Do personal and financial ties corrupt views on global warming? The warmists thinks so, but only when skeptical scientists are involved.

Skeptic climate scientist Dr. S Fred Singer, a contributor to American Thinker, relayed the following in his weekly Science & Environmental Policy Project email (reproduced here):

IPCC Censorship: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a Vice-Chair (Vice President) of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, objected to Fred Singer participating in a seminar on global warming / climate change that was to be held at SEII Foundation Universitaire in Brussels. A google translation of part of the letter van Ypersele sent follows:

You should know that Mr. Fred Singer is a person whose scientific integrity leaves much to be desired. Its (sic) activities are financed disinformation by the lobbies of fossil fuels..... , and it is scandalous that such a person may be associated, directly or indirectly, to SEII and the University Foundation.

Claes Johnson, another skeptic who had been expected to participate in the seminar, has the original untranslated letter at his blog site, along with more about van Ypersele’s suggestion for censoring skeptic speakers.

Having never heard of IPCC Vice-Chair van Ypersele before, but having written several online articles here and elsewhere on the apparently unsupported accusations that skeptic scientists are corrupted by fossil fuel industry funding, I decided to see what other connections were to be found between Mr. van Ypersele and the people surrounding what I call the ‘96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists.  It seems every time I look into this, I find anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan and his associates at the enviro-advocacy group Ozone Action, which later merged into Greenpeace USA in 2000.

My first guess is that Mr. van Ypersele might be a recent addition to the IPCC, so I simply plugged his name into an internet search along with one of the two names from my June A.T. article, which was about people associated with the long-term smear accusation who also turned out to be recent IPCC report reviewers. Sure enough, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele is on the same list of 2007 Reviewers of the IPCC WGIII Fourth Assessment Report as the two in my article. That probably doesn’t mean much, it is a rather huge list.

Perhaps not helping matters in Mr. van Ypersele’s favor is that the same two people are on the list of participants at the Bonn, Germany 1999 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP5). In the UNFCCC meeting the following year in The Hague, no less than eleven people from Ozone Action, including Ross Gelbspan, were participants.

Did they all talk among themselves, and with the multiple number of Greenpeace International attendees, about skeptic scientists?  That would be for professional reporters to find out.

The plot thickens considerably when we first read the line in the official IPCC bio for Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, which says he “...was a Lead Author for the WGII contribution to the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC and was elected in 2002 Vice-Chair of its Working Group II.” You’d think he would want to minimize any ties with enviro-activist groups at that point, but then we read in this Greenpeace paper, “Report commissioned by Greenpeace and written by Jean-Pascal van Ypersele and Philippe Marbaix, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. July 2004.

On the 2nd page - let me repeat the above points for emphasis - IPCC Lead Author Jean-Pascal van Ypersele’s Greenpeace-commissioned paper starts with a fictional account of an out-of-control global warming disaster 40 years into the future, and then states,

I have long dreamed of drafting an inventory on the potential impacts of climate change in Belgium, as has been done for Europe or for several of our neighbours. Greenpeace’s request has given me the chance to make a start on this....We assume full scientific responsibility for the result and would like to thank Greenpeace for not having interfered at all in the content of our paper....

I hope that this report will be food for thought. This is our only planet - we do not have a spare.

Could anyone dare imagine a more breathtaking example of hypocrisy? An IPCC Lead Author commissioned to write a paper for an enviro-activist group while claiming no influence from them is now a top ranking IPCC leader repeating an old unproven accusation insinuating that mere association with fossil fuel industry funding renders skeptic scientists completely untrustworthy, and he demands such skeptics should be silenced.

Add this to Al Gore latest efforts to try equating skeptics with Civil Rights-era racists, and the ever-growing appearance of an impending implosion for the entire global warming crisis is much harder to miss now. In the parlance of current internet talk, this is fast becoming an “Epic Fail.”

