Retracted in a Nano-Second

Qualifications and Clarifications Aplenty

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.  Monty Python could not have written such inanity into a script.  NASA came out at the end of last week trumpeting that 2014 was the warmest year on record.  The media dutifully picked up the headline, though with less fervour than it would have several years ago.  It’s hard to maintain apocalyptic fever for so long a time.

The climate shills at NASA have had their credibility questioned over many years.  But they are still at the game of propaganda, not science.  Nowadays a growing number of climatologists and sceptical scientists are ready and willing to debunk their alarmist, emotive eruptions.  And so the reaction has started.  Consequently, it took only 48 hours for NASA to come out and admit that there was only a one in three chance that 2014 was the warmest year on record, and even if it were the case, it would only be the warmest by 0.02 degrees, which is within the margin of error.

A headline from the Daily Mail said it all:

Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right 

Goddard Institute for Space Studies claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’. But it emerged that GISS’s analysis is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all  The Nasa climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.

In a press release on Friday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’. The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all. Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much.

But the picture gets much more distorted when we place it in a wider context.  In the first place NASA’s long term temperature data has been “adjusted”–that is, cooked.  It has systematically revised downwards the temperature readings from the early part of the twentieth century, so that recent temperature readings will appear to be warmer, “proving” a global warming trend over time.(See also, here)

Secondly,  NASA is deliberately disguising the fact that for the past eighteen years global temperatures have not increased.  The trend has flat lined.  Consequently, flat-lining temperature trends will show, from time to time, a year which will get the record, when compared to 2010 or 2005, or whatever–by 0.02 degrees, no less!  In the same way, some years will show up as the “coldest” years over the past eighteen years of measurement.  The reality remains, however, that the ostensible long term warming trend stopped.  In this case 2014 was 0.02 degrees higher than the previous high year of 2010, which is statistically meaningless.  It is well within the margin of measurement error.  Oh dear, how embarrassing. Never mind. 

Thirdly, it is universally agreed, although not often publicly acknowledged, that the actual temperature readings are now far lower that the forecast temperatures for the past fifteen years that fed into the climate computer models that “proved” the emerging climate catastrophe in the first place.  Meanwhile, CO₂ has continued to spill out into the atmosphere at rates well beyond those in the late nineties.  Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is reported to be 8.3 percent higher at the end of 2014 than at the end of 1999. This implies that temperatures should be roughly 8.3 percent higher today than in 2000.  Not so.  Given that bit of unfortunate reality, any scientist not deeply sceptical of the theory of man-caused global warming by now more resembles a zealot than a scientist. 

The theory of anthropogenic global warming is looking decidedly thin.  It’s precisely at such times that the zealots will trumpet most loudly.  Having to issue qualifications and retractions within 48 hours is a bit of a record, though.  Now, that’s global warming as we knew it, Jim.

Long Live the Pause

Scientists balk at ‘hottest year’ claims

Ignores Satellites showing 18 Year ‘Pause’ – ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’ – The ‘Pause’ continues

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: ‘Claiming 2014 is the ‘hottest year’ on record based on hundredths of a degree temperature difference is a fancy way of saying the global warming ‘pause’ is continuing.’
Astrophysicist Dr. Dr David Whitehouse: ‘The NASA press release is highly misleading…talk of a record is scientifically and statistically meaningless.’
Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: ‘Why 2014 Won’t Be the Warmest Year on Record’ (based on surface data)– ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’ 

Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels debunks 2014 ‘hottest year’ claim: ‘Is 58.46° then distinguishable from 58.45°? In a word, ‘NO.’

No Record Temperatures According To Satellites

Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl: ‘Please laugh out loud when someone will be telling you that it was the warmest year’

Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.: ‘We have found a significant warm bias. Thus, the reported global average surface temperature anomaly is also too warm.’

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘With 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year, this implies that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade.’

