At a 2004 conference of the Russian National Academy of Sciences Sir David King, Chief Scientific Adviser to Tony Blair’s government made the startling statement that, “Global warming is worse than terrorism.” He was right, but not as he intended. The false premise promoted by the IPCC that human CO2 was causing global warming was being used to terrorize and undermine developed nations in pursuit of Maurice Strong’s goal of getting rid of them.

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, was the only world leader to openly understand the science and what Strong and his instrument the IPCC were about. He was also immediately aware of communism and recognized what is happening. In a 2008 article for The Australian he wrote, “I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries. This ambition goes very much against past human experience which has always been connected with a strong motivation to better human conditions. There is no reason to make the change just now, especially with arguments based on such incomplete and faulty science.” (The Australian)

Rather than summarize how Maurice Strong used the United Nations and specifically the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to achieve his goal of getting rid of the industrialized nations this final article examines the devastation it has already brought.  Reports of the IPCC, falsely presented as based on science, were used to scare the world, initially about global warming and then climate change. Politicians caught up with the need to appear green grasped at the output of the IPCC. They were thus vulnerable and easily fooled because they didn’t understand and the entire objective of the IPCC was to mislead, misdirect and distort.

Instead of helping poor countries and poor people the machinations of Strong, Gore and the IPCC are reaping the rewards of their activities while the people pay the price. The people are paying in other ways as governments use IPCC reports to justify carbon taxes and other restrictive, punitive and expensive regulations. A huge industry has erupted as the UK newspaper the Telegraph reported.  “Investing in climate change is proving to be profitable for governments, corporations, and investors from many sectors. Governments recent subsidies towards energy-efficient programs is bringing in newfound wealth for investors. In addition, the rising price of oil have been influential in pushing investments towards alternative energy sources. CEO’s are taking charge in ways that were unforeseen. “So, the very people and industries the environmentalists and socialists despise are doing what they do best - make money.

In 1976 Strong told the Canadian magazine Maclean’s I am “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology” therefore we shouldn’t be surprised he is making a great deal of money from exploiting the false doctrine of human induced climate change. The fact the ideology precludes the methodology doesn’t bother a master manipulator like Strong. Ronald Bailey provides the following quote in his article about Strong. “He’s dangerous because he’s a much smarter and shrewder man [than many in the UN system],” comments Charles Lichenstein, deputy ambassador to the UN under President Reagan. “I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way over to the Left.” Gore is different in that his motive was initially personally political; As H L Mencken said “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” Al Gore used or rather misused the misleading information of the IPCC Reports evidenced by them sharing the Nobel Prize. However, as his political ambitions receded he also began making a great deal of money through his involvement with carbon credit trading. Scientists of the IPCC may be involved in carbon trading, but they also benefit through a high profile, easier access to funding and easier promotion. All the relationships between Gore, Strong, and carbon credit trading are well documented here. Read more here.

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?” Maurice Strong, Rio Summit 1992

The Midwest floods were rolling downstream last week, setting river stage records in Iowa, bursting levees on the Mississippi, and causing thousands to be displayed from their homes.  Billions have been lost in damaged and destroyed property and 24 lives lost.

In the midst of this tragedy, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) tried to capitalize on heightened public interest with an attempt to gain headlines by tying these tragic events to “global warming.” The EDF proclaimed:  Did Humans Cause the Midwest Flooding?  In the piece, EDF’s James Wang writes, “Another element [of the Midwest floods] may be global warming, which increases the probability of extreme weather events like torrential rain.” NCDC, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, headlined, Extreme Weather to Become More Common.  The respective headlines can be found here and here.

This is fear mongering, not the advancement of science.  And, it detracts from NOAA as a whole because its National Weather Service performed heroically - with its field staff working long hours coping with the floods and accompanying tornadoes and severe thunderstorms. It is unseemly to work to score public relations points when people are losing their homes, their crops, and their lives.

And, it leaves us to ponder a key question:  Does the science justify tying the Midwest floods to Global Warming? My answer?  An emphatic “no.” The record Midwest floods of 1993 and 2008 occurred after periods of rapid cooling.  The warmest year, 1998, did not have Midwest floods anywhere near the magnitude of those in 1993 and 2008.  It is my judgment the attempt to link the 2008 floods to Global “Warming” is completely unjustified.

Mike Smith is a certified consulting meteorologist and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the opinions stated above represent his personal point-of-view.  He is CEO of WeatherData Services, Inc., an AccuWeather Company, based in Wichita.  AccuWeather’s global warming blog can be viewed at: http://global-warming.accuweather.com/

Read more here.

There is another Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) report that was made available yesterday. It is CCSP, 2008: Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate. It is led by the same individual, Tom Karl, Director of the National Climate Data Center, who produced the CCSP Report “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences”, in which I resigned from and detailed the reasons in Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2005: Public Comment on CCSP Report “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences”. 88 pp including appendices.

