Fourteen Is the New Fifteen!

FROM-American Thinker

According to the leaders of the global warming doomsday cult, the average surface temperature of Earth is 14 degrees Celsius (57.2 degrees Fahrenheit), but this is a new value which has quietly replaced the original average of 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit).

Read entire article here

Climate Change, Act Three

FROM-American Thinker

By Jeffrey Folks

Once upon a time, it was the contention of global warming alarmists that the earth was getting warmer -- a lot warmer. Now, after decades of such claims, the evidence points to a world that is, for the present at least, growing colder. When that fact became evident, alarmists shifted the ground of their argument. The earth's climate was not necessarily getting warmer; it was just "changing," and that was somehow a bad thing. No matter that the climate had been changing for more than four billion years, ever since the earth's formation.

Not to be deterred, climate alarmists insist that the climate is changing in new ways -- for example, in the "extreme weather" that has purportedly struck the U.S. since 2005. Focusing on Hurricane Katrina in that year and an outbreak of deadly tornadoes in 2011, alarmists contend that the weather is becoming more extreme and that climate change is the cause.

The facts undercut this claim. Only one hurricane has made landfall on the U.S. mainland since 2005, while tornado deaths in the 2000s were the least of any decade on record. Heightened media coverage of extreme weather events, not the weather itself, has made it appear that climate change is reaching epic proportions.

This is precisely the intent of such coverage: to manufacture a crisis so as to facilitate government takeover of large segments of the economy. In reality, the climate is no more extreme than it has been in the past. The deadliest hurricane in American history remains the great Galveston storm of 1900. The worst tornado was the Tri-State storm of 1925, which killed nearly 700 persons. The Joplin tornado of 2011 was the only U.S. tornado to kill more than 100 persons since 1953. It is true that lower death tolls are mostly the result of improved forecasting and warning systems, but if climate change really were producing monster storms of Al Gore proportions, death tolls would be higher than they are. The fact is that there were F-5 tornadoes in the past, and there are F-5 storms today. Today's storms are no stronger or more destructive than in the past.

The plain truth is that there has been no documented increase in the severity of storms in the U.S., or anywhere else, as a consequence of climate change. There has, however, been an explosion in the intensity of media coverage devoted to extreme weather events. (There is even an "extreme weather channel" for kids.) NBC news has its own Chief Environmental Affairs reporter, Anne Thompson, who is not shy about linking extreme weather events with climate change. Practically every story she has filed harps on the climate "crisis," pointing implicitly to the need for heightened government regulation of carbon-emitting industries and commerce -- which is to say, the entire global economy.

I suspect that correspondents like Thompson know well enough that in reality no such extreme weather crisis exists. That does not stop her and others from filing stories that purport to show polar bears drifting off into the sunset on melting chunks of arctic ice. One could feel sorry for those bears were it not for the fact that they can swim for up to 40 miles in the open sea. It's unlikely that they would allow themselves to be carried off to Havana.

Despite all that the media can do to maintain the fiction, the public is catching on to the climate change hoax. Every year, NOAA predicts a "more active than usual" hurricane season, and every year they are proven wrong. Come to think of it, how can it be that every year is "more active than usual"?

The American people are wising up to the climate change fraud. But climate change is a vast enterprise with trillions of dollars at stake. So what is a global warming alarmist to do?

One approach is to bury his head in the sand and deny reality, which is what the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has decided to do. In its latest report, issued on March 28, the IPCC has largely abandoned talk of global warming mitigation and shifted instead to what is termed "disaster risk reduction." That is to say, reductions in greenhouse gases are not really going to affect temperatures, as the IPCC claimed in 2007, but with a wink and a nod we're going to assume that rising temperatures, which have actually been falling since 2002, are responsible for every severe storm in the next few decades. And since the IPCC is determined to remain in business and continue attempting to control the affairs of national economies around the world, we're going to focus on risk mitigation.

It seems that the careerists at IPCC still think they can get away with flogging the dead horse of "extreme weather." More savvy alarmists, such as those in the American media, have decided that this will no longer do, and it's time to shift the terms of the debate.

The latest claim is not that the weather is warming or even that it is growing more extreme -- it is that it is growing more variable. And that variation is just more proof of climate change, according to Judah Cohen of Atmospheric and Environmental Research of Massachusetts. This year, winter temperatures in the eastern U.S. have been among the warmest on record. In Europe they have been among the coldest. Isn't that proof of climate change?

Well, no. It is proof that if you roll the dice a thousand times, you will probably come up with snake eyes twice in a row. Or an extremely warm winter in the U.S. accompanied by a cold one in Europe. Or any number of other "extreme" combinations, all of them the product of natural causes.

For the left, however, any sort of variation in the weather is evidence of climate change, and climate change is grounds for government takeover of the global economy. If it is warm in Boston but cold in Budapest, that is grounds for cap-and-trade. If a tornado strikes somewhere in the Midwest this spring, but not in the South, that is a basis for EPA regulation of the energy industry. If it strikes the South but not the Midwest, that is also grounds for government control. If it is drier in the West than the East, that is a catastrophe. If the wind blows in Wisconsin but not in Washington State, it's climate change at work. That is how desperate the left is to control the global economy.

Ultimately, of course, none of this has anything to do with the climate. Any rational human being, and even the irrational ones on the left, knows well enough that there have always been variations in the climate. In recent decades these variations have been minor and benign compared to changes that have taken place in the recent geologic past (for example, the Great Ice Age).

It seems, however, that the left is not really concerned with the facts. What they are really focused on is power. Ever since Marx published his Communist Manifesto in 1848 -- well before that, in fact -- the left has sought totalitarian control over the means of production, and indeed over all aspects of human life. Modern-day practitioners such as Barack Obama know that the best way to bring about increased regulation, and thus control, is through the fiction of a crisis that can be addressed only by government.

The only problem with that is that the climate is not changing -- not to any perceptible extent. But it is variable, and that is likely to be the message of climate alarmists for some time.

Unchanging Science

FROM-The Weekly Standard

Among other things the global warming crusaders got wrong: skepticism is a virtue, not a vice.

Joseph Bottum and William Anderson


In retrospect, we probably should have paid more attention when, around 2005, activists shifted their primary vocabulary from global warming to climate change to describe the impact of human beings on this biosphere we call the Earth. Both phrases had been around for a while, of course. Global warming got its modern start back in 1975, when the journal Science published a feature asking, “Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” In one form or another, climate change has been in use since the physicist Joseph Fourier wrote of the greenhouse effect in the 1820s.

