By John O’Sullivan

Despite greater scientific doubt and falling public interest the mainstream media is still avidly trumpeting the doomsaying clamor to bored viewers.

Australia’s ABC is the latest mainstream media outlet accused of failing to be objective in how it presents key environmental issues. ABC’s “favorite psychologist” Stephan Lewandowsky now claims man-made global warming is as real as the theory of gravity.

Disgruntled Aussie geologist Marc Hendrickx has blasted back at Lewandowsky, as reported on Greenie Watch (November 11, 2010) and Hendrickx is not alone. Recently Professor Hal Lewis famously resigned from the American Physical Society rejecting the “global warming scam” and was roundly applauded by many of his peers. But as more scientists and voters reject the green hype most of the mainstream media are just not presenting both sides of the story.

Hendrickx pulls apart Lewandowsky’s piece titled “Climate change: are you willing to take the risk?” The geologist accuses Lewandowsky of vastly exaggerating the level of certainty in climate science. He says “if we apply the same level of uncertainty inherent in climate science concepts to other disciplines it seems there is little to justify Lewandowsky’s level of confidence.” Recent evidence shows Hendrickx has a valid point.

Mainstream Media Disconnect with Scientific Evidence

The Aussie geologist’s argument has been enhanced by three new developments discrediting some of the accepted science. The first is his government’s recent official admission raising doubts about the standard methods applied in garnering accurate temperatures from towns and cities due to what is called the ‘urban heat island effect’ (UHI).

Secondly, it may turn out that the Aussie data is as unreliable as their Kiwi cousins when their Antipodean neighbors confirmed that the New Zealand government has abandoned all pretense to even having an “official” climate record.

Third, on the opposite side of the world last month the Royal Society, London was shown to have miscalculated the duration of CO2 in the atmosphere. All these stories went unreported in the international mainstream media.

U.N.’s IPCC is the Crumbling Cornerstone of Climate Claims

But there exists a fourth even more withering revelation that ABC’s Lewandowsky fails to mention which erodes the very cornerstone of climate doomsaying confidence. It has been found that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been embarrassed by a Thomson Reuters analysis in which it found there is very little peer-reviewed literature backing up climate alarmism.

Global Warming Facts

In their ‘Essential Science Indicators (Research Fronts 2004-09),’ Reuters proved that the IPCC uses only 13 peer-reviewed papers to justify blaming human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) for global warming; thus disproving the so-called “consensus” of world scientists that ABC’s Lewandowsky and others would have us think.

Indeed, the IPPC stands very much apart from most scientists in predicting climate catastrophes. In their 2007 ‘Summary for Policymakers’ the IPPC use the word ‘catastrophe’ or its conjugated derivatives no less than 338 times despite the word never appearing in any of the scientific literature.

Moreover, so scant was IPCC regard for expert opinion about the role of the sun that they entrusted its analysis to just one expert. But worse, that sole IPCC scientist referred only to her own studies - a clear conflict of interest that no mainstream media outlet has ever addressed.

Mainstream journalism has been so lax leaving the public largely unaware that a further 534 important studies unquestioningly put their trust in the narrowly focused IPCC findings.

So poor was the examination of the role of the sun that the issue of cosmic rays was ignored completely even though it is considered a key climate factor by most scientists and a world leading theorist on this issue, Henrik Svensmark.

Cancun Climate Conference Likely to be Last

Ultimately, trumpeted apocalyptic climate scenarios hold no sway outside the English speaking nations and European Union. Only 32 international science academies out of 192 United Nations member states show any concern at all. With momentum so much with skeptics the alarmists now fear for the prospects for the 16th Conference of Parties (COP-16). COP-16 is the next UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in Cancun, Mexico, starting November 29, 2010.

Perhaps that brand of strident advocacy from those such as ABC’s Professor Lewandowsky has turned off voters? Or perhaps its the free access to information found in the blogosphere that helped sweep the midterm U.S. election victory the Republican Party’s way? With avowed climate skeptics winning half of those seats a new mandate may be claimed in Congress contrary to the one-sided media presentation.

Now a disaffected India has announced developing nations are unlikely to entertain further such climate change conferences if the upcoming Cancun event fails, as is likely, to deliver a binding treaty on so-called greenhouse gas emissions.

References:

[1.]Moss, R., and S. Schneider, ‘Uncertainties, in Guidance Papers on the Cross Cutting Issues of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, (2000), R. Pachauri ed., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Geneva.

[2.] Manning, M. R. et al (Eds), ‘IPCC Workshop on Describing Scientific Uncertainties in Climate Change to Support Analysis of Risk and of Options: Workshop report.’ (2004) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva.

Read more on Suite 101 here.

By David A. Burton

Analysis of global linear mean sea level (MSL) trends, including distance-weighted averaging

Abstract

159 tide stations with long (avg. ~85 year) Mean Sea Level (MSL) measurement records make up the GLOSS-LTT designated tide stations for monitoring long term sea level trends around the world. A spreadsheet containing the Local MSL (LMSL) trend data for those stations is available on the noaa.gov web site. (The data for 114 of the tide stations are maintained by the PSMSL in the UK, and the rest are maintained by NOAA in the USA.)