This report perpetuates the use of assessments to promote a particular perspective on climate change, such as they write in the Executive Summary: “It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases. Such studies have only recently been used to determine the causes of some changes in extremes at the scale of a continent. Certain aspects of observed increases in temperature extremes have been linked to human influences. The increase in heavy precipitation events is associated with an increase in water vapor, and the latter has been attributed to human-induced warming.” This claim conflicts with the 2005 National Research Council report where a diversity of human climate forcings were found to alter global average radiative warming, including from atmospheric aersosols and due to the deposition of soot on snow and ice. The claim of an increase in atmospheric water vapor conflicts with a variety of observations as summarized on Climate Science (e.g. see).

To further illustrate the bias in the report, the assessment chose to ignore peer reviewed research that raises serious questions with respect to the temperature data that is used in their report. As just one example, they ignored research where we have shown major problems in the use of surface air temperature measurements to diagnose long term temperature trends including temperature extremes, including this. It was ignored. Yet the papers that use this land surface temperature data to claim changes in the extremes were included.

Since this assessment is so clearly biased, it should be rejected as providing adequate climate information to policymakers. There also should be questions raised concerning having the same individuals preparing these reports in which they are using them to promote their own perspective on the climate, and deliberately excluding peer reviewed papers that disagree with their viewpoint and research papers. This is a serious conflict of interest. Read more here.

The famous physicist Niels Bohr is attributed with saying that “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Anyone who pays attention to weather forecasts or economic predictions knows how true this is. But given that the future can’t be predicted with perfect accuracy, seeing predictions fail is actually an important part of their usefulness.  Whether one is faced with evacuating from a possible hurricane landfall or investing in a mutual fund, decision-making is improved when uncertainties are readily understood.

On the highly politicized issue of climate change, however, understanding uncertainties is made difficult when scientists advocating for action oversell the predictive capabilities of climate models, such as those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But action on climate change makes sense even if many climate scientists oversell predictive capabilities.

Scientists oversell the predictive capacity of climate models when they claim that the most recent weather events occurring around the world are consistent with predictions from climate models. For example, last fall a scientist who had contributed to the most recent IPCC reports said that the intense southern California wildfires occurring at the time “are consistent with what the latest modeling shows.” Similarly, in 2006 a Berkeley professor and climate change expert asserted that “the current heat waves throughout much of North America and Europe are consistent with the predictions of our global climate models.” A quick Internet search will reveal countless scientists who have made such claims about the predictive prowess of climate models.

But what does it mean to say that some weather events are “consistent with” climate model predictions?  The implication of such statements of course is that models are reliable and offer accurate predictions that have been borne out by experience. But unfortunately, the real answer is that saying that any recent weather events are “consistent with” model predictions is an empty statement. Read more here.

Roger Pielke, Jr. is a professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado and a former director of its Center for Science and Technology Policy Research

With the failure of the Lieberman-Warner global-warming bill in the Senate last Friday, I am reminded of the long and grand tradition the scientific community has had in promoting “bad science.” (It is mere coincidence that the acronym for this term is “BS.") While the failure of the carbon cap-and-trade legislation was largely a result of economic concerns over what it would cost the country, its proponents will no doubt return next year with claims that no price is too great to save us from planetary destruction.

But I believe that the huge cost of “doing something” substantial about global warming will inevitably cause us to reexamine the science. Just how certain are we that recent warming really has been caused by SUVs spewing carbon dioxide and cows belching methane? After all, the greater the cost of the advertised fixes, the more certain we must be that the scientific consensus really is more than just a political statement.

And why should the science of global warming be so uncertain? Mostly because it is a whole lot easier to make scientific measurements than it is to figure out what those measurements are telling us about how the natural world works. The famous humorist and writer Mark Twain once said, “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”

I consider the theory that global warming is caused by mankind to be just one more example of the continuing tradition scientists have of extrapolating well beyond what they think they know. In his 1883 book Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain also expressed perfectly the proclivity of scientists for turning observations of the natural world into long range predictions which were clearly outlandish. Twain humorously extrapolated an observed change in the length of the Mississippi River forward and back in time by millions of years to demonstrate the absurdity of the conclusions one can reach when one assumes something currently observed will continue to happen at the same rate, indefinitely. Twain famously concluded “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact.”

Possibly the most prolific purveyor of failed environmental predictions is the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Beginning in the 1960s, Dr. Ehrlich embarked on a series of premonitions that included dead oceans by 1979, hundreds of thousands of smog deaths in cities, pesticide-related cancers reducing average life expectancy to 42 years by 1980, and such an abuse of pesticides that would cause other countries to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. out of fear of global poisoning. Read much more here.

Climate experts agree that the seriousness of manmade global warming depends greatly upon how clouds in the climate system respond to the small warming tendency from the extra carbon dioxide mankind produces. To figure that out, climate researchers usually examine natural, year-to-year fluctuations in clouds and temperature to estimate how clouds will respond to humanity’s production of greenhouse gases.

When researchers observe natural changes in clouds and temperature, they have traditionally assumed that the temperature change caused the clouds to change, and not the other way around. To the extent that the cloud changes actually cause temperature change, this can ultimately lead to overestimates of how sensitive Earth’s climate is to our greenhouse gas emissions. This seemingly simple mix-up between cause and effect is the basis of a new paper that will appear in the “Journal of Climate.” The paper’s lead author, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, a principal research scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, believes the work is the first step in demonstrating why climate models produce too much global warming.

