By Seth Borenstein
As police cracked down on climate protesters, church bells tolled 350 times Sunday to impress on the United Nations global warming conference a number that is gaining a following, but also is awash in contradictions.
Conference negotiators, meanwhile, went behind closed doors in talks toward a new pact on climate, talks in which the figure 350 looms as a goal for true believers, but one that appears impossible based on progress so far.
It refers to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the highest concentration that some leading scientists say the world can handle without sparking dangerous climate effects.
“It’s the most important number in the world,” said Bill McKibben, founder of the environmental activist group 350.org. “It’s the line between habitability on this planet and a really, really desolate future.”
Not everyone buys into that. But an entire environmental group has sprung up around the number, pushing 350 as a goal, sporting it on T-shirts and flags waved by throngs of protesters who marched to the conference center over the weekend. About 100 nations at the UN climate summit have signed on to the idea of heading for 350.
Actually, the world has lived with more than 350 for a while.
The last time the Earth had 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air was a generation ago, in the fall of 1989. This year CO{-2} pushed higher than the 390 level. When scientists started measuring carbon dioxide in 1958, it was 315.
Since the atmosphere passed the 350 level, ice sheets have been melting and other dramatic changes have been happening. Prominent scientists—notably NASA’s James Hansen, one of the earliest to warn about global warming, and Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—have said 350 is the only safe level of carbon dioxide in the air.
Many economists, political leaders, and even some scientists say they believe that the worst effects of global warming can be avoided even with less stringent actions.
But there is general agreement among negotiators and climate scientists that continued global warming will lead to dramatic changes that mean more widespread drought in some regions, greater flooding along coastlines, stronger storms and the loss of species.
On Sunday, hundreds of churches around the world had signed up to ring bells at 3:50 p.m. in their respective time zones.
“It was an incredibly powerful moment and to know that there are bells ringing all over Europe, up to Greenland, down into the south Pacific and every corner of the planet,” McKibben said moments after the bells stopped ringing in Copenhagen.
ICECAP note: The only bells rining are in McKibben’s head. 350 should be the minimum threshold for CO2 not the max. Greenhouses worldwide pump in 1000 ppm to get plants to grow vigorously to spur sales. Tests in sugarcane fields in Brazil showed a 40% increase in biomass after a growing season in fields with 1000ppm. The levels of CO2 inside the meeting rooms at Copenhagen were probably 2000 ppm. If anyone suffered any problems there is was likely to be hypothermia, or frostbite from low 20F temperatures and snow outside where 30,000 were left to wander because the UN invited 45,000 to attaned a conference in a facility that can only hold 15,000. And we want to give the UN more control over world’s people. Many tropical and southern hemisphere attendees were unprepared. An even bigger snow is due Friday with temperatures holding in the 20s and then dropping to the teens after the storm this weekend. Maybe the snow will keep Obama from landing and giving away more of the money we don’t have.
By Alan Caruba
When President Obama shows up in Copenhagen to take part in the greatest fraud perpetrated worldwide in the modern era, there is only one thing you need to know. It is all a lie.
It was a lie from the first moment a scientist like James Hansen told Congress on June 23, 1988 that the planet was going to be roasted by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and it was a lie when Al Gore wrote “Earth in the Balance” and there were still more lies in his Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
A British court banned the documentary from being shown in their schools unless a long list of disclaimers was read to the students before his lies were inflicted on them. American students were not so fortunate. Indeed, as I have said many times before, global warming has been a form of child abuse, causing needless anxiety and fear for countless children on whom it was inflicted.
But how could such a lie be perpetrated on such a vast stage and for so long? My answer to you is “the Soviet Union.” From its inception in 1917 when the czarist monarchy was overthrown and Marxist theory, Communism, was imposed on Russia, whole generations were forced to suffer under this huge lie that the state would provide everything for everybody.
It is such a popular lie that it has been resurrected in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It returned the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua. In the last century, millions died under the Communist banner, but that lie never seems to die.
Little wonder then that, when Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s communist dictator addressed the conference, Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald-Sun reported that he received “a rousing round of applause.” He was followed by Zimbabwe’s despicable president, Robert Mugabe, who decried “these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions.”
A conference that celebrates such communist blather betrays its true intent. No American President should participate in such a naked display of contempt for capitalism unless of course he shares it
A really Big Lie told often enough acquires the verisimilitude of truth. Global warming, however, was dependent on a different kind of truth, one subject to vigorous review and challenge; it is scientific truth and no matter how many lies were told by the global warming scientists, there were others who stood their ground and challenged them.
By itself, the Big Lie cannot exist solely in a political framework like the United Nations or any one of the nations, including our own, that wasted billions based on it. It has to have the support of the media, both our own and those around the world.
Journalists are not scientists and they are subject to what scientists tell them unless they do some fairly easy investigation of their own. They didn’t! Instead, journalists at influential newspapers like The New York Times repeated and amplified every global warming lie and they continue to this day.
The true science, not the stuff conjured up on computer models, always refuted the global warming theory. That’s because it was widely known to honest climatologists, meteorologists, and others. It was always known that carbon dioxide (CO2) was a miniscule part of the Earth’s atmosphere, barely 0.038 percent. Of that amount, man-made CO2 emissions constitute less than 0.00022 percent! Some will argue these figures, but they always remain within these very tiny parameters.
