Jo Nova has done sterling work in documenting and providing insight into what led to the 10:10 video in which the producers fantasise about utterly destroying, at the press of a button, those who show the slightest reluctance to toe the party line on climate.  Including young children in a classroom. 
The whole thing deserves deep study.  The paper by Jo Nova has been published by the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), and can be downloaded as a pdf.

Kudos to the SPPI for publishing this.  Kudos to Jo Nova for creating it.  She gives a summary and background at her own blog.

It provides some provocative speculations as to what led to the creation of the video, speculations which deserve to be shared widely and investigated further.  Given that the scientific case for alarm about CO2 in the atmosphere is so shoddy, the motivation for such an arrogant, aggressive, and deeply malevolent video must come from elsewhere.  Is it the same motivation that drove Maurice Strong to call for the destruction of industrial civilisation? (more background on Strong here. 

Is it the same motivation that led James Lee to terrorise the employees of a broadcasting company in the States? (here).  Or, at the milder end of this sorry spectrum, was it what led three women to barge their way into the offices of a newspaper whose editorials they happened to disagree with? (here)

Meanwhile, and more in the background, there seems no end to the initiatives aimed at pushing children into conformance to the party line on climate.  Here is a recent report of one in the States called ACE .  Links to many more can be found on the Page on climate sites aimed at schools (7).  Many of them do not hesitate to use scary imagery and doomladen notions to win attention and obedience. 

This is a veritable moral swamp that needs to be drained.  Standing at the edges of it, we can see unpleasantness, scaremongering, arrogance, ignorance, intolerance, brutality, destructiveness, and terrorism.  Quite a result to follow from the speculative insertion of a dramatic effect for CO2 into computer models of the climate!  Fortunately the real climate has displayed no such role for this beneficial gas.  In our world, the dramatic role for CO2 is found in its impact on plant growth.  Read more here.

Wealthy Californians and conservation groups united in a bipartisan campaign to defeat the oil industry-sponsored initiative to suspend the state’s greenhouse gas law - ensuring the economic collapse of the state - no bailout this time you morons.

Proposition 23, the oil industry sponsored initiative to suspend California’s greenhouse gas law, was touted early on by environmentalists as a “David vs. Goliath” battle. “Its our slingshot vs. their oily club,” said Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for opponents.

But in the end, Proposition 23 failed by a stunning 61% to 39%, giving heart to national environmental leaders and signaling the advent of new players in eco-politics: high-tech entrepreneurs, mainly based in Silicon Valley, who see clean energy as an economic investment.

“It is the largest public referendum in history on climate and clean energy policy,” said Fred Krupp, president of the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund. “There has never been anything this big. It is going to send a signal to other parts of the country and beyond.”

The independent Texas-based refiners, Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp., which launched the initiative along with the California Manufacturers and Technology Assn. and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn, were outspent 3 to 1 as $31 million poured in from venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, Intel’s Gordon Moore, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Google’s Sergey Brin, along with other wealthy California philanthropists and national conservation groups.

That campaign chest paid for TV spots that framed the debate as Texas vs. California, even though Valero and Tesoro operate refineries in Wilmington and Benicia.

Equally important were the 3,200 volunteers, 2.8 million phone calls, 3.4 million pieces of mail, 379,676 on-campus contacts with college students, and a computerized outreach program that identified and contacted 481,000 voters and showered voters with get-out-the vote calls and text messages in the last three days. Political observers say it was the broadest and most sophisticated field operation ever mounted over an environmental issue.

Well-defined constituencies were targeted. Latinos were wooed by actor Edward James Olmos, union leader Dolores Huerta and Spanish-speaking activists at their doors. CREDO Mobile, a San Francisco phone company known for endorsing liberal causes, recruited its subscribers to work phone banks and picket Valero gas stations. Robo-calls from Sally Bingham, a San Francisco Episcopal minister, went out to Protestant women older than 55.

The California League of Conservation Voters identified green-leaning but infrequent voters. The Sierra Club got 84,000 onto conference calls. The American Lung Assn. rallied 60 hospitals and health groups to contact their employees and members. And a score of unions worked on the ground.

Unlike the national arena, where the GOP is closely allied with the oil and coal industry in fighting greenhouse-gas regulation, California environmentalists benefited from bipartisan support. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who sees the 2006 climate law as his signature achievement, attacked “the dirty oil hearts” of Proposition 23 backers. George P. Shultz, secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, served as co-chair of the No on 26 campaign.

Shultz made the case to fellow Republicans and business leaders that dependence on oil is a national security issue because of terrorism and the economic risks from price spikes. “What do we do with this victory?” he asked rhetorically in a news conference Wednesday. “We need to wake up our fellow Republicans.”

