Police have arrested 114 people who were allegedly planning to target a power station in Nottinghamshire. Officers made the arrests at just after midnight when they raided an independent school in Sneinton, Nottingham.

They said the protesters would have posed “a serious threat” to the safe running of the nearby Ratcliffe-On-Soar power station. A spokesman for Nottinghamshire Police said “specialist equipment” recovered during the raid led them to believe the coal-fired power station was the intended target.

He said: “Just after midnight, Nottinghamshire Police arrested 114 men and women from across the UK on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage.” In April 2007, 11 environmental activists were arrested after they entered the power station to protest about its greenhouse gas emissions. The Nottingham Evening Post claimed police had contacted power stations across the North and the Midlands to warn them of possible protests over the Bank Holiday weekend.

A spokesperson for E.on, which owns the power station, said: “We can confirm that Ratcliffe power station was the planned target of an organised protest in the early hours of this morning. “While we understand that everyone has a right to protest peacefully and lawfully, this was clearly neither of those things.

“So we will be assisting police with their investigations into what could have been a very dangerous and irresponsible attempt to disrupt an operational power plant. “It is not yet know why the protest was being organised. “But it is believed it could be connected to E.on’s plans to build a new coal-fired power station in Kingsnorth, Kent.

Nottingham City councillor David Mellen said the police raided the privately-run Iona School as the result of “an intelligence-led operation”. He said: “I don’t know whether it was the school itself being used or the car park.

“Neighbours reported a lot of noise after midnight. It seems to have been used as a rendezvous for people from a wide area.” Read story and see interview here.

Both Hansen and Gore have advocated civil disobedience in stopping efforts to build conventional coal power plants. Hansen did it with a group in the UK this last year and testified in support of the use of vandalism in these protests.

Read more from the UK Guardian here.

Let us begin by understanding that the entire basis for declaring the second most vital gas on Earth, carbon dioxide, a “pollutant” that requires regulation and is the object of a proposed elaborate “cap-and-trade” scheme is the generation of enormous amounts of money for the government while allowing it to exercise complete control over the use of any energy for any purpose.

Carbon dioxide is said to be the chief cause of “global warming”, but there is NO global warming. The Earth continues to COOL - ten years since the completely natural cycle began in 1998.

Nor is the Earth running out of energy sources such as oil, natural gas or coal. Here in the United States, however, Americans have long since run out of access to the extraction of the vast amounts that reside under the states and the offshore continental shelf.

Since around the 1970s, America has been systematically starved for access to its own energy reserves and forced to rely on imports, most notably of oil. Politicians and Greens who keep calling for “energy independence” are lying through their teeth. No nation on Earth is energy independent. When you control energy, you control people’s lives and the entire economy. Simple example; a blizzard causes power lines to fail. All of a sudden people served by those lines are at risk of freezing to death. Another example, power fails during a heat wave. The elderly and ill are at risk of death for lack of air conditioning or even an electric fan. In 1995, a heat wave in Chicago killed over 600 people.

So, when House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman, Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, and Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, conjure up an energy/climate bill designed to curb carbon dioxide emissions alleged to be causing “global warming”, they are perpetrating a massive fraud on Americans.

When that bill includes a provision that would permit anyone, absolutely anyone, to sue the government as victims of global warming and in anticipation of suffering as the result of global warming, Waxman-Markey have opened the door wide to a deluge of lawsuits that have no merit whatever in scientific fact or truth.

As reported in The Washington Times, “The measure sets grounds for anyone ‘who has suffered, or reasonably expects to suffer, a harm attributable in whole or in part’ to government inaction to file a ‘citizen suit.’ The term ‘harm’ is broadly defined as ‘any effect of air pollution (including climate change) occurring or at risk of occurring.’”

It is a little known fact that many environmental organizations reap vast amounts of money suing the government over the enforcement of various laws affecting clean air, clean water, and endangered species. The Western Environmental Law Center is just one example. It just sent “an urgent letter to Lisa Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, asking her to “speed issuance of regulations aimed at restricting greenhouse pollution to include black carbon, or soot, among climate forcing agents to be regulated.” Soot! The Greens are now prattling about “unmanageable and calamitous disruption of the climate system.” Can anyone cite a single example of how human activity could possibly cause or prevent “unmanageable and calamitous disruption of the climate system”?

