While on extended leave in New York, I often pondered conditions in this huge city, versus in Uganda and most of Africa. Perhaps most of all, I reflected on electricity and the economic activity, modern living standards and improved health that this amazing technology makes possible. I thought about that as I read articles about climate change “reparations” and other foreign aid, oil and gas discoveries in Africa, and impediments to African electricity and economic development.

Several European and US energy companies recently announced major natural gas discoveries in East Africa, both onshore and offshore. Other companies are using hydraulic fracturing to unlock natural gas from the continent’s shale rock formations.

There is a lot of talk about building LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminals to ship gas overseas. “I’m convinced that in 10 years’ time Tanzania, Mozambique and Kenya will together form a major gas hub for Asian and Far Eastern markets,” Cove Energy CEO John Craven told the Wall Street Journal.

There is a lot of gas in West Africa too, especially in Angola and Nigeria, and companies are often criticized for “flaring” gas - burning it off at the wellhead, instead of using it for something productive. (The same thing happened in the United States, until people figured our how to use this previously unwanted byproduct of oil production to heat homes, generate electricity, and make fertilizers, plastics and chemicals.)

Why should this valuable energy resource be flared? In fact, why should we just talk about sending it to Asia, the Far East and other markets? Why aren’t we talking more about using it right here in Africa?

Why aren’t we talking more about using it right here in Africa?

East African gas could easily be used all over the Great Lakes region to generate electricity for homes and businesses, hospitals and schools, jobs and economic growth - turning dreams into reality. All we’d need to do is provide legal, tax and other incentives to attract investors who could build a few gas-fired generating plants and pipelines to connect them to gas fields.

There would still be plenty of gas for export, but the reliable, affordable electricity would launch an economic boom unlike anything we have ever seen.

That’s what happened in the southeastern United States, when the Tennessee Valley Authority began building hydroelectric dams and other projects. One of America’s poorest regions was transformed into an economic powerhouse. Dams built in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest regions of the USA during the Great Depression did the same thing.

Recognizing the immense value of electricity, South Africa is racing to build the Medupi coal-fired power plant and many other generators and transmission lines. In just one example, when an electrical line finally reached a remote area of the country, two furniture makers were able to install power equipment, hire local workers, sell far more furniture of much higher quality - and help launch a local economic revolution that has enabled families to improve their living standards greatly.

Just imagine what could happen if people all over Africa could have access to affordable electricity, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year!

Meanwhile, Ghana is building a 130-MW gas-fired power plant, even though the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation refused to support the $185-million project. Other investors stepped forward, the plant is being built, the country will send some of its abundant natural gas to the plant, and numerous Ghanaians will finally enjoy the blessings of modern living through electricity.

Just imagine what could happen if people all over Africa could have access to affordable electricity, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year!

As Zambian Dambisa Moyo and South African Leon Louw have often said, foreign aid causes more harm than good- whether it is traditional aid or new-fangled “climate reparation” aid. Most of it ends up in just a few hands. Poor families see little or no improvement in their lives. And people have few incentives and little money to make investments, launch businesses or improve their homes and communities.

Foreign aid keeps people alive, but barely. It ties them to international welfare, in perpetual poverty, with little or no chance to become middle class.

Let them eat cake!

Access to electricity changes everything. It puts people in charge of their future. It unleashes the human spirit, and people’s innovative and entrepreneurial instincts. It gives people one of the most important tools they need: affordable, reliable energy for lights, refrigerators, computers and machinery - along with good jobs, so that they can afford electricity, more nutritious food, healthcare and other basics.

Some say putting more carbon dioxide into the air from burning natural gas will affect the climate. However, many scientists say CO2 plays only a minor role in climate change - and Africans already put millions of tons into the air by burning wood, grass and dung, which are far less efficient fuel sources and cannot generate electricity.

The rest of the world - especially Europeans, Americans, Chinese and Indians – are burning enormous amounts of coal and natural gas to generate the electricity that runs their countries. Why shouldn’t Africa? Besides, carbon dioxide makes plants grow better, even in droughts, and companies like General Electric are developing cleaner, more efficient gas turbine technologies that African nations could purchase.

