It depends on what your definition of independence is-is

Climategate Stunner: NASA Heads Knew NASA Data Was Poor, Then Used Data from CRU

New emails from James Hansen and Reto Ruedy (download PDF here) show that NASA's temperature data was doubted within NASA itself, and was not independent of CRU's embattled data, as has been claimed.

FROM- Pajamas Media

Email messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered — by the top climate scientists within NASA itself — to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.

These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data.

Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007.
The reporter never published it.
—————————————
There are only four climate datasets available. All global warming study, such as the reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), must be based on these four.
They are: the NASA GISS dataset, the NCDC GHCN dataset, the CRU dataset, and the Japan Meteorological Agency dataset.

Following Climategate, when it became known that raw temperature data for CRU’s “HADCRU3″ climate dataset had been destroyed, Phil Jones, CRU’s former director, said the data loss was not important — because there were other independent climate datasets available.
But the emails reveal that at least three of the four datasets were not independent, that NASA GISS was not considered to be accurate, and that these quality issues were known to both top climate scientists and to the mainstream press.

In a response to reporter Doyle Rice of USA Today, Dr. Reto Ruedy — a senior scientist at NASA — recommended the following:

Continue using NCDC’s data for the U.S. means and Phil Jones’ [HADCRU3] data for
the global means. …
We are basically a modeling group and were forced into rudimentary analysis of global observed data in the 70s and early 80s. …
Now we happily combine NCDC’s and Hadley Center data to … evaluate our model
results.

This response was extended later the same day by Dr. James Hansen — the head of NASA GISS:

[For] example, we extrapolate station measurements as much as 1200 km. This allows us to include results for the full Arctic. In 2005 this turned out to be important, as the Arctic had a large positive temperature anomaly. We thus found 2005 to be the warmest year in the record, while the British did not and initially NOAA also did not. …

It should be noted that the different groups have cooperated in a very friendly way to try to understand different conclusions when they arise.

Two implications of these emails: The data to which Phil Jones referred to as “independent” was not — it was being “corrected” and reused among various climate science groups, and the independence of the results was no longer assured; and the NASA GISS data was of lower quality than Jones’ embattled CRU data.

The NCDC GHCN dataset mentioned in the Ruedy email has also been called into question by Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts. D’Aleo and Watts showed in a January 2010 report that changes in available measurement sites and the selection criteria involved in “homogenizing” the GHCN climate data raised serious questions about the usefulness of that dataset as well.

These three datasets — from NASA GISS, NCDC GHCN, and CRU — are the basis of essentially all climate study supporting anthropogenic global warming.

Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Duke University, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, Duke University Medical Center. Find him at http://chasrmartin.com, and on his blog at http://explorations.chasrmartin.com.

More...

One Flew over.....The Sequel

UN to review errors made by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

FROM-The Times

The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility.

A team of the world’s leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming.

The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world’s leading national science academies, including Britain’s Royal Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The review will be led by Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the Interacademy Council and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has been asked to investigate the internal processes of the IPCC and will not consider the overarching question of whether it was right to claim that human activities were very likely to be causing global warming.

The review, which will be announced in New York by Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, and Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, is expected to recommend stricter checking of sources and much more careful wording to reflect the uncertainties in many areas of climate science.

The IPCC’s most glaring error was a claim that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Most glaciologists believe it would take another 300 years for the glaciers to melt at the present rate.

It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

The allegations about climate scientists are believed to have contributed to a sharp rise in public scepticism about climate change. Last month an opinion poll found that the proportion of the population that believes climate change is an established fact and largely man-made has fallen from 41 per cent in November to 26 per cent.

The Met Office, which produces the global temperature record used by the IPCC in its reports, has proposed a separate review of its data after admitting that public confidence in its findings had been undermined.

The Met Office relies on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which is under investigation over allegations that its director manipulated raw data and tried to hide it from critics.




More...

A picture is worth...how many ppm?

I went to Google Image and entered CO2 and on the first page among others I was shown these photos:






















I went through the first twenty pages and was shown plenty of graphs, more smokestacks a few guns (air pistols) even some penguins but I did not run across one picture like this.


I was kind of hoping for some pictures of trees and plants but with the exception of some pretty cool chart representations of the carbon cycle, flora and fauna were pretty much missing from Google Worlds pictorial record of carbon dioxide.

So I tried typing in carbon dioxide with similar results, although I did get this nice representation of carbon dioxide from Tree Hugger which was in an article titled "Carbon Dioxide Production Much Faster than Originally Anticipated"



Spooky huh?

Of course as we all know(?)Carbon dioxide is colorless and odorless so although there is definitely Carbon Dioxide in those pictures, you can not really see it, ever wonder how many people know that? As a matter of fact over 95% of all atmospheric carbon dioxide has nothing whatsoever to do with tailpipes or smokestacks or man at all-it's what the environuts call..."natural". In fact if you wanted a truer picture of CO2 emissions you would not use a smokestack you would use a picture like this:




Since decaying trees etc create far more CO2 than our planes, trains, automobiles and even Al Gore's smoke stacks. I mean we are not talking about a close race here, by about a factor of ten the Autumn picture out produces the Tree Hugger picture as a true representation of CO2 in the atmosphere. Interesting that an organization dedicated to trees would not only slight the object of their affections from their true benefit in "nature", they seem to ignore the fact that trees themselves would die very quickly without the very element they are hell bent on vilifying whether man made or otherwise.




More...

STOP THE PRESSES !

Sanity in the Main Stream Media

Editorial: Global warming challenge

FROM-OC Register

The possibility of suspending California's Global Warming Solutions Act, a law unlikely to change temperatures but certain to wreak economic havoc, appears to have increased dramatically.

Two large Texas-based refineries have pledged as much as $2 million to pay for signature-gathering to place an initiative on the November ballot that would suspend the global warming law if passed by voters, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing Sacramento sources.

California refineries of the two companies, Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp., would be forced to slash greenhouse gas emissions. But the initiative would delay implementation until unemployment level drops to 5.5 percent for at least a year.

Unemployment is now at 12.4 percent.
The last thing California needs is an unnecessary law that drives up costs for businesses, prices for consumers and could send many of both fleeing the state.

The Times reported Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had asked businesses not to support the ballot measure. The initiative is sponsored by Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Linda, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Granite Bay, and the People's Advocate, a Sacramento-based anti-tax group. They have until April 24 to gather 433,971 valid signatures.

It's time the public vote on the increasingly questionable theory underlying California's law. Leaked documents have shown climate scientists paid by government grants may have rigged data, suppressed conflicting information and blocked skeptical scientists from inspecting their studies and submitting alternate theories.

Global warming alarmism would penalize huge economic sectors by forcing the purchase of government permits to emit greenhouse gases, while imposing other costly conditions to switch to uneconomical, taxpayer-subsidized alternative fuels.

