By Christopher Booker, the UK Telegraph
There is something very odd indeed about the statement by the Information Commission on its investigation into “Climategate”, the leak of emails from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Gordon Smith, the deputy commissioner, confirms that the university’s refusal to answer legitimate inquiries made in 2007 and 2008 was an offence under S.77 of the Information Act. But he goes on to claim that the Commission is powerless to bring charges, thanks to a loophole in the law - “because the legislation requires action within six months of the offence taking place”.
Careful examination of the Act, however, shows that it says nothing whatever about a time limit. The Commission appears to be trying to confuse this with a provision of the Magistrates Act, that charges for an offence cannot be brought more than six months after it has been drawn to the authorities’ attention - not after it was committed. In this case, the Commission only became aware of the offence two months ago when the emails were leaked - showing that the small group of British and American scientists at the top of the IPCC were discussing with each other and with the university ways to break the law, not least by destroying evidence, an offence in itself. Read full story here.
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Mann inquiry concludes, board to release findings
By Colleen Boyle, Collegian Staff Writer
A panel of Penn State faculty and staff concluded the inquiry of Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann this weekend and is slated to release its “Climategate” findings later in the week, university officials said.
The end of the two-month inquiry marks a major point in the worldwide climate debate. Penn State’s inquiry began after hundreds of illegally obtained e-mails were leaked last November from a private server in the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, containing comments critics say suggest Mann and his colleagues may have distorted climate change evidence.
The inquiry’s findings will determine if the university will further investigate Mann’s work. Penn State President Graham Spanier addressed the inquiry and the panel’s work during the Board of Trustees meeting on Jan. 22. “I know they’ve taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides,” Spanier said.
But conservative groups are already mobilizing to respond to the university’s findings. Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)—a Penn State student group working to “advance the principles of individual and economic freedom, limited government and traditional values”—has taken an interest in the Mann inquiry. On Feb. 12, YAF will host a demonstration in front of the HUB to protest what the group feels is a violation of academic integrity, YAF member Samuel Settle said. The 9-12 Project of Central PA, a conservative group, will join the demonstration. Settle (sophomore-political science and history) said the university’s handling of the inquiry unsettles him. “What the university has done is they’ve taken three Penn State employees and assigned them to deciding whether or not Mann violated university policy,” he said. “That’s an awful lot of power in the hands of three with no external oversight.”
See post here. See here how Steve McIntyre and none of those who post at Climate Audit were questioned by the inquiry team despite their promise to investigate the issue from all sides.
Meanwhile a short distance away.
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Global warming science implodes overseas: American media silent
By Rick Moran, The American Thinker
The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens - yes dozens - of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the “consensus” of 2500 of the world’s climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.
We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.
Glaciergate, tempgate, icegate, and now, disappearing Amazon forests not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus “science” on was written by a food safety advocate according to this Christopher Booker piece in the Telegraph :
Dr North next uncovered “Amazongate”. The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest - as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.
A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages - when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.
This is a great story. It has everything a media outlet could desire; scandal, conflict of interest (IPCC head Pauchuri runs companies that benefited from climate scare stories), government cover ups - why then, has this unraveling of the basis of climate science that posited catastrophic man made warming not been making any news at all in the United States?
It’s too easy to simply claim “bias.” Media outlets don’t pass up juicy stories that could potentially increase their readership and revenue for ideological purposes (except the New York Times - and even they could spin all of this to show skeptics to be using flawed arguments like the liberal Guardian is doing in England).
Perhaps its time to ask why this story being revealed overseas with new revelations almost daily in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Timesonline, and other Fleet Street publications can’t get any traction here. Blogs like Watts up with That and Climate Depot are keeping us informed of the latest from England but we hear crickets chirping when it comes to stories from major newspapers and - outside of Fox News - the cable nets.
As global warming the political movement is losing its scientific justification, the American people - who will be asked to foot the bill to the tune of trillions of dollars if Obama goes ahead with his “green” plans - are grossly uninformed about the state of the debate. Until the media starts to give this story the coverage it deserves, that state of affairs will not change.
See post here.
See the growing list of IPCC’s Questionable Citations here.
AMS Executive Director Emeritus Kenneth C. Spengler, a vital force in the growth of the AMS after World War II, passed away on January 28th at the age of 94. Dr. Spengler was executive director of the AMS from 1946 to 1988, leading the Society at a time when membership surged from 2,000 to about 10,000. In 1958, he negotiated the acquisition of the current AMS Headquarters building at 45 Beacon Street in Boston. The entire AMS community extends its condolences to Dr. Spengler’s family.
Dr. Spengler was a gentleman scientist and a true leader. He always provided a smiling face and a handshake welcome at conferences and AMS functions. He worked to ensure the society during his tenure focused on science and served all constituent groups. All the societies have abandoned that in recent years in a movement towards advocacy, something that troubled Dr. Spengler and many of the senior members of these societies. I join other current and former AMS members in saying we will truly miss him.
