By Jonah Goldberg, LA Times

I watched the Super Bowl in the chilled air of the GFISZ (that’s Goldberg Family Ice Station Zebra). Here in Washington, we haven’t seen this much snow since at least 1922. The blizzard of 2010 took out our electricity for a day. Digging out from “snowmaggedon” was nothing less than an Augean challenge, though my lower back is, alas, less than Herculean. Meanwhile, snow canceled my daughter’s 7th birthday party Saturday and her school Monday. We’re slated for another foot by Wednesday.

Suffice it to say I’m not panicking about global warming right now.

Perhaps that’s why I was bemused and intrigued by Audi’s Super Bowl ad.

Audi’s “Green Police” (available on YouTube) depicts an America where citizens are arrested—roughly—for even minor environmental infractions. A man at the supermarket asks for a plastic shopping bag and has his head slammed against the counter as he’s cuffed by a Green Police officer. “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy,” quips the cop. When officers find a battery in the wrong suburban garbage bin, one big cop yells, “Battery! Let’s go! Take the house!”

It’s a fascinating commercial. They even got Cheap Trick to rerecord “Dream Police” as “Green Police” for the soundtrack. But just as the satire becomes enjoyable, the message changes. Until the pitch for Audi intrudes, you’d think it was a fun parody from a right-wing free-market outfit about the pending dystopian environmental police state.

The pitch involves an “eco roadblock.” A young man driving an Audi A3 TDI is singled out by an inspector. “We’ve got a TDI here,” he says. “Clean diesel,” he adds approvingly.

“You’re good to go, sir,” the cops inform the driver. The smiling Audi owner accelerates to happiness on the open road. The screen fades to black and the tagline appears—“Green has never felt so right.”

So, instead of some healthy don’t-tread-on-me mockery, the moral of the story is that we should welcome our new green overlords and, if we know what’s good for us, surrender to the New Green Order.

Some eco-bloggers disliked the ad because it reinforces the association of undemocratic statism or PC bullying with environmentalism. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times dubbed it “misguided.”

Meanwhile, some conservatives didn’t like it because it makes light of what they believe is actually happening. After all, in America and Europe, the list of environmental crimes is growing at an almost exponential rate. The ad is absurd, of course, but not nearly as absurd as Audi thinks.

What was Audi’s intent? Presumably, to sell cars.

“The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police,” writes Grist magazine’s David Roberts on the Huffington Post. The target audience, according to Roberts, are men who want to “do the right thing.” He’s certainly right that the ad isn’t aimed at people (whom he childishly mocks as “teabaggers") who worry that their liberties are being slowly eroded.

But the message is hardly “do the right thing.”

To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless upscale white men (all of the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the Audi ad has a lot in common with those execrable MasterCard commercials. Targeting the same demographic, those ads depicted hapless fathers being harangued by their children to get with the environmental program. MasterCard’s tagline: “Helping Dad become a better man: Priceless.”

The difference is that MasterCard’s ads were earnest, creepy, diabetes-inducing treacle. Audi’s ad not only fails to invest the greens with moral authority, it concedes that the carbon cops are out of control, unjustly bullying people and power-hungry (in a postscript scene, the Green Police pull over real cops for using Styrofoam cups). But, because resistance is futile when it comes to the eco-borg, you might as well get the best car you can.

It will be interesting to see whether the ad actually sells cars. The premise only works if you take it as a given that this Gorewellian nightmare is inevitable. But the commercials arrive at precisely the moment when that inevitability is unraveling like an old pair of hemp socks. The global warming industry is imploding from scientific scandals, inconvenient weather, economic anxiety and surging popular skepticism (according to a Pew Research Center survey released in January, global warming ranks 21st out of 21 in terms of the public’s priorities).

Personally, this week, I don’t want a car to get past the Green Gestapo. I’m looking for something that can power through the frozen tundra separating me from the supermarket.

Update: See here how the snowblitz has delayed announcement of the new climate agency

By Randolph E. Schmid, AP Science Writer

The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.

Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA’s National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.

“Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat,” Locke said Monday at a news conference.

