Update: A new storm is mobving east and will dumpo another heavy snow on the Mid-Atlantic. It is likely to move DCA and PHL into all-time seasonal snow records with still more winter to come. Another storm will follow in the deep south with snow close to the Gulf.

The mainstream mediasphere and the alarmist blogosphere has been ignoring or dismissing the dominos of global warming collapsing as the fraudulent machinations of the IPCC are exposed, NOAA and NASA and CRU data manipulation is revealed and their heroes Michael Mann and Phil Jones are being investigated, and this incredible winter unfolds in many areas of the United States and Europe and Asia. 

China has had the coldest weather since 1971. Europe and Russia experienced brutal, deadly cold and heavy snows. Snow and cold surprised delegates to the UN Copenhagen global warming conference and followed Obama and congress back to DC.

Florida and parts of the southeast had the longest stretch of cold weather in history. Florida citrus areas had the worst damage since 1989. Washington saw a heavy snowstorm in December and now a record breaking storm in early February. Another one is on the way and will likely affect other cities further north.

In recent years snows have fallen in unusual places like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Buenos Aires, southern Brazil. Johannesburg, South Africa, southern Australia, the Mediterranean Coast and Greece. All-time record snows fell in many locales across the western and northern United States from Washington State and Oregon and Colorado to Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont and Maine. All-time records were also set in southern Canada and now the Mid-Atlantic.

Snow returned to the UK reminiscent of the Dickens winters the last few years.

Washington was oblivious to the wild weather, so nature has brought the wild weather to their backyard. This storm brought over 3 feet of snow to a few spots around the nation’s capitol, perhaps to estates of some of the nation’s political leaders or media bigwigs (see list of snow totals here). See a news accounts of it here. It and following storms will ensure DC will have the All-TIME SNOWIEST WINTER ever going back to 1871. Expect the enviro wackos and their media lapdogs to come out and claim the storm and cold winter is the result of global warming.

The winter was not a surprise to many of the private industry forecasters, unencumbered by the global warming albatross. We expected the winter to be a harsh one (see here). The reasons we felt so was a developing stratospheric warming in the polar regions of the northern hemisphere favored in east QBO low solar years and east QBO low solar El Ninos and also in winters following high latitude volcanoes (Redoubt and Sarychev). The stratospheric warming started in late November peaked in December then faded in mid January. Often in years when it occurs early, it recurs later (2000-2001, 1995-1996, 1977-78).

The stratospheric warming leads to a negative arctic oscillation (exceeding 5 standard deviations in December and again in February) which pushed cold air to middle latitudes while surface temperatures in the higher latitude are cold but above normal under the warm ridging aloft.  This kind of pattern happened in the 1960s and 1970s and indeed the winter is very much like 1965/66, 1968/69, and 1977/78 in that regard.

Enlarged here.

See how well through February 3rd, the upper level pattern has fit the expected pattern based on these natural factors.

Enlarged here.

Also we are back in the cold Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) phase which favors the colder El Ninos of the late 1950s to late 1970s (and again 2002/03).

Expect another storm this upcoming week with perhaps more snow for DC and this time further north, where less has fallen so far this season. The SOI hit an amazing 8 STD negative last week.

The water is warmest in the central tropical Pacific. A cold pool northwest of Hawaii also favors a cold central and east. That argues for a continued active southern storm track. The warm central Pacific and cold east also favors the same pattern as the East QBO low solar El Ninos, cold PDO. Once again natural oscillations provide a better indication of weather AND climate then the CO2, aerosol forcing dominated tinkertoy climate models (see a new peer review paper on their limitations here).

Looking ahead, these stratospheric warming events last 4 to 6 weeks so since it began in late January, expect it to continue at least several more weeks. Cold air and snow will be returning to Europe too after the same January thaw we experienced here in the states before winters return. See full PDF here. Updates to come after the storms the next week.

Oh and this ad was done before the big snowstorm this weekend and the one upcoming this week.

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Climate scepticism ‘on the rise’Climate scepticism ‘on the rise’
By BBC News

There has been an increase in the number of British people who are sceptical about climate change, a poll commissioned by BBC News has suggested. The poll, based on a sample group of 1,001 adults, was conducted by Populus.

The findings, based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February, show that only 26% of people think “climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made”, only 1% more than those who think there is no global warming.

In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus - commissioned by the Times newspaper - showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities.

See enlarged image here

“It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period,” Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News.

“The British public are sceptical about man’s contribution to climate change - and becoming more so,” he added. “More people are now doubters than firm believers.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) chief scientific adviser, Professor Bob Watson, called the findings “very disappointing”. “The fact that there has been a very significant drop in the number of people that believe that we humans are changing the Earth’s climate is serious,” he told BBC News. “Action is urgently needed,” Professor Watson warned. “We need the public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move towards a low carbon economy.”

‘Exaggerated risks’

Of the 75% of respondents who agreed that climate change was happening, one-in-three people felt that the potential consequences of living in a warming world had been exaggerated, up from one-in-five people in November.

The number of people who felt the risks of climate change had been understated dropped from 38% in November to 25% in the latest poll. During the intervening period between the two polls, there was a series of high profile climate-related stories, some of which made grim reading for climate scientists and policymakers.

In November, the contents of emails stolen from a leading climate science unit led to accusations that a number of researchers had manipulated data. And in January, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted that it had made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. All of this happened against the backdrop of many parts of the northern hemisphere being gripped by a prolonged period of sub-zero temperatures.

However, 73% of the people who said that they were aware of the “science flaws” stories stated that the media coverage had not changed their views about the risks of climate change. “People tend to make judgements over time based on a whole range of different sources,” Mr Simmonds explained. He added that it was very unusual for single events to have a dramatic impact on public opinion. “Normally, people make their minds up over a longer period and are influenced by all the voices they hear, what they read and what people they know are talking about.” See post here.

Icecap Comments: notice the care to avoid the the underlying results that 73% believe that man is or may not be involved in climate change, believing the climate is not changing (25%), is changing but man’s role is environmentalist propoganda (10%) or that climate is changing and man’s role has not been convincingly established (38%).  Notice in the full poll here, that a number of questions are written in such a way as to illicit a supportive reponse and yet in all, the message is clear, the public is not buying what the enviros, pols and media are pushing. One example is the first question that asks whether “do you think that the Earth’s climate is changing and global warming taking place?” Many skeptics might answer yes on that one. The climate is always changing, always warming or cooling.

Another sign the media dam may be breaking - this CBS Online video:

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Unquestionably the world’s final authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings and recommendations have formed the bedrock of literally every climate-related initiative worldwide for more than a decade. Likewise, virtually all such future endeavors—be they Kyoto II, domestic cap-and-tax, or EPA carbon regulation, would inexorably be built upon the credibility of the same U.N. panel’s “expert” counsel. But a glut of ongoing recent discoveries of systemic fraud has rocked that foundation, and the entire man-made global warming house of cards is now teetering on the verge of complete collapse.

Simply stated, we’ve been swindled. We’ve been set up as marks by a gang of opportunistic hucksters who have exploited the naïvely altruistic intentions of the environmental movement in an effort to control international energy consumption while redistributing global wealth and (in many cases) greedily lining their own pockets in the process.

Perhaps now, more people will finally understand what many have known for years: Man-made climate change was never really a problem—but rather, a solution.

For just as the science of the IPCC has been exposed as fraudulent, so have its apparent motives. The true ones became strikingly evident when the negotiating text for the “last chance to save the planet” International Climate Accord [PDF], put forth in Copenhagen in December, was found to contain as many paragraphs outlining the payment of “climate debt” reparations by Western nations under the watchful eye of a U.N.-controlled global government as it did emission reduction schemes.

Icecap Note: in the story here, Marc then goes into great detail on the history of the global warming movement and the increasing level of fraud. We pick up now in November 2009.

Caught with their Green Thumbs on the Scale

Most readers are likely aware that in November of last year, a folder containing documents, source code, data, and e-mails was somehow misappropriated from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The so-called “Climategate” emails disclosed an arrogant mockery of the peer review process as well a widespread complicity in and acceptance among climate researchers to hiding and manipulating data unfriendly to the global warming agenda. The modeling source code—as I reported here—contained routines which employed a number of “fudge factors” to modify the results of data series—again, to bias results to the desired outcome. And this, coupled with the disclosure of the Jones “hide the decline” e-mail, provided more evidence that MBH98—and ergo unprecedented 20th-century warming—is a fraud.

The following month, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change had probably tampered with Russian climate data. Apparently, Hadley ignored data submitted by 75% of Russian stations, effectively omitting over 40% of Russian territory from global temperature calculations—not coincidentally, areas that didn’t “show any substantial warming in the late 20th-century and the early 21st-century.”

But Climategate was only the tip of the iceberg. An AR4 warning that unchecked climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was found to be lifted from an erroneous World Wildlife Federation (WWF) report and misrepresented as peer-reviewed science. IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri attempted to parry this “mistake” by accusing the accusers at the Indian environment ministry of “arrogance” and practicing “voodoo science” in issuing a report [PDF] disputing the IPCC. But one in his own ranks, Dr Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the chapter making the claim, had the astoundingly bad manners to admit that he knew all along that it “did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.” Apparently, so had Pachauri, who continued to lie about it for months so as not to sully the exalted AR4 immediately prior to Copenhagen.

And “Glaciergate” opened the floodgates to other serious misrepresentations in AR4, including a boatload of additional non-peer-reviewed projections pulled directly from WWF reports. These included discussions on the effects of melting glaciers on mudflows and avalanches, the significant damages climate change will have on selected marine fish and shellfish, and even assessing global-average per-capita “ecological footprints.” It should be noted here that IPCC rules specifically disqualify all non-peer-reviewed primary sources.

Nonetheless, Chapter 13 of the WG2 report stated that forty percent of Amazonian forests are threatened by climate change. And it also cited a WWF piece as its source—this one by two so-called “experts,” who incidentally are actually environmental activists. What’s more, the WWF study dealt with anthropogenic forest fires, not global warming, and barely made mention of Amazonian forests at all. Additionally, the WWF’s figures were themselves based on a Nature paper [PDF] studying neither global warming nor forest fires, but rather the effects of logging on rain forests. So the IPCC predicted climate change-caused 40% forest destruction based on a report two steps upstream which concluded that “[l]ogging companies in Amazonia kill or damage 10-40% of the living biomass of forests through the harvest process.”

Adding to the glacial egg on the AR4 authors’ faces was the statement that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps, and Africa were being caused by global warming. It turns out that one of the two source papers cited was actually a mountain-climbers’ magazine. Actually, this is a relatively authoritative source compared to the other: a dissertation from a Swiss college student based on his interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The 2007 green bible also contained a gross exaggeration in its citation of Muir-Wood et al., 2006’s study on global warming and natural disasters. The original stated that “a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% per year.” But the AR4 synthesis report stated that more “heavy precipitation” is “very likely” and that an “increase in tropical cyclone intensity” is “likely” as temperatures rise.

Perhaps the most dumbfounding AR4 citation (so far) was recently discovered by Climatequotes.com. It appears that a WG2 warning that “[t]he multiple stresses of climate change and increasing human activity on the Antarctic Peninsula represent a clear vulnerability and have necessitated the implementation of stringent clothing decontamination guidelines for tourist landings on the Antarctic Peninsula” originated from and was attributed to a guide for Antarctica tour operators on decontaminating boots and clothing. Really. 