The science behind the global warming is highly speculative. Several disclosures in recent months have shown many catastrophic claims were based on slipshod documentation, not peer-reviewed studies. A recent disclosure from Sweden's Goteborgs Universitet showed only 62 percent of sources cited by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were peer-reviewed in the its 2001 report.

Meanwhile, Dr. Phil Jones, head of Britain's Climate Research Unit was forced to step down after thousands of leaked e-mails revealed he may have suppressed and altered data. He testified last week in the House of Commons that he withheld data of countries including Sweden because those nations' prohibited release. But he was almost immediately rebutted by the nonprofit Stockholm Initiative "for a rational climate policy," saying "All Swedish climate data are available in the public domain" and "that fact has been clearly explained to Dr. Jones."

Claims of catastrophic global warming are based on computer models derived from increasingly questionable data by a relatively small cadre of scientists, who have profited for years from government and private grants to study the alleged threat. We say, let's have a vote.

More...

The wind-energy cover-up

FROM-Washington Times

The Obama administration works with lobbyists to distort reality

By Chris Horner

Barack Obama promised many things on his way into office. Key among these was transparency and a vow to banish lobbyists from insider roles in the policy process.

Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Competitive Enterprise Institute has confirmed that both promises are being aggressively violated.

In 2008 and 2009, Mr. Obama told Americans on no fewer than eight occasions to "think about what's happening in countries like Spain [and] Germany" to see his model for successful "green jobs" policies, and what we should expect here.

Some Spanish academics and experts on that country's wind- and solar-energy policies and outcomes took Mr. Obama up on his invitation, revealing Spain's policies to be economic and employment disasters. The political embarrassment to the administration was obvious, with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs asked about the Spanish study at a press conference, and the president hurriedly substituted Denmark for Spain in his stump speech.

Team Obama was not amused, and they decided to do something about it. The crew that campaigned on change pulled out the oldest plan in the book - attack the messenger. The U.S. government's response to foreign academics, assessing the impact in their own country of that foreign government's policies, was to come after them in a move that internal e-mails say was unprecedented. They also show it was coordinated with the lobbyists for "Big Wind" and the left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP).

What emerged was an ideological hodgepodge of curious and unsupported claims published under the name of two young non-economist wind advocates. These taxpayer-funded employees offered green dogma in oddly strident terms and, along the way, a senior Obama political appointee may well have misled Congress.

Congress was naturally curious about how the administration would end up attacking foreign academics, so Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, asked how these unprecedented offensives were launched, given that National Renewable Energy Lab and the Energy Department immediately offered conflicting statements to the media and a congressional oversight office.

Mr. Sensenbrenner asked for details from Cathy Zoi, assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Department of Energy (DOE) and until recently, the CEO of Al Gore's climate-advocacy group. She dodged four pointed questions.

However, the documents we uncovered reveal that her office was fully aware of the answers to these questions, but elected to keep the information to itself.

What transpired is difficult to discern with precision, as DOE continues to withhold numerous responsive documents. But it is clear that senior staff in Ms. Zoi's office, and another under her authority, were told by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) of its concern over the foreign economic analysis because of the media and policymaker attention it was receiving.

The questions raised about green jobs also threatened the vast increase in Department of Energy spending to pursue green jobs. The Obama administration has poured cash into renewable-energy efficiency and renewable energy with abandon. One such program at the department has grown from a budget of $1.7 billion in 2008 to $18 billion in 2009.

What is clear is that the Department of Energy then worked with Center for American Progress and the industry lobby AWEA to produce an attack that would serve all their interests.

That may not be all because we have appealed energy's decision to withhold numerous documents. Incredibly, it refuses to release documents exchanged between it and the pressure group CAP and lobbyist AWEA on the grounds that these are "inter-agency memoranda."

So, lobbyists and lavishly funded political advocacy groups are, for purposes of secrecy, mere extensions of the Obama administration. Transparency in the Age of Obama means so transparent, you can't see it.

Chris Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the best-selling "Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed" (Regnery, 2008).


More...

Methane Madness

FROM- American Thinker

By Jeffrey Folks

The environmentalist assault on economic growth resembles the old shell game practiced by con artists for centuries. Just when you're sure the pea will appear at the right, it shows up in the middle. Place your bet on the middle, and the pea appears somewhere else.

For decades now, alarmists have claimed that CO2 emissions are warming the earth past the "tipping point" and that only extreme reductions in the use of fossil fuels can avert catastrophe. Yet the earth today is less warm than it was in the middle ages, a period in which it cannot be claimed that human activity was contributing much, if anything, to global warming. Global temperatures in 2010 are colder than they were in 2000, despite a tripling of CO2 emissions in the last decade largely attributable to the mushrooming economies of developing nations such as China and India. Alarmists have been predicting catastrophe for over thirty years, yet the earth continues in natural cycles of warming and cooling, just as it has for eons.

Even before the exposure of factual errors and potential misconduct at the IPCC, the East Anglia Climate Centre, and other organizations, the public in America and elsewhere (Australia, New Zealand, and even Britain) had begun to doubt the claims of climate scientists. Now, with these disturbing revelations concerning the way climate science actually works, the public has become even more skeptical. Maybe that's why climate science has shifted its attention to methane.
On Jan. 14, 2010, the British newspaper the Guardian reported dramatic news of a major increase in the amount of methane leaking through arctic permafrost. Between 2003 and 2007, according to a study in Science cited by the newspaper account, there had been a 31% increase (or one ton per year, for a total of five tons) of methane released. Paul Palmer, the British scientist who reported these figures, stated that his study was based on satellite readings of groundwater depths, not on actual measurements of permafrost emissions.

The Guardian was quick to report that some in the scientific community believe that the earth has reached a "tipping point" from which temperatures will rise exponentially. Increased temperatures will then trigger rising oceans, raging storms, devastating floods (or droughts), and the end of civilization as we know it.

There are problems, however, with the "tipping point" theory. Even with the reported increase in arctic methane, the global buildup of methane has flattened out over the past decade. From 1983 to the present, methane levels have fluctuated from year to year, with an actual decline reported in the period between 2004 and 2006. NOAA scientists confess that they have yet to come up with an explanation for the discrepancy between an arctic tipping point theory and reported levels of methane.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the actual recorded level of methane in the atmosphere does not match the predictions of climate researchers aggregated by the IPCC. As of 2009, the atmospheric methane concentration was 1800 ppb, while the IPCC predicted a range averaging over 1850 ppb -- a significant difference. Extrapolating ten years into the future from IPCC projections and recently reported figures, the discrepancy in the model and actual readings would amount to 125 ppb.

The odd thing about the latest shift in environmental scare tactics is that it contradicts nearly everything we have been told about CO2 emissions. Just two years ago, at a time when most of the public actually believed that the use of fossil fuels was responsible for global warming, we were told that fossil fuels must go. Power plants must stop burning coal; oil and natural gas must be replaced with solar and wind; industries must be shuttered; agricultural practices must be radically altered; land use must be restricted. But now that that concern has lessened, the shell game is up and running again. Fossil fuels alone, we are told, may not alter temperatures all that much. The danger is that the use of fossil fuels will warm the planet just enough to reach the "tipping point," and that at that point, billions of tons of methane will come gushing out of the arctic permafrost. Then, much to the delight of the alarmists, the much-heralded catastrophe will actually arrive, but it will be too late to do anything about it.

