The UK’s Met Office has had its funding for climate research slashed by a quarter, following withdrawal of financial support by the government’s Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The loss of 4.3 million pounds (US$7.0 million) in funding from the MoD will affect the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, the world-class climate modelling institute whose researchers made key contributions to the last assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

“This news comes as a shock,” says climate scientist Martin Parry, formerly at the Met Office and now at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. “The UK’s core modelling work on climate change has been funded from this source, up to now.”

“Global and regional security will be threatened by climate change, and the MoD is hopelessly wrong to think it is outside its responsibility,” adds Parry, who co-chaired the IPCC’s working group on climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

In a statement, an MoD spokesperson said that the cuts, which will come into effect immediately, were made with a view to “prioritizing success in current operations, such as Afghanistan”.

On the defensive

This will be the first time that Met Office climate research has gone without MoD cash, according to a Met Office spokesman. The office became an executive agency of the ministry in 1990 and a commercialized trading fund in 1996. By 2008, one-sixth of its budget of 176.5 million pounds came from commercial services. But government, and the MoD in particular, has continued to be its main customer and funder.

In 2007, the MoD signed a three-year deal worth 12 million pounds with the Met Office, to part-fund its Integrated Climate Programme (ICP), which makes up the bulk of its climate research. Although the MoD has withdrawn its remaining funding, a Met Office spokesman insisted that the programme is not threatened.

The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is committed to providing 4 million pounds per year in funding up until 2011 to ICP, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will provide approximately 10 million pounds in annual funding over the same period.

The Met Office is now in negotiations with these departments, and with the Department for International Development (DfID), in an effort to recoup some of the lost funding.

“If they don’t recoup it, they are going to be in serious trouble,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. “Losing 25% of your funding is a huge deal. Five percent is generally containable, but 25% is not an amount you can hope to absorb easily."…

Icecap Note: Let’s hope when American’s come to their senses and throw the bums out, the US follows suit with major cuts in funding for our national centers including NOAA’s NCDC (National Center for Data Corruption), NCAR (National Center for Astrological Research), NASA GISS and the Universities and national societies where most of the garbage science comes from thanks to major global warming research funding. When you pay someone generously to find a desired outcome, they deliver to keep the money coming. And, if the issue is really settled as they claim, then they have done their job and there is no need to do more. We can better invest that money elsewhere.

Meanwhile global temperatures continue the downslide now in its 8th year. Blue is UAH satellite MSU lower tropospheric data and Hadley CRUt3v (Hadley is used by (IPCC) versus the NOAA ESRL monthly seasonally adjusted CO2). Larger version here.

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages. Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.” The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency—and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. “It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else,” Carlin said. “That was obviously coming from higher levels.” E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to “have any direct communication” with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

“I was told for probably the first time in I don’t know how many years exactly what I was to work on,” said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. “And it was not to work on climate change.” One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead. For its part, the EPA sent CBSNews.com an e-mailed statement saying: “Claims that this individual’s opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This Administration and this EPA Administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency and science-based decision making. These principles were reflected throughout the development of the proposed endangerment finding, a process in which a broad array of voices were heard and an inter-agency review was conducted.”

Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing. After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. “My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide),” he said. “There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They’re not going up, and if anything they’re going down.”

Carlin’s report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there’s “little evidence” that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth’s temperature.

If there is a need for the government to lower planetary temperatures, Carlin believes, other mechanisms would be cheaper and more effective than regulation of carbon dioxide. One paper he wrote says managing sea level rise or reducing solar radiation reaching the earth would be more cost-effective alternatives. The EPA’s possible suppression of Carlin’s report, which lists the EPA’s John Davidson as a co-author, could endanger any carbon dioxide regulations if they are eventually challenged in court.

“The big question is: there is this general rule that when an agency puts something out for public evidence and comment, it’s supposed to have the evidence supporting it and the evidence the other way,” said Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C. that has been skeptical of new laws or regulations relating to global warming. Kazman’s group obtained the documents—both CEI and Carlin say he was not the source—and released the e-mails on Tuesday and the report on Friday. As a result of the disclosure, CEI has asked the EPA to re-open the comment period on the greenhouse gas regulatory proceeding, which ended on Tuesday.

