By John McLean

How many times have you heard or read words to the effect that 4000 scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) supported the claims about a significant human influence on climate? I think I’ve seen it on television, radio and the Internet and I know that politicians at national levels have quoted such figures. There’s no question whatsoever. It’s utterly wrong.

In fact, once the duplicated names are removed that number falls below 2,900 and if we only want those who explicitly supported the claims it falls to only about 60. So how does 4,000 become 60? Let’s take a closer look at the real numbers.

Consider the statement “The IPCC report concluded that there is a human influence on climate. This was supported by almost 4,000 authors and reviewers.” The popular mythology - and one that IPCC never tries to correct - is that those 4,000 supported the findings but all they really supported, by their work, was the creation of the report. The IPCC is allowing, or perhaps even encouraging, an ambiguity be misinterpreted, and not for the first time either, but I digress.

But how many individuals were involved? Was it 4,000 or some other number? The IPCC said in its flyer for its Fourth Assessment Report (4AR): 2500+ Scientific Expert Reviewers. 800+ Contributing Authors, 450+ Lead Authors. So immediately the figure drops from 4,000 to 3,750 - but a closer check shows that’s not correct either.

John goes on in this analysis to show why the number is closer to 60 and concludes with “We can however be sure that support among those other IPCC authors and reviewers was not unanimous. The lists of reviewers contain the names of many people who are known to be sceptical of a significant human influence on temperature, so any implication that they supported the IPCC’s findings are totally without merit. As mentioned earlier, the support to which the IPCC referred in its flyer was towards the creation of the entire report, not the findings of a small network of climate modellers, although the “sceptical reviewers” would probably argue that their support for the report was only in trying to curb the excesses of the IPCC’s authors.

This document has shown that yet another statement by the IPCC is unsupported by any solid evidence. Not only was the IPCC dishonest about the level of support for its primary claim, either deliberately or through allowing an ambiguity to be misinterpreted, but it couldn’t even get its number of authors and reviewers correct. If the IPCC cannot provide an accurate count of authors, reviewers and the people who acted in both roles for its report then we probably should be asking what, if any, of its statements can be believed.

By Kate Galbraith, New York Times Business

Old Man Winter, it turns out, is no friend of renewable energy. This time of year, wind turbine blades ice up, biodiesel congeals in tanks and solar panels produce less power because there is not as much sun. And perhaps most irritating to the people who own them, the panels become covered with snow, rendering them useless even in bright winter sunshine.

So in regions where homeowners have long rolled their eyes at shoveling driveways, add another cold-weather chore: cleaning off the solar panels. “At least I can get to them with a long pole and a squeegee,” said Alan Stankevitz, a homeowner in southeast Minnesota.

As concern has grown about global warming, many utilities and homeowners have been trying to shrink their emissions of carbon dioxide - their carbon footprints - by installing solar panels, wind turbines and even generators powered by tides or rivers. But for the moment, at least, the planet is still cold enough to deal nasty winter blows to some of this green machinery.

In January 2007, a bus stalled in the middle of the night on Interstate 70 in the Colorado mountains. The culprit was a 20 percent biodiesel blend that congealed in the freezing weather, according to John Jones, the transit director for the bus line, Summit Stage. (Biodiesel is a diesel substitute, typically made from vegetable oil, that is used to displace some fossil fuels.) The passengers got out of that situation intact, but Summit Stage, which serves ski resorts, now avoids biodiesel from November to March, and uses only a 5 percent blend in the summertime, when it can still get cold in the mountains. “We can’t have people sitting on buses freezing to death while we get out there trying to get them restarted,” Mr. Jones said.

Winter may pose even bigger safety hazards in the vicinity of wind turbines. Some observers say the machines can hurl chunks of ice as they rotate.
Read more here.

By Michael Fox, Hawaii Reporter

The year 2008 marked the tenth consecutive year of no global warming. This is not widely reported or known. In fact the Earth has been cooling for the last 6 years.

Richard Lindzen: A profound analysis of the global warming issues including huge political issues was written and presented in August this year by Dr. Richard Lindzen, climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He asks two very important questions: 1. Has the global warming alarm become the goal itself, instead of the result of scientific research?  2. Is climate science really designed to answer questions or promote political goals? Too often we witness climate alarmism being promoted while solid science is ignored, misrepresented, or downplayed. This makes great fodder for scary movies, scary news articles, and scary documentaries, but it is still bad science.

We also note that the nearly $5 billion/year being spent on global warming research is buying a lot of name-calling, ad hominem attacks, and all around nastiness by many of the indentured recipients of that money. Such behavior certainly is not scientific. In fact it inhibits the progress of science, and the intelligent formulations of science and energy policies. If half the participants are ignored by the science journals, insulted with ad hominem attacks by the promoters, and ignored and dismissed by the media, then the simple and rational scientific processes are stopped.
Lindzen describes the origins of global warming alarm, the political agenda of the alarmists, their intimidation tactics, and the reasons for their success. Also, in painstaking detail, he debunks their key scientific claims and counterclaims.

This Lindzen paper, although quite lengthy, is must reading for all decision makers, energy policy makers, and their staffs. Of course it would also help if the entire US population and the media read it as well, to help them understand the unscientific political processes taking place right before their eyes.

Les Kinsolving: Writer Kinsolving reports more of the bad news. As Dr. David Gee at the University of Uppsala Sweden asks “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, has authored 130-plus peer-reviewed papers, and currently is at Uppsala University of Sweden. As if this weren’t bad enough, the list of credentialed skeptics is growing by leaps and bounds. Kinsolving provides a number of other important quotations from the scientists who don’t accept the dogma of man-made global warming: 1. “I am a skeptic. Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize winner for physics Ivar Giaever.  2. “Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time.” – Solar physicist Dr. Pal Brekke, senior adviser to the Norwegian Space Centre.  3. “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S. government atmospheric scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.  4. “After reading (U.N. IPCC Chairman) Pachauri’s asinine comment (comparing skeptics to) Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs.  5. “All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.” – Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, serving as staff physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  6. “The (global warming) scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” – Award-winning paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.  7. “Earth has cooled since 1998 in defiance of the predictions by the U.N.-IPCC. ... The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millennium ... which is why ‘global warming’ is now called ‘climate change.’” – Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.

The Petition Project: There are many more scientists and engineers who do not accept the fuzzy “science” of global warming. More than 31,000 of them are now listed on the Petition Project, including more than 9000 Ph.D.s. These 31,000 scientists, engineers, and medical professionals sign a simple statement which says: “We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.” This is not an unreasonable appeal by very well educated people asking our government not to fall for the steady stream of a continuing hoax. Solid evidence is needed. If we don’t get the science right, we won’t get the policy right.

Summary: A nation which abolishes its fossil energy sources (coal. oil, and natural gas), nuclear energy, hydro energy, as these political forces are pushing, will lose all of the energy needed for our industries, homes, and infrastructure such as hospitals, office buildings, schools, and hotels. A powerful nation such as ours cannot sustain its energy needs on sunbeams and gentle breezes, as many of the warmers propose. That pathway to the future is dangerous and instead is a pathway to economic suicide. Read full post here.