NYTimes lets facts intrude on alarmist narrative

Green Hell Blog

A funny thing happened on the New York Times’ way to climate alarmism today - a paragraph of debunking facts.

In an above-the-fold, front-page story, the Times’ Leslie Kaufman tried to tell a sad tale about global warming-induced sea-level rise wreaking havoc in Norfolk, VA.

If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides.

For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea.

As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.

And of course, what tale of global warming would be complete without an “expert”?

Many Norfolk residents hope their problems will serve as a warning.

“We are the front lines of climate change,” said Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.”

Kaufman’s tale of woe then ends with the “bitter reality” of global warming:

“The fact is that there is not enough engineering to go around to mitigate the rising sea,” he said. “For us, it is the bitter reality of trying to live in a world that is getting warmer and wetter.”

Unfortunately for the Times, Kaufman and Schultz, some editor (with an ironic sense of humor) inserted the following text into the middle of the story:

Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast - 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.

So climate alarmism and Norfolk have much in common. Both were built in on a faulty foundation. Not unexpectedly, both are now sinking.

What’s remarkable about the Times’ coverage of both is that facts - even when printed in plain English in the middle of the story - just don’t matter.

See post here.

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Boycott the Cancun Climate Circus
By Viv Forbes, Carbon Sense Coalition

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on all Australian governments to boycott the Cancun Climate Change Circus.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said “we do not want a repeat of the Copenhagen obscenity when 45,000 people gathered to discuss how to reduce things like air travel and conspicuous consumption”.

Forbes said there is no reason for Australia to attend. “This conference is no longer about climate - it is about international redistribution of wealth and industry from the west to the rest of the world. Australia is part of the spoils they hope to redistribute.

“There is zero chance of global agreement on emissions trading schemes or more carbon taxes. The political landscape and public opinion in the USA has turned dramatically sceptical of the increasingly shrill predictions from the desperate alarmists. Moreover, trading in carbon credits in Chicago has collapsed and even Al Gore is recanting on ethanol. Without US participation, nothing will be agreed globally.

“In addition, for over a decade, the whimsical world climate has mocked the feverish forecasts of the IPCC. Global Warming looks like becoming Global Cooling (still caused by burning coal of course). Prudently they chose tropical Mexico for this conference or the world media would be treated again to the amusing spectacle of warmists shivering in another bitter northern winter of “unseasonal” snow and blizzards.

“So they are plotting a new scheme - enforced global rationing of carbon emissions on a per capita basis. This means transfer of Australian wealth, industry and jobs to India, China and Africa for decades to come. And to bypass parliaments and the suspicious electorate, this will be attempted via “International Agreements”.

“Australia should send no more than one observer to Cancun, and that person should have no power to agree to anything. In particular there should be no promises to extend the failed but costly Kyoto Accord, and no transfer of authority to any new international body.

“A boycott makes more sense than sending jumbo jets of people to beach resorts in Mexico to talk about reducing that sort of activity.”

Authorised by:
Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

See many stories about how the UN and enviro inspired agenda is destroying economies worldwide in an alternative energy ICECAP blog here. For the holidays see this post.

From Copenhagen to Cancun

Scientific Alliance

This time last year, the Copenhagen climate change conference (technically the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention, COP15)) was being widely hyped in the media. This was to be the make-or-break conference, which would come up with a workable international agreement to follow on from the Kyoto protocol. In particular, it was to be the first agreement bringing in both the USA and China and other major emerging economies.

In fact the conference turned out to be a failure by any standards. An unprecedented 45,000 delegates registered to attend. 22,000 of these were from NGOs, and there were a further 5,000 journalists. Not all these people will have travelled for the conference but, since the conference centre held only 15,000 people, it was inevitable that many thousands would be left queuing for hours, only to find they were not admitted. This would have been frustrating enough on a balmy summer’s day, but winter in Copenhagen must have added another layer of misery. Not only were there major logistical problems, but it rapidly became clear that no binding agreement would be reached. The negotiating text simply had too many basic issues unresolved and national interests of key players meant that a workable compromise was impossible.

The final result was the Copenhagen declaration, agreed by a small group of world leaders in a back room at a meeting which President Obama had to gatecrash. Many reasons have been put forward for this failure. The climategate emails were seen by many as a deliberate spoiler, although their real effect was probably minimal. An early version of a Danish draft agreement, apparently being put together in good faith by the hosts in an attempt to overcome the barriers presented by the official negotiating text, was leaked to the press near the start of the conference. Michael Jacobs, a former UK government adviser, is quoted by the BBC’s Roger Harrabin as saying “I am confident it was a deliberate tactic to destroy the conference. It’s a shame that we didn’t expose the fact that representatives of all of the major countries - including those who’d said ‘we’ve never seen this text’ were actually at a meeting to discuss it the previous week.”

Again, the real impact was negligible. George Dvorsky, a director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies put forward five reasons for the failure at Copenhagen: 1. Nation states are far too self-serving 2. Democracies are too ill-equipped and irresolute to deal with pending crises 3. Isolationist and avaricious China 4. The powerful corporatist megastructure 5.

Weak consensus on the reason for global warming Although I am loathe to characterise all true believers in man-made climate change as primarily left-ish politically, this analysis does encapsulate much of the narrative which comes from that part of the political spectrum, driven by a certainty that something has to be done and that people cannot be allowed to decide for themselves. Mr Dvorsky summarises his preferred way forward as follows “Given the failure of Copenhagen, I’m inclined to believe that semi-annual conferences are not the way to go.

Instead, I’d like to see the United Nations assemble an international and permanent emergency session that is parliamentary in nature (i.e. representative and accountable) and dedicated to debating and acting on the problem of anthropogenic climate change (a sub-parliament, if you will). The decisions of this governing board would be binding and impact on all the nations of the world.” Setting aside the politics and ethical judgements, his view of human nature and selfish interests (in the non-pejorative sense) is as good a rationale for what happened as we are likely to get. But whatever your view of the world, the failure of Copenhagen was something of a watershed in the climate change saga.

Expectations have inevitably been dampened. Negotiations over the past months in preparation for COP16 in Cancun seem to have been fractious and inconclusive. Many fewer delegates have registered to attend the conference and media coverage has been far less intense. Nevertheless, thousands will still turn up, whether to do the negotiating or to encourage others to reach an agreement. Some still seem to be hopeful. Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, says in the organisation’s newsletter “I am confident that Cancun will be a success, where the stage is set for a concrete, positive outcome.” But note that there is no reference to arriving at a binding post-Kyoto agreement. With statements like this, any form of agreement can be hailed as a success. And the public mood is still being massaged in the run up to next week’s conference.

Mikhail Gorbachev had an article in the New York Times headlined “Let’s get serious about climate change talks”. The World Meteorological Organization has talked of record levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (a continuation of the current inexorable upward trend) and there are expectations of 2010 being a record warm year, publicised this week by the UK Met Office. But the consensus seems to be that the only real hope is to keep the momentum of talks going. In the current economic environment, it is clear that any slowing of the process would be hard to reverse. The situation could end up like the stalled Doha round of WTO talks, with the difference being that there is a good chance these will be revived at some stage. If UNFCCC negotiations were to stop, the chances of restarting them without some unassailable proof that rising carbon dioxide levels are driving dangerous climate change would be effectively zero. It looks likely that the climate change agenda will make little further progress over the next few years, but certainly not for want of trying by those committed to the cause. The ‘fact’ that our species is a blight on the planet will continue to drive many of them.

Recently, for example, the primatologist and UN peace messenger Jane Goodall spoke to a group of Belgian schoolchildren and teachers at the European Parliament. Her message, as reported under the headline UN envoy says humans are ‘destroying’ the planet, was that protecting tropical forests was both good for wildlife and one of the most important ways of slowing climate change. But, as for many activists, her message is supported by dubious ‘facts’ ("&more and more people eat more and more meat, they want cheap meat. The animals are fed unnatural diets so they produce huge amounts of methane gas which is a big contributor to the greenhouse effect.") and has more than a hint of double standards (“‘I travel 300 days a year on aircraft that spew C02 into the atmosphere so I am clearly contributing to the production of greenhouse gas emissions’, she said. She hoped, however, that increased environmental protection measures would help ‘absorb’ her personal impact on the environment.")