The EPA also said in its statement: “The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding.” That appears to conflict with an e-mail from McGartland in March, who said to Carlin, the report’s primary author: “I decided not to forward your comments… I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.” He also wrote to Carlin: “Please do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of (our group) on endangerment. There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc.”

One reason why the process might have been highly charged politically is the unusual speed of the regulatory process. Lisa Jackson, the new EPA administrator, had said that she wanted her agency to reach a decision about regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act by April 2—the second anniversary of a related U.S. Supreme Court decision.

“All this goes back to a decision at a higher level that this was very urgent to get out, if possible yesterday,” Carlin said. “In the case of an ordinary regulation, these things normally take a year or two. In this case, it was a few weeks to get it out for public comment.” (Carlin said that he and other EPA staff members asked to respond to a draft only had four and a half days to do so.)

The revelations could prove embarrassing to Jackson, the EPA administrator, who said in January: “I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.” Similarly, Mr. Obama claimed that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over… To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. It is contrary to our way of life.” “All this talk from the president and (EPA administrator) Lisa Jackson about integrity, transparency, and increased EPA protection for whistleblowers—you’ve got a bouquet of ironies here,” said Kazman, the CEI attorney. Read full story here.

Alan Carlin is the economist and 38 year veteran at the Environmental Protection Agency whose report was stonewalled internally and so was not considered (or so he was told) in their decision to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. I spoke with him for an hour this evening. (A background interview with an anonymous source in the EPA that corroborates what Carlin says below can be found here.)

At the end of the hour, the last question I asked him was what had motivated him to come forward with an almost 100-page report written in 4 days detailing the problems with the scientific claims for global warming as given by the IPCC (an early draft can be found here ). The report was not transmitted internally, and the emails released by CEI on Tuesday suggest to me that this may have been because the report did not support the previously determined conclusions desired by the new Administration.

In Carlin’s personal view “The bottom line is whether or not the IPCC is wrong or right about the significance of increasing levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in increasing global temperatures--it is amazing how few people have asked that question. What’s happening in Australia (where a Senator Fielding is holding a ‘mini-debate’ with skeptical scientists and administration advocates of an Australian cap and trade policy) is fantastic--why can’t we do that here? Models, good or bad, don’t prove or disprove a scientific hypothesis about the real world. I’m dreadfully concerned that we may be taking an ineffective and extremely costly action, and after six years of working on climate change I might be able to help--but I’m not allowed to.”

Carlin got his first degree in physics, before he turned to economics and remembers lunching occasionally with the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman while at Caltech, who told him that if you attempt to compare observations with a hypothesis and the observations don’t fit, you can either change the hypothesis or ascertain if the observations are wrong. Carlin is convinced that observations of climate do not match the hypothesis that human-generated greenhouse gases are producing significant global warming in the real world. He adds ruefully that if the NIPCC report recently released by the Heartland Institute had been available in March, when he wrote his report, it might have saved him a lot of time assuming that it covers many of the same points.

Carlin’s main concern seems to be that the Endangerment Finding (an official declaration by the EPA that CO2 is a danger to public health and welfare) may actually turn out to be a time bomb that may explode in the EPA, echoing the reasoning of our anonymous source as reported earlier today. As I wrote then, the EPA does not want to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air act without legislation limiting their regulation to the largest emitters. If the proposed new cap and trade legislation (which removes EPA’s ability to use the Clean Air Act to regulate global warming gases) is not forthcoming, Carlin worries that it may well be very difficult for the EPA to carry out its mandate. His report was an attempt to have the EPA reconsider the science (which Carlin considers bad science), as despite the respectable trappings that cloak the IPCC and their reports, their hypotheses fail many observational tests in his view.

Carlin has been transferred off all climate-related work, but is not at all bitter. He says that from a civil service point of view, his boss ‘absolutely has the right’ to give him new work assignments. “I still have a phone, I can still talk to people in my office,” he says.