By: Marc Morano – Climate Depot 

January 16, 2015 

The global warming establishment and the media are crowing about 2010 being in a tie for the “hottest year” ever. The UK Guardian headline sums up the media’s promotion: 

UK Guardian: ‘Hottest Year’ Claim: 2014 officially the ‘hottest year’ on record US government scientists say – ‘Nasa and Noaa scientists report 2014 was 0.07F (0.04C) higher than previous records…The global average temperatures over land and sea surface for the year was 1.24F (0.69C) above the 20th century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and Nasa reported. The scientists said 2014 was 0.07F (0.04C) higher than the previous records set in 2005 and 2010.’

But scientists and climate skeptics are countering that the claims of “hottest year” are based on immeasurable temperature differences that are based on hundredths of a degree differences.

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano issued this statement: “There are dueling global datasets — surface temperature records and satellite records — and they disagree. The satellites show an 18 year plus global warming ‘standstill and the satellite was set up to be “more accurate” than the surface records. 

See: Flashback: 1990 NASA Report: ‘Satellite analysis of upper atmosphere is more accurate, & should be adopted as the standard way to monitor temp change.’

Any temperature claim of “hottest  year” based on surface data is based on hundredths of a degree hotter than previous “hottest years”. This immeasurable difference is not even within the margin of error of temperature gauges. The claim of the “hottest year” is simply a political statement not based on temperature facts. “Hottest year” claims are based on minute fractions of a degree while ignoring satellite data showing Earth is continuing the 18 plus year ‘pause’ or ‘standstill’. See: The Great Pause lengthens again: Global temperature update: The Pause is now 18 years 3 months (219 months)

Claiming 2014 is the “hottest year” on record based on hundredths of a degree temperature difference is a fancy way of saying the global warming ‘pause’ is continuing.”

End Morano statement. (Morano was former staff of U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee and producer of upcoming documentary Climate Hustle. He also testified in West VA on the climate school curriculum. )

#

Even former NASA global warming chief scientist  James Hansen, the leading proponent of man-made global warming in the U.S., conceded in 2011 that the “hottest year” rankings are essentially meaningless. Hansen explained that 2010 differed from 2005 by less than 2 hundredths of a degree F (that’s 0.018F). “It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005, or 1998 was the hottest year on record,” Hansen admitted on January 13.

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry, former chair of the school of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, had this to say about 2014 being the ‘hottest year’: “The ‘warmest year’ is noticeably missing in the satellite data sets of lower atmospheric temperatures,” Curry wrote on January 16. 

Curry predicts another decade of a global warming ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’. “I’ve made my projection – global surface temperatures will remain mostly flat for at least another decade,” she eexplained 

“With 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year, this implies that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade. This ‘almost’ record year does not help the growing discrepancy between the climate model projections and the surface temperature observations,” Curry told the Washington Post.

Curry continued: “Berkeley Earth (temperature analysis) sums it up well with this statement: ‘That is, of course, an indication that the Earth’s average temperature for the last decade has changed very little.’

Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels, mocked the notion of the “hottest year.”   “Whether or not a given year is a hundredth of a degree or so above a previous record is not the issue. What IS the issue is how observed temperatures compare to what has been forecast to happen,” Michaels said.

Michaels continued: “John Christy and Richard McNider, from University of Alabama (Huntsville) recently compared climate model projections to observed lower atmospheric temperatures as measured by two independent sources: satellites and weather balloons. They found that the average warming predicted to have occurred since 1979 (when the satellite data starts) is approximately three times larger than what is being observed.”

Climatologist Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric sciences, University of Alabama-Huntsville, noted satellites do not agree with “warmest year” claims. “The satellite and balloon data of the deep atmosphere have 2014 in a cluster of warmish years well below the hottest two of 1998 and 2010″, Christy said.

Christy continued: “With the government agencies reporting that the surface temperature as highest ever, we have a puzzle. The puzzle is even more puzzling because theory (i.e. models) indicate the opposite should be occurring – greater warmth in the deep atmosphere than the surface. So, there are just many very basic and fundamental aspects of the global climate we have yet to comprehend.”

Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., professor of atmospheric science, Colorado State University, downplayed the accuracy of the surface temperature record. “There remain significant uncertainties in the accuracy of the land portion of the surface temperature data, where we have found a significant warm bias. Thus, the reported global average surface temperature anomaly is also too warm.”