Beyond Cancun, and as we enter the post-Kyoto period in just over a year, we can expect to see little progress towards the binding international targets which have long been the goal of the talks. But the momentum of policy changes will mean that mitigation activities continue. Politicians will still take the opportunity to raise ‘green’ taxes, large amounts of taxpayers’ money will be sunk into renewable energy projects which do little to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and financial institutions will continue to make money from emissions trading.

Eventually, chickens will come home to roost. Either the whole ambitious project to force a reduction in fossil fuel use will turn out to be a failed, costly and unnecessary detour in global development or hard evidence (not the output of computer models) will give conclusive support to the enhanced greenhouse effect hypothesis, at which stage resources can be used to implement the necessary policies. In the meantime, the debate about evidence and appropriate responses has to continue.

The Scientific Alliance (info@scientific-alliance.org),St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 0WS
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Inconvenient Truth About Green Agenda
Before climate conference, U.N. official admits it’s about ‘redistributing’ wealth. See Marc Morano on this surprising admission here.

Another Top International Scientist Jumps off Global Warming ‘Titanic’

Happy Thanksgiving

And safe travel.

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By John O’Sullivan, Canada Free Press

A top East European climatologist, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with UN global warming colleagues, jumps a sinking ship as ocean data signals a cooler climate.

Dr. Lucka Kajfez Bogataj left cold clear water between herself and her former UN shipmates by declaring that rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide probably don’t cause global temperatures to rise. The news scuppers hope for a change in fortune for the beleagured UN climate agency.

Their doomed ‘ship,’ the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been sailing on an ill wind ever since it was struck by that Climategate ‘torpedo’ last year.

The Slovenian climate professor made the chilling announcement last month in an obscure foreign language journal that has only now been translated into English. The lambast came in the publication Delo Polet (18/11/2010), translated into English as, “Inconvenient Truth.” Inside Bogataj publishes a paper entitled, “The more we know, the better.”

Rises in Levels of Carbon Dioxide follow Rises in Temperatures

Buried in an otherwise drab study on paleo - and proxy methods, Dr. Bogataj admitted to what skeptics have long been saying and what the ice core proxy data shows: that rises in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) are proven to mostly, if not always, occur AFTER rises in temperature.

The eminent Slovenian expert is also key climate change adviser to her nation’s president, Danilo Turk. Bogataj’s article, translated into English by her countryman, Miso Alkalaj, makes a startling admission:

“A detailed comparison of temperature data and the quantity of carbon dioxide captured in the ice shows, that sometimes it warmed up first and then the concentration of carbon dioxide increased, and sometimes vice versa, but on average the temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.”

More Women Bailing from Doomed Global Warming ‘Titanic’

With science being thus clearly defenestrated it’s the women who are now leading the men in fleeing the sinking ship. As that rotten IPCC hulk steers towards its ignominous fate well known American climatologist, Dr. Judith Curry was the first female professor jostling for the lifeboats last month accusing the IPCC of “corruption” according to Nature magazine.

Bitter New Political Reality in Cold Climate

And another ‘iceberg’ seems set to further wreck the baleful boat in the form of a blockbuster new book. Our friendly Slovenia/English translator, Mizo Alkalaj, reveals he is one of an international team of 21 co-authors of the world’s first full-volume scientific debunk of the greenhouse gas theory titled ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory,’ launched later this week. He says Bogataj is bailing out of the IPCC to help rebuild her status as a credible government paleoclimatologist before the warmist cult is drowned in fast-freezing political waters. Mizo writes:

“She is still regarded as an eminent scientist (inter alia, she is the adviser to the president), so she has a lot to lose if she were to persist on the IPCC Titanic for too long. She’s a political survivor, so next she’ll pretend that she always knew! “

Ahoy! Beware More Icebergs in Colder Oceans

Concluding the nautical metaphor comes Argo*, the official world sea temperatures record (as much as 80% of the earth’s heat is held in the oceans). It seems our oceans are getting very cold according a survey from the world’s top 50 international laboratories - so perhaps we may see more icebergs forming to snare that rudderless IPCC ship?

*Argo is an international collaboration of over 3,000 buoys installed throughout the word’s oceans whereby 50 scientific institutions in 26 different countries share crucial sea temperature data.

References:

Dr. Bogataj, K. L., ‘The more we know, the better,’ (18/11/2010), Delo Polet

Lemonick, M. D., ‘Climate heretic: Judith Curry turns on her colleagues,’ (November 1, 2010), Nature.com, (accessed online: November 22, 2010)

The Argo Home Page at UC San Diego

Please help us improve and help us (and you) to do more

By the Icecap Staff

Well over nineteen million times in the last three and one half years people like you have visited Icecap from over 25 countries. They have hopefully taken the time to read some of several thousand stories since inception, many insightful, thought provoking scientific postings from some of the leading climate experts in the world as well as posting from some of the journalists and writers that are not driven by a political or social agenda. We and our scientific posters tend to be empiricists who rely on our experience with data and analysis of raw data sets rather than on models and theory. We believe in validation of models and forecasts using data not validation of theory and data using model forecasts. The realist journalists see the world without the blinders imposed by political or societal views or elitism as we find with so many others in the mainstream media.

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We continue to make presentations on cable, local television, in schools, colleges, libraries, clubs, and industry groups. As the story on ACE posted here and the college video here showed, we need to do even more.  An educated electorate and populace is our only defense. Unfortunately our children have been brainwashed for too long. They are the green generation. We all support conservation and a pollution free environment but do not accept that carbon dioxide, which we breathe out and plants need, is a contaminant. The misplaced focus on CO2 prevents us from properly addressing the real issues. Economists and the public rank global warming at the bottom of the priority list for what would do the most good for the people, creatures and plants on this special planet.

We have new momentum and public opinion on our side but the alarmist’s are receiving billions of dollars from their determined supporters to keep the movement alive and the government does not seem to care about public opinion. Just when our economy was showing signs of life, the powerbrokers in Washington tried to snuff it out. They had planned to use climate change to fund their re-inventing of America.

While the election is an encouraging sign, Senator Inhofe has a worrisome warning. “What Sen. Reid said about cap-and-trade - that it’s dead for next Congress-may be true for the massive, thousand-page bills filled with mandates, taxes, regulations, bureaucracy, and much more. 

“But it’s not true for the more subtle strain of cap-and-trade now moving through the Environmental Protection Agency.  That’s right: this is backdoor cap-and-trade, hidden behind an administrative curtain. So we need to address this, because employers and small businesses are afraid to hire and expand in large part because of EPA’s global warming regulations.  To get this economy moving again, and create jobs for those who need them, we need to stop EPA.” With your help and your grass roots involvement, we can stop the EPA and the enviro NGOs from destroying our economy in their Quixotic efforts to pursue unreachable and unwise ideals in the name of their false god Gaia. We also try and spread the word abroad in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and much of western Europe where similar government and enviro efforts are even further along. Canada is showing the most common sense. It appears that global cooling sharpens the brain. Help us spread the word and force other countries to reject their green anti-people agendas.

A common claim is that all skeptics and realist sites like ours are lavishly funded by big oil. But the truth is most big oil and energy corporations now fund the green movement to appease a few very vocal stockholders. See how the NGOs and UN approved CSO’s have been abusing the system here. In reality, as Joanne Nova found for SPPI, the governments since 1989 have spent $79 billion on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary. An HSBC report predicts that annual capital investment in climate and the green economy will grow from an annualized $460 billion in 2010 to $1.5 trillion in 2020.

You won’t read in the traditional media, but alarmist sites receive significant support from opportunistic environmental groups (NGOs), energy companies, rich individuals (like George Soros), foundations (Fenton Communications funds RealClimate) or communications groups with vested interest in propagating this new political agenda or corporations or banks looking at money making carbon trading/control or alternative energy schemes, while the climate realist blogs depend on donations from individuals and we all struggle.

