A new NASA-funded study has concluded that Amazon rain forests were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought,” said Arindam Samanta, the study’s lead author from Boston University.

The comprehensive study published in the current issue of the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters used the latest version of the NASA MODIS satellite data to measure the greenness of these vast pristine forests over the past decade.

A study published in the journal Science in 2007 claimed that these forests actually thrive from drought because of more sunshine under cloud-less skies typical of drought conditions. The new study found that those results were flawed and not reproducible.

Canopy of the Amazon rain forest. A new study has concluded that Amazon rain forests were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“This new study brings some clarity to our muddled understanding of how these forests, with their rich source of biodiversity, would fare in the future in the face of twin pressures from logging and changing climate,” said Boston University Prof. Ranga Myneni, senior author of the new study.

The IPCC is under scrutiny for various data inaccuracies, including its claim—based on a flawed World Wildlife Fund study—that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically and be replaced by savannas from even a slight reduction in rainfall.

“Our results certainly do not indicate such extreme sensitivity to reductions in rainfall,” said Sangram Ganguly, an author on the new study, from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute affiliated with NASA Ames Research Center in California.

“The way that the WWF report calculated this 40% was totally wrong, while [the new] calculations are by far more reliable and correct,” said Dr. Jose Marengo, a Brazilian National Institute for Space Research climate scientist and member of the IPCC. See report here.

Journal Reference: Samanta et al. Amazon forests did not green-up during the 2005 drought. Geophysical Research Letters, 2010; 37 (5): L05401 DOI: 10.1029/2009GL042154

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago - changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media - even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC - are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying ‘It is too so!’ In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

The body blows to the climate campaign did not end with the Climategate emails. The IPCC - which has produced four omnibus assessments of climate science since 1992 - has issued several embarrassing retractions from its most recent 2007 report, starting with the claim that Himalayan glaciers were in danger of melting as soon as 2035. That such an outlandish claim would be so readily accepted is a sign of the credulity of the climate campaign and the media: Even if extreme global warming occurred over the next century, the one genuine scientific study available estimated that the huge ice fields of the Himalayas would take more than 300 years to melt - a prediction any beginning chemistry student could confirm with a calculator. (The actual evidence is mixed: Some Himalayan glaciers are currently expanding.) The source for the melt-by-2035 claim turned out to be not a peer-reviewed scientific assessment, but a report from an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which in turn lifted the figure from a popular magazine article in India whose author later disavowed his offhand speculation.

But what made this first retraction noteworthy was the way in which it underscored the thuggishness of the climate establishment. The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri (an economist and former railroad engineer who is routinely described as a ‘climate scientist’, initially said that critics of the Himalayan glacier melt prediction were engaging in “voodoo science,” though it later turned out that Pachauri had been informed of the error in early December- in advance of the U.N.’s climate change conference in Copenhagen - but failed to disclose it. He’s invoking the Charlie Rangel defense: It was my staff’s fault.

The Himalayan retraction has touched off a cascade of further retractions and corrections, though the IPCC and other organs of climate alarmism are issuing their corrections sotto voce, hoping the media won’t take notice. The IPCC’s assessment that 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest was at risk of destruction from climate change was also revealed to be without scientific foundation; the WWF was again the source. The Daily Telegraph identified 20 more claims of ruin in the IPCC’s 2007 report that are based on reports from advocacy groups such as Greenpeace rather than peer-reviewed research, including claims that African agricultural production would be cut in half, estimates of coral reef degradation, and the scale of glacier melt in the Alps and the Andes. Numerous other claims were sourced to unpublished student papers and dissertations, or to misstated or distorted research.

Peer reviewers in the formal IPCC process had flagged many of these errors and distortions during the writing of the 2007 report but were ignored. For example, the IPCC claimed that the world is experiencing rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather related events brought on by climate change. But the underlying paper, when finally published in 2008, expressly contradicted this, saying, “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.” Perhaps the most embarrassing walkback was the claim that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level, and therefore gravely threatened by rising sea levels. The correct number is 26 percent, which Dutch scientists say they tried to tell the IPCC before the 2007 report was published, to no avail. And in any case, a paper published last year in Nature Geoscience predicting a 21st-century sea level rise of up to 32 inches has been withdrawn, with the authors acknowledging mistaken methodology and admitting “we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.” The IPCC ignored several published studies casting doubt on its sea level rise estimates.

This central pillar of the climate campaign is unlikely to survive much longer, and each repetition of the “science-is-settled” mantra inflicts more damage on the credibility of the climate science community. The scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil ("hide the decline") Jones dealt the science-is-settled narrative a huge blow with his candid admission in a BBC interview that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today, and that he agrees that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years- all three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting. And Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan.