Russell Cook’s collection of writings on this issue can be seen at “The ‘96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists,” and you can follow him on Twitter at QuestionAGW.

Washington, D.C. - Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, today blasted President Obama’s announcement of his choice of Alan Krueger as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Krueger served as chief economist at the Treasury Department during the first two years of the administration.

“The choice of Alan Krueger is yet another example of the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy, on American jobs and on our economy,” Senator Inhofe said. “During his time at the Department of Treasury under President Obama, Mr. Krueger made clear his opposition to the development of traditional domestic energy. He even went so far as to say, ‘The administration believes that it is no longer sufficient to address our nation’s energy needs by finding more fossil fuels...’ He further stated, ‘The administration’s goal is to have resources invested in ways which yield the highest social return.’ Yet as the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports, America has the largest recoverable reserves of oil, gas and coal in the world. The Obama administration’s failure to appreciate this fact is one of the many reasons why they are failing to make progress on creating jobs and improving our economy. 

“The nominations of John Bryson to head Commerce, Rebecca Wodder at Interior and now Alan Krueger should make it crystal clear that President Obama continues to favor a radical environmental agenda ahead of turning around our economy and putting Americans back to work.”

A paper published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that changes in the character of El Ninos over the past 31 years are the opposite of the predictions of climate models from greenhouse gases. The paper concludes “A plausible interpretation of these results is that the character of El Nino over the past 31 years has varied naturally” rather than being forced by increased greenhouse gases. Another alarmist prediction by climate modelers crumbles in the face of real-world data.

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, L15709, 4 PP., 2011

El Nino and its relationship to changing background conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean

Key Points:

The character of El Nino is changing in ways not expected from climate models

Changes in El Nino are projecting onto background conditions

The changes probably result from natural variations rather than GHG forcing

M. J. McPhaden et al

This paper addresses the question of whether the increased occurrence of central Pacific (CP) versus Eastern Pacific (EP) El Niños is consistent with greenhouse gas forced changes in the background state of the tropical Pacific as inferred from global climate change models. Our analysis uses high-quality satellite and in situ ocean data combined with wind data from atmospheric reanalyses for the past 31 years (1980–2010). We find changes in background conditions that are opposite to those expected from greenhouse gas forcing in climate models and opposite to what is expected if changes in the background state are mediating more frequent occurrences of CP El Ninos. A plausible interpretation of these results is that the character of El Niño over the past 31 years has varied naturally and that these variations projected onto changes in the background state because of the asymmetric spatial structures of CP and EP El Ninos.

Enlarged. H/T Marc Morano

According to its website, the Pew Environment Group is on a mission. Its purpose is:

saving the natural environment and protecting the rich array of life it supports. Our aim is to strengthen environmental policies and practices…and mobilize public support for their implementation. [bold added]

In other words, it’s an environmental advocacy outfit. Its entire purpose is to draw more attention to environmental concerns. Of all the problems and issues out there (from inadequate inner-city schools, to horrible diseases desperate for research funding, to the wrongfully convicted), this organization thinks the environment is top-of-the-list.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Per se. But what happens when a group with a political agenda becomes a persistent source of funding for a particular category of scientists? Say scientists whose specialty is the oceans and marine life. Say via a program that has been running for more than 20 years - long enough to have influenced an entire generation of research?

Allow me to introduce you to the Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation. Researchers lucky enough to be named a Pew Fellow receive $150,000.

These days, five new scientists each year become Pew Fellows - which adds up to $750,000. Back in the year 2000 10 scientists a year were being so honoured – representing an expenditure of $1.5 million per annum.

That is one big bag of cash. Can you imagine the outrage if the tobacco industry was handing out $1 million to researchers in one corner of the scientific world every year like clockwork? Would anyone believe that such a constant stream of cash was having no influence on which scientific questions those working in that field were choosing to ask - or avoid?