With your help we can do more

There is so much more we can do. We would like to produce more reports and a modular series of Powerpoint slide sets and handouts that could be downloadable and used by teachers and students and others who want to address the issue of natural versus man-made climate change. We are looking for support for a follow-up more detailed and comprehensive video climate production (one or two hourly presentations). We have been asked to testify in DC next month. More will follow in 2011. The newly elected representatives and senators have the right instinct on climate change but often do not know how much the science supports their staked out position. Remember that alarmists have promised a coordinated effort to fight off ‘evil’ skepticism (and keep their grant gravy train on track).

We also have plans to make the site more user and eye friendly. We recently bit the bullet on larger, non-shared, more dependable server. The cost increased accordingly. We want to next address the email bottleneck we had the last year. We intend to resume sending out regular emails to highlight and link to new stories on our site and others.

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And Happy Thanksgiving.

UN IPCC Official Admits ‘We Redistribute World’s Wealth By Climate Policy’

By Noel Sheppard | November 18, 2010 | 11:27

If you needed any more evidence that the entire theory of manmade global warming was a scheme to redistribute wealth you got it Sunday when a leading member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told a German news outlet, “[W]e redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

Such was originally published by Germany’s NZZ Online Sunday, and reprinted in English by the Global Warming Policy Foundation moments ago:

(NZZ AM SONNTAG): The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.

(OTTMAR EDENHOFER, UN IPCC OFFICIAL): That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.

(NZZ): That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.

(EDENHOFER): Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet - and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400 - there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.

(NZZ): De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.

(EDENHOFER): First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

For the record, Edenhofer was co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III, and was a lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007 which controversially concluded, “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

As such, this man is a huge player in advancing this theory, and he has now made it quite clear - as folks on the realist side of this debate have been saying for years - that this is actually an international economic scheme designed to redistribute wealth.

Readers are encouraged to review the entire interview at GWPF or Google’s slightly different translation.

Read more here.

Soros advises Obama to use forceful measures to override the will of the people - on climate, etc

By Ed Lasky for American Thinker

George Soros funds the Center for American Progress, which has been characterized as Barack Obama’s Ideas Factory. John Podesta, its head, led the transition team when Barack Obama became President. The Center has also become a hiring hall for the Obama team, filling its positions with former employees (among these was controversial Van Jones - who now is back at the Center).

Apparently, George Soros and his Center are upset that the American people placed a roadblock in their plans when we rose up and painted the nation red. The Center now is providing a blueprint of ways Barack Obama can do an end run around the people’s will by resorting to methods that will strike many of us as being improper-to say the least. Relying on executive orders, interpretation of regulations, rule - making and the like they are collectively a recipe for even more power being assumed by President Obama.

From Tuesday’s Politico Playbook:

[The] Center for American Progress today is releasing a report, “Power of the President,” proposing 30 executive actions the president can take to advance progressive change in the areas of energy, the economy, health care, education, foreign policy, and national security. “The following authorities can be used to ensure progress on key issues facing the country today: Executive orders, Rulemaking, Agency management, Convening and creating public-private partnerships , Commanding the armed forces, Diplomacy.

The New York Times fleshes out these proposals with some suggestions about policy changes across the board. The ideology of George Soros shines through the Center’s report as it justifies this forceful approach to circumvent Congress when it states that:

[The] legislative battles that Mr. Obama waged during his first two years - notably on health care and financial regulatory reform - have created a weariness among the general public with the process of making laws. And it hints it has not helped Mr. Obama politically in the process.

In other words, when Congress passed a variety of laws Americans became dismayed by the horse-trading and bribes that were resorted to by Democrats to impose these policies on us. Instead of compromise and listening to the American people, Soros counsels that more forceful measures should be used to override the will of the American people.

And this is the man the Democratic Party has as their sugar daddy and who various Democratic leaders over the years have defended and praised (for example, as shown by this letter from 11 Democratic lawmakers).

He is certainly a dictatorial daddy

Read post and comments here.

Icecap Note: Meanwhile in Canada, the Harper Government and the conservatives turned down the climate change bill, shocking the enviro groups like Sierra Club Canada and the greenies in the media. Good for you. Wish you were our leader.

REAL crimes against humanity

By Paul Driessen

Last week’s elections resoundingly affirm that America’s top priorities are economic growth, job creation and less Washington control of our lives. The elections are likely the final nail in the cap-and-tax coffin.

However, even before close contests could be decided, President Obama announced that he will be “looking for other means” besides cap-and-tax to address the “problem” of carbon emissions and what the White House now calls “global climate disruption.” His top priorities include using the “lame duck” session and administrative actions to implement his “climate control” and renewable energy agenda:

* Environmental Protection Agency regulation of hydrocarbon energy, based on the assertion that carbon dioxide “endangers human health and welfare,”

* Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rules that will force all consumers to subsidize new transmission lines from wind and solar projects;

* millions of dollars in last-minute grants to scientists, companies and activist groups that support the Administration’s agenda; and

* supporting state and regional legislative, tax and regulatory actions to restrict hydrocarbon use and mandate “renewable energy standards” and “greenhouse gas” reductions.

These actions underscore the need to reexamine the supposed science behind “dangerous global warming” and “sustainable renewable energy” claims. If the science is bad, the policies will be awful.

Thankfully, most Republicans remain opposed to any actions that would make energy less reliable and affordable. More importantly, next year’s likely House committee chairs have served notice that they will carefully examine EPA’s alleged scientific evidence for its job-killing “endangerment” decision - and investigate the data manipulation and other irregularities in climate change research conducted under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and various government and university labs.

The world is finally catching on to the junk science and is no longer willing to give up dreams of electrified homes, shops and offices, jobs, and improved health and nutrition. Many incoming senators and congressmen openly challenged climate chaos claims and voiced deep concern that cap-and-tax and its bastard offspring would further traumatize our economy (for no environmental gain).

These are ominous developments for individuals, institutions and companies that derive their legitimacy, prestige, influence and financing from the “climate chaos” hypothesis. Thus segments of the American Geophysical Union oligarchy are running a campaign to get alarmist members to confront and attack “catastrophic warming” skeptics. Two prominent Penn State University alarmists also went on the warpath, in recent newspaper columns that reveal their growing anxiety and desperation.

Aware that he could be compelled to testify under oath (and pain of perjury) regarding emails, research methods, and efforts to stigmatize and marginalize scientists who disagree with him, Dr. Michael Mann devised a clever diversion. Certain politicians, he told Washington Post readers, are trying “to mislead and distract the public.” Penn State, he claimed, “exonerated” him of any wrongdoing. Investigators simply want to “assault” climate research.

“Burying our heads in the sand [about carbon dioxide] would leave future generations at the mercy of potentially dangerous” climate change, he continued. A “good-faith debate is essential” and “welcome,” he self-righteously declared, but challenges to his views are “anti-science.” Questioning the alleged CO2-global warming link is akin to questioning “the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.”

It’s amazing how many false or misleading assertions he was able to jam into such a short column.

No one questions “the reality of climate change,” as Mann alleges. Earth’s climate changes constantly and has throughout the eons. We “skeptics” simply point out that no one has yet proffered convincing, replicable evidence that human CO2 emissions have replaced the complex natural forces that drove past storm, flood and drought cycles, ice ages, Little Ice Ages and Dust Bowls. Assertions, computer models, doctored temperature data, pal-reviewed papers, and pseudo-consensus IPCC reports are not evidence. Catastrophic manmade climate change is not the same as catastrophic Mann-made climate change.

(How does he explain stable 1995-2010 global temperatures, in the face of rising carbon dioxide levels?)

Penn State’s in-house “investigation” and “exoneration” was a whitewash, as was its East Anglia counterpart. No adverse witnesses were allowed to testify, not one skeptic was permitted to ask a question. How different a congressional inquiry will be! No wonder Mann is hyperventilating.

As to debating the dangerous manmade global warming (aka “global climate disruption") issue, the world is still waiting for Messrs. Mann, Hansen, Gore, Schmidt, Jones or Trenberth to display the cojones to debate anyone. All have dodged every debate opportunity, and Gore refused even to testify before a friendly House committee if Lord Christopher Monckton was allowed to speak or even be in the room.