For that matter, both are unexceptionable meteorological terms with reasonably clear meanings: global warming a particular species or instantiation of general changes in the globe’s climate. The public purpose of those words, however​—​the political intent: That was a different thing altogether. For decades, global warming seemed a powerful, dynamic term to use​—​an apocalyptic phrase that summoned a grim vision of the eschaton, our world reduced to a lifeless wasteland. The only trouble was that it required the world to be, you know, warming. Constantly. A cold winter, and people started to wonder. A chilly spring, and people started to doubt.

Recent news reports have been dominated by squabbles between Berkeley’s Richard Muller and Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry, both involved in research that led to the release of data in October from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures study. Muller claims that the fact of global warming now leaves “little room for doubt,” while Curry tells the Daily Mail that there exists “no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped.” And yet, even in the midst of touting the study, Muller admits that the Berkeley data show that temperatures have not risen over the last decade.

Which confirms, more or less, what seems to be emerging as the feeling of the general public: These recent winters have been cold, and the summers themselves not so hot. That, in turn, creates a problem, for no sense of impending apocalypse survives widespread disbelief. And so​—​right around the point where it all started to seem a little hard to swallow​—​the phrase climate change, more generic if less picturesque, began to slip into public pronouncements, supplanting the old, falsifiable term global warming. A bitter January in the Midwest could well be a sign of climate change. Hurricanes in the Caribbean, mudslides in Latin America, floods in Australia. Earthquakes, even. Everything and anything, the whole wild uncertainty of the world, proved that we were right to feel under the gun​—​faced with an eschatological doom of our own creation.

The more the term embraced, however, the less it explained. That’s not as contradictory as it may seem. There’s a simple epistemological process by which, as we move up the genus-species tree, we arrive at ideas that cover more cases but convey less information: Lots more mammals exist in general than marmosets in particular, but mammal doesn’t tell us as much about the beast in question as marmoset does. Move up high enough into the linguistic arbor, and you arrive at terms that refer to all but mean none: thing, for example, or being.

Or climate change, as far as that goes. The great emotional gain of the shift from global warming to climate change was that the name had become so generic that nothing imaginable could prove it wrong. Every shift in weather is a confirming instance. The only problem left was the pesky little scientific one that, well, nothing imaginable could prove it wrong. In its public use, in the mouths of activists and the titles of organizations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the phrase had come to describe something nonfalsifiable.

This is what was in the background when Ivar Giaever, a Nobel laureate in physics, resigned recently from the American Physical Society​—​in protest over the society’s loudly declared position that evidence of human-caused climate change is “incontrovertible.” Giaever is not some committed global warming skeptic, but he decided that he just couldn’t stomach the claim that anything in science is incontrovertible. If you can’t imagine conditions under which it might be controverted, then you’re no longer doing science.

It was back in the 1930s that Karl Popper popularized the idea of falsifiability as a necessary property of a scientific proposition. Several of the intellectual currents of the era combined to make Popper’s work seem a major breakthrough. The mechanisms of inductive logic had become a crisis point in philosophy, for example, and the commonly used “fact-value distinction” lacked clarity.

None of these philosophical problems seem particularly pressing these days, but the concept of falsifiability still grants some insight into the vagaries of modern environmentalism. In politics, the notion that climate change can’t be falsified​—​everything only serves to confirm it, nothing imaginable can contradict it​—​has been a marvelous boon. In science, the fact that climate change can’t be falsified seems to prove, mostly, that climate change isn’t science: There’s no way to test for it, no way to quantify it, and no way to demonstrate it.

If politics is the human activity by which collective decisions are made, then (whatever the structure of the regime, from the most coercive authoritarianism to the most radical democracy) all government depends on some kind of agreement. Our political instincts have developed over many millennia, but the essential commonality is that we are most comfortable when we shape our opinions to the consensus of our group. As a general matter, we’d rather be wrong in a group than right but alone.

Science, on the other hand, is a methodological tool by which we coordinate observation, logic, and experiment to attempt to discover facts. Science doesn’t deal in either certainty or consensus. Every well-formed theory contains a set of testable hypotheses. When these hypotheses fail confirmation by repeated experiment, the theory has to change. Thus the progress of science is halting and erratic, ultimately convergent on, but never achieving, final explanations of our world.

Naturally, that means confusion reigns when scientists dabble in politics and politicians attempt to explain science​—​as when we are confronted by such oxymorons as “settled science.” And, unfortunately, in the worlds of climate change, such confusions seem to be happening a lot​—​from the United Nations agency that got caught taking an environmental activist group’s unsupported (and mistaken) word that Himalayan glaciers would all be melted away by 2035, to the Times Atlas that recently decided global warming would be more striking if 15 percent of the Greenland ice cap were arbitrarily erased from the map. To say nothing of the 2009 case in which bizarre emails between influential scientists and activists, hacked from a server at the University of East Anglia (which is climate-change central, keeper of international temperature records), were released to the public.

Professional scientists are people, of course, and thus participants in the rough and tumble of political debate. Professional politicians are also people, of a sort, and they’re always eager to use the prestige of science to claim support for their political goals. Most of the time, these crossover category errors stay relatively minor. Occasionally, however, conflations of politics and science snowball into disasters for both politics and science​—​and the debate over climate change is as clear an example as we’ve had since stem cells rolled into public view.

An hour’s poking around on the Internet reveals that no scientific consensus on massive human-caused climate change actually exists. Those afflicted with what economists call “perverse incentives,” however, want scientific consensus to exist, and they try, hard, to pull that consensus into being. Naturally, the debate is skewed toward the faction which controls the most political and economic resources​—​particularly the United Nations, on the commanding heights of resource allocation for activists through the mechanism of its various interlocking directorates of committees and NGOs.

The result is an astonishing tangle of mostly ad hominem arguments. Proponents of catastrophic global warming claim that their opponents are in denial and corrupted by corporate funding. Skeptics counter that these alarmists are corrupted by government funding and political pressure. The result has been good for neither politicians nor scientists, with every new poll betraying smaller numbers of those who trust either government or science to speak the truth​—​much less to fix our strange and broken world.

As far as the actual facts go, they go quickly, the first casualties in the battles at the crossroads of science and politics. We do know that there have been periodic ice ages for the past million or so years, and that the period of those ice ages is on the order of 100,000 years. About 10 percent of discernible history is made up of warm periods (such as our current climate), and the rest much colder, with large portions of the earth covered with thick ice.