Carbon dioxide has nothing to do with global warming or as it is now called, climate change.
Nor has the Earth been rapidly warming. The last warming cycle began around 1850 as a respond to a Little Ice Age that began in 1300. The Earth warmed about one degree Fahrenheit. By 1998, it began to cool again!
So, when President Obama shows up in Copenhagen to attend the liar’s competition called the United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP-15, anything and everything he says about global warming, fossil fuels, CO2, et cetera, will be a lie.
Al Gore has been at the conference and managed to stumble around like a punch-drunk boxer saying really stupid things like the Arctic will completely melt away any day now or that the center of the Earth is millions of degrees hot. But Gore is a stranger to the truth because, as you may recall, he’s a politician who served in Congress and as Vice President.
If George W. Bush is remembered for anything, it will be that he saved the nation from a “President Gore.” Despite Bush’s poll numbers when he left office, President Obama has accomplished one extraordinary thing; he has made people think more kindly of Bush.
At the heart of the Big Lie is, of course, MONEY! There are millions to be made selling bogus “carbon credits” for the use of energy. That’s what Obama’s “Cap-and-Trade” scam is all about.
Billions were wasted on “climate research” over the past twenty years and now they are being wasted on “clean energy” research which we’re told is needed to replace “dirty” fuels like coal, oil and natural gas. It too is all a lie.
Solar and wind power can never and will never replace or even rival the power that so-called fossil fuels provide. Combined, solar and wind provide barely one percent of all the electricity used daily in the nation. Biofuels are another bad idea.
Listen, if you can, to Obama delivering yet another of his speeches in Copenhagen, barely getting his breath back after his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, and remember, he is lying.
By Deroy Murdock, Scripps-Howard
President Obama flies to Copenhagen later this month for a fresh round of taxes and spending. To slay an imaginary beast called “global warming,” Obama and other leaders will discuss a treaty that forces industrialized nations to shake themselves down and enrich the developing world. Even worse, Copenhagen occurs as climatic computer models misfire and climatologists substitute science with deception.
More maddening, this tax-and-spend treaty is a costly solution to an imaginary problem. So-called “global warming” threatens Earth about as urgently as does the Loch Ness Monster. Like the Oracle at Delphi, computer models of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (essentially the Vatican of so-called “global warming") issue frightful visions of a boiling planet in the year 2100. Too bad they so inaccurately foresaw Earth’s conditions just before 2010.
“Not one of the U.N.’s models had predicted the long stasis in global temperatures, which have shown no statistically significant trend since 1995 - i.e., for almost 15 years - notwithstanding continuing increases in CO2 concentration,” the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley tells me from London. The SPPI’s Lord Monckton is a member of the House of Lords and a leading critic of the entire “global warming” charade.
Of course, U.N. computers are no better than the data on which they dine. These data look quite dodgy considering e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which the Sunday Times of London calls “the world’s leading center for reconstructing past climate and temperatures.” These hacked messages show influential British climatologists and their American counterparts distorting and concealing facts that contradict their faith in so-called “global warming.” “ The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can’t.”
“The rest of the [CRU] databases seems [sic] to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage.”
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline” in temperatures, Prof. Philip Jones, CRU’s chief, wrote in a Nov. 16, 1999, e-mail to Prof. Michael Mann, director of Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center.
As Jones e-mailed Mann: “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.” “We need to cover our behinds on what was done here,” Mann wrote Jones on June 20, 2003. “Mike, can you delete any e-mails you may have with Keith re: AR4 [IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report]. Keith will do likewise,” Jones wrote Mann on May 29, 2008. “Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.” Mann wrote back: “I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP.” ‘I did get an email from the [Freedom of Information] person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails,” Jones wrote on Dec. 10, 2008. Under British law, it is a crime to destroy materials sought in Freedom of Information requests.
CRU still wants scientists to trust its conclusions - on which even more climatology is based - although it now admits that during an office move, it discarded computer tapes and paper records containing years of original weather-station observations. This is like telling an IRS auditor, “Just read my tax return; I chucked my receipts.” Proper science relies on generating reproducible results. Since these climate data now likely are locked in a landfill, CRU’s results are, by definition, irreproducible. This means, ipso facto, they are non-scientific.
Meanwhile, Professor Jones has stepped aside while he and his unit are under investigation. Also, Penn State is probing Professor Mann. “The University is looking into this matter further,” according to a November 30 statement. In the wake of Climategate, the Met Office (Britain’s equivalent of the U.S. National Weather Service) announced Friday that it would release meteorological observations from 1,000 surface-measurement stations worldwide. It also will analyze 160 years’ worth of raw data to reconstruct the global climate record that has been compromised by CRU’s disposal of data that undergird its conclusions. The Times of London reports that “the new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.” The Met Office (which relies heavily on CRU’s data), the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies are the three sources for data that flow into the IPCC’s computer models. The Met Office’s announcement constitutes a flat tire on the three-wheel All-Terrain Vehicle that pulls the global-warming issue around the world. And three years will pass until this flat is fixed.
