By Margaret Cronin Fisk, Bloomberg

U.S. Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar was sued by the state of Alaska over claims he improperly banned drilling off the state’s coast after BP Plc’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The U.S. hasn’t issued drilling permits in the Arctic since the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf in April and Salazar announced at a press conference this month that he wouldn’t allow exploration plans to resume this year, according to the complaint filed yesterday by Alaska and its Republican governor, Sean Parnell.

The U.S. in May imposed a moratorium on deep-water drilling in the wake of the Gulf spill. Regulators including Salazar have improperly stopped drilling as well in the shallower waters off Alaska’s coast without issuing a formal ban, the state said.

“Defendants have not issued a final, appealable decision on a moratorium for the Alaska region,” the state said in the complaint filed in federal court in Anchorage. “Nor have defendants issued any findings, analysis, or explanation to support such a moratorium.”

The lawsuit claims that Salazar and the Interior Department didn’t consult the state or give it a chance to participate in the moratorium decision, as legally required. The state asked the fcourt to order the U.S. to end any moratorium on drilling in the Alaska region.

The state also sued the Interior Department, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement and its director, Michael Bromwich.

‘No Moratorium’

“There is no moratorium in Alaska and therefore nothing to sue on,” Kendra Barkoff, an Interior Department spokeswoman, said in an e-mail yesterday. “The moratorium is on deep-water drilling and there is no deep-water drilling in Alaska.”

U.S. regulators are “taking a cautious approach to offshore oil and gas development,” she said. “We need additional information about spill risks and spill response capabilities, which is why Secretary Salazar has delayed Shell’s request to drill in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas and canceled the remaining four lease sales in the Arctic.”

The case is State of Alaska v. Salazar, 3:10-cv-00205, U.S. District Court, District of Alaska (Anchorage).

See more here.

By Joanne Nova

If this was Exxon pushing a PDF promoting skeptical views, it would be on the front page tomorrow. Where are the front page headlines?

“Bankers feed scare-mongering report”

Instead it’s just Deutsche Bank try to save the world their profit line.

Just in case you are missing your daily dose of being spoon fed propaganda by Bankers who want your money, see Climate Spectator Balancing reason and risk, where Deutsche Bank is helping the skeptics by giving us yet another example of just how desperate they are to get carbon trading running.

Q: When will the bankers worry about whales?

(Ans: When they can trade Humpback Credits.)

The good news is we are getting to them, and we are marking the lines they need to jump over. They now admit it looks bad when they denigrate scientists (they finally a “get” that they shouldn’t call scientists deniers):

Although the scientific community has already addressed the sceptic arguments in some detail, there is still a public perception that scientists have been dismissive of the sceptic viewpoint,

Watch how they pretend to care about the science (science-schmaltz), even as they trash the scientific method by arguing from authority:

...we at Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors (DBCCA) have always said that the science is one essential foundation of the whole climate change investment thesis. Navigating the scientific debate is therefore vitally important for investors in this space.

For these reasons, we asked our advisors at the Columbia Climate Center at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, to examine as many as possible of the major sceptic claims in the light of the latest peer reviewed scientific literature and to weigh the arguments of each side in the balance. The result is, [a 51 page document!] we believe, a balanced, expert, and detailed assessment of the scientific case for climate change that will help investors navigate these extremely complex issues.

As always, there’s “that line” where the basic physics that might give us 1.2 degrees is hailed as if it explains it all:

To us, the most persuasive argument in support of climate change is that the basic laws of physics dictate that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere produce warming. (This will be the case irrespective of other climate events.)

But lookee here. The feedback argument makes an appearance. So Deutsche Bank are forced to come up to another line we’ve drawn in the sand. They admit they have to answer:

The only way that warming can be mitigated by natural processes is if there are countervailing ‘feedback mechanisms’, such as cooling from increased cloud cover caused by the changing climate.

Then there is the straight out deceit:

A key finding of the current research is that there has so far been no evidence of such countervailing factors.