The cause of this periodicity is not well understood. Human activity may have contributed to some of it recently, but clearly not to changes occurring over millions of years. Variations in solar irradiance, changes in atmospheric gases, variable ocean currents, and cosmic rays have been hypothesized, each the bearer of a much greater burden than human activity could be. We now appear, on the basis of prior history, to be in the last stages of a warm period which has existed, with some variations, for about 10,000 years.

Within each era, variances of climate occur, as warmer and colder periods of several hundred years come and go. The causes of these changes are similarly uncertain. Is there an ideal global average temperature? If so, what is it? And how do we measure it? Can our species influence these changes? If so, should we? In which direction? What are the costs, risks, and benefits? These questions are not, to say the least, in any realm of settled science.

Enter the climate scientists. The research enterprise in the modern world is a large-scale activity. Difficult questions are raised, and hypotheses are generated to move toward an answer. This requires hiring staff, recruiting experts and consultants, purchasing equipment, and putting all of it in a building, preferably on a university campus. Most of all, what’s needed for this kind of research is oceans of money. And where money is the driver, politics is the unavoidable road down which the scientist has to race. Grant-making authorities, whether in government, industries, or foundations, tend to have a preferred perspective on the process and outcome of research. These preferences are not lost on the applicant researchers.

A few research centers have dominated the study of climate change, and these are typically funded by national governments, with the approval of U.N. agencies and the transnational perspective that U.N. agencies represent. What has emerged, in other words, is a political consensus that emphasizes the claim of ongoing climate change which (1) tends toward warming, (2) is caused by human activity, and (3) threatens to be apocalyptic. Groupthink then emerges as the dominant social response, with ostracism of skeptics and excommunication of apostates.

As the grant-achieving scientists congealed their opinions around the hypothesis (and now doctrine) of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming​—​warmed, themselves, by their presumptive guardianship of truth and virtue​—​some have succumbed to the temptation to cut corners. Dissenting investigators have been marginalized, their research papers viewed with prejudice by academic journals. The principle of free availability of raw data has been ignored. Peer review has degenerated into pal review. Cases of data destruction and tampering have been documented.

Through all this, public opinion has remained bemused, and only mildly interested, with polls suggesting a small decrease in concern over catastrophic manmade climate change and a gradual increase in disbelief about the whole thing. Which has to concern the people whose livelihood depends on predicting catastrophe. Prophecy demands belief.

Perhaps the greatest reason for any of us to feel skepticism about climate change, however, is the unchanging politics of those who employed it to advance their agendas. Are we wrong to suspect that most global warming activists are merely using global warming as the latest in a long series of tools with which to demand fundamental changes in Western civilization?

Think of it this way: The premise of catastrophe produces the conclusion that the political and economic underpinnings of Western civilization must be discarded. Governments must take control of economies. Capitalism must give way. All decisions must be made by our scientific and political elite, for only they can save us from doom.

Now, in a purely logical world, the rejection of the premise would mean that we don’t have to accept the conclusion. If A, then B and not A together produce nothing. But the people who’ve been lecturing us for more than a decade now about global warming and climate change didn’t start by holding A. They began by holding B​—​the conclusion, the proposition that Western civilization must change. And it is, literally, a nonfalsifiable proposition: If global warming and climate change help lead to it, then hurray for global warming and climate change. If not, well, then, they’ll find something else.

Yet facts remain stubborn things, and the thesis of climate change, at least, is clearly in decline. The once-proud carbon-trading market in Chicago is now defunct. Similar European schemes have collapsed in confusion and fraud. Alternative scientific theory is beginning to find its footing. Flawed methods have been exposed. Leaked emails indicate a corrupted scientific process. Most of all, public opinion has not been stampeded, in spite of intense climate-change advocacy in the media.

Skepticism, the prime scientific virtue, still lives, in other words. If nothing else, Ivar Giaever may yet be able to rejoin the American Physical Society.

Psychiatrist William Anderson teaches at Harvard University. Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of The Second Spring: Words into Music, Music into Words.

Why Hasn’t The Earth Warmed In Nearly 15 Years?

FROM-Forbes

Patrick Michaels

There is no statistically significant warming trend since November of 1996 in monthly surface temperature records compiled at the University of East Anglia. Do we now understand why there’s been no change in fourteen and a half years?

If you read the news stories surrounding a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Boston University’s Robert Kaufmann and three colleagues, you’d say yes, indeed. It’s China’s fault. By dramatically increasing their combustion of coal, they have increased the concentration of fine particles in the atmosphere called sulphate aerosols, which reflect away solar radiation, countering the warming that should be occurring from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Further, if this is true, then (as is usual in climate-world), “it’s worse than we thought.” After all, China will eventually reduce their sulfate emissions as their population becomes affluent enough to demand something better than miasmic air. Indeed, they are already beginning to clean things up, and when they finally do, all the cooling particles will be gone and the earth will warm substantially.


Reality may be a bit simpler, or much more complicated. But the reason this is all so important is that if there is no good explanation for the lack of warming, then an increasingly viable alternative is that we have overestimated the gross sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide in our computer models.

One problem is that we really don’t know how much cooling is exerted by sulfates, or whether they are just a convenient explanation for the failure of the forecasts of dramatic warming. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which grants itself climate authority, states that our “Level of Scientific Understanding” of the effects range between “low” and “very low,” with a possible cooling between zero (none) and a whopping 3.5 degrees (C) when the climate comes to equilibrium (which it will never do). That’s a plenty large range from which to pick out a number to cancel about as much warming as you’d like.

Kaufmann’s team looked into how sulfate uncertainty impacted its results and decided that it was relatively minor. However, we can’t find any independent test showing that the geographic “fingerprint” of a dramatic recent increase in sulfate cooling is actually being observed. More on this in a minute.

The other problem — and climate flatliners hate me for pointing this out — is that the beginning of the period of “no warming” includes the warmest year in the instrumental record, caused by the great El Nino of 1997-1998. In a modestly warming world, starting off at or near an anomalously high point pretty much assures little or no warming for years afterward.

Kaufmann’s team (and others) have duly noted that El Nino cycles are one factor partially responsible for the lack of recent warming. There’s little doubt of this. Further, if you back out solar changes and volcanism, as they did, you can convince yourself that there is still an underlying “residual” warming trend, but it is masked by all these variables. This has been done repeatedly in the scientific literature, which, until now, did not include increasing the sulfate effect on recent temperatures.

Where is the test of the hypothesis that sulfates are indeed responsible for the lack of warming? In this paper, it’s simply “modeled-in” as it fits the data well. That’s correlation, not causation.