Lubchenco added, “Climate change is real, it’s happening now.” She said climate information is vital to the wind power industry, coastal community planning, fishermen and fishery managers, farmers and public health officials.

NOAA recently reported that the decade of 2000-2009 was the warmest on record worldwide; the previous warmest decade was the 1990s. Most atmospheric scientists believe that warming is largely due to human actions, adding gases to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

Researchers and leaders from around the world met last month in Denmark to discuss ways to reduce climate-warming emissions, and a follow-up session is planned for later this year in Mexico.

“More and more people are asking for more and more information about climate and how it’s going to affect them,” Lubchenco explained. So officials decided to combine climate operations into a single unit.

Portions of the Weather Service that have been studying climate, as well as offices from some other NOAA agencies, will be transferred to the new NOAA Climate Service.

The new agency will initially be led by Thomas Karl, director of the current National Climatic Data Center. The Climate Service will be headquartered in Washington and will have six regional directors across the country. Read more here. See the NOAA Climate web site paid for by your dollars (the administration’s fiscal 2011 budget request includes $1.5 million for the new NOAA climate services portal) here.

Icecap Note: this was expected. Where and who were the unknowns. I guess all the work to produce the greatest warming in the last few years (taking over from NASA), gave NOAA not NASA the prize. Or maybe it was Hansen’s trenchcoat and hat.

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Climate scepticism ‘on the rise’
By BBC News

There has been an increase in the number of British people who are sceptical about climate change, a poll commissioned by BBC News has suggested. The poll, based on a sample group of 1,001 adults, was conducted by Populus.

The findings, based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February, show that only 26% of people think “climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made”, only 1% more than those who think there is no global warming.

In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus - commissioned by the Times newspaper - showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities.

See enlarged image here

“It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period,” Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News.

“The British public are sceptical about man’s contribution to climate change - and becoming more so,” he added. “More people are now doubters than firm believers.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) chief scientific adviser, Professor Bob Watson, called the findings “very disappointing”. “The fact that there has been a very significant drop in the number of people that believe that we humans are changing the Earth’s climate is serious,” he told BBC News. “Action is urgently needed,” Professor Watson warned. “We need the public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move towards a low carbon economy.”

‘Exaggerated risks’

Of the 75% of respondents who agreed that climate change was happening, one-in-three people felt that the potential consequences of living in a warming world had been exaggerated, up from one-in-five people in November.

The number of people who felt the risks of climate change had been understated dropped from 38% in November to 25% in the latest poll. During the intervening period between the two polls, there was a series of high profile climate-related stories, some of which made grim reading for climate scientists and policymakers.

In November, the contents of emails stolen from a leading climate science unit led to accusations that a number of researchers had manipulated data. And in January, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted that it had made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. All of this happened against the backdrop of many parts of the northern hemisphere being gripped by a prolonged period of sub-zero temperatures.

However, 73% of the people who said that they were aware of the “science flaws” stories stated that the media coverage had not changed their views about the risks of climate change. “People tend to make judgements over time based on a whole range of different sources,” Mr Simmonds explained. He added that it was very unusual for single events to have a dramatic impact on public opinion. “Normally, people make their minds up over a longer period and are influenced by all the voices they hear, what they read and what people they know are talking about.” See post here.

Icecap Comments: notice the care to avoid the the underlying results that 73% believe that man is or may not be involved in climate change, believing the climate is not changing (25%), is changing but man’s role is environmentalist propoganda (10%) or that climate is changing and man’s role has not been convincingly established (38%).  Notice in the full poll here, that a number of questions are written in such a way as to illicit a supportive reponse and yet in all, the message is clear, the public is not buying what the enviros, pols and media are pushing. One example is the first question that asks whether “do you think that the Earth’s climate is changing and global warming taking place?” Many skeptics might answer yes on that one. The climate is always changing, always warming or cooling.

Another sign the media dam may be breaking - this CBS Online video:

By Viv Forbes, Carbon-Sense Coalition

The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the Emissions Trading Scheme proposed for Australia and now before the Australian Parliament was far more than “A Great Big New Tax”.  The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that PM Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme combined a Big New Tax with a War-Time Rationing scheme and an Income redistributing compensation scheme, all to be run by a regulatory army probably bigger than our real army.