No evidence? Douglass 2007, Spencer 2007, Lindzen & Choi 2010, McKitrick 2010, McShane 2010, Spencer 2010 and of course, the entire radiosonde record going back to 1959.

In fact, most observed and anticipated feedback mechanisms are actually working to amplify the warming process, not reduce it.

That’s according to the models that predict things we know don’t happen.

This is an information war

The lesson from this is that even the most well resourced advocates armed with PR, marketing and teams of scientists can’t endlessly back a false claim, not as long as we have free speech. With next to no resources we’re setting the rules. We’ve pointed out their bad manners, their censorship and their name-calling, and so even the bullies recognize there’s a price - they can’t afford to be “seen” doing those things. So they finally start being polite, finally admit there are “uncertainties”, and admit the feedbacks are worth talking about.

Next step: we need to point out why “Bankers Really Want Us To Trade Carbon” and show it for what it is. When bankers push it on us, it marks them as profit hungry corporations who are happy to see their customers cheated, who have no interest in protecting their investors, and are keen to join in the propaganda war. We need to make their every attempt a net negative for them. The alarmists made it too painful for Exxon to support skeptics with pitifully small amounts, so we are only returning fire with fire. If Exxon can’t support unpaid skeptics, why should Bankers get away with pushing their power-hungry, profit-seeking legislation that is backed-by-a-fake-consensus and supported by scientists who cheat, hide data, and declare only half the truth?

When the public starts to associate bankers pushing carbon-scares as being bad corporate citizens, the bankers will sit it out quietly. They’ll still fund the PR, but they won’t want their name on it. It will be another small win for us.

Note their Disclaimer:

Disclaimer
This material is intended for informational purposes only and it is not intended that it be relied on to make any investment decision.
ie: we can lie to you and it’s ok, you can’t sue us.

Who would trust this bank?

Their 51 page pdf report attacks all the usual Strawmen.

See Deutsche Bank exposed in a previous post for advertising for climate change, and (if you want) see more Deutsche Bank propaganda on their site.

See more here.

See here the good news that the value of carbon on the carbon exchange (CCX) has dropped to 10 cents with no volume from a high over $7 US). That means a lot of investors and banks (hopefully Deutsche is one) have lost a lot of money and the trading of air will fail miserably.

By Shikha Dalmia, Fortune

When a woman consistently messes up her relationships, her therapist doesn’t just tell her to wear a new dress and change her lipstick before her next date; s/he asks her to do some real soul searching. But a new dress-and-lipstick combo is pretty much what an agency charged with reviewing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control’s procedures in the wake of the GlacierGate mess recommended last week.

Both the detractors and supporters of the IPCC - the U.N. body that serves as the Vatican of climate change - are billing the

Inter Academy Council’s recommendations as “fundamental” change. And some of its recommendations might indeed make a difference if the IPCC ever implements them - a big “if.” But fundamental change would require creating incentives for the IPCC to question its own conclusions - do constant soul searching, as it were - something that other scientific disciplines do as a matter of course. Nothing in the review’s recommendations does that.

The global warming establishment found itself in hot water last year when leaked e-mails suggested that leading climatologists had massaged data, interfered with the peer review process and engaged in other shenanigans to exaggerate the observed warming. A subsequent whitewash exonerated the scientists involved but further scrutiny debunked other alarmist claims in the IPCC’s last assessment report. For example, the IPCC had predicted that the entire 500,000 square km Himalayan glacier range would disappear by 2035. Multiple analyses, including one by the Yale Climate Media Forum - no denialist outfit - found the claim to be perfectly accurate except for two problems. One, the approximate area covered by the glaciers is just 33,000 - not 500,000 - square km as the IPCC stated. And two, the paper from which the IPCC lifted this claim had predicted the shrinkage would occur by 2350, not 2035! (The Yale analysis is well worth a full read.)