Even more to the point: Do we imagine that the work of such scientists would ever be taken seriously again? Surely, in many circles, their findings and their judgment would henceforth be considered suspect.

Which brings me to Jane Lubchenco. In 2008 US President Barack Obama nominated her to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In early 2009 her nomination was duly confirmed by the US Senate. She therefore holds the title of Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere.

When her appointment was officially announced, the NOAA told us that “Dr. Lubchenco is the first woman and the first marine ecologist” to lead “the nation’s top science agency for climate, oceans, and the atmosphere.”

We were reminded that the NOAA’s annual budget is four billion taxpayer dollars.

We were advised that Lubchenco is part of “a distinguished group of scientific leaders in the Obama administration that will ensure that science plays its proper role in shaping policy.”

In this official announcement, Lubchenco promised to use “the best science” as her guide. Moreover, someone else described her as “a top flight scientist.” We were told about her many awards and her many impressive titles.

What the announcement neglected to mention is that, at the time she was nominated, Lubchenco was Vice Chair of the board of the aggressive, influential, and outrageously wealthy Environmental Defense Fund (I’ve blogged about the EDF here).

Nor did it mention that in, 1992, she became a Pew Fellow - which means she accepted $150,000 from the activist entity I’ve described above. (To confirm this fact, one need only type her surname into the search box on this page.)

Nor, funnily enough, did the official announcement mention that Lubchenco is a former trustee of the World Resources Institute.

At the moment, this third activist group’s board of directors includes Al Gore. Its climate and energy program is being directed by Jennifer Morgan, the former chief spokesperson for the World Wildlife Fund (read about Morgan’s current role with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change here).

This means that an enormous government body is being led by a woman whose links to activist organizations are beyond dispute. The EDF. The Pew Environment Group. The World Resources Institute. None of these are a secret. None are marginal, shoe-string operations.

Yet even when there are three good reasons to worry that an activist mindset may be clouding your judgment, people are still prepared to call you a top flight scientist.

This suggests that, at its very highest levels, the scientific establishment is now rife with activists. But these people are not the same thing as genuine, bona fide scientists. Not at all.

So long as the scientific community chooses to pretend otherwise it doesn’t deserve the public’s respect - or its trust.

See the long list of marine scientists that have been bought off by the PEW Foundation here.

FROM-Rasmussen Report

The debate over global warming has intensified in recent weeks after a new NASA study was interpreted by skeptics to reveal that global warming is not man-made. While a majority of Americans nationwide continue to acknowledge significant disagreement about global warming in the scientific community, most go even further to say some scientists falsify data to support their own beliefs.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that 69% say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs, including 40% who say this is Very Likely. Twenty-two percent (22%) don’t think it’s likely some scientists have falsified global warming data, including just six percent (6%) say it’s Not At All Likely. Another 10% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The number of adults who say it’s likely scientists have falsified data is up 10 points from December 2009.

Fifty-seven percent (57%) believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009.
One in four (25%) believes scientists agree on global warming. Another 18% aren’t sure.

Republicans and adults not affiliated with either major political party feel stronger than Democrats that some scientists have falsified data to support their global warming theories, but 51% of Democrats also agree.

Men are more likely than women to believe some scientists have put out false information on the issue.

Democrats are more likely to support immediate action on global warming compared to those from other party affiliations.

Read Article here.

By Niger Innis

From New York, Washington and Atlanta to Chicago, St. Louis and Dallas, America is baking in a furnace. As millions swelter and gasp, they thank their lucky stars for air-conditioned cars, homes, offices and other places of refuge. And for the reliable, affordable electricity that makes AC possible.

Previous generations weren’t so fortunate. When a record heat wave slammed the nation in July 1936, Midwest temperatures hit 100-107 for a week. With most homes and businesses lacking even fans in this pre-AC era, millions suffered heat prostration. In Wisconsin, 449 died. Nationwide, thousands perished.