Helping to circle the wagons and protect the university’s multi-million-dollar annual climate funding stream, PSU “environmental ethics” professor Donald Brown waded in with rants via London’s Guardian and his personal blogspot. Skeptics must publish in “peer-reviewed scientific journals” (which systematically exclude their papers), he demanded - or shut up.

The fossil fuel industry, Brown continued (citing the unimpeachable New York Times), “lavishly financed...anti-global warming studie...and websites.” One presumes he means the $23 million ExxonMobil allegedly gave non-alarmists over the decade before it succumbed to eco-activist pressure and cut off the funding. That “lavish” funding is not to be confused, one supposes, with the “trivial” billions per year that alarmists and renewable energy aficionados receive. (Imagine the “consensus” those sums could buy.)

Then Dr. Brown played his trump card. “Disinformation” about Earth-on-the-brink climate science, he intoned, is “morally reprehensible” - “if not criminally irresponsible.” Or even a “crime against humanity,” because “climate-change impacts are potentially catastrophic for many of the poorest people around the world.” Climate change could cause floods, droughts, and disease, he suggested, or even prevent indigenous people from using “sleds in cold places.”

Sorry, Doctor. On your virtual-reality planet, your litany of horrors could maybe happen if CO2 continues to rise. But we live here on the real Earth, where a CO2-climate link is still speculative, at best, and where real horrors already kill millions of real people:  lung infections, 1.4 million ...intestinal diseases, 700,000...malaria a million more mothers, fathers and children - year after year.

They are dying because they don’t have access to the hydrocarbon energy you want to consign to the ash heap of history. That hydrocarbon energy could purify water; replace open fires to heat homes and cook food; fuel cars, trucks and buses that carry people, food and consumer products; and generate electricity to power homes, hospitals, schools, factories, offices and shops - to create jobs, hope, opportunity, prosperity, and infinitely better health than people in those impoverished nations have ever known.

So Dr. Brown, if you’re going to talk about crimes against humanity, please don’t engage in the climate equivalent of North Korea criticizing US voting machines. The real crime against humanity is elitist professors, politicians, pressure groups, UN panels and policies guarding against speculative and fabricated risks - and preventing the world’s poor from gaining access to modern technologies that could improve and save their lives, and enable them to adapt to climate change, whether regional or global, natural or manmade.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

The recovery of Phil Jones - Back to the future

The recovery of Phil Jones - Back to the future

Back to the Future?

In 2008, in an message titled “IPCC and FOI”, Phil Jones asked Michael Mann to delete emails he might have gotten from Kieth Briffa, assuring him that Briffa would delete such emails as well. He said ‘they’ was going to get in touch with Caspar Ammann asking him to delete emails too. Responding to Jones, Michael Mann replied sphinx-like, that he would get in touch with Eugene Wahl about the matter.

Four scientists - Kieth Briffa, Michael Mann, Caspar Ammann, Eugene Wahl - all being set into motion by Phil Jones, deleting emails relating to the IPCC fourth assessment report - this is the picture we get, from one the emails in Climategate.

The alleged email exchange is below:

From: Michael Mann mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
To: Phil Jones p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 08:12:02 -0400
Reply-to: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Hi Phil,
laughable that CA (Climate Audit) would claim to have discovered the problem. They would have run off to the Wall Street Journal for an exclusive were that to have been true.

I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
talk to you later,

mike

Phil Jones wrote:

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone [removed]
School of Environmental Sciences Fax [removed]
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJl, UK

--------

Michael E. Mann
Associate Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)
Department of Meteorology Phone: [removed]
503 Walker Building FAX: [removed]
The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
University Park, PA 16802-5013
Website
Now, a year after these series of exchanges were made public by Climategate, Jones, we are informed by Nature magazine, deleted the emails from just “bravado”.

“We just thought if they’re going to ask for more, we might as well not have them”

Apparently Jones deleted these emails, to “simplify his life”, by “not having them”, if they were requested by people “in the future”. Mindblowing.

The Nature article potrays Jones’ story through Climategate year One. He is shown as a sensitive man, sucked into a vortex of reactive maneuvers, outwitting critics, bloggers and sceptics, deleting emails in the process.  As much as one hopes for more transparency and data openness, one hopes Jones finds the right rationalizations to put his mind at rest first. Meanwhile the skeptics are not going to get anything in the near future, it seems.

Here is an interesting bit of “search-box” investigation you can perform. Look for the words ‘denier’ or ‘fossil-fuel’ in the article - you might just be surprised by the results.

See post here.

Nature Editors block sensible reply to commenter re Jones
By Rupert Wyndham

I thought people might be interested in this. As you see, I responded this morning to a piece in some Nature offshoot. People can judge for themselves whether or not my contribution in any way breaches acceptable standards of debate, good taste or whatever.

I suggest a small but illustrative example of the complete corruption of what was once a prestigeous publication.

From:
Date: 17 November 2010 10:07
Subject: [Nature News] Your post has been hidden
To: rupertwyndham@xxxxxxx

Dear Rupert Wyndham,

The following post you wrote on the Nature News website has been hidden by the moderator in accordance with our terms and conditions.

Kathleen Wood - “#15697
The ultimate irony for Jones and scientists like him is that he is engaged in a philosophical battle against people who use theology and pseudo-science rather than real science to support their claims. While critics are accusing Jones of skewing results to meet his hypotheses, the climate deniers are bound by no such scientific methods. Link.

What ‘scientific methods’ - and, by the way, scientific method is scientific method - singular not plural. For more than thirty years I have been observing the evolution of ‘environmentalist science’ from global cooling to global warming, to climate change, to global climate disruption. Two ‘philosophical’ features (to use Ms. Wood’s term) stand out:

a. a refusal to countenance any form of detached scientific debate;
b. the employment by default of personal abuse towards towards anyone who questioned the prevailing orthodoxy.

Science, as succinctly and elegantly defined by Prof. Richard Lindzen, is the ‘opposing dialectic between theory and observation’. Ms. Wood would make more useful contributions if she engaged with that proposition.

RW

-Nature News editors

NOTE: They posted the comment later. 

A New Consensus

Investors Business Daily

Global Warming: Wouldn’t the followers of Scientific American have a pretty good understanding of what’s really going on with the climate? If a reader poll is any indication, they’re skeptical man is heating the planet.

For years we’ve heard that scientists have reached a “consensus” that the earth is warming due to a greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide emissions resulting from man’s use of fossil fuels. No use in discussing it further, Al Gore and others have said. It’s happening.

Not every reader of Scientific American magazine is a scientist. But the responses of the 7,000 readers (6,767 as of Friday morning) who’ve taken the magazine’s online poll strongly suggest that claims of a consensus are, at best, an exaggeration.

More than three-fourths (77.7%) say natural processes are causing climate change and almost a third (31.9%) blame solar variation. Only 26.6% believe man is the cause. (The percentages exceed 100 because respondents were allowed to choose more than one cause on this question.)

Whether climate change is man-caused or natural, most respondents don’t believe there’s anything that can be done about it anyway. Nearly seven in 10 (69.2%) agree “we are powerless to stop it.” A mere one in four (25.7%) recommend switching “to carbon-free energy sources as much as possible and adapt to changes already under way.”

It seems even some of those who would endorse changing energy sources don’t believe the benefits are worth the costs (which indicates they aren’t taking the alarmists’ claims seriously). Almost eight in 10 (79.4%) answer “nothing” to the question: “How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?”

A small but apparently hard-core 12.3% say they’d be OK with spending “whatever it takes.” Only 4.9% choose “a doubling of gasoline prices” while 3.4% don’t mind paying “a 50% increase in electricity bills.”

That small, but hard, core likely makes up most of the 15.7% who think “the IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is an effective group of government representatives, scientists and other experts.” These holdouts are overwhelmed, though, by the 83.6% who agree the IPCC “is a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda.”

This isn’t what we expected from the readers of a magazine that Cato’s Patrick Michaels says “has been shilling for the climate apocalypse for years.” Yet we’re not shocked. A new consensus is emerging as the unraveling of the global warming tale picks up speed. See more here. H/T Marc Morano, Climate Depot.

