Our old friend Jo Abbess BSc is back. And she’s got some searching, pertinent questions which could put paid to my AGW-denying antics once and for all!

Dear James,

Inquisitively yours,

Now the only reasons I’m rising to Jo’s bait are a) because I know it will give you all so much pleasure and b) because of what it says about the delusions of the Warmist lobby. They really do seem to imagine, bless, that the only reason anyone could possibly have for being sceptical about AGW is if they were being bribed by sinister business concerns (Big Oil, etc) or had some similar vested interests.

The Independent On Sunday had another feeble attempt at resurrecting this myth at the weekend. But the sad truth (sad, that is, for those of us who really wouldn’t mind being funded by Exxon and wouldn’t feel compromised one bit) is that all the big money has long since migrated to the other side. For Warmists, there are fortunes to be made in lavish grant funding, carbon trading, government subsidised green non-jobs, and so on. For us sceptics there’s little more than the satisfaction of having right and truth on our side.

As Richard North points out, the amount Exxon spent over 10 years funding sceptics is as nothing to the quantities of public money which has been splurged on funding climate change alarmism:

Over ten years, the company paid a grand total of $23 million to sceptics (by no means the larger part of which was devoted to climate change) less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.

Against that, over the last 20 years, by the end of fiscal year 2009, the US government had poured in $32 billion for climate research. In 1989, the first specific US climate-related agency was created with an annual budget of $134 million. Today in various forms the funding has leapt to over $7 billion per annum, around 50 fold higher.

That, of course, is only the US picture - and government funding. To that, one must add the hundreds of millions, if not billions, poured in by the charitable foundations, and the massive funding from industry - much of which ends up in the pockets of advocacy groups such as the WWF.

Then, albeit on a smaller scale, we have other nations around the world adding to the funds. In the UK we have seen that the Met Office has been given 243 million pounds of taxpayers’ money on “climate research”, and that represents just the tip of the iceberg.

Today, the good Dr North has yet another shocking story about taxpayers’ money being squandered on global warming drivel. Turns out that man in charge of discredited Working Group II section (yep: the one which responsible for Glaciergate, Amazongate and Africagate) of the risibly flawed Fourth IPCC assessment report was paid over one third of a million quid for supervising this piece of tosh. His name is Professor Martin Parry.

Dr North reports:

Through his own personal consultancy, Martin Parry Associates, he was paid 330,187 pounds by Defra, for the part-time post of: “Acting as Co-chair of Working group II at meetings of IPCC WG II and associated groups.”

Additionally, his consultancy was paid 10,690 pounds, again by Defra to “assess the global impact of climate change on world food supply and global food security” - the very issue in which Parry is supposedly expert.

That was, presumably, separate from the contract in the financial year 2002/2003 for a study on “Global Impacts of Climate Change on Food Security”. For that, Parry Associates were paid 64,020 pounds. That was the year, incidentally, that the Global Atmosphere Division of Defra supported 35 research contracts on climate change, in 21 different establishments, at a total of 12 million pounds.

These sums, however, are only a small part of the total which went into preparing the WGII report. Defra also paid 1,436,162 to “provide the scientific and administrative Technical Support Unit (TSU) for Working Group II (WGII) on Impacts and Adaptation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and to provide support for the chair of WGII, Professor Martin Parry and the preparation of the IPCC AR4 Synthesis report,” paid via the UK Met Office.

An entirely separate sum of 1,144,738 was awarded to Working Group II Technical Support Unit under the amorphous title “An international commitment to provide technical support on climate change,” also paid to the Met Office.

This means that the scientists and experts who “volunteered their time” on WGII were paid to the tune of nearly 3 million (2,921,777) by British taxpayers alone - which does not of course include the sums paid by other nations and the production costs, or the payments by the IPCC directly.

Let me run that one by you again, just in case the full horror didn’t sink in properly. YOU paid 3,000,000 pounds of your hard-earned dosh in order to fund a farrago of nonsense concocted in order to justify still more of your money being spent in the future to deal with a crisis which only exists in the imaginations of corrupt scientists, EU apparatchiks, One-World-governmenters, carbon-traders, third world kleptocrats and hysterical eco-loons.

Just for your amusement, here’s Professor Parry two years ago, boasting on the BBC website about the, er, robust integrity of the IPCC review process.