“Although the CRU in Great Britain has been ground zero for the initial investigation because of its role in the IPCC, other national weather centers, universities, and the U.S. global data centers at NOAA and NASA will be shown in upcoming weeks to be complicit in the misrepresentation or manipulation of data to support the supposed consensus,” says Joseph D’Aleo of ICECAP, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, and the Weather Channel’s first director of meteorology.
Notwithstanding this “maze of skullduggery,” as author Christopher Booker calls Climategate, America’s broadcast networks moved glacially to cover this global-warming scandal. Two weeks after the story emerged, NBC Nightly News finally covered it last Friday. Until then, reports the Media Research Center, ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored Climategate on their morning and nightly news programs. In fact, Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart scooped the three networks by three days with a December 1 segment that presented key facts and generated big laughs. “Why would you throw out raw data from the ‘80s?” Stewart incredulously asked. “I still have Penthouses from the ‘70s - laminated.”
The Copenhagen Convention codifies world government fueled by fraud, justified by faulty data, and financed with massive, new global taxes. Rather than jet to Denmark to embrace such rubbish, Obama should stay here, toss a log into the Oval Office fireplace, and focus on resuscitating America’s economy. Read story in full here.
UPDATE: AP’s Seth Borenstein left out in the cold at Copenhagen for 7 hours thanks to U.N. incompetence
By Anthony Watts
I try to remind people that the U.N. has not succeeded at much of anything during its history. Mostly it just makes pronouncements and consumes cash. When it comes to doing any real work, they fall down on the job, because most of the people that make up the U.N. have never had to do any real work themselves.
So I hope this lesson on the U.N. to Seth Borenstein sinks in. He’ll hardly forget his day in the cold I’m sure. Temperature and Weather on Dec 14th in Copenhagen: Hi 33F Lo 31F Humidity average 89%, winds averaged 6 mph for a wind chill of 26F. Overcast.
From the Climate Pool: Seth’s toes are finally warm. In his security photo he is grinning like a child - and with reason. He’s finally in. “You have no idea how important water and a bathroom is until you don’t have it,” he said after waiting 7 hours and 20 minutes to enter the Copenhagen climate talks.
With U.N. security letting in only those cleared last week, hundreds of accredited delegates, journalists and NGO representatives were left to stand for hours in near-freezing temperatures before being let through. “It was crazy,” AP’s Seth Borenstein said. “You couldn’t leave the line. You couldn’t go to the bathroom, you couldn’t eat. Then snowflakes started falling. One woman even said, ‘if lightning strikes me, would they take me out of line?’”
People started handing out food - one gave out tangerines, another croissants. A man screamed “I don’t need food. I need socks! I’m freezing my ass off out here.” At one point, a U.N. official announced the wait would be longer, prompting the crowd to boo and chant “Let Us In!”
An Indian TV crew member interviewing actor Rahul Bose quipped “we’ll just do our interviews out here!” to which Bose mused “when bad things happen in a first-world country, it’s really a disaster!”
Seth himself stepped into the line at 7:55 a.m. and was through at 3:15 p.m., but only after another AP reporter, John Heilprin, “saved my bacon” by persuading a U.N. security guard to go out and fetch him. “John was afraid to go out himself in case they wouldn’t let him back in… the first thing I did when I saw him was give him a big hug. I have never been so grateful to be indoors.” Seth’s neighbors in line? “Oh they’re still out there.”
And it looks like they might stay there. With 40,000 people registered and Bella Center’s capacity only 15,000, the U.N. introduced a new quota system and ordered NGOs to cut down their numbers. Police shut down the Bella Center’s subway stop in a bid to ease the congestion. The situation can only get worse as more than 100 heads of state and government, including President Obama, show up this week with their entourages.
Many among the 3,500 accredited journalists worry they may be “locked down” in the press area and kept away from the conference center’s central atrium where delegates, presidents and premiers would circulate.
UPDATE: At 5 p.m., U.N. officials told everyone still in line that accreditation would close at 6 p.m. and so they should leave until Tuesday morning. Police started pulling people out of the crowd, which shouted back “Shame on the U.N.!” The U.N. then apologized for the inconvenience - a gesture met with more booing and chanting. Katy Daigle is based in London and covers international news for the AP
ICECAP Note: in the height of irony the cold will deepen the rest of this week with temperatures down into the 20s (F) and more snow. Many from Africa and Asia and the Southern Hemisphere came unprepared for the cold. Some of the thousands of global warming fanatics stranded will end up with frostbite or hypothermia or respiratory illnesses from many hours in the cold while campaigning to stop global warming. The Gore Effect goes viral.
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Here’s Some Money; Can I Quote You?
By Paul Chesser
An article by environmentalist journalist Fred Pearce about the “public relations disaster” that is Climategate is getting a lot of attention for Yale Environment 360, as it should. But the Web site, a clearinghouse for eco-Left points of view, crossed into bizarro territory last week with an “analysis” piece co-written by Michael Northrup and David Sassoon that touts “ambitious actions” by U.S. states to push “toward climate goals.” And the centerpiece of their “expert” analysis about the “great” things states are doing on climate policy? The Center for Climate Strategies:
Twenty-four policies and measures account for 85 percent of the states’ emissions reduction potential, touching every sector of the economy. The majority of the policies save money or expand the economy; the remainder either cost money or require investment, but overall they create new economic opportunity.
