Stories by Michael Mogil, Dr. William Gray, Dr. Bob Carter
Stories by Michael Mogil, Dr. William Gray, Dr. Bob Carter
“December 7, 2009 - a Day of Environmental Infamy”
By Michael Mogil
On December 7, 2009, 68 years after Pearl Harbor, known as the “Day of Infamy,” the global environmental community and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have created another such tragic event. Marking the start of a global conference on climate change (determined to create a global environmental government), environmentalists poured into Copenhagen, Denmark to push for controls on the emission of greenhouse gases, even in the face of a growing scandal that casts dispersions onto the very basis of their climatic change claims. Meanwhile, the U.S. EPA declares greenhouse gases as “terrorists” and will be regulating them because they are harmful. As my wife noted again today, “it’s truly arrogant to think that we humans are more powerful than the forces of nature.”
Hence, December 7, 2009 must now be remembered as a “Day of Environmental Infamy.”
For years, I have noted that if the EPA was ever fully successful in banning everything they wanted to in the Earth’s atmosphere, Earth would become a dead planet. I am in favor of controlling/limiting serious emissions, but without some pollutants and especially without greenhouse gases (like water vapor and carbon dioxide) our entire planetary hydrologic and biological system would collapse. Read much more here.
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Puncturing the Climate Balloon
By Dr. Bill Gray
Had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events I would have likely been concerned over the possibility of humans causing serious global climate degradation. There has been an unrelenting quarter century one-sided indoctrination of the western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon dioxide (CO_2 ) induced global
warming disaster. These warming scenarios have been orchestrated by a combination of environmentalists, vested interest scientists wanting larger federal grants and publicity, the media which profits from doomsday scenario reporting, governmental bureaucrats who want more power over our lives, and socialists who want to level-out global living standards. These many alarmist groups appear to have little concern over whether their global warming prognostications are accurate, however. And they most certainly are not. The alarmists believe they will be able to scare enough of our citizens into believing their propaganda that the public will be willing to follow their advice on future energy usage and agree to a lowering of their standard of living in the name of climate salvation.
Rising levels of CO2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be a honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO2 ‘s influence on global temperature. The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.
The last century’s global warming of about 1F (Icecap Note:in large measure created by scientists manpulating data) is not a consequence of
human activities. This warming is primarily the result of a multi-century changes in the globe’s deep ocean circulation. These ocean current changes have lead to a small and gradual increase in the globe’s temperature. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age and into a generally warmer climate state. This is akin to the warmer global climate of the Medieval Period. We can do nothing but adapt to such long period natural temperature changes.
The recent ‘ClimateGate’ revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years. This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publically funded climate research groups of the US and of foreign governments were ever made public.
The disastrous economic consequences of restricting CO2 emissions from the present by as much as 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 (as
being proposed in Copenhagen) have yet to be digested by the general public. Such CO2 output decreases would cause very large increases in our energy costs, a lowering of our standard of living, and do nothing of significance to improve our climate. The Cap-and-Trade bill presently before Congress, the likely climate agreements coming out of the Copenhagen Conference, and the EPA’s just announced decision to treat CO2 as a pollutant represents a grave threat to the industrial world’s continued economic development. We should not allow these proposals to restrict our economic growth. Any United Nations climate bill our country might sign would act as an infringement on our country’s sovereignty. Read more here.
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Kill the IPCC
By Dr. Bob Carter
I am standing on the helicopter deck of the famous science-drilling ship JOIDES Resolution, the snow-capped mountains of South Island, New Zealand, glistening gently along the far western horizon.
It is a privilege and a pleasure to be here. The group of 50 scientists and technicians on board are drawn from the best in the world, and from the many country members of the International Drilling Program (IODP). For a research proposal to be allocated a drilling leg on JR - which lasts 2 months and costs about US $15 million to conduct - the science involved has to survive the most rigorous international peer-review.
The drilling leg in which I am participating has been fostered by a group of scientists who are vitally interested in the topic of ancient sea-level and climate changes. Faintly, for it is far away, I remember that these issues are supposed to be the focus of international discussions in Copenhagen this week.