But Proposition 23 advocate Charles Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Assn., said California’s climate law mandates “will result in the relocation of jobs and businesses from California to other states and other countries, along with the relocation of carbon emissions produced by those businesses.... Moving carbon from one location to another will not bring about any reduction in greenhouse gases.”

The data below is from various carbon footprint calculators scattered about the web and largely based on EPA emissions estimates and conversations.  Of all the agitators and propagandists lecturing the common person about their large carbon footprint life styles, not a single one has evidenced their belief in the “climate emergency” by their own behavior.  This has been particularly true for President Obama, Al Gore and Hollywood.

Activity CO2 footprint (lbsCO2)

Burn a gallon of gasoline - 19.4

Use a kWh of electricity (U.S. average fuel mix) - 1.3

Car trip to the grocery store (roundtrip 15 miles) - 11.6

Mowing the lawn (1hr, gas engine push mower) - 9.7

Watch TV (42” LCD), 4 hrs - 1.1

Make a pot of coffee - 0.3

Use a desktop computer (CRT screen) 8 hrs - 2.1

Use a 75W light bulb for 4hrs - 0.4

Fly 1,000 miles - 440

Annual refrigerator usage - 827

Annual lawn care (mow grass 25 times) - 242.5

Annual desktop computer usage (1,000 hrs) - 260

Annual TV usage (42” LCD, 1000hrs) - 406

Annual Coffee (365 pots per year) - 109.5

Annual usage of 75W light bulb (1,500 hrs) - 146.3

Annual car usage (12,000 miles @ 25mpg) - 9,391

Annual home heating/cooling - 30,000

Average American per year - 45,000

Obama Entourage to India (flights only) - 18,671,400

Obama Entourage to India (estimated, all sources) - 27,921,100

U.N. Climate Confab (Copenhagen) - 89,100,000

Enlarged here.

Enlarged here.

As the tropical tropospheric temperatures continue to cool, the global average is finally beginning to follow suit:+0.42 deg. C for October, 2010. This is the lowest monthly temperature anomaly we’ve seen in what has been a very warm year.

For those following the race for warmest year in the satellite tropospheric temperature record (which began in 1979), 2010 is still within striking distance of the record warm year of 1998. Here are the 1998 and 2010 averages for January 1st through October 31:

1998 +0.57
2010 +0.54

Note that the difference between the two is not statistically significant...just symbolically.

[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT’s are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments.]

Bottom Falling Out of Global Ocean Surface Temperatures?
October 28th, 2010

Having just returned from another New Orleans meeting - this time, a NASA A-Train satellite constellation symposium - I thought I would check the latest sea surface temperatures from our AMSR-E instrument.

The following image shows data updated through yesterday (October 27). Needless to say, there is no end in sight to the cooling. (Click here for the full-size version).

Since these SST measurements are mostly unaffected by cloud cover like the traditional infrared measurements are, I consider this to be the most accurate high-time resolution SST record available...albeit only since mid-2002, when the Aqua satellite was launched.

I won’t make any predictions about whether SSTs will go as low as the 2007-08 La Nina event. I’ll leave that to others. See post here.

CO-2’s bad rep is undeserved.

It’s high time we recognize that carbon dioxide has been treated unfairly. Not only have the good deeds of that wonderful molecule so essential to rain forests, begonias and plants that feed God’s creatures been ignored, it has even come to be demonized as an endangering pollutant and climate-ravaging menace. What real evidence has been offered up to support these defamatory charges? Absolutely none.

Take the EPA’s CO-2 endangerment finding, for example. Shrouded under the ever- expanding blanket of the Clean Air Act, it is being applied to validate an unprecedented regulatory takeover of carbon-emitting energy and construction industry permitting. Another proposed congressional end-run application will restrict emissions produced by long-haul trucks.

The endangerment finding ignores conclusions of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) own internal research report: “Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based upon a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

The study author, a senior analyst at the EPA’s National Center for Environment Economics, was subsequently removed from his position after serving for 38 years.

And exactly what man-made climate crisis will such a ruling protect us from? If the science is really “settled,” as alarmists claim, how are the large numbers of knowledgeable dissenters accounted for? Take, for example, noted physicist Harold Lewis, who recently resigned from the American Physical Society over its suppression of views contrary to those of man-made global warming orthodoxy. Excerpting from his open letter, the APS Fellow and member of 67 years declared:

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. ... There are indeed billions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that goes with being a member of the club. ... As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

Numerous other scientists have taken public stands against unfounded climate alarmism. Included are 650 climate-related experts from around the world who gave testimony in a U.S. Senate Minority Report issued by Sen. James Inhofe’s Committee on Environment and Public Works, and more than 30,000 who signed a petition challenging the relevance of climate model predictions cited by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The petition was initiated by Frederick Seitz, a former president of APS, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University who commented regarding the IPCC’s second (1955) summary, “I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than events that led up to this IPCC report.”