And here’s one you may not have heard yet. A paper published last December by Lockart, Kavetski, and Franks rebuts the AR4 WG1 assertion that CO2-driven higher temperatures drive higher evaporation and thereby cause droughts. The study claims they got it backwards, as higher air temperatures are in fact driven by the lack of evaporation (as occurs during drought). I smell another “-gate” in the works. 

And yet, perhaps the greatest undermining of IPCC integrity comes from a recent study, which I’ve summarized here, challenging the global temperature data reported by its two most important American allies: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As these represent the readings used by most climate analysis agencies, including the IPCC, the discovery by meteorologist Joe D’Aleo and computer expert E.M. Smith that they’ve been intentionally biased to the warm side since 1990 puts literally every temperature-related climate report released since then into question.

...Along with, of course, any policy decisions based on their content.

It’s Time for some Real Climate Justice

Here in the states, left-leaning policymakers and their cohorts in the MSM have thus far all but ignored both the reality and implications of the fraud unveiled by Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, and the myriad other AGW-hyping scandals that seem to surface almost daily. Remarkably, most continue to discuss “climate pollution” and “carbon footprints” and the “tragedy” of Copenhagen’s failure, even as the global warming fever of their own contagion plunges precipitously. The president appears equally deluded, as passing a “comprehensive energy and climate bill” (as though the climate might somehow be managed by parliamentary edict) was one of the many goals he set forth in his State of the Union address last week.

But their denial will be short-lived as even the last vestiges of the green lie they so desperately cling to evaporate under the heat of the spotlight suddenly shining upon them.

For outside of the U.S., many news organizations and politicians already get it. Some are calling for Pachauri’s resignation, and others for a full investigation into his possible financial conflicts of interest. There have also been demands for a complete reassessment of all IPCC reports, including a suggestion from the Financial Times that, given the IPCC’s “central role in climate science,” an independent auditor must be commissioned to “look at all the claims in the 2007 report and remove any that were not soundly based.”

At least one American, AGW believer Walter Russell Mead of American Interest Online, agrees: “A highly publicized effort that includes serious skeptics and has bipartisan backing is the only way to get American public opinion on board the climate change train.” And China’s lead climate change negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, suggested that “contrarian views” be included in 2014’s AR5.

But when the Australian suddenly recommended “applying a healthy degree of scepticism to scientific claims that drive policy,” paleoclimatologist Bob Carter told me he just couldn’t help laughingly writing the editors to welcome them to the ranks of the majority of scientists who “practice exactly the technique that [they] belatedly recommend”—the skeptics.

Indeed, this abrupt challenge to their own “consensus” mantra that they’ve spoon-fed the public for years rings decidedly hollow. Those “serious skeptics” and the holders of those “contrarian views” are the same scientists the IPCC deliberately excluded from its proceedings with impunity. They’re the same people whom the media have ignored or ridiculed for years, along with their conventions—like Heartland’s ICCC 1, 2, and 3—and innumerable contrarian reports. In fact, a superb rebuttal to AR4, Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)—produced by Dr. S. Fred Singer, Dr. Craig Idso, and thirty fellow scientists—has received no MSM attention whatsoever, despite its availability here since last June.

Besides, the time for credibility makeovers has long passed. As U.K. Professor Phillip Stott recently observed:

[A]s ever, capitalism has read the runes, with carbon-trading posts quietly being shed, ‘Green’ jobs sidelined, and even big insurance companies starting to hedge their own bets against the future of the Global Warming Grand Narrative. These rats are leaving the sinking ship far faster than any politician, many of whom are going to be abandoned, left, still clinging to the masts, as the Good Ship ‘Global Warming’ founders on titanic icebergs in the raging oceans of doubt and delusion.

Stott compared the IPCC’s fall to that of the Berlin Wall. And he’s spot-on—for just as the latter symbolized the doom of European communism, so does the former signal the death knell for global socialist-environmentalism.

Let’s get real—given the enormousness of the booty these grifters attempted to extort from the entire developed world, not to mention the extraordinary depth of their hubris, it isn’t rehabilitation that’s required here, but swift justice. In 2006, IPCC cheerleader Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts received a pass when he called for the Nuremberg-style war-crimes trials for the “bastards” who were members of the global warming “denial industry.” Surely, it’s now clear that the members of the global warming “fraud industry” are the true “bastards” who should be hauled before an international tribunal for crimes against humanity...any tribunal, that is, other than the U.N.’s own International Criminal Court in The Hague.

We’ll deal with their accessories-after-the-fact in the Congress, the White House—and consequently, the EPA—in due time.

And the first such judgment is already scheduled—for November.

See full post, one for the time-capsule, here.

Scotland has suffered some of the coldest winter months in almost 100 years, the Met Office has confirmed.

By combining the temperatures of January and December it showed they were the coldest since 1914 - the year data started being logged.

Elsewhere, it was the coldest December and January in Northern Ireland since 1962/63 and the coldest in England and Wales since 1981/82.

Sub-zero temperatures and snow blew into the UK from mid-December. The average minimum overnight temperature for January is usually at freezing point, but in Scotland it was regularly below -5C.

Salt grit shortages were reported throughout December and January and the tiny Highlands village of Altnaharra recorded one January night temperature of -22.3C.

Although Scotland has had the coldest combined December and January on record, temperatures would need to go lower to beat the coldest two month winter combination. January and February in 1963 was the coldest on record north of the border.

MEANWHILE...Cold Snap Causes Deaths in Eastern Europe, Germany
Speigel on-line story here

Cold weather in Germany and Eastern Europe in recent days has caused deaths and major disruption to transportation systems. Parts of Europe have been snow-covered for a month, but that coating turned into a layer of ice in many countries in recent days.

A continuing cold snap across parts of Europe over the weekend and into Monday caused the deaths of more than 40 people in Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. It’s a cold spell that also stretched across much of Germany, leaving people here shivering as temperatures plunged as low as -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) early on Monday morning.

The frigid temperatures transformed images of a snowy winter wonderland into an icy landscape in Germany. Cold weather caused lakes, rivers and streams to freeze over and ice to collect on roadways, rail lines and airport runways, disrupting transportation and causing accidents. Several dozen injuries and at least two deaths occurred as a result of road accidents on Monday. Traffic jams were also reported across the country, and at Frankfurt airport, Germany’s largest, over 150 flights had to be cancelled because of runway conditions. Numerous other flights were delayed.

Deadly Cold Strikes Eastern Europe

Germany’s cold spell, however, has been minor compared to temperatures being experienced in Eastern Europe. A government spokesperson in Bucharest (Subway Station shown) reported that ice cold temperatures of -34 degrees Celsius caused the deaths of 11 people in Romania in just 24 hours, with a total of 22 deaths registered in the last five days as a result of the cold.

The country’s social services have reported that 15,000 people in Romania are homeless, with 5,000 living in the capital city of Bucharest alone. Authorities have ordered hospitals to take in as many as possible to escape the cold.

“Most of the dead are older homeless people, “ said Raed Arafat, a senior official in the Romanian Health Ministry. “We try to find endangered people and bring them to safety, but in some cases we miss people,” he said, according to French news agency AFP.

Meanwhile, in Poland 11 people died during what has so far been the country’s coldest night this winter, with temperatures as low as -31 degrees Celsius. In total, 16 people died over the weekend from freezing temperatures, the government in Warsaw reported.

With temperatures as low as -29 degrees Celsius, Bulgaria reported the lowest temperatures for the region in the past 50 years. Three deaths linked to the cold weather have been reported since Saturday. Meteorologists also warn that waters in the bay of the Black Sea could freeze for the first time since the winter of 1942-1943.

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Climategate Necessary to Cover Incorrect Climate Basics of IPCC
By Dr. Tim Ball, Canada Free Press

Canada and the US announced new targets for carbon reduction that are completely unnecessary. It is madness and ultimately destructive to western society but what the perpetrators want. Despite exposure of the complete corruption of the science they continue to assume CO2 is a problem. UN Climate chief Yves De Boer said, “what’s happened, it’s unfortunate, it’s bad, it’s wrong, but I don’t think it has damaged the basic science.”

British Climate Secretary Ed Miliband said, “It’s right that there’s rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that’s there,” It’s not one mistake but a complete fabrication of every aspect of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports. In addition, science is only correct when accurate predictions are made and the IPCC have been wrong in every single one. Miliband’s thinking helps explain why the UK is on the brink of economic disaster and needs a diversion. It is said, despite the disclosures, because the objective of eliminating fossil fuels and destroying industrial economies is still pursued.

What they don’t understand or choose to ignore is that the basic science was wrong from the start.

Climategate Corruption: Custom Made Science

Corruption disclosed was necessary because the science and the evidence didn’t fit what they wanted. They made the science fit the political goals and stopped at nothing to achieve the end. They succeeded, because beyond manipulations that duped politicians, media and most of the public, they knew many scientists who participated did not understand climate science. Blinded by career ambitions and large funding they ignored what was going on or lacked the expertise to know. Now some scientists incorrectly claim the basic evidence is still valid.

Politicians and political leaders worldwide accepted and adopted these reports as their political Bible. Most of them still don’t understand what went on and therefore failed to react properly. Scientists in political positions support them in their chosen ignorance manifest in inappropriate reactions. John Beddington, science advisor to the UK government and professor of applied population biology demonstrates his lack of understanding of climate science. He says, “It’s unchallengeable that CO2 traps heat and warms the Earth and that burning fossil fuels shoves billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where you can get challenges is on the speed of change.” There are serious questions about the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. For example, the IPCC claimed CO2 stays in the atmosphere for up to 100 years but we know that this residency time is wrong.  It is between five and six years. The duration was an essential part of the political game to increase pressure for action: even if we stopped CO2 production right now the impact would be felt for decades. There’s also the troubling fact that in every record of any duration for any time in the Earth’s history temperature change precedes CO2 change. We have little idea of the greenhouse effect when we have no understanding of the role of water vapor. His argument about the speed of change is not an issue either. They made it one by claiming current change is faster than in the past. It isn’t.

Beddington’s comments show he doesn’t understand the scientific method.  He said, “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper skepticism.” How does he distinguish between skepticisms? What is “proper”? All scientists are skeptics and all of their questions and inputs are healthy. The CRU gang and government agencies actively excluded skeptics and skepticism. The use of the term is dismissive and in a backhanded way acknowledges their behavior.

Complaints about the control, typified by CRU Director Phil Jones’s statement he would keep certain papers out even if it meant changing the peer-reviewed process, led to an external review process. It was a sham, a public relations exercise allowing them to say they were inclusive of skeptics, when they changed virtually nothing. I could never discover who chose the reviewers. Virtually none of the corrections amendments and additions proposed by the external reviewers were included. One review editor claimed he had eliminated files when pushed for an accounting.

Powerful Players Still Active

Recently a paper published in Science announces, “climate scientists have overlooked a major cause of global warming and cooling, a new study reveals today.” No they haven’t, only the scientists involved in the IPCC have overlooked it. We then have a quote from Dr. Susan Solomon of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “current climate models do a remarkable job on water vapor near the surface but this is different it’s a thin wedge of the upper atmosphere that packs a wallop from one decade to the next in a way we didn’t expect.”