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IPCC Errors Mount, Apparently so does Pachauri
In a China Daily story below they talk about 3 errors possibly being the breaking point for the IPCC report, well the number is increasing daily. Read here how one of the reports used as peer review was generated by Greenpeace. and below how a student’s disseratation and a magazine article from a hiker were used as evidence.
UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent and Rebecca Lefort, UK Telegraph
The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change. The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change. The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming. The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps. The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.
This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected. But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC’s use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.
Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes. Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been. There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense.”
The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government’s worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people. The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled “Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming”. It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000. The report also states that the section is intended to “assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects”. But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.
The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s. Mr Bowen said: “I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes.” The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps. Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.
The IPCC has faced growing criticism over the sources it used in its last report after it emerged the panel had used unsubstantiated figures on glacial melting in the Himalayas that were contained within a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report. Read rest of story here.
Icecap Note: Anytime you see a report talking about changes since the 1970s, remember that is before and after the great Pacific Climate shift which resulted in a positive PDO and more El Ninos and ultimately a warm Atlantic (positive AMO). We have reversed the pattern to a cold Pacific and cooling Atlantic that together with a quiet solar quarter century should mean a rapid increase in ice and snow and colder temperatures (which have been observed).
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Bizarroland Continues for IPCC, Pachauri publishes ‘smutty’ romance novel!
By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That
Just when you think things can’t get any more bizarre with the IPCC, having just learned that the IPPC 2007 report used magazine articles for references, head of the IPCC, Dr. Rajenda Pachauri, provides comedy gold. According to the UK Telegraph, he’s just released what they describe as a “smutty” romance novel, Return to Almora laced with steamy sex, lots of sex. Oh, and Shirley MacLaine.
See the good doctor, grinning like a Cheshire cat at his book launch in India on January 10th here.
Icecap note: Sadly there is more truth in Return to Almora than in AR4. As Steve McIntyre on Climate Audit reports it explains why the good love doctor was too busy to check into glaciergate problems last December. As Lubos Motl notes here, perhaps this will qualify Pachauri for a second nobel prize for literature as his book is already #8 for fiction. Recall Pachauri and his IPCC pals already won the nobel prize for science fiction for the AR4.
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Do three errors mean breaking point for IPCC?
By Li Xing (China Daily)
While covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, I took a morning away from the main venue to attend a forum of “climate skeptics”.
The speakers presented political, economic, and scientific analyses to counter the series of assessments by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
A few of the skeptics went so far as to suggest that the current international drive to tackle global warming would eventually lead the world into some kind of “energy tyranny”. One even showed a video clip of how “energy police” would invade private homes in the American suburbs, unplugging and removing the owners’ microwave ovens, television sets, and other appliances.
I left the forum before the morning session ended. I felt that most of the speakers were too emotional and politically charged to be considered objective.
But I was impressed by the presentation of Dr Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist and founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service, who challenged the IPCC findings with his research data.
In the next few days, I talked with several scientists, including Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chair, and asked them about Singer’s data. All of these scientists brushed aside Singer’s arguments, saying that the IPCC’s primary finding is indisputable: “Warming in the climate system is unequivocal”.
I believed the IPCC reports, which summarize the research of some 4,000 scientists, but I had some serious reservations. For one thing, the IPCC reports contained very little data from Chinese researchers. I was told the IPCC refused to consider Chinese data because the Chinese research was not peer-reviewed.
China is not a small country. Its landmass spans several climate zones and includes the roof of the world. I have to wonder how data from China would affect the IPCC’s findings.
Several Chinese scientists who have gone over the IPCC report believe that the IPCC may have overstated the link between global temperature and CO2 in the atmosphere.
In a paper published in the December issue of the Chinese language Earth Science magazine, Ding Zhongli, an established environmental scientist, stated that the current temperatures on earth look normal if global climate changes over the past 10,000 years are considered.
Ding’s paper highlighted the fact that in its policy suggestions, the IPCC offered solutions that would give people in rich countries the right to emit a much higher level of greenhouse gas per capita than people in developing countries. It in effect set limits on the economic growth of developing countries, which will result in furthering the gap between rich and poor countries.”
A series of “climategate” scandals now add more reason to give the IPCC research closer scrutiny.
Last November, hackers revealed that some scientists had favored data which supports the case for “global warming” in order to enhance their grant proposals.
Just last week, the IPCC announced that it “regrets the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures” in a claim that glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by 2035. Instead of coming from a peer-reviewed scientific paper, the statement was sheer speculation, the IPCC conceded.
Then over the weekend, the media revealed that the IPCC had misrepresented an unpublished report, which it said linked climate change with an increase in natural disasters. However, the author of the report, Dr Robert Muir-Wood, clearly stated the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe loss.” Muir-Wood is not a climatologist, but a researcher in risk management.
I am particularly troubled by the fact that top IPCC officials do not seem to take these revelations seriously. Interviewed by the BBC, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the IPCC, dismissed the matter as a “human mistake”.