Now the EPA and NAACP want to send America back to the “good old days.” Under a perverse notion of “environmental justice,” they are promoting tough new air quality rules that would shut down dozens of coal-fired power plants that make affordable AC possible for millions of poor and minority families.

According to them, coal-based electricity is “racist.” Minorities are more at risk because they often live near “dangerous,” older, more polluting power plants.

There is no excuse for the ridiculous “racism” and “justice” rhetoric, or the way EPA used cherry-picked data and computer models to conjure up health risks and benefits that exist only in virtual worlds. (Visit www.AffordablePowerAlliance.org for details.) Worse, the agency refused to consider the disastrous effects its draconian regulations will impose on families and businesses, due to skyrocketing electricity prices.

EPA’s rules will reduce electricity availability and send costs soaring 12% to 60% by 2015 – especially in the 26 states that depend on coal for 48-98% of their electricity. Families and businesses in those states currently pay less than half as much per kilowatt hour as those in low-coal, high-tax, hyper-regulated states. That means jobs, profits, balanced budgets - and protection against life-threatening heat and cold.

Under EPA/NAACP rules, all that would end. Power plant closures will cause deadly electricity shortages during periods of peak demand. Millions of poor and minority families will be unable to afford air conditioning when electricity is available. Our elderly will be particularly at risk, especially in inner cities, because energy costs hit them disproportionately and they are least able to survive heat and heatstroke.

This summer’s blistering heat wave is a forecast for what lies ahead. Dozens have already died, including a Kansas man who had air conditioning but was concerned about paying his electricity bill, and so didn’t turn it on. How many more will face this life-or-death choice, after the EPA and NAACP succeed in closing power plants and driving electricity prices through the roof, no one can say. But in Chicago, a 1995 heat wave killed 700 people - and local papers predict a 40-60% price hike by 2015.

Shops, restaurants, groceries, dry cleaners and bakeries will see electric bills soar by thousands a year. Hospitals, school districts, internet providers, hotels and factories will be forced to pay tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions in added electricity costs. Factories that now pay $1 million for electricity could see an extra $600,000 added to their annual operating costs.

Each $30,000 increment is equal to another entry-level job that won’t be “created or saved.”

Chicago public schools will need an extra $2.7 million a year for electricity by 2014, the Chicago Tribune has reported. That translates into dozens of terminated sports programs, teachers and administrators.

Steel and paper mills, aluminum and petroleum refineries, car and aircraft factories will see annual electricity costs soar by millions of dollars. That could mean massive layoffs and entire operations shuttered or moved overseas. Management Information Services calculates that EPA/s rules will cost six Midwestern manufacturing states a combined 3.5 million jobs and $42-82 billion in annual GDP.

Do the EPA and NAACP suppose their rules will end heat waves? Or that unemployed workers and their families will be better able to afford air conditioning the next time temperatures climb above 100 degrees? Or that newly impoverished state and local governments will be better able to provide energy welfare - perhaps via another $1 trillion in federal debt?

Power plant emissions have been falling for decades. They have hardly morphed into a health-threatening crisis that suddenly justifies this EPA power grab and power plant shutdown. There is no basis for imposing stratospheric electricity costs that will kill millions more jobs - and put millions more people at risk from heat stroke and other ravages of government-inflicted poverty.

It would be nice if we could wave a magic wand and find billions of dollars to tear down and replace older power plants – or retrofit them with new pollution control and monitoring equipment, cover the extra annual operating and maintenance expenses, pay for “stranded investments” from facilities that will be shuttered long before the end of their useful life, and build or upgrade transmission lines from new power plants, wind farms and solar arrays.

It would be wonderful if wind and solar facilities could actually replace the NAACP and EPA’s detested coal-burning power plants - without needing billions in federal subsidies, duplicative gas-fired backup generators, thousands of miles of new transmission lines, hundreds of thousands of acres, and millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass and rare earth metals.