Kenya, Uganda and other African countries would not need extensive gas pipeline systems. They just need to build a few pipelines to carry gas to large generating units that would provide electricity for homes, hospitals, schools, shops, factories and water treatment plants. Miracles would happen.

As my wife, businesswoman and fellow malaria and economic development activist Fiona Kobusingye, has pointed out, “Not having electricity means millions of Africans die every year from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities.”

All that would change if our countries had electricity.

The modern world runs on electricity. It’s time for Africa to take its rightful place among the healthy and prosperous nations of the world. Our growing supplies of natural gas could help make that happen.

Cyril Boynes, Jr. is co-chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality - Uganda.

Just to recap, we have learnt that GISS temperatures for Iceland and Greenland have been artificially adjusted, with the result that current temperatures appear much warmer than when compared with the warm period during the 1940’s. Temperature data for Reykjavik from the Iceland Met Office confirmed that this adjustment was wholly artificial and resulted in a net warming of about a half a degree centigrade since 1940 and that the actual mean temperatures in the last decade are about a degree less than GISS show.

I also have data from the Iceland Met Office for two other stations, Stykkisholmur and Akureyri and these show the same pattern of adjustments as the graphs below illustrate.


Enlarged.

Enlarged.

In both cases the temperatures from 1940 to 1964 have been adjusted downwards, and as with Reykjavik the overall effect is to create about a half a degree of warming.

On further investigation, it appears that the adjustments have actually been carried out by GHCN, whose figures GISS use. The changes seem to have taken place when they issued a revised version, 3.1, of their database in November 2011.  The GHCN website gives access to all their stations and shows both adjusted and unadjusted data. Examination of these records confirms that, out of eight stations in Iceland, seven have had such artificial warming applied, e.g

Enlarged.

The top right hand graph (red) is the unadjusted version, middle one is adjusted, and the bottom one graphs the adjustment (blue is minus, red plus).

Evidence is already building up that these adjustments are not limited to only Iceland. Similar adjustments have already been found in Greenland, Ireland and Scotland.

This issue raises several points of concern :-

1) These are palpably not “one-off” adjustments, which might be justified for station location changes or other local reasons. Have they been made as a result of a deliberate decision by GHCN, or are they the result of an error or a faulty piece of software?

2) If the result of error, what does this tell us about the quality control procedures at GHCN and GISS?

3) How many other similar adjustments have been made previously that have not been spotted? Would these have been uncovered without the attention of independent observers?

4) If GHCN believe the adjustments are justified, why have they not published their results and reasons for discussion, before issuing the revision? According to their CHANGELOG “GHCNMv3.1.0 is released with several minor corrections and a reworking of internal arrays for more efficient operations.” No mention of large scale temperature adjustments!

5) What assurance do we have that more changes of this sort won’t be made in future?

La Nina events may make flu pandemics more likely, research suggests.

US-based scientists found that the last four pandemics all occurred after La Nina events, which bring cool waters to the surface of the eastern Pacific.

In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they say that flu-carrying birds may change migratory patterns during La Nina conditions.

However, many other La Nina events have not seen novel flu strains spread around the world, they caution.

So while the climatic phenomenon may make a pandemic more likely, they say, it is not sufficient on its own - and may not be necessary either.

La Nina is the cold cousin of El Nino - the two collectively making up the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

“Certainly ENSO affects weather and precipitation and humidity around the world,” said Jeffrey Shaman from Columbia University in New York.

“But the effects are very varied around the world - there’s no coherent picture.”

Nevertheless, the last four pandemics - the Spanish Flu that began in 1918, the Asian Flu of 1957, the Hong Kong Flu of 1958 and the swine flu of 2009 - were all preceded by periods of La Nina conditions.

What pandemics have in common is that they all feature novel strains of the virus to which people have not developed immunity.

Typically these are created when two existing strains infecting an animal such as a bird or a pig exchange genetic material.

The link to La Nina events is not clear. But recent research has shown that some wild birds’ patterns of flights and stopovers during migrations, or moulting times, differ between El Nino and La Nina years.