The IPCC withdrew this claim - dismissing it as one mistake in a voluminous report that didn’t affect its overall conclusions. But the bigger problem is not with what the IPCC says but what it doesn’t. Even before GlacierGate, many external reviewers had bitterly complained that lead authors of the report’s various chapters solicit their opinion only to ignore it in the final summary if it contradicts their conclusions - creating an impression of a faux scientific consensus. Ross McKitrick, the University of Guelph-Ontario economist who debunked Penn State climatologist Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph, has copiously documented this behavior. Take tree ring-based climate reconstructions in the third IPCC report. McKitrick notes that Mann, a lead author, had available to him two studies besides his own presenting hemispheric temperature histories dating back to the Medieval Era. One of them did not support his claim that the 1990s were the hottest decade in the millennium. So what did Mann do? Simply delete all mention of it. The same trick was pulled in the latest report, McKitrick says. Indur Goklany, a policy analyst in the Department of Interior, has documented similar sleights of hand when it comes to predictions of food and water shortages due to global warming.

To its credit, the IAC review, headed by former Princeton University president Harold Shapiro, takes a serious stab at addressing these problems. It acknowledges that giving lead authors the final say in accepting critiques of their work is like having Enron certify its own books. (O.K. It didn’t quite put it that way, but the point is that there is a fundamental conflict of interest here). It recommended letting editors - not authors - be the final arbiters of which comments to keep or throw out as academic journals do. And when substantial disagreement persists between reviewers and authors, it should be documented in an appendix, the academy emphasized.  This is something that is already required by the current IPCC rules but roundly ignored. Even more commendably, the IAC recognized the incestuous group-think involved in producing the IPCC reports and recommended that more scientists from outside the climate change establishment be inducted in various stages of the report-writing process.

But then the academy’s review takes a leap into Banal Land. It recommends that IPCC chairs serve no more than one six-year term, a thinly veiled dig at the current chair, Rajendra Pachauri, now on his second term. Pachauri is a pompous, arrogant man (with an awful haircut) who brooks no disagreement with the global warming orthodoxy and deserves to go. He dismissed concerns that the IPCC’s Himalayan glacier claim might be in error as “school boy science.” However, there is no reason why a one-term chair would inherently be any better than a multiple-term chair.

Even more ridiculously, the academy concluded that IPCC’s sloppiness could be better handled if it had a permanent executive committee, something it currently lacks, a suggestion that Pachauri - surprise, surprise! - whole-heartedly embraced. But the idea that another layer of bureaucracy will solve the panel’s problems is absurd. Equally absurd is the academy’s suggestion that the IPCC enhance its “media-relations capacity” in order to communicate better with “audiences beyond scientists and governments” - as if its real problem is getting its message out given the legions of compliant journalists who happily regurgitate its line for free.

But none of the academy’s suggestions - good or bad - address the IPCC’s fundamental problem: It has every incentive - financial and otherwise - to buttress the global warming orthodoxy and none to challenge it. In every other discipline, scientists earn fame and fortune if they successfully debunk its reingning theories. They are feted at conferences, cited more often, offered more jobs. In climate science, by contrast, debunkers invite an onslaught by the entire global warming juggernaut that can leave their academic reputation in ruins. Debunkers get branded as deniers. And as this Australian blogger points out, they get investigated by Desmog, Exxon Secrets, or Sourcewatch, websites dedicated to exposing any connection the researcher might have with the fossil fuel industry - no matter how old or tenuous.

So how could the problem be fixed? First and foremost, IPCC’’s Working Groups 2 and 3, neither one of which has the slightest thing to do with science, ought to be disbanded. Group 2 speculates about the larger impact of global warming and Group 3 offers mitigation options to policy makers, all of which inevitably pushes the panel toward advocacy, something the IAC said it shouldn’t do. In their stead, Working Group 1 that deals with the scientific issues ought to be expanded to include departments dedicated to exploring the full range of possible explanations for the observed warming beyond human emissions such as natural variability or sun spot activity - all of which have become anathema to the global warming establishment.

The case for anthropogenic warming might indeed become airtight one day. But in order to get there, it has to withstand constant attempts at falsification.  That’s what fundamental change would require. Anything less is purely cosmetic. More here.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a Forbes columnist