He continued: “Let’s try to understand this Ruddy ETS. To simplify things, let’s look at just the electricity industry. If Rudd’s ETS ever rules Australia, companies producing electricity from carbon fuels must beg, buy or borrow a permit to burn coal, gas or diesel. They can beg a free permit from some mate in Canberra; they can buy a permit from some lucky sod who managed to get more permits than he needs; they can borrow a permit by entering into some tricky derivative trade with a speculator in Chicago; or they can pay carbon credit penance to a shifty land owner in some foreign land who promises solemnly not to clear his trees.

No matter which option is chosen, power costs will go up and companies must pass the extra cost (plus GST) onto their customers or go broke.
There will be no effect on climate.

Now look at consumers. The ETS must push up the cost of all goods and services using carbon fuel. It will boost the cost of electricity, food, transport and travel. When this happens, consumers will suddenly understand the ETS Tax and politicians who voted for it will feel their anger.

“But there is a plan: “Let’s compensate all those likely to vote for us”. If these subsidies work properly, the lucky consumers will be in the same position as they were before ETS, except for the extra bureaucracy. For these consumers, there is no signal to reduce their consumption of carbon fuels. The ETS will do nothing except create a tangle of red tape which consumes and redistributes wealth.

“But for the un-subsidised consumers, the ETS is an extra tax on everything. And for the power companies, the ETS will produce nothing except a heap of angry customers, and lots of red tape.”

Mr Forbes claimed that Tony Abbott was wrong about the ETS. It is not just a Great Big Tax. It’s a Great Big Tax PLUS a mountain of Red Tape. And it will have absolutely no effect on world climate.

Monckton Tour

There has been a tremendous public response to the tour by Christopher Monckton and Ian Plimer. Every function packed out, people turned away, and sustained standing ovations in many places. Because of the number of disappointed people, two more functions have been organised hurriedly (see).

Public Opinion

This response of the public shows that politicians of all parties are, as usual, lagging public opinion. The public have had a gutful of green propaganda and vested interests masquerading as science.  A recent Australian poll shows that only 33% of Australians now support the Rudd Ration-N-Tax Scheme. And in Britain, only 26% now believe in man-made global warming (see). Even the BBC and now the ABC have discovered that “The Science is not settled”. And the BBC’s huge vested interest in promoting climate alarmism is revealed. Their eight billion pound pension fund is heavily invested in the Climate Change Industry (see).

It is more important than ever to prevent Australia being left like a shag on a rock with the only lonely Ration-N-Tax Scheme in the Pacific Rim.
Keep the heat on the politicians, and watch how they vote. We need to work actively for the removal of EVERY politician from EVERY party who votes for the destruction of Australian industry on a bunch of manufactured scare stories.

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Droughtgate: Study Finds IPCC had Temperature - Drought Connection Backwards
By Marc Sheppard, American Thinker

Add another to the growing list of IPCC outrages.  As I mentioned in last week’s IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks, in Chapter 9 of Assessment Report 4’s (AR4) Working Group One (WG1) Report, the IPCC claimed that manmade CO2-driven higher temperatures drive higher evaporation, and thereby cause droughts.  As readers are all too aware, droughts are favorite ingredients in most alarmists’ recipes for manmade climate disaster.  But a paper published last month in Geophysical Research Letters lays out a compelling argument that the IPCC has it completely backwards - that droughts are actually causing warming, not the other way around.

In Section 9.1.2, the IPCC states that: [P]recipitation and temperature are ordinarily inversely correlated in some regions, with increases in temperature corresponding to drying conditions. Thus, a warming trend in such a region that is not associated with rainfall change may indicate an external influence on the climate of that region (Nicholls et al., 2005; Section 9.4.2.3).

That statement is attributed to the same Neville Nicholls who wrote in his 2004 paper, The Changing Nature of Australian Droughts, that:
The relatively warm temperatures in 2002 were partly the result of a continued warming evident in Australia since the middle of the 20th century. The possibility that the enhanced greenhouse effect is increasing the severity of Australian droughts, by raising temperatures and hence increasing evaporation, even if the rainfall does not decrease, needs to be considered.