Unfortunately for the alarmists, this argument has all the marks of desperation. Even climate scientists, whose lucrative salaries and grant monies depend on promotion of the theory of global warming, note that arctic sources constitute only two percent of methane emissions.

Those same scientists admit that five years of data are not indicative of a long-term trend. Even if a trend is underway, a five-year increase of 31% in permafrost release amounts to an increase of less than two-thirds of one percent in global methane emissions. That is not enough to flood the 25% of the Netherlands that lies beneath sea-level, especially since methane is cleansed from the atmosphere by reaction with the hydroxyl free radical (OH).

Global temperatures are now trending downward, so it is reasonable to conclude that the short-term trend in permafrost melting will be reversed. There is also another huge problem with the new methane alarmism: even if CO2 and methane emissions continue to rise (most of them from natural sources), there is no conclusive evidence that these emissions are significantly altering the earth's climate. It is possible, in other words, but not proven that man-made global warming is real. It is possible but not proven that human activity may be a significant factor in global warming. It possible but not proven that global warming will increase arctic methane emissions. Even though these emissions constitute a small percentage of global methane, it is possible but not proven that they will bring about a global catastrophe. It is also possible, and far more likely, that variations in the climate are largely the result of natural forces.

It appears that environmental activists have once again shifted the pea around, hoping that no one will notice.

Dr. Jeffrey Folks taught for thirty years in universities in Europe, America, and Japan. He has published many books and articles on American culture and politics.
More...

40 Years Later: Air Quality Has Never Been Better

Via-CARPE DIEM: 40 Years Later: Air Quality Has Never Been Better



More...

And Real Scientist Say.....?

Global Warming has no impact on Himalayas claims Wadia Director

FROM-Hindustan Times

Senior scientists at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WITG) has rejected the Global Warming Theory and told that the Himalayas are quite safer zone on earth, where Global Warming has no role in controlling the conditions.

In an exclusive chat with HT, Director WIHG Dr AK Dubey has said that the conditions of Himalayas are controlled by the winter snowfall rather than external factors like much hyped Global Warming. He told that for a concrete result, at least 30 years of continuous research with steady outcome is needed to confirm the actual impact.

"According to a data for over 140 years available with a British weather observatory situated in Mukteswar (2311m) in Almora has actually revealed that temperature in that region witnessed a dip of .4 degrees," he said.

Since 1991, the institute is monitoring the Himalayas extensively with focusing the glacial studies and last twenty year data has never witnessed a continual retreat. Sometimes, the recession rates have gone up but on an average the rate is very much safer, he added.

Whatever predictions about Himalayas are being made are based on short-term studies conducted on glaciers, which have no comparison with Himalayan Glaciers, he told. "Our glaciers are giant high altitude glaciers above 4000m altitude with a permanent temperature below 20 degrees Celsius. And has no comparison with the Alps Glaciers or Alaskan Glacier which are at sea level," he said.

Dr. DP Dobhal, eminent glaciologist added that however there is a change in climate in terms of shrinking of winter period but still a lot is dependent upon the snowfall occurs. Currently the rate of recession is in between 16-20 meters a year for glacial retreat in Himalayas, whereas 30 percent of the glaciers are more than 10km in length, he said.

**********

Please note this comment:

"Our glaciers are giant high altitude glaciers above 4000m altitude with a permanent temperature below 20 degrees Celsius"

Do you think the same factors may apply to places like...I don't know let's say Antarctica where the average summer temperatures range between -15 to -35 C


More...

Time for climate change reality check

FROM-The Union

Russ Steele

Now that we know the UN IPCC climate change reports are the result of scientific fraud, claiming that humans cause global warming, it is time for a reality check. You can make your own assessment from the news, but what are your children being taught about global warming in their schools? Are your children's teachers telling them that humans are responsible for global warming? Or, are they attributing climate change to natural climate cycles? Are you sure?

A year ago, I sent e-mails to all the Nevada County school superintendents, asking if their schools were teaching students about climate change. If climate change was being taught in the classroom, were the presentations balanced and giving both point of view? Were both human caused warming and natural cycle theories being presented and discussed?

Those superintendents who answered back, about 25 percent, said it was up to teachers to decide what to teach about climate change. Not having any children in schools to ask, I dropped my investigation.

Now that the wheels are coming off the global warming wagon, and we now know that the whole climate change scare was really a hoax perpetuated by some agenda driven climatologists in the U.S. and the U.K. It is time for another attempt to get at the facts? What are the schools teaching our children? Are they telling them the truth? Or are they continuing to be propaganda agents for the government?

Looking at the materials available to help teachers with science questions, I discovered a NASA Web site that is trying to convince your children that you, your neighbors and all humans are responsible for climate change. The Web site (climate.nasa.gov/kids/bigQuestions/climateChanging) uses emotional pictures of little animals, polar bears, and simulations of sea level rise to scare your children.

NASA ties the rise in CO2 to human activity, claiming it is now higher that anytime in the last 650,000 years. But, if you go back 500 million years and carbon levels were not just 10 to 20 percent higher, they were 10 to 20 times higher, and not just for a fleeting decade or two, but for a staggering hundred million years.

According to NASA, the ice cores going back 650,000 years show CO2 level rose and fell along with temperatures, but they fail to tell the children that any warming occurred hundreds of years before the rise in CO2. It is not good science to hide the facts from students to promote a climate change hoax.

Also, this is the same lie that Al Gore used in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” This movie was based on data we now know is a result of scientific fraud. Are your children's teachers using Al Gore's movie and this NASA Web site in their classroom?

Are you sure?

It is time to ask your children's teachers some hard questions:

• What are they teaching about climate change?

• Are they teaching climate change is caused by human, or natural cycles?

• The science is not settled, so are they presenting both sides of the argument in a fair and balance way?

Here are some facts you should share with your children and their teachers about climate change:

• Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional. The warming during 1975-1998 is similar to that during 1910-1940 and 1860-1880.

• There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. Earth has been cooling for more than a decade, according to satellite temperature measurements.

• The Medieval Warm Period, about 1,000 years ago, was hotter than today, when the vikings were farming on Greenland, which is now covered with ice.

• Sea levels have been rising at rate of 1.6 mm/yr over the last 100 years, which translates into a sea level rise of about six inches by the year 2100.

In 2007 the record-low Arctic sea ice was not caused by global warming, but by wind currents that pushed a massive amount of thick, multiyear sea ice out of the Arctic basin into warmer Atlantic water, according to NASA.

• Analysis of Arctic ice core data demonstrates that CO2 concentrations have not played a significant role in the waxing and waning of past ice ages.

