By Geoffrey Lean, in Bali, The Telegraph
Environment and Climate ministers meeting in closed session in Bali last night insisted that an independent review should be carried out following the publicising of mistakes in its last report, and a row surrounding Dr Pachauri’s robust response to his critics. If his management is found to be at fault his position could become untenable.
Participants in the unprecedented meeting - held at the annual assembly of the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Governing Council in Bali - were sworn to secrecy over the decision and it is only expected to be announced after its detaled scope and composition have been worked out by UNEP and the World Meteorological Organisation, the two UN agencies that oversee the IPCC’s work.
The ministers - led by Hillary Benn, the Environment Secretary,and his counterparts from Germany,. Norway, Algeria and Antigua and Barbuda - refused to allow Dr Pachauri to decide who would carry out the review, insisting it must be completely and demonstrably independent of the IPCC.
The two agencies are expected first to approach national academies of sciences and to ensure that it examines the management of the organisation as well as its scientific procedures.
The review is to report by August to allow time for its conclusions - and Dr Pachauri’s position - to be assessed before the IPCC meets for its own annual assembly in Korea in October.
Achim Steiner, UNEP’s Executive Director said that the IPCC faced a “crisis of confidence” with the public. , According to participants at the meeting, Dr Pachauri expressed regret for any mistakes that had been made, but stopped short of apologising for them. “He gave the impression of making an apology without actually doing so”, said one.
The participants add that he admitted only one mistake, a discredited prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayas would entirely melt away by 2035, for which the IPCC has already apologised. They say he described other alleged errors - such as a prediction that food production in parts of Africa might be cut in half by 2020 or the citing of studies by pressure groups rather than peer-reviewed research - as misunderstandings.
The ministers regard the mistakes as exaggerated, point out that they just concern a few sentences in a 3000 page report, and say they do not in any way undermine the basic science behind global warming. Their main concern has been over the aggressive way in which Dr Pachauri has responded to criticism, beginning with denouncing Indian research suggesting that the glaciers were not melting so rapidly as “voodoo science”.
Many wish he would resign,. But he was reelected unopposed less than 18 months ago,and has often rejected doing so. He refused to comment on the latest developments.
Read more here.
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Punitive taxes would cost jobs, hitting economy
By Senator James Inhofe in the Hill
The surest way to rejuvenate our ailing economy, create American jobs, and strengthen our energy security is through an “all-of-the-above” energy policy that encourages production of our vast domestic resources. We can and should utilize all of the energy available to us, including natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear - along with emerging alternative energy sources like wind, biofuels, geothermal, and solar. A new non-partisan government report shows that America is an energy-rich nation. The Congressional Research Service found that America’s combined supply of recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal is the largest on Earth. In fact, the CRS reports that America’s recoverable resources are far larger than those of Saudi Arabia (3rd), China (4th), and Canada (6th) combined - and that’s without including America’s immense oil shale and methane hydrates deposits. Additionally, just-released Department of Energy statistics show that the United States has eclipsed Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas.
To the detriment our energy security and the economy, the Obama administration - through, in some cases, explicit regulations and purposeful inaction - is keeping much of our abundant energy supply off-limits. As with most of my colleagues, I appreciated President Barack Obama’s support for nuclear energy and natural gas during his State of the Union address last month. But the release of the Obama budget just one week later told a much different story, especially when it comes to natural gas.
The Obama administration’s 2011 budget - once again - proposes a crippling tax increase on America’s homegrown natural gas and oil industry - specifically, $36.5 billion of new taxes, which would be paid by consumers in the form of higher heating bills and higher prices at the gas pump. (It’s worth noting the stubbornness of this administration: This tax comes after Congress rejected Obama’s $31 billion energy tax increase in last year’s budget.)
In his State of the Union address, President Obama pledged to put America back to work. The domestic oil and gas industry is a great place to start. Last September, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report finding that “the U.S. oil and natural gas industry’s total employment contribution to the national economy amounted to 9.2 million full-time and part-time jobs, accounting for 5.2 percent of the total employment in the country ... The industry’s total value-added contribution to the national economy was over $1 trillion, accounting for 7.5 percent of U.S. GDP in 2007.”