Several thousand scientists are asked to review the authors’ drafts, at two different stages; and there are also two stages of review by governments. The purpose of the review is to ensure that the assessments are a fair reflection of the views of the whole scientific community, not just of the authors themselves. Each chapter has two review editors to ensure that reviews are considered and responded to appropriately. The assessments are therefore stuffed with references regarding one tendency suggested by some sets of data, and other tendencies suggested by others.

It is a summary of what we know and - just as importantly - what we do not know.

Earlier he claims:

This is why they err, if anything, on the side of conservatism and have been criticised for not exploring the outer edges of knowledge. And if you want to make yourself even more depressed have a guess where he is now.

We discuss here in some detail the way in which warming trends were introduced into the IPCC Report - when in fact they did not exist or were extremely small. We focus on the period 1979 to 1997. There was cooling up to 1976; in 1998 there was a super-El-Nino and no subsequent warming. Our discussion is in three parts: (1) a ‘bottoms-up’ approach; (2) the ‘top-down’ approach; and next week I shall discuss (3) the treatment of sea surface temperatures (SST).

Bottoms-Up Distortion of Temperature Data

The Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU-UEA), under the direction of Dr. Philip Jones, collected data from weather stations from around the world. These are almost all land-based stations, showing a high concentration in the United States and Western Europe and a lower concentration elsewhere -with many parts of the globe hardly covered by reliable stations.

There are a variety of problems with such data, and the investigators were aware of most of them. Many stations produce useless data, either because of inadequate maintenance, or because of their location. Anthony Watts (in his WUWT blog) has shown that even stations in the USA were badly placed and subject to local warming influences that were not adequately corrected.

The surface of the earth is then divided into grid boxes, usually five degrees by five degrees. When there are several stations in a grid box, the investigators would choose those they considered most reliable - which in many cases meant urban stations, or stations at airports, that are well maintained. However, because of their location, they generally are subject to ‘urban heat-island’ (UHI) effects, a local warming that increases with population and urban growth over time and suggests a temperature trend of a global nature. The investigators tried various ways to eliminate such local UHI trends, but were not very successful.

The problem was greatly exacerbated by the closing of over half the world’s weather stations between 1970 and 2000 (see NIPCC Summary, Fig 12 - which in most cases removed rural stations but also stations from higher latitudes and altitudes that tended to show a lower warming trend or no warming trend at all. It should be obvious therefore that this drastic change in the sampling population would introduce a fictitious warming trend which is an artifact of the change. E. Michael Smith and Joseph D’Aleo have documented in some detail how such artificial temperature trends could be produced even when there was no global trend.

The Top-Down (TD) Approach

In many ways, the ‘Top-Down’ (TD) approach to derive the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) is to be preferred over ‘bottom-up’ (deriving GMST by collecting data from weather stations and sea surface readings). The TD approach relies primarily on the data from weather satellites, the only truly global measuring system, using a single microwave sounding (MSU) instrument and therefore independent of the vagaries of individual weather stations and their thermometers.

There are of course certain disadvantages: The MSU cannot measure temperatures at different levels of the atmosphere but derives instead a ‘weighted mean’ of the vertical temperature profile; the times of observation are fixed by the orbit of the satellite; a change of satellite, and MSU instrument, requires an overlap in operating time to permit a recalibration. Nevertheless, by comparing different view angles, one can change the weight factors and obtain a temperature value for ‘Lower Troposphere.’ The University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) group has shown good agreement of UAH results with those of radiosondes from weather balloons.

As early as 1997, I noticed a disparity between temperature trends of satellites and surface trends, esp. in the tropics. (See Fig 9 in Hot Talk, Cold Science, 1997) The troposphere trends (between 1979 and 1995) were close to zero or even slightly negative, while surface trends showed a warming of about 0.05 deg per decade. This disparity is just the reverse of what one would expect from GH models [see IPCC-SAR] - namely a positive (warming) troposphere trend up to twice as large as the surface trend.