Read much more here.

"The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot,” according to a Commerce Department report published by the Washington Post. Writes the Post: “Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers. . . all point to a radical change in climate conditions and . . . unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone . . . Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones . . . while at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.”

More evidence of human-caused global warming? Hardly.

The above report of runaway Arctic warming is from a Washington Post story published Nov. 2, 1922 and bears an uncanny resemblance to the tales of global warming splattered across the front pages of today’s newspapers. It is one of many historical accounts published during the past 140 years describing climate changes and often predicting catastrophic cooling or warming.

Here are excerpts from a few of those accounts, appearing as early as 1870:

“The climate of New-York and the contiguous Atlantic seaboard has long been a study of great interest. We have just experienced a remarkable instance of its peculiarity. The Hudson River, by a singular freak of temperature, has thrown off its icy mantle and opened its waters to navigation.” - New York Times, Jan. 2, 1870

“Is our climate changing? The succession of temperate summers and open winters through several years, culminating last winter in the almost total failure of the ice crop throughout the valley of the Hudson, makes the question pertinent. The older inhabitants tell us that the winters are not as cold now as when they were young, and we have all observed a marked diminution of the average cold even in this last decade.” - New York Times, June 23, 1890

“The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.” - New York Times, Feb. 24, 1895

Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.” - Chicago Tribune, Aug. 9, 1923

“The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to the conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” - Time Magazine, Sept. 10, 1923

Headline: “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise” - New York Times, March 27, 1933

“America is believed by Weather Bureau scientists to be on the verge of a change of climate, with a return to increasing rains and deeper snows and the colder winters of grandfather’s day."- Associated Press, Dec. 15, 1934

Warming Arctic Climate Melting Glaciers Faster, Raising Ocean Level, Scientist Says - “A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a “serious international problem,” Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist, said today. - New York Times, May 30, 1937

“Greenland’s polar climate has moderated so consistntly that communities of hunters have evolved into fishing villages. Sea mammals, vanishing from the west coast, have been replaced by codfish and other fish species in the area’s southern waters.” - New York Times, Aug. 29, 1954

“An analysis of weather records from Little America shows a steady warming of climate over the last half century. The rise in average temperature at the Antarctic outpost has been about five degrees Fahrenheit.” - New York Times, May 31, 1958

“Several thousand scientists of many nations have recently been climbing mountains, digging tunnels in glaciers, journeying to the Antarctic, camping on floating Arctic ice. Their object has been to solve a fascinating riddle: what is happening to the world’s ice? - New York Times, Dec. 7, 1958

“After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.” - New York Times, Jan. 30, 1961

“Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age.” - Los Angeles Times, Dec. 23, 1962

“Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two.” - New York Times, Feb. 20, 1969

“By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half ...” - Life magazine, January 1970

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” - Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day, 1970

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind. We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” - Barry Commoner (Washington University), Earth Day, 1970

Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor, “the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” - Newsweek magazine, Jan. 26, 1970

“The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.” - New York Times, July 18, 1970

“In the next 50 years, fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun’s rays that the Earth’s average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.” - Washington Post, July 9, 1971

“It’s already getting colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes. . . .” - Los Angles Times, Oct. 24, 1971

“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.” - New York Times, Jan. 5, 1978

“A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.” - New York Times, Feb. 18, 1978

“A global warming trend could bring heat waves, dust-dry farmland and disease, the experts said… Under this scenario, the resort town of Ocean City, Md., will lose 39 feet of shoreline by 2000 and a total of 85 feet within the next 25 years.” - San Jose Mercury News, June 11, 1986

“Global warming could force Americans to build 86 more power plants—at a cost of $110 billion—to keep all their air conditioners running 20 years from now, a new study says...Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010, and the drain on power would require the building of 86 new midsize power plants - Associated Press, May 15, 1989

“New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 17, 1989 (actually Florida was more like New York 20 years later)

“[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers . . . The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.” - “Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect,” Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle, 1990.

“It appears that we have a very good case for suggesting that the El Ninos are going to become more frequent, and they’re going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so, we’ll go into a permanent El Nino. So instead of having cool water periods for a year or two, we’ll have El Nino upon El Nino, and that will become the norm. And you’ll have an El Nino, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years,” according to Dr. Russ Schnell, a scientist doing atmospheric research at Mauna Loa Observatory. - BBC, Nov. 7, 1997 (followed immediately in late 1998 by three straight years of La Nina)

“Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people.”—The Birmingham Post in England, July 26, 1999

“This year (2007) is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998.” - ScienceDaily, Jan. 5, 2007

Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer (2008), report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field. “We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history],” David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker. - National Geographic News, June 20, 2008

“So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually.” Dr. James Hansen (NASA GISS), The Observer, Feb. 15, 2009.