“Our best guess is this brings together birds [in La Nina conditions] that don’t otherwise mix, and that allows the genetic reassortment to take place,” Professor Shaman told BBC News.

Yet the fact that many other La Nina periods have not been followed by a pandemic indicate that other factors must also be involved.

If the swine flu pandemic of 2009-10 was part of this pattern, the crossing of viral strains must have had something to do with birds as well as pigs.

As wild migratory birds will sometimes visit farms and as domestic flocks of ducks or chickens often live alongside pigs, especially in developing countries, this is quite feasible.

Professor Shaman cautions that the link is far from being firm enough that it could be used as a tool to forecast pandemics. 

NOTE: BACK IN 2009, Eugenio Hackbart of our friends at the METSUL reported on ICECAP that finding:

“..all the flu pandemics in the last 100 years originated in periods of negative PDO and cooling...”
Eugenio Hackbart, METSUL

Our chief meteorologist at MetSul Weather Center Eugenio Hackbart wrote an article, in Portuguese, to the ABC Sunday newspaper that was published on August 28th, calling the attention of the readers to the fact that all the flu pandemics in the last 100 years originated in periods of negative PDO and cooling trend in the world. There were the following pandemics:

Spanish Flu: 1918-1920
Asian Flu: 1957-1958
Hong Kong Flu: 1968-1969
Swine Flu: 2009-

Note that the coldest period of the PDO in the 20th century - 1946 to 1976 - recorded two flu pandemics. Also note that currently we are under the longest streak of months of negatives values for the PDO since late 60’s, exactly when there was the last pandemic prior to the current one. It is very interesting to plot in the PDO graphic the years the flu pandemics originated. MetSul understands that, if climate in fact plays a role, more frequent La Nina events (cold years) and not El Nino episodes have a role to favor flu pandemics.

About 10 years ago, December 20, 2002 to be exact, we published a paper titled “Revised 21st century temperature projections” in the journal Climate Research. We concluded:

Temperature projections for the 21st century made in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate a rise of 1.4 to 5.8C for 1990-2100. However, several independent lines of evidence suggest that the projections at the upper end of this range are not well supported… The constancy of these somewhat independent results encourages us to conclude that 21st century warming will be modest and near the low end of the IPCC TAR projections.

We examined several different avenues of determining the likely amount of global warming to come over the 21st century. One was an adjustment to climate models based on (then) new research appearing in the peer-reviewed journals that related to the strength of the carbon cycle feedbacks (less than previously determined), the warming effect of black carbon aerosols (greater than previously determined), and the magnitude of the climate sensitivity (lower than previous estimates). Another was an adjustment (downward) to the rate of the future build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide that was guided by the character of the observed atmospheric CO2 increase (which had flattened out during the previous 25 years). And our third estimate of future warming was the most comprehensive, as it used the observed character of global temperature increase - an integrator of all processes acting upon it - to guide an adjustment to the temperature projections produced by a collection of climate models. All three avenues that we pursued led to somewhat similar estimates for the end-of- the-century temperature rise. Here is how we described our findings in paper’s Abstract:

Since the publication of the TAR, several findings have appeared in the scientific literature that challenge many of the assumptions that generated the TAR temperature range. Incorporating new findings on the radiative forcing of black carbon (BC) aerosols, the magnitude of the climate sensitivity, and the strength of the climate/carbon cycle feedbacks into a simple upwelling diffusion/energy balance model similar to the one that was used in the TAR, we find that the range of projected warming for the 1990–2100 period is reduced to 1.1–2.8C. When we adjust the TAR emissions scenarios to include an atmospheric CO2 pathway that is based upon observed CO2 increases during the past 25 yr, we find a warming range of 1.5–2.6C prior to the adjustments for the new findings. Factoring in these findings along with the adjusted CO2 pathway reduces the range to 1.0–1.6C. And thirdly, a simple empirical adjustment to the average of a large family of models, based upon observed changes in temperature, yields a warming range of 1.3–3.0C, with a central value of 1.9C.