“More generally, we need to move beyond just assessing global warming, but examine how (and if) key atmospheric and ocean circulations, such as El Nino, La Nina, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, etc. are changing in their intensity, structure and frequency. These are the climate features that determine if a region has drought, floods, and so forth, not a global average surface temperature anomaly,” Pielke added.

Astrophysicist Dr. Dr David Whitehouse declared “talk of a record is scientifically and statistically meaningless.’ “The addition of 2014 global temperature data confirms that the post-1997 standstill seen in global annual average surface temperature has continued,” Whitehouse wrote on January 16.

“According to the Nasa global temperature database 2014 was technically a record ‘beating’ 2010 by the small margin of 0.02 deg C. The NASA press release is highly misleading saying that 2014 is a record without giving the actual 2014 figure, or any other year, or its associated error.”

“In reality of course it is no record at all as the error of the measurements is about +/- 0.1 deg C showing NasaGiss’ statement to go against the normal treatment of observational data and its errors. Talk of a record is therefore scientifically and statistically meaningless,” Whitehouse added.

“It is clear beyond doubt by now that there is a growing discrepancy between computer climate projections and real-world data that questions their ability to produce meaningful projections about future climatic conditions,” Whitehouse concluded.

Another analysis noted: NASA Hottest Year Claims Not Supported By The Data: NASA admitted in 2011 that “hottest year” differences were “smaller than the uncertainty in comparing the temperatures of recent years.”

Via the website ‘Not A Lot Of People Know That: “Nowhere does their (NASA 2015) press release tell us that it only beat the previous record by a tiny, effectively unmeasurable 0.02C. Nor do they mention that the error bars are many times greater, or even tell us what they are. This is all very strange because in their (NASA) report on 2010 Global Temperatures, NASA said:

“Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. The difference is smaller than the uncertainty in comparing the temperatures of recent years, putting them into a statistical tie.”

Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University ridiculed the same “hottest year” rankings in 2010 and NASA’s Hansen’s admission that it “was not particularly important” which year was declared the “hottest.” “Well, then stop issuing press releases which tout the rankings, which are subject to change ex post facto,” Maue demanded in a January 14, 2011 commentary at WattsUpWithThat.com.

Other prominent scientists have said that temperature rise since 1850 has been very small.
See: Top Swedish Climate Scientist Says Warming Not Noticeable: ‘The warming we have had last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all’ – Award-Winning Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, formerly of UN IPCC: ‘We Are Creating Great Anxiety Without It Being Justified’. Dr. Bengtsson announced his skeptical climate views in 2014.

Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever, declared his dissent on global warming and noted that the temperature rise over the 20th century was “so little. It is not even fever.”  Giaever won a Nobel Prize for physics.

“.8 degrees we will be discussing in global warming. .8 degrees if you ask people in general they will think it is 4 or 5 degrees they don’t know it is so little. It is not even fever,” Giaever said.

“I am amazed that the temperature can be so stable,” Giaever explained. ‘The temperature (of the Earth) has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.’

“I don’t see that co2 is the cause of all this problem,” he added.

Related Links: 
It’s Official – There are now 66 excuses for Temp ‘pause’ – Updated list of 66 excuses for the 18-26 year ‘pause’ in global warming Eco-Activists Warn 2014 Could Be Hottest Year On Record – Satellites Disagree

‘Hottest Year’ Update: NASA & NOAA ignore satellite data which reveal 2014 ‘well below’ hottest claims

Even ignoring satellite data Year-to-date ‘record’ temps are 0.21C *below* climate model projections

New paper finds excuse #66 for the ‘pause’: There’s no pause if you look at only at the warmest & coldest day of the year – Published in Environmental Research Letters

2014 might be 0.01C warmer than 2010!