At what point do we realize we have been hijinxed by those we have wanted to trust? By prominent members of the international climate science community whose “Climategate” e-mails purloined from the prestigious East Anglia University Climate Research Unit that exposed clear evidence of data manipulation, concealment of public records and exclusion of disagreeable research findings from influential publications. By hysterically hyped claims of “green” energy subsidy-seekers promising salvation from a dastardly CO-2 menace and foreign oil dependence. By deceptively word-crafted “climate and energy” legislative proposals intended to disguise carbon cap-and-tax, hot-air trading scams. By eco-sanctimonious legal arguments against fossil exploration and plant development (and all other energy alternatives) to protect the planet from the perils of runaway human prosperity. And by extravagantly funded man-made climate crisis media campaigns of decidedly political origin promoting expansion of government bureaucracy and regulatory authority.

But then, aren’t those bureaucrats really just looking after our best interests? As Al Gore’s former U.S. Senate pal, Timothy Wirth, observed, representing the U.S. as Clinton-Gore administration’s undersecretary of state for global affairs at the U.N.’s 1992 Rio de Janiero Climate Summit: “ We have got to ride the global warming issue. ... Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Summit Chairman Maurice Strong agreed with Wirth and his policy priorities. “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse,” he said.

Wirth went on to head the U.N.’s foundation dedicated to global wealth redistribution. Strong moved to mainland China after being charged with receiving nearly $1 million from Saddam Hussein’s government for his influence in the U.N.’s “Oil for Food” scandal.

Then there’s the Nobel laureate Al Gore himself, now an exceedingly wealthy founder of Generation Investment Management, a green business broker and major stockholder in the Chicago Climate Exchange. Established in 2003, CCX aspires to be the New York Stock Exchange for carbon offset trading. Speaking before a 2007 U.S. Joint House Energy and Science Committee, he enthused that just a little legislative magic could convert bad carbon into an enormously profitable commodity. “As soon as carbon has a price,” said Gore, “you’re going to see a wave [of investments] in it. ... there will be unchained investment!”

Instead, here’s an alternate possibility. Let’s offset the nonsense, begin to give carbon some honest credit it deserves, and put a cap on those who malign it to advance special agendas. We can start by stripping EPA and other federal government alphabet agencies of powers to invoke unwarranted intrusions into our free markets, business and lives. That will constitute a man-made climate change truly worthy of celebration.

Larry Bell is a professor at the University of Houston and the author of Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax, which will be released Jan. 1, 2011.

It turns out that Muir Russell didn’t bother asking, since that would have exposed Jones to potential liability.

But in a surprising new turn of events, it seems that VC Acton sort-of did what Muir Russell was supposed to do - ask Jones whether he had deleted emails. The Guardian reports Acton’s testimony as follows:

Prof Phil Jones told the University of East Anglia’s boss that he did not delete any of the emails that were released from the university last November, despite apparently saying he would in one of those emails.

In the narrowest sense, the very existence of the Climategate emails seems to show that, whatever Jones may or may not have attempted to do, he had not deleted the emails that survived on the back up server.

But, needless to say, you have to watch the pea under the thimble as there is more to the story than this, as I found out last spring.

Jones’ delete-all-emails request was directed particularly at the Wahl-Briffa exchange about IPCC in summer 2006. (In a related emails, Jones said that Briffa should deny the existence of such correspondence to the UEA administration - something that was never investigated as misconduct.)

Wahl’s insertions in the IPCC report - the unilateral changes in assessment that do not appear to have had any third party oversight other than Briffa’s - were made in attachments to his emails to Briffa.

Last spring, I sent an FOI request to the University of East Anglia for the attachments to the Wahl emails that would show precisely what Wahl had inserted. These, of course, are precisely the sort of thing that Muir Russell panel was obligated to examine but didn’t bother.

Contrary to claims by Jones and Acton that nothing had been deleted, the University refused the FOI request on the basis that the attachments had been deleted, that they no longer possessed the attachments to the emails - see previous review here.

In response to my request, they said:

We were unable to provide the following four documents as we had determined that these were no longer held by the University and cited Reg. 12(4)(a):

There is no single repository in which all information is held and in order to determine whether the University holds specific information searches are required in a number of locations. I have reviewed the criteria and searches that were undertaken to locate the requested documents and agree with the assessment that these documents are no longer held and agree that Reg. 12(4)(a) applies in this instance.