There is very little exchange of air between the northern and southern hemispheres, and basic climate science shows that most sulfates from China will rain out before they get across the thermal equator. In fact, there is a great deal of literature out there published by luminaries like the Department of Energy’s Ben Santer and NASA’s James Hansen claiming relative cooling of the northern hemisphere from sulfates, compared to the southern.

So, if it is indeed sulfates cooling the warming, given that there is no net change in global temperature, then the northern hemisphere should be cooling since 1998 (the first year in Kaufmann’s paper) while the southern warms. Here are the sad facts:

The opposite is occurring. Why this test was not performed eludes me. Perhaps that is because it provides yet another piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that we have simply overstated the sensitivity of surface temperature to changes in carbon dioxide.

Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Research Fellow for Research and Economic Development at George Mason University and author and editor of “Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of our Government and our Lives.”

The case against the hockey stick

The "hockey stick" temperature graph is a mainstay of global warming science. A new book tells of one man's efforts to dismantle it—and deserves to win prizes
Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph.

FROM-Prospect

Matt Ridley


I can remember when I first paid attention to the “hockey stick” graph at a conference in Cambridge. The temperature line trundled along with little change for centuries, then shot through the roof in the 20th century, like the blade of an ice-hockey stick. I had become somewhat of a sceptic about the science of climate change, but here was emphatic proof that the world was much warmer today; and warming much faster than at any time in a thousand years. I resolved to shed my doubts. I assumed that since it had been published in Nature—the Canterbury Cathedral of scientific literature—it was true.

I was not the only one who was impressed. The graph appeared six times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s third report in 2001. It was on display as a backdrop at the press conference to launch that report. James Lovelock pinned it to his wall. Al Gore used it in his film (though describing it as something else and with the Y axis upside down). Its author shot to scientific stardom. “It is hard to overestimate how influential this study has been,” said the BBC. The hockey stick is to global warming what St Paul was to Christianity.

Of course, there is other evidence for global warming, but none of it proves that the recent warming is unprecedented. Indeed, quite the reverse: surface temperatures, sea levels, tree lines, glacier retreats, summer sea ice extent in the Arctic, early spring flowers, bird migration, droughts, floods, storms—they all show change that is no different in speed or magnitude from other periods, like 1910-1940, at least as far as can be measured. There may be something unprecedented going on in temperature, but the only piece of empirical evidence that actually says so—yes, the only one—is the hockey stick.

And the hockey stick is wrong. The emails that were leaked from the University of East Anglia late last year are not proof of this; they are merely the icing on the lake, proof that some of the scientists closest to the hockey stick knew all along that it was problematic. Andrew Montford’s book, despite its subtitle, is not about the emails, which are tagged on as a last chapter. It is instead built around the long, lonely struggle of one man— Stephen McIntyre—to understand how the hockey stick was made, with what data and what programs.

A retired mining entrepreneur with a mathematical bent, McIntyre asked the senior author of the hockey stick graph, Michael Mann, for the data and the programs in 2003, so he could check it himself. This was five years after the graph had been published, but Mann had never been asked for them before. McIntyre quickly found errors: mislocated series, infilled gaps, truncated records, old data extrapolated forwards where new was available, and so on.

Not all the data showed a 20th century uptick either. In fact just 20 series out of 159 did, and these were nearly all based on tree rings. In some cases, the same tree ring sets had been used in different series. In the end the entire graph got its shape from a few bristlecone and foxtail pines in the western United States; a messy tree-ring data set from the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada; another Canadian set that had been truncated 17 years too early called, splendidly, Twisted Tree Heartrot Hill; and a superseded series from Siberian larch trees. There were problems with all these series: for example, the bristlecone pines were probably growing faster in the 20th century because of more carbon dioxide in the air, or recovery after “strip bark” damage, not because of temperature change.

This was bad enough; worse was to come. Mann soon stopped cooperating, yet, after a long struggle, McIntyre found out enough about Mann’s programs to work out what he had done. The result was shocking. He had standardised the data by “short-centering” them—essentially subtracting them from a 20th century average rather than an average of the whole period. This meant that the principal component analysis “mined” the data for anything with a 20th century uptick, and gave it vastly more weight than data indicating, say, a medieval warm spell.

Well, it happens. People make mistakes in science. Corrections get made. That’s how it works, is it not? Few papers get such scrutiny as this had. But that is an even more worrying thought: how much dodgy science is being published without the benefit of an audit by Mcintyre’s ilk? As a long-time champion of science, I find the reaction of the scientific establishment more shocking than anything. The reaction was not even a shrug: it was shut-eyed denial.

If this had been a drug trial done by a pharmaceutical company, the scientific journals, the learned academies and the press would have soon have rushed to discredit it—and rightly so. Instead, they did not want to know. Nature magazine, which had published the original study, went out of its way to close its ears to McIntyre’s criticisms, even though they were upheld by the reviewers it appointed. So did the National Academy of Sciences in the US, even when two reports commissioned by Congress upheld McIntyre. So, of course, did the IPCC, which tied itself in knots changing its deadlines so it could include flawed references to refutations of McIntyre while ignoring complaints that it had misquoted him.

The IPCC has taken refuge in saying that other recent studies confirm the hockey stick but, if you take those studies apart, the same old bad data sets keep popping out: bristlecone pines and all. A new Siberian data series from a place called Yamal showed a lovely hockey stick but, after ten years of asking, McIntyre finally got hold of the data last autumn and found that it relied heavily on just one of just twelve trees, when far larger samples from the same area were available showing no uptick. Another series from Finnish lake sediments also showed a gorgeous hockey stick, but only if used upside down. McIntyre just keeps on exposing scandal after scandal in the way these data were analysed and presented.

Montford’s book is written with grace and flair. Like all the best science writers, he knows that the secret is not to leave out the details (because this just results in platitudes and leaps of faith), but rather to make the details delicious, even to the most unmathematical reader. I never thought I would find myself unable to put a book down because—sad, but true—I wanted to know what happened next in an r-squared calculation. This book deserves to win prizes.

Oh, and by the way, I have a financial interest in coal mining, though not as big as Al Gore has in carbon trading. Maybe you think it makes me biased. Read the book and judge for yourself.


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.
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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.
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University ‘tried to mislead MPs on climate change e-mails’

FROM-The Times

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails has been accused of making a misleading statement to Parliament.

The University of East Anglia wrote this week to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee giving the impression that it had been exonerated by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). However, the university failed to disclose that the ICO had expressed serious concerns that one of its professors had proposed deleting information to avoid complying with the Freedom of Information Act.