Also SEPP’s weekly newsletter TWTW reports Wall Street Journal article on a leaked White House memo contained the Quote of the Week. Apparently the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Treasury question the wisdom of huge subsidies for wind farms, thus are delaying approvals for massive amounts of subsidies under the stimulus bill. According to the article, a wind farm at Shepherds Flat, Oregon will receive a total of $1.2 Billion in Federal, state, and ratepayer subsidies. According to another article, the total permanent jobs created will be 35. This works out to over $34 Million per job. From: Wind Jammers at the White House, A Larry Summers memo exposes the high cost of energy corporate welfare, Editorial, WSJ, Nov 11, 2010

$10K Climate Challenge and Debunking John Cook; Skeptical Science

The Climate Guy

Peter Laux, Locomotive Engineman from Australia, “will pay $10,000 (AUS) for a conclusive argument based on empirical facts that increasing atmospheric CO2 from fossil fuel burning drives global climate warming.”

See Peter Laux’s signed and authorized Statutory Declaration (affidavit) to this effect HERE.

The Statutory Declaration is a legal and binding document: “a false declaration is liable to the penalties of perjury.” The authorising witness is Constable Jack Armstrong 37499 of the Victoria Police, Australia.

As stated in the Statutory Declaration, all submissions for the “$10K Climate Challenge” must be made using the submitter’s true identity and must be submitted as a comment to the present Climate Guy blog post.

It is understood that $10K (AUS) will be paid to the first person to send a complete submission. This challenge is open for 20 years from the date of this post.

Warmists of the world: The ball is in your court. The $10K Climate Challenge is declared open.

-Climate Guy

Not the first such offer. Dr. Economides of University of Houston had a similar standing offer for his students for years with no winners. Steve Milloy of Junk Science had a much larger offer for a few years without a winner. See the Climate Guy post.

A commenter Adam said…
I suspect that some warmists will try and use John Cook’s unskeptical website to try and do this challenge. Jo Nova has done a good rebuttal to Cook’s ‘empirical evidence’ here and Lubos has debunked the whole site here. Anyway, good luck Mr Laux. I doubt anyone warmist will be able to meet your challenge.

-----------

John Cook: Skeptical Science
By Lubos Motl, The Reference Frame

John Cook, a former student of physics in Australia, has constructed an interesting website trying to attack the opinions of climate skeptics.

Skeptical Science: Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism

It’s been in my climate bookmarks for quite some time but no one really cared about it so I didn’t want to respond. However, his talking counter-points were recently adopted by an iPhone application. Moreover, Andrew Revkin promoted the website, too. So let us look at his points and counter-points.

See Lubos’s point by point debunking here.

-------

An Icecap commenter, Jerry Orr asks the following:

I have been following the AGW dispute for some time now, but have not found anyone who posed, or answered, the following question that I consider quite
basic. To wit:

“It is settled science that at some time in Earth’s distant past there was abundant CO2 in the atmosphere.  Over time, a profusion of plant and animal life
absorbed some of this CO2 and sequestered it in the biosphere.  By some mechanism this sequestered Carbon was turned into fossil fuels and stored until
recent times.  Now we are told that releasing some small portion of this Carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2 would cause catastrophe to plant and animal life on Earth rather than a return to abundance.  Why is this reasonable?”

Respond back to me at jsdaleo@yahoo.com if you can respond.

A New Treasure Trove Of 1970s “Global Cooling” Articles

By Maurizio Morabito

Italian newspaper “La Stampa” has just put online its 1867-today archive (yes, it IS in Italian). What better chance (well, for me at least...) to explore the evolution of “global cooling” thinking in the 1970s beyond the usual English-speaking newsmedia? With the added bonus of plenty of names and other key words to use as...keywords for further research.

Very briefly: in the 15 articles I have found so far:

the popularity of scientists predicting an ice age is very clear up to the Feb 1979 meeting of the World Meteorological Organization, “upcoming ice age” is the meme du jour up to 1985 at least there is a warmist slant in 1990 but strangely, the arguments of discussion are more or less the same still central to the debate in 2010. This collection strongly indicates that in Italy, like elsewhere, the average reader of newspapers would have had all the reasons to believe in a “global cooling consensus” for much of the 1970’s and even later.

-------

Here’s the article list:

1. June 22, 1976 (n.145, p.14): “Entro cento anni avremo una era glaciale” - “Within a hundred years we’ll get an ice age” by Umberto Oddone

- Mentions Reid Bryson “not all scientists agree”
- a Cesare Emiliani from the University of Miami investigates 700,000 years of sea-shells Oxygen isotopes
- icebreaker “Glacier” gets “stuck in the Atlantic”

2. June 27, 1976 (n.150, p.9): “Tra ghiacci e siccita” - “Between ice and drought” by Umberto Oddone

- Earth is “having a fever”
- Bryson again
- Cesare Emiliani and sea-shells analysis, again

3. Oct 19, 1976 (n.229, p.21): “Fra pochi anni inverni freddissimi - In Siberia spariranno i cereali?” - “Very cold winters within few years - will grains disappear from Siberia?” by Bruno Ghibaudi

- 30 years of cooling trend
- Not a new ice age but hard consequences expected for the USSR
- Mentions Prok Nikola Volkov, Director, Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, Leningrad
- Kara Sea temperature having dropped from -10C to -13C in 30 years
- Nearby polar seas, decreases of 1 or 2C
- Sea lanes to Murmansk and Arkangelsk closed by the ice in the early 1900′s, open in 1941-45, now 60% closed again
- Two teams of French scientists complete research in the Antarctic.
- Oxygen-isotope analysis indicates climate cycles, with a new cold peak in 3000AD and a warm peak in 9000AD
- Mentions human influence, possible apocalyptic consequences
- Recommends an international program to control climate

4. Feb 14, 1977 (n.29, p.3): “E’ giunta l’era glaciale” - “The ice age has come” by Alberto Rapisarda

- Bryson again. Must have been very popular.

5. Jan 3, 1978 (n.1, p.3): “Si torna all’era glaciale?” - “A return to the ice age?” by Umberto Oddone

- Mentions a new book “Climatologia” by Prof. Mario Pinna
- Suggests getting warm clothes ready, for a few decades or for thousands of years

6. Apr 14, 1978 - (n.85, p.15): “Aiuto, arriva l’era glaciale” - “Help, the ice age is coming” (unsigned article)

- “Many meteorologists” “convinced” about upcoming little ice age
- Climate for 90% of the time warmer than at present
- Causes of the cooling: disagreement
- According to Juri Izrael, Hydrometer Service Director for the USSR: deforestation, landscape changes
- According to James Hays of Columbia University and Nicholas Shackelton of Cambridge University: orbital changes
- Hurd Willett of MIT mentioned as expecting lower temps
- “Many meteorologists” of the opinion that “it’s all due to changes in the Sun”

7. Apr 27, 1978 (n.95, p.9): “Siamo alla soglia dell’era glaciale?” - “Are we on the edge of an ice age?” by Umberto Oddone

- Mentions “18 known American climatologists” and a series of articles on Die Welt
- North Polar ice cap increases from 1971 to 1978 by 12%
- Antarctic ice mass increase from 1966 to 1967 by 10%
- Global temperature down in 30 years by 0.5C
- Mentions Bryson expecting a return to the little ice age
- Mentions other climatologists as far more pessimist ("big" ice age) - work by the Impact Team headed by climatologist William Colby, former head of the CIA - “snowblitz”
- Mentions Dansgaard
- Mentions Calder as reporting the opinion of “not a few” scientists

8. Jan 4, 1979 (n.3, p.4): “Sta per cominciare un’era glaciale - secondo meteorologi giapponesi” - “An ice age is coming - according to Japanese meteorologists” by press agency Ansa-Reuter

- Mentions Junkichi Nemoto - University of Saitama - saying a “little ice age” is already underway
- Mentions WMO conference in Feb 1979 in Geneva

9. Jan 9, 1979 (n.8, p.28): “Ma perche’ parlare di era glaciale?” - “And why all the talk of an ice age?” by Stefano Pavan