We thus concluded:

Our adjustments of the projected temperature trends for the 21st century all produce warming trends that cluster in the lower portion of the IPCC TAR range. Together, they result in a range of warming from 1990 to 2100 of 1.0 to 3.0C, with a central value that averages 1.8C across our analyses.

Little did we know at the time, but behind the scenes, our paper, the review process that resulted in its publication, the editor in charge of our submission, and the journal itself, were being derided by the sleazy crowd that revealed themselves in the notorious “Climategate” emails, first released in November, 2009. In fact, the publication of our paper was to serve as one of the central pillars that this goon squad used to attack on the integrity of the journal Climate Research and one of its editors, Chris de Freitas.

The initial complaint about our paper was raised back in 2003 shortly after its publication by Tom Wigley, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and University of Toronto’s L. D. Danny Harvey, who served as supposedly “anonymous” reviewers of the paper and who apparently had a less than favorable opinion about our work that they weren’t shy about spreading around. According to Australian climate scientist Barrie Pittock:

I heard second hand that Tom Wigley was very annoyed about a paper which gave very low projections of future warmings (I forget which paper, but it was in a recent issue [of Climate Research]) got through despite strong criticism from him as a reviewer.

So much for being anonymous.

The nature of Wigley and Harvey’s dissatisfaction was later made clear in a letter they sent to Chris de Freitas (the editor at Climate Research who oversaw our submission) and demanded to know the details of the review process that led to the publication of our paper over their recommendation for its rejection. Here is an excerpt from that letter:

Your decision that a paper judged totally unacceptable for publication should not require re-review is unprecedented in our experience. We therefore request that you forward to us copies of the authors responses to our criticisms, together with: (1) your reason for not sending these responses or the revised manuscript to us; (2) an explanation for your judgment that the revised paper should be published in the absence of our re-review; and (3) your reason for failing to follow accepted editorial procedures.

Wigley asked Harvey to distribute a copy of their letter of inquiry/complaint to a large number of individuals who were organizing some type of punitive action against Climate Research for publishing what they considered to be “bad” papers. Apparently, Dr. de Freitas responded to Wigley and Harvey’s demands with the following perfectly reasonable explanation:

The [Michaels et al. manuscript] was reviewed initially by five referees… The other three referees, all reputable atmospheric scientists, agreed it should be published subject to minor revision. Even then I used a sixth person to help me decide. I took his advice and that of the three other referees and sent the [manuscript] back for revision. It was later accepted for publication. The refereeing process was more rigorous than usual.

This did little to appease to those wanting to discredit Climate Research (and prevent the publication of “skeptic” research) as evidenced by this email from Mike Mann to Tom Wigley and a long list of other influential climate scientists:

Dear Tom et al,

Thanks for comments - I see we’ve built up an impressive distribution list here!
...

Much like a server which has been compromised as a launching point for computer viruses, I fear that “Climate Research” has become a hopelessly compromised vehicle in the skeptics’ (can we find a better word?) disinformation campaign, and some of the discussion that I’ve seen (e.g. a potential threat of mass resignation among the legitimate members of the CR editorial board) seems, in my opinion, to have some potential merit.

This should be justified not on the basis of the publication of science we may not like of course, but based on the evidence (e.g. as provided by Tom and Danny Harvey and I’m sure there is much more) that a legitimate peer-review process has not been followed by at least one particular editor.

Mann went on to add “it was easy to make sure that the worst papers, perhaps including certain ones Tom refers to, didn’t see the light of the day at J. Climate.” This was because Mann was serving as an editor of the Journal of Climate and was indicating that he could control the content of accepted papers. But since Climate Research was beyond their direct control, it required a different route to content control. Thus pressure was brought to bear on the editors as well as on the publisher of the journal. And, they were willing to make things personal. For a more complete telling of the type and timeline of the pressure brought upon Chris de Freitas and Climate Research see this story put together from the Climategate emails by Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That.