The end result of the Waxman-Markey law would be to vastly enrich the many environmental organizations that would be filing hundreds of thousands of suits and ultimately collecting millions, if not billions, of dollars on the basis of something that is not occurring and the alleged inaction of the government to stop it!  Only the collected stupidity and indifference of the American people will permit this new law to reach the desk of the President who will surely sign it. It is a death warrant for our lives, our economy, and our nation. Read more here.

Sunspots are relatively cooler and darker areas on the sun’s surface caused by intense magnetic activity. Approximately every 11 years, the sun undergoes cyclic periods of high and low sunspot activity related to a 22-year reversal of the sun’s magnetic field. From the sunspot maxima to the sunspot minima solar radiation impacting Earth decreases by approximately 0.1%. Although this seems like an insignificant change, such decreases in solar output over an extended period of time are integrated and can have considerable impacts on Earth’s climate. Moreover, some radiative spectra such as ultraviolet and cosmic rays vary significantly more than 0.1% and can affect cloud cover and other feedbacks on the earth-climate system.

The most reliable and widespread global weather observations have only been recorded since the mid 20th century. Unfortunately that is a period when generally high sunspot activity occurred, thus making it difficult to accurately quantify the impacts of decadal sunspot minima on climate. However, the regular reoccurrence of the 11-year sunspot cycle makes it possible to ascertain the short term impacts of sunspot minima and maxima on climate. Presumably, if short term climate is influenced every 11 years, then longer periods of sunspot inactivity would cause larger changes in climate. The availability of historical global weather observation analyses since 1948 allows us to compare surface temperatures during periods of high sunspot activity and periods of low sunspot activity.

From 1948-2000, five complete solar cycles occurred and the 10th and 90th percentiles of sunspots each month were used to differentiate periods of low activity versus high activity. Temperature anomalies were averaged only when sunspots exceeded 160 (~ 90th percentile) and when sunspots were less than 10 (~ 10th percentile). It was found that the global average temperature anomalies during low sunspot periods were around 0.35F cooler than during high sunspot periods. Even more significant is the notable impacts on the tropical east Pacific. La Nina is apparently favored during periods of low sunspots as surface temperatures averaged cooler than normal by more than 1F over portions of the tropical east Pacific.

See larger image here.

See full story here. Hat tip to Dag Tessem, Norway.

Note the cooling sun may have forced the AMO into its cold mode prematurely. If it persists, it could affect the hurricane season. See Jeremy’s post here.

Ecotretas commented “sealevel.colorado.edu recently downgraded the rate of rise from 3.3mm/year to 3.2mm/year… Not a big thing, but it has been going down now for 3 years.”

As he/she points out it is really not that big of deal accept when you google sea levels in the news, Right at the top you’ll read this.

Global Warming Accelerates

As sea levels rise faster than expected, political and social catastrophes loom. Sea levels are rising much faster than expected - perhaps by three feet or more by 2100, according to climate scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago in February.
Scientists there also announced that global warming is increasing at a greater rate than the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted in its 2007 Fourth Assessment report.

For the last 15 years, sea levels, measured by satellite and by gauges in the ocean, rose twice as fast as in the past half century. And Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change, notes that between 1961 and 2003, sea level has risen 50 percent faster than computer models predicted. Given these results, he said new modeling can’t yet be done “with any confidence......”

Now I can look at the graph

Notice Professor Rahmstorf failed to mention the fact that since 2003 it is an entirely different story. Either he has information that is not available on the above chart or he is flat out being deceitful. I suspect it is the latter, Do you see the deceit of these people? Scary.

I invite you to click on the new link I have posted called The Greatest Lie Ever?”. It is information put out by Nils-Axel Mörner. Who is an expert, retired and has nothing to gain by exposing this, except trying to maintain scientific integrity in the field he loves.

The question you should ask yourself is this; If sea level rise on the official sea level site are being down graded, how can scientist claim they are accelerating? What is their motive? certainly it can not be science.

UPDATE : Reading the statement purported to be from Rahmstorf again I must say I am even more perplexed “that between 1961 and 2003, sea level has risen 50 percent faster than computer models predicted.”

What models predicted what and when? Some computer model prior to 1961 made a projection that was exceeded by 50% ? Or more likely they back-cast a computer to project what should have happened and what actually happened exceeded that projection ? Wouldn’t that be a nice slight of hand ? Read post and comments here.

As the case for AGW falls completely apart, the alarmists are turning to outright lies to try and keep the public in their camp. It will work only so long. Already the majority of the public now believes that natural variability is the most important climate driver. One expects lies or exaggerations from politicians but objective and truthful analyses from scientists. But big money is a lure that some can’t resist and never has so much money been made available to scientists and organizations to support the agenda of the environmentalists and those with financial or political ideology agendas.