“Every macroeconomic analysis of state climate action that we have done has shown an expansionary effect,” Tom Peterson, the CEO of the Center for Climate Strategies (CCS), told us. “It should not be a big leap to figure out how to nationalize it.”
Peterson’s group has worked with governors and elected officials on both sides of the aisle in dozens of states and is completing an economic analysis of state climate action for presentation at a series of events at the Copenhagen meetings.
The laughable, undisclosed thing about this article is that Northrup, one of the co-authors and program director for sustainable development at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, probably has a conversation with Peterson every day. Why? Because RBF funds a substantial majority of their work, as I explained earlier this year:
While (CCS’s) Peterson and (Ken) Colburn have been far from transparent about their origins (they also hide how much they get paid), the work CCS does has also been thoroughly discredited. They forbade any debate or discussion about global warming science. As they wooed states out of as much money as they could (not much, it turns out) to reduce the burden on their subsidizers—mainly the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—they peddled incompetent economics (Green jobs! Cost savings!) in every state where they worked. They could not produce analysis in any state that showed the effect their policy recommendations would have upon climate—ostensibly the purpose for their state commissions. And besides their disregard for recent observed climatological trends, they continue to promote obsolete technologies like biofuels, which recent studies show have increased greenhouse gas emissions rather than reduced them.
So when I asked in the comments section (scroll, baby, scroll) of the Yale 360 article why the authors didn’t disclose the RBF-CCS funding relationship, the answer from co-author Sassoon was that they were disclosed—in RBF’s annual reports! That Leftist version of “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” transparency was then followed by, “So what!” In other words, “you idiot readers ought to be well-acquainted with funding specifics of our multi-million-dollar foundation.”
Then, in keeping with the global warming alarmist playbook, they suggested I disclose who my funders are. So in response I asked if they could share some of that Standard Oil/Exxon slathered Rockefeller dough they enjoy with little ‘ol me. That comment hasn’t been posted at Yale 360 as of this writing.
Update 4:45 p.m.: I forgot to mention that CCS is over in Copenhagen delivering advice about how to further wreck state economies by raising energy costs. Surprise, surprise—RBF’s Michael Northrup is on their honored guest list. Payback is not a bitch at all!
Update 5:24 p.m.: Just noticed that the Yale Environment 360 editors posted the following at the end of the article sometime today:
“The original posting of this article should have noted that the Center for Climate Strategies - whose CEO, Tom Peterson, is quoted in the story - has received funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. One of the article’s co-authors, Michael Northrop, is program director for sustainable development at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.” Likely a result of an email I sent them last night. I would have put it at the beginning of the article, but at least it’s there.
See post here.
Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media
Science writer Andrew C. Revkin, the individual journalist most identified with reporting on climate change, is leaving The New York Times. His last day will be December 21, and he will affiliate with Pace University. He is expected to continue working on his popular Dotearth blog through The Times, though details are still being arranged.
Revkin’s move has been in the works for some time, and he says he decided some two years ago - after writing a “next 20 years” personal memorandum about his career plans - that he would leave journalism. He cites frustration with journalism and also personal fatigue after routinely working virtually 24/7 in recent years.
More details, based on a personal interview and analysis of newsroom impacts, to be posted later today at The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.
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Brochure reveals Gore accurately cited scientist’s prediction of ice-free Arctic—It is the Scientist who has the explaining to do—not Gore
By Marc Morano in Cold and Soon to be Snowy and Frigid Copenhagen
Update: This is turning into a war of phrases. Maslowski tells the UK Telegraph: “I was very explicit that we were talking about ‘near-ice-free conditions’ and not ‘completely ice-free conditions’ (as Gore claimed) in the northern ocean.”
Al Gore’s citation of a scientist predicting an ice-free Arctic within a decade appears to have been accurate. It appears the scientist Gore cited, Dr. Wieslav Maslowski, did in fact make this prediction and it was published on December 2, 2009 by the Danish Climate Centre, lending support to Gore’s claim that the “figures are fresh.”
On December 14, former Vice President Al Gore told the UN climate summit that the Arctic could be ice free within a decade. “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years,” Gore said.
But Dr. Maslowski essentially threw Gore under the bus, according to a December 15, 2009 article in the UK Times:
“However, the climatologist whose work Mr. Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast. ‘It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr. Maslowski said. ‘I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.’ Mr. Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr. Maslowski as a ‘ballpark figure’ several years ago in a conversation with Mr. Gore.” The UK Times characterized it as Gore’s “embarrassing error.”
But Climate Depot has obtained a handout on the Arctic that is being distributed by the Danish government that cites Dr. Maslowski’s Arctic modeling and it appears to vindicate Gore’s citation of Dr. Maslowski. The December 2, 2009 handout, published by the Danish Climate Centre is entitled “FreshNor The freshwater budget of the Nordic Seas.”
The Danish Climate Centre’s brochure cites Maslowski’s models and claims and reaches the same conclusion as Gore: “Projecting the trend into the future indicates that autumn could become near ice free between 2011 and 2016 (Maslowski, 2009).” This appears to vindicate Gore’s assertions during his UN speech that Maslowski had made such a prediction. Maslowski is a research professor with the Department of Oceanography at the Navy Post Graduate School in Monterey, CA.