Spencer and his co-author, principal research scientist William (Danny) Braswell, used a simple climate model to demonstrate that something as seemingly innocuous as daily random variations in cloud cover can cause year-to-year variation in ocean temperature that looks like—but isn’t—“positive cloud feedback,” a warmth-magnifying process that exists in all major climate models. “Our paper is an important step toward validating a gut instinct that many meteorologists like myself have had over the years,” said Spencer, “that the climate system is dominated by stabilizing processes, rather than destabilizing processes—that is, negative feedback rather than positive feedback.”

The paper doesn’t disprove the theory that global warming is manmade. Instead, it offers an alternative explanation for what we see in the climate system which has the potential for greatly reducing estimates of mankind’s impact on Earth’s climate. “Since the cloud changes could conceivably be caused by known long-term modes of climate variability—such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or El Nino and La Nina—some, or even most, of the global warming seen in the last century could simply be due to natural fluctuations in the climate system,” Spencer said. Read abstract here.

There is an article in Scientific American by David Biello entitled “Impure as the Driven Snow - Smut is a bigger problem than greenhouse gases in polar meltdown”. The article states that “Belching from smokestacks, tailpipes and even forest fires, soot-or black carbon-can quickly sully any snow on which it happens to land. In the atmosphere, such aerosols can significantly cool the planet by scattering incoming radiation or helping form clouds that deflect incoming light. But on snow-even at concentrations below five parts per billion-such dark carbon triggers melting, and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming. Photo courtesy od NOAA’s Mark Dennett.

“Impurities cause the snow to darken and absorb more sunlight,” says Charlie Zender, a climate physicist at the University of California, Irvine. “A surprisingly large temperature response is caused by a surprisingly small amount of impurities in snow in polar regions.”

Zender, physicist Mark Flanner and other colleagues built a model to examine how soot impacts temperature in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Temperatures in the northern polar region have already risen by 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.88 degrees Fahrenheit) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The researchers incorporated information on soot produced by burning fossil fuels, wood and other biofuels, along with that naturally produced by forest fires and then checked their model predictions against global measurements of soot levels in polar snow from Sweden to Alaska to Russia and in Antarctica as well as in nonpolar areas such as the Tibetan Plateau.

The researchers also took into account the natural darkening of snow as it ages. “The larger crystals eat the smaller ones and get larger, and that means they get darker and absorb more sunlight,” Zender explains. “When soot is there it heats the snow. It acts like a little toaster oven.”

This article builds on a growing set of evidence on the major role of the deposition of soot on snow and ice as a contributor to radiative warming from what it would be in the absence of human activity. Climate Science has posted weblogs on this subject (e.g. see and see) and it is welcome that much needed attention is finally being given to this topic.

Demands to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and other greenhouse gases are intensifying. Many environmental groups, foreign governments, state governors, the Congress, and presidential candidates assert that the only way to avoid a climate catastrophe is to prevent emissions from reaching levels that constitute dangerous interference with the climate system. To achieve that end, the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 60% or more by mid-century from some recent level, such as 2005 is promoted. Is such a goal achievable? At what cost? The answers to those questions are overwhelmed by the appeal to the dire consequences of supposedly failing to act, but they are significant to any calculation of the feasibility of a public policy for addressing climate change and the mix of energy sources. Advocates claim that such reductions are achievable with existing and almost commercial technology and without imposing serious economic harm on economies. Such fanciful claims divert attention from the true crux of the issue, which is how can the world reconcile its growing energy needs and reduce the extreme poverty of 1.6 billion people with demands to reduce CO2 emissions.

The Energy Information Administration estimates that fossil energy-coal, oil, and gas-will remain our dominant sources of energy for decades to come. So, where will the gigaton reduction in CO2 emissions come from while the population and economy are growing? The reality is that the technologies needed for reductions on the scale demanded do not exist. When and if they do come into existence, it will take decades to put them in place because the nation’s capital stock turns over slowly. Nuclear power is one alternative to coalgenerated electricity, but it is currently more expensive and faces continued political opposition. Ironically, some cap and trade proponents also oppose more nuclear power. Natural gas, which is also a substitute, is rising in price because of political decisions preventing increased domestic production. Forcing utilities to shift to natural gas will drive its price higher, impacting home owners and driving investments in industries like chemicals overseas. There also is no abundant and affordable substitute for gasoline and diesel fuels in the near term.

The bottom line is that a growing population and growing economy are not compatible with lower emissions, given the state of today’s technology and the technologies that could be in the market in the next decade. Proponents of cap and trade legislation should be held accountable for reconciling their assertions with economic, energy and technology realities. It is hard to understand why thoughtful senators would support a legislative approach that is so obviously flawed. The only explanation is a willingness to embrace an illusion because the facts are not politically expedient. A number of people claimed in 1997 that the Kyoto Protocol would fail, and it has. Cap and trade schemes also will fail and we challenge advocates to show us why they won’t have the same fate as Kyoto. Assertions and well meaning intentions are not a substitute for cold, hard facts. Read full detailed analysis here.