- Mentions climate wars
- Hubert Lamb, Alastair Woodroffe: snowblitz (snow accumulating by not completely melting by the end of the summer), 50cm/year

10. Feb 19, 1979 (n.48, p.3): “Cambia il nostro clima - Il mondo va verso una nuova era glaciale?” - “Our climate is changing - Is the world going towards an ice age?” by Fabio Galvano

- Mentions the WMO Conference in Geneva
- “400 climatologists” meeting to discuss how humanity can adapt to climate changes
- Conference President - Robert White
- Mentions some scientists as believing that Earth is moving towards an ice age
- Mentions most scientists as believing that Earth is getting warmer due to human activities
- Greenhouse effect from a sulphuric acid/ammonium sulphide “polar fog”
- Mentions Stephen Schneider as expecting 2C-3C of increase in the temperate zones in 2050, as CO2 concentrations double. Mentions William Kellogg as expecting another doubling by 2100, with +6C
- Mentions +20C at the Poles
- Mentions the Amazon turning into a Sahara (Harry Knowles)
- Geoengineering in the USSR proposed by climatologist Federov

11. Jan 20, 1982 (n.16): “Tranquilli, non e’ un’altra era glaciale” - “Keep cool, there’s no ice age coming” by James Wagner, National Weather Service

- No ice age

from Piero Bianucci’s Apr 21, 1982 article

12. Apr 21, 1982 (n.25, p. 3): “Questo freddo di aprile farà’ scendere i ghiacciai?” - “This cold in April will expand the glaciers?” by Piero Bianucci

- Detailed temperature graph for the last 80,000 years
- Mentions winter 81-82 as colder than 77’s, considered “coldest in the century” by “American climatologist”
- Walter Orr Roberts and sun/drought link
- Mentions Stephen Schneider, according to whom the “turnaround year” from a warming trend to a cooling one was 1972, a year with drought in the USSR, floods in Pakistan, and a delayed start of the monsoon season.
- Mentions Lamb describing a “butterfly effect” on climate

13. Jan 30, 1985 (n.155, p. 2): “Dietro l’angolo c’e’ un’era glaciale?” - “Is there an ice age behind the corner?” by Stefano Pavan

- Nicholas Shackleton, Cambridge University - shells analysis indicates a descent into an ice age - for 5,000 years, an accumulation of 50cm/year - “snowblitz”
- Mentions Danish glaciologists as saying that summer insolation in the Northern Hemisphere has come down, and it’s lower than when 90,000 years ago there was a sudden cooling episode
- Mentions Nigel Calder’s “The Weather Machine” with a long list of countries that would fall against the climate catastrophe

14. Oct 10, 1990 (n.436, p. 21): “Il clima cambia, ecco gli indizi” - “The climate changes, here’s the evidence” by Angelo Tartaglia
and
15. Oct 10, 1990 (n.436, p. 21): “I dati sono insufficienti” - “There is not enough data” by Stefano Pavan

Both articles could have been written yesterday, including skeptics at the MIT and computer models at the UK’s Met Office

See post and more here.

Is The Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? Asks SPPI

SPPI Press release

The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) continues raising serious concerns for policy makers and the public as to whether the “adjustments” that government-funded employees continue making to raw surface and ocean temperature data sets can be trusted. 

In a new collaborative paper, Is The Western Climate Establishment Corrupt?, Dr. Dave Evans has gathered substantial evidence that corruption has become endemic within government-sponsored climate units.

Dr. Evans finds that, “The Western Climate Establishment has allowed egregious mistakes, major errors and obvious biases to accumulate - each factor on its own might be hard to pin down, but the pattern is undeniable.” Evans asks, “How many excuses does it take?”

Continues Dr. Evans, “These photos speak for themselves. The corruption of climate science has become so blatant, so obvious, that even non-scientists can no longer throw their hands in the air, and say ‘I don’t know’.  You don’t need a PhD to know it is cheating to place thermometers near artificial heat sources and call it ‘global warming’.”

Key findings of the paper include:

* Official thermometers are overwhelmingly in warm localities such as near air conditioner exhaust vents, buildings, concrete, tarmac, asphalt, and even fermenting vats of warm sludge.

* Officials hide the modern ARGO data which shows the world’s oceans are cooling.

* They ignore hundreds of thousands of weather balloon results that show the climate models overestimate future warming by at least 300%. 

* Officials frequently point to the last 130 years of global warming. But almost never mention the full story: that the planet started the current global warming trend before 1700, over a century before humans started pumping out meaningful amounts of CO2.

* Leading authors publish a crucial graph with a deceptive colour scheme designed to imitate the results they wish they’d got. Why did a leading journal publish such a naked and childish attempt at cheating?

* Their adjustments blatantly transform the original raw data from thermometers, often creating rising trends. They also selectively ignore thousands of other thermometers.

* Researchers repeatedly go out of their way to hide their records, and dodge FOIs.

* The Russian, Chinese and Indian climate establishments, which are financially independent of the western financial establishment, are all skeptical. As are scientists from other branches of science, as well as many older or retired climate scientists (who have nothing to lose by speaking their minds).

Concludes Dr. Evans, “Once one or two major news outlets start printing these photos of official thermometers near artificial heating sources, and points out the deception, the rush will be on for our elected representatives to abandon the Global Warming Crusade. No one would want to be seen to be taken in by half-truths and shameless deception. Who wants to look gullible because they didn’t ask the obvious burning questions? Those who support conclusions based on corrupt behaviour will be seen as negligent for not having considered the serious evidence here.”

Observes SPPI President, Robert Ferguson, “For years, non-government scientists and researchers have expressed the urgent need to have the validity of government temperature adjustments audited.  Dr. Evans’ findings exhibit ongoing revelations surrounding the shoddy, often enigmatic science and data handling practices at government funded institutions like the CRU, GISS, NOAA and the IPCC.  A growing body of such findings only enhances the urgency for unbiased Congressional oversight investigations.  The policy implications are far too dire to allow government scientists to persist in stonewalling a full investigative audit into their surface and ocean temperature data handling practices and computer programs.”

Dr David Evans worked for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering.

The full report can be read here.

Carbon Trade Ends on Quiet Death of Chicago Climate Exchange - not before Gore pockets $18M

Gore Pocketed ~$18 Million from Now-Defunct Chicago Climate Exchange
Hockey Schtick

Although the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) collapsed and shut down this week, Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management LLP pocketed approximately $17.8 million on it’s 2.98% share of the exchange when it was sold to the publically traded Intercontinental Exchange a mere 6 months ago. According to news reports, the brainchild of the exchange, academic Richard Sandor, founded the exchange with a foundation gift of $1.1 million, and pocketed $98.5 million for his 16.5% share of the CCX. This would place the value of Gore’s firm’s stake at almost $18 million. Note Gore is the founder, chairman, and largest shareholder in Generation Investment Management LLP. Barack Obama was on the Joyce Foundation Board when it provided the funding to establish the CCX. Maurice Strong, founding head of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), precursor to the IPCC, was a CCX board member.

Collapse of Chicago Climate Exchange Means a Strategy Shift on Global Warming Curbs

By Ed Barnes Published November 09, 2010 | FoxNews.com

The closing this week of the Chicago Climate Exchange, which was envisioned to be the key player in the trillion-dollar “cap and trade” market, was the final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s effort to pass the controversial program meant to combat global warming.

“It is dead for the foreseeable future,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and the Environment with the Competitive Energy Institute, which had fought the measure.

That assessment was echoed by environmentalists as well.

“Economy-wide cap and trade died of what amounts to natural causes in Washington,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, which had supported the plan.

The CCX was set up in 2000 in anticipation of the United States joining Europe and other countries around the world to create a market that would reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Under the system, factories, utilities and other businesses would be given an emissions target. Those that emitted less fewer regulated gases than their target could sell the “excess” to someone who was above target. Each year, the target figures would be reset lower.

The Exchange was the brainchild of Richard Sandor, an economist and professor at Northwestern University, and it was modeled after a successful program that was launched in 1990 and helped control acid rain in the Midwest. It was initially funded by a $1.1 million grant from the Joyce Foundation of Chicago, and President Obama was a board member at the time.