No Record Temperatures According To Satellites – BBC put up a deliberately apocalyptic picture while telling us the world is on course for the warmest year on record. What they failed to tell us was that the more accurate satellites, which monitor atmospheric temperatures over nearly all of the globe, say no such thing.  Figures from UAH are out for November, and these show a drop from the  October anomaly of 0.27C to 0.33C. This means that at the end of November, this year is only in a tie for 3rd with 2005, and well below the record year of 1998, and 2010.

Flashback: 1990 NASA Report: ‘Satellite analysis of upper atmosphere is more accurate, & should be adopted as the standard way to monitor temp change.’

2014 ‘Warmest ever’? ‘Conflicting Reports’ – Surface temps show it may be warmer by ‘a couple hundredths of a degree Celsius’ — A Fancy Ways of Saying Temp Standstill Continues! – ‘As a result of data and computational uncertainty,  none of the surface compilations will 2014 be statistically different from 2010′ – ‘The three major groups calculating the average surface temperature of the earth (land and ocean combined) all are currently indicating that 2014 will likely nudge out 2010 (by a couple hundredths of a degree Celsius) to become the warmest year in each dataset (which begin in mid-to-late 1800s).’ – ‘The two satellite datasets ‘show that 2014 is nowhere near the warmest (in data which starts in 1979), trailing 1998 by several tenths of a degree Celsius. This difference is so great that it statistically clear that 2014 will not be a record year…The super El Niño of 1998 set a high temperature mark that will likely stand for many years to come, or at least until another huge El Niño occurs.’ – ‘If you want 2014 to be the “warmest year ever recorded” you can find data to back you up, and if you prefer it not be, well, you can find data to back up that position as well. In all cases, the former will make headlines.’

False Predictions And The Big Chill

Spare a Thought For These Poor Chaps

It must be pretty dispiriting being a card carrying, gung-ho climate warmist these days.  Just about everywhere you turn, the data just does not compute.

Remember how Al Gore used to pronounce portentously (just a few years ago) on the disappearance of arctic sea ice by 2014?  Big Al has gone strangely silent.  Arctic sea-ice is doing not bad at all.  And Antarctic sea ice is hitting all kinds of records out of the park.  Oh dear.  Never mind.

Ice returns to 1984 levels: Area of Arctic sea ice is nearly identical to 30 years ago

December 30, 2014

Sea Ice Extent – Day 363 – Highest Global Sea Ice and Highest Antarctic Sea Ice For The Day

Filed under: Antarctic,Antarctic Sea Ice,Antarctic Sea Ice Extent,Arctic,Arctic Sea Ice,Arctic Sea Ice Extent,Global Sea Ice,Global Sea Ice Extent — sunshinehours1 @ 7:51 AM
Tags: Antarctic Sea Ice, Antarctic Sea Ice Area, Arctic, Arctic Sea Ice, Arctic Sea Ice Extent, Global Sea Ice, Global Sea Ice Extent

Another Climate Con

NOAAgate

How ‘ocean acidification’ could turn out to be the biggest con since Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon
23 December 2014

Christmas has come a couple of days early for climate sceptics, in what may well prove to be one of the biggest blows to the Global Warming religion since Climategate.

This time the pillar of green faith which has been rudely dismantled by sceptical investigators is an alleged phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.”  For years this has been touted by environmentalists as possibly the greatest threat to the planet after “global warming.”

According to Jane Lubchenko, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), it is “climate change’s equally evil twin” because of the disastrous consequences it may have for everything from the navigational systems of spawning salmon to the health of coral reefs.  Ocean acidification is said to be caused when excess atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed by the sea, reducing its pH levels to make it more acidic.

But, as Watts Up With That reports new evidence unearthed by an inquisitive graduate student suggests that “ocean acidification” may be a scientific fraud to rank with the great “man-made-global warming” scare.
  At the centre of the scandal is NOAA, the US federal scientific agency which measures and researches changes in the oceans and atmosphere, and which maintains one of the temperature datasets used to measure “global warming.”

