A week or so ago the Latrobe University Professor of Politics Robert Manne wrote an awful pot-boiler at the ABC’s The Drum opinion site that reiterated the weary arguments about AGW, and blamed “the denialists” for having influenced public opinion away from action on the matter (here).
To my considerable surprise, the editor of The Drum then asked me to write a piece in response to Manne’s. That piece was posted this morning, and within a few hours it has attracted the usual avalanche of well over 100 mostly ad hom notes of abuse (here)
I will appreciate anyone who can spare brief time from their Xmas shopping and partying to contribute some brief rational comments about the matter to The Drum.
Seasonal greetings to all.
Bob
Professor Robert (Bob) M. Carter
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Marine Geophysical Laboratory
James Cook University
Townsville, Qld. 4811
AUSTRALIA
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Are your tax dollars helping hide global warming data from the public? Internal emails leaked as part of “Climategate 2.0” indicate the answer may be “Yes.”
The original Climategate emails—correspondence stolen from servers at a research facility in the U.K. and released on the Internet in late 2009—shook up the field of climate research. Now a new batch posted in late November to a Russian server shows that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit refused to share their U.S. government-funded data with anyone they thought would disagree with them.
Professor Phil Jones asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to a report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Making that case in 2009, the then-head of the Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones, told colleagues repeatedly that the U.S. Department of Energy was funding his data collection—and that officials there agreed that he should not have to release the data.
“Work on the land station data has been funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn’t be passed on. I got this [agreement] in 2007,” Jones wrote in a May 13, 2009, email to British officials, before listing reasons he did not want them to release data.
Two months later, Jones reiterated that sentiment to colleagues, saying that the data “has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
A third email from Jones written in 2007 echoes the idea: “They are happy with me not passing on the station data,” he wrote.
The emails have outraged climate-change skeptics who say they can’t trust climate studies unless they see the raw data—and how it has been adjusted.
“In every endeavor of science, making your work replicable by others is a basic tenet of proof,” Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and climate change blogger, told FoxNews.com. “If other scientists cannot replicate your work, it brings your work into question.”
Is the Department of Energy to blame? The Climategate emails reveal correspondence only between Jones and his colleagues—not between him and the DoE.
“What’s missing,” Watts said, “is a… directive from DoE that they should withhold station data gathered under their grant. The email may be there, but....still under lock and key.”
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wants that key. He recently filed Freedom of Information acts with the DoE, requesting the emails they exchanged with Jones.
“So far no administration department has bothered to respond, indicating they… believe the time bought with stonewalling might just get them off the hook for disclosure,” Horner told FoxNews.com.
“Not with us, it won’t,” he said.
The Department of Energy has until December 29 before it must legally respond to Horner’s request.
When contacted by FoxNews.com, DoE spokesman Damien LaVera declined to comment.
However, climate change researcher and blogger Steve McIntyre forwarded FoxNews.com an email exchange from 2005 in which climate scientist Warwick Hughes asked an official at a DOE lab if he could get the data that the government paid Jones to collect.
“I am asking you to provide me with the following data… DoE has been funding [the data] since the 1980s,” Hughes noted in his request.
But Tom Boden, of the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, told Hughes at the time that the DOE itself did not have the data, and that “you will need to contact Phil [Jones] directly. I spoke today with the DOE program manager who indicated Phil was not obligated under the conditions of past or present DOE proposal awards to provide these items.”
McIntyre said he himself later had a similar exchange with the DOE, after which “I suggested that they amend this as a condition of further financing.”
“I was surprised that the new emails show them actively taking the opposite approach,” he added.
Asked about the connection with the Department of Energy, Simon Dunford, a spokesman for Jones’ Climatic Research Unit, told FoxNews.com that Jones has changed his tune since the emails were made public.
“Prof Jones has already accepted he should have been more open, and has since made all the station data referred to in these emails publicly available,” Dunford told FoxNews.com.
Watts said that while much of the data itself is now available, the methods of adjusting it—statistical modification meant to filter anomalies, “normalize” the data, and potentially highlight certain trends—remain a secret.
“Much of climate science, in terms of the computer processing that goes on, remains a black box to the outside world. We see the data go in, and we see the data that come out as a finished product—but we don’t know how they adjust it in between.”
Watts said he would like to be given the adjustment formulas to make his own determination.
“The fact that they are trying to keep people from replicating their studies—that’s the issue,” Watts noted. “Replication is the most important tenet of science.”
i have posted the latest revision to “A Chronological Listing of Early Weather Events” on my website. This revision adds more than 200 pages of new material, mostly on U.S. Weather to the chronology. The document is now 802 pages long and is a 12 megabyte pdf file. If you think weather in this country has increased in intensity due to man-made global warming, perhaps a review of U.S. weather during the 1870’s, 1880’s and 1890’s is in order.