After the Democrats won the White House, the House and the Senate in 2008, businesses and investors flocked to the exchange, believing Congress would quickly approve the program. And it almost happened. The House of Representatives passed a bill proposed by Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, which would have made cap and trade law. But the Senate couldn’t muster the votes, and everything went downhill from there.

“When those that voted for the measure in 2009 went home on July 4th after the vote, they met widespread outrage among their constituents,” said Nick Loris, an analyst with Heritage Foundation. Conservatives renamed the idea “cap and tax,” and they began an assault on the program. In the last week, following the Nov. 2 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, the slide became an avalanche. Investors in CCX, including Sandor and former Vice President Al Gore, sold the exchange to a company involved in commodities trading.

Sale records show that Sandor cleared more than $90 million for his 16 percent stake in the company. Meanwhile, the White House has dropped all references to cap and trade from its web site; and, unlike the heralded climate summit in Copenhagen last year, a 10-day meeting in Mexico beginning Nov. 29 on the next steps to battle global warming has not even mentioned publicly by the administration.

“The pieces of the puzzle just kept breaking off,” Loris said. “And Obama has given up on it.” But both Loris and Ebell say that isn’t necessarily cause for celebrating. “I would like to have a party and say we won, but the truth is were are still in the middle of it,” Ebell said. “The problem is now that the administration changed strategy and is using existing laws and regulations, like the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and EPA regulations to implement its agenda. And unlike the cap and trade effort, it is much harder to get the public excited about rule changes.”

“Obama will try a piecemeal approach,” Loris said. “And they have a much better chance of becoming law than cap and trade ever did.” Republicans in the new Congress, for their part, will try to pass a law “to stop all regulation of greenhouse gases using existing legal authority,” Ebell said. “And we are pretty sure we can get 60 votes in the Senate on it.”

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Carbon Trade Ends a Quiet Death on Chicago Climate Exchange
By John O’Sullivan

Republican mid-term election joy deals financial uncertainty among green investors as the Chicago Climate Exchange announces the end of U.S. carbon trading. The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on October 21, 2010 that it will cease carbon trading this year. However, Steve Milloy reporting on Pajamasmedia.com (November 6, 2010) finds this huge story strangely unreported by the mainstream media.

To some key analysts the collapse of the CCX appears to show that international carbon trading is “dying a quiet death.” Yet Milloy finds that such a major business failure has drawn no interest at all from the mainstream media. Milloy noted that a “Nexis search conducted a week after CCX’s announcement revealed no news articles published about its demise.”

The collapse of the trading market is a personal embarrassment to the current U.S. President.

Barack Obama was a board member of the Joyce Foundation that funded the fledgling CCX. Professor Richard Sandor, of Northwestern University had started the business with a $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based left-wing Joyce Foundation endorsed by Obama. Fortunately for Sandor he was able to net $98.5 million for his 16.5% stake in CCX when it was sold.Failure of European Climate Market May Follow

Business Collapse is Setback for Washington

Milloy pointedly draws attention to the fact that when founded in November 2000, CCX’s carbon trading market was predicted to grow from $500 billion to $10 trillion. Milloy writes, “although the trading in carbon emissions credits was voluntary, the CCX was intended to be the hub of the mandatory carbon trading established by a cap-and-trade law and trading carbon was, “the only purpose for which it was founded.” But with the resurgence Republicans in the mid-terms a new cohort of global warming skeptics have been installed in the corridors of power.

Unlike the American voluntary scheme, the European cousin of the CCX, the European Climate Exchange (ECX), continues to trade due to the mandatory carbon caps of the Kyoto Protocol. But the ECX may also fail unless a new climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol is introduced. That treaty expires in 2012. But the ineffectual Copenhagen Climate Conference (2009) exposed an inability among international politicians to agree on climate change. If this stalement persists then the European ECX may likely suffer the same fate as Chicago’s CCX.

More Job Losses in Green Trading Sector

Only by November 02, 2010 had the story had been picked up briefly by Chicagobusiness.com (Crain’s). Reporter, Paul Merrion adds that while CCX will cease trading of new emission allowances at the end of the year, “it will continue trading carbon offsets generated by projects that consume greenhouse gases, such as planting trees.”

Admitting that there will be “deep staff cuts,” Chief Financial Officer Scott Hill of Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange Inc. further conceded, “We had about 66 people when we bought the company [CCX]. I think we’ll be closer to 25 by the end of the year. And then we’ll reduce further into the first quarter.” ICE had bought Climate Exchange PLC, which operated CCX, the European Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange, in April 2010 for around $634.5 million.

U.S. Corporations and Investors in Retreat

Speaking to the New York Times ( March 2010) Kristel Dorion, a developer with 10 years of experience putting together offset projects under the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), foresaw that investors were “quickly shifting focus elsewhere.”

Since its launch in 2003 the CCX succeeded in attracting major players such as Ford, Bank of America, IBM and Intel. By signing up as voluntary contributors these corporations made been making voluntary but legally binding commitment to meet greenhouse gas emission reduction targets either by cutting emissions or by buying emissions permits sold by other CCX members.

But Dorion warned, “The ones that are pulling out are all the American-based companies.”

Republican successes in America’s mid-term election are likely push the possibility of climate legislation even further off the political agenda. Nonetheless, California outlined its plans for it’s own cap-and-trade scheme with the ambition of a joint trading scheme by 2012 across members of the Western Climate Initiative, an alliance of 11 states and Canadian provinces. Read more at Suite101: Carbon Trade Ends on Quiet Death of Chicago Climate Exchange here. 

Not the Last You Will See of “Climate” Oversight

By Chris Horner

Last night the Competitive Enterprise Institute, through its outside counsel Gibson Dunn, filed its brief arguing against NASA’s rather scattershot and contradictory effort to dismiss our lawsuit requesting certain documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)(press release available here).

Our suit, CEI vs. NASA (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia), followed on the heels of ClimateGate, and a December 2009 Notice of Intent to Sue if NASA did not turn over certain records withheld since CEI sought them in August 2007 and January 2008 requests. That Notice was eleven months ago and, despite NASA offering some documents and admitting—temporarily—that certain others relating to the advocacy site used by NASA scientists, RealClimate.org were “agency records”, NASA then ceased its brief steps to comply with the transparency statute FOIA.

Despite NASA stonewalling CEI has already learned, for example, that NASA does not, contrary to widespread media and pressure group claims, have an independent temperature data set. Instead, as NASA told USA Today in an email, despite its serial, breathless press releases trumpeting some new temperature high, it actually is just a modeling office, which also (for unknown reasons, possibly extra attention and importance, or mere advocacy) cobbles together some US data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) with that of the Climatic Research Unit’s temperature history. You may recall how CRU withdrew its claim to a temperature history data set after ClimateGate led to an admission it actually lost its data.

Specifically, CEI’s FOIA suit seeks documents and emails relating to NASA’s temperature record, which NASA was forced to correct in response to criticism from a leading climate watchdog, Steve McIntyre.  Those corrections destroyed NASA’s stance that U.S. temperatures have been steadily rising in recent years and returned 1934, not 1998, to being the warmest year on record. NASA refuses to give CEI the computer file they used to make these changes, whose title includes “Steve” and “alternate cleaning.”

CEI also seeks emails from NASA scientists using Real Climate.org on official time using official resources, often to advance what NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (its climate activist office) has decided is appropriate public advocacy.

In addition to uncovering the “Steve"/"cleaning" file, a few of the more interesting pieces of evidence expounded upon in CEI’s brief include:

* After CEI filed the FOIA seeking RealClimate emails, administrators at Real Climate deleted all timestamps on all of their postings, making it impossible to show they were made during work hours.  But we kept color copies of the original posts.

* NASA admits that it discovered 3,500 emails on Dr. Schmidt’s NASA computer related to his work on RealClimate but won’t produce them.

* NASA did not ask Dr. Schmidt to look for responsive records until 22 months after we sent them the FOIA and threatened to sue.  It is highly likely relevant emails were destroyed during this period.