But the benefits of affordable, abundant, and domestic energy production don’t stop there: hundreds of thousands of land and mineral owners - some of whom are farmers and ranchers - from 33 producing states receive monthly checks from natural gas and oil royalties produced on their properties. And states receive tens of billions of dollars in natural gas and oil excise and severance taxes that support roads, schools, and law enforcement. Yet by punishing America’s oil and natural gas industry with new taxes, President Obama is impoverishing states, harming consumers, and stifling creation of new jobs.
Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it: that’s one of the unfortunate lessons of the Obama energy tax. Just turn back the clock to 1980. Then-President Jimmy Carter imposed a similar tax on the oil and gas industry, ostensibly to increase our energy independence and lower prices at the pump. It didn’t work. A government report from CRS later found the following: “The WPT [windfall profits tax] reduced domestic oil production between 3 and 6 percent, and increased oil imports from between 8 and 16 percent ... This made the U.S. more dependent upon imported oil.”
Punitive energy taxes didn’t work in 1980, and they won’t work now.
President Obama appears to suffer from an energy cataract. So-called “green energy” is all he can see - while all other forms of energy are punished or ignored. And what has American gained? The Los Angeles Times noted recently that “[President] Obama promised to create some 5 million green jobs over a decade. The stimulus bill approved last year allocated billions of dollars to the clean energy sector ... Last month, government economists released their first tally of clean energy jobs created or saved by the stimulus: 52,000.”
These results are simply tragic, given that millions of new jobs can be created through a few simple policy reforms - reforms that will, among many other benefits, make energy more affordable and reliable. President Obama has stressed the need for bipartisanship to jumpstart America’s economy. I agree, and the solution is ready at hand: it’s called American energy, in all its forms.
Read more here.
See interview with the Hill here:
By Bob Ferguson, SPPI Blog
In Senate EPA hearings today false claims were made by Senators Boxer (D-CA) and Merkley (D-OR) that the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) is Exxon Mobil funded, implying its work and findings should be cast aside.
Says SPPI president, Robert Ferguson, “SPPI has never been offered or accepted funds or support in any form from Exxon Mobil. Senators Boxer and Merkley owe an apology and a correction in the record.” Added Ferguson, “It is rather simple for any senate staffer to call Exxon Mobil to verify the facts, or examine public filings for Exxon Mobil’s Contributions and Community Investments.”
The intended slurs came as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson faced stern questioning from Senator James Inhofe (R-AR) and Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) about recent revelations of the shoddiness of the science underpinning the EPA’s CO2 ‘endangerment’ finding.
Senator Barrasso referenced a recent study by SPPI indicating that NASA and NOAA temperature records had been manipulated, and asked the Administrator if she’d be willing to have the EPA IG investigate and review the allegations.
In Surface Temperature Records - Policy-driven Deception?, veteran meteorologists Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed world temperature records with the startling conclusion that instrumental land temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely and systematically tampered with that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant global warming in the 20th century. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.
On the other hand, the Senators have not objected that in 2002, Exxon Mobil donated $100-million - $10-million a year for 10 years running - to Stanford University “for research into global warming and renewable energy alternatives.” Neither did the Senators suggest rejection of “oiled” testimony from any witness from Stanford University, including extreme alarmist Stephen Schneider’s in 2003.
Do Senators Boxer and Merkley dismiss as tainted any testimony or research produced from the University of California, Berkeley faculty or employees in light of its $500-million alliance with foreign oil giant British Petroleum?
Other academic institutions supported by Exxon Mobil include Columbia, George Washington, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, North Carolina, Texas and the Harvard Smithsonian (a “corporate partner").
Also, MIT’s hurricane researcher, Kerry Emanuel, has accepted reimbursement payments from Exxon Mobile funded Frontiers of Freedom Institute for participating with NOAA’s Chris Landsea in a congressional staff briefing. Would Dr. Emanuel’s testimony be considered tainted by Senators Boxer and Merkley?