Later in the paper, Nicholls concluded that “the warming has meant that the severity and impacts of the most recent drought have been exacerbated by enhanced evaporation and evapotranspiration.”

Not surprisingly, as with many other AR4 irregularities that have recently surfaced, this too has a non-peer-reviewed World Wildlife Fund link to it.  Nicholls’ was an extension of the work of fellow Aussie alarmist, David Karoly, whose 2003 WWF report, Global warming contributes to Australia’s worst drought [PDF], studied the 2002 drought in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin and found that: “This drought has had a more severe impact than any other drought since at least 1950, because the temperatures in 2002 have also been significantly higher than in other drought years (see Table 1 and 2). The higher temperatures caused a marked increase in evaporation rates, which sped up the loss of soil moisture and the drying of vegetation and watercourses. This is the first drought in Australia where the impact of human-induced global warming can be clearly observed.”

So then, the basis for the claim that anthropogenic warming causes droughts put forth in the IPCC’s AR4 was a WWF report and its follow-up written the next year.

But that basis, conclude Natalie Lockart, Dmitri Kavetski and Stewart W. Franks, authors of On the recent warming in the Murray-Darling Basin: Land surface interactions misunderstood, is bogus.  As stated in its opening, their study “demonstrates that significant misunderstanding of known processes of land surface - atmosphere interactions has led to the incorrect attribution of the causes of the anomalous temperatures, as well as significant misunderstanding of their impact on evaporation within the Murray-Darling Basin.” And after deconstructing the claims of both Nicholls and Karoly, concludes that:

All presented results demonstrate that potential evaporation under dry conditions is elevated not as a result of the air temperature, but as a result of the lack of actual evaporation. This is accompanied by increased sensible heat fluxes which increases air temperatures. This is an entirely natural consequence of the dynamics of drought. Importantly, it is shown that antecedent temperature increases do not lead to insignificant increases in actual or potential evapotranspiration.

As coauthor Stewart Franks explained to me in an email, “this is a confusion of the well known physics of evaporation - as higher air temperatures are driven by the lack of evaporation (as occurs during drought).” He explained further in a subsequent correspondence:
Of course, when there is a deficit of rainfall, this tends to be accompanied by less cloud-cover, hence more sunshine, which does increase the energy available for evaporation, but as soil moisture is low, the bulk of the energy goes into heating the near-surface atmosphere and hence higher air temperatures. But amazingly, the story doesn’t end with how wrong the chapter was.

Professor Franks also pointed out that Neville Nicholls was one of the chapter’s Lead Authors, and David Karoly, whose work was also heavily cited in WG1 Chapter 9, was its Review Editor.  Quipped Franks: “Hence they cite and review their own papers as part of the clearly flawed IPCC process.”

Unbelievable. Read moe here.

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Barrasso Calls for U.N. Climate Chief’s Resignation

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, Senator John Barrasso, R-Wyo., called on Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to resign after revelations of ongoing scientific fraud under Dr. Pachauri’s watch. Senator Barrasso delivered the following statement on the Senate Floor:

“Every day, new scandals emerge about the so called ‘facts’ in the UN reports. The integrity of the data and the integrity of the science have been compromised.

“Concrete action by world leaders is needed. Government delegations of the UN’s general assembly and UN Secretary Moon must pressure Dr. Rajendra Pachauri to step down as head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“It is time to conduct an independent investigation into the conduct of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientific data behind these policies must be independently verified.

“Administration policies relating to climate change will cost millions of Americans their jobs. We need to get this right. To continue to rely on these corrupted U.N. Reports is an endorsement of fraudulent behavior. It is a signal to the American people that ideology is more important than their jobs.”

Background:

Recent news reports have highlighted Dr. Rajendra Pachauri’s and the United Nation’s involvement in covering up flawed science:

February 2, 2010, Investor’s Business Daily article, Walter Russell Read, Project Director for Religion and Foreign Policy at the Pew Forum, said “After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all.”

On January 30, 2010, the Times of London reported, “Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it.”