I grimace at the thought, because the study of climate change, under the aegis of “dangerous global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions,” has long since been captured by the small group of well connected, well networked and well funded atmospheric scientists and computer modellers who advise the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and whose nearly every utterance confirms their ignorance of the true course of climate history and change on our planet - a topic that is the domain of geologists, not meteorologists and computer jockeys.
However, the stately progress that the IPCC was making towards achieving international action at the COP15 climate conference against carbon dioxide, an environmentally beneficial trace gas, has been shattered by the Climategate affair. Read more here.
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David and Goliath
By John Coleman
The 21st century Goliath is Global Warming. It is a powerful six-legged monster. In no order of strength, those legs are:
(1) The big money climate change scientists and their powerful institutions from governmental centers to Universities,
(2) The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is a Geneva-based, highly funded bureaucracy controlled by one-world government political activists,
(3) Environmentalists who seek to use threats of climate chaos to stop the use of fossil fuels and return to a simpler, more “natural”, primitive lifestyle,
(4) Government at all levels whose political leaders find dealing with global warming is their opportunity to save us all from disaster cementing their status and success,
(5) The media populated by people who love to warn us of impending disaster and give us the advice we need to cope, who believe in Al Gore and his political party and who know that “the sky is falling” is the best headline of them all,
(6) Al Gore, who uses his status as a successful former Senator and Vice President to provide a platform to promote his message of doom and gloom, a message he learned in his only college science class and must have truly believed for many years but should see now is only an empty threat.
The total financial resources and power structure behind Goliath are staggering. Goliath now occupies Copenhagen. For the 15th time, Goliath is meeting to publicize his long list of threatened consequences if do not head his demands. The ice will melt, the coasts and islands will flood displacing millions and killing tens of thousands; the polar bears and eventually thousands of other species will die as habitats are destroyed; hurricanes will become superstorms wrecking havoc on the coastal cities killing tens of thousands; heat waves will kill more hundreds of thousands as they grip the planet; drought and heat will destroy our agriculture starving untold millions more. He tells us this is because of our carbon footprints left by our burning of fossil fuels emitting exhaust of carbon dioxide.
Fifteen thousand “delegates” are attending Goliath’s conference coming by hundreds of private jet aircraft, riding in over a thousand limos, occupying every hotel room for miles around and all living on expense accounts paid by taxpayers and stock holders. They are making speeches, politicking one another and most importantly negotiating how much the people of each of their nations will reduce their carbon footprints in coming years, having a major impact on all our lifestyles.
Meanwhile, here at home The Environmental Protection Administration, part of Goliath’s government leg, just classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant that is an endangerment to our lives. And the US Congress is working with the President on legislation known as Cap and trade that will make all of us pay taxes for our carbon footprints. Goliath is a rich and very powerful monster. He thrives on carbon dioxide.
David is tiny and weak. He is composed of:
30 thousand scientists who sign a petition but only a few hundred of whom have the specialized education, skill and positions to do unfunded or underfunded research that debunks the carbon dioxide greenhouse claims of Goliath, a handful of struggling policy institutes that strive to stage events to educate the public and media about the global warming myth, the internet, a resource that is open to all on both sides to communicate and educate and organize and protest as best the skeptics can, There skeptics have established websites and blogs and posted videos, some serious and some as clever as animated musical parodies, talk radio with a hundred solid talk hosts who cover all aspects of the folly of global warming and reach several million people, and a small cadre of elected officials from one or two Senators to a hand-full of members of the House of Representatives, to the President of Czech Republic and a small collection of other office holders who understand the science and are brave enough to join a minority group.
We are outmanned, poor by comparison and somewhat leaderless and disorganized. How can David win this battle? The rocks he throws are small and his rock pile is small. Time is short before the consequences of increased government control, a scaled back and altered lifestyle and, most of all, establishment of bad science as a controlling instrument. David has one great strength, however: Truth.