I downloaded the spreadsheet and used the data to check the IPCC’s claim that sea levels rose ~18 cm during the last century (a rate of 1.8 mm/year).
I averaged the tide station data several different ways (including by weighting stations’ LMSL trends according to distance from other stations), and found that the IPCC’s claimed 1.8 mm/year rate of global MSL rise exaggerates the actual, measured rate of MSL rise by at least 50%:

MSL Trend
+1.090 mm/yr (measured, median)
+0.611 mm/yr (measured, average1, equal station weights)
+0.458 mm/yr (measured, average2, equal station-year weights)
+1.133 mm/yr (measured, distance-weighted average) plus/minus 0.113 mm/yr
+1.8 mm/yr (IPCC claim)

Furthermore, the IPCC’s claims that the rate of sea level rise is accelerating, and that the acceleration has been confirmed by coastal tide gauges, are also untrue. In fact, tide gauge measurements indicate that the global average rate of sea level rise has not measurably accelerated in more than a century.

See detailed analysis here.

------------

Quotes I never expected to see in a New York Times mostly-alarmist climate article on the ice sheets
Hockey Schtick

Global warming skeptics, on the other hand, contend that any changes occurring in the ice sheets are probably due to natural climate variability, not to greenhouse gases released by humans…

Strictly speaking, scientists have not proved that human-induced global warming is the cause of the changes. They are mindful that the climate in the Arctic undergoes big natural variations. In the 1920s and ‘30s, for instance, a warm spell caused many glaciers to retreat.

John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is often critical of mainstream climate science, said he suspected that the changes in Greenland were linked to this natural variability, and added that he doubted that the pace would accelerate as much as his colleagues feared.

For high predictions of sea-level rise to be correct, “some big chunks of the Greenland ice sheet are going to have to melt, and they’re just not melting that way right now,” Dr. Christy said.

However, in typical New York Times fashion, the article

1. Fails to mention that glaciers have been melting and sea levels rising since the peak of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, which is helpful to perpetuate the myth that this is a man-made phenomenon.

2. Fails to mention that the claim below of accelerated melting based on GRACE satellite data was recently debunked by a paper published in Nature Geoscience.

3. Claims that sea level rise is accelerating and that sea levels will rise “perhaps” 3 feet by 2100, even though the recent scientific literature shows that sea level rise has decelerated 44% since 2005 to a rate of 7 inches per century and also decelerated in the latter half of the 20th century.

By Marlo Lewis

Cap-and-tax may be dead in Congress but the Kyoto agenda of stealth energy taxes marches on at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Although the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, years before global warming was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, and even though the statute says nothing about greenhouse gases (GHGs), EPA is now “legislating” climate policy. How did this happen?

In Massachusetts v. EPA (April 2007), the Supreme Court held that carbon dioxide (CO2) and other GHGs are “air pollutants” because they are “emitted into” or “otherwise enter” the air. The Clean Air Act exists, of course, to control and prevent air pollution.

But Court decoupled the term “air pollutant” from its plain English meaning - as if any “emitted” substance is an “air pollutant” whether or not it actually dirties, fouls, or otherwise pollutes the air.

As Justice Scalia quipped in dissent, as defined by the Court, “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies as an ‘air pollutant.’” Indeed, even absolutely clean, pollution-free air qualifies the moment it moves or circulates.

From that absurd premise springs all the “absurd results” EPA now struggles to avoid by amending the statute through its so-called Tailoring Rule.

EPA claims that it is regulating GHGs “under court order.” Not so. The Court said EPA need not make an endangerment determination - the prerequisite and trigger for regulatory action - as long as the agency grounds its reason for “inaction” in the statute.

Here’s the now-obvious statutory reason. Finding endangerment compels EPA to establish GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles, which in turn makes CO2 a “regulated air pollutant,” which in turn subjects millions of non-industrial facilities to Clean Air Act pre-construction and operating permit requirements, crippling both environmental protection and economic development, contrary to congressional intent.

As EPA acknowledges, regulating GHGs via the Clean Air Act leads to “absurd results.” That EPA must now violate the separation of powers and “tailor” (amend) the Act to avoid absurdity is strong evidence that the Court misread the Act.

Had counsel for EPA alerted the Court to the “glorious mess” a GHG endangerment finding would create, Mass. v. EPA might well have been decided differently. But then EPA would not now be in a position to regulate CO2, the most ubiquitous byproduct of industrial civilization.

EPA is nothing if not the master of bureaucratic self-dealing. EPA’s GHG Tailpipe Rule, for example, not only is a springboard for EPA regulation of stationary sources, it also empowers EPA to determine the stringency of motor vehicle fuel-economy standards (because CO2 from gasoline combustion accounts for 94% of all motor vehicle GHG emissions). Yet Congress authorized the Department of Transportation, not EPA, to regulate fuel economy.

More climate regulations are in the pipeline, such as EPA’s recently proposed GHG standards for heavy-duty vehicles, or in development, such as GHG industrial performance standards, which could be used to suppress electricity generation from coal, America’s most abundant and affordable fuel source.

Looking further ahead, the Endangerment Rule logically commits EPA to establish national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for GHGs. Environmental groups have already petitioned EPA to establish NAAQS for CO2 at 350 parts per million (40 ppm lower than the current concentration). Not even a global depression lasting several decades would be sufficient to achieve that objective. Even de-industrializing America might not be enough.

Momentous decisions affecting potentially trillions of dollars in cumulative GDP should be based on something more solid than a tortured reading of the definition of “air pollutant.” That is an absurd way to make public policy.

The good news is that Congress can set things right. Overturning EPA’s Endangerment Rule is the best option, since it would negate all of EPA’s GHG regulations. Next best would be a beefed up version of West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s bill to suspend GHG regulation of stationary sources for two years.

How about this - suspend GHG regulation of stationary sources until such time as Congress votes to remove the suspension?

Marlo Lewis is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a contributor to Globalwarming.org

Read more at the Washington Examiner here.