Professor Phil Jones, director of the university’s Climatic Research Unit, has stepped down while an inquiry takes place into allegations that he manipulated data to avoid scrutiny of his claims that manmade emissions were causing global warming. Professor Edward Acton, the university’s vice-chancellor, published a statement he sent to the committee before giving evidence to MPs at a public hearing on Monday. He said a letter from the ICO “indicated that no breach of the law has been established [and] that the evidence the ICO had in mind about whether there was a breach was no more than prima facie”.

But the ICO’s letter said: “The prima facie evidence from the published e-mails indicate an attempt to defeat disclosure by deleting information. It is hard to imagine more cogent prima facie evidence.”

The letter also confirmed the ICO’s previous statement that the university had failed in its duties under the Freedom of Information Act by rejecting requests for data. The university had demanded that the ICO withdraw this statement.

The ICO letter, signed by Graham Smith, the deputy commissioner, said: “I can confirm that the ICO will not be retracting the statement ...The fact that the elements of a section 77 offence may have been found here, but cannot be acted on because of the elapsed time, is a very serious matter.

“The ICO is not resiling from its position on this.”

The ICO cannot prosecute the university because the complaint about its rejection of the information request was made too late. The ICO is seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach of the act.

Dr Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat member of the Science and Technology Committee, said: “It seems unwise, at best, for the University of East Anglia to attempt to portray a letter from the Information Commissioner’s Office in a good light, in evidence to the select committee, because it is inevitable that the Committee will find that letter, and notice any discrepancy.

“It would be a wiser course for the university not to provide any suspicion that they might be seeking to enable the wrong impression to be gained.”

An ICO spokesman said: “The commissioner has provided the select committee with a copy of the January 29 letter to which the university referred in a press statement.

“This is so that the committee can be aware of the full contents. The commissioner has not been invited to give evidence to the committee but stands ready to assist the inquiry.”

A spokeswoman for the university said: “The point Professor Acton was making is that there has been no investigation so no decision, as was widely reported. The ICO read e-mails and came to assumptions but has not investigated or demonstrated any evidence that what may have been said in emails was actually carried out.”

The university last night published its correspondence with the ICO on its website .


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The end of the IPCC

By S. Fred Singer

FROM-American Thinker


Almost daily, we learn about new problems with the formerly respected UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was "unusual" and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in Southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis.

The most recent IPCC report of 2007 predicted the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers within 25 years; the imminent death of nearly half the Amazon rain forest; and major damage from stronger hurricanes -- all in contradiction to expert opinions offered by its appointed reviewers, but ignored by IPCC editors for mostly ideological reasons. More scandalous even, the IPCC based their lurid predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources -- not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards.

These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme bias -- quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. By themselves, they do not invalidate the basic IPCC conclusion -- that a warming in the latter half of the 20th century was human-caused, presumably by the rise of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to ClimateGate, which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC's main policy result.

As the leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia (UK) reveal, this IPCC conclusion -- that Global Warming is anthropogenic -- is based on manipulated data and therefore flawed -- as are demands for the control of CO2 emissions, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord. In my opinion, ClimateGate is a much more serious issue than simply sloppiness and ideological distortion; ClimateGate suggests conspiracy to commit fraud.

Let us recall: The e-mails leaked in the fall of 2009 allow us to trace the machinations of a small but influential band of British and US climate scientists who played the lead role in the IPCC reports. It appears that this group, which controlled access to basic temperature data, was able to produce a "warming" by manipulating the analysis of the data, but refused to share information on the basic data or details of their analysis with independent scientists who requested them -- in violation of Freedom of Information laws. In fact, they went so far as to keep any dissenting views from being published -- by monopolizing the peer-review process, aided by ideologically cooperative editors of prestigious journals, like Science and Nature.

Woe to these dissenting scientists, however. The younger ones were denied an opportunity to advance or receive academic tenure -- or were simply fired. The independent ones were maligned as "deniers" and ostracized. In many instances, commercially operated 'smear blogs' invented slurs; the most common ones being "tool of the oil industry" or "paid by the tobacco lobby." In my own case, my Wiki bio also carried additional malicious accusations; the most bizarre one was that I believed in the existence of Martians.

We learn from the e-mails that the ClimateGate gang was able to "hide the decline" [of global temperature] by applying what they termed as "tricks," and that they intimidated editors and forced out those judged to be "uncooperative." No doubt, thorough investigations, now in progress or planned, will disclose the full range of their nefarious activities. But it is clear that this small cabal was able to convince much of the world that climate disasters were impending -- unless drastic steps were taken. Not only were most of the media, public, and politicians misled, but so were many scientists, national academies of science, and professional organizations -- and even the Norwegian committee that awarded the 2007 Peace Prize to the IPCC and Al Gore, the chief apostle of climate alarmism.

In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental zealots, anti-technology Luddites, utopian one-worlders, and population-control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses, brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and profit from government grants and subsidies for exotic schemes to produce "carbon-free" energy and from the trading of carbon permits. Hundreds of billions have already been wasted -- most of this in transfers of tax revenues to a favored few.

These sums pale, however, in comparison to the trillions that would have been spent in future if some of the mitigation schemes had come to fruition -- such as an extension and major expansion of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to control greenhouse-gas emissions. Fortunately for the world economy and for taxpayers in industrialized nations, these schemes collapsed at the Copenhagen climate conference in Dec 2009. Clearly, developing nations did not want to take on the sacrifices and restrictions on growth. There was little concern expressed about climate; Copenhagen was mostly about transfer of money from rich to poor countries - or more precisely, from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor ones.

Of course, this breakdown in negotiating global controls does not stop unilateral actions. Major developing nations, like India and China, have already refused to act. Australia's parliament has so far turned down attempts to impose limits on the emission of greenhouse gases, which many still believe to cause significant global warming -- in spite of contrary evidence. The European Union is likely to persist in its misguided efforts to continue and expand the Kyoto restrictions. In the US, the House has (barely) passed the calamitous Waxman-Markey "Cap & Trade" bill; the US Senate likely will not pass a similar bill in 2010, an election year.

There is still the US-EPA's drive to extend the Clean Air Act to include carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as "pollutants." But with the evidence of ClimateGate in hand, EPA's attempt to provide the necessary scientific justification for its "Endangerment Finding" will surely fail. Whoever leaked the incriminating e-mails deserves a medal for saving the US economy from certain ruin.


The writer, an atmospheric physicist, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service, is the organizer of NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change) and coauthor of its reports "Nature, not human activity, rules the climate" [2008] and "Climate Change Reconsidered" [2009].

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Super Bowl or Stanley Cup ?