Continuing to the teach children that humans are responsible for climate change will lead them to question all science when the truth becomes known, and they discover they have been fooled by their teachers.

It is time for a reality check. What are your children or grandchildren being taught about global warming?
More...

What investigative Journalism used to look like

There is No Frakking "Scientific Consensus" on Global Warming: The Great Peer-Review Fairy Tale



More...

Bad Branches

In our litigant hungry society it is not at all surprising that indviduals would play the victim card and sue fossil fuel companies for their losses brought about by Hurricane Katrina, blaming global warming.

The class action suit brought by residents from southern Mississippi, which was ravaged by hurricane-force winds and driving rains, was first filed just weeks after the August 2005 storm hit.

"The plaintiffs allege that defendants' operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries in the United States caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming," say the documents seen by AFP.

The increase in global surface air and water temperatures "in turn caused a rise in sea levels and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina, which combined to destroy the plaintiffs' private property, as well as public property useful to them."

It is not that these indviduals are not victims of the terrible tragedy brought on by Katrina, I am sure they are and suffered as the result of the storm. But associating natural disasters to man made global warming and seeking to be compensated for it is something that in the past has been reserved for true victims of carbon dioxide such as polar bears.

The real villain here though is not Exxon-Mobil, BP, or the other defendants in this frivolous law suit, the real villain is ALGORE and his Malthusian environmental ilk who have endangered sanity.

Consider the lawsuit in relation to this new report commissioned by the World Meteorological Organization co-authored by scientist on both sides of the AGW debate which concluded:

. . . we cannot at this time conclusively identify anthropogenic signals in past tropical cyclone data.

So if the worlds foremost "experts" on the subject can not say that "man made" carbon dioxide "added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina", then what is the basis for the lawsuit?


Now do you think that ALGORE, Prince Charles, or any of the rest of our celebrated alarmist will be held legally responsible for their exaggerated claims? Will their hyperbolic deceptions ever be hauled before a court of law? How about the IPCC itself?

• About the past: “There is observational evidence for an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures

Or will their far less publicized qualifiers be their defense?

....There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater. Multi-decadal variability and the quality of the tropical cyclone records prior to routine satellite observations in about 1970 complicate the detection of long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity. There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones.”

So again if even the IPCC the alleged authority on all things warming says on the one hand "There is observational evidence for an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic" but on the other hand "There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones.”(Oh the settled science!) What is the basis for the lawsuit? The basis for the lawsuit is the narrative of man made global warming, is a narrative permissible in a court of law? Of course it is, the narrative of AGW was upheld by the Supreme Court itself and now the courts will be dealing with it for years to come. Won't that be fun.

It is doubtful that anyone will ever be held accountable for arguably the greatest scientific malfeasance, political coercion and economic waste in human history. Law suits will be filed, attorneys will be paid, companies will pass on these expenses to the consumer and life will go on. But where will justice come from?

The irony is that their emotional plea that we must act to save future generations in the end will be the alarmist severest punishment. As is the retribution for all famous scoundrels they will be rewarded with the judgement of history as having reeked havoc upon a generation of mankind for their own unfounded, self-serving claims. In the end they will be a shameful branch on the family tree of their descendants.

"Oh, Great Uncle Al was a bit off, ignore your classmates dear."

More...

Treason Is A Matter Of Dates

FROM-The American Interest Online

Walter Russel Mead

This observation, famously made by Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna as the powers debated the fate of the turncoat King of Saxony, reminded the crowned heads of Europe that all of them had at one time or another worked with Napoleon. Talleyrand himself had served the emperor as foreign minister and trusted ally before switching to the other side as Napoleon’s power waned — and his megalomania grew.

These days, it’s The New York Times that is redefining treason. Three weeks ago, anyone who pointed at the lack of public confidence in climate science was aiding and abetting those horrible climate ‘deniers.’ Treason against Planet Earth! You had to be some kind of dread ‘right wing blogger’ or talk radio host to point out that blunders and arrogance had undermined the credibility of climate scientists and ended any short term chance of serious global agreement on urgent measures to stop global warming.

But a story this morning by John Broder gently lets Times readers know that something has gone badly wrong.

WASHINGTON — For months, climate scientists have taken a vicious beating in the media and on the Internet, accused of hiding data, covering up errors and suppressing alternate views. Their response until now has been largely to assert the legitimacy of the vast body of climate science and to mock their critics as cranks and know-nothings.

But the volume of criticism and the depth of doubt have only grown, and many scientists now realize they are facing a crisis of public confidence and have to fight back. Tentatively and grudgingly, they are beginning to engage their critics, admit mistakes, open up their data and reshape the way they conduct their work

.

Admit mistakes? Open up their data? Change the way the work? You mean there was something wrong with the way climate science was operating last year? Is the Times telling us that the climate scientists–on the basis of whose work the whole world is debating complex and far-reaching changes in its economic structure and political governance–were using slipshod and careless procedures that need to be fixed?

Gosh, one has to ask, if these terrible things were going on for such a long time, why didn’t the New York Times notice this earlier on? Why didn’t the New York Times break this important story back when it was news, rather than lamely sweeping up at the end of the parade? Could it be that a climate of politically-correct group-think inhibited the editors and reporters at the country’s newspaper of record from recognizing a one of the major stories of the decade? Could the environmental writers at the Times be just a teensy bit too close to their sources?

The Times seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business. For years now ’skeptic’ has been a dirty word at the Times when the subject of climate change comes up. Excuse me, but reporters are supposed to be skeptics. They are supposed to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their mothers — but cut the cards. They are supposed to think that scientists are probably too much in love with their data, that issue advocates have hidden agendas, that high-toned rhetoric is often a cover for naked self interest, that bloviating politicians have cynical motives and that heroes, even Nobel Prize laureates, have feet of clay. That is their job; it is why we respect them and why we pay attention to what they write.

Reporters are not supposed to be wide-eyed gee-whiz college kids believing everything they hear and using the news columns of the paper to promote a social agenda. They are wet blankets, not cheerleaders, Eeyores, not Piglets and they can safely leave all the advocacy and flag-waving to the editorial writers and the op-ed pages.

This is not just a question of liberal bias. The same wide-eyed gee-whiz culture shaped much of the reporting on the run-up to the Iraq War. Maybe the word we are looking for when trying to describe what’s wrong with the mainstream press isn’t ‘liberal’ — maybe the term is something like ‘credulous’ or ‘naive.’ The gradual substitution of ‘professional journalists’ for the old hard boiled hacks may have given us a generation of journalists who are used to trusting reputable authority. They honestly think that people with good credentials and good manners don’t lie.

Today’s journalists are much too well-bred and well-connected to stand there in the crowd shouting “The emperor has no clothes!” They’ve worked with the tailors, they have had long background interviews with the tailors, they’ve been present for some of the fittings. Of course the emperor’s new clothes are fantastic; only those rude and uncouth ‘clothing deniers’ still have any doubts.