Climate change? Yes, there has been plenty of that during the past 140 years. Despite warnings by “experts of the day” of approaching climate disasters, mankind somehow managed to survive. A decade or so from now, after earth’s climate changes once again, those who are old enough will recall with amusement the time, early in the 21st century, when the world went crazy over an imaginary threat called “global warming.”

Kirk Myers is one of the few environmental reporters who is bothering to look at actual data - not reading from the guidelines provided by the Society of Environmental Journalists. We applaud him for his boldness.

Environmentalists pressure the insurance industry.

Copenhagen was a flop. Congress’s cap-and-trade bill is stalled. The EPA has delayed its climate rules. If you think this means American business is escaping the threat of carbon restraints, think again.

Most of the climate debate focuses on Washington. This misses a more clever and committed force - environmental groups that impose their agenda on companies via pressure, legal threat and sympathetic regulators. A textbook example has been quietly unfolding in the insurance sector. The question is whether governors will stand by to let green activists effectively regulate their businesses.

Since the beginning of the climate debate, environmental lobbies such as Ceres (a coalition of activists and investors that pressures companies to go green) have expressed particular interest in insurers. Rather than nitpick every company to adopt climate-change policies, these organizations realized it would be more efficient to target a gatekeeper. Everybody needs insurance. If insurers could be bludgeoned into requiring policyholders adopt carbon-mitigation practices as a requirement for insurance, the activists would have imposed their will widely and quickly.

Enter the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the professional body for state regulators. Unlike, say, the National Governors Association, NAIC has a quasi-regulatory role. Insurance is complex, and the association develops model bills for state legislatures to vote on. This has at times been beneficial, but NAIC’S structure also means activist commissioners can drive its agenda.

No surprise then when several commissioners - with the prodding of outside green groups - several years ago dragged NAIC into the climate debate. It began innocently enough, with a task force charged with producing a “white paper.”

Yet under the direction of members such as Wisconsin Insurance Commissioner Sean Dilweg and Pennsylvania Commissioner Joel Ario - both climate crusaders - the task force turned itself into a national climate regulator. In particular, in unveiled its “Climate Risk Disclosure Survey,” a document insurers must complete and make public. This survey was not put forward for legislative approval, but rather presented as something state commissioners must issue unilaterally.

Among the questions: Does the company have a plan to assess, reduce or mitigate its emissions in its operations or organizations? Summarize steps the company has taken to encourage policyholders to reduce the losses caused by climate change-influenced events. Has the company considered the impact of climate change on its investment portfolio?

The survey - already issued in some states - flows from the tenuous position that climate change poses grave risks to business. As such it is designed to coerce insurers to adopt and require climate policies, or risk financial and legal fallout.

It’s also crafted to pressure insurers to shift their sizable investment portfolios away from, say, Exxon, and into the sort of “socially responsible” investments ballyhooed by Ceres. Companies that refuse will be prime targets for trial lawyers who claim they have failed to protect investors. It is, in effect, regulation via public and legal pressure.

The survey itself was crafted by the environmental lobby, using NAIC as its vehicle. Industry groups were amazed and horrified to see Ceres present at task force meetings, designing the survey language. It came out that the Rockefeller Family Fund - an ideologically green foundation - had provided grant money to fund “research assistance” for NAIC’s climate task force. Since when do state regulators require financial assistance from an outside advocacy organization?

Industry associations such as the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies have pushed back, and managed to have the survey cut to eight questions from its initial 23. The financial threshold of insurers that must take part is also higher, though will still encompass an estimated 70% of the industry by market share.

When I called the industry association CEO Chuck Chamness to ask him about this fight, he expressed the general frustration: “We are a good, green industry. What we don’t believe is that our industry should be made into an environmental traffic cop. If there is a need to change business behavior, go directly to the industry in question and regulate it. Don’t use us as leverage.”

Some states have already caught on to this end run around governors and legislatures. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was the first to object, directing his insurance department to refrain from administering the survey. Officials in Mississippi and Missouri have followed suit; Rhode Island says the survey won’t be mandatory.

Activists groups have meanwhile sought to further spin this victory. Ceres went to Washington last year and made the argument to new Obama Securities and Exchange Commissioner Mary Schapiro that if even state insurance regulators were willing to act, surely so must the SEC? In January the agency issued new regulation requiring publicly listed companies to disclose their “climate risks” to investors.

Thus does an unaccountable political body, advised by unaccountable green groups, fundamentally rewrite the rules of business. Many state governors and politicians remain in the dark about this back door power grab. If they want a say in how their states enforce climate policy on the business community, they might want to intervene soon. 