James A. Marusek
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Lord Christopher Monckton:
Treaty calls for the west to achieve 50 percent CO2 emissions reduction within the next eight years, a feat that would completely bankrupt the global economy and spark a new great depression
The UN Climate Change Summit in Durban has outlined the mandate to “respect the rights of Mother Earth” by paying a “climate debt,” a slush fund to bankroll the activities of a one-world government. I bet you did not know that Mother Earth had rights.
Lord Christopher Monckton said that the treaty
“calls for the west to achieve 50 percent CO2 emissions reduction within the next eight years, a feat that would completely bankrupt the global economy and spark a new great depression, as well as a more than 100 percent reduction by 2050, which presumably could only be accomplished by killing billions of humans to prevent them from exhaling carbon dioxide.”
Monckton writes,
“So, no motor cars, no coal-fired or gas-fired power stations, no aircraft, no trains, back to the Stone Age, but without even the right to light a carbon-emitting fire in your caves.”
The treaty calls for a two degree Celsius drop in global temperatures, which Monckton says, “would kill hundreds of millions and herald a new ice age.” So much reduction in CO2 concentration would “kill plant life and trees on the planet because they need levels of CO2 above 210 ppmv (parts per million by volume) to survive.”
International Climate Court of Justice
The plan calls to disband military forces as they contribute to climate change. The UN will become the world army and police of the globe. An “International Climate Court of Justice” will enforce the treaty. This will require paying a “climate debt” and reparations to third world nations if carbon cuts are not drastic. Developed nations are thus responsible and guilty for the weather patterns and they must be punished.
Monckton also writes that the money will be collected by UN bureaucrats and distributed according to their judgment.
The UN has designed new slush funds to enrich its coffers, a tax on shipping and aviation fuel, a worldwide cap and trade, and a new “Green Climate Fund.”
Green Climate Fund
According to Venezuela’s envoy, Claudia Salerno, the Green Climate Fund is “designed to help poor nations tackle global warming and nudge them towards a new global effort to fight climate change.”
I have a huge problem with this statement for two reasons. First, global warming has been debunked as a scientific hoax, and secondly, it is arrogant for bureaucrats to claim that humans can manage the climate or fight changes in climate. Over the past century, only two inches in water level rise has been measured, so it is disingenuous to say that many areas would be underwater without such draconian measures undertaken at the helm of the United Nations.
The “legally-binding treaty” is likely to pass this time, says Lord Monckton. The discussion centered on major polluters like China and India. The U.S. wants all polluters to be held to the same legal standard on emission cuts, while China and India do not wish their fast growing economies to be encumbered by strict guidelines.
Eco-Lunatics and Eco-Fascists
Lord Monckton was not allowed at the conference initially, he had to “parachute in.” He represented the Committee for Constructive Tomorrow, which provides “real solutions to dealing with environmental problems that third world nations are experiencing rather than the Marxist party line of environmentalist eco-fascists who want to punish the West alone and its developed nations.”
According to Lord Monckton, the eco-lunatics sent in goons in certain regions of Uganda, killed off the population and then declared the areas “carbon safe zones.” “These people are certifiably insane and are waging a sustained, malevolent attack on the West like termite ants.” They are going to send in troops to shut down entire industries for non-compliance with their UN Treaty.
Lord Monckton suggested that people should read for themselves the document at climatedepot.com at the Committee for Constructive Tomorrow website and at cfact.org. More than 1,000 international scientists disagree over “man-made global warming” claims.
United Nations “scientists” warn that “time is running out to close the gap between current pledges on cutting greenhouse gases and avoiding a catastrophic rise in average global temperatures.”
UN released reports claim that “delays on a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions will make it harder to keep the average temperature rise to within 2 Celsius over the next century.” This Chicken Little, the Sky is Falling warning is so ridiculous, pretending that the UN has the power to stop the eruption of a volcano, a hurricane, a tsunami, or control nature with its demanding third world dictatorships at the helm.
The treaty is based on deliberately erroneous “scientific data” provided by Al Gore and other environmentalist alarmists who claim, “A warming planet has already intensified droughts and floods, increased crop failures, and sea levels could rise to levels that would submerge several small island nations, who are holding out for more ambitious targets in emission cuts.”
The fact that solar flares have intensified, the fact that the data suggest, based on temperature readings in the last century, that we are in a global cooling period, are not variables in this international climate calamity travesty.