As reported by Anthony, RSS satellite temperature data is out for March.  And as the Catlin adventurers have discovered, it has been “stupidly cold” in the Arctic.  March was the second consecutive month of below normal Arctic temperatures, and the continuation of a four year cooling trend - as seen below.  Google’s linest() function shows that since the beginning of 2005, Arctic temperatures have been cooling at a rate of 1.8 degrees C per decade, or 18C per century (see comments).  Also note that Arctic monthly temperature anomaly now is about three degrees lower than in January, 1981.

That short term trend isn’t meaningful, except in the context of the Catlin Expedition and the cold they are experiencing. Note in the graph below, the huge drop in temperatures since the Catlin expedition started two months ago.  Is this another example of The Gore Effect? Or, perhaps it is the “observer effect”? Humor aside, the graph below tells the story of the cold the Catlin Expedition must be experiencing.

This cooling is reflected in increasing amounts of winter ice since 2005.  Not surprisingly, as the temperature gets colder, the amount of ice increases. Read more with comments here.

Last October the House of Commons passed, by 463 votes to three, the most expensive piece of legislation ever put through Parliament. The only MP to question the cost of the Climate Change Act, requiring Britain to cut its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent within 40 years, was Peter Lilley. It was also Mr Lilley who, just before the MPs voted to stop runaway global warming, drew the House’s attention to the fact that, outside, London was experiencing its first October snow for 74 years.

What made the MPs’ lack of interest in the cost of this Act even more curious was that the Government’s own “impact assessment” showed that, whereas its benefits were estimated at 110 billion pounds, its costs were 205 billion pounds. The MPs thus happily voted for something that would be twice as costly as any benefit.

But these figures were based on the Government’s original plan to cut CO2 emissions by only 60 per cent. A last-minute amendment had this to 80 per cent (a target which can only be achieved by closing down most of Britain’s economy), so our “climate change minister”, Ed Miliband, was obliged to produce new figures. These he has now belatedly slipped out via the Department of Energy and Climate Change website - no thought of reporting them to Parliament - and truly mind-boggling they are. The cost of the Act has nearly doubled, to 404 billion pounds, or 18.3 billion pounds for every year between now and 2050. However, the supposed benefits are given, astonishingly, as 1,024 billion pounds, an increase of 1,000 per cent.

How on earth were such unbelievable figures calculated? Peter Lilley has written a trenchant letter to Mr Miliband, asking this and a series of other highly pertinent questions. But pending any reply, last week I posed this question to DECC myself. I was assured that the new figures had been worked out by “a method used by the independent Committee on Climate Change, and peer-reviewed by Simon Deitz, an expert in carbon pricing from the London School of Economics”. Dr Deitz’s website shows that last year he carried out “research for the UK Committee on Climate Change”.

So this independent expert was asked to peer review the method used by an “independent” committee (which he had already been working for) to produce figures that seem rather to have been plucked from the thin air of which only 0.04 per cent - one 2,500th - consists of the self-same carbon dioxide which we are now expected to believe we will benefit by 1 trillion pounds from not emitting. Truly we are governed these days by stark, raving lunacy - and no one is meant to notice. Read more here.

It’s wrong to blame our warming climate on human pollution alone, says a major analysis by U.S. climate scientists who say North America’s warming and drying trend also has important natural causes.

Natural shifts in ocean currents have caused much of the warming in recent decades, and almost all of the droughts, says the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Most climate researchers today deal exclusively with man-made “greenhouse” gases, and often dismiss suggestions of naturally caused warming as unscientific. Yet NOAA says Western Canada has warmed by two degrees and Eastern Canada hasn’t warmed at all because flows of air from naturally shifting Pacific currents have affected the West most.

The lengthy re-analysis of climate data doesn’t dispute that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels cause a warmer climate. But it raises questions about the details: How much warming? How many causes? And why isn’t it the same everywhere? It also stresses that we don’t understand climate as well as we like to think, because scientists only have good data from about 1948 onward.

“Most of the warming (worldwide) is the consequence of human influences,” said Martin Hoerling, a NOAA climate scientist. But he said the question remains, “what does that mean for my back yard?” Policy-makers need to know whether natural changes or pollution is causing local conditions such as the current drought from California across to Texas, the report notes.