Vijay Kumar Raina is amused. The 76-year old retired geologist who lives in Sector 17, Panchkula in Haryana has been blitzkrieged by the media, government, world scientist community and the average citizen since December 2009. Why? Because he blew the lid off the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), headed by the charismatic R.K. Pachauri, claims that the Himalayan glaciers will be extinct by 2035.

Raina’s life has taken a complete turnaround in the last six months. Like most retirees, Raina had followed a routine: Early morning walks, discussing politics, attending to his plants and working religiously on his book devoted to ‘tracing the work done on Indian glaciers’. He was on the receiving end of jibes from Pachauri who dismissed his claims as school-boy science. Now Pachauri has been keeping a low profile, his reputation at stake. However, neighbours call on Raina non-stop. There is no time to work on his book. But Raina laughs off the publicity. “The last one month has been absolutely maddening. Morning to evening, I am either talking to the press or answering questions on email and I haven’t been able to even touch my book. [But] so far I am concerned, the case is closed,” he says.

However simple this may sound, it makes a lot of difference to the authenticity of the data collected. By November, the first snowfall has already taken place because of which it is very difficult to identify the outline of the glaciers. That’s why many glaciers outlined in the maps show much larger outlines than actually present. So, when the SAC compared the current size of glaciers using satellite imagery with the 1962 maps they obviously found a lot of shrinkage. “We told the minister that we do not agree what SAC says. At least that is our experience of the glaciers we have gone to,” adds Raina.

Ramesh took notice and asked Raina if he would prepare a ‘white paper on the status of work done on Himalayan glaciers’. He was given a window of three weeks to complete the white paper. Raina claims he had no idea what a white paper meant. But he checked. “I found that a white paper means truthful expression of facts,” he says. On August 4, 2009, Raina submitted his report. It contained 150 years of data collected by the GSI of 25 Indian glaciers. It said that the Himalayan glaciers and glaciers in the rest of the world have retreated and advanced irregularly with no direct link to warming or cooling of the earth’s climate. “This is one of the many issues of climate change science that we do not fully understand,” says Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, a scientist based out of Canada who has been an expert reviewer of the 2007 IPCC report.

On November 9, 2009, Jairam Ramesh released the Himalayan glacier document at a press conference in New Delhi. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening with the Himalayan glaciers,” he said.

Hell Breaks Loose

Raina vividly remembers the day the report was released. “It is surprising that even on the day when this document was released by the minister, a lot of press asked me questions but nobody bothered to put them in the papers because probably at that time they thought this fellow knows nothing… yeh to mantriji ne kar diya,” he says. He was partially correct. Not many took the statement too seriously in the beginning, except for some stray critics writing in the media. But the one man who took immediate note of it and reacted bitterly was R. K. Pachauri, chairman of IPCC.

Pachauri came down strongly on the report. The following day, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, he questioned the minister’s intentions behind releasing such a report terming it as ‘an extremely arrogant statement’. And he didn’t refrain from taking pot shots at Raina either. “With the greatest of respect, this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.” He went on to say that such claims were those of “climate change deniers and school boy science.” Scientists across the world and six of them who shared their perspective on this issue with Forbes India say that Pachauri’s comments were out of order because they were very personal.

In December, 2009, however, Dr. Murari Lal, a scientist and one of the authors of the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report spilled the beans at a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) conference held in New Delhi at the headquarters of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). He said that he had cited the ‘Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035’ claim from a 2005 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.

The implication of this “"confession" was serious. Lal was saying his data was from a secondary source. The events quickly unravelled. WWF quickly responded and said it had, in turn, take the information from a quote in the New Science Journal given by Dr. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, who was then at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and who later became the head of glaciology at TERI. Hasnain, on his part, denied making any such statement. The source of the claim in IPCC’s report thus entered a blackhole.

The moment this story made headlines, scientists and policy makers across the world started questioning IPCC’s credibility. Dr. Vincent Gray, a scientist based out of New Zealand who has been an expert reviewer on all IPCC reports, puts IPCC’s current state of affairs in perspective. “This Himalayan story is so obviously fraudulent that it is surprising that people have only just noticed it. I blame myself that I should have noticed it long ago,” says Gray. It is the IPCC’s motivation and hand-in-glove nature with policy makers that have come into question. “It is not a scientific body and it has become a political body, dedicated to distorting evidence to support the view that human emissions are dangerous,” says Gray. Read much more here.

Several errors have been recently uncovered in the 4th Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These include problems with Himalayan glaciers, African agriculture, Amazon rainforests, Dutch geography, and attribution of damages from extreme weather events. More seem to turn up daily. Most of these errors stem from the IPCC’s reliance on non-peer reviewed sources.