Carlin hastens to add that he did not turn over to the Competitive Enterprise Institute the emails that were published.  “But when a reporter called Tuesday and asked me to verify them it became evident that CEI had them.”

Carlin also assisted in the organization of a series of seminars with notable scientists in the field of climate science, including some notable skeptics as well as ardent “warmists.” They were attended by an average of maybe 30 or 40 employees--but those employees only rarely included members of the workgroup that eventually would be charged with writing the proposed endangerment document.

Later we will discuss the science that Carlin wanted to present to the EPA. For now, he’s another whistleblower who actually wanted to help the organisation that shut him out and moved him off the case.  Is this really how we want to run things? Read post here.

Suppose a company doctored data, misrepresented study findings, replaced observations with computer simulations, and hired PR flacks to promote its new “wonder drug.” News stories, congressional hearings and subpoenas would be in overdrive. Fines and jail sentences would follow. And rightly so. But the standards change when “climate catastrophe” is involved.

The White House has made global warming the centerpiece of its revenue-raising and energy policies. A House of Representatives 1,201-page bill would tax, regulate and penalize all US hydrocarbon energy use, to “save the planet from climate disaster.” The Senate promises an August vote. But average global temperatures peaked in 1998 and since have fallen slightly, even as carbon dioxide levels continue to climb. Thousands of scientists say CO2 has little effect on planetary temperatures, and there is no climate crisis. Few developed countries are ready to commit economic suicide, by agreeing to reduce their CO2 emissions by a fraction of what the House bill demands for the United States.

Americans are beginning to realize the legislation would cost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars for a hypothetical 0.1 degree F reduction in global temperatures. Most put global warming dead last in a Pew Research list of 20 concerns. The government’s answer to these inconvenient truths is simple.
Issue another report by government scientists carefully selected to exclude any who don’t subscribe to climate Armageddon. Ignore contrary data and analyses. Crank out more bogus computer-generated worst-case scenarios. Hire an activist media firm that specializes in environmental scare campaigns. And spend tens of millions hyping every imaginable climate disaster: 

Rising sea levels, floods in lower Manhattan, California beaches permanently submerged. Ferocious hurricanes, floods and droughts. Food shortages, epidemic diseases, a quadrupling of heat-wave deaths in Chicago. Aged sewer systems convulsing from massive storm runoff. Wildflowers disappearing from Rocky Mountain slopes and polar bears from the Arctic. Leisure time gone, as people struggle to survive. “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” is the “most up-to-date, authoritative, comprehensive” analysis ever done on how human-caused warming affects the United States, deadpans Obama “science” advisor John Holdren.

Actually, it’s the most flagrant attempted con-job and propaganda campaign in US history.  If it helps Congress enact cap-and-tax legislation, it will give activists, courts and bureaucrats control over virtually every aspect of our lives. It will enable them to confiscate hard-earned dollars, convert them to payoffs for activists and companies that get on the climate-crisis bandwagon, consign uncooperative companies and scientists to the ash heap of history, and conceal the exorbitant costs of restrictive energy policies - on families, industries, jobs and transportation - until long after the bill becomes law.
The bogus “report” conflates and confuses human activities and emissions with the powerful natural forces that have caused major and minor climate changes and weather anomalies since the dawn of time - from the Carboniferous Period to the Age of Dinosaurs, from the Big Ice Ages and interglacial periods to the Little Ice Age, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, Dust Bowl and countless others. It relies on conjecture, conformist thinking and conspicuous elimination of contrary, skeptical, realist scientists and studies that do not support climate cataclysm conjecture and ideology.

The authors “largely ignored” critical comments to earlier drafts and made the final version “even more alarmist” than infamous UN “summaries” of global warming “crises,” says Joseph D’Aleo, first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Weather Analysis and Forecasting Committee. The report is simply “wrong on many of its claims” and marks “an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA,” D’Aleo concludes.

University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke, Jr. says the report “misrepresents” his own work, makes claims that are not supported by citations provided, relies heavily on analyses that were never peer reviewed, ignores peer-reviewed studies that reach opposite conclusions from those proclaimed by the report, and cites analyses that do not support conclusions rendered.