How Met Office blocked questions on its own man's role in 'hockey stick' climate row

FROM- UK Daily Mail

By David Rose

The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years.

And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.

By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland.

In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today.

Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate.

But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.

Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth – whose department has responsibility for the Met Office.

Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders.

Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled that scientists from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – the source of the leaked ‘Warmergate’ emails – acted unlawfully in refusing FOI requests to share their data.

Some of the FOI requests made to them came from the same person who has made requests to the Met Office.

He is David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming.

The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers.

Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job.

Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings.

The Met Office had even boasted of his role in a Press release when the report first came out.

But disclosure, they added, was still rejected on the grounds it would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank provision of views’.

It would also ‘prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation’ and thus be contrary to UK interests.

In a written response justifying the refusal dated August 20, 2008, Mr Ainsworth – then MoD Minister of State – used exactly the same language.

Mr Holland also filed a request for the papers kept by Sir Brian Hoskins of Reading University, who was the review editor of a different chapter of the IPCC report.

When this too was refused, Mr Holland used the Data Protection Act to obtain a copy of an email from Sir Brian to the university’s information officer.

The email, dated July 17, 2008 – when Mr Holland was also trying to get material from the Met Office and the CRU – provides clear evidence of a co-ordinated effort to hide data. Sir Brian wrote:

‘I have made enquiries and found that both the Met Office/MOD and UEA are resisting the FOI requests made by Holland. The latter are very relevant to us, as UK universities should speak with the same voice on this. I gather that they are using academic freedom as their reason.’

At the CRU, as the Warmergate emails reveal, its director, Dr Phil Jones (who is currently suspended), wrote to an American colleague:

‘[We are] still getting FOI requests as well as Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions – not to respond.’

Last night Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the affair further undermined the credibility of the IPCC and those associated with it. He said:

‘It’s of critical importance that data such as this should be open. More importantly, the questions being raised about the hockey stick mean that we may have to reassess the climate history of the past 2,000 years.

‘The attempt to make the medieval warm period disappear is being seriously weakened, and the claim that now is the warmest time for 1,300 years is no longer based on reliable evidence.’

Despite repeated requests, the MoD and Met Office failed to comment.


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Finding Freedom

There is the famous scripture "you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free," and I have always found this to be true in life. Once I know the truth, good or bad, I am free. Only by knowing the truth can I begin to set a course with a guiding compass. Without the truth I generally wobble along and when following a lie, self inflicted or otherwise I inevitably head in the wrong direction.

There is another far less known scripture which is almost as profound "What is truth ?" Pilate asked Jesus just before sending him back to be crucified. Jesus did not answer. Perhaps because the answer is in all of us.

It has been my experience that seeking the truth is often a futile quest but recognizing lies as lies will generally lead me towards the truth whereas following lies will only lead to more lies.

From the UK Daily Mail

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. ‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

The lead author for this segment of the IPCC report which won a Nobel Peace Prize-lied. It does not matter why he lied, the fact is that he used his position of authority to influence people towards his (and the IPCC's) objective. This is not a simple matter of inadvertently referencing non-peer reviewed literature, this was a premeditated attempt to influence policy by knowingly inserting literature into a report known to be unreliable for the express purpose to deceive

This particular lie is not just some unimportant failing in the process, it is a critical distortion of reality, the glaciers are not going to melt by 2035 or any time in the next couple of centuries if at all. This is a cynical attempt to play on the fears and the emotions of a large portion of the population of the world.

The Himalaya Glacier melt is to the peoples of South East Asia particularly India what the Polar Bear has been made to represent to the peoples of the developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere. Actually it is far more a concern for the peoples of Asia than the emotional heart tugs inflicted on us by false claims of the Polar Bears demise. The glaciers of the Himalyas supply water to billions of people and have a deep traditional and even religious tie through the rivers they feed. A historical and cultural connection far deeper and longer held than say we Americans have towards our Mississippi River. So when the IPCC knowingly lied about those glaciers melting, they knew just how much "It had importance for the region".

From Uk Referendum

"Excellencies, members of the media, distinguished ladies and gentlemen! I speak to you in the voice of the world's scientific community...". So declared Dr R K Pachauri in his opening address to the climate summit in Potsdam last September.

In the name of that "scientific community" which in November 2007 had completed the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) - "the collective effort of almost four thousand of the world's best specialists working tirelessly over five years" – Dr Pachauri larded his speech with examples of impending doom.

Thus he told the assembly that, by 2020, "in some countries of Africa yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent".

Crucially, this was not a random statement plucked from one of the working group reports but one highlighted in the "gold standard" Synthesis Report (Section 3.3.2).

But there is no science behind this claim as senior former and current members of the IPCC admit. Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, from The Sunday Times :

“I was not an author on the Synthesis Report but on reading it I cannot find support for the statement about African crop yield declines.”

Now remember this is the document used to "sell" the world on the threat of global warming, it is used by governments all over the world including the in the United States to make decisions that will effect generations of Americans. In that same Sunday Time article Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002 said regarding the claims about African crops:

“Any such projection should be based on peer-reviewed literature from computer modelling of how agricultural yields would respond to climate change. I can see no such data supporting the IPCC report,”

Even the pathetic practice of using climate models which are nothing more than a programmed hypothesis themselves were not used to predict a coming catastrophe in Africa. Yet we have the man who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for this very report making apocalyptic claims:

Particularly vulnerable in this respect would be rain fed agriculture, and there are parts of Africa which may see a decline of 50 per cent in agricultural yields as early as 2020. And do remember that this is a continent which already has considerable malnourishment and inadequate nutrition, issues we also have to worry about

There is far more to both of these stories including some very shady business practices but the mere fact that the IPCC would use their position as "the world's greatest authority on climate change" to mislead, deceive-lie to the world about nonexistent threats is despicable.

The power this organization has had on the world can not be overstated, the policies that have been enacted due to that influence is immense and all encompassing. Policies that they can not justify through the normal process of scientific inquiry and investigation a process which is supposed to be based on objectivity and a quest for the truth which is instead based on speculation and exaggerations-lies.

These are by no means the first, the only or the most egregious of the IPCC's manipulative "science". These are just the newest which are finally drawing wide spread media attention. This pattern has been a characteristic of the IPCC and the AGW lobby since the beginning as an example from an article in the Wall Street Journal in 1996 regarding the the 1995 IPCC SAR:

The following passages are examples of those included in the approved report but deleted from the supposedly peer-reviewed published version:

"None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

"No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes."

"Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."

Those claims were made by the late Dr. Frederick Seitz a former president of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, who had his reputation totally besmirched for trying to bring the scientific process back into climate science.