It appears that far from just a “‘ballpark figure’ several years ago in a conversation with Mr. Gore,” that Maslowski has indeed made this ice-free Arctic prediction much more formally and in model studies. Gore’s version of events appears to be accurate, while Maslowski appears to be the one who has the explaining to do. Climate Depot contacted Maslowski about this controversy but had not received a reply by press time.
The colorful brochure issued by the Danish Climate Centre clearly cites Dr. Maslowski’s research as predicting an ice free summer Arctic in the time frame Gore claimed. The brochure states: “Models indicate that sea ice thickness and volume have decreased possibly twice as much during the same period (Maslowski et al., 2007). Should the present trend of sea ice melt continue, some models suggest that the Arctic Ocean could become near ice free in the summer time within one decade,” the brochure claims, echoing Gore’s exact claims.“FreshNor is coordinated by Dr. Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen, Danish Climate Centre at Danish Meteorological Institute.”
Climate Depot’s Editor’s Note: The issue of whether Gore cited Maslowski’s work accurately is a very serious one scientifically and ethically. It appears Maslowski did indeed tout his extreme model predictions of an ice-free Arctic within a decade or less and that Gore accurately cited his work. A larger point to be made though, is that Maslowski’s “predictions” are nothing more than wild-eyed computer model scare scenarios. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.” Read more here.
Also see: Climate Depot Arctic Fact Sheet. See much more at Climate Depot. See also Lord Monckton address the arctic claims here.
Icecap Note: Since 2007, the arctic ice at peak summer melt has increased 26%.
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Met Office Criticised for Political Lobbying
By Dr. Benny Peiser
LONDON, 11 December 2009 - The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) today criticised the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the UK Met Office for their political intervention in the international negotiations currently taking place in Copenhagen.
The Met Office claims that preliminary temperature data for 2009 show that global temperatures continue to rise and that the argument that global warming has stopped is flawed.
According to the Met Office, the final temperature data for 2009 will notbe made available until early next year. A spokesperson, however, stated that the preliminary estimates were released by the Met Office in orderto influence the negotiations at the Copenhagen Summit.
“We are very concerned that both agencies have overstepped their scientific remits, which are supposed to provide governments with balanced advice and empirical data, and not to lobby politically,” Dr Benny Peiser, the Director of the GWPF said.
The GWPF is also concerned that global temperature data is being misrepresented to give the impression of continuous global warming. Inreality, there has been no statistically significant warming trend for thelast decade. The GWPF says this is a vital fact that must not be ignored.
“The world’s major scientific journals agree that since 2001 the global average temperature has been constant. We live in a warm decade and the world is reacting to that warmth but, contrary to predictions, the world isn’t getting any warmer at the moment,” Dr David Whitehouse, the GWPF’sscience editor, said.
Suggestions by the Met Office that a warming trend will resume in the next year or two should be treated with reserve in light of the recognised difficulties in making such confident predictions. After all, a number ofeminent scientists have published work which suggests that global temperatures might continue to flatline for up to another 10-15 years.
“As a result of the absence of any recorded 21st century warming trend,the formulation now favoured by climate campaigners is that the last decade has been the warmest since records began. It is rather as if the world’s population had stopped rising and all the demographers could say was that global population had been the highest ever recorded,” Lord Lawson, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, said. See post here.
Also note here BBC’s distortion of facts:
Recent BBC TV news reports have claimed that a recent poll has shown that 63% of Scots consider climate change to be an immediate and urgent problem. We were then invited to visit their web site to view the detailed poll results. Anyone visiting the poll results on the web site would see the significant distortion that the broadcast claim represents. When asked what they regarded as the most important issues facing Scotland, participants rated global warming only seventh, behind such issues as unemployment, the economy, crime, education and health. In fact only 2% of respondents considered environment/climate change as such an issue! This indicates that the reported interpretation of poll results depends largely on what the BBC wants the poll to show? The BBC strikes again!!!!
Open Letter to Secretary-General of United Nations
His Excellency Ban Ki Moon
Secretary-General, United Nations
New York, NY
United States of America
8 December 2009
Dear Secretary-General,
Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ - the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.
Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.
We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.
Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:
Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate; Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.
It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do so.
Letter and signatories here.
By Andrew C. Revkin and John M. Broder
Note: Uncomfirmed reports have Andy Revkin leaving the New York Times. Poor Gavin may have nobody to talk to...unless they (’Real’ Climate) hire Revkin as their mouthpiece.
Just two years ago, a United Nations panel that synthesizes the work of hundreds of climatologists around the world called the evidence for global warming “unequivocal.”
But as representatives of about 200 nations converge in Copenhagen on Monday to begin talks on a new international climate accord, they do so against a background of renewed attacks on the basic science of climate change.
The debate, set off by the circulation of several thousand files and e-mail messages stolen from one of the world’s foremost climate research institutes, has led some who oppose limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and at least one influential country, Saudi Arabia, to question the scientific basis for the Copenhagen talks.
The uproar has threatened to complicate a multiyear diplomatic effort already ensnared in difficult political, technical and financial disputes that have caused leaders to abandon hopes of hammering out a binding international climate treaty this year.