If you think that our federal government has not already bought into the climate change debacle, you would be wrong.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in October 2009 that it is “hard for federal, state, and local officials to predict the impact of climate change, and thus hard to justify the current costs of adaptation efforts for potentially less certain future benefits.”
Based on opinion surveys of 176 people, with only 61 percent returning the questionnaire, the following issues were identified in reference to a “federal climate service:”
· Translating climate data such as temperatures and precipitation changes into information that officials would need to make decisions
· The difficulty in justifying the current costs of adaptation with limited information about future benefits.
The October 2009 report on climate change adaptation recommended the “development of a strategic plan to guide the nation’s efforts to adapt to a changing climate, including the mechanisms to increase the capacity of federal, state, and local agencies to incorporate information about current and potential climate change impacts into government decision making.”
On November 16, 2011, GAO released a document, “Climate Change Adaptation,” during the testimony before the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and the U.S. Senate.
Based on global-scale models, and we know how reliably scientific those are, GAO suggested that data from such models must be downscaled to a geographic area relevant to decision makers.
GAO testified that “climate change is a complex, crosscutting issue that poses risks to many existing environmental and economic systems, including agriculture, infrastructure, ecosystems, and human health.”
The globe has gone through periods of mild to severe climate changes throughout history. Climate change is not something we suddenly discovered and it was never proven scientifically to be the result of human activity.
We do have ample evidence that the University of East Anglia had hidden or destroyed data that had proven the global warming hypothesis to be a hoax. Most recently, 5,000 more e-mails were released as evidence that data was tampered with by the academics pushing the Marxist environmental agenda.
“The data does not matter. We are not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models,” said Professor Chris Folland from the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. Dr. David Frame, a climate modeler at Oxford University stated, The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.”
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony...climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world,” said Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment.
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy,” said Timothy Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation.
“A 2009 assessment by the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) found that climate-related changes - such as rising temperatures and sea level -will combine with pollution, population growth, urbanization, and other social, economic, and environmental stresses to create larger impacts than from any of these factors alone.” Thirteen U.S. federal agencies are subscribers to USGCRP.
“According to the National Academies, USGCRP, and others, greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will continue altering the climate system into the future, regardless of emissions control efforts. Therefore,adaptation - defined as adjustments to natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climate change -is an important part of the response to climate change.”
As with UN Agenda 21, it seems that the fix is on Climate Change and no amount of dissension from the rest of the population or scientific clarity will dissuade the minority policy makers. One world environmental control by the United Nations through its Secretariat is a bad idea for the developed world; it is a bad idea for the United States, and a bad idea for the sovereignty of many developed nations. It is not just bad policy; it is extortion, plain and simple.
Do kindergarten teacher views on climate science really debunk those of the climate skeptics?
That’s what the American Geophysical Union reportedly says.
According to the Environmental News Examiner article “American Geophysical scientists strike back with climate change literacy online”:
American Geophysical Union (AGU) scientists struck back at climate change deniers yesterday at the 44th annual AGU meeting of earth scientists from around the world in step with global leaders’ discussion of solutions to climate change at the 17th U.N. Climate Change Conference in Durban, Africa.
A representative from NASA announced “My guess is that it isn’t that there are a lot of climate change deniers in as so much as the few of them there are - are just loud.”
And how exactly did the AGU strike back a deniers? With a survey of K-12 teachers:
Further supporting the NASA position on global warming, a representative from the National Earth Science Teachers of America (NESTA) reported the results of 555 K-12 teachers in the United States who currently teach about climate change.
And what were the results?
On average, 89% of respondents indicated that they believe global warming is happening with the highest levels of agreement from respondents in Western states, younger teachers, urban teachers, and females.
Only 6% of respondents indicated that they did not believe global warming is happening. On average, only 13% of respondents attribute climate change to mainly natural causes with the highest rates of this response among male and Southern respondents.
Apparently as far as the AGU is concerned, climate skeptics - including top scientists like Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, hydrogen bomb architect Edward Teller, MIT atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen, space science pioneer S. Fred Singer, first president of the National Academy of Sciences Frederick Seitz and more than 31,000 other American scientists - are wrong because their views differ with those of 494 K-12 teachers.
Words fail us.
Icecap Note: Of course these young teachers have been brainwashed by the environmental professors who have taken over the schools and the science textbooks that present the failied global warming theory as fact. The AGU has fallen so far, it may never recover.
Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter, Greenwire: Wednesday, December 7, 2011
DURBAN, South Africa—The United States has abandoned the international effort to curb global warming and will never again consider legislation that would limit heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, the Senate’s chief climate skeptic told the U.N. climate conference here in a brash video message today.