One of NOAA’s departments – the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) – also happens to be one of the mainstays of the alarmist narrative about “ocean acidification.”  A 2004 paper by two of PMEL’s senior oceanographers – Dr Richard Feely and Dr Christopher Sabine – is often cited in support of “ocean acidification” theory and is reproduced, in simplified form, at NOAA’s website.  It also formed part of testimony that Feely gave to Congress in 2010, again to the effect that increasing atmospheric CO2 is causing a reduction in seawater pH.

It warns:

“The impacts of ocean acidification on shelled organisms and other animals could negatively affect marine food webs, and, when combined with other climatic changes, could substantially alter the number, variety, and health of ocean wildlife. As humans continue to send more and more carbon dioxide into the oceans, the impacts on marine ecosystems will be direct and profound.”

and:
“The message is clear: excessive carbon dioxide poses a threat to the health of our oceans.”

However, it now seems that the paper’s certainty is at best misplaced, at worst outright dishonest. Not unlike Michael Mann’s discredited Hockey Stick graph it appears to depend on cherry-picked data and misleading projections in defiance of real-world evidence.

The alleged fraud was uncovered by Mike Wallace, a hydrologist with nearly 30 years’ experience now working towards his PhD at the University of New Mexico. While studying a chart produced by Feely and Sabine, apparently showing a strong correlation between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and falling oceanic pH levels, Wallace noticed that some key information had been omitted.

Mysteriously, the chart only began in 1988. But Wallace knew for a fact that there were oceanic pH measurements dating back to at least 100 years earlier and was puzzled that this solid data had been ignored, in favour of computer modelled projections.

When Wallace emailed his query to Feely and Sabine, however, he found them less than helpful.  Sabine replied that it was inappropriate for Wallace to impugn the “motives or quality of our science” and warned that if he continued in this manner “you will not last long in your career.” Having provided Wallace with a few links – all of which turned out to be useless – he concluded his email by saying “I hope you will refrain from contacting me again.”

This response, again, calls to mind the behaviour of Michael Mann in response to queries from Steve McIntyre about where to find the raw data for his Hockey Stick. Mann was similarly obfuscatory, rude and dismissive.  Undeterred, Wallace eventually got hold of the instrumental records which Feely and Sabine had chosen to exclude from their graph of doom and plotted a time series chart of his own, covering the period from 1910 to the present.

His results were surprising. What they suggest is that global acidification is a figment of Feely’s and Sabine’s imagination: there has been NO reduction in oceanic pH levels in the last century.

Wallace says: “Oceanic acidification may seem like a minor issue to some but, besides being wrong, it is a crucial leg to the entire narrative of ‘human-influenced climate change’.”  He adds: “In whose professional world is it acceptable to omit the majority of the data and also not disclose the omission to any other soul or Congressional body?”

For the background to the story, read Marita Noon’s full account at http://energymakesamericagreat.org/current-energy-commentary

Green Energy Meets the Real World

Renewable Energy

So Useless That Even Greenie Google Gave up on it

by James Delingpole  

22 Nov 2014

Breitbart London

Some people call it “renewable energy” but I prefer to call it “alternative energy” because that’s what it really is: an alternative to energy that actually works (eg nuclear and anything made from wonderful, energy-rich fossil fuel.)

Now a pair of top boffins from uber-green Google’s research department have reached the same conclusion.
Ross Konigstein and David Fork, both Stanford PhDs (aerospace engineering; applied physics) were employed on a Google research project which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal. But after four years, the project was closed down. In this post at IEEE Spectrum they tell us why.

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

In a nutshell, renewable energy is rubbish because so much equipment is needed to make it work – steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage – that it very likely uses up more energy than it actually produces.

Why is renewable energy such a total fail? Because, as Lewis Page explains here, it’s so ludicrously inefficient and impossibly expensive that if ever we were so foolish as to try rolling it out on a scale beyond its current boutique levels, it would necessitate bankrupting the global economy.

In a nutshell, renewable energy is rubbish because so much equipment is needed to make it work – steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage – that it very likely uses up more energy than it actually produces.

Yet our political class remains committed to the fantasy that the emperor’s green clothes are perfectly magnificent. Earlier this week, for example, the British government chucked £720 million of taxpayers’ money into a cesspit labelled the Green Climate Fund.