Now, let’s turn the wheels of time ahead 10 years, to January 10, 2012. Just published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is a paper with this provocative title: “Improved constraints in 21st century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations” by Nathan Gillett and colleagues from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis of Environment Canada (not a group that anyone would confuse with the usual skeptics). An excerpt from the paper’s abstract provides the gist of the analysis:

Projections of 21st century warming may be derived by using regression-based methods to scale a model’s projected warming up or down according to whether it under- or over-predicts the response to anthropogenic forcings over the historical period. Here we apply such a method using near surface air temperature observations over the 1851–2010 period, historical simulations of the response to changing greenhouse gases, aerosols and natural forcings, and simulations of future climate change under the Representative Concentration Pathways from the second generation Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM2).

Or, to put it another way, Gillett et al. used the observed character of global temperature increase - an integrator of all processes acting upon it - to guide an adjustment to the temperature projections produced by a climate model. Sounds familiar!!

And what did they find? From the Abstract of Gillett et al.:

Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways.

The Transient Climate Response is the temperature rise at the time of the doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, which will most likely occur sometime in the latter decades of this century. Which means that results of Gillett et al. are in direct accordance with the results of Michaels et al. published 10 years prior and which played a central role in precipitating the wrath of the Climategate scientists upon us, Chris de Freitas and Climate Research.

Both the Gillett et al. (2012) and the Michaels et al. (2002) studies show that climate models are over-predicting the amount of warming that is a result of human changes to the constituents of the atmosphere, and that when they are constrained to conform to actual observations of the earth’s temperature progression, the models project much less future warming (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Dashed lines show the projected course of 21st century global temperature rise as projected by the latest version (CanESM2) of the Canadian coupled ocean‐atmosphere climate model for three different future emission scenarios (RCPs). Colored bars represent the range of model projections when constrained by past 160 years of observations. All uncertainty ranges are 5–95%. (figure adapted from Gillet et al., 2012: note the original figure included additional data not relevant to this discussion).

And a final word of advice to whoever was the editor at GRL that was responsible for overseeing the Gillett et al. publication - watch your back.

References:

Gillett, N.P., et al., 2012. Improved constraints on 21st-century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L01704, doi:10.1029/2011GL050226.

Michaels, P.J., et al., 2002. Revised 21st century temperature projections. Climate Research, 23, 1-9.

And what about a guy with a clash of financial interests and the spouse of a radical Marxist wife?

Climate activist blog Mother Jones has posted this interesting video that complains about the conservative attitudes of the Republican Party (and the G.O.P. presidential candidates) to the issue of climate change:


The video was created ahead of the New Hampshire primaries.

If you listen to 4:00-5:00, you will hear a lot from MIT climate alarmist Kerry Emanuel. He describes himself as one of the few Republican scientists in the U.S. His impressive punch line is that he is ashamed to be an American because the Republican party that he votes for (much like Obama whom he chose in 2008) isn’t alarmist enough.

Instead, Kerry tells us, the Republican party is all about responsibility. And the main responsibility of the conservative people is to act collectively, share the wealth with the whole world, introduce and increase taxes, kindly ask the anointed people in the government to take care of everything, and to adopt the opinions about the climate that were held by Osama bin Laden, Al Gore, and (today) Fidel Castro.

Well, I thought that one of the defining features of the Republican Party is that it usually does not share these opinions, and even if it believed that there is a problem related to the climate (which it shouldn’t because there’s none), it should adopt totally different solutions than those that are proposed by the most radical left-wing forces in the world. In other words, if many of the candidates for the Republican Party were paying lip service to the climate jihad and propaganda, it wouldn’t really be a conservative party.

Fine. These things are probably obvious to most readers. But Kerry Emanuel paints himself as a heroic climate alarmist inside a party that rejects the climate hysteria. Is he really brave? Is his formal political affiliation the most important fact he has to consider when he decides what opinions he should promote?

Not at all. There are more important things than your (very loosened) party affiliation - for example, the stability of your marriage and your banking account.

Let me start with the latter. If you make a Google search, you will need a minute to find out that Kerry A. Emanuel is either a board member or director of two insurance companies that are making money out of many things including the hypothetical climatic threats:

•AlphaCat Fund Ltd

•Homesite Insurance Company

Click the links above to see the sources including the name of the MIT professor.

