The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is as lefty as our own dear CBC. Recently it sent reporter Margot O’Neill away to Oxford University for a year to study the state of environmental reporting. She returned recently to bemoan the fact that in the year since the Climategate emails and the UN climate summit debacle in Copenhagen there have been far fewer prominent climate change stories in Western press.

Her theory (and the theory of every source she seems to have talked to - all anonymous) is that scientists and reporters are simply doing a lousy job of explaining why climate change is still an impending disaster. But here’s another theory: In the past year, more of the public has seen through the shaky science of climate change and the questionable conclusions of the UN and some of the world’s most well-known climate scientists.

The house of cards has collapsed because its underlying assumptions were wrong to start with, not because the public cannot be made to care or because there exists some vast conspiracy to suppress the truth. The Emperor has been seen to be the naked fool he is.

“Where did all the climate change stories go?” O’Neill wonders. She quotes an unnamed BBC reporter saying “The [programmers] are against it because it loses ratings. The wave [of public interest] has gone. There is climate change fatigue. That is why I am not [reporting] it now.”

She adds that “even reporters at The Guardian, which especially targets environmental reporting, complain that it’s difficult to get a run. Another UK broadcast journalist said he was warned that putting climate change on prime time would risk losing a million viewers.”

Why this recent dearth? O’Neill offers several plausible explanations, but dismisses the most important one. She faults “cold winter in Europe, the distant impacts, the failure of the December 2009 UN climate change Copenhagen summit to produce a binding international agreement, public confusion about whether there is a reliable scientific consensus, and alarmist media coverage with Hollywood-horror headlines like “Be Scared; Be Very Scared!"” that have turned the public off. All of which are likely contributing factors.

But as to the most important reason - the exposure of the tricks many prominent climate scientists and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were playing with the scientific figures - O’Neill skates over that. She insists that “the underlying science has been exonerated in successive inquiries.”

Climate alarmists like to tell themselves that - that the science of man-made climate change remains sound and that the vaunted consensus among scientists has not diminished - but the fact is the three Climategate investigations were whitewashes and the vaunted consensus was never absolute. There have always been scientists who were not in the paid employ of oil and coal companies who were unwilling to buy the theory that man-made carbon dioxide had so filled the atmosphere that it was trapping in extra heat from the sun and causing a dangerous warming of the atmosphere.

As Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist at the University of Guelph, pointed out about just one of these apparently “independent” investigations into Climategate, “The Oxburgh Inquiry was supposed to review the scientific work of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. It examined a short list of papers chosen by the university itself, it held no hearings, only interviewed CRU scientists, took no evidence from critics, kept no notes of interviews, released a five-page report after only three weeks of work, then destroyed all its records. When it later emerged that CRU scientists admitted that their work was far more uncertain than was previously acknowledged, Ronald Oxburgh was asked why he did not report this. He replied that ‘the science was not the subject of our study.’”

The other two inquiries were equally dubious.

Whereas reporters like Margot O’Neill are placated by such obvious attempts to paper over the flaws in climate science - so they can keep alive the alarmist storyline about how we are in danger of destroying our planet if we don’t increase the size and power of governments to regulate every aspect of our daily lives - members of the public are not. Nor are scientists who have not built their reputations on their ability to paint horrifying pictures of the coming climate Armageddon.

The public is ahead of the politicians and environmental activists on this one. They are not clamouring to be lead to safety because they have seen through the thin veneer of the alarmists’ logic.

See post here.

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.