Scroll down to Icing the Hype and Icecap In the News sections to see the blockbuster stories on Glaciergate putting IPCC chief Pachauri on the hot seat and how non-peer review environmental activists studies were used by the IPCC to alarm us about the threat to the Amazon, which has become Amazongate. Also See how they are on the defensive too about trends in disaster losses. The IPCC is unravelling before our eyes.

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UK Climate Change Activists Push for Average Speed Cameras

The UK Sustainable Development Commission yesterday released a report recommending the use of average speed cameras for round-the-clock tracking of motorist journeys nationwide. The government advisory body said that widespread deployment of average speed cameras was required to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide by automobiles, a factor that some believe is linked to global changes in temperature. The report made a number of recommendations affecting the driving public.

“The business models associated with private motoring are not aligned with sustainability,” the report explained.

The commission suggested that the government take immediate action to encourage the use of mass transit and discourage automobile use in general. Speed cameras were seen as an easy method of accomplishing this goal.

“Enforcing the speed limit has also been shown to be a very cost-effective way of reducing CO2 emissions from road transport with estimates of a reduction of 1.4 million tons of carbon dioxide simply by enforcing the 70 MPH speed limit,” the report claimed. “In 2009 the Home Office approved average speed cameras to enforce speed limits in urban areas. Cameras are networked together and can be placed at entry and exit points to an area with a fixed speed limit, for example 20 or 30 MPH.”

The report also called for a “clear timetable” for the introduction of Intelligent Speed Adaptation technology that would use global positioning satellites to take away control of vehicle speed from the driver, making it impossible for a car to exceed the limit on a given road. The same information communications technology (ICT) infrastructure could be used for congestion pricing, tolling of every journey and charging for insurance by the number of miles driven. The commission explained that such systems would require a substantial and ongoing financial investment.

“ICT does tend to need higher revenue funding to maintain and upgrade systems once in place,” the report conceded. “Systems will have continuous running costs and may need regular software updates. Computer hardware can have a working lifetime of as little as five to ten years.”

Motoring advocates responded that imposing average speed cameras, often known as SPEC cameras, would reduce safety.

“SPEC systems do nothing for good drivers, making them become zombie-like,” Safe Speed co-founder Claire Armstrong said. “Their visual search patterns are altered and compromised, drivers say it is like driving in a fog. They tailgate and stop paying attention, traffic bunches, and drivers become mentally tried, having to spend a disproportionate amount of time concentrating on their speed.”

The Association of British Drivers pointed out that much of the climate change rationale that underpins works like that of the Sustainability Commission are based on discredited claims by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“The evidence is now overwhelming that the UN IPCC reports have tried to scare governments into submission with doomsday scenarios—perhaps to distract them from the poor quality of the ‘evidence’ supporting their assertion that mankind’s CO2 emissions really do drive the climate,” ABD Environment spokesman Paul Biggs said. “This is an exercise in global warming alarmism aimed at underpinning ‘green’ taxes and restrictions on the general public, with a disproportionate focus on drivers.”

As evidence, ABD pointed to three recent scandals. In the first, leaked emails from respected climate scientists described how charts were manipulated to “hide the decline” in global temperatures in IPCC reports. ABD then pointed to an IPCC report author’s recent admission that the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was false. Finally, the group showed how the IPCC linked the issue of climate change to the severity of disasters such as hurricanes and floods without proper scientific scrutiny. Read story here.

A U.S. ClimateGate?
Investor’s Business Daily Editorial

Hoaxes: Climate researchers and the Weather Channel’s founder accuse NOAA and NASA of the same data manipulation as Britain’s Climate Research Unit. Were weather stations cherry-picked to hide the temperature drop?

We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.

In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.

As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, our two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of “creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based.”

Joseph D’Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NOAA “systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations.” The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35.

E. Michael Smith, a computer programming expert who worked with D’Aleo, said he found “patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked liked dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations.” The more he looked, the more he found “patterns of deletion that could not be accidental.”

Stations in places such as the Andes and Bolivia have virtually vanished, meaning, according to D’Aleo, temperatures from these areas are now “determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon.” He says it’s as if Minneapolis stopped reporting and its average temperature was extrapolated from readings in St. Louis and Kansas City.

Smith argues that the decrease in stations used and the selectivity of locations make NASA’s data and conclusions suspect. D’Aleo goes further, saying such cherry-picking and data manipulation are a “scientific travesty” committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.