The defenders of the IPCC have contended that most of these errors are minor in significance and are confined to the Working Group II Report (the one on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability) of the IPCC which was put together by representatives from various regional interests and that there was not as much hard science available to call upon as there was in the Working Group I report ("The Physical Science Basis"). The IPCC defenders argue that there have been no (or practically no) problems identified in the Working Group I (WGI) report on the science.

We humbly disagree.

In fact, the WGI report is built upon a process which, as revealed by the Climategate emails, is, by its very nature, designed not to produce an accurate view of the state of climate science, but instead to be an “assessment” of the state of climate science - an assessment largely driven by preconceived ideas of the IPCC design team and promulgated by various elite chapter authors. The end result of this “assessment” is to elevate evidence which supports the preconceived ideas and denigrate (or ignore) ideas that run counter to it.

These practices are clearly laid bare in several recent Petitions to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) petitions asking the EPA to reconsider its “Endangerment Finding” that anthropogenic greenhouse gases endanger our public health and welfare. The basis of the various petitions is that the process is so flawed that the IPCC cannot be considered a reliable provider of the true state of climate science, something that the EPA heavily relies on the IPCC to be. The most thorough of these petitions contains over 200 pages of descriptions of IPCC problems and it a true eye-opener into how bad things had become.

There is no doubt that the 200+ pages would continue to swell further had the submission deadline not been so tight. New material is being revealed daily.

Just last week, the IPCC’s (and thus EPA’s) primary assertion that “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations” was shown to be wrong. This argument isn’t included in the Petition.

This adds yet another problem to the growing list of errors in the IPCC WGI report, this one concerns Antarctic sea ice trends. While all the press is about the observed declines in Arctic sea ice extent in recent decades, little attention at all is paid to the fact that the sea ice extent in the Antarctic has been on the increase. No doubt the dearth of press coverage stems from the IPCC treatment of this topic.

In the IPCC AR4 the situation is described like this in Chapter 4, “Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice, and Frozen Ground” (p. 351): As an example, an updated version of the analysis done by Comiso (2003), spanning the period from November 1978 through December 2005, is shown in Figure 4.8. The annual mean ice extent anomalies are shown. There is a significant decreasing trend in arctic sea ice extent of –33 plus/minus 7.4 × 103 km2 yr–1 (equivalent to -2.7 plus/minus 0.6% per decade), whereas the Antarctic results show a small positive trend of 5.6 plus/minus 9.2 × 103 km2 yr-1 (0.47 plus/minus 0.8% per decade), which is not statistically significant. The uncertainties represent the 90% confidence interval around the trend estimate and the percentages are based on the 1978 to 2005 mean.

Notice that the IPCC states that the Antarctic increase in sea ice extent from November 1979-December 2005 is “not statistically significant” which seems to give them good reason to play it down. For instance, in the Chapter 4, Executive Summary (p. 339), the sea ice bullet reads: Satellite data indicate a continuation of the 2.7 plus/minus 0.6% per decade decline in annual mean arctic sea ice extent since 1978. The decline for summer extent is larger than for winter, with the summer minimum declining at a rate of 7.4 plus/minus 2.4% per decade since 1979. Other data indicate that the summer decline began around 1970. Similar observations in the Antarctic reveal larger interannual variability but no consistent trends.

Which in the AR4 Summary For Policymakers becomes two separate items:

Satellite data since 1978 show that annual average arctic sea ice extent has shrunk by 2.7 [2.1 to 3.3]% per decade, with larger decreases in summer of 7.4 [5.0 to 9.8]% per decade. These values are consistent with those reported in the TAR. {4.4}

and,

Antarctic sea ice extent continues to show interannual variability and localised changes but no statistically significant average trends, consistent with the lack of warming reflected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region. {3.2, 4.4}

“Continues to show no statistically significant average trends”? Continues?

This is what the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), released in 2001, had to say about Antarctic sea ice trends (Chapter 3, p. 125): Over the period 1979 to 1996, the Antarctic (Cavalieri et al., 1997; Parkinson et al., 1999) shows a weak increase of 1.3 plus/minus 0.2%/decade.

By anyone’s reckoning, that is a statistically significant increase.

In the IPCC TAR Chapter 3 Executive Summary is this bullet point:

Satellite data indicate that after a possible initial decrease in the mid-1970s, Antarctic sea-ice extent has stayed almost stable or even increased since 1978. So, the IPCC AR4’s contention that sea ice trends in Antarctica “continues” to show “no statistically significant average trends” contrasts with what it had concluded in the TAR.