Meanwhile, over on the aforementioned op-ed pages, our old friend Al Gore is still crying a river of denial, blaming everyone but himself for the abject failure of the world to accept his views without checking the facts for themselves. If the New York Times and its peers had come at this story with more skepticism and rigor from the beginning, climate scientists would have realized long ago that if they hope to convince a skeptical world they need to be ultra-careful, ultra-cautious and even ultra-conservative in their public statements and recommendations. They would have understood long ago that because their science is important, they have to do it more carefully and more publicly than other people. That may be harsh and it may be ‘unfair’ in some sense, but when you are dealing with the interests of billions of people you have to expect a little bit of scrutiny — though not, apparently, from the New York Times.

The very idea that critics would have to use the Freedom of Information Act to pry back-up data from a scientist on a matter of great public importance is insane. That data should have been out there years ago, without anyone having to ask. If it’s considered ‘normal’ in climate science for researchers to keep their raw data under lock and key, and refuse to subject it to skeptical and hostile review, then climate science isn’t science.

The Times and its peers in the mainstream press need to ask themselves why something this obvious, this important, this newsworthy passed them by. If they don’t figure that out and make some wrenching changes, they will continue to watch helplessly as their credibility and readership inexorably shrink.

The meltdown that worries me most in this whole dismal story isn’t the meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers. It’s the evident meltdown of basic journalistic standards among a whole generation of reporters and editors that keeps me up late at night; I don’t just worry about what they missed on this story, or on the Iraq story–I wonder what else they are missing every day.

John Broder’s story this morning is good as far as it goes, but it looks more and more as if our greatest newspaper has been so wholly conquered by the spirit of enlightened upper-middle-class progressivism that it has lost the ability to view its own assumptions with the necessary skepticism. That is terrible news; the world is changing rapidly in ways that simply don’t fit the thought templates that upper-middle-class baby boomers developed over the last twenty years. Increasingly, the mental map that shapes the way the Times looks at the world simply fails to match what is happening out there, yet the Times seems less able than ever to see that.

Before you can report an inconvenient truth you have to be able to recognize it; this is the test that the Times‘ coverage of the ‘climategate’ story has failed.





More...

"Notable Quotes"

"Since the power generated by modern wind turbines is so unpredictable, conventional power plants have to serve as back-ups. Therefore, these run at far less than half power most of the time. That is terribly uneconomical – only at full power they have good thermal efficiency and minimal CO2 emissions per kWh delivered. Think also a moment of the cable networks needed: not only a fine-maze distribution network at the consumer end, but also one at the generator end. And what about servicing? How do you get a repair crew to a lonely hillside? Especially when you decided to put the wind park at sea? Use helicopters – now THAT is green …! "

source

Henk Tennekes
More...

Lysenkoism and James Hansen

FROM-Quadrant Online


by Bob Carter

March 3, 2010

Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?

On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer's day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.

He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that "the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders".

Hansen's testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic".

This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually.

Scientists and bureaucrats being only too human, the power of such sums of money to corrupt not only the politics of greenhouse, but even the scientific process itself, should not be underestimated. In recognition of these events, the term Hansenism is now sometimes used to describe the climate hysteria which had, until recently, gripped western media sources and political, business and public opinion in a deadly grasp.

Histories of science contain an account of the ideological control of Soviet biology during the mid-20th century by plant scientist Trofim Lysenko, who by 1940 had risen to be Director of the influential Institute of Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Lysenko and his supporters rejected the "dangerous Western concepts" of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution. They preferred the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics; for instance, that cows could be trained to give more milk and their offspring would then inherit this trait.

Whilst this was not an unreasonable hypothesis to erect in the early 19th century, by the 1930s the idea had been tested in many ways and was known to be wrong. Requiring its application to agricultural and allied biological research in the USSR was disastrous, not least in the vicious persecution of scientists that took place, and the legacy of this sad episode still disadvantages Soviet biology today.

Lysenkoism grew from four main roots:

a necessity to demonstrate the practical relevance of science to the needs of society;

the amassing of evidence to show the "correctness" of the concept as a substitute for causal proof;

noble cause corruption, whereby data are manipulated to support a cause which is seen as a higher truth; and

ideological zeal, such that dissidents are silenced as "enemies of the truth".

The first of these roots has been strongly represented in Australian government attitudes to the funding of science as far back as the 1980s. The remaining three roots exemplify closely the techniques that are currently used by global warming alarmists in pursuit of their aims – as recently exposed for all to see by the Climategate and IPCCgate scandals.
Lysenkoism damaged mainly Soviet science and society, whereas Hansenism has now been exerting its pernicious influence worldwide for more than twenty years. The climate alarmism involved has long been undermining the precious public trust from which science draws its traditional influence and sustenance, and now Climategate has opened up new sinkholes all over the place.

Hansenist climate alarmism has also damaged the standing of many leading science journals and science organizations, which have replaced their formerly careful editorial and organizational balance with environmental alarmism and naked global warming advocacy.

Future historians of science are likely to judge the 1988-2009 frenzy of climate change alarmism as even more damaging than Lysenkoism, because of the distrust that collapse of the global warming paradigm has already inculcated about using science to inform modern policy making.

Instead of exercising the leadership that is desperately needed to correct this, and to restore public faith in science and scientists, public utterances from Australia’s senior research advisors show that they have so far lost the plot that they are no longer even in the theatre.

Thus we have Megan Clark, CEO of CSIRO, boasting on Brisbane ABC 612 radio that “there are 40 CSIRO scientists on the IPCC panel”, as if this were something to be proud of. Meanwhile, the Chairman of Universities Australia, Peter Coaldrake, describes the Climategate scandal as “this tabloid decimation of science”. Next, Margaret Sheil, CEO of the Australian Research Council, has said she is deeply concerned about the backlash generated by emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit [and] the criticisms of Rajendra Kuma Pachauri, head of the IPCC. Finally, Chief Scientist Penny Sackett has, so far as I can determine, remained silent since her “me too” February 9th comment in support of an anodyne statement of blessing for climate sceptics issued by the U.K.’s chief scientist, John Beddington. How much influence the views of these independent scientists have had on Dr. Beddington can be judged from reading the apocalyptic study that he has just released regarding the effects of imaginary future climate change in Britain (Land Use Futures: Making the Most of Land in the 21st Century). This study is described in a letter by Dr. Gerrit van der Lingen in today’s Christchurch Press as:

A group of 300 ivory tower scientists, economists and planners in the UK, led by the British Government’s scientific advisor, have come up with a new apocalypse scenario, still based on the belief in catastrophic man-made global warming (February 27-28). They probably felt they had to do this because Climategate and the revelations of serious errors in the IPCC report have fatally exposed the man-made-global-warming scam. Their vision lacks any scientific credibility and totally ignores human nature. Their action is nothing more than a rear-guard action.