To us, it looks like just another example of ideologically driven climate deceit following the Climate Research Unit scandal and the fraudulent claim by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers would soon vanish.
See more here. See full report now from Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts here.
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Central Park Revisited
By Joseph D’Aleo

We had earlier analyses posted here on Central Park comparing old data sets like USHCN version 1, the original raw observations as still downloadable from the NWS site in New York City and the GHCN v2. Version 2 city data is now available for USHCN. I would guess GHCN v3 rumored to be coming out this year will be the same as USHCN v2 (but can’t guarantee). In any event here is the plot of USHCN versions 1 and 2 together with raw for Central Park (below, enlarged here).

And the differences between the raw and USCHN v1 and v2 (below enlarged here).

The most obvious thing that jumps out from the chart for the USHCNv1-Raw is the cooling (UHI) that peaked at just over 6 degrees in the 1980s then inexplicably diminished after 1999 slowly and disappeared in 2007 when version 2 was issued. For version 2, a reduction of 2.6 for the first two years (1909-1910) gradually diminishes to vanish in recent years.

Obviously adjustments here like in the many other locations are enhancing warming. More to come.

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Climate-gate Redux
By Jane Jamison

Climate-gate part I occurred in early December when a still-unknown person posted thousands of e-mails and documents on a scientific website.  The e-mails showed that scientists at the leading “global warming” research institute in the world, East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) had “changed” weather data to prove their climate-warming theories, and squelched dissenting opinions from skeptical scientists to maintain credibility for their fraud.

Climate-gate part II begins now: The scientists with Icecap.us website announced findings late last week that not only was the CRU involved in producing fraudulent weather data, but two United States agencies, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have also been falsifying climate reports for years. NOAA, the report concludes, is actually “ground-zero” for the fraud of global warming, not the East Anglia Institute.

Climate researchers have discovered that government researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2009 as “THE SECOND WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.”

In a new report supported by SPPI, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina Smith and D’Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations and then ‘adjusting’ the data in ways that increase the apparent warming.

The results of Smith and D’Aleo’s findings were aired in a special on KUSI-TV hosted by founder of the Weather Channel and long-time meteorologist and climate “realist”, John Coleman. 

DAleo’s preliminary report is HERE. Segments of the KUSI-TV report are HERE.  SPPI’s website will print the final report soon.

Bottom line:  Just about everyone involved with the “global warming” movement was faking and lying about faking their reports.

Not related directly to the investigation by the climate-gate scientists, but related nonetheless was another new report:

Polar bears are not dying or drowning due to melting icebergs caused by climate change.  There are so many polars bears in Canada, they are causing problems.

This news is coming from Canadian wildlife agencies that have real live Inuit Indian hunters who count the real, live polar bears on the ground and in the water.  The United States Geologic Survey (USGS), which has made the alarming findings about polar bear populations being extinct in 20 years, fly over in helicopters and make reports based on “analysis"of weather predictions.

Gabriel Nirlungayuk, director of wildlife for Nunavut Tuungavik Inc.says it is getting “beary” scary in many Canadian towns: During the summer and fall, families enjoying outdoor activities must be on the look-out for bears. Many locals invite along other hunters for protection.

Last year, in Pelly Bay, all the bears that were captured were caught in town, Nirlungayuk says. “You now have polar bears coming into towns, getting into cabins, breaking property and just creating havoc for people up here,” he says.

In the Western Hudson Bay area, where harvest quotas were reduced by 80 percent four years ago, communities are complaining about the number of polar bears. “Now people can look out the window and see as many as 20 polar bears at the ice-flow edge.”

Let the scientists report further on the intricacies of the graphs, maps, and calculations of “global warming fraud,” and then turn it all over to a prosecutor and make these “scientists” pay for this outrageous hoax that has continued for decades and is still having huge financial impacts on policy, commerce and the economy.  “Global warming” is a crime. Read more here.

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Pew Center Survey on Top Priorities for 2010

Global Warming and the Environment
Dealing with global warming ranks at the bottom of the public’s list of priorities; just 28% consider this a top priority, the lowest measure for any issue tested in the survey. Since 2007, when the item was first included on the priorities list, dealing with global warming has consistently ranked at or near the bottom. Even so, the percentage that now says addressing global warming should be a top priority has fallen 10 points from 2007, when 38% considered it a top priority. Such a low ranking is driven in part by indifference among Republicans: just 11% consider global warming a top priority, compared with 43% of Democrats and 25% of independents.

Image enlarged here.

See post here.