In addition, I noticed that the proxy data to which I had access showed no surface warming (tree-ring data of Jacoby et al (Fig 16 in HTCS) and ice core data of Dahl-Jensen et al]. I tried very hard to obtain more proxy data but was not successful. For example, I noticed that Michael Mann’s infamous hockeystick graph did not extend beyond 1979 and suspected that his proxy temperatures diverged from the instrumented surface results. Yet when I wrote to Mann about post-1980 proxy data, I received only a brusque negative reply. Thanks to ‘Climategate’ we now know, what I had then suspected, i.e., that Mann and Jones were engaged in a scheme to “hide the decline [in post-1979 proxy temperatures].”

To sum up: Both the satellite results and the proxy data tell us that the claimed rise of surface temperature between 1979 and 1997, shown by IPCC, is probably much smaller or even non-existent.

S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and former founding Director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. He is author of Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate (The Independent Institute, 1999).

Richard Somerville, Ph.D. is a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He has told San Diego “City Beat” that KUSI promised to present his full statement on-air but didn’t. He was talking about my January 14th hour long program “Global Warming: The Other Side”. KUSI contacted Scripps seeking a response to the program for our 10 PM newscast that night. Scripps referred our Producer to Somerville. The Producer who had that assignment assures me that no “promise” was made. But according to the nasty City Beat editorial that slam-bams the program, Somerville said the station didn’t run his written statement and included only a couple of “garbled” sentences from a lengthy interview during a 10 p.m. newscast. He called KUSI and me “unethical.”

I object to his remarks to “City Beat” and take particular exception to being called unethical.

First, I was aware the station was seeking a response from Scripps but unaware that it had been obtained until shortly before the program aired. The production of the program had already been completed and it was never intended that a response would be included in the program. Rather it was intended to be seen in the newscast immediately following the program. I scrambled to get some of the Somerville video on the newscast. I was told to use less than a minute of the Somerville interview and to read the entire statement from NASA. No one even mentioned a written statement from Somerville. I was attempting to accomplish good journalism. I don’t know that I totally accomplished that, but I am sure that KUSI and I were not unethical.

I am now going to go through the video of the Somerville interview done by one of our cameramen using questions written by one of our producers to see if I can put together a segment for our second global warming special scheduled for later this month. I think that will help give more balance.

But please understand, equal time is not required or justified here. The media, including the KUSI newscasts, carry frequent reports supportive of the global warming claims and agenda. The media frequently carries programs about the dire global warming predictions. “An Inconvenient Truth,” shown over and over again in the schools, is totally one-sided. Our one and only program debunking global warming falls far short of balancing the overall budget of global warming coverage on television or even KUSI.

Here are the first three of Dr. Somerville’s six points about the skeptical side of the global warming debate from the Scripps website. After each of his points, I offer a response (in blue).See the Somerville statement and John’s detailed reply here.

See the first TV special in 5 segments here. The show was immensely successful beating out 30 Rock in that hour and receiving over a million letters and comments, nearly all favorable. NOAA, NASA and Scripps took exception (Scripps sent 22 scientists to Copenhagen including Somerville). Somerville, who was on the losing side of the New York City debate along with Gavin Schmidt versus Richard Lindzen, Michael Chrichton and Richard Courtney. The skeptics turned the audience around. Somerville likes to point to the IPCC’s rigorous process for peer review research and scientific review. I wonder if he has heard the IPCC’s credibility is falling faster than snowflakes in DC.

The other unbelievable part of this story is the arrogance and ignorance of Somerville in attacking John and KUSI as unethical for not reading his letter on air or inserting his whole interview in their news show. Friends, having been interviewed a hundred times, you are always lucky to get more than one 10 second soundbite in a television inteview. Long monologues by arrogant academics don’t make for ratings even if he was right (which is not the case). John is doing his best to be responsive and letting you read and see both sides and in his blog showing Somerville’s the errors of his ways. I look foward to the second show. Hopefully there will be more and more stations and networks will copy KUSI.

The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report - that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years. And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.

By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland. In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today.

Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate. But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.
Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth - whose department has responsibility for the Met Office. Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders.

Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled that scientists from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - the source of the leaked ‘Warmergate’ emails - acted unlawfully in refusing FOI requests to share their data. Some of the FOI requests made to them came from the same person who has made requests to the Met Office.

He is David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming. The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers.
Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job.

Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings. The Met Office had even boasted of his role in a Press release when the report first came out.

But disclosure, they added, was still rejected on the grounds it would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank provision of views’.