Ancient Chinese considered three a breaking point. They could forgive two errors, but not a third. Now that the IPCC has admitted three “human” errors, isn’t it time scientists gave its work a serious review? Read story here. Icecap Note: It is a lot more than three. In fact the whole IPCC report and AGW movement is based on a house of cards with a lot based on the unproven assumption that the atmosphere’s sensitivity to CO2 is high (proven empirically and by theory not to be the case), that its atmospheric lifetime is centuries (research suggests 5-7 years) and that temperatures have never been as warm as they have been this decade. See the SPPI report and this story on the report by Examiner Environmental Reporter Kirk Myers.
A significant peer-reviewed study by David Frank et al. in NATURE just released refutes the premise of an important IPCC AR4 CO2 Feedback conclusion. As other major claims of the IPCC AR4 (about glaciers, extreme events, the Amazon) crumble under the weight of increasing scrutiny, this important feedback along with earlier challenges to the water vapor and cloud feedback assumptions by Lindzen and Spencer and others in peer review, raise increasing doubt about the importance of CO2 to climate change.
Dr. Frank says: “for every degree Celsius of warming, natural ecosystems tend to release an extra 7.7 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere (the full range of their estimate was between 1.7 and 21.4 parts per million).
This stands in sharp contrast to the recent estimates of positive feedback models, which suggest a release of 40 parts per million per degree; the team say with 95% certainty that value is an overestimate.”
David C. Frank, Jan Esper, Christoph C. Raible, Ulf Buntgen, Valerie Trouet, Benjamin Stocker, & Fortunat Joos. Ensemble reconstruction constraints on the global carbon cycle sensitivity to climate. Nature, 2010; 463 (7280): 527 DOI: 10.1038/nature08769. Correspondence to: David C. Frank Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to D.C.F. (Email: david.frank@wsl.ch) at Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zurcherstrasse 111, CH-8903 Birmensdorf, Switzerland or the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Zahringerstrasse 25, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
Abstract:
The processes controlling the carbon flux and carbon storage of the atmosphere, ocean and terrestrial biosphere are temperature sensitives and are likely to provide a positive feedback leading to amplified anthropogenic warming. Owing to this feedback, at timescales ranging from interannual to the 20–100-kyr cycles of Earth’s orbital variations, warming of the climate system causes a net release of CO2 into the atmosphere; this in turn amplifies warming. But the magnitude of the climate sensitivity of the global carbon cycle (termed γ ), and thus of its positive feedback strength, is under debate, giving rise to large uncertainties in global warming projections. Here we quantify the median γ as 7.7 p.p.m.v. CO2 per degree C warming, with a likely range of 1.7-21.4 p.p.m.v. CO2 per degree C. Sensitivity experiments exclude significant influence of pre-industrial land-use change on these estimates. Our results, based on the coupling of a probabilistic approach with an ensemble of proxy-based temperature reconstructions and pre-industrial CO2 data from three ice cores, provide robust constraints for γ on the policy-relevant multi-decadal to centennial timescales. By using an ensemble of >200,000 members, quantification of γ is not only improved, but also likelihoods can be assigned, thereby providing a benchmark for future model simulations. Although uncertainties do not at present allow exclusion of γ calculated from any of ten coupled carbon–climate models, we find that γ is about twice as likely to fall in the lowermost than in the uppermost quartile of their range. Our results are incompatibly lower (P < 0.05) than recent pre-industrial empirical estimates of ~40 p.p.m.v. CO2 per degree C (refs 6, 7), and correspondingly suggest ~80% less potential amplification of ongoing global warming.
This study agrees with the Soon/Baliunas study of 2003 (PDF)!
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Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data but escape prosecution
By Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Jonathan Leake, Times Online
The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.
The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.
The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.
The stolen e-mails , revealed on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, showed how the university’s Climatic Research Unit attempted to thwart requests for scientific data and other information, and suggest that senior figures at the university were involved in decisions to refuse the requests. It is not known who stole the e-mails.
Professor Phil Jones, the unit’s director, stood down while an inquiry took place. The ICO’s decision could make it difficult for him to resume his post.
Details of the breach emerged the day after John Beddington, the Chief Scientific Adviser, warned that there was an urgent need for more honesty about the uncertainty of some predictions. His intervention followed admissions from scientists that the rate of glacial melt in the Himalayas had been grossly exaggerated.
In one e-mail, Professor Jones asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
He also told a colleague that he had persuaded the university authorities to ignore information requests under the act from people linked to a website run by climate sceptics.
A spokesman for the ICO said: “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred.” Breaches of the act are punishable by an unlimited fine.
The complaint to the ICO was made by David Holland, a retired engineer from Northampton. He had been seeking information to support his theory that the unit broke the IPCC’s rules to discredit sceptic scientists.
In a statement, Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the ICO, said: “The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information.”
He added: “The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. We will be advising the university about the importance of effective records management and their legal obligations in respect of future requests for information.”
Mr Holland said: “There is an apparent Catch-22 here. The prosecution has to be initiated within six months but you have to exhaust the university’s complaints procedure before the commission will look at your complaint. That process can take longer than six months.”
The university said: “The way freedom of information requests have been handled is one of the main areas being explored by Sir Muir Russell’s independent review. The findings will be made public and we will act as appropriate on its recommendations.”
Read more here.