I am never bored when I am present. What I actually said in my talk — and Abraham knows this, because he spent eight months trying to take it apart — was that “I’m boring that way — I check things.” And I had checked the climate extremists’ claims of catastrophe by consulting a paper by Klaus-Martin Schulte, published in 2008. The extract from the paper was labeled “Schulte, 2008” on my slide — in quite large letters.

It was not I, but Schulte, who had done the search, as I had said in my talk.

It was not Google Scholar (most of whose sources are not peer-reviewed papers), but the ISI Web of Science database of peer-reviewed, learned journals that Schulte searched, as I had said in my talk.

It was not the “containing all of the words” search option that Schulte had used — though that is the option Abraham used! — but the “exact phrase” option, which returned only 539 papers.

If Abraham had had the courtesy to check with me or to look up Mr. Schulte’s paper on the Web of Science database — to which his Bible college subscribes — he would have found that Mr. Schulte used this phrase because Naomi Oreskes, a science historian, had previously used the same phrase in researching climate papers up to the end of 2003. Schulte had carried her research forward to mid-February 2007, and his paper had been published in 2008.

Abraham then trots out various papers he found in his Google Scholar search, one of which says that the world is warming because of human activities: but that was not the point made in my slide.

My point was that not a single one of the 539 papers searched by Schulte had provided evidence for catastrophe.

Abraham also mentions a paper he found that talks about extinctions that are predicted as a result of “global warming.” But — though he may perhaps not have understood this, for many of his political stamp do not — prediction is not the same thing as evidence. The fact is that most of the predictions of the climate extremists and their overworked X-Box 360s and Playstation Vs have proven to be spectacular exaggerations.

“Gore was right and Monckton wrong about sea level”

The first slide of mine that Abraham criticizes is one in which I show the table of contributions to observed sea level rise from various sources as published in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and draw from it the conclusion that the measured contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to “global warming” is 6 cm/century, while Al Gore’s mawkish sci-fi comedy horror movie predicts 610 cm (20 feet) of imminent sea-level rise.

Abraham again artfully distorts or carefully omits what I actually said.

First, he says that the IPCC predicts 20-50 cm of sea level rise this century, not 6 cm. Well, yes it does, but the reason for the difference is that the IPCC’s figure (which still amounts to below 2 feet, not 20, and it’s actually rising at just 1 ft/century at present, if that) is for sea level rise from all sources, chiefly thermosteric expansion, not just from ice melt.

But Gore’s prediction of a 20 ft sea level rise is, as his movie makes quite clear, based on ice melt alone.

Abraham says Gore was right to worry about a very large rise in sea level because the IPCC specifically excludes ice melt from its calculations, saying it cannot yet be quantified.

No.

The IPCC specifically includes ice melt in its calculations, as the table on my slide showed, but it does add that “dynamic” effects of unpredictable but theoretically possible large-scale failure on the ice sheets are not taken into account.

Abraham says that if either Greenland or the West Antartic ice sheet were to melt, sea level would indeed rise by around 20 feet, and that, he says, is where Gore got his figure.

Just two problems with that.

First, the IPCC also says, on the very page quoted by Abraham, that even if there were a major collapse of the ice the Greenland ice sheet would not entirely disintegrate for millennia, a phrase that was also used in the IPCC’s 2001 report, where it was made plain that surface temperatures at least 2 Celsius degrees higher than today’s would have to persist for several millennia before either the Greenland or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt away.

True, the British Antarctic Survey disagrees with the IPCC and maintains that the WAIS is in imminent danger of collapse, but so far even the IPCC has not bought that alarmist story.

Secondly — as I said in my talk, but as Abraham very carefully failed to point out in his — both sides of this particular argument have been carefully heard in the impartial forum of the British High Court. The British government, unsuccessfully attempting to defend Gore on this point, had eventually been compelled — when confronted with what the IPCC actually says about several millennia — to concede that Gore’s 20 feet of sea level rise was a flagrant exaggeration.

And the judge’s finding could not have been blunter:

The Armageddon scenario that he [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view.

And that quotation, too, was on one of my slides, but Abraham carefully failed to mention it, or to check with me to find out how it was that the judge had come to that conclusion.

Nor, of course, did Abraham mention the slide in which I showed a picture of the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, with a map showing it to be just feet from the allegedly rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, and a statement that in 2005, the very year in which Gore was making up his alarmist movie, he had spent $4 million buying a condo there. Would he have bought that condo if he had seriously thought sea level would imminently rise by 20 feet? That, as my Latin grammar would put it, is a question expecting the answer “No.”

Well, I could go on. And on and on. And on and on and on. Just about every one of the 115 slides presented by Abraham in his shoddy little piece of lavishly funded venom contains serious, serial, material errors, exaggerations, or downright lies.

All I have been able to do here is to give you some flavor of how unscientific, inaccurate, and deliberately mendacious Abraham is. He is not only an ignoramus, but a cheat and a liar.

And he has spent a lot of someone’s money preparing and peddling his lies.

I have already initiated the process of having Abraham hauled up before whatever academic panel his Bible college can muster, to answer disciplinary charges of willful academic dishonesty amounting to gross professional misconduct unbecoming a member of his profession.

Keep an eye out at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. There, in due course, will appear the letter I am now drafting to Abraham, asking him several hundred pertinent questions designed to make him and anyone who may think of relying upon him understand that academic dishonesty and deliberate lying on this scale and with this amount of public circulation is just not acceptable and will not be tolerated.

Abe, baby, if you present yourself as “a scientist” — as you do throughout your talk — then it is as a scientist that you will be judged, found lamentably wanting, and dismissed. You may like to get your apology and retraction in early: for I am a Christian too, and will respond kindly to timely repentance.