It would also ‘prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation’ and thus be contrary to UK interests. In a written response justifying the refusal dated August 20, 2008, Mr Ainsworth - then MoD Minister of State - used exactly the same language. Mr Holland also filed a request for the papers kept by Sir Brian Hoskins of Reading University, who was the review editor of a different chapter of the IPCC report.

When this too was refused, Mr Holland used the Data Protection Act to obtain a copy of an email from Sir Brian to the university’s information officer. The email, dated July 17, 2008 - when Mr Holland was also trying to get material from the Met Office and the CRU - provides clear evidence of a co-ordinated effort to hide data. Sir Brian wrote: ‘I have made enquiries and found that both the Met Office/MOD and UEA are resisting the FOI requests made by Holland. The latter are very relevant to us, as UK universities should speak with the same voice on this. I gather that they are using academic freedom as their reason.’

At the CRU, as the Warmergate emails reveal, its director, Dr Phil Jones (who is currently suspended), wrote to an American colleague:

‘[We are] still getting FOI requests as well as Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions - not to respond.’ Last night Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the affair further undermined the credibility of the IPCC and those associated with it. He said:

‘It’s of critical importance that data such as this should be open. More importantly, the questions being raised about the hockey stick mean that we may have to reassess the climate history of the past 2,000 years.

‘The attempt to make the medieval warm period disappear is being seriously weakened, and the claim that now is the warmest time for 1,300 years is no longer based on reliable evidence.’ Despite repeated requests, the MoD and Met Office failed to comment.

Read story here. Read more here and here. 

Bryan Walsh has a great career in public relations awaiting him. Unfortunately he is currently passing himself off as a journalist for Time Magazine.

PR, a profession I have enjoyed for several decades, is widely seen to “spin” facts to a client’s advantage and this is frequently the case. PR is advocacy. Journalism is supposed to be something else, i.e., the unbiased, objective reporting of the facts. Someone needs to explain this to Bryan.

In an article titled “Explaining a Global Climate Panel’s Key Missteps”, Bryan barely pretends to be a journalist as he engages in whitewashing some widely known facts about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ scam for the propagation of the huge global warming hoax.

Bryan correctly notes that the IPCC was “one of the most respected organizations in the world” and, in October 2007, had shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, a famed global warming blowhard and fabulist best known for predicting the end of the world next Tuesday.

Bryan noted that the Norwegian Nobel committee had “lauded the IPCC’s fourth assessment report in 2007 as creating an ever broader consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.” Note that these are stated as facts, but in truth there never was a “consensus” in the worldwide community of climatologists and meteorologists, and other scientists.

Indeed, there have been three international conferences to debunk global warming, all sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based non-profit, free market think tank that brought together some of the world’s leading scientists who participated in seminars and gave addresses that were illustrated by graphs and other data that debunked global warming. A fourth conference is scheduled in May and, who knows, some members of the U.S. media might actually attend and report the truth this time?

The assertion that there is a connection between human activities and the non-existent global warming doesn’t even meet the lowest standard of journalistic accuracy. There is no connection. None has ever been proven despite the claims. In general terms, the Earth’s climate is determined by the sun, the oceans, and other factors of such magnitude as to suggest that an ant hill poses a threat to a skyscraper.

Bryan finally got around to mentioning that “over the past week or two, the IPCC has seen its reputation for impartiality and accuracy take serious hits.” Hello! Those hits have been around for years, but the leak of emails in November 2009 between the key players in the global warming fraud unleashed a tsunami of revelations about the way the IPCC relied on deliberately distorted “facts” and strove to suppress the publication of the truth in leading science publications. It wasn’t over the past week or two unless Bryan has been in a deep comma for three months.

Calls for the resignation of IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, were noted. He has been under fire because he knew in advance of the Copenhagen conference that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were bogus. Plaintively, Bryan asked,
“What’s wrong with the IPCC?” and then answered saying, “To some degree, it’s a victim of its own size.”

Wrong again. The IPCC may have claimed that it had some 2,500 scientists participating, but the real “work” of the IPCC was undertaken by a close knit group of global warming fraudsters, several of whom are under investigation. They include Prof. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that provided key data regarding the planet’s temperatures---which always seemed to be rising exponentially.