It would be fabulous if they actually generated electricity anywhere near their rated capacity and worked 24/7/365, instead of maybe 8/5/300 - and their electricity didn’t cost three times the coal-based alternative.

It would be incredible if EPA permit quagmires and environmentalist lawsuits did not stymie virtually every proposal for new coal, gas and nuclear power plants, transmission lines, natural gas drilling, and even wind farms and photovoltaic arrays, to replace coal-fired generators.

But that is not the world we live in.

Instead, we remain bogged down in an interminable recession, with intractable unemployment. We have incurred monumental debt. We have created a morass of legislation, regulation and litigation that ensures old power plants will be gone, replacements won’t be built anytime soon, and “smart meters” will let bureaucrats shut off AC power anytime electricity demand exceeds supply. We are killing jobs, businesses, investment and innovation - and will soon be killing our own citizens.

America’s workers, poor and minorities now face the prospect of skyrocketing energy prices and even more unemployment - accompanied by recurrent blackouts, rolling brownouts, misery, heatstroke, and unnecessary deaths during future heat waves.

One shudders to think that NAACP is so misguided, so ideologically hidebound, so beholden to government grants that it cannot recognize this - or realize it is the NAACP and EPA that are inflicting “energy racism” and “environmental injustice” on our nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

Reliable, affordable energy is the foundation for jobs, modern living standards, health, opportunity and civil rights progress. The NAACP needs to join the Affordable Power Alliance and Congress of Racial Equality in protecting Americans against further job losses and future heat waves.

In January, India’s Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, said: “There is a groupthink in climate science today. Anyone who raises alternative climate theories is immediately branded a climate atheist in an atmosphere of climate evangelists.

Climate science is incredibly more complex than negotiators make it out to be . . . Climate science should not be driven by the West. We should not always be dependent on outside reports.”

Indian newspaper The Hindu commented: “A key belief of climate science theology - that a reduction in carbon emissions will take care of the bulk of global warming - has been questioned in a scientific paper released by the Environment Ministry.”

Ramesh made his comments in response to a scientific study released by respected Indian physicist Dr UR Rao, a former chairperson of the Indian Space Research Organisation.

I was most pleased to see this Indian response, particularly from a Cabinet Minister. Ramesh is exhibiting the courage to listen to his scientists and then take a stand on a most important issue. The issue is also thorny, and many politicians avoid it like the plague.

The fundamental issue is: Is climate change occurring as a result of man-made factors, or is any potential or observable change due to natural factors?

I agree entirely with Rao that climate change is probably caused by natural factors.

The report brought out by Rao says that human-induced global warming is much less than is claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and that, in fact, most of the observed temperature fluctuations could be attributed to cosmic rays, in particular Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs).

When nuclear reactions occur in stars, nuclear particles of various sorts are spewed as a consequence of the nuclear reactions. These particles race across the vast distances of outer space.

In our own sun, such reactions occur, producing a spread of nuclear particles, some of which strike our planet. In fact, they give rise to the coloured sheets of light seen in the night skies over the far north and south of our planet, known as the Northern and Southern Lights.

All stars are actually ‘suns’ and, so, the galaxy is full of these GCRs, which arrive at our planet all the time.

Our planet has protection, and this is a magnetic field which results from the interaction of the earth’s magnetic field and the magnetic field of the sun. The sun’s field changes from time to time by some mechanism which is not yet fully understood. But one good indicator of the state of the sun’s magnetic field is the number of sunspots that can be seen on the surface of the sun. The sunspots show up as dark blobs, which are actually huge magnetic storms.

The bottom line of all this is that, when there are few or no sunspots, the protective field around the earth is weak and above-average numbers of cosmic rays reach the atmosphere of the earth. When there are many sunspots, a strong field results and there are less than average GCRs reaching our atmosphere.

What we see, and what Rao pointed out, is that more GCRs mean more cloud cover over the earth and then global cooling results. With many sunspots evident, global warming results. The principle is simple: with more clouds, less heat reaches the earth because it is stopped by the clouds.