No, the current climate models do not do a remarkable job. In fact the entire issue of water vapor as a greenhouse gas is essentially ignored and badly handled. Dr. Solomon was a co-chair of the Working Group 1, the Scientific Group of the IPCC.  This means responsibility for the content of their report. Solomon was in direct communication with the people at CRU. Dr. Solomon failed to identify the serious problems now being disclosed. How does the certainty of the Reports and especially the Summary for Policymakers fit with this statement by Solomon? “We call this the 10/10/10 paper, 10 miles above your head, there is 10% less water vapor than there was 10 years ago. Why did the water vapor decrease? We really don’t know, we don’t have enough information yet.”

Despite this Solomon must play down the limitations the findings imply saying, “this isn’t an indication that predictions on global warming are overstated”. Yes it is, and the cooling trend since 2002 while CO2 levels increased is another. “This doesn’t mean there isn’t global warming.” “There’s no significant debate that it is warmer now than it was 100 years ago, due to anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gases.” The only place were that statement is true is in the computer models of the IPCC and we know they are useless.  As CRU and IPCC member Trenberth said on October 12 2009, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Solomon apparently found an answer by claiming the upper level water vapor, “very likely made substantial contributions to the flattening of the global warming trend since about 2000.” And that is probably what the research is all about.

Dr. Solomon was also involved in the claim that CFCs were destroying the ozone when there was never any evidence. In fact, UV interacting with oxygen creates ozone but they incorrectly assumed UV was constant. We now know it varies by up to 200%.

Destructive Policies Are a Self-Perpetuating Behemoth

The hypothesis that CO2 was causing warming was accepted as fact before scientific testing began. They blocked most testing and challenges, but it never was the cause. As the evidence accumulated this was the case Climategate became necessary to corrupt and falsify. Now dismissal of Climategate ignores how the fundamental science is wrong. Climategate became necessary to achieve the political objective. Politicians and scientists who bought into the objectives don’t want to believe Climategate or abandon the benefits of appearing green, advancing careers, making money, or imposing taxes and political control on everybody to destroy western economies and democracy.  Read more here.

By David Freddoso, Online Opinion Editor, Washington Examiner

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who flies around on private planes so as to tell larger numbers of people how they must live their lives in order to save the planet, wrote a column last year on the lack of winter weather in Washington, D.C.

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington’s C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy.

Having shoveled my walk five times in the midst of this past weekend’s extreme cold and blizzard, I think perhaps RFK, Jr. should leave weather analysis to the meteorologists instead of trying to attribute every global phenomenon to anthropogenic climate change.

Read more at the Washington Examiner ICECAP NOTE: More is on the way from DC to PHL and NYC. New seasonal all-time records will be set in DC and PHL.

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India to drop out of IPCC, snubs Pachauri
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi, UK Telegraph

India has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri.

The Indian government’s move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing in the face of global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country. “There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses...they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with international bodies and operate as a “sort of Indian IPCC,” he added. The body, which he said will not be rival the UN’s panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year, with reports on the Himalayas, India’s long coastline, the Western Ghat highlands and the north-eastern region close to the borders with Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal. Through these we will demonstrate our commitment to climate science,” he said. Read more here.

The UN panel’s claims of glacial meltdown by 2035 “was clearly out of place and didn’t have any scientific basis,” he said, while stressing the government remained concerned about their health of the Himalayan ice flows. “Most glaciers are melting, they are retreating, some glaciers, like the Siachen glacier, are advancing. But overall one can say incontrovertibly that the debris on our glaciers is very high the snow balance is very low. We have to be very cautious because of the water security particularly in north India which depends on the health of the Himalayan glaciers,” he added.

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Is Paul Dennis The Hero Of ClimateGate?
Posted by CBullitt, Soylent Green

The UK Guardian is reporting that Dennis, whose ice-core temperature studies are at odds which the Church of Carbon Come, has been questioned several times about leaking the emails and data files from the CRU at East Anglia.

Dennis refused to sign a petition in support of Jones when the scandal broke. He told friends he was one of several staff unwilling to put their names to the Met Office-inspired statement in support of the global warming camp, because “science isn’t done by consensus”.

University sources say the head of department, Professor Jacquie Burgess, received a letter from Dennis at the height of the email uproar, calling for more open release of data. He appears to have disapproved of the way Jones resisted FoI requests.

Russian hackers? A conspiracy of denialist flat-earthers? Not so much. Bwuhahahaha

If Dennis is the leaker, he deserves a ticker-tape parade and all the rock-star accoutrements he can get. Great work, Paul - you may have saved science. See more here.
---------------------------

Acclaimed Climategate Analyst points to whistleblower rather than hacker
By John ‘O’Sullivan, Climategate

Climategate.com can now reveal the details of our exclusive interview with Australian physicist, Dr. John Costella, the acclaimed scientist who authored the accepted expert analysis of the Climategate emails. Costella wants to dispel doubts raised by those who clearly have not bothered to pay close scrutiny to what those infamous emails prove. Having directed my attention to the evidence cited below, I am convinced our readers will agree with Costella, that Professor Jones, the scientist at the center of the scandal, was having his correspondence closely monitored by the Freedom of Information Officer (FOI) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) before they were certainly leaked.

Costella’s statements will be seen as an embarrassing slight to former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King. On Monday, James Delingpole at the Telegraph exposed King for blowing off a lot of hot air about some hunch that nasty Russian or American spies hacked into the UEA’s Internet server. The bottom line is that the Information Commissioner’s Office has had to come clean and admit publicly that criminal conduct has taken place within the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, although no one in authority appears to want to do anything about it.

Dr. Costella, in his analysis, “Climategate Analysis,” has now published what is widely regarded as the best review of all 1,000+ emails and other documents contained in a 62MB upload to a Russian Internet server on November 19, 2009.

I asked John to comment on whether he believed it was the work of a hacker or an inside whistleblower that broke this most sensational scandal. He replied, “My only speculation on this comes from the following email,” and then directed me to read email 1228922050 of December 9, 2008 in which U.S. climatologist Ben Santer catches onto UEA climatologist, Phil Jones’s strategy of arguing that a greater number of requests implies lower credibility and validity, rather than the opposite:

Santer:

“I had a quick question for you: What is the total number of F[reedom] O[f] I[nformation (FOI)] A[ct] requests that you’ve received from Steven McIntyre?”

Jones:

“[I h]aven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at [the] U[niversity of] E[ast] A[nglia]. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails -unless this was “normal” deleting to keep emails manageable!”

Costella comments:

“Unless Jones volunteered this information to their FOI officer, this intriguing email may indicate that the FOI officer - who will generally have system-level rights to read all emails, as part of their job - may have been monitoring Jones’s emails, including the one above where he admitted deleting emails. This may lead to the identity of the Climategate whistle-blower, for those who continue to doubt their existence.”

Relatedly, Dr. Costella also confirmed that contrary to widespread misunderstanding, none of the emails were redacted: “The ZIP file I downloaded on December 6, 2009 has the emails intact. The files on my webpage are not redacted either.”

The continued to speculate on the confusion of this issue:

“I think that when some people decided to post them all online, they wrote a program to redact all email addresses to avoid them being picked up by spammers. But by the time I saw them, there were so many unredacted copies on the Internet that I knew it was useless to do that.”

Pointedly, Costella informed me that he found the full email addresses are “extremely useful” in deciphering the affiliations of the alleged climate conspirators. “They are also important in that they show that these people were (almost always) using their OFFICIAL work email, not personal email,” he said.

John left me with a few sobering words that shows that here is a man who thinks with the cool, objective head of a scientist: “Opinions on likely hackers are mere speculation, no matter how well-respected or honorable the speculator may be...it has been over two months now. Regardless of how the emails were leaked, they have been acknowledged as genuine, and provide evidence of astounding fraud. Investigation and potential prosecution or protection of the leaker or hacker is a separate issue, of no direct relevance to the issue of fraud.”

In this article we have dealt with facts, not the spin that warmists like Sir David King are spouting. Conclusions may only properly be drawn from evidence plainly presented. We have seen very little or any of that from the apologists of climate crime.

Dr. Costella has made a compelling factually-based case that Phil Jones’ unlawful deletion of emails was, he admits, well known to his FOI Officer. Jones was instructed to desist in breaking the law by that Officer. He continued to refuse to comply with the officer’s request. Thereafter, a vast amount of data (62MB) contained within a directory entitled ‘FOIA’ was uploaded onto the Internet. Absent any evidence to prove a hack we may thus infer a conscientious whistleblower, probably the FOI Officer, leaked the emails.” Read more here.

See Monckton’s debate on Australian ABC television last night here.

By Shanta Barley, New Scientist

A rise in water vapour in the atmosphere fuelled 30 per cent of the global warming that took place during the 1990s. This discovery suggests that the potent greenhouse gas plays a bigger role in climate change that we previously imagined.

Susan Solomon and colleagues at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration combined satellite measurements and weather balloon data to track changes in the concentration of water vapour 16 kilometres up in the stratosphere, between the 1980s and today.

Water vapour levels in the stratosphere increased in the 1990s but dropped by 10 per cent in 2001. After feeding their measurements into a climate model, the team suggests that vapour was to blame for almost a third of the warming that happened in the 1990s.

Icecap Note: that corresponded to a decline in tropical activity during the cold PDO La Ninas of 1999 to 2001 (below, enlarged here).

It likely bounced back and then declined agin afte the 2005 tropical activity spike

The model also suggests that the decline in water vapour concentrations that occurred in 2001 slowed down the rate of global warming in the last decade by 25 per cent.

“This research does not change the consensus view that human emissions drive climate change,” says Fortunat Joos, a climate modeller at the University of Bern, Germany.

Journal reference: Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1182488

Water vapor is 20 times more abundant greenhouse gas than CO2, a bit player at best in climate change, but of course you can’t tax or control the hydrological cycle

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Is the NULL default infinite hot?
By E.M. Smith

What to make of THIS bizarre anomaly map?

What Have I Done?
I was exploring another example of The Bolivia Effect where an empty area became quite “hot” when the data were missing (Panama, posting soon) and that led to another couple of changed baselines that led to more ‘interesting red’ (1980 vs 1951-1980 baseline). I’m doing these examinations with a 250 km ‘spread’ as that tells me more about where the thermometers are located. The above graph, if done instead with a 1200 km spread or smoothing, has the white spread out to sea 1200 km with smaller infinite red blobs in the middles of the oceans.

I thought it would be ‘interesting’ to step through parts of the baseline bit by bit to find out where it was “hot” and “cold”. (Thinking of breaking it into decades… still to be tried...) When I thought:

Well, you always need a baseline benchmark, even if you are ‘benchmarking the baseline’, so why not start with the “NULL” case of baseline equal to report period? It ought to be a simple all white land area with grey oceans for missing data.

Well, I was “A bit surprised” when I got a blood red ocean everywhere on the planet.

You can try it yourself at the NASA / GISS web site map making page.

In all fairness, the land does stay white (no anomaly against itself) and that’s a very good thing. But that Ocean!

ALL the ocean area with no data goes blood red and the scale shows it to be up to 9999 degrees C of anomaly.

“Houston, I think you have a problem”.

Why Don’t I Look In The Code?

Well, the code NASA GISS publishes and says is what they run, is not this code that they are running.

Yes, they are not publishing the real code. In the real code running on the GISS web page to make these anomaly maps, you can change the baseline and you can change the “spread” of each cell. (Thus the web page that lets you make these “what if” anomaly maps). In the code they publish, the “reach” of that spread is hard coded at 1200 km and the baseline period is hard coded at 1951-1980.