Others included Prof. Michael Mann of Penn State University, a paleoclimatologist famed for his “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that managed to overlook the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. Joining the merry pranksters was Prof. Keith Briffa, another CRU researcher, who dished up a tree ring theory that confirmed global warming.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, linked increased hurricane activity to global warming, but was probably hard pressed to explain those years when it did not increase. There are others like Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute that got the whole ball rolling in 1986 when he told Congress that global warming would destroy the Earth if we didn’t put an end to all energy use that generated greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of noting the misdeeds of these and others closely affiliated with the IPCC, Bryan quoted a scientist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a “lead author on the 2007 IPCC report.” And we know how eager Richard Somerville must have been to suggest it might have been a thousand pages of nonsense. Bryan also quoted Peter Frumhoff of the left-learning Union of Concerned Scientists who repeated the tired IPCC message that “there is no debate about the core urgency” of global warming.

No debate? The debate has been raging for decades. Bryan, however, just plowed on, offering one excuse after another to cover the IPCC’s serious breach of ethics and accuracy, concluding that its “self-assessment” after each report and
“the pressure to be flawless” is the problem, but not the lies it has been putting forth since 1988.

“But that’s exactly the sort of information policymakers will need to prepare for climate change going forward,” said Bryan.

No, policymakers need is real science, proven science. And the IPCC “science” about global warming, now rebranded as “climate change”, is an insult to all real scientists and, beyond them, to a worldwide public that was consistently led to believe a massive hoax.

Time, Newsweek, and countless others in the mainstream media have been co-conspirators in the global warming fraud. It is time to end this shameful blot on journalism and begin to report facts, not apocalyptic fantasy. Read Alan’s blog here.

Solar Cycle 24 was a late starter, about three and a half years later than the average of the strong cycles in the late 20th century and almost three year later than the weak cycles of the late 19th century.  It was almost as late as Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum.  The last few months have seen it ramp up relatively rapidly.

[Note: Solar Cycle 22 and 23 are overlaid on solar cycle 3 and 4 above to show similarity]

Plotting up the last three solar cycles relative to the Dalton Minimum, another solar minimum is not precluded by the data to date (below, enlarged here).

With Solar Cycle 23 ending up at twelve and a half years long, applying Friis-Christenson and Lassen theory to the temperature record of Hanover, New Hampshire (below, enlarged here) results in a two degree centigrade decline in the annual average temperature at this location over the expected twelve years of Solar Cycle 24, from December 2009 to late 2021.  Given some record low monthly averages in the northeast US in the recent summer, and the current cold winter, this cooling is well under way.

Read story and comments here.

Also shown in this analysis by the Armaugh Observatory in Ireland (below and enlarged here).

ICECAP NOTE: SNOWCOVER RUNNING WELL ABOVE NORMAL

The Weather Channel and Heidi Cullen of Climate Central, who used to haunt the halls at The Weathrer Channel while talking about the frigid cold and snow in most places in mid-latitudes from Europe and Russia to China and the United States, in their infinite ignorance mentioned that global warming did not go away because it was warmer than normal in the arctic regions. Of course, any practicing meteorologist knows this kind of 5 standard deviation nagative arctic oscillation (high latitude blocking) that we have had is what drive cold to mid-latitudes and that comes with warmer higher latitude temperatures (still cold but above normal). TWC is owned by GE which had expected to benefit hugely from global warming and carbon trading, solar and wind power and NBC is the green peacock network and Heidi Cullen now works for George Soros funded Climate Central. GE stock which once was over $40/share is hovering around $15. And as for Climate Central, George you are wasting your money.

Guess what? The man responsible for looking after the fat pensions of the boys and girls at the BBC is a climate change fanatic, and he is part of an international group of investment managers who bust a gut to invest in ‘climate change’ schemes. He’s called Peter Dunscombe, and he runs the 8.2bn corporation pension fund, advising trustees on a day-to-day basis about their investments. Mr Dunscombe, who addresses conferences about ‘ethical investments’, is also chairman of the Institutional Investment Group on Climate Change(IIGCC), which has 47 members and manages four trillion euros’ worth of investments; yes, four trillion. Their goal is to find as many ‘climate change’ investment opportunities as possible:

The IIGCC Investor Statement on Climate change was launched in October 2006. Asset owners and asset managers who signed the Statement committed to increasing their focus on climate change in their own processes and in their engagement with companies and governments.