Moreover, Copenhagen has shown that the balance of world power has shifted to the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Western countries, including New Zealand and Australia were totally side-lined in Copenhagen. It is now extremely unlikely that an international climate agreement will ever be reached. Thanks to the BRIC countries, we can now all heave a sigh of relief.

Breathtakingly, in the light of all this, our Australian research managers’ expressed concern remains that the revelations of Climategate and IPCCgate have caused a public re-examination of the science of global warming, with a consequent shift in public opinion. Apparently they have nary a thought for the deep scientific malaise and malfeasance that has now been exposed for the whole lay world to see – part of which is being investigated currently in a British parliamentary committee investigation.

On the heels of revelations about meteorological data tampering overseas, irregularities have also been discovered in the way that Australian temperature data have been manipulated. And, across the Tasman, NIWAgate is developing apace, as the N.Z. National Institute of Water & Atmosphere battles to provide a parliamentary accounting for its historic temperature archive, which may yet prove to include the “dog ate my homework” excuse for the apparent absence of some records.

Yet no comment at all has been offered on any of this - and related matters of science ethics, procedures and policy - by Australia’s science leaders.

It is crystal clear that there is only one way to restore public confidence in climate policy and research in Australia, and that is for an independent and authoritative investigation to be carried out into the matter before an experienced judge assisted by scientifically expert counsellors.

As Senator Fielding’s four scientific advisors – all of whom are experienced and independent climate scientists – have recommended in their due diligence report (item 7) on the advice being provided to Climate Minister Wong by her department:

Parliament should defer consideration of the CPRS bill and institute a fully independent Royal Commission of enquiry into the evidence for and against a dangerous human influence on climate. We add ..... that the scientific community is now so polarised on the controversial issue of dangerous global warming that proper due diligence on the matter can only be achieved where competent scientific witnesses are cross-examined under oath and under strict rules of evidence”.

Bob Carter is a geologist and environmental scientist who studies ancient climate change.

(pictures not in original story)
More...

"Notable Quotes"

" Of course, the big farce there is that the notion, the thing that I said seven years ago, that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are causing catastrophic global warming just flat isn’t true, it is a hoax. And the general public now realizes, and the majority of the people understand this....."


source

SEN. JIM INHOFE
More...

Global Warming Causes Blizzards. Really?!

FROM-New American
Written by Charles Scaliger


Item: “There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm,” Bryan Walsh wrote in a February 10 Time magazine online article, commenting on the twin blizzards that buried Washington, D.C., within a few days of each other. He went on: “As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.”

Item: John M. Broder reported in the New York Times of February 10:

A federal government report issued last year ... pointed to the likelihood of more frequent snowstorms in the Northeast and less frequent snow in the South and Southeast as a result of long-term temperature and precipitation patterns. The Climate Impacts report, from the multiagency United States Global Change Research Program, also projected more intense drought in the Southwest and more powerful Gulf Coast hurricanes because of warming.
Item: “Deniers have long taken advantage of scientists’ cautious statements, and ‘Climategate’ breathed new life into the movement, but the science stands: warming is real, and it’s caused by human actions” — so said David A. Graham on February 12 for Newsweek online, under the heading “Anthropogenic Global Warming Is a Hoax,” one of several allegedly false conspiracy theories detailed in “Know Your Conspiracies: Newsweek’s guide to today’s trendiest, hippest, and least likely fringe beliefs.”
Correction: According to the very latest wisdom from the climate-change claque, the epochal blizzards that have hit the Northeast this winter in rapid succession are a likely consequence of global warming.

Really? As I was writing the first draft of this article, blizzard number two raged outside my window, combining wind and heavy snow to eventually deposit more than a foot of new white stuff on top of the nearly two feet visited on my zip code by the first storm. And these figures, coming from west-central Pennsylvania, are benign in comparison to the quantities of snow dumped on portions of Maryland and the Philadelphia and D.C. metropolitan areas during that same unforgettable stretch. The First Great Blizzard of 2010 set all kinds of snowfall records, including in the D.C. area. By the time the second had vented its wrath, parts of the Baltimore metropolitan area had received up to 50 inches of total snowfall from the two storms, amounts not seen in the mid-Atlantic since the Great Blizzard of 1888. Baltimore has already set new records for total winter snowfall, and many weeks of potential winter precipitation still lie ahead.

And it hasn’t just been the snow. December and January were unusually cold. In the wake of the first blizzard, temperatures plunged into the single digits for several nights in a row, ascending (in the bright sun) into the upper teens or low twenties by day. In short, if this is global warming, I’d hate to see what global cooling might entail!

Yet Time and the New York Times, among others, haven’t missed a beat in their latest contribution to what must be regarded as one of the most persistent mistaken orthodoxies in the history of science and politics. The argument, as Bryan Walsh explains, is that any spate of statistically anomalous severe weather is likely due to what is now being coyly styled “climate change.” The odds, argue global-warming acolytes, militate against unlikely events such as two record-breaking blizzards in rapid succession being caused by anything besides global warming.


Oh, so? What if the climate were in a cooling cycle? Or were the people who experienced the Little Ice Age a few hundred years ago (or the Big Ice Age a few millennia back, for that matter!) merely being vexed by persistent flurries? What, in point of fact, produced those massive glaciers that overwhelmed the northern portions of what is now the continental United States and all of Canada, if not snow, and lots of it? While it is true that warmer temperatures can produce heavier snow — as anyone who lives within range of lake-effect snow, which mostly falls before the Great Lakes freeze over or become too cold to generate the condensation responsible for heavy snow, can attest — we have been seeing both heavier snow and colder temperatures, both in the United States and in Europe, and not merely this winter, but for a number of winters running. No less an authority than Professor Phil Jones, former director of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, has admitted, according to the Daily Mail, that “for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.”

Ah, but weather and climate are two different things, insist the global-warming gurus. “It’s a mistake to use any one storm — or even a season’s worth of storms — to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of [this year’s] Winter Olympic Games … to global warming),” Walsh reminds his readers, in that infuriating way that global-warming pseudoscience has of avoiding falsifiability. “Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries.”

In other words, weather really isn’t a reliable indicator of long-term climate trends — but that isn’t going to stop Walsh and his ilk from making sweeping predictions and (which is much more important) insisting upon sweeping policy changes just in case they turn out to be right one of these millennia.

But quite aside from the vexing refusal of recent weather trends to cooperate with the gloomy prognoses of global-warming models, the credibility of the entire climate-change creed has been severely undermined by a cascade of recent revelations that climatologists have systematically massaged data and cooked statistics to produce politically desirable models. From the “Climategate” scandal — which has exposed the nauseating hypocrisy and duplicity of a whole gang of climatologists manufacturing “science” to fit the agenda of UN-connected environmental extremists — to the embarrassing disclosure that data on allegedly vanishing Himalayan glaciers was almost completely fabricated, the pseudoscience is finally being laid bare to public scrutiny.