Interestingly, the AR4 did not include references to any previous study that showed that Antarctic sea ice trends were increasing in a statistically significant way. The AR4 did not include the TAR references of either Cavalieri et al., 1997, or Parkinson et al., 1999. Nor did the IPCC AR4 include a reference to Zwally et al., 2002, which found that:

The derived 20 year trend in sea ice extent from the monthly deviations is 11.18 plus/minus 4.19 x 103 km2yr-1 or 0.98 plus/minus 0.37% (decade)-1 for the entire Antarctic sea ice cover, which is significantly positive. [emphasis added]

and (also from Zwally et al. 2002),

Also, a recent analysis of Antarctic sea ice trends for 1978-1996 by Watkins and Simmonds [2000] found significant increases in both Antarctic sea ice extent and ice area, similar to the results in this paper. [emphasis added]

Watkins and Simmonds (2000) was also not cited by the AR4.

So just what did the IPCC AR4 authors cite in support of their “assessment” that Antarctic sea ice extent was not increasing in a statistically significant manner? The answer is “an updated version of the analysis done by Comiso (2003).” And just what is “Comiso (2003)”? A book chapter!

Comiso, J.C., 2003: Large scale characteristics and variability of the global sea ice cover. In: Sea Ice - An Introduction to its Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Geology [Thomas, D. and G.S. Dieckmann (eds.)]. Blackwell Science, Oxford, UK, pp. 112-142.

And the IPCC didn’t actually even use what was in the book chapter, but instead “an updated version” of the “analysis” that was in the book chapter.

And from this “updated” analysis, the IPCC reported that the increase in Antarctic sea ice extent was an insignificant 5.6 plus/minus 9.2 × 103 km2 yr–1 (0.47 plus/minus 0.8% per decade) - a value that was only about one-half of the increase reported in the peer-reviewed literature.

There are a few more things worth considering.

1) Josefino Comiso (the author of the above mentioned book chapter) was a contributing author of the IPCC AR4 Chapter 4, so the coordinating lead authors probably just turned directly to Comiso to provide an unpeer-reviewed update. (how convenient)

and 2) Comiso published a subsequent paper (along with Fumihiko Nishio) in 2008 that added only one additional year to the IPCC analysis (i.e. through 2006 instead of 2005), and once again found a statistically significant increase in Antarctic sea ice extent, with a value very similar to the value reported in the old TAR, that is:

When updated to 2006, the trends in ice extent and area in the Antarctic remains slight but positive at 0.9 plus/minus 0.2 and 1.7 plus/minus 0.3% per decade. These trends are, again, by anyone’s reckoning, statistically significant.

Figure 1. Trend in Antarctic ice extent, November 1978 through December 2006 (source: Comiso and Nishio, 2008) enlarged here.

And just in case further evidence is needed, and recent 2009 paper by Turner et al. (on which Comiso was a co-author), concluded that: Based on a new analysis of passive microwave satellite data, we demonstrate that the annual mean extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a statistically significant rate of 0.97% dec-1 since the late 1970s. This rate of increase is nearly twice as great as the value given in the AR4 (from its non-peer-reviewed source).

So, the peer reviewed literature, both extant at the time of the AR4 as well as published since the release of the AR4, shows that there has been a significant increase in the extent of sea ice around Antarctica since the time of the first satellite observations observed in the late 1970s. And yet the AR4 somehow “assessed” the evidence and determined not only that the increase was only half the rate established in the peer-reviewed literature, but also that it was statistically insignificant as well. And thus, the increase in sea ice in the Antarctic was downplayed in preference to highlighting the observed decline in sea ice in the Arctic. It is little wonder why, considering that the AR4 found that “Sea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic under all SRES scenarios.” See full report with references here.

Hold on to your wallets and purses.

A recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling declaring CO2 a harmful pollutant will generate hundreds of new regulations that will drive up the cost of living for financially strapped Americans while severely burdening small businesses and hampering U.S. competitiveness in the world marketplace.

The EPA ruling, which is designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions, “amounts to little more than a new tax on businesses and consumers,” says the National Taxpayers Union. “If EPA’s ‘endangerment finding’ is fully implemented, all kinds of products and services - from milk and paper towels to gasoline and electric bills - will cost more. And these new taxes are the last things Americans can afford right now as they attempt to crawl out of a recession.”

The EPA finding has been challenged by several industry groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute.
“This action poses a threat to every American family and business if it leads to regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Such regulation would be intrusive, inefficient, and excessively costly. It could chill job growth and delay business expansion,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute. “The Clean Air Act was meant to control traditional air pollution, not greenhouse gases that come from every vehicle, home, factory and farm in America,” he said.