So I simply can not do any debugging on this issue, because the code that produces these maps is not available.

But what I can say is pretty simple:

If a map with no areas of unusual warmth (by definition with the baseline = report period) has this happen; something is wrong.

I’d further speculate that that something could easily be what causes The Bolivia Effect where areas that are lacking in current data get rosy red blobs. Just done on a spectacular scale.

Further, I’d speculate that this might go a long way toward explaining the perpetual bright red in the Arctic (where there are no thermometers so no thermometer data). This “anomaly map” includes the HadCRUT SST anomaly map for ocean temperatures. The striking thing about this one is that those two bands of red at each pole sure look a lot like the ‘persistent polar warming’ we’ve been told to be so worried about. One can only wonder if there is some “bleed through” of these hypothetical warm spots when the ‘null data’ cells are averaged in with the ‘real data cells’ when making non-edge case maps. But without the code, it can only be a wonder:

With 250 km ‘spread’ and HadCRUT SST anomalies we get bright red poles.

The default 1200 km present date map for comparison:

GIS Anomaly Map for November 2009

I’m surprised nobody ever tried this particular ‘limit case’ before. Then again, experienced software developers know to test the ‘limit cases’ even if they do seem bizarre, since that’s where the most bugs live. And this sure looks like a bug to me.

A very hot bug… Read more here.

Read also the Madagascar Muse here which shows despite no stations, a permanent red spot appeared over Madagascar in recent years thanks to the interpolation made. In the latest update after the post, GISS removed that hotspot.

See Surface temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? which heavily drew on data from E.M. Smith and postings by Anthony Watts here.

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UAH MSU jumped this month with a boost from ocean temperature rises. This has been jumped on by alarmsists trying to deflect attention from the brutal Northern Hemisphere land winter. Why the satellite sensed ocean warming? Walter Starck explains:

“Sea surface temperatures in the top meter of the oceans rapidly increase in periods of extended calm weather due to the cessation of wave driven mixing. After a week or two of calm, the surface temperature may become as much as 4-5 degrees higher than the temperature 2m below the surface. This thermal stratification disappears in a few hours when normal trade winds resume. El Niño events are characterized by extended and expanded areas of calm over the tropical oceans and it is this calm, not exceptional atmospheric temperatures, which is responsible for the rise in sea surface temperatures.

Elevated sea surface temperatures would presumably result in greater transfer of thermal energy to the atmosphere via increased back radiation, conduction/convection and evaporation. After an El Nino, when the warm layer is again mixed through the normal 70-100m thickness of the surface zone above the thermocline, the total thermal content should be somewhat less than it otherwise would be due to the cessation of mixing during the period of calm and the greater loss to the atmosphere from the higher temperature shallow surface layer. The result is that the high SSTs characteristic of El Ninos is followed by a period of lower than average surface temperatures (i.e. La Nina). This seems quite evident following the 1998 El Nino.

I am aware of the high temperature shallow surface layer from a lifetime of diving in the tropics where I have experienced it directly on repeated occasions.  Although this warm surface layer would show up in old fashioned measurements taken using buckets it would not appear in temperatures taken from cooling water intakes on ships since they are below it and XBT records would be problematic as the heated layer is so limited in thickness.

I suspect that the high January SSTs just experienced are a manifestation of this effect and will be followed by lower than average SSTs when normal trade winds resume. The important thing that is not being properly recognized is that the higher SSTs of El Nino events involves only a very shallow surface layer, not the entire upper mixed layer of the ocean.”

By Richard North

Less than a week after he claimed the IPCC’s credibility had increased as a result of its handling of the “Glaciergate” scandal, Pachauri’s own personal credibility lies in tatters as The Times accuses him of a direct lie.

This is about when he first became aware of the false claim over the melting glaciers, Pachauri’s version on 22 January being that he had only known about it “for a few days” - i.e., after it had appeared in The Sunday Times.

However, Ben Webster writes that a prominent science journalist, Pallava Bagla - who works for the Science journal (and NDTV as its science correspondent) - claims that last November he had informed Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

Bagla interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, he asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month - as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates - early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.”

According to Pachauri, “… within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never - and I can say this categorically - ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”

Without even Bagla’s input, we know this to be lies. Apart from anything else, there was the crisis meeting under the aegis of UNEP - which we reported on Thursday - which concluded that the 2035 claim “does not appear to be based upon any scientific studies and therefore has no foundation”.

Separately, we have Syed Hasnain, while stressing that he was not involved in drafting the IPCC report, claiming that he noticed some of the mistakes when he first read the relevant section in 2008.

That was also the year he joined TERI in Delhi, headed by Dr Pachauri. Then, he says, he realised that the 2035 prediction was based on an interview he gave to the New Scientist magazine in 1999. But, he claims, he did not tell Pachauri because he was not working for the IPCC and was busy with his own programmes.

“I was keeping quiet as I was working here,” he said. “My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

However, Hasnain’s assertions contrast rather sharply with a video interview given by him to NDTV (see clip above) on 9 November 2009 - the day that the Raina report on glaciers was published, challenging the claims made in the IPCC report. Then, he is seen to be defending the 2035 figure, and allowing himself to be styled as “author of the original IPCC report”.

According to The Guardian, V K Raina, formerly deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India, has joined calls for Pachauri’s resignation.

The Guardian cites India’s Economic Times from over a week ago, which criticised the IPCC for damaging its own credibility, noting that “it would now seem that Mr Pachauri’s steadfast unwillingness to consider an alternate position could well have given climate sceptics a stronger footing.”

But today, the Deccan Herald also weighs in, declaring: “The [glacier] incident reflects poorly on the professionalism and scientific rigour of the IPCC and has done damage to its credibility.” The writing is not so much on the wall as obliterating it.

Adding to the graffiti, in yet another development, the popular Indian magazine Open rips apart global warming, labelling it: “The Hottest Hoax in the World.” Indian blogger Gurmeet in Liberty News Central thinks this could be the most hard-hitting article in the Indian MSM on AGW fraud ever.

Given what is about to descend upon him on Sunday, by the time the Indian media have absorbed the detail, Pachauri will be history. See Richard North’s blog here.

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Global Warming: the Collapse of a Grand Narrative
By Philip Stott, The Clamour of the Times, Saturday, 30 January 2010

For over a month now, since the farcical conclusion of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, I have been silent, partly through family commitments abroad in the USA, but also because, in this noisy world, in ‘The Clamour Of The Times’, it is on occasion better to be quiet and contemplative, to observe rather than to comment. And, as an independent academic, it has been fascinating to witness the classical collapse of a Grand Narrative, in which social and philosophical theories are being played out before our gaze. It is like watching the Berlin Wall [pictured] being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face - political, economic, and scientific. Likewise, the bloggers have been swift to cover the crumbling edifice with colourful graffiti, sometimes bitter, at others caustic and witty.

The Political And Economic Collapse

Moreover, the collapse has been quicker than any might have predicted. The humiliating exclusion of Britain and the EU at the end of the Copenhagen debacle was partially to be expected, but it was brutal in its final execution. The swing of power to the BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) had likewise been signified for some time, but, again, it came with precipitate ease, leaving even the American President, Barack Obama, with no doubts as to where the political agenda on climate change was now heading, namely to the developing world, but especially to the East, and to the Pacific Rim. The dirigiste tropes of ‘Old Europe’, with its love of meaningless targets and carbon capping, will no longer carry weight, while Obama himself has been straitjacketed by the voters of Massachusetts, by the rust-belt Democrats, by a truculent Congress, by an increasingly-sceptical and disillusioned American public, but, above all, by the financial crisis. Nothing will now be effected that for a single moment curbs economic development, from China to Connecticut, from Africa to Alaska. 

And, as ever, capitalism has read the runes, with carbon-trading posts quietly being shed, ‘Green’ jobs sidelined, and even big insurance companies starting to hedge their own bets against the future of the Global Warming Grand Narrative. These rats are leaving the sinking ship far faster than any politician, many of whom are going to be abandoned, left, still clinging to the masts, as the Good Ship ‘Global Warming’ founders on titanic icebergs in the raging oceans of doubt and delusion.

The Scientific Collapse

And what can one say about ‘the science’? ‘The ‘science’ is already paying dearly for its abuse of freedom of information, for unacceptable cronyism, for unwonted arrogance, and for the disgraceful misuse of data at every level, from temperature measurements to glaciers to the Amazon rain forest. What is worse, the usurping of the scientific method, and of justified scientific scepticism, by political policies and political propaganda could well damage science sensu lato - never mind just climate science - in the public eye for decades. The appalling pre-Copenhagen attacks by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and his climate-change henchman, Ed Miliband, on those who dared to be critical of the science of climate change were some of the most unforgivable I can recall.

It is further salutary that much of the trouble is now emanating from India. Indeed, the nonsense written about the Indian Sub-Continent has been a particular nadir in climate-change science, and it has long been judged so by many experts on the region. My ex-SOAS friend and colleague, Dr. Robert Bradnock, a world authority on the Sub-Continent, has been seething for years over the traducing of data and information relating to this key part of the world. In June, 2008, he wrote:

“However, in my own narrow area of research, I know that many of the claims about the impact of ‘global warming’ in Bangladesh, for example, are completely unfounded. There is no evidence that flooding has increased at all in recent years. Drought and excessive rainfall are the nature of the monsoon system. Agricultural production, far from being decimated by worsening floods over the last twenty years, has nearly doubled. In the early 1990s, Houghton published a map of the purported effects of sea-level rise on Bangladesh. Coming from a Fellow of the Royal Society, former Head of the Met Office and Chair of the IPCC, this was widely accepted, and frequently reproduced. Yet, it shows no understanding of the complex processes that form the Bengal delta, and it is seriously misleading. Moreover, despite the repeated claims of the World Wide Fund, Greenpeace, and, sadly, Christian Aid, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers is of completely marginal significance to the farmers of the plains in China, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. One could go on!”

The Media Collapse

One could indeed! But we may not need to do so for much longer. Why? Because the biggest collapse is in the media, the very ‘mechanism’ through which the greedy Global Warming Grand Narrative has promulgated itself during the last ten to twenty years. The break in the ‘Media Wall’ began in the tabloids and in the ‘red tops’, like The Daily Express and the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, but it is today spreading rapidly - yet once more as theory predicts - to the so-called ‘heavyweights’ and to the BBC. In the past, uncritical and apocalyptic stories and programmes were given the highest prominence, with any sceptical comment confined to the briefest of quotations from some benighted, and often snidely-mentioned, sceptic squeezed in at the very end of the piece ("For balance, you know"). Today, the reverse is becoming true, with the ‘global warming’ faithful firmly forced on to the back foot. Yet, in our post-modern world, it is the journalistic language being employed that is the true indicator of a new media order. Listening to good old Roger Harrabin this morning, reporting on BBC Radio 4’s flagship ‘Today’ programme, was a revelation in this respect; the language, and even the style, had altered radically.