The May 29, 2008 email was directly responding to FOI request 08-31, dated May 27, 2008. This was the precise case where the ICO said that “more cogent” “prima facie” evidence was impossible to contemplate.

Muir Russell’s amendments says that the “conclusions and recommendations” of the report are unaffected by the actual facts. Who would have guessed?

See post here.

Here’s a bit of research that you don’t normally see in the MSM stories about glacier melt. It is backed up by a second and very interesting article (below) from 1947 in Geographical Review which says “Most of the worlds glaciers have been shrinking in recent decades.” Yet, news reports of the last decade would have you believe that glacier recession is an unprecedented phenomenon.

From ETH Zurich: The most recent studies by researchers at ETH Zurich show that in the 1940s Swiss glaciers were melting at an even-faster pace than at present. This is despite the fact that the temperatures in the 20th century were lower than in this century. Researchers see the main reason for this as the lower level of aerosol pollution in the atmosphere.


A glaciologist on the way to work on the Silvretta glacier (Image: Matthias Huss - ETH Zurich)

In Switzerland, the increase in snow in wintertime and the glacier melt in summertime have been measured at measurement points at around 3,000 metres above sea level - on the Clariden Firn, the Great Aletsch glacier and the Silvretta glacier - without interruption for almost 100 years. As part of his doctoral work, Matthias Huss used this unique range of measurements to examine how climate change in the last century affected the glaciers. The work was carried out under the supervision of Martin Funk, professor and head of the Department for Glaciology at the Laboratory for Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (’VAW’ at ETH Zurich, who is also co-author of the study.

Solar radiation as the decisive factor

In its work, the research team took into account the solar radiation measured on the Earth’s surface in Davos since 1934. Studies over the past two decades have shown that solar radiation varies substantially due to aerosols and clouds, and this is assumed to influence climate fluctuations. Recent years have seen the emergence of the terms ‘global dimming’ and ‘global brightening’ to describe these phenomena of reduced and increased solar radiation respectively. These two effects are currently the subject of more and more scientific research, in particular by ETH Zurich, as experts feel that they should be taken into account in the climate models (see ETH Life dated July 9, 2009)

The new study, published in the journal ‘Geophysical Research Letters’, confirms this requirement. This is because, taking into account the data recorded for the level of solar radiation, the scientists made a surprising discovery: in the 1940s and in the summer of 1947 especially, the glaciers lost the most ice since measurements commenced in 1914. This is in spite of the fact that temperatures were lower than in the past two decades. “The surprising thing is that this paradox can be explained relatively easily with radiation”, says Huss, who was recently appointed to the post of senior lecturer at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

On the basis of their calculations, the researchers have concluded that the high level of short-wave radiation in the summer months is responsible for the fast pace of glacier melt. In the 1940s, the level was 8% higher than the long-term average and 18 Watts per square metres above the levels of the past ten years. Calculated over the entire decade of the 1940s, this resulted in 4% more snow and ice melt compared with the past ten years.

Furthermore, the below-average melt rates at the measurement points during periods in which the glacier snouts were even advancing correlate with a phase of global dimming, between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Less snow fall and longer melt periods

The researchers arrived at their findings by calculating the daily melt rates with the aid of climate data and a temperature index model, based on the half-yearly measurements on the glaciers since 1914. These results were then compared with the long-term measurements of solar radiation in Davos.

Huss points out that the strong glacier melt in the 1940s puts into question the assumption that the rate of glacier decline in recent years “has never been seen before”. “Nevertheless”, says the glaciologist, “this should not lead people to conclude that the current period of global warming is not really as big of a problem for the glaciers as previously assumed”. This is because it is not only the pace at which the Alpine glaciers are currently melting that is unusual, but the fact that this sharp decline has been unabated for 25 years now. Another aspect to consider - and this is evidenced by the researchers’ findings - is that temperature-based opposing mechanisms came into play around 30 years ago. These have led to a 12% decrease in the amount of precipitation that falls as snow as a percentage of total precipitation, accompanied by an increase of around one month in the length of the melt period ever since this time. Scientists warn that these effects could soon be matched by the lower level of solar radiation we have today compared with the 1940s.

Reference
Huss M, Funk M & Ohmura A: Strong Alpine glacier melt in the 1940s due to enhanced solar radiation. Geophysical Research Letters (2009), 36, L23501, doi:10.1029/2009GL040789

Here’s the supporting article in Geographical Review, available here. See post here.