In recent days, an array of scientists and policy makers have said that nothing so far disclosed - the correspondence and documents include references by prominent climate scientists to deleting potentially embarrassing e-mail messages, keeping papers by competing scientists from publication and making adjustments in research data - undercuts decades of peer-reviewed science.
Yet the intensity of the response highlights that skepticism about global warming persists, even as many scientists thought the battle over the reality of human-driven climate change was finally behind them.
On dozens of Web sites and blogs, skeptics and foes of greenhouse gas restrictions take daily aim at the scientific arguments for human-driven climate change. The stolen material was quickly seized upon for the questions it raised about the accessibility of raw data to outsiders and whether some data had been manipulated.
An investigation into the stolen files is being conducted by the University of East Anglia, in England, where the computer breach occurred. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has also said he will look into the matter. At the same time, polls in the United States and Britain suggest that the number of people who doubt that global warming is dangerous or caused by humans has grown in recent years.
Politics, ideology and economic interests interlace the debate, and the stakes on both sides are high. If scientific predictions about global warming’s effects are correct, inaction will lead at best to rising social, economic and environmental disruption, at worst to a calamity far more severe. If the forecasts are wrong, nations could divert hundreds of billions of dollars to curb greenhouse gas emissions at a time when they are struggling to recover from a global recession.
Yet the case for human-driven warming, many scientists say, is far clearer now than a decade ago, when the skeptics included many people who now are convinced that climate change is a real and serious threat.
Even some who remain skeptical about the extent or pace of global warming say that the premise underlying the Copenhagen talks is solid: that warming is to some extent driven by greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere from human activities like the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
Roger A. Pielke Sr., for example, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado who has been highly critical of the United Nations climate panel and who once branded many of the scientists now embroiled in the e-mail controversy part of a climate “oligarchy,” said that so many independent measures existed to show unusual human-influenced warming taking place that there was no real dispute about it. “The role of added carbon dioxide as a major contributor in climate change has been firmly established,” he said.
The Copenhagen conference itself reflects increasing acceptance of the scientific arguments: the negotiations leading to the talks were conducted by high-ranking officials of the world’s governments rather than the scientists and environment ministers who largely shaped the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Late last week, President Obama changed the date of his visit to Copenhagen to Dec. 18, the last day of the talks.
For many, a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was a marker of a shift in the global warming debate. In it, the panel - a volunteer network of hundreds of scientists from many disciplines who meet periodically to review climate studies and translate the results into language useful to policy makers - concluded that no doubt remained that human-caused warming was under way and that, if unabated, it would pose rising risks.
Over the last several decades, other reviews, by the National Academy of Sciences and other institutions, have largely echoed the panel’s findings and said the remaining uncertainties should not be an excuse for inaction.
The panel’s report was built on two decades of intensive scientific study of climate patterns.
Greenhouse gases warm the planet by letting in sunlight and blocking the escape of some of the resulting heat. “The physics of the greenhouse effect is so basic that instead of asking whether it would happen, it makes more sense to ask what on earth could make it not happen,” said Spencer Weart, a physicist and historian. “So far, nobody has been able to come up with anything plausible in that line.”
The atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases released by humans has risen rapidly in the last century, along with industrialization and electricity use. Carbon dioxide from burning of coal, oil and natural gas is the most potent of the greenhouse gases because it can persist in the atmosphere for a century or more.
Methane - from landfills, livestock and leaking pipes, tanks and wells - has recently been found to be a close second. And these gases not only have a heating effect, but also cause evaporation of water from sea and soil, producing water vapor, another powerful heat-trapping gas.
In reaching its conclusion, the climate panel relied only partly on temperature data like that collected by the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, whose circulated e-mail correspondence set off the current uproar. It also considered a wide range of data from other sources, including measurements showing the retreat of glaciers in mountain ranges around the world, changes in the length and character of the seasons, heating of the oceans and marked retreats of sea ice in the Arctic.
Since 1979, satellites have provided another check on surface temperature measurements. Strong disagreements about how to interpret the satellite data were largely resolved after the Bush administration began a review in which competing research groups worked out some of their differences.
Science is about probability, not certainty. And the persisting uncertainties in climate science leave room for argument. What is a realistic estimate of how much temperatures will rise? How severe will the effects be? Are there tipping pointsbeyond which the changes are uncontrollable?
Even climate scientists disagree on many of these questions. But skeptics have been critical of the data assembled to show that warming is occurring and the analytic methods that climate scientists use, including mathematical models used to demonstrate a human cause for warming and project future trends.
Both sides also have at times been criticized for overstatement in characterizing the scientific evidence. The contents of the stolen e-mail messages and documents have given fresh ammunition to the skeptics’ camp.
The Climatic Research Unit’s role as a central aggregator of temperature and other climate data has also made it a target. One widely discussed file extracted from the unit’s computers, presumed to be the log of a researcher named Ian Harris, recorded his years of frustration in trying to make sense of disparate data and described procedures - or “fudge factors,” as he called them - used by scientists to eliminate known sources of error.