“I didn’t notice a single recognized hurricane expert in the list of authors,” says NOAA Hurricane Research Division scientist Stanley Goldenberg. The report relies heavily on surface temperature data from monitoring stations located next to parking lots and air conditioning exhaust ports - falsely skewing temperature records upward - other experts noted. It is lead-heavy on assumptions, assertions and speculation - hydrogen-light on evidence.

But the most egregious miscarriage of science in this agit-prop exercise is its near-total dependence on worst-case scenarios conjured up by computer models. That’s where it gets its litany of “Day After Tomorrow” Hollywood disasters. These climate models have never been validated by actual observations, notes Professor Robert Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at Australia’s James Cook University. Indeed, Australia’s own climate modeling agency (CSIRO) stresses that climate change scenarios are based on computer models that “involve simplifications of [real world] processes that are not fully understood. Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted...for the accuracy of forecasts inferred” from its reports.

“Modeling results are interesting - but worthless for setting public policy,” says Carter. But that is exactly how they’re being used. Sure, it’s conceivable that Antarctica could melt, and cause sea levels to rise 20 feet, as Al Gore and the government con-artists suggest. Greenhouse gases would merely have to increase average annual Antarctic temperatures from their current -50 degrees F to +40 degrees for a century or two, to melt 200,000 cubic miles of South Pole icecaps. A mere 90-degree swing.

That may be as likely as having the planet overrun by raptors and T-rexes cloned from DNA in fossilized mosquitoes. But it’s conceivable. And in the realm of global warming politics, that’s all that matters. As MIT atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen observes, “global warming has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own, quite removed from science.”

As one climate activist group put it: “The task...is not to persuade by rational argument.” It is “to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.” The strategy is to treat “climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is the route to mass behavior change.”

This is the kind of science, transparency, honesty and accountability we have come to expect over “human-caused climate chaos.” If the congressional, administration and activist conspirators behind this massive deceit were in the private sector - peddling bogus drugs, rather than bogus science - they’d quickly become convicts. Instead of jail time, though, they’ll probably get bonus checks. See PDF.

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.

Finally, the question we’ve all wanted to ask of the people in power: Where’s the evidence?

Senator Fielding holds a crucial vote on the proposed Emissions Trading Legislation.  Fielding and four independent scientists faced the Minister for the Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong, The Chief Scientist, Penny Sackett, and Professor Will Steffan, director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University. Read what happened from someone who was there.  Joanne Nova

Guest Post by Dr David Evans
17 June 2009

Australia’s Parliament House

Introduction
Australian Senator Steve Fielding met with the Australian Minister of Climate Change, Senator Penny Wong, on 15 June 2009. Senator Fielding was seeking evidence that human emissions of carbon dioxide were the main cause of global warming; Senator Wong presumably wanted Senator Fielding’s vote for the upcoming Emission Trading Scheme legislation.

I was at that meeting, one of four independent scientists invited by Senator Fielding. Many people have asked me what happened, so I am replying to everyone at once like this. These are my impressions of the meeting, with special attention to the way the meeting was conducted and to the arguments used by the alarmists. This account is not primarily a science discussion; nor is it a record of who said what. I took some notes during the meeting, but otherwise it is written from memory over the next three days.

Meetings between official alarmist and skeptical scientists are so rare they are newsworthy in their own right (see, there was no debate). The aim here is to inform the public about what sort of things happen at an event like this. While it is not the aim of this account to persuade anyone of a point of view on the causes of global warming, obviously it will be told from my skeptical viewpoint. Read more of this fascinating encounter here.

Senator Fielding commendably attended the Heartland ICCC III in Washington, D.C. in early June to hear more of the alternative viewpoint on climate change not covered by the Australian media in order to make an informed decision. We hope that visit and this reported meeting will help inform enough Australian legislators to reject Rudd’s and Wong’s disastrous ETS. We wish more of our U.S. congressman and senators would perform due diligence on this important devisive issue to avoid making a wrong ill-informed decision on the Waxman-Markey cap-anfd-tax bill that would affect every American for decades to come in a very negative way.

Update: See this Real Politics story on Fielding “Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare?”here.