None of which is to say that climate change is not occurring and has not occurred in the past. Quite the contrary: the historical and geological record both show inconvertibly that climate and weather patterns are in more or less constant flux, sometimes verging into drastic long-term shifts that create ice ages and warming epochs. At issue is whether such changes can be driven by human activity — as opposed to, say, sunspot cycles or other natural factors. The near-total absence of sunspot activity over the last decade has coincided with a return of significantly cooler winters both in North America and in Europe — in stark contrast to the active cyclicity of the eighties and nineties that coincided with a stretch of mild winters and hot summers. While correlation does not necessarily signify causation, the mass of evidence suggesting a link between sunspot activity and climate cycles certainly does not warrant the dismissive treatment of many climatologists determined to indict the human race for melting ice caps and sizzling summers. Whatever the case, the world’s climate is nowhere near either of the extremes attested by the geologic record; no glaciers are spilling across Eurasia and North America (as they did during the last Ice Age), nor do lush forests (or any trees at all) now grow on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic (as they did several million years ago during the late Tertiary, when the climate was up to 10 degrees C warmer than it is now). Not even the comparatively recent extremes of the Medieval Warming Period and the subsequent Little Ice Age have been breached (just ask any Dutchman whether any winter in living memory has produced wintry scenes like Pieter Brueghel’s famous ice skating tableau painted in the early 16th century).

In a word: Climate change happens. But with all due respect to the arrogant asseverations of Al Gore, Newsweek, and their Ph.D.-accredited epigones, the so-called science of anthropogenic or manmade global warming is far from settled.

President Obama, probably dismayed by the capacity of Mother Nature to shut down Washington, called the storms “Snowmageddon,” which media pundits were quick to seize upon. In a similar vein, the ancient Norse — drawing, perhaps, on some racial memory of climate change in the prehistoric past — insisted in their eschatology that the end of the world (Ragnarok, marked by warring among gods and men and great natural disasters) would be preceded by three great winters or “fimbulwinters.” The attribution of such forces of nature to divine wrath, while not scientific, at least has an internal logic that the doctrine of anthropogenic global warming — driven more by ideology than by level-headed science — lacks absolutely.

More...

Climategate: This Time It's NASA

FROM-The American Spectator

By Iain Murray & Roger Abbott

The "Climategate" scandal, which broke in November 2009, revealed what many skeptics had privately suspected. Prominent climate scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) had collaborated to keep data out of skeptics' hands, subverted the peer review process, and used questionable methods to construct the temperature record on which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) based its recommendations.

Now a new "Climategate" scandal is emerging, this time based on documents released by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in response to several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suits filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The newly released emails further demonstrate the politicized nature of climate science, revealing a number of questionable practices that cast doubt on the credibility of scientific data provided by NASA.

The emails reveal that GISS, like CRU, has done a poor job of preserving and managing its data. Although there is no evidence that GISS has destroyed its data, as CRU did in the late 1980s, Dr. Reto Ruedy of GISS admits in an email that "[The United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date." In another email, he reveals that NASA had inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis. "[NASA's] assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data… may not have been correct," he says. "Indeed, in 490 of the 1057 stations the USHCN data were up to 1C colder than the corresponding GHCN data, in 77 stations the data were the same, and in the remaining 490 stations the USHCN data were warmer than the GHCN data."

Unfortunately, it seems that the discrepancy privately highlighted by Dr. Ruedy was not coincidental, but part of a broader pattern of misrepresentation on the part of GISS. Between 2002 and 2005, GISS chief James Hansen issued press releases headlined "2005 Warmest Year in a Century;" "2006 was Earth's Fifth Warmest Year;" and "The 2002 meteorological year is the second warmest year in the period of accurate instrumental data." In other words, global warming is happening and that immediate action is necessary.

However, as Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre points out, these releases were inconsistent with other NASA documents that suggest that the warmest year in U.S. history was actually 1934. In response to McIntyre, Hansen emailed Dr. Donald E. Anderson, saying that, "If one wished to be scientific, instead of trying to confuse the public … one should note that single year temperatures for an area as small as the U.S. (2% of the globe) are extremely noisy." In a similar email to Dr. Anderson on August 14, 2007, Hansen described the previously touted temperature "records" as "minor," "negligible," and "less than the uncertainty."

In fact, further corrections revealed by the emails indicate that U.S. temperatures on average had only increased by 0.5 degree Celsius since 1934, rather than 1 degree, as originally claimed.

The released emails from both the University of East Anglia and NASA illustrate how far the "scientific consensus" on climate change has been politicized -- to the point of unreliability. Dependent on an alarmist atmosphere for continued government funding, state-sponsored scientific organizations have a strong incentive to hire ideologically committed partisans.

Taken together, these revelations all show that we actually know much less about the workings of the climate than politicized scientists and advocates like Al Gore say we do. Yet virtually all calls to "action" to prevent climate change are based on the belief that the extent to which greenhouse gases have overwhelmed natural forces in affecting the climate is a settled question.

Despite all this, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is forging ahead with its politically motivated finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare and need to be expensively regulated. Thankfully, as the evidence of the bankruptcy of much of the "settled" climate science continues to accumulate, public outcry may help bring this politically motivated agenda to an end.


More...

Al's latest global-warming whopper

FROM-NY Post

Alan Reynolds

Al Gore's defense of global-warming hysteria in Sunday's New York Times has many flaws, but I'll focus on just one whopper -- where the "Inconvenient Truth" man states the op posite of scientific fact.

Gore says, "The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere -- thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States."

It's an interesting theory, but where are the facts?

According to "State of the Climate" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "Global precipitation in 2009 was near the 1961-1990 average." And there was certainly no pattern of increasing rain and snow on America's East Coast during the post-1976 years, when NOAA says the globe began to heat up.

So what was it, exactly, that Gore's nameless scientists "have long pointed out"? A 2008 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Climate Change and Water," says climate models "project precipitation increases in high latitudes and part of the tropics." In other areas, the IPCC reports only "substantial uncertainty in precipitation forecasts."
In other words, the IPCC said that its models predicted some increases in rain or snow -- not observed them. And only in high latitudes or the tropics, which hardly describes New York or Washington, DC.

In fact, recent research actually contra dicts Gore's claims about "significantly more water moisture in the atmosphere."

In late January, Scientific American reported: "A mysterious drop in water vapor in the lower stratosphere might be slowing climate change," and noted that "an apparent increase in water vapor in this region in the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated global warming."
The new study came from a group of scientists, mainly from the NOAA lab in Boulder. The scientists found: "Stratospheric water-vapor concentrations decreased by about 10 percent after the year 2000 . . . This acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25 percent."

Specifically, the study found that water vapor rising from the tropics has been re duced, because it has gotten cooler there (another inconvenient truth). A Wall Street Journal headline summed it up: "Slowdown in Warming Linked to Water.

Moisture in the lower stratosphere (about 8 miles above the earth's surface) has been going down, not up.