The funding sources the Senators should be most dismissive of are those from governments. Another SPPI study, Climate Money, revealed that the US federal government has a near monopsony on climate research funding. Where a monopoly market consists of a single seller, a monopsony market consists of a single buyer. The only thing the government buys is policy-driven data and manufactured alarmism, and it has done so to the tally of more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 - and counting. By comparison, Exxon Mobil’s grants to “skeptics” of climate apocalypse is less that a thousandth of what the US government spends on alarmists, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in 2008 alone.
Concluded Ferguson, “The act of dismissing information and data from SPPI which is not Exxon funded and accepting them from sources who are Exxon funded - all the while saying Exxon funding disqualifies testimony - is Theater of the Absurd. If the senators and their staffs truly seek a better understanding of the current state of climate science, they should read more Lindzen and less Alinsky.”
Perhaps California and Oregon voters will see it that way, too. See SPPI blog here.
See also the SPPI blog Post on the Washington Post story How Al Gore Wrecked Planet Earth here.
EPW Special Report
In this report, Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works examine key documents and emails from the University of East Anglia‘s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). We have concluded:
The emails were written by the world’s top climate scientists, who work at the most prestigious and influential climate research institutions in the world.
Many of them were lead authors and coordinating lead authors of UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, meaning that they had been intimately involved in writing and editing the IPCC’s science assessments. They also helped write reports by the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).
The CRU controversy and recent revelations about errors in the IPCC’s most recent science assessment cast serious doubt on the validity of EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The IPCC serves as the primary basis for EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.
Instead of moving forward on greenhouse gas regulation, the Agency should fully address the CRU controversy and the IPCC’s flawed science.
The scientists involved in the CRU controversy violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws. In addition to these findings, we believe the emails and accompanying documents seriously compromise the IPCC-backed consensus‖ and its central conclusion that anthropogenic emissions are inexorably leading to environmental catastrophes. Read the very detailed summary here.
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Lawrence Solomon: A dying initiative
By Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post
The Western Climate Initiative’s cap and trade market may soon need to be renamed The Canada Climate Initiative.
Until last week, the Western Climate Initiative boasted seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces who were working toward the launch of a regional cap and trade system on Jan. 1, 2012. Last Thursday, Arizona formally announced it was backing out of cap and trade. As the state with the fastest rate of emission growth - 61% between 1990 and 2007 - many feared a body blow to Arizona’s economy if it tried to meet the initiative’s carbon reduction goals.
The following morning neighbouring Utah indicated it might follow suit. By a 6 to 2 vote, its House Committee on Public Utilities and Technology passed a nonbinding resolution to urge Governor Gary Herbert to pull out of the Western Climate Initiative. Earlier in the week, the full Utah House voted resoundingly - 56 to 17 - to curb any carbon-curbing attempts by the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency. Specifically, the resolution introduced into the House “urges the United States Environmental Protection Agency to halt its carbon dioxide reduction policies and programs and with its ‘Endangerment Finding’ and related regulations until a full and independent investigation of the climate data conspiracy and global warming science can be substantiated.”
To date, only four of the 11 jurisdictions have adopted legislation that would allow them to participate in the cap-trade-market: California, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, with Manitoba appearing close to joining. Oregon, Washington, Montana and New Mexico have not yet adopted cap-and-trade legislation and now California, which is tottering toward bankruptcy, has become iffy: A voter initiative in California, if it passes in November, would halt the cap-and-trade program until unemployment falls to 5.5%.
Even before last week’s climate revolt, many believed the Western Climate Initiative unofficially died with the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency. When George W. Bush was U.S. president, those backing climate change legislation could argue for a regional plan on the basis that national legislation would never pass a Bush presidency. As soon as Obama came to office, pressure built in the western states to abandon the regional cap and trade plan, on the logic that the states should harmonize with federal cap and trade policy. Now that federal cap and trade legislation appears dead, the states have cooled further to regional trading.
The upshot? By the end of the year, the only jurisdictions left in the Western Climate Initiative’s cap and trade program could be the Canadian provinces.
Read more here.
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Climategate’s guerrilla warriors: pesky foes or careful watchdogs?