On January 24, 2010, the Times of London reported the UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters. Reporter Jonathan Leake wrote, “The United Nations climate panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods,” and the report “had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny.”

Senator Barrasso, a member of both the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee, has continued to call on the international community and the Obama Administration to ensure that our energy policy is based on sound scientific data.

Recently, Barrasso sent letters to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to express his concerns regarding a report concluding the organizations eliminated two-thirds of their temperature monitoring stations around the globe in places that are colder, rural or at higher altitudes beginning in 1990 in order to drive up temperature trend averages.

See the Barasso story here. See the growing list of IPCC’s wuestionable, non-peer reviewed citations here.

See here how Greenpeace has called for Pachauri to resign.

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The end is not near
By Dr Fred Singer, Hindustan Times

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acknowledged they made a mistake in their projection of 2035 as the year when Himalayan glaciers were said to melt. But the blunder is not a one-off mistake, and is the latest in the litany of errors that have dogged the panel over the past ten years.

In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was “unusual” and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000A.D.) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800A.D.). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the panel and the statistical errors in their analysis. In mid-August, after repeated requests for such data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international agencies that calculate global temperatures, announced that it discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. This action renders independent review and verification of the temperature trends published by it impossible - a clear violation of principles of science and the Act.

At the 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating how tree ring data from Russia showing a cooling after 1961 were truncated and disguised in IPCC publications. The deceit, so exposed, indicates that the IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4) contains deceptions rendering the document scientifically questionable.

In November, emails from the CRU were leaked and they reveal efforts to suppress independent studies that are contrary to IPCC conclusions that humans caused global warming. Thus, the IPCC’s scientific review process has a systematic bias of an unknowable magnitude in favour of human-induced warming.

In mid-December, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis reported that the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office) had probably tampered with Russian climate data and that the Russian meteorological station data do not support human-caused global warming. The Met Office collaborates with the CRU in reporting global temperatures. The reported global surface temperature trends are unreliable and probably have a strong warming bias of an unknown magnitude.

In January, Joe D’Aleo, Anthony Watts and E. Michael Smith reported that the National Climatic Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies dropped many meteorological stations from their data bases in recent years. The dropped stations are generally in colder climates. It seems the three major reporting international organisations probably have a warming bias of an unknown magnitude rendering their announced temperatures and temperature trends scientifically unreliable.

On January 23, 2010, the Sunday Times (London) reported that the AR4 wrongly linked natural disasters to global warming. Yet it reported the actual published report upon which this claim was based stated: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophic losses.”

In January, Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the AR4’s chapter on Asia, stated that the report deliberately exaggerated the possible melt of the Himalayan glaciers. “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” This admission demonstrates that the AR4 is a political document and not a scientific one.

This past week, additional reports reveal that IPCC’s claims that warming will cause extensive adverse effects in the Amazon rainforests and on coral reefs came not from peer-reviewed science but from publications by environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. Thus, the IPCC pretence that it represents peer-reviewed science is false.

More scandalous even, the IPCC-based its predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources - not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards. These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme ideological bias - quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. By themselves, they do not invalidate the basic IPCC conclusion - that a warming in the latter half of the 20th century was human-caused, presumably by the rise of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to ClimateGate, which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC’s main policy result.

In my opinion, ClimateGate is a much more serious issue than simply sloppiness and ideological distortion; ClimateGate suggests conspiracy to commit fraud.

In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental zealots, anti-technology Luddites, Utopian one-worlders, and population-control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses, brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and profit from government grants and subsidies for exotic schemes to produce ‘carbon-free’ energy and from the trading of carbon permits. Hundreds of billions have already been wasted - most of this in transfers of tax revenues to a favoured few.

These sums pale, however, in comparison to the trillions that would have been spent in future if some of the mitigation schemes had come into effect. Fortunately for the world economy, these schemes collapsed at the Copenhagen conference. Clearly, developing nations did not want to take on the sacrifices and restrictions on growth. There was little concern expressed about climate; Copenhagen was mostly about transfer of money from rich to poor countries - or more precisely, from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor ones.