By Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.) Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world’s governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought. Read full post here.

By Joseph D’Aleo

The ANPR is one of the steps EPA has taken in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. The Court found that the Clean Air Act authorizes EPA to regulate tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions if EPA determines they cause or contribute to air pollution that may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare. The ANPR reflects the complexity and magnitude of the question of whether and how greenhouse gases could be effectively controlled under the Clean Air Act.

The document summarizes much of EPA’s work and lays out concerns raised by other federal agencies during their review of this work. EPA is publishing this notice at this time because it is impossible to simultaneously address all the agencies’ issues and respond to the agency’s legal obligations in a timely manner.

Key Issues for Discussion and Comment in the ANPR: Descriptions of key provisions and programs in the CAA, and advantages and disadvantages of regulating GHGs under those provisions; How a decision to regulate GHG emissions under one section of the CAA could or would lead to regulation of GHG emissions under other sections of the Act, including sections establishing permitting requirements for major stationary sources of air pollutants; Issues relevant for Congress to consider for possible future climate legislation and the potential for overlap between future legislation and regulation under the existing CAA; and, scientific information relevant to, and the issues raised by, an endangerment analysis.

EPA will accept public comment on the ANPR until November 28, 2008. See EPA ANPR for details and directions.

Earlier responses to the CCSP are supposed to be considered but it is a good idea to resubmit them to ANPR to play it safe. I have done so in two parts: Part I summarizing the 9 responses to the CCSP and a new one in Part II responding to these specific scientific questions the EPA is seeking input on:

(1). EPA seeks comment on the best available science for purposes of the endangerment discussion, and in particular on the use of the more recent findings of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.

(2). EPA also invites comment on the extent to which it would be appropriate to use the most recent IPCC reports, including the chapters focusing on North America, and the U.S. government Climate Change Science Program synthesis reports as scientific assessments that could serve as an important source or as the primary basis for the Agency’s issuance of “air quality criteria.”

(3). EPA requests comments as well as the adequacy of the available scientific literature [synthesis reports such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report and various reports of the US Climate Change Science Program]

(4). The Endangerment Technical Support Document provides evidence that the U.S. and the rest of the world are experiencing effects from climate change now.

The window will close on comments November 28, 2008 and decisions will be made that we may have to live with for a long time. We can only do our best to ensure we have a say and maybe some influence on those decisions. Though the responses I sent were relatively long, they need not be. Short pithy comments that address one or more of the questions with relevant documentation to papers and peer review or just data can be just as if not more effective. Thank you for whatever you do.

By Tom LoBianco and S.A. Miller, Washington Post

President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team is flirting with creating a White House “Climate Czar,” but climate change crusader Al Gore says he doesn’t want the job. The Obama team declined to comment on such a post, even as environmentalists and power industry executives say it’s being widely discussed inside the transition offices as a way to spur a clean energy industry, which Mr. Obama has promised will ween the U.S. from foreign oil and create millions of “green jobs.”

Obama transition chief John Podesta promoted a similar idea earlier in his role as president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.  Mr. Podesta authored a white paper calling for an Energy Security Council within the White House to oversee climate change and clean energy initiatives. The czar and the council would coordinate agencies, including the Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The obvious choice to lead the council is Mr. Gore, whose campaign to address climate change earned him the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. But the former vice president is taking a pass. “Former Vice President Gore does not intend to seek or accept any formal position in government,” Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said. “He feels very strong right now that the best thing for him to do is to build support for the bold changes that we have to make to solve the climate crisis.” Mr. Obama foreshadowed the new post on the campaign trail in April when he told a voter that Mr. Gore would be offered a special Cabinet post overseeing climate change. “Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem,” Mr. Obama said.

Al Gore appears on behalf of Barack Obama early Friday afternoon, Oct. 31, 2008, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla.. Gore, former vice president and democratic presidential candidate in 2000, and his wife Tipper, returned to Palm Beach County, ground zero of the year 2000 election debacle. It was Gore’s first campaign event for the Obama/Biden ticket.

With Mr. Gore out of the running for an administration job, leading candidates for the post likely include former EPA chief Carol M. Browner, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. Other names mentioned for czar or membership in the energy council include World Resources Institute President Jonathan Lash, former Pennsylvania Environment Secretary Kathleen McGinty and California Air Resources Board chief Mary D. Nichols. Read more here