Potential Losers

The collapse is now so precipitate that there will inevitably be some serious losers caught out by it all. The UK Met Office could well be one, with the BBC rightly reviewing its contract with them. At the moment, Met Office spokespersons sound extraordinary, bizarre even. They bleat out ‘global warming’ phrases like programmed robotic sheep, although they are finding it increasingly difficult to pull the wool over our eyes. It is terribly 1984, and rather chilling, so to speak. It is obvious that the organisation is suffering from another classical academic state, namely that known as ‘cognitive dissonance’ [see here and here]. This is experienced when belief in a Grand Narrative persists blindly, even when the facts in the real world begin to contradict what the narrative is saying. Sadly, many of our public and private organisations have allowed themselves to develop far too great a vested interest in ‘global warming’, as have too many politicians and activists. These are increasingly terrified, many having no idea how to react, or how to adjust, to the collapse. It will be particularly interesting to witness how, in the end, the Royal Society plays its cards, especially if competing scientific paradigms, such as the key role played by water vapour in climate change, start to displace the current paradigm in classic key role played by water vapour in climate change, start to displace the current paradigm in classic fashion. Icecap Note: This may be Susan Solomon’s bout with cognitive dissonance.

“For over a month now, since the farcical conclusion of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, I have been silent, partly through family commitments abroad in the USA, but also because, in this noisy world, in ‘The Clamour Of The Times’, it is on occasion better to be quiet and contemplative, to observe rather than to comment. And, as an independent academic, it has been fascinating to witness the classical collapse of a Grand Narrative, in which social and philosophical theories are being played out before our gaze. It is like watching the Berlin Wall [pictured] being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face - political, economic, and scientific. Likewise, the bloggers have been swift to cover the crumbling edifice with colourful graffiti, sometimes bitter, at others caustic and witty.

Certain newspapers, like my own DNOC, The Times, have also been a tad slow to grasp the magnitude of the collapse (although Ben Webster has tried valiantly to counter this with some good pieces); yet, even such outlets at last appear to be fathoming the remarkable changes taking place. Today, for example, The Times carries a brief, but seminal, critique of the ‘science’ from Lord Leach of Fairford.

What Will It Mean?

I have long predicted, and in public too, that the Copenhagen Conference could prove to be the beginning of the end for the Global Warming Grand Narrative. It appears that I may well have been right, and, indeed, I may have considerably underestimated the speed, and the dramatic nature, of the demise. Where this all leaves our politicians and political parties in the UK; where it leaves climate science, scientists more generally, and the Royal Society; where it leaves energy policy; where it leaves the ‘Green’ movement; and, where it leaves our media will have to be topics for many later comments and analyses. For the moment, we must not underestimate the magnitude of the collapse. Academically, it is jaw-dropping to observe.

And, the political, economic, and scientific consequences will be profound. See Philip’s site sinfonia here.

See also Dr. Vincent Gray’s view of the Decline of Science here. 

Update: See here how the snowblitz has delayed announcement of the new climate agency

By Randolph E. Schmid, AP Science Writer

The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.

Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA’s National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.

“Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat,” Locke said Monday at a news conference.

Lubchenco added, “Climate change is real, it’s happening now.” She said climate information is vital to the wind power industry, coastal community planning, fishermen and fishery managers, farmers and public health officials.

NOAA recently reported that the decade of 2000-2009 was the warmest on record worldwide; the previous warmest decade was the 1990s. Most atmospheric scientists believe that warming is largely due to human actions, adding gases to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

Researchers and leaders from around the world met last month in Denmark to discuss ways to reduce climate-warming emissions, and a follow-up session is planned for later this year in Mexico.

“More and more people are asking for more and more information about climate and how it’s going to affect them,” Lubchenco explained. So officials decided to combine climate operations into a single unit.

Portions of the Weather Service that have been studying climate, as well as offices from some other NOAA agencies, will be transferred to the new NOAA Climate Service.

The new agency will initially be led by Thomas Karl, director of the current National Climatic Data Center. The Climate Service will be headquartered in Washington and will have six regional directors across the country. Read more here. See the NOAA Climate web site paid for by your dollars (the administration’s fiscal 2011 budget request includes $1.5 million for the new NOAA climate services portal) here.

Icecap Note: this was expected. Where and who were the unknowns. I guess all the work to produce the greatest warming in the last few years (taking over from NASA), gave NOAA not NASA the prize. Or maybe it was Hansen’s trenchcoat and hat.

By Viv Forbes, Carbon-Sense Coalition

The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the Emissions Trading Scheme proposed for Australia and now before the Australian Parliament was far more than “A Great Big New Tax”.  The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that PM Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme combined a Big New Tax with a War-Time Rationing scheme and an Income redistributing compensation scheme, all to be run by a regulatory army probably bigger than our real army.

He continued: “Let’s try to understand this Ruddy ETS. To simplify things, let’s look at just the electricity industry. If Rudd’s ETS ever rules Australia, companies producing electricity from carbon fuels must beg, buy or borrow a permit to burn coal, gas or diesel. They can beg a free permit from some mate in Canberra; they can buy a permit from some lucky sod who managed to get more permits than he needs; they can borrow a permit by entering into some tricky derivative trade with a speculator in Chicago; or they can pay carbon credit penance to a shifty land owner in some foreign land who promises solemnly not to clear his trees.

No matter which option is chosen, power costs will go up and companies must pass the extra cost (plus GST) onto their customers or go broke.
There will be no effect on climate.

Now look at consumers. The ETS must push up the cost of all goods and services using carbon fuel. It will boost the cost of electricity, food, transport and travel. When this happens, consumers will suddenly understand the ETS Tax and politicians who voted for it will feel their anger.

“But there is a plan: “Let’s compensate all those likely to vote for us”. If these subsidies work properly, the lucky consumers will be in the same position as they were before ETS, except for the extra bureaucracy. For these consumers, there is no signal to reduce their consumption of carbon fuels. The ETS will do nothing except create a tangle of red tape which consumes and redistributes wealth.

“But for the un-subsidised consumers, the ETS is an extra tax on everything. And for the power companies, the ETS will produce nothing except a heap of angry customers, and lots of red tape.”

Mr Forbes claimed that Tony Abbott was wrong about the ETS. It is not just a Great Big Tax. It’s a Great Big Tax PLUS a mountain of Red Tape. And it will have absolutely no effect on world climate.

Monckton Tour

There has been a tremendous public response to the tour by Christopher Monckton and Ian Plimer. Every function packed out, people turned away, and sustained standing ovations in many places. Because of the number of disappointed people, two more functions have been organised hurriedly (see).

Public Opinion

This response of the public shows that politicians of all parties are, as usual, lagging public opinion. The public have had a gutful of green propaganda and vested interests masquerading as science.  A recent Australian poll shows that only 33% of Australians now support the Rudd Ration-N-Tax Scheme. And in Britain, only 26% now believe in man-made global warming (see). Even the BBC and now the ABC have discovered that “The Science is not settled”. And the BBC’s huge vested interest in promoting climate alarmism is revealed. Their eight billion pound pension fund is heavily invested in the Climate Change Industry (see).

It is more important than ever to prevent Australia being left like a shag on a rock with the only lonely Ration-N-Tax Scheme in the Pacific Rim.

Keep the heat on the politicians, and watch how they vote. We need to work actively for the removal of EVERY politician from EVERY party who votes for the destruction of Australian industry on a bunch of manufactured scare stories.

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Droughtgate: Study Finds IPCC had Temperature - Drought Connection Backwards
By Marc Sheppard, American Thinker

Add another to the growing list of IPCC outrages.  As I mentioned in last week’s IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks, in Chapter 9 of Assessment Report 4’s (AR4) Working Group One (WG1) Report, the IPCC claimed that manmade CO2-driven higher temperatures drive higher evaporation, and thereby cause droughts.  As readers are all too aware, droughts are favorite ingredients in most alarmists’ recipes for manmade climate disaster.  But a paper published last month in Geophysical Research Letters lays out a compelling argument that the IPCC has it completely backwards - that droughts are actually causing warming, not the other way around.

In Section 9.1.2, the IPCC states that: [P]recipitation and temperature are ordinarily inversely correlated in some regions, with increases in temperature corresponding to drying conditions. Thus, a warming trend in such a region that is not associated with rainfall change may indicate an external influence on the climate of that region (Nicholls et al., 2005; Section 9.4.2.3).

That statement is attributed to the same Neville Nicholls who wrote in his 2004 paper, The Changing Nature of Australian Droughts, that:
The relatively warm temperatures in 2002 were partly the result of a continued warming evident in Australia since the middle of the 20th century. The possibility that the enhanced greenhouse effect is increasing the severity of Australian droughts, by raising temperatures and hence increasing evaporation, even if the rainfall does not decrease, needs to be considered.

Later in the paper, Nicholls concluded that “the warming has meant that the severity and impacts of the most recent drought have been exacerbated by enhanced evaporation and evapotranspiration.”

Not surprisingly, as with many other AR4 irregularities that have recently surfaced, this too has a non-peer-reviewed World Wildlife Fund link to it.  Nicholls’ was an extension of the work of fellow Aussie alarmist, David Karoly, whose 2003 WWF report, Global warming contributes to Australia’s worst drought [PDF], studied the 2002 drought in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin and found that: “This drought has had a more severe impact than any other drought since at least 1950, because the temperatures in 2002 have also been significantly higher than in other drought years (see Table 1 and 2). The higher temperatures caused a marked increase in evaporation rates, which sped up the loss of soil moisture and the drying of vegetation and watercourses. This is the first drought in Australia where the impact of human-induced global warming can be clearly observed.”

So then, the basis for the claim that anthropogenic warming causes droughts put forth in the IPCC’s AR4 was a WWF report and its follow-up written the next year.

But that basis, conclude Natalie Lockart, Dmitri Kavetski and Stewart W. Franks, authors of On the recent warming in the Murray-Darling Basin: Land surface interactions misunderstood, is bogus.  As stated in its opening, their study “demonstrates that significant misunderstanding of known processes of land surface - atmosphere interactions has led to the incorrect attribution of the causes of the anomalous temperatures, as well as significant misunderstanding of their impact on evaporation within the Murray-Darling Basin.” And after deconstructing the claims of both Nicholls and Karoly, concludes that:

All presented results demonstrate that potential evaporation under dry conditions is elevated not as a result of the air temperature, but as a result of the lack of actual evaporation. This is accompanied by increased sensible heat fluxes which increases air temperatures. This is an entirely natural consequence of the dynamics of drought. Importantly, it is shown that antecedent temperature increases do not lead to insignificant increases in actual or potential evapotranspiration.

As coauthor Stewart Franks explained to me in an email, “this is a confusion of the well known physics of evaporation - as higher air temperatures are driven by the lack of evaporation (as occurs during drought).” He explained further in a subsequent correspondence:
Of course, when there is a deficit of rainfall, this tends to be accompanied by less cloud-cover, hence more sunshine, which does increase the energy available for evaporation, but as soil moisture is low, the bulk of the energy goes into heating the near-surface atmosphere and hence higher air temperatures. But amazingly, the story doesn’t end with how wrong the chapter was.

Professor Franks also pointed out that Neville Nicholls was one of the chapter’s Lead Authors, and David Karoly, whose work was also heavily cited in WG1 Chapter 9, was its Review Editor.  Quipped Franks: “Hence they cite and review their own papers as part of the clearly flawed IPCC process.”

Unbelievable. Read moe here.