Homesite is insuring landlords against things like floods (the first thing in the title of their web page). For example, you may be afraid that your house in Boston will be destroyed by the rising sea levels from the melting Greenland ice sheet (or from a “divine wind”, see the book above) and to pay some money to Homesite. Do you think that its director, Kerry A. Emanuel, will care about the money?

Rick Santorum, a flavor of the month, sensibly presents a rational, Republican attitude to a problem in NH

If you need to verify that it is the same Kerry Emanuel of MIT who is a director of this flood insurance company, try this page. He became a director in June 2011.

If the insurance against rising sea levels, hurricanes, and floods isn’t enough for your insurance company, or if you’re not satisfied that you’re just a director, Kerry Emanuel doesn’t rely just on HomeSite Insurance company. He is also a board member of the AlphaCut Fund, owned by Bermuda-based Validus Holdings, which is described in this way:

The AlphaCat Fund and the AlphaCat High Return Fund invest in private reinsurance transactions as well as catastrophe bonds, a common type of ILS issued by insurance and reinsurance companies. Validus Managers leverages the Validus Group’s extensive business sourcing, underwriting, research and analytic capabilities to construct ILS portfolios with a superior long-term expected return subject to prudent risk constraints.

Thanks to Junk Science.COM for the discovery of this insurance company; I found the Homesite. I can’t rule out that you will find additional insurance companies with a Kerry Emanuel on their board.

In the Czech Republic, we call Kerry Emanuel’s positions on global warming a “clash of interests” ("stret/konflikt zajmu” if you want the original words). I just happened to think that a few hundreds thousands or millions of dollars may be more important than some loosened relationship to any party - that Kerry Emanuel only uses to mask what he really cares about.

Wife

But the bizarre financial interests are not the end of the story. There’s something else that is decisively non-Republican about Kerry Emanuel: his wife. Susan Boyd-Bowman was born in Boston in 1950 but according to her CV (thanks, Steve!), she actually gave up her U.S. citizenship around the 1960s and she actually lived in the U.K. between 1974 and 1989. Her primary residence is in Lexington, Massachusetts (a small town I know pretty well, too, and have hundreds of photographs from there: we often biked there with a friend of mine and I’ve visited about two parties thrown by a co-author I share with Stephen Hawking who lives there) but she only lives in the U.S. on resident visa. Her secondary residence is in France.

Your humble correspondent has spent 6 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the same town where Kerry Emanuel works. So even though I may have never met him, I know many things. You know, one talks to many people in 6 years. One of the things I know is the reason why she abandoned the U.S. citizenship. She’s been a real hardcore left-wing activist and she was just ashamed to be an American at least since the 1960s. You know, America is a symbol of the evils of capitalism! Google Scholar is enough for you to check that Susan has belonged to the Marxist structuralist tradition whenever she wrote about TV. She’s always thought that good films should always mention “gender” and stay inside feminist and neo-Marxist perspectives.

I can give you another hint that nothing much has changed about her political views since the 1960s.

So Kerry Emanuel isn’t the first member of his family who is ashamed to be an American, so I guess that you don’t need to pay any attention to such big words. However, he may be the first member of his family who is superficially ashamed to be an American but who has flagrant financial conflicts of interests that actually drive his dishonest claims about the climate.

I urge Kerry Emanuel not to hide the facts that really matter in his future interviews and texts; his questionable links to the G.O.P. are not among the primary things that matter; it was inconceivable that no one would notice the things that actually do matter. Thank you very much for your understanding.

NOTE: See how Emanuel failed to disclose conflict on interest in his latest paper here.

Kerry a decade ago was part of a panel on the Perfect Storm. He was asked with the rest of us of Global Warming was real. He like the rest of us replied the evidence was not there. He later went that direction because as he implied to colleagues that was where the grant money was. And the accolades. When he crossed over to the dark side, the AMS awarded him with three presigious awards the FIRST year. And this ‘republican’ had a party celebrating Obama’s election in 2008.