“All regions are not participating (in warming) at the same rate as the global temperature is changing,” Hoerling said. Some in the West are warming rapidly, and some not at all (the southeastern United States and Atlantic Canada). Oceans carry vast amounts of heat, releasing heat and moisture into air which then travels inland. The re-analysis focused on this fact.

Some of the changes in North America’s warming trend of the past half-century has been due to shifting ocean currents, the NOAA team found. It estimates the “natural” change is substantial and could be close to half of all warming in North America (though it’s still less than the amount caused by greenhouse gases.) Read more here.

The answer is simple and one that many refuse to admit to, the multidecadal PDO. The past 50 years went from a -PDO favoring a cold western North America and warmer southeast US from 1947 to 1977 then a positive PDO favoring the opposite a warmer western US and a colder east and southeast from 1979 to 1998. The changes in the 50 years brought about the observed warming in western North America and cooling in the east and southeast.

We are now back to a cold PDO favoring the return to the cold and snowy western North America we observed the last few years. This will lead to an slowing of any glacial melting in the west and some glacial advancement despite the claims of some alarmists like Washington State climatologist Phil Mote and British Columbia IPCC modeler Andrew Wheeler who refuse to admit to the role of the PDO and sun in climate. Oh and I believe much of the other half of the warming in the global station based data is from contamination from urbanization, bad station siting and the other issues identified here.

When Al Gore screams out in Senate testimony: “The Earth Has A Fever"he is not so much developing a scientific theory as he is seeking to use fear to drive a political agenda. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued four reports and in each one they have become more convinced that man is the chief cause of global warming, and that this warming is and will be seriously destructive to life as we know it.

We are told that “he science is settled"and that there is “ consensus"of scientists who believe we are headed for disaster if we do not stop burning fossil fuels. Yet, there is a growing number of scientists who disagree. Over 32,000 scientists have signed “The Petition Project” over 9,000 of them with PhDs proclaiming that man is not the chief cause of warming and that this warming will not be disastrous.

True science does not depend on a consensus, but on a careful analysis of evidence as found in nature. One scientist noted that once they have a theory about something they work hard to prove themselves wrong. History is replete with examples where scientists were just plain wrong about life matters, but continued research revealed the truth. It is our contention that the present emphasis on man-caused (anthropogenic) global warming is a myth, in fact a carefully orchestrated hoax, not to further science, but to gain more control over the peoples of the world. It is incumbent on each of us to search out the truth in this matter and act accordingly.

THE EARTH IS WARMING

There seems to be little disagreement among scientists that the Earth is warming. In fact, the earth has continued to warm since the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. But that warming has not been an even warming with years of warming followed by some years of cooling, but each period leaving us just a little warmer than before. We are told that the Earth has warmed about half a degree centigrade a century for the past 150 years. The actual amount of warming as recorded is difficult to support given that a half-degree is about all the closer we could record temperature until very recently. There are just 1,221 weather stations in America and few of these have been in the same position for the entire time. Some have moved to new locations, and others have had cities grow up around them, which raises the average temperature. Temperature readings can vary a couple of degrees depending on whether they are next to a building, on a slope, in a valley, or on a hilltop.

There appears to have been more warming in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere, but it needs to be kept in mind that there are few weather stations over the ocean, in Africa and South America, and even fewer in Antarctica. It is very probable that the earth is warming, but by less than half a degree.

CARBON DIOXIDE IS A POLLUTANT

The U.S. Supreme Court has declared that Carbon Dioxide is a pollutant. That is not a scientific statement made by a scientific body, but a deliberative statement made by a political body. We often forget that Supreme Court Justices are human just like the rest of us, and though we expect them to know more about that law than we know we do not expect them to be experts in every field of endeavor. The greatest evidence for this is in their own decisions (or opinions) which are often 7-2, 6-3, or 5-4. One vote one way or the other would change the outcome of the decision.

Our atmosphere is approximately 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, .9% argon, and .04% carbon dioxide. From that “trace” amount of carbon dioxide is built all the plants we see on the Earth. Far from being a pollutant Carbon Dioxide is a natural substance required for all plant life. All plants use Carbon Dioxide to grow and in the process they give off Oxygen. Animals use Oxygen and give off Carbon Dioxide. This relationship is the miracle of life that enables both plants and animals to survive on Earth.

Growers know that increasing Carbon Dioxide increases plant growth, and for this reason Carbon Dioxide is sometimes used in greenhouses to increase plant growth. It has also been demonstrated that an increased level of Carbon Dioxide enables a plant to survive and even thrive at warmer temperatures. Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant. Read much more here.