In theory this UN-driven initiative is supposed to help Third World countries cope with the effects of climate change. In reality, all it will do is force on their struggling economies more of the costly, intermittent renewable technologies (wind turbines; solar; etc) which have proved such a disaster for the advanced Western economies.

If we really want to throw money at the developing world so it can combat climate change, then what we should really be doing is insist that it is spent on adaptation projects – not, heaven forfend, ones to do with “decarbonisation.”

As Benny Peiser and Daniel Mahoney write here, adaptation projects make a real difference and save lives.

Bangladesh’s investment in cyclone shelters, better weather forecasts, and smarter construction practices is a prime example of how effective adaptation can be. The country has learnt how to prepare for the threat of cyclones, succeeding in significantly reducing related deaths. The two deadliest cyclones in Bangladesh’s history occurred in 1970 and 1991, killing up to 500,000 and almost 140,000 respectively. Through adaptation investment, in the last two decades the country has been able to reduce deaths and injuries from such disasters 100-fold.

Instead, though, our leaders are still ideologically committed to wasting much of our foreign aid on renewables.

Take the UK’s recent contributions. Just over a quarter of UK climate aid from 2011 to the beginning of 2014 went to adaptation measures, whereas well over 50 per cent was allocated to renewables, according to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. The World Resources Institute estimates that, between 2010 and 2012, of a total of $35bn in global climate aid, a mere $5bn was allocated to adaptation.

You know that scene right at the end of Spartacus? Well I think I’d like to recreate it, using wind turbines instead of crucifixes, and, instead of rebellious gladiators, all those lovely people – green activists, wind and solar industry parasites, idiot politicians – who’ve been telling us that renewable energy is the way forward.

Wild Exaggerations

The Sheriff of Nottingham Redivivus

While Rome burns, hapless world “leaders” like UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon and US President Barack Obama, drone on about how climate change is the world’s biggest imminent threat.  Never has so much misdirection been attempted by so many, convincing so few.

Meanwhile, more and more heretics are taking to the hustings to deride the whole sordid conspiracy.

Recantation

Britain’s Former Environment Minister: Abandon Carbon Targets and Embrace Shale and Nuclear

by Nick Hallett  

15 Oct 2014

BreitbartLondon

LONDON, United Kingdom – Former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has called for Britain to abandon is carbon targets, saying that renewable energy cannot help Britain meet its energy needs and only a combination of shale gas, Combined Heat and Power and more, smaller nuclear power plants can provide renewable energy for the foreseeable future in Britain.

Speaking to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, Paterson also derided wind farms, saying that Britain’s wind energy policy is the “single most regressive policy we have seen in this country since the Sheriff of Nottingham,” calling it: “The coerced increase of electricity bills for people on low incomes to pay huge subsidies to wealthy landowners and rich investors.”  He added that it was “immensely costly, regressive and damaging to the environment”, and has had virtually no impact on carbon emissions.

Paterson also said that many of the forecasted effects of climate change have been “widely exaggerated”.

“The stopping of the Gulf Stream, the worsening of hurricanes, the retreat of Antarctic sea ice, the increase of malaria, the claim by UNEP that we would see 50m climate refugees before now – these were all predictions that proved wrong,” he said.  The former minister also slammed all current forms of renewable energy in the UK, saying they will never help Britain achieve “zero carbon” by 2050.

He was particularly scathing of offshore wind turbines, which he criticised for their “gigantic costs” and unreliability, saying: “There is a reason we are the world leader in this technology – no other country is quite so foolish as to plough so much public money into it.”  He also called solar power “an expensive red herring” and criticised biomass for not being zero carbon.

Britain’s wind energy policy is the “single most regressive policy we have seen in this country since the Sheriff of Nottingham

Paterson said that Britain should instead adopt shale gas, which has helped reduce emissions in America by displacing coal-fired generation, and has cut US gas prices to a third of their European level. He said that just 10 percent of shale from the Bowland basin, could meet Britain’s needs for decades.  He added that Combined Heat and Power could be a brilliant