The research in question concerned attempts to chart past temperature changes by studying tree rings and other indirect indicators, an area of research that has long been fraught with disputes. An influential study that drew in part on the British data was challenged in 2003. In 2006, a review by the National Academy of Sciences concluded, with some reservations, that “an array of evidence” supported the broad thrust of the research.
To skeptics, the purloined files suggest a conspiracy to foist an expensive policy agenda on the nations of the world and to keep inconsistent data from the public.
“If we were arguing about archaeology then people could hoard their data,” said Stephen McIntyre, a blogger and retired Canadian mining consultant who since 2003 has investigated climate data, sometimes finding errors. “But I don’t think the public has any time for that” in the climate debate.
Many scientists, however, deny that any important data was held back and say that the e-mail messages and documents will in the end prove merely another manufactured controversy.
“There will remain after the dust settles in this controversy a very strong scientific consensus on key characteristics of the problem,” John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, told a Congressional hearing last week. “Global climate is changing in highly unusual ways compared to long experienced and expected natural variations.”
Whichever view prevails, the questions will undoubtedly linger well after the negotiators who are trying to work out the complex issues that still stand in the way of an international climate treaty leave Copenhagen.
Andrew C. Revkin reported from New York, and John M. Broder from Washington
ICECAP NOTE: where does one start with addressing this obfuscation. Instead of being angry at being used as useful idiots by their ‘friends’ at Real Climate and in the Universities, these gullibles turn back to them to respond to the explosive emails confirming what skeptics have been saying for many years thanks to a whistleblower. This could have been written by Gavin Schmidt.
Weart’s comment about CO2 are crazy, CO2 is not proven anywhere to be what is claimed and has a lifetime of 5 to 10 years not hundred or longer. We have many possible candidates for factors that could be responsible for the ups and downs including the sun and multidecadal cycles in the oceans which favor a predominance of El Ninos (with excess warmth) or La Ninas (with a cold bias). Ian “Harry” Harris’s comments about fudge factors was not to deal with known errors, but to create or alter data to agree with the desired results. He also was shocked at the total mess the world’s data was in. He commented “This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!” and “Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?” To call it just disparate data is to give it too much credit. Much more to come.
Also note here BBC’s distortion of facts:
Recent BBC TV news reports have claimed that a recent poll has shown that 63% of Scots consider climate change to be an immediate and urgent problem. We were then invited to visit their web site to view the detailed poll results. Anyone visiting the poll results on the web site would see the significant distortion that the broadcast claim represents. When asked what they regarded as the most important issues facing Scotland, participants rated global warming only seventh, behind such issues as unemployment, the economy, crime, education and health. In fact only 2% of respondents considered environment/climate change as such an issue! This indicates that the reported interpretation of poll results depends largely on what the BBC wants the poll to show? The BBC strikes again!!!!
By Art Horn, Icecap
1. Surface temperature records show that global temperature fell from 1875 to 1910. Temperature rose from 1911 to 1943. Temperature fell again from 1944 to 1976. Temperature rose from 1977 to 1998. There has been no warming since 1998. We are now in the 8th year of cooling. While all these changes were happening carbon dioxide levels did nothing but go up.
2.There are 5 major centers that collect global temperature data, The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Remote sensing systems, The University of Alabama Huntsville, The Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Nation Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. All of these centers show no warming since 1998 and all show cooling to varying degrees for the last 8 years.
3. Using surface temperature records to track global temperature change has numerous problems. The number of worldwide climate measuring sites has dropped from 6,000 in 1970 to under 2,000 today. Two thirds of the weather stations that were closed in this period were in the country. They had the colder night time temperatures. They are gone. What we are left with is a high percentage of urban weather stations with warmer night time readings due to pavement, buildings and general urban sprawl. This fact alone biases the temperature record warmer as the urban areas have grown around the world in the last 50 years. Several studies indicate that perhaps half the warming in the data base in the last 50 years is due to these land use changes. So while there has been warming the magnitude of it has been artificially magnified. That in itself is the real man made (made up) global warming.
4. NASA said that in the summer of 2009 the oceans were warmer than ever before. This was accomplished by subtracting the satellite measured ocean temperatures from the ocean temperature data base. NASA also does not use the 3307 ARGO buoys deployed in the world oceans because they show ocean heat content has been falling since the buoys were deployed in 2003.
5. There is no statistical relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature during the last 150 years. There is a strong statistical relationship between the cyclic Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and global temperature. The PDO is a 60 year cycle of warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean. In every instance over the last 150 years when the PDO was in the cool phase the global temperature went down. When the PDO was in the warm phase the temperature went up. The PDO has shifted back to cool and the air temperature is falling again.
6. The total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 3.8 one hundredth of a percent. The total increase by volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the last 150 years is one hundredth of a percent. This increase has benefited agriculture, trees, flowers and other plants. They grow faster with more carbon dioxide and are more resistant to drought.
7. Carbon dioxide is not pollution. Everything that grows on earth needs it. The source is irrelevant. Remove all the carbon dioxide from the air and the earth dies.