Winston Churchill said "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on." When you have the authority of a global organization such as the IPCC, the celebrity of the former Vice President Al Gore, and the complicity of the money hungry scientific community a lie can actually circumnavigate the globe many times before truth puts on its pants. But truth is a patient master:

"There is a fine line between climate science and climate
evangelism, I am for climate science.

"

This is what India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh said as he announced that India, the worlds largest democracy was going to form their own climate study group and not rely upon the IPCC for their policy decisions.

Not only were these lies intended to unduly alarm people about unproven threats, they were used to influence the less developed countries of the world to put pressure on the developed countries to pay for their "climate crimes". It was used as a means of extortion. It has not only served to undermine the science communities credibility, it has undermined global harmony, pitting the have nots against the haves, class warfare on a global scale. Inflicting a guilt complex upon western civilization-pathetic.

The idea that the world should take the IPCC or their claims seriously based on the fact that they are so willing to lie in order to convince us of their "truth" is obscene. The fact that they and their followers are so willing to prostitute themselves for their agenda shows how deeply flawed the science community has become and how much power they wield in our lives, have you stocked up on your curly light bulbs yet?

However the truth as we all know will catch up to you, or in the words of Edgar Mohn "A lie has speed, but truth has endurance." and this truth is pulling up its pants and looking for the exit door.


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Manipulating the Climate Numbers

FROM-Politico
By David Warren

Yesterday was Candlemas, and therefore also Groundhog Day. Punxsutawney Phil, the weather-prognosticating groundhog of Gobbler's Knob, predicted six more weeks of "global cooling." I use that term with the same abandon as might the IPCC, of course: technically, the animal only predicts six more weeks "of winter." I'm not sure how far away from his location in Pennsylvania the prediction is meant to apply.

In fact, I've never been able to get a clear answer to this, just as my reader will never get a clear answer from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- which, together with Al Gore, an immense groundhog-like creature who crawls frequently out of a hole in Tennessee, constitutes our chief media source of climatological "settled science." (A contradiction of terms.)

We've been given some clear answers that weren't serious, ranging from the famed "hockey stick" diagram, that entirely misrepresented planetary temperature trends; to smaller assertions such as, "all the glaciers in the Himalayas will have melted by the year 2035." This latter we now know was made up from whole cloth, like the polar bear die-off, and a great deal of nonsense about Arctic and Antarctic ice cover.

To my survey, there is not a single aspect of the "anthropogenic global warming" hypothesis that has been left standing by recent revelations, and more shoes drop every day.

It's better than that: Sir David King, the British government's former "chief scientist," has even had to abandon his arguably paranoid claim that "highly sophisticated" foreign intelligence services and/or wealthy rightwing Americans were behind the e-mail leak from the University of East Anglia, that touched off the bottomless "Climategate" scandal in November. For as he admitted to the Guardian on Monday (hardly a rightwing newspaper), he had simply failed to follow the story.

All the e-mails were hacked through a single server. They included e-mails saved from as far back as 1996, and various data sets that fatally undermined the credibility of the whole international "anthropogenic global warming" research effort -- by illustrating conscious selection of statistics, and direct manipulation of reporting in scientific publications, by major players.

From what I can see, I doubt Sir David was dishonest. He had simply averted his eyes from inconvenient truths. This is a very common human foible, and scientists are, I insist, human beings. Had he been following the story he would have grasped that everything came through one server, that the information had not been cherry-picked by some nefarious spy agency over 14 years.

I might almost say the same for the disgraced Dr. Phil Jones, the former boss of the East Anglia operation, now implicated in various cover-ups, attempts to intimidate and silence skeptics, and purposeful breaches of Britain's freedom of information act. I'm sure he "believed" in what he was doing.

Like communist apparatchiks in the good old days, a global warm-alarmist may "honestly" think he is serving a higher purpose, that he is on "the right side of history," that he must cut a few corners for the greater good, that the end will eventually justify the means. Read Dostoevsky on this. The book is Crime and Punishment, and the character is Raskolnikov. By subtle increments a failure of candour degenerates into major-league crime.

Not only all the numbers, but all the assumptions behind "AGW" -- not "most," but all -- have depended on the manipulation of facts by persons who had an interest in manipulating them. Often the specific incident is small, but the falsehood is cumulative. Investment in the illusion grows, the stakes become too large to forfeit. Yet the reality remains: that we still don't know any more about long-term human influence on climate than Punxsutawney Phil can know by observing his own shadow.

This should have been obvious to climatologists from the beginning. At the simplest level, they could observe that global temperature estimates depended on a slur of constantly changing thermometer locations and time sequences. NASA's recent admissions are the more pathetic for that reason: from the top down, these were men who should have known better than to think they could fly beyond the end of such a limb.

I have argued previously for chastity: not limited to the sexual sense, of keeping one's pants on. The virtue of chastity requires us to look at the world without immediately engaging our desires. Those desires are often not sexual at all; some of the most powerful involve justifying one's livelihood. A scientist with an interest in getting a result is under huge temptation, compounded by the huge public funding on which his research depends.

Our mysterious capacity for chastity can put us above the animal level: for if we try, we can actually remove the blinkers of, "What's in it for me?" -- and discover truths larger than ourselves. The highest arts and sciences require alike the highest conditions of chastity. It is what lifts us above the groundhogs.




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EXCERPTS FROM- CLIMATEGATE ANALYSIS

by John P. Costella

March 8, 2006: email 1141398437

Richard Alley writes to Jonathan Overpeck:

Do you know anything about the "divergence problem" in tree rings? Rosanne D’Arrigo talked to the National Research Council yesterday. I didn’t get to talk to her afterward, but it looked to me that they have redrilled a bunch of the high-latitude tree rings that underlie almost all of the high-resolution estimates, and the tree rings are simply missing the post-1970s warming, with reasonably high confidence. She didn’t seem too worried, but she apparently has a paper just out in the Journal of Geophysical Research. It looked to me like she had pretty well killed the "hockey stick" graph in public forum—they go out and look for the most-sensitive trees at the edge of the treeline, flying over lots and lots of trees that are less sensitive but quite nearby, and when things get a little warmer, the most-sensitive trees aren’t sensitive any more; and so the trees miss the extreme warming of the recent times, and can’t reliably be counted as catching the extreme warmth of the Medieval Warm Period if there was extreme warmth then.
Because, as far as I can tell, the "hockey stick" really was a tree-ring record, regardless of how it was labelled as "multiproxy", this looks to me to be a really big deal. And, a big deal that may bite your Chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report …

Overpeck responds:

Hi Richard—this issue is one that we refer to in our key uncertaintytable. I believe Keith Briffa was one of the first to write about it, and it is an important issue. I haven’t seen Rosanne’s paper or results myself, but I bet Keith has. I’m cc’ing this to him to see what he thinks.