Jeet Heer, Toronto’s Globe and Mail
Much remains murky about the scandal dubbed Climategate, which involves the release last fall of e-mails leaked or stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Initial accounts focused on e-mails that seemed to show scientists deliberately distorting research to make the danger of global warming appear worse than it is. Others have suggested this could be a misreading of the e-mails, most of which, though not all, simply suggest working professionals wrangling over contentious issues and occasionally slagging their critics.
The question of scientific misconduct is still under investigation at East Anglia. But what’s clear is that the scandal - one of the biggest to hit the science community in the past decade - wouldn’t still be hanging so heavily over climate-change researchers if it weren’t for bloggers such as Stephen McIntyre.
A Toronto-based retired mining executive who has emerged as a uniquely polarizing figure in one of our era’s most contentious issues, Mr. McIntyre has been an outspoken critic of the CRU’s research on his blog, Climate Audit, and has launched countless freedom-of-information requests for data used by its scientists. He likes to speculate that the Climategate e-mails were released by a whistleblower unhappy at the research unit’s intransigence over making data public. That may or may not be true, but whoever got hold of the e-mails and made them public clearly kept a close eye on Mr. McIntyre’s struggles with the CRU, which form a strong theme in the leaked e-mails.
Many reveal researchers bristling at the armchair scientist’s criticism. One e-mail, written by Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, called Mr. McIntyre “the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science.” Another referred to him as a “bozo.” But Mr. McIntyre doesn’t mind the criticism: His website is now getting a million hits a month, double what it got before Climategate.
In the wake of the scandal, blogs that question the reality of man-made global warming have surged in public attention, leading new readers to websites such as Wattsupwiththat.com (run by weatherman Anthony Watts) and climatedepot.com (run by conservative activist Marc Morano). The sites’ rising popularity, and the growing influence they appear to wield in shaping public debate, is deeply worrying to the scientific community.
“There has been a transition in the way people get their news over the last decade or so, from the traditional print media to online sources of news,” says Michael Mann, one of the key researchers behind the now-famous “hockey stick” graph (which shows the temperature of the Earth steeply rising in the 20th century after a long period of stability - data hotly disputed by the online skeptics, although accepted by the scientific community).
“I think the climate-change-denial movement has recognized that transition was taking place and has really invested a lot of effort and resources in creating this huge infrastructure of online disinformation. And I think it is a challenge for legitimate news organizations to compete with that massive disinformation network.”
Science journalist Chris Mooney, co-author of the 2009 book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, calls the Internet a “complete Wild, Wild West for scientific information.”
Mr. Mooney thinks the belief in the reality of man-made global warming, which is the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community, is losing ground in public opinion because of these blogs. “It’s a drumming,” he laments. “If it’s a football game, it would be 56-0.” Read much more here.
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Editorial: More errors in temperature data
The Washington Times
Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’ top climate-change official, announced his resignation yesterday. Good riddance. The bureaucrat’s departure is no surprise because his pseudo-scientific global warming religion was proved to be a hoax on his watch.
The list of problems central to the global warming fraud just doesn’t seem to end. As if hiding and losing data, the numerous errors in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the suppression of academic research that disagrees with global warming weren’t bad enough, now comes word that basic ground-based temperature data may have been biased towards incorrectly showing temperature increases.
Joseph D’Aleo, the first director of meteorology and co-founder of the Weather Channel, and Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and founder of SurfaceStations.org, are well-known and well-respected scientists. On Jan. 29, they released a startling study on SPPI showing that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began systematically eliminating climate-measuring stations in cooler locations around the world. Eliminating stations that tended to record cooler temperatures drove up the average measured temperature. The stations eliminated were in higher latitudes and altitudes, inland areas away from the sea and more rural locations. The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.
Enlarged here. Temperatures in rose and station count in blue.
Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Watts provide some amazing graphs showing that the jumps in measured global temperature occurred just when the number of weather stations was cut. But there is another bias that this change to more urban stations also exacerbates. Recorded temperatures in more urban areas rise over time simply because more densely populated areas produce more heat. Combining the greater share of weather stations in more urban areas over time with this urban heat effect also tends to increase the rate that recorded temperatures tend to rise over time.
See editorial here.