The new finding has been denounced by members of both political parties, including Collin Peterson, the Democratic Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee from Minnesota’s seventh congressional district. “With or without congressional action, EPA will be free to regulate greenhouse gases, resulting in one of the largest and most bureaucratic nightmares that the U.S. economy and Americans have ever seen,” Peterson warned in a recent press announcement.

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska also condemned the ruling. “Businesses will be forced to cut jobs, if not close their doors for good. Domestic energy production will be severely restricted, increasing our dependence on foreign suppliers and threatening our national security. Housing will become less affordable, and consumer goods more expensive, as the impacts of the EPA’s regulations ripple and rake their way across our economy . . . The EPA’s endangerment finding may be intended to help protect our environment, but the regulations that inevitably follow will only endanger our economy,” she said.

Economy-killing ruling based on flawed science

The EPA ruling is based on the theory that rising CO2 levels, caused by human activity, amplify the earth’s normal greenhouse effect, which, in turn, causes global warming. But the hotly debated theory has come under increasing attack in recent months following the release of pilfered e-mails from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The correspondence shows leading climate scientists conspiring to manipulate data, evade freedom of information requests, silence critics, and interfere with the publication of research challenging the man-caused warming theory.

Much of the manipulated data found its way into U.N. International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007, a primary source of research used by the EPA to justify its endangerment finding. The IPCC report has been attacked in recent months by critics who accuse the organization of using non-peer-reviewed research to support its predictions of catastrophic climate change. In February, the IPCC was forced to retract statements in its assessment claiming that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 and 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest would very likely disappear if temperatures continued to rise.

The IPCC also had to back away from a statement in the report claiming that rising seas would endanger the 55 percent of the countryside in Netherlands that is below sea level. The embarrassing truth: only 20 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level. All three fraudulent claims were lifted from non-peer-reviewed magazine articles or studies supplied by writers or researchers linked to environmental pressure groups and the climate-change movement. Britain’s Sunday Telegraph documented at least 16 non-peer-reviewed articles produced by the preservationist group World Wildlife Fund - all used as sources in the IPPC report.

Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guleph in Ontario, Canada, says the U.N. needs to determine how much other research has been “likewise compromised.” He claimed in a FoxNews.com interview that the IPCC is “admitting what they did only because they were caught. The fact that so many IPCC authors kept silent all this time shows how monumental has been the breach of trust.”

In its independent assessment of the IPPC report, the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) described the document as “flawed.” “The overall tone of AR4 is highly alarmist, with evidence that might point in other directions deliberately edited out or buried out of sight. It is not a reliable basis for making public policy.”

According to the NIPCC, most of the “2,500 scientists” who contributed to the assessment were never given a chance to review the conclusions contained in the final Summaries for Policymakers (SPM). Instead, the summaries were written by a small group of scientists and then revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments prior to publication.

NIPCC claims the IPCC’s full report was revised after the executive summaries were written to make it agree with the political documents.

The state of Texas recently filed a petition with the EPA, asking it to reconsider its endangerment finding and accusing climate scientists affiliated with the IPCC of an “orchestrated effort to violate freedom of information laws, exclude scientific research, and manipulate temperature data.” In a Feb. 16 announcement, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the agency had outsourced “the scientific basis for its greenhouse gas regulation to a scandal-plagued international organization that cannot be considered objective or trustworthy.”

CO2 a harmless trace gas

The EPA’s endangerment finding identifies six greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride - which it asserts are the “primary driver of climate change” and “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people.” But according to paleobotany research site Geocraft, total human contributions to greenhouse gases account for only about 0.28 percent of the greenhouse effect. Anthropogenic (man-mad) carbon dioxide comprises about 0.117 percent of this total, and man-made emissions of other gases (e.g. methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons) contribute another 0.163 percent. Using a real-world comparison, 0.117 percent of a football field—the amount of CO2 in the air—would equal just over 4 inches.

As Geocraft explains: “At 385 parts per million, CO2 is a minor constituent of earth’s atmosphere - less than 4/100 of 1 percent of all gases present. Compared to earlier geologic times, earth’s current atmosphere is CO2-impoverished.

“Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small - perhaps undetectable - effect on global climate.”

As physical science and mathematics professor Richard F. Yada writes in his 2009 paper, “Reality Check: CO2”: “The great lesson from geologic history is that carbon dioxide is critical to life. The move to label it as a pollutant is simply preposterous. The logical extension to that thought process is that the government has legally regulated life. The notion would be laughable if it were not so tragically real.”

IPCC uncertain of its own climate models

If the EPA had dug more deeply into IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, it would have found this stunning admission in the section, “Working Group 1: The Physical Science Basis: IPCC 8.6.4”:

“A number of diagnostic tests have been proposed since the TAR [Third Assessment Report] (see Section 8.6.3), but few of them have been applied to a majority of the models currently in use. Moreover, it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining future projections. Consequently, a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed.”