There is no significant man-made global warming, there has not been any in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future. Carbon dioxide is a natural trace gas in the atmosphere with very limited greenhouse impact on temperatures and naturally produced CO2 greatly exceeds the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels. There is no tipping point when the impact of CO2 sets in to cause an increased impact because of “forcing.” The bad science behind the global warming myth is based on a hypothesis that has failed. Superman fought for “truth, justice and the American way.” So is David. But he is no Superman. The battle goes on.
See also videos of the Economic Consequences of Climate Change Policy here. See the 50+ videos from skeptic scientists produced for Copenhagen here. Icecap and KUSI were involved but CO2Science did the lion’s share of the work and deserve the credit.
By John Vidal in Copenhagen
The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.
The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.
The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” - but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark - has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.
The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol’s principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol - the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.
The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as “a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks”.
A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:
• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;
• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called “the most vulnerable”;
• Weaken the UN’s role in handling climate finance;
• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.
Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations. “It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process,” said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.
Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: “This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed.”
Hill continued: “It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.” Read more here.
By Marc Sheppard, American Thinker
Close followers of the Climategate controversy know that much of the melee surrounds an email in which Climate Research Unit (CRU) chief Phil Jones wrote about using “Mike’s Nature Trick” (MNT) to “hide the decline.” And yet, 17 days and thousands of almost exclusively on-line op-eds into this scandal, it still seems very few understand exactly which “decline” was being hidden, what “trick” was used to do so, and why Jones’s words have become the slogan for the greatest scientific fraud in history.
As the mainstream media move from abject denial to dismissive whitewashing, CRU co-conspirators move to Copenhagen for tomorrow’s UN climate meeting, intent on changing the world as we know it based primarily on their now exposed trickery. Add yesterday’s announcement of a UN investigation into the matter, which will no doubt be no less corrupt than those being investigated, and public awareness of how and why that trick was performed is now more vital than ever.
So please allow me to explain in what I hope are easily digestible terms. First and foremost—contrary to what you’ve likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the email was sent in November of 1999 should have allayed any such confusion.
In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists - those determined by proxy reconstructions. As this scandal has attracted new readers to the subject, I ask climate savvy readers to indulge me while I briefly explain climate proxies, as they are an essential ingredient of this contemptible conspiracy.
Truth be told—even reasonably reliable instrumental readings are a relatively modern convenience, limiting CRU’s global measured temperature database to a start date somewhere in the mid-19th century. That’s why global temperature charts based on actual readings typically use a base year of 1850 or somewhere thereabouts.
And yet—most historical temperature charts, including the one Al Gore preached before in An Inconvenient Truth, go way back to 1000 AD. That’s where proxies come in. While historical documents (e,g, ship’s logs, diaries, court and church records, tax rolls, and even classic literature) certainly provide a glimpse into past temperature trends, such information is far too limited and generalized to be of any statistical value. So climate scientists have devised means to measure variations in such ubiquitous materials as lake sediments, boreholes, ice cores, and tree rings to evaluate past temperature trends.
They then employ complex computer programs to combine such “proxy” data sampled throughout a region to plot that area’s annual relative changes in temperature hundreds or even thousands of years prior. By then combining the datasets, they believe they can accurately reproduce hemispheric and global temperature trends of the previous millennia.
And while reconstructions—as past temperature interpretations from proxy data are called—can differ greatly from one source to another, those generated by the CRU have often been accepted as the de facto temperatures of the past. Largely because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proclaims them to be.
Warmist Public Enemy Number One: The Medieval Warming Period
It’s important to understand that early analyses of these “proxies” clearly demonstrated that three radical temperature shifts occurred within the past millennium, as do many contemporary studies. Indeed, the years 900-1300 AD were labeled the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), as global temperatures rose precipitously from the bitter cold of the previous Dark Ages to levels several degrees warmer than today. The Little Ice Age, a sudden period of cooling, then followed and lasted until the year 1850. And then began the modern warming period, which was by no means unique and appears to have ended with the millennium itself.
Originally, even the IPCC accepted that pre-20th century analysis. In fact, the 1990 First Assessment Report used this schematic IPCC 1990 Figure 7c (courtesy of Climate Audit) to represent last millennium’s dramatic temperature swings.