Aside from clouds, water vapor accounts for as much as two-thirds of the earth's greenhouse-gas effect. Water vapor traps heat from escaping the atmosphere -- but clouds have the opposite effect (called "albedo") by reflecting the sun's energy back into space. And snow on the ground from the IPCC's predicted precipitation in high latitudes would have the same cooling effect as clouds.

What the new research suggests is that changes in water vapor may well trump the ef fect of carbon dioxide (only a fraction of which is man-made) and methane (which has mysteriously slowed since about 1990).

This raises an intriguing question: Since the Environmental Protection Agency declared that it has the authority to regulation carbon emissions because of their presumed effect on the global climate, why hasn't the EPA also attempted to regulate mist and fog?

Alan Reynolds, a Cato Institute senior fellow, is author of "Income and Wealth."

Maybe Gore Still Needs to Thaw

FROM- The American

By Jay Richards

Al Gore seems to have thawed out from the deep freeze that descended over Copenhagen in early December. In light of the embarrassing failure of the Copenhagen climate summit, the string of scientific blunders issued by the UN’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the scandalous behavior revealed in the Climategate documents, a well-grounded person might sound a little penitent. But not Al Gore.

In his Sunday op-ed in the New York Times, he has retained all of the chastising charm for which he is known. The Times was careful to edit out the sighs and the huffs, but you can still sense the presence of the irritated schoolmarm in the prose.

The point of the piece—of course—is that none of the trivialities about the crumbling credibility of the leading authorities and their demonstrated tendency to mislead the public do anything to weaken the absolutely certain scientific case that we are catastrophically warming the planet, and have to do something drastic—NOW.

So does he offer us new, improved scientific data? No. We get a summary of the same stuff my first grader tells me when I’m using too much hot water in the shower:

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants—especially carbon dioxide—have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting—and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

The first sentence confuses a hypothesis for a “finding.” The second sentence describes a mere correlation that no one disputes. The rest of the sentences are either highly debatable, false, or predictions rather than evidence.

But his argument really gets interesting when he challenges the rumor-spreading like wildfire among the lumpen proletariat—that the global temperature hasn’t much changed in the last ten years. Watch closely:

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

This sentence is a gem. Notice first the term of art, “since modern records have been kept.” The writer hopes you’ll read: “the hottest decade ever,” but that’s not what it says. It basically says it’s the hottest decade in the last century and half or so. But if he had said that, every attentive reader would have said: What about the decades prior to that? Was it hotter or colder then? And that’s just the sort of denialist reasoning Mr. Gore wants to prevent.

But I’m swatting at flies here. The truly stunning feature of the sentence is its use of logic. He’s trying to refute the claim that there’s been no warming in the last decade by claiming that … the last decade has been really hot. But, of course, even if the surface temperature had been a few million degrees during the last decade (that’s roughly the temperature Gore recently thought obtained a few miles below the Earth’s surface), that wouldn’t mean it had gotten hotter in the last decade. A pedantic logician would note that being hot and getting hotter are two different properties.

Perhaps the most significant revelation in Gore’s piece, however, is that he doesn’t realize that the rhetorical context of the debate has changed. Maybe he still needs to thaw out.
More...

"Notable Quotes"

"Prof Jones today said it was not 'standard practice' in climate science to release data and methodology for scientific findings so that other scientists could check and challenge the research."

It is standard practice in every proper science to release date and methodology in the greatest of detail so that every aspect of the research and of the argument can be 'falsified' (using the Popper meaning of the word).

That is how science works.
That is why science works.
Not to do so puts climate research at the level of iridology, homeopoathy, and alchemy.
Add political agenda, and finding, and you have a bastardised pseudo-science barely worth another look. Unscrupulous people making money out of the latest political bandwagon, to justify further taxation by this dreadful government.

Which many of us have suspected for a long time."

- PeterMac, Ronda, Spain,

Source-from comments to this article

More...

Green money, not green jobs

FROM-Washington Examiner

By: Star Parker

Van Jones is back, reconstructed and rehabilitated.

Jones, recall, departed from his White House job as "green jobs czar" after publicity about his association with a "9/11 truther" organization, which alleges complicity of the Bush administration with the Sept. 11 attacks.

He was already a lightening rod, having characterized President George W. Bush as a "crackhead," using profanity to describe Republicans, and offering gems like blaming "white polluters and white environmentalists" for "steering poison" to minority communities.

But, as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel understands that power brokers should "never waste a crisis," those on the Left grasp that you never waste an asset like a black self-described communist from the 1990s with an Ivy League degree and a best-selling "green jobs" book.

So now Jones has new jobs at Princeton University and Washington's Center for American Progress. And, to seal the public rehabilitation, he will be awarded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Image Award and has been called by NAACP President Benjamin Jealous a "national treasure."

Central to Jones' work will, of course, be the continuation of his "green jobs" agenda. The Center for American Progress announcement says he'll be a senior fellow and leader with its Green Opportunity Initiative.

CAP was founded by rich liberals who thought the Left needed a think tank as conservatives have (as they concluded they needed talk radio and hence founded the now defunct Air America).

One of the major sources of funding of CAP was Marion and Herbert Sandler, who got rich building Golden West Financial selling adjustable-rate mortgages with teaser rates to unsophisticated buyers. Yes, the very greedy kind of businesspeople that the Obama administration would have us believe caused our current economic crisis.

But the beauty of the Left is that facts will never get in the way of ideology.

The recent scandal associated with the use of research data at the Climate Research Unit in England -- which has been essentially the headquarters of global warming research -- has brought claims of man-made climate change into serious doubt.

Sober minds realize that this must be a time for reassessment about assumptions driving the belief that irreversible climate change has occurred and that this alleged change is caused by human activity.

As expressed in an editorial in Britain's Prospect Magazine, "We cannot rely on highly imperfect climate models as a basis for policy initiatives that cost billions and change how we live."

But this hasn't put a dent in the green jobs movement. President Obama continues to push this idea as central to economic recovery, as he did the other day speaking to chief executive officers at the Business Roundtable in Washington.

The love affair on the Left with "green jobs" is, of course, about ideology, which is why facts are irrelevant. It is another excuse to grow government and bring European socialism to America. What could be a better opportunity than to claim that the planet's atmosphere is now out of whack because of capitalism?

Jones is important because he uses environmentalism as a new platform to welcome poor blacks onto the government plantation.

This is important spin because poor folks do have common sense. In a Zogby poll done after the presidential election, 73 percent of blacks said they were opposed to taxing fossil fuels to promote alternative energy.

The Carter administration invested $2.1 billion in the Great Plains Coal Gasification Plant to convert coal to gas. The result -- zero. Federal government spending since 1961 on "advanced energy technologies and basic energy science research" totals $187 billion with hardly anything to show.

Poor folks don't need socialism or green jobs. They need green money. They'll get more of it being free, going to school, getting married and going to work.





More...