In plain English, the IPCC is admitting it doesn’t know which metrics to employ in its models to test their reliability. And it is not sure how high or low temperatures will be in the future, because the models it relies on are incapable of calculating climate sensitivity to CO2.

In short, the incessant fear-mongering about rising CO2 emissions – and the EPA’s decision to declare an atmospheric plant nutrient dangerous – is based on unrealistic and unproven climate models whose predictive accuracy is questionable, if not completely unsound.

The hare-brained anti-CO2 schemes advocated by overwrought global warming alarmists would border on theatrical if it were not for the clear and present danger they pose to economic development and human advancement.

As MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen opines: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

The big picture: 65 million years of temperature swings

David Lappi is a geologist from Alaska who has sent in a set of beautiful graphs - including an especially prosaic one of the last 10,000 years in Greenland - that he put together himself.

If you wonder where today’s temperature fits in with the grand scheme of time on Earth since the dinosaurs were wiped out, here’s the history. We start with the whole 65 million years, then zoom in, and zoom in again to the last 12,000 from both ends of the world. What’s obvious is that in terms of homo sapiens history, things are warm now (because we’re not in an ice age). But, in terms of homo sapiens civilization, things are cooler than usual, and appear to be cooling.

Then again, since T-rex & Co. vanished, it’s been one long slide down the thermometer, and our current “record heatwave” is far cooler than normal. The dinosaurs would have scoffed at us: “What? You think this is warm?”

With so much volatility in the graphs, anyone could play “pick a trend” and depending on which dot you start from, you can get any trend you want.

Greenland ice core temperatures last 10,000 years, enlarged here

This does not look like dangerous global warming. In fact the big picture looks more like long term cooling. For the full Guest post report see here.

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Climate Panel Vows New Review
By Jeffrey Ball, WSJ

The world’s leading organization on climate change says it is working on a strategy to better police the experts who produce its high-profile reports, to try to ensure they adhere to rigorous scientific standards. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change needs to “leave no stone unturned to come up with a set of measures so this can be ensured,” Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations-sponsored organization, said.
Separately, the Met Office, a U.K. agency that does prominent weather and climate research, said it was proposing a new effort to improve temperature measurement.

The move by Mr. Pachauri and other IPCC leaders to step up oversight and enforcement of the panel’s existing policies follows a string of revelations that have prompted criticism of the organization, which won a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its report that year concluding that climate change is “unequivocal” and is “very likely” caused by human activity."We certainly don’t feel comfortable with the loss of even one iota of trust,” Mr. Pachauri said. “We are grappling with this issue and we’ll come up with some measures.”

Chief among the revelations was that the IPCC’s 2007 report, which runs to about 3,000 pages, erroneously projected that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. “That’s a classic case that should have got caught,” Mr. Pachauri said. “That one single instance is enough of a lesson that we do something to make sure it doesn’t recur.”

As the IPCC moves forward with its review, the Met Office, a U.K. government meteorological agency and research center, announced a new planned effort to improve the measurement of the earth’s temperatures - data it said is necessary to “strengthen decisions on adapting to climate change.”
The Met Office, whose research is often cited by the IPCC, said in a statement that a more-robust set of data on surface temperatures around the globe will provide a clearer picture of how the planet’s climate is changing.

Government officials in many countries have asked for detailed information as they mull whether, and how, to implement policies designed to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that the IPCC says are contributing to climate change. Much of climate science focuses on making broad projections about how increased greenhouse-gas emissions might change the global average temperature.

But even as political bids to curb emissions stumble - a big U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in December ended without agreement on mandatory steps - policy makers want to better understand how climate change might affect temperature extremes and particular regions. That, the Met Office said, will require more-granular temperature data. Yhe new effort “will augment, not replace,” current temperature data, the Met Office said. It will provide more-frequent temperature readings. And the information will be “fully peer reviewed and open to scrutiny,” the Met Office noted.

The transparency of climate-science data has come into question in the wake of the release late last year of more than 1,000 emails from the computers of another U.K. scientific center, the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Those emails appeared to show scientists there trying to squelch the views of others who questioned their research pointing to a significant human influence on the climate. The university has launched an investigation.

The changes at the IPCC will focus less on rolling out new policies than on enforcing those already in effect, Mr. Pachauri said. Among them: extensive checks on the research that is to be cited in IPCC reports. In addition, some IPCC leaders said, the organization needs better procedures to correct any errors in its reports once they are found. “I hope we’ll be able to do something by which we can infuse confidence in our audience and assure them that the IPCC takes this issue very seriously,” Mr. Pachauri said.