Keith Briffa responds:

We do need to say something, but as I said in an earlier message, not without more consideration. We should not write something curt on this—ditto the possible direct effects of carbon dioxide. In the push to do all this other stuff, we have had to leave it—to discuss later how to include an "uncertainty issues" bit about recent environmental mess ups. The D’Arrigo paper is not convincing, but we have to do some work to show why, instead of just saying this.

Indeed! Briffa finally realizes that brief public assertions without any scientific backing will no longer be credible.
He continues:

The divergence issue is not universal, and not unrelated to very recent period bias arising from processing methods.

In other words, the problem is real—and its extent unknown. That "processing methods" can completely bias their results completely undermines their stated public confidence that "the science is settled". Indeed, Briffa explains how little they really know—and this is 2006, not 1986:

It is very likely not the threshold problem that D’Arrigo thinks it is. We need money here to work on this, and losing our last application to Europe has messed us up. For now we cannot include anything. I will work on text for the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report.

In other words, as of 2006, they needed funding to begin new research to even determine how reliable any of their previous results were. Is this "settled science"?

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EXCERPTS FROM- CLIMATEGATE ANALYSIS

by John P. Costella
August 25, 2005: email 1124994521

Mike Mann writes to Christoph Kull, Phil Jones, Heinz Wanner, and others:

In our discussion of possible participants in Bern, I think (someone correct me if I’m wrong) we concluded that the last two on the list (with question marks) would be unwise choices because they are likely to cause conflict than to contribute to consensus and progress.

Phil Jones to Christoph Kull:

I agree with Mike that the last two names on the list should be removed.

Debate and disagreement is crucial to the healthy functioning of science. Weeding out those who may prevent a predetermined “consensus” is abhorrent.

August 26, 2005: email 1125067952

Heinz Wanner to Christoph Kull:

Concerning the participants:
…
- If Phil and Mike do not support von Storch it does not make sense to invite him (or Eduardo Zorita?).

Mike Mann concurs:

I’m afraid I don’t agree on Zorita. He has engaged in some very nasty, and in my opinion unprofessional email exchanges with some close colleagues of mine who have established some fundamental undisclosed errors in work he co-published with von Storch. Given this, I don’t believe he can be involved in constructive dialogue of the sort we’re looking for at this workshop.

Again, a “constructive” dialog appears to be one that leads to their predetermined “consensus”.
He continues:

There are some similarly problematic issues with Cubasch, who, like von Storch, … has engaged in inflammatory and personal public commentary. There is no room for that on any side of the debate.
If the Germans need to be represented here, I would suggest instead someone from the Potsdam group, such as Eva Bauer …

Our attention is here drawn to an undercurrent in this entire saga: the need to give the perception of international agreement—which translates into the notion of the need for a “quota” of representation from the key countries involved, rather than true international debate

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Climategate: NOAA and NASA Complicit in Data Manipulation

FROM-
Pajamas Media

by Joseph D'Aleo

excerpts

...We don’t dispute the fact that there has been some cyclical warming in recent decades — most notably from 1979 to 1998 — but cooling took place from the 1940s to the late 1970s, again after 1998, and especially after 2001, all while CO2 rose. This fact alone questions the primary role in climate change attributed to CO2 by the IPCC, environmental groups, and others.

However, the global surface station data is seriously compromised.

There was a major station dropout — and an increase in missing data from remaining stations — which occurred suddenly around 1990. Just about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles.

A clear bias was found towards removing higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations — the cooler stations — during this culling process, though that data was not also removed from the base periods from which “averages,” and then anomalies, were computed....

...Actually Klotzbach et al. (2009) found that when the satellites were first launched, their temperature readings were in relatively good agreement with the surface station data. There has been increasing divergence over time (exceeding 0.4C now), but the divergence does not arise from satellite errors. Further, they found that the divergence between surface and lower-tropospheric measurements, which has probably continued, is consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

...Land temperatures trends were 0.31C for NOAA, versus 0.16C for the satellite measurements from the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH).

NOAA announced that June 2009 was the second-warmest June. In sharp contrast to this, GISS and the UAH satellite assessments had June virtually at the long-term average (+0.001 C°, or the 15th coldest in 31 years). Remote Sensing Systems (RSS — the other satellite measurement database) had June at +0.075 C°, the 14th coldest in 31 years.
NOAA proclaimed June 2008 to be the eighth-warmest for the globe in 129 years. Meanwhile, NASA showed it was the 9th-coldest June in the 30 years of its record in 130 years, falling just short of 2005.

Satellites were positioned by NOAA to be the future of temperature monitoring — but they amazingly are never mentioned in the NOAA or NASA monthly report...


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Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data

FROM-The Times

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.

The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The stolen e-mails , revealed on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, showed how the university’s Climatic Research Unit attempted to thwart requests for scientific data and other information, and suggest that senior figures at the university were involved in decisions to refuse the requests. It is not known who stole the e-mails.

Professor Phil Jones, the unit’s director, stood down while an inquiry took place. The ICO’s decision could make it difficult for him to resume his post.

Details of the breach emerged the day after John Beddington, the Chief Scientific Adviser, warned that there was an urgent need for more honesty about the uncertainty of some predictions. His intervention followed admissions from scientists that the rate of glacial melt in the Himalayas had been grossly exaggerated.

In one e-mail, Professor Jones asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He also told a colleague that he had persuaded the university authorities to ignore information requests under the act from people linked to a website run by climate sceptics.

A spokesman for the ICO said: “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred.” Breaches of the act are punishable by an unlimited fine.

The complaint to the ICO was made by David Holland, a retired engineer from Northampton. He had been seeking information to support his theory that the unit broke the IPCC’s rules to discredit sceptic scientists.

In a statement, Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the ICO, said: “The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information.”

He added: “The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. We will be advising the university about the importance of effective records management and their legal obligations in respect of future requests for information.”

Mr Holland said: “There is an apparent Catch-22 here. The prosecution has to be initiated within six months but you have to exhaust the university’s complaints procedure before the commission will look at your complaint. That process can take longer than six months.”

The university said: “The way freedom of information requests have been handled is one of the main areas being explored by Sir Muir Russell’s independent review. The findings will be made public and we will act as appropriate on its recommendations.”




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