So now we really know why BBC staffers are so fanatical about ‘climate change’. It’s naked self-interest. In 2008, there were 18,736 contributors to the BBC pension fund; every man jack of them benefits from climate alarmism.

Update: I’ve been going through the latest BBC Pensions Trust report, and it reveals that Helen Boaden, who is the overall boss of the BBC’s news and current affairs operation, was appointed to the trust in 2008. So the woman who tells environment reporters such as Roger Harrabin and Richard Black that the science is settled also works to maximise the returns of the pension fund with Peter Dunscombe. I thought that needed spelling out fully, just in case any subtleties might be missed. See post here.

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Global warming extremists silence doubters with charges of ‘terracide’
By Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental Examiner

The extremist disciples of modern climate-change theology are hard at work trying to silence unbelievers who express doubts or misgivings about the “proven science” of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.

The True Believers - those who claim man is warming the planet - view non-worshipers as heretics who should be ostracized, silenced, fired, put on trial or jailed (no talk yet of firing squads or public hangings) for the crime of “terracide” - destroying earth.

The eco-ecclesiastics brook no dissent from official dogma, as two university professors discovered. Climatologist Pat Michaels was forced from his post as a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia for postulating a belief in naturally induced climate swings - for example, changes caused by solar activity or ocean currents. And Oregon State University professor George Taylor, the state’s climatologist, was damned in the media for apostasy and forced to defend himself publicly for challenging the Book of Global Warming Revelation.

Many university professors who question the man-is-warming-the-earth dogma - and their numbers are growing - remain silent out of fear of reprisal. Those who are courageous enough to speak out are ridiculed and sometimes threatened. Dr. Timothy Ball, a former professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, received five death threats after publicly confronting the tenets of global warming. “I can tolerate being called a skeptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.”

Put them on trial, says Dr. James Hansen

Among the chief keepers of the faith is Al Gore comrade Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, who declared that global warming dissenters should be put on trial for “crimes against humanity.” This is the same James Hansen who has been called an activist and an embarrassment by his former supervisor at NASA, Dr. John Theon, and was roundly criticized for testifiying on behalf of six Greenpeace activists who had vandalized a coal-fired power plant in Britain. On the witness stand, Hansen testified that CO2 emissions from the plant would damage the environment through the effects of climate change.

It gets worse. Speaking at a business conference in Montreal, prominent scientist David Suzuki branded as “criminals” politicians who challenge the global warming orthodoxy, much to the delight of the standing-room-only crowd. “What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act,” said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “It’s an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years.”

Robert Kennedy, Jr. calls skeptics ‘traitors’

Not to be outdone, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., during a fire-and-brimstone speech at the 2007 Live Earth concert, lambasted the “crooked scientists who are lying to the American people day after day after day . . . and these rotten politicians . . . who are nothing more than corporate toadies . . . .”

“This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors,” he thundered. Heidi Cullen, former host of The Weather Channel’s “Forecast Earth,” called for the American Meteorological Society to revoke the Seal of Approval for any weatherman disputing the tenets of man-made warming.

“If a meteorologist can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn’t agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns,” she wrote in her Weather Channel weblog.

Thought control on the Internet?

Stripping non-believers of their professional credentials is only the start. Several eco-cultists have called for the appointment of Internet gatekeepers to monitor the opinions of global warming doubters. In Britain, environmental journalist Alex Lockwood of the University of Sunderland writes that “there is clearly a need for research into the ways in which climate skepticism online is free to contest scientific fact.” Translation: How do we best muzzle dissenters?

He continues: “I would argue that climate disinformation online is a form of cultural and political Malware. . . [that] harms not only our democracy, but our planet.” Lockwood also views favorably those who have called for nationalizing the Internet as a public utility and requiring online publications to register with an “Internet watchdog.”

In the minds of some eco-alarmists, banning contrary thinking does not go nearly far enough. More draconian measures are needed to rein in and punish views that deviate from officially sanctioned dogma.

David Roberts, a staff writer for the environmental organization Grist, wants to see leading warming skeptics hauled before a “war crimes” tribunal. He writes: “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us, and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards - some sort of climate Nuremberg.”

To his credit, Roberts says he is interested only in the truth and is “opposed to state-sanctioned execution in all cases . . . and would certainly never advocate it merely for the crime of being a lying scumbag.” No word yet on whether water-boarding or flogging would be acceptable.