“The message from Washington to the U.N. delegates in South Africa this week could not be any clearer: You are being ignored,” Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe told negotiators and environmentalists in a small meeting room on the sidelines of the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP).
“And you are being ignored,” he added, “by your biggest allies in the United States—that’s President Obama and the Democratic leadership in the Senate.”
Two years ago, Inhofe noted, Obama and several members of Congress traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, to attend the U.N. talks. Though that meeting didn’t yield a new treaty on emissions, the president was instrumental in brokering a voluntary agreement on national emission-cutting targets and funding known as the Copenhagen Accord.
But Obama stayed home this year, as did all members of Congress and the president’s Cabinet, citing busy year-end agendas. And expectations for the U.N. gathering are low, with some expecting it to lead to the death of the Kyoto Protocol—the only binding multilateral treaty on climate change. Many here are blaming U.S. domestic policy and negotiating stance for the treaty’s demise.
Inhofe—sounding a bit like Hanoi Hannah, a radio personality known for her propaganda broadcasts during the Vietnam War—pronounced efforts to pass U.S. climate legislation “done, gone, dead forever.” And gone with them, he said, is the Kyoto Protocol.
“You should know that global warming skeptics everywhere wish we could be with you celebrating the final nail in the coffin on location in South Africa,” he said. “And tell Al Gore hello for me.”
Congressional Democrats have been relatively quiet on the Durban talks, but Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer released her own statement today from Washington in which she said climate action is vital.
The California Democrat, who was involved in several failed attempts to win Senate passage of a climate change bill, only mentioned the U.N. climate talks once. She wished the negotiators good luck.
Instead, Boxer focused on instances of extreme weather that some link to climate change and on efforts Democrats and her home state have made to ratchet down emissions.
“It is our moral obligation and legislative responsibility to address this enormous global challenge,” she said. “I pledge to do everything I can to stand up to climate change deniers, to shine a light on the truth, and to build support for taking common-sense steps to address this critical global problem.”
ICECAP NOTE: No Senator, if California chooses to self destruct over a phoney cause, don’t expect the rest of the states to follow. Spain led the way in Europe to renewables for carbon control and their unemployment is over 24%. Since CO2 has NO effect on climate, but is a plant fertilizer, I advocate cranking up fossil fuel plants and driving sensible cars that I don’t have to plug in twice a day.
Skeptics parachute into Durban
Inhofe’s triumphant mood was echoed by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the skeptic group whose members arrived here yesterday by landing on North Beach in brightly colored parachutes bearing slogans like “Climategate 2.0: Science Not Settled.”
“Climategate” is the name given to the scandal in 2009 in which emails were stolen from a British university and posted to the Internet just ahead of the Copenhagen talks. Skeptics said the emails, written by prominent climate scientists, showed researchers were colluding to manipulate data to show human activities are changing climate patterns. Subsequent independent investigations of those emails found that that was not the case.
A similar bunch of emails surfaced last month, but they appeared to be leftovers from the first event. This is the “Climategate 2.0” referred to on the parachute.
Marc Morano, a former Inhofe staffer who now maintains the skeptic blog Climate Depot, taunted the audience that former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, the only candidate for the Republican presidential nomination who had maintained that man-made climate change is occurring, has “bailed,” citing the second batch of emails.
“The only Republican you had hope for has bailed on you,” he said. “So that’s the good, cheery news I bring you.”
A British heckler in the audience pointed out that in appearances announcing his shift, Huntsman said the University of East Anglia—where the emails originated—was located in Scotland. East Anglia is a county in England.
Morano was joined on stage by Leon Louw, executive director of South Africa’s Free Market Institute, who said that climate change was inevitable, but could be better dealt with by strong economies run on cheap, high-carbon fuels.
The Kyoto Protocol keeps African countries poor, he said, “and the best that can be done for them is that they can have some kind of alternative way of being poor.”
“What I think anyone who is decent wants to see is for Africa, and Asia, and other poor parts of the world to have cities like New York, Tokyo and Paris,” he said.
Also speaking were prominent international climate skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton and Kelvin Kemm, an African nuclear physicist who said that the current trend of warming was no different than historic events like the mini-ice age that froze the Thames River in Shakespeare’s time.
Monckton answered the only questions entertained by the group, in which he explained that the oceans are not becoming more acidic as most climate scientists have claimed. Monckton himself is not a climate scientist, but was a domestic policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Morano said after the presentation that the group would meet with South African activists, but would not bother meeting with U.N. delegates.