In 2009, Ramesh stated that evidence given to him showed that a claim that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 was wrong. Only a few months later, the IPCC, after a review, stated that it had been wrong about the glacier prediction and that it regretted the error.

When Ramesh released Rao’s findings on GCRs, he noted: “The impact of cosmic ray intensity on climate change has thus far been largely ignored by the mainstream scientific consensus.” He added that a “unidimensional focus” on carbon emissions by most Western countries put additional pressure on countries like India in international climate negotiations and that “international climate negotiations are about climate politics [but], increasingly, science is becoming the handmaiden of politics”.

While the impact of cosmic rays on climate change has been studied before, Rao’s paper quantifies their contribution to global warming and concludes: “The future prediction of global warming presented by the IPCC’s fourth report requires a relook to include the effect due to long-term changes in the galactic cosmic ray intensity.”

What is laudable about the stance taken by Ramesh is that he challenges the entire dogma that mankind is solely to blame for any observed global temperature change.

In governments and companies around the world, one finds whole departments working on the ‘mitigation of climate change’ or trying to reduce the rate of global warming.

If the GCR theory is correct, which it seems to be, then there is nothing that mankind can do about global temperatures.

Having departments to mitigate climate change would then be like having a department to reduce the influence of ghosts and evil spirits on weather patterns.

To Ramesh, I say: “Keep it up; you are on the right track.’

When the next world environment conference, the seventeeth Conference of the Parties, or COP 17, takes place in Durban later this year, GCRs should be well and truly on the agenda.

Anthony Watt’s Surface Station Project to verify the quality of the United States Historical Climate Network, which Ellen and I worked on, was mentioned in Larry Bell Forbes Column: NASA’s Inconvenient Ruse: The Goddard Institute For Space Studies

The next time you read that NASA declares this or that day, month or year the hottest since yadda, yadda, yadda - you might want to check the source. It’s a pretty safe bet that it came from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and probably quotes its director, James Hansen.

One would imagine that if you can trust any organization regarding reliable climate information, it would be NASA, right? Particularly a NASA organization named after Dr. Robert H. Goddard, widely recognized as the “father of American rocketry.” Think how important it is to get weather information right when launching people into space, and consider all those satellites and other high-tech stuff they have at their disposal. One would certainly believe that they could be relied on to give us the real scoop.  Unfortunately, one might be very wrong, at least regarding the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Your can read the rest of Larry Bell’s insightful column here.  Here is his reference the Surface Station Project, which surveyed over a 1000 of the surface stations with the longest records that NASA uses in its models to forecast future global warming.

Dr. Ruedy of GISS confessed in an email that “[the United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date, and in another that NASA had inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis. “NASA’s assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data...may not have been correct”, he said. “Indeed, in 490 of the 1,057 stations the USHCN data was up to 1 C degree colder than the corresponding GHCN data, in 77 stations the data was the same, and in the remaining 490 stations the USHCN data was warmer than the GHCN data.”

Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who has conducted extensive surveys of NOAA temperature recording posts, told FoxNews.com in February 2010 that “...90 % of them [surface stations] don’t meet the [government’s] old, simple rule called the ’100-foot rule for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence… and we’ve got documentation”.

Bell concludes his column with this insight:

Dr. Theon also testified that: “My own belief concerning anthropogenic [man-made] climate change is that models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit”. He observed: “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modeled in the observations, nor explain how they did it…this is contrary to the way science should be done.” He then went on to say “Thus, there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy”. [My emphasis added]

Many members of the newly reconstituted U.S. Congress who are determined to cut non-essential government spending are very likely to agree. Perhaps this circumstance will substantially chill the overheated atmosphere surrounding NASA GISS operations.

I have sent a copy of Larry Bell’s column to Congressman McClintock’s office, but did not waste my time sending it to California’s intellectually challenged Senators.