The climate-change Torquemadas no doubt yearn for the good old medieval times of the rack, thumb screw, heretic’s fork, head vice, Inquisition chair, and Virgin of Nuremberg. Let the red out and the green spirit in. The first sinners in line for spiritual cleansing would undoubtedly be Lord Monckton of Brenchley, Steven McIntyre of Climate Audit and Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? - three well-known apostates held in especially high disrepute by the high priests of global warming.

Have the environmental-global warming-climate change jihadists finally lost their moral bearings - and sense of fair play in the forum of intellectual debate? When thoughtful people can no longer express their doubts about man-made global warming - a still unproven theory - without fear of on-the-job reprisals, ostracism, jail or worse, something has gone terribly awry. Environmentalism then has crossed into the dark province of eco-extremism, interested not in the pursuit of truth, but in strict adherence to a neo-fascist religious code.

The following missive forwarded recently to Climategate.com, captures the gravitas and profound philosophical underpinnings of the global warming cult:

“it doesnt really matter what you people say - all your arguments and all the bullsh!t won’t make a lick of difference to what we are facing and what will happen to our climate. I don’t know how you can live with yourselves. please just put some arsenic in your coffee and let the rest of world get on with it.” Read more of this frightening look into the sick and angry minds of environmental alarmism here.

Never mind predictions of catastrophic bleaching from global warming, cold is the culprit of this story. With ocean heat content now shown to be dropping slightly since 2005, there is even greater concern.

Excerpts from Physorg.com: Coral in Florida Keys suffers lethal hit from cold

A dead coral in the Upper Keys shows signs of temperature stress. (Nature Conservancy / January 29, 2010)
January 30, 2010 By Curtis Morgan

Bitter cold this month may have wiped out many of the shallow water corals in the Keys. Scientists have only begun assessments, with dive teams looking for “bleaching” that is a telltale indicator of temperature stress in sensitive corals, but initial reports are bleak. The impact could extend from Key Largo through the Dry Tortugas west of Key West, a vast expanse that covers some of the prettiest and healthiest reefs in North America.

Given the depth and duration of frigid weather, Meaghan Johnson, marine science coordinator for The Nature Conservancy, expected to see losses. But she was stunned by what she saw when diving a patch reef 2.5 miles off Harry Harris Park in Key Largo.

Star and brain corals, large species that can take hundreds of years to grow, were as white and lifeless as bones, frozen to death. There were also dead sea turtles, eels and parrotfish littering the bottom. “Corals didn’t even have a chance to bleach. They just went straight to dead,” said Johnson, who joined teams of divers last week surveying reefs in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. “It’s really ecosystem-wide mortality.”

The record chill that gripped South Florida for two weeks has taken a heavy toll on wildlife - particularly marine life. Many of the Florida Keys’ signature diving destinations such as Carysfort, Molasses and Sombrero reefs as well as deeper reefs off Miami-Dade and Broward are believed to have escaped heavy losses, thanks to warming effects of the Gulf Stream. But shallower reefs took a serious, perhaps unprecedented hit, said Billy Causey, Southeast regional director of national marine sanctuaries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Cold-water bleaching is unusual, last occurring in 1977, the year it snowed in Miami. It killed hundreds of acres of staghorn and elkhorn corals across the Keys. Neither species has recovered, both becoming the first corals to be federally listed as threatened in 2006. This big chill, said Causey, shapes up worse.

“They were exposed to temperatures much colder, that went on longer, than what they were exposed to three decades ago,” he said. Typical winter lows in-shore hover in the mid- to high-60s in the Keys. At its coldest more than a week ago, a Key Largo reef monitor recorded 52. At Munson Reef, just about a half-mile off the Newfound Harbor Keys near Big Pine Key, it hit 56.

At Munson Reef, said Cory Walter, a biologist for Mote Marine Laboratory in Summerland Key, scientists saw losses similar to what was reported off Key Largo. Dead eels, dead hogfish, dead coral - including big coral head 5- to 6-feet wide, bleached white with only fringes of decaying tissue.

“They were as big, as tall, as me. They were pretty much dead,” said Walter, who coordinates Mote’s BleachWatch program, which monitors reefs. See PHYSORG story.