* NASA’s delay in responding to CEI’s FOIA requests was extraordinary, far outside its normal or even most egregious examples of delay or non-compliance. For instance:

o NASA took more than 900 days to produce documents pursuant to CEI’s two 2007 requests.  The agency took more than 700 days to produce records in response to CEI’s 2008 request.  NASA does not explain these delays. FOIA requires that an agency produce responsive records within 20 days. Although agencies rarely meet that deadline, even for “complex” FOIA requests, NASA’s average processing time is under 100 days. In 2008, NASA processed complex requests in 82 days, on average. In 2009, it processed such requests in 89 days, on average.

o Prompted by congressional inquiries, the NASA Inspector General investigated the delay associated with these FOIA Requests. The Inspector General determined that the delays were caused by “inadequate direction” as to what documents were requested; “inadequate communication between NASA personnel; and “inadequate staffing” at the Goddard FOIA office.  In reality, one of the primary reasons for the delay was that NASA did not inform GISS officials about one of the requests and inexplicably held documents for years instead of producing them on a rolling basis, as requested.

We should argue this within the month. CEI requests the court allow it to proceed to the discovery stage next, examining records and deposing relevant witnesses. See post on American Spectator here.

Enlarged here.

ICECAP NOTE: See how above NASA alter the global temperatures regularly. You can see the changes made in 2007 after McIntyre discovered an issue “millennium bug” but see how it was reversed in 2007, probably after NOAA eliminated the urban heat island adjustment. See in the comparison below how NASA/NOAA has changed history dramtically - cooling off the warm blip of the 1930s-1950s amd warming the post 1980 data.

Enlarged here.

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Threat of Oversight Claims First Scalp?
By Chris Horner, American Spectator

Politico reports:

EPA policy chief steps down

One of the Obama administration’s most aggressive officials on global warming regulations is stepping down from her post at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Lisa Heinzerling, the head of EPA’s policy office, will return to her position as a Georgetown University law professor at the end of the year, said EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan.

Within EPA, Heinzerling is one of the more dogmatic proponents of regulating greenhouse gases to the maximum extent possible under the Clean Air Act.

There are two camps within the agency on climate, said an environmental advocate who spoke on background. The Heinzerling camp, with the mind-set that, “we have the law on our side; let’s go get them.” In the other camp are Administrator Lisa Jackson and EPA air chief Gina McCarthy, who are trying to maintain the support of the White House and Congress…

“I think she’s probably the farthest left and most committed of anyone on the team, with the exception of Carol Browner,” on climate change, said an industry attorney familiar with the agency, referring to the former agency administrator and President Barack Obama’s energy and climate adviser.

Certain private interests have pursued inquiry of Ms. Heinzerling’s activities while in this perch for some time. I’m just guessing, but this longtime partisan and activist may have heard footsteps and got out while the getting was less bad. Read more here.

2009/10 Winter El Nino Very Different than 1997/98; Look at US Winter 2010/11

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

Last winter with a strong El Nino, we had one of the coldest winters (in places like parts of the southeast United States and parts of Siberia, the coldest ever). It was warm though in Canada and the arctic (relative to normal) indicative of strong blocking high pressure.


Enlarged here.

The super El Nino in 1997/98 was very different in most places. It was cold in northwest Russia but much warmer in most other areas it was cold last winter.


Enlarged here.

Why the big difference?

2009/10 was the strongest El Nino since 1997/98 but clearly not as strong as that super event. In many ways, it was more like the El Ninos of the last cold Pacific (PDO) era from 1947 to 1977). The El Ninos were stronger in the warm PDO phase from 1978 to 1998. Wolter’s Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) shows the big red El Nino spikes of the warm period and the moderate spike of 2002/02 and 2009/10 now in the cold PDO Phase.

Enlarged here.

Another very key difference was the solar - the 2009/10 El Nino was during the later part of the ultra-long solar minimum between cycles 23 and 24. 1997/98 winter was much further into a rebound after a much briefer and less deep solar minimum.

Enlarged here.

Drew Shindell, NASA modeller who works with James Hansen showed here in a paper in Science (2001) how low solar periods with reduced ultraviolet leads to less ozone chemistry warming in high altitudes over low and mid latitudes. This apparently allows for cooling and expansion of the polar vortex and more blocking in high latitudes (a negative NAO/AO).

Here Shindell shows the difference between the Maunder Minimum temperatures of 1680 and those of much more active sun period 1780. You clearly see the negative NAO and AO and a cold winter in the continents in the low sun period.

Enlarged here.

Writing in Environmental Research Letters (2010), Mike Lockwood et al. have verified that solar activity does seem to have a direct correlation with Earth’s climate by influencing North Atlantic blocking (NAO) as Shindell has shown. 

Last winter had a record negative AO/NAO for the winter season, beating out 1976/77 at the end of the last quieter sun period.

Enlarged here.

Labitzke (2001), Baldwin and Dunkerton (2004) and others have shown a tendency for stratospheric warming events in low solar easterly QBO winters (like 2009/10, 1976/77, 1965/66). More on the sun here and here.

Another factor in the anomalous AO was the prior spring high latitude volcanoes in Alaska (Redoubt) and Russia (Sarychev). Oman etal (2003) found high latitude volcanoes lead to enhance winter time high latitude blocking. 

A correlation of the AO (reversed colors to show cold (blues) and warm (reds) for a negative value show the pattern last winter very well.

Enlarged here.

Indeed if we do what Shindell did and subtract the temperatures during the latest low solar El Nino and that of 1997/98 we fit the pattern of 2009/10 and in the correlation to a tee.


Enlarged here.

Thus last winter was largely anomalous because the El Nino came along in a year of high latitude volcanoes and in a very quiet sun which led to record high latitude blocking. If indeed we are in quieter sun era, future El Ninos will be more like 2009/10 than 1997/98. They will be less frequent and mainly weaker than they were in the warm Pacific phase.

Enlarged here.

This past summer, El Nino has given way to a strong La Nina and the sun is slowly rebounding. The effects of Redoubt and Sarychev are likely faded but Iceland’s volcano last year MIGHT be having some effect (blocking continues above normal in the higher latitudes). PDF here.

What will that mean for this upcoming winter? An early look was here.

Updated Outlook for the United States for 2010/11 Winter

Update: Hear an interview episode #034 with Andre Bernier of FOX 8 Cleveland on his WeatherJazz site here. FOX8’s Dick Goddard Winter Outlook appears here. Also go to the WBZ TV 4 web site and see the video of the Winter Outlook - which included interviews with Joe Bastardi and Joe D’Aleo

A reversal back to a pattern seen in 2007/08 and 2008/09. Composite of all the winters with similar conditions - La Nina, cold PDO, warm AMO, low solar, westerly QBO yields the following temperature anomalies for December through February.

Enlarged here.

Looks like very cold air will build due to large blocking high presure off the Aleutians making for a very cold winter (more like 2007/08 and 2008/09) in Alaska, Canada and the northern and western United States. The southeast will be warmer this year after a very cold El Nino winter last year. However, there could be a cold frosty outbreak reaching down to Florida, just not the continuous chill.

Storms will tracks along the boundary of the cold air with storms entering the west coast or dropping down from Canada. Many will move up the St. Lawrence Valley bringing snow to the Great Lakes and northern New York State and New England and rain starting as snow or ice further south. Some will run into cold high pressure and be forced to develop off the southern New England coast. They are more likely to mean snow and ICE further south.

The October ‘Chiclone’ from space. Northern branch systems like this are symptoms of what’s ahead.

Other storms will track out of the Gulf up the Appalachians and these often will do the same, with a secondary storm off the southern New England coast with similar results. The further south these storms develop the more snow wilol fall Boston south. The Mid-Atlantic states where records fell last year will see much less snow but could see some ice. Northern ski areas should do very well, not so much the southern ski areas.


Enlarged here.

You can see the precipitation matching the storm tracks below.

Enlarged here.

The degree and location of blocking high pressure in the Atlantic will determine how much cold and snow in Europe and Asia. South America looks like a cool summer - dry in Argentina. No significant anomalies elsewhere. 

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