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Barrasso Calls for U.N. Climate Chief’s Resignation

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, Senator John Barrasso, R-Wyo., called on Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to resign after revelations of ongoing scientific fraud under Dr. Pachauri’s watch. Senator Barrasso delivered the following statement on the Senate Floor:

“Every day, new scandals emerge about the so called ‘facts’ in the UN reports. The integrity of the data and the integrity of the science have been compromised.

“Concrete action by world leaders is needed. Government delegations of the UN’s general assembly and UN Secretary Moon must pressure Dr. Rajendra Pachauri to step down as head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“It is time to conduct an independent investigation into the conduct of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientific data behind these policies must be independently verified.

“Administration policies relating to climate change will cost millions of Americans their jobs. We need to get this right. To continue to rely on these corrupted U.N. Reports is an endorsement of fraudulent behavior. It is a signal to the American people that ideology is more important than their jobs.”

Background:

Recent news reports have highlighted Dr. Rajendra Pachauri’s and the United Nation’s involvement in covering up flawed science:

February 2, 2010, Investor’s Business Daily article, Walter Russell Read, Project Director for Religion and Foreign Policy at the Pew Forum, said “After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all.”

On January 30, 2010, the Times of London reported, “Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it.”

On January 24, 2010, the Times of London reported the UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters. Reporter Jonathan Leake wrote, “The United Nations climate panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods,” and the report “had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny.”

Senator Barrasso, a member of both the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee, has continued to call on the international community and the Obama Administration to ensure that our energy policy is based on sound scientific data.

Recently, Barrasso sent letters to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to express his concerns regarding a report concluding the organizations eliminated two-thirds of their temperature monitoring stations around the globe in places that are colder, rural or at higher altitudes beginning in 1990 in order to drive up temperature trend averages.

See the Barasso story here. See the growing list of IPCC’s wuestionable, non-peer reviewed citations here.

See here how Greenpeace has called for Pachauri to resign.

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The end is not near
By Dr Fred Singer, Hindustan Times

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acknowledged they made a mistake in their projection of 2035 as the year when Himalayan glaciers were said to melt. But the blunder is not a one-off mistake, and is the latest in the litany of errors that have dogged the panel over the past ten years.

In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was “unusual” and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000A.D.) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800A.D.). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the panel and the statistical errors in their analysis. In mid-August, after repeated requests for such data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international agencies that calculate global temperatures, announced that it discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. This action renders independent review and verification of the temperature trends published by it impossible - a clear violation of principles of science and the Act.

At the 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating how tree ring data from Russia showing a cooling after 1961 were truncated and disguised in IPCC publications. The deceit, so exposed, indicates that the IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4) contains deceptions rendering the document scientifically questionable.

In November, emails from the CRU were leaked and they reveal efforts to suppress independent studies that are contrary to IPCC conclusions that humans caused global warming. Thus, the IPCC’s scientific review process has a systematic bias of an unknowable magnitude in favour of human-induced warming.

In mid-December, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis reported that the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office) had probably tampered with Russian climate data and that the Russian meteorological station data do not support human-caused global warming. The Met Office collaborates with the CRU in reporting global temperatures. The reported global surface temperature trends are unreliable and probably have a strong warming bias of an unknown magnitude.

In January, Joe D’Aleo, Anthony Watts and E. Michael Smith reported that the National Climatic Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies dropped many meteorological stations from their data bases in recent years. The dropped stations are generally in colder climates. It seems the three major reporting international organisations probably have a warming bias of an unknown magnitude rendering their announced temperatures and temperature trends scientifically unreliable.

On January 23, 2010, the Sunday Times (London) reported that the AR4 wrongly linked natural disasters to global warming. Yet it reported the actual published report upon which this claim was based stated: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophic losses.”

In January, Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the AR4’s chapter on Asia, stated that the report deliberately exaggerated the possible melt of the Himalayan glaciers. “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” This admission demonstrates that the AR4 is a political document and not a scientific one.

This past week, additional reports reveal that IPCC’s claims that warming will cause extensive adverse effects in the Amazon rainforests and on coral reefs came not from peer-reviewed science but from publications by environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. Thus, the IPCC pretence that it represents peer-reviewed science is false.

More scandalous even, the IPCC-based its predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources - not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards. These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme ideological bias - quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. By themselves, they do not invalidate the basic IPCC conclusion - that a warming in the latter half of the 20th century was human-caused, presumably by the rise of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to ClimateGate, which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC’s main policy result.

In my opinion, ClimateGate is a much more serious issue than simply sloppiness and ideological distortion; ClimateGate suggests conspiracy to commit fraud.

In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental zealots, anti-technology Luddites, Utopian one-worlders, and population-control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses, brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and profit from government grants and subsidies for exotic schemes to produce ‘carbon-free’ energy and from the trading of carbon permits. Hundreds of billions have already been wasted - most of this in transfers of tax revenues to a favoured few.

These sums pale, however, in comparison to the trillions that would have been spent in future if some of the mitigation schemes had come into effect. Fortunately for the world economy, these schemes collapsed at the Copenhagen conference. Clearly, developing nations did not want to take on the sacrifices and restrictions on growth. There was little concern expressed about climate; Copenhagen was mostly about transfer of money from rich to poor countries - or more precisely, from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor ones.

By Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit

The Mann Report is here. I’ll comment later. See RA-47 here.

A couple of quick points. Readers should understand that I have limited expectations from this sort of inquiry. What I do expect is that the authors not make untrue statements that can be easily disproven. (At least make them hard to disprove.)

Point 1. Penn State President Spanier is quoted as saying:

“I know they’ve taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides,” Spanier said.
The only interviews mentioned in the report (aside from Mann) are with Gerry North and Donald Kennedy, editor of Science. [Since they are required to provide a transcript or summary of all interviews, I presume that the Inquiry did not carry out any other interviews.] What does Donald Kennedy know about the matter? These two hardly constitute “looking at issues from all sides”. [A CA reader observed below that “North [at a Rice University event] admitted that he had not read any of the EAU e-mails and did not even know that software files were included in the release."] They didn’t even talk to Wegman. Contrary to Spanier’s claim, they did not make the slightest effort to talk to any critic or even neutral observer.

Point 2. The Penn State Committee stated:

The so-called “trick” was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field. This is untrue on a variety of levels. The “trick” is not a “legitimate” statistical method; its essence is the failure to show adverse data. See Climate Audit here or the Daily Express here. Did they do any investigation of the “trick”? They don’t even seem to have read the relevant Climate Audit post - only realclimate.

Point 3. The Report states:

The allegation inquires about whether Dr. Mann seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities. In 2006, similar questions were asked about Dr. Mann and these questions motivated the National Academy of Sciences to undertake an in depth investigation of his research.

Similar questions may have been asked in 2006 but the National Academy of Sciences panel did not carry out an “in depth” investigation into whether Mann had “deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” Ralph Cicerone of NAS, together with Gerry North, drew up terms of reference that specifically excluded such an investigation. This is discussed in CA post Sir Humphrey and the Boehlert Questions.

While the Science Committee had asked questions about MBH, Cicerone did not submit these questions to the NAS Panel. Cicerone framed the terms of reference as follows (See the Sir Humphrey post for context):

the committee will summarize current scientific information on the temperature record for the past 1,000-2,000 years, describe the main areas of uncertainty and how significant they are, describe the principal methodologies used and any problems with these approaches, and explain how central the debate over the paleoclimate temperature record is to the state of scientific knowledge on global climate change. The committee will address tasks such as identifying the variables for which proxy records have been employed, describing the proxy records that have been used to reconstruct surface temperature records for the pre-instrumental period, assessing the methods employed to combine multiple proxy data to develop surface temperature reconstructions, discussing the geographical regions over which proxy data can be reliably extrapolated, and evaluating the overall accuracy and precision of such reconstructions.

When Hans von Storch showed the Boehlert questions in a PPT slide, it caused great consternation for the panel - many of whom had never seen the Boehlert questions - and they had a hard time deciding whether they would entertain von Storch’s presentation on these matters.

Panelist Christy asked Mann whether he had calculated a verification r2 for the AD1400 step and what it was. Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence that the verification r2 statistic for this step had been calculated along with the RE statistic, Mann famously said that he had not calculated a verification r2 statistic as that would be a “foolish and incorrect reasoning”. No one on the panel asked Mann why he had shown verification r2 results for the AD1820 step or why it was calculated in the same step as the RE statistic - though they had been briefed on both points. Instead, North and the panelists sat there like bumps on a log. My contemporary post on Mann’s presentation is here and noted:

Christy did ask Mann: “Did you calculate R2?” ‘? Mann’s answer was: “We didn’t calculate it. That would be silly and incorrect reasoning”?. Whenever I hear this statement in my mind, the following phrase runs through my mind: “I did not have r2 with that statistic, Miss Lewinsky”.

We had discussed the verification r2 issue in considerable depth on the previous day, even showing a graphic in which Mann had shown verification r2 for the AD1820 step. However, no one on the panel challenged Mann either about his claim that they did not calculate the r2 statistic or why it would be “silly and incorrect reasoning“‘? to calculate the r2 statistic - a point which is not only not self-evident, but incorrect. Perhaps the non-statistical panelists were reluctant to step into an area where they were not experts, given Mann’s aggressive and dismissive response to Christy. However, Nychka and Bloomfield, as statisticians, should have stepped here. I’ve pointed out Nychka’s association with Ammann (he is acknowledged in Wahl and Ammann [2006]); Nychka is a decent guy, but he should have made way for an independent statistician.

Mann arrived at the NAS presentation shortly before his presentation and left immediately after answering the panel questions (before any public questions.) I criticized the panel at the time for not resolving the verification r2 issue that had been specifically mentioned in the very first letter from NAS to the Barton Committee. North and the others sat there like bumps on a log. After the session, Nychka came up to me and said that just because they didn’t say anything about Mann’s verification r2 answer didn’t mean that they didn’t notice what had happened. But then they didn’t deal with it.

Update: 11 pm: The Inquiry Report stated that Mann “consented to the public release” of the report. RA-10 says:

A written report shall be prepared that states what evidence was reviewed, a copy of all interview transcripts and/or summaries, and includes the conclusions of the inquiry.

The Inquiry Report says that their interview with Mann was recorded and transcribed. Despite the RA-10 requirement that the written report include a “copy of all interview transcripts”, the Inquiry Report did not contain a transcript of the interview with Mann. The Inquiry Report stated that Mann provided a ten page supplemental written response to the matters discussed during his interview. Contary to RA-10, this was not included in the written report.

The Inquiry Report said that Gerald North and Donald Kennedy were interviewed. Once again, despite RA-10 requirements, the Inquiry Report did not contain a transcript and/or summary of the interviews with North or Kennedy.

RA-10 said that the Inquiry Report should state “what evidence was reviewed”. It also states:

Documentation in sufficient detail to permit a later assessment, if necessary, of the reasons for determining that an investigation was not warranted shall be maintained for a period of at least three years by the Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, and shall be made available upon request to any involved Federal agencies.

Here is how the Inquiry Report describes what evidence was reviewed:

It was agreed that these individuals would meet again in early January and that they would use the time until that meeting to review the relevant information, including the above mentioned e-mails, journal articles, OP-ED columns, newspaper and magazine articles, the National Academy of Sciences report entitled “Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years,” ISBN: 0-309-66144-7 and various blogs on the internet.