But this image of a fluid climate system subject to abrupt and natural up-and-downturns made unprecedented 20th century warming about as marketable as Florida swampland. And opportunists who depended on the aberrance of post-industrial revolution warming in order to condemn and control mankind’s CO2 emissions soon recognized that perhaps the LIA but most certainly the MWP simply had to go.
And as many of these hucksters were closely connected to the IPCC - both sender and recipient names on those illuminating CRU emails include many of its editors, lead authors and contributors—that task was far less daunting than one might imagine.
Proxies, Tricks and Hockey Sticks
The first step was taken in the 1995 Second Assessment Report, when the above Figure 7c was replaced with a 1993 reconstruction from RS Bradley and Phil Jones himself that used 1400 AD as its base - effectively wiping the MWP off the radar-screen.
But it wasn’t until the 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) that the MWP simply vanished. This multi-proxy reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature anomalies appeared in chapter 2, page 134, of the Working Group 1 (WG1) report [PDF] (below enlarged here).
Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is that both the MWP and LIA have indeed disappeared. In fact, temperatures appear to trend downward throughout the millennium until a sharp jump upward last century. But if you look closer, you’ll also notice that the “reconstructed” series terminate in 1980. What forms the dramatic blade to the hockey stick shape (yes, this is indeed the famous “Hockey-Stick” graph) is instead the distal segment of the 1902 to 1999 instrumental data series.
Mann has recently claimed that the available proxy data ended in 1980, but even his coconspirators at RealClimate admit that’s nonsense. The truth is that the proxy data was scrapped because unlike those measured, reconstructed temperatures showed a marked decline after 1980. And, as the chart plotted temperature anomalies against what the plotters selected as the “normal” period and temperatures of 1961 to 1990, the reconstruction would have been quite unremarkable otherwise. So at the 1980 mark, the actual post-1980 measurements were actually attached to the truncated proxy series to create the illusion they were one.
The figure below, found on the same page of the WG1 report reveals this trick more clearly. This chart plots the original 4 reconstructions used: 2 from Mann et al, 1 from Jones et al and 1 from Briffa et al. Notice how all but the first series continue to trend downward around 1960 while instrumental readings begin to trend upward? And even that series ends abruptly in 1980 (below enlarged here).
So not only did conspirators cherry-pick the one series of the four that approximated measured temperatures the longest, they also terminated that series at the point that it too, began to trend down. They then joined it to the actual 1980-1999 temperatures to “hide the decline” in the final product, as that decline created an inexplicable divergence between the reconstructed and measured temperatures. The existence of which challenges the entire series dating back to 1000 AD.
Remember, all of the temperatures prior to 1850 were estimated by computer algorithms and no actual readings exist to prove or disprove those figures. So a relatively short window of opportunity exists to test the programs against observations. Had 20th century measured temperatures continued to align with those recreated as smoothly after 1960 as they did previously, then the programmers could declare their code and hence their millennial temperatures sound. But the divergence, if allowed to stand, instead revealed serious design flaws in the proxy reconstructions. Which suggests that just as the decline was dealt with through trickery, so was the MWP.
And it seems that each time the trick was used, its involvement would be more deeply concealed.
Every multi-volume IPCC Assessment has been accompanied by a relatively brief and highly-politicized Summary for Policymakers (SPM). This synopsis invariably commands the bulk of the media and political attention. Here’s the version of the graph depicted prominently on page 3 of the 2001 TAR SPM [PDF], the only version of the report most policymakers and reporters would ever actually see. Notice how they further obscured their chicanery by omitting the series defining legend and the “1988 instrumental value” declaration (below enlarged here).
And despite the fact that the only confirmable segment of the series failed that very test, which should have declared the entire series null and void, the chart’s caption informed policymakers that:
“the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries. Similarly, it is likely that the 1990s have been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium.”
And it’s this highly fraudulent version that has become the poster child of the equally fraudulent Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) movement.
Thanks in large part to the trick that hides the decline (read much more here).