8. There are many large organizations including but not limited to Governments, Wall Street brokerage houses, environmental groups, corporations, universities, media outlets and political parties that have a strong financial interest in having you believe carbon dioxide is pollution. The saying “follow the money”
9. Ice cores show that increases in carbon dioxide in the past were the result of warmer temperature, not the cause of it. The laws of nature have not changed. Most of the increases in carbon dioxide in the air are the result of nature. The human component is very small, on the order of 3 percent per year. Half the carbon dioxide emitted into the air by human activity each year is immediately absorbed into the biosphere. Carbon dioxide is 3.5 percent of the greenhouse effect. Water vapor is 95 percent. Since human activity only adds 3 percent a year and half of that is absorbed into the biosphere the total human contribution to the greenhouse effect each year is about one tenth of one percent. Reducing this amount by some fraction will have no effect on temperature.
10. There is a strong relationship between the strength of the solar wind and global temperature. Strong solar wind equals a warmer earth, weak solar wind equals a cooler earth. Variations in cosmogenic isotopes of carbon 14 and beryllium 10 in ice cores prove this. Right now the solar wind is weaker than anytime that NASA has been able to measure it, nearly 50 years and the earth is cooling. The solar magnetic index (AP) is the lowest since measurements began in 1932 and it’s continuing to go down. The Pacific Ocean is in it’s cool phase and will be for another 25 years. The Atlantic is showing signs of cooling. The sun is weak and will likely be so for the next two solar cycles. We are heading for colder temperatures, not warmer.
11. The cyclic downward trend in the amount of ice left in the Arctic at the end of the summer has ended. The ice data from polar orbiting satellites clearly shows the extent of arctic ice is increasing. There is today 25 percent more ice than 2 years ago.
12. In the 1960s there were an estimated 5,000 polar bears, today there are 25,000. In a typical biased story in April of this year TIME magazine reported there were “only” 25,000 left. Once again this story had major input from environmental groups.
13. Satellite measurements show there is more ice in Antarctic than 30 years ago. News media reports only talk about shrinking ice in the Arctic, never about growing ice in Antarctica. They are selling fear. The reporters and news anchors know nothing about climatology. I this because I worked with them for 25 years.
14. The melting of glaciers is not new. The “Little Ice Age” was from 1400 to 1850. The coldest temperatures were in the 1600s. Global temperature has been rising unevenly for 300 years. Glaciers have been retreating unevenly for at least 250 years.
15. Computer models say that there should be a rapid warming of the upper troposphere between 30 degrees north and south of the equator if global warming is proceeding as they predict. Measurements with weather balloons over the last 50 years so no such warming at all. This proves the computer models do not understand how the climate system works. These models can’t predict the climate 50 to 100 years in the future. Computer model forecasts of warming are not evidence of climate change. They are marketing tools for research institutions and universities to continue their funding from our government.
16. Data from the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite show outgoing longwave radiation (heat) increased by 4 watts per square meter in the 1980s and 1990s while the oceans were undergoing a cyclic warming. Computer models predicted outgoing longwave radiation would decrease as oceans warmed. All the models used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were wrong. This means the models make the wrong assumptions about how the climate works and are useless in making any climate policy.
17. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed in the late 1980s to prove human burning of fossil fuels causes global warming. From the beginning it was never a scientific organization. It was formed with a biased political agenda. Their true goal is to capture power through climate treaties partly to insure the institutions own survival. These treaties give the UN the legal power to redistribute the developed nations wealth as they see fit. They will use the concept of “climate debt” owed to third world countries as justification. The debt will be retribution for the industrialized nations sin of “polluting” the climate with carbon dioxide and using all the available carbon space in the air. It is the UN’s goal to use global warming to extract money from developed nations without having to work for it. Recently the chairman of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri announced “We’re at a stage where the warming is happening at a much faster rate.” Apparently he does not look at real world data.
18. Large environmental groups, political “leaders” and eco-activists believe the climate system is so simple that it behaves like a room in your house. Simply turn down the thermostat or in other words reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we can regulate the world temperature. People who think this way are far more dangerous than any global warming because some of these people are in power.
19. As for Al Gore...He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. His message of fearing global warming has reached the third world. The nations of the third world are now demanding “climate reparations” for damage the western world has inflicted on the climate system over the last 150 years. They now say we owe them “climate Debt” because we have used up all the carbon space in the air. This is not promoting peace, it is causing more tension and anger in the developing countries towards the west. Gore’s “peace prize” is having the opposite effect. As for Gore’s financial investments in “green companies” I say “beware of the prophet seeking profits”. The urge to save the world is always a cover for the need to rule it.
20. The “climategate” emails prove that there is at best blind ambition among some of the worlds leading climate scientists and at worst criminal activity. The reaction of much of the mainstream media in the United States is proving to be very revealing. They either don’t report the story or they defend the actions of the climate scientists. Some of these leading scientists were caught intimidating scientific journals to keep skeptics prom publishing and altering data to make the case for man made global warming. The emails also reveal that these scientists have deleted data or refused freedom of information requests and have deleted emails relevant to those requests, a criminal offence. NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has also been stonewalling freedom of information efforts. It is clear from the emails that a small but powerful group of leading climate scientists have used their lofty positions to pervert the science of climate change.
“CO2 for different people has different attractions. After all, what is it? - it’s not a pollutant, it’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving = I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality.” - Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Science, MIT
See PDF with partial list of references here.