“We’re here to deliver the message, because this is a vast echo chamber here where they never hear from the outside world—except essentially falsehoods about how the whole world is waiting breathless for some kind of agreement,” he said, “where they think the United Nations is somehow going to somehow be able to pass some kind of regulation that’s going to control the floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and droughts.
“This is now getting to the level of medieval witchcraft, where they think the U.N. can control the weather.”
On Wednesday, 7 December at 15:30 CFACT will cosponsor a press conference with U.S. Senator James Inhofe in Room Kosi Palm (ICC level 2).
On Tuesday, CFACT conducted a highly publicized parachute drop which called attention to Climategate 2.0 (details including usable video of the drop and Lord Monckton jumping from the plane at www.CFACT.tv).
The Wednesday press conference will feature an analysis from Senator Inhofe of the prospects of a new climate treaty in the U.S. Senate. The conference will also feature the release of Marc Morano’s (editor in chief of ClimateDepot.com) new report “From A-Z” which details troubles and failings in what has been falsely proclaimed by global warming advocates to be a “settled scientific consensus.”
Many of the proponents of man-made global warming are now claiming that climate change is worse than they predicted. According to an October 18, 2011 Daily Climate article, global warming activists claim that the “evidence builds that scientists underplay climate impacts” and “if anything, global climate disruption is likely to be significantly worse than has been suggested.”
But this exclusive Climate Depot exhaustive A-Z Climate Reality Check report on the scientific reality of the failure of man-made global warming shatters any such illusions that the climate is “worse than we thought.” As the real world evidence mounts that global warming claims are failing, the climate activists have ramped up predictions of future climate change impacts to declare that it “worse than we thought.” But a prediction or projection of 50-100 years into the future is not “evidence.” Recent scientific data and developments reveal that Mother Nature is playing a cruel joke on the promoters of man-made climate fears.
The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim—from A-Z—the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing, and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts. This Climate Depot special report categorizes and indexes the full range of climate developments in a handy A-Z reference guide. The A-Z report includes key facts, peer-reviewed studies and the latest data and developments with links for further reading, on an exhaustive range of man-made global warming claims.
Full PDF of A-Z Climate Reality Check.
“Climate Depot’s new A-Z report reveals that the great man-made global warming catastrophe that was predicted - has been cancelled.” Morano said. “The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim - from A-Z - the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing and in many instances going in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts. This Climate Depot special report categorizes and indexes the full range of climate developments in a handy A-Z reference guide from the Antarctic to Polar Bears to Mount Kilimanjaro to Sea Levels to Global temperatures to hurricanes and tornados.”
Nobel Prize nominee, Leon Louw, Executive Director of South Africa’s Free Market Institute, will discuss the devastating impact climate policy has had on the economies of both the developed and developing world and the crippling hindrance it poses to the poor.
South African nuclear physicist Dr. Kelvin Kemm will discuss global warming policy providing a unique South African analysis.
Lord Christopher Monckton, freshly rested from his parachute jump to call attention to Climategate 2.0, will explain exactly why it would be a mistake to adopt a new treaty in Durban along the lines of the failed Kyoto Protocol.
“Secretary Figueres is telling the COP that she can obtain a new commitment period in Durban.” Said CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker. “After she hears what Senator Inhofe has to say, she may want to reevaluate her wishful thinking.”
Go to www.CLIMATEDEPOT.com for details on Climategate 2.0. More information on CFACT’s mission to Durban at www.CFACT.tv. Also at www.CFACT.org, & www.CFACT.eu.
In the US, in a speech delivered at Osawatomie High School in Osawatomie, Kansas, on Tuesday, President Barack Obama argued that while a limited government that preserves free markets “speaks to our rugged individualism” as Americans, such a system “doesn’t work” and “has never worked” and that Americans must look to a more activist government that taxes more, spends more and regulates more if they want to preserve the middle class.
“‘[T]here is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. ‘The market will take care of everything,’ they tell us,” said Obama. “If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes - especially for the wealthy - our economy will grow stronger.
“Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers,” Obama continued. “But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.
No Mr. Pressident Jack Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton demonstrated that it works. What doesn’t work and won’t work is your approach modelled after the failed socialist experiemnts in Europe that promises trickle up poverty. And if you want to help the middle class, approve the Keystone Pipeline project as your union supporters ask and tell the enviros to stuff it. That will create 20,000 jobs, make us more energy independent, drop the cost of energy by 30%, one of the biggest drains on the economy and expenses for the low and middle classes. Forget the green job agenda which is partially responsible for the economic woes and unemployment and even higher energy costs in Europe. Global warming is a farce, green jobs just a liberal fantasy that has never worked, won’t work and could ultimately destroy our economy.