Does the statement that they looked at “journal articles, OP-ED columns, newspaper and magazine articles, the NAS report and various blogs on the internet” constitute acceptable “documentation” at Penn State for a freshman essay, much less for an Inquiry Report required to provide “sufficient detail to permit a later assessment, if necessary, of the reasons for determining that an investigation was not warranted”.

Speaking of which - the only evidence said to have been considered by the Inquiry was what was already in the public record. They did not examine any of Mann’s correspondence that was not already on the public record. RA-10 states that “Relevant research records, documents, and/or materials shall be immediately sequestered.” This does not appear to have been done. See more and comments here.

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.

Last month, the IPCC was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate Photo: ALAMY

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming. But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:

The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.

Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.

New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.

More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.

They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007. Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate.

Last weekend, this paper revealed that the panel had based claims about disappearing mountain ice on anecdotal evidence in a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

And on Friday, it emerged that the IPCC’s panel had wrongly reported that more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level because it had failed to check information supplied by a Dutch government agency.

Researchers insist the errors are minor and do not impact on the overall conclusions about climate change. However, senior scientists are now expressing concern at the way the IPCC compiles its reports and have hit out at the panel’s use of so-called “grey literature” - evidence from sources that have not been subjected to scientific ­scrutiny.

A new poll has revealed that public belief in climate change is weakening. The panel’s controversial chair, Rajendra Pachauri is facing pressure to resign over the affair.

The IPCC attempted to counter growing criticism by releasing a statement insisting that authors who contribute to its 3,000-page report are required to “critically assess and review the quality and validity of each source” when they use material from unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources. Drafts of the reports are checked by scientific reviewers before they are subjected to line-by-line approval by the 130 member countries of the IPCC. Despite these checks, a diagram used to demonstrate the potential for generating electricity from wave power has been found to contain numerous errors. The source of information for the diagram was cited as the website of UK-based wave-energy company Wavegen. Yet the diagram on Wavegen’s website contains dramatically different figures for energy potential off Britain and Alaska and in the Bering Sea.

When contacted by The Sunday Telegraph, Wavegen insisted that the diagram on its website had not been changed. It added that it was not the original source of the data and had simply reproduced it on its website. The diagram is widely cited in other literature as having come from a paper on wave energy produced by the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in 1991 along with data from the European Directory of Renewable Energy.

Experts claim that, had the IPCC checked the citation properly, it would have spotted the discrepancies. It can also be revealed that claims made by the IPCC about the effects of global warming, and suggestions about ways it could be avoided, were partly based on information from ten dissertations by Masters students. One unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on people living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development.

The IPCC also made use of a report by US conservation group Defenders of Wildlife to state that salmon in US streams have been affected by rising temperatures. The panel has already come under fire for using information in reports by conservation charity the WWF.

Estimates of carbon-dioxide emissions from nuclear power stations and claims that suggested they were cheaper than coal or gas power stations were also taken from the website of the World Nuclear Association, rather than using independent scientific calculations.

Such revelations are creating growing public confusion over climate change. A poll by Ipsos on behalf of environmental consultancy firm Euro RSCG revealed that the proportion of the public who believe in the reality of climate change has dropped from 44 per cent to 31 per cent in the past year. The proportion of people who believe that climate change is a bit over-exaggerated rose from 22 per cent to 31 per cent.

Climate scientists have expressed frustration with the IPCC’s use of unreliable evidence. Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, the biggest funder of climate science in the UK, said: “We should only be dealing with peer-reviewed literature. We open ourselves up to trouble if we start getting into hearsay and grey literature. We have enough research that has been peer-reviewed to provide evidence for climate change, so it is concerning that the IPCC has strayed from that.”

Professor Bob Watson, who chaired the IPCC before Dr Pachauri and is now chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, insisted that despite the errors there was little doubt that human-induced climate change was a reality. But he called for changes in the way the IPCC compiles future reports. “It is concerning that these mistakes have appeared in the IPCC report, but there is no doubt the earth’s climate is changing and the only way we can explain those changes is primarily human activity,” he said. Mr Watson said that Dr Pachauri “cannot be personally blamed for one or two incorrect sentences in the IPCC report”, but stressed that the chairman must take responsibility for correcting errors.

Another row over the IPCC report emerged last night after Professor Roger Pielke Jr, from Colorado University’s Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research, claimed its authors deliberately ignored a paper he wrote that contradicted the panel’s claims about the cost of climate-related natural disasters. A document included a statement from an anonymous IPCC author saying that they believed Dr Pielke had changed his mind on the matter, when he had not. Read story here.

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Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility
By Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor, TimesOnline

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.

The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report. Read more here.

A sampling of stories (thanks to Climate Depot), since the Climategate story broke in November, that discredit “consensus” global warming science and the UN IPCC—many from British media:

Greenpeace cited as ‘sole source’ for ‘coral reef degradation’ claims

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

‘Researchers are still grappling to understand the balance of feedback loops’

UN IPCC’s Global Warming Report Under Fresh Attack for Rainforest Claims

Analysis: NASA GISS Rural US Sites Show No Temperature Increase Since 1900

BBC: Temperature and CO2 feedback loop ‘weaker than thought’

UN’s Amazongate’: ‘Made false predictions’ on Amazon rainforest, referenced non-peer-reviewed paper produced by WWF

Study: ‘Carbon dioxide appears to play a very limited role in setting interglacial temperature’

IPCC cited multiple Master’s Students in AR4, some unpublished

Chinese Scientist Qian Weihong of Beijing University: ‘Expects global temperatures will decrease continuously until 2030’

And that just scratches the surface, as they say. But what do the intrepid Society of Environmentalist Journalist template-followers at USA Today report about today? Butterflies, in another one of those “scientists say” articles:

A study of beleaguered butterflies in California provides some of the best clues yet as to how other animals may react to climate change, scientists say.

The unprecedented, 35-year analysis of butterfly populations in the Sierra Nevada details how several species are fleeing to higher elevations to escape warming temperatures.

Formerly mainstream American enviro-media sure know how to sniff out a scandal, don’t they?

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Climate alarmists out in the cold
By Miranda Devine, Sydney Morning Herald

As the wheels keep falling off the climate alarmist bandwagon, it’s suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic. Out of the woodwork have crawled all sorts of fair-weather friends. But where were they when the going was tough, when we were being hammered as Holocaust deniers, planet wreckers, in the pay of the “Big Polluters”, bad parents, pariahs, equivalent to murderers? It was pure McCarthyism.

But now, even the most aggressive alarmists have gone quiet or softened their rhetoric and people who sat on the fence have morphed into wise owls. They still think it’s acceptable to mock touring British sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton’s protruding eyes, a distressing symptom of his thyroid disease, in an effort to marginalise him as a lunatic, rather than address his criticisms. But, when even the British left-leaning, warmist-friendly Guardian newspaper has begun to investigate the fraud involved in “sexing up” climate change science, it’s clear the collapse of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s credibility and the holes in the case for catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be ignored.

We are witnessing an outbreak of neo-open-mindedness and face-saving from people who brooked no nuance. The formerly alarmist British chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, has said: “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper scepticism.” Hallelujah.

Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, who just three months ago was telling us that we had only five years to stop catastrophic global warming, is similarly less gung-ho these days.  On ABC television’s 7.30 Report this week she expressed concern about “a confusion” between the science and the politics of climate change. “I think that we’re seeing more and more a confusion between a political debate, a political debate that needs to happen, it’s important to happen, and the discussion of the science. I feel that these two things are being confused and it worries me, actually.”

Funny, proponents of the theory of catastrophic man-made climate change never expressed concern about the “confusion”, aka politicisation of science, when it was running their way. Blows to the climate alarm case keep coming, from fraudulent claims about melting glaciers, increased hurricanes and drought, dying Amazon rainforest, disappearing polar bears and the flooding of half of Holland.

The latest, most serious, blow was the revelation this week that an influential paper discounting the so-called urban heat island effect was based on vanished and perhaps fraudulent data from remote Chinese weather stations. The 1990 paper was co-authored by the besieged director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones and a US colleague, who are now accused of a “cover-up”.

Jones, of course, and other leading scientists, have been exposed by their leaked “Climategate” emails, as political partisans who tried to suppress data, subvert freedom of information laws, and blackball journals and scientists who didn’t toe the alarmist line.

Meanwhile, revelations pile up about shoddy references used to sex up the IPCC’s Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of 2007. Among them is the bogus claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, based on a speculative interview in a popular science magazine.
The IPCC lead author of the chapter that contained the reference, Murari Lal, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday last week that he knew the glacier claim was wrong but included it to put political pressure on world leaders to cut emissions. “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

Because it was in a good cause it was somehow OK for the United Nations’ lead climate change body to slant science, cherry-pick data, and base claims on such flimsy references as Greenpeace and WWF propaganda, a student’s master’s thesis and anecdotes in Climber magazine. This sort of ‘’noble cause’’ corruption appears to have permeated climate change science, and set back the legitimate cause of fighting pollution. The dishonesty will have only ensured a generation of people will no longer trust environmental warnings.

One of the most significant recent revelations is how influential and embedded were environmental activists such as WWF and Greenpeace. Not only were their publications cited in the 2007 report in at last 24 instances as if they were proper peer-reviewed science, but their staffers were in familiar communication with East Anglia climate researchers, and were regarded apparently as “honest brokers” rather than political lobbyists.

In one email, Alan Markham from WWF writes to climate scientists urging a paper on climate change in Australia be “beefed up”. WWF “would like to see the section on a variability and extreme events beefed up, if possible,” Markham wrote in 1999. “I guess the bottom line is that if they are going to go with a big public splash on this they need something that will get good support from CSIRO scientists.”

In another email to East Anglia scientists, WWF’s Stephan Singer offers “a few thousand euros” to write a paper about the economic cost of Europe’s 2003 heatwave. They got away with it for a very long time.

Today, the bankruptcy of the climate alarm cause is demonstrated by the fact its highest profile champion is Osama bin Laden. ‘’Boycott [America] to save yourselves...and your children from climate change”, he said in an audiotape released last week.

Rising in the opinion polls, the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has found himself on the right side of history. He was even able this week to utter the former heresy that “carbon dioxide is an essential trace gas” and “these so-called nasty big polluters are the people who keep the lights on’’.
But in the game of musical chairs that politics often is Kevin Rudd has found himself with no place to sit.

Quick, name the most distrusted occupations. Trial lawyers? Pretty skuzzy, as witness the disgraced John Edwards, kept from the vice presidency in 2004 by the electoral votes of Ohio. Used car dealers? Always near the bottom of the list, as witness the universal understanding of the word “clunker.”

But over the last three months a new profession has moved smartly up the list and threatens to overtake all. Climate scientist.

First came the Climategate e-mails made public in November that showed how top-level climate scientists distorted research, plotted to destroy data and conspired to prevent publication of dissenting views. The British government concluded last week that the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit violated the nation’s freedom of information act, although the violations occurred too long ago for prosecution.

The CRU has been a major source of data for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which for 20 years has issued alarms about supposed global warming. The e-mails conclusively establish the intellectual dishonesty of the climate scientists at the CRU and their co-conspirators.

Recently, there have been even more shocking revelations. The IPCC has claimed that warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. It turns out that that claim was based solely on a pamphlet published by the World Wildlife Federation, based on no science at all. The head of the IPCC was informed that a 1996 report said those glaciers could melt significantly by 2350, not 2035, but he let the claim stand.

As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph of London, “A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviews WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority.” Similarly, the Times of London reports that a claim that warming could endanger “up to 40 percent” of the Amazon rainforest came from an anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis whatever.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” writes Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations in The American Interest. “The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.”

Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence. And taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty and dissembling.

There was some basis for concern. If carbon dioxide emissions were the only factor affecting global climate, it is clear that increased emissions would tend to produce warmer temperatures over time. Those temperatures could create problems that rational societies would want to address.

But carbon dioxide emissions are not the only factor affecting global climate. Solar activity and water evaporation and countless other things do, too. Climate scientists do not fully understand those things and how they interact. It is rational for society to want to learn more.

Unfortunately, the cadre of climate scientists who have dominated public discussion and have controlled the IPCC have been demonstrated to be far, far less than trustworthy. Like the theorists who invented epicycles to explain away the failure of Ptolemaic theory to account for astronomical observations, they have distorted science in the interest of something that resembles religious dogma.

The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics (global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever flimsy source may be at hand.

The rest of us, and judging from polls that includes most of the American people, are free to follow a more rational path. In his State of the Union Address, Barack Obama alluded to “the overwhelming evidence on climate change.” But he felt obliged to add, “even if you doubt the evidence”—an admission that the evidence is less than overwhelming. On a par with, it seems, the claims of trial lawyers and the assurances of used car salesmen. Read story here.

USPS Causes Global Warming

Enlarged here.

GlobalWarming: The Other Side

See John Coleman’s on-hour special on KUSI Global Warming, the Other Side here.

The Early Weather Channel Days and a Discussion of Global Warming
By Joe D’Aleo and Andre Bernier

Here more of an interview, I did with TV Meteorologist Andre Bernier of FOX 8 in Cleveland on Weatherjazz, who was a student of mine at Lyndon State College, and who by luck of the draw, was one of two on-camera meteorologists who did the first half hour of the Weather Channel (along with Bruce Edwards) on May 2, 1982. We talked about both the early days of the Weather Channel and global warming. The audio is here.

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Here is a series of radio interviews by Kim Greenhouse on It’s Rainmaking Time:

Rethinking Wind Power
By Kim Greenhouse, It’s Rainmaking Time, February 5, 2010

In this show, guest Lawrence Dwight, Jr. of Dwight Investment Counsel gives us valuable insight into true energy independence and the economics of wind power. We tend to perceive it as an exciting, cost-effective, sustainable energy solution for the future. It seems very alluring. But is it really as great as we’ve been told?

The details suggest that wind power may not be as affordable or efficient as we thought. Of course everything has its place, but where does wind power fit in? How does it work? And who benefits from using it? Tune in to find out! Go here.

The Art of Weather
By Kim Greenhouse on January 11, 2010

When I learned about a meteorologist who was teaching educational weather programs at elementary, middle, and high schools, I became very excited! Voted the best weatherman in Palm Beach, Art Horn was a weather anchor for 25 years. He spoke at the first International Climate Change Conference in New York in 2008. Now he teaches a popular program about weather that informs audiences about the realities and myths of climate change.

Art founded the program “The Art of Weather” and writes online for The Energy Tribune, Pajamas Media, and China Daily. He received an Emmy nomination and a Telly award for a documentary he produced called “Hurricane: Direct Hit”.  Join us for an enlightening interview that is sure to broaden your perspectives on climate change! Click here for more and streaming audio interview.

An Inquiry About Polar Bears With Dr. Mitch Taylor
By Kim Greenhouse on January 8, 2010

We have heard plenty about diminishing polar bear populations and the loss of their habitats due to melting sea ice. I thought it was about time that we defined an initial frame of reference for polar bears in order to empower personal inquiry into their status. Dr. Mitch Taylor has 30 years of professional experience studying polar bears firsthand in the field. Consider this segment an introduction to polar bears through one man’s professional life amongst them.

Now more than ever, anyone doing this kind of work is worth listening to and learning from. Mitch Taylor’s perspective is refreshing and rare. How many people do you know that have lived such a life? Spend some time with us and learn about these beautiful animals that many of us have come to love. No matter how much confusion and conflict may surround the concept of climate, one thing is for sure: many of us are concerned about our friends, the polar bears. Click here to hear interview.

The International Climate Change Treaty at Copenhagen
By Kim Greenhouse on December 9, 2009

Lord Viscount Monckton of Brenchley joins us live from the Copenhagen Climate Conference to reveal the legal underbelly of this event, and to share his take on the entire new international power deal being sealed in Denmark. The focus of this conference is the introduction of one of the most critical International Frameworks outside of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU and the New Call for a World Banking System and Currency.

If you want to hear the single most controversial figure in the Climate Change arena - one who is well-grounded in the evolution of the IPCC and the Science itself, who understands and has read the new legal framework which is about to be signed - please tune in. He is with SPPI. Here the interview here.

CO2: The Breath of Life or A Dangerous Pollutant?
By Kim Greenhouse on December 15, 2009

On December 7th, 2009 - Day 1 of the Copenhagen Climate Conference - the EPA declared that carbon dioxide (CO2) is now a pollutant. I thought that we had better get to the seed of the matter right away and explore scientific facts about CO2. Instead of focusing on the declarations of major stakeholders in the new industrial complex, I wanted to learn how CO2 affects Nature. What I discovered may startle you.

I personally believed that carbon dioxide was a pollutant. For many years, that has been the official story: that CO2 is the root cause of “Global Warming”. However, Nature apparently views it as “the breath of life”.

I reached out to someone who has studied CO2 for many years in order to get a clear perspective. On the spur of the moment, I called Sherwood Idso, the president of The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide & Global Change, who graciously granted me an interview on short notice. I’m glad I did it! His many years of experience and multi-disciplinary expertise were very enlightening. Listen and see what you think. See CO2Science. Here interview here.

A True Inquiry Into Climate & Weather, Part 2: The Plot Thickens
By Kim Greenhouse on November 14, 2009

The plot really does thicken as we continue our inquiry into climate and weather. The verifiable data offered in this interview is both fascinating and disturbing. Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and climatologist Dr. David Legates (University of Delaware) brief us on key scientific data that cannot be overlooked or dismissed.

I deeply appreciate the gift of real knowledge that these men have brought us. Speaking with clarity, passion, and openness, they identify numerous factors that leave the average activist and global warming advocate with a totally different understanding of what is really occurring. They display a rare courage in standing up for the integrity of verifiable science as they continue to speak truth to power against vicious attacks.

Have a listen. See what you come up with and ask the questions that need to be asked. If addressed improperly, this incredibly complex up-and-coming piece of inquiry could lead humanity to shocking and chilling new discoveries about climate that will overshadow global politics and outweigh any ideology.

A True Inquiry Into Climate & Weather, Part 1: A Hot Potato
By Kim Greenhouse on October 25, 2009

This broadcast segment addresses the urgent need for verifiable facts about climate and weather that have been unable to make their way in a cohesive, understandable way to the public. The first in a multi-part series, this show features Bob Felix, author of Not by Fire, But By Ice and Magnetic Reversals & Evolutionary Leaps. Bob has spent considerable time researching climate, extinctions, magnetic reversals and ice ages. His books present staggering evidence of global cooling that suggests an ice age could begin at any moment (i.e. NOW!).

As I prepared for this interview, I came across two other individuals that I felt would contribute greatly to the discussion. Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo (of http://icecap.us) and climatologist Dr. Tim Ball join us to provide a broader perspective on climate change and explain what’s missing from the established climate dialogues. The information these men bring to bear will shake you to your very foundations!

Well-meaning politicians must open their field of receptivity to improve their understanding of climate in a larger context - one that is devoid of political and economic survival, peer pressure, fear of marginalization, and fear of losing their positions. As a result, a gross body of distortion and misinformation exists about the climate dangers we are truly facing.

The truth is that very few of us understand climate or weather. Most of us have taken a blind faith approach to researching these subjects. Unfortunately, this will be to the great detriment of all of humanity. In order to adequately prepare for coming changes, we need a different framework to quickly and properly understand weather and climate. Get ready to learn things you have never known before about weather, climate, and the business of climate change! Listen here.

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The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) - a DC think tank - has produced a science-based critique of a recent film produced by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The SPPI paper is entitled Acid Test: The
Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification - A New Propaganda Film by the National Resources Defense Council Fails the Acid Test of Real World Data

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Fourth International Conference on Climate Change on May 16-18, 2010, Chicago, Illinois.

Make plans now to attend ICCC-4, an international conference on climate change calling attention to new scientific research on the causes and consequences of climate change, and to economic analysis of the cost and effectiveness of proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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75% of American Meteorological Society Broadcasters Reject IPCC Man-made Climate Claims
By Bill Murray, Weather Historian, Alabamawx.com

A survey of weathercasters’ feelings on global warming was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It had some interesting findings. There were 121 respondents. 94% of the respondents had at least one of the three major seals.

Television meteorologists are the official scientists for most television stations. The overwhelming majority felt comfortable in that role for their stations. The majority agreed that the role of discussing climate change did fall to them.

The eyebrow raising responses:

“Respond to this IPCC conclusion: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” Only 35% agreed or strongly agreed. 34% disagreed or strongly disagreed.

“Most of the warming since 1950 is likely human induced.” A full 50% disagreed or strongly disagreed. 25% were neutral on this question. Only 8% strongly agreed.

“Global climate models are reliable in their predictions for a warming of the planet.” Only 3% strongly agreed and another 16% agreed. A full 62% disagreed or strongly disagreed.

“Respond to one TV weathercaster’s Quote saying “Global warming is a scam.” Responses were mixed. The largest percentage was neutral, at 26%. A total of 45% disagreed (23%) or strongly disagreed (22%). 19% of the respondents agreed with this statement and 10% strongly agreed.

The amount of uncertainty found in this survey tells that even the most educated and motivated communicators are still uncertain about the truth on this issue. Interesting article.

The entire text can be found here.

ICECAP NOTE: The broadcasters asked for more materials such as powerpoints and graphics which they could use to better study and present climate change.

Here is an excellent very detailed time-line and forensic analysis on climate-gatedone by an Australian physicist.

Here is an excellent source of short videos by the top scientists to provide an alternative to the dogma from COMET and Heidi Cullen and Climate Central and sadly The Weather Channel.  KUSI’s Coleman’s Corner has four videos by Dr. Richard Lindzen, Dr. Willie Soon, John Coleman and Joe D’Aleo here.

Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.

Excellent libraries of stories and papers and reviews can be found at Climate Science weblog by Roger Pielke Sr., CO2 Science site with the Idsos, Watts Up With That with Anthony Watts and Friends, World Climate Report, SPPI compiled by Bob Ferguson, Climate Audit by Steve McIntyre and Friends of Science with Tim Ball and others. This is just a few web sources.

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See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additonal scientific youtubes here. Note that many more are coming, in part thanks to your donations.

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See 500 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming here. See more here and still more annotated here.

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The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under “What’s New” or “A Primer on Global Warming.” Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.

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Available now some items that will gore your alarmist friends (part of the proceeds go to support Icecap) SOME NEW ITEMS:

See full size display here.

And “My carbon footprints are bigger than yours and plants love me for it” items here and here

See sister sites:

Science and Public Policy Institute here.

Intellicast Dr. Dewpoint Library here.

RedNeck Engineer Energy and Innovation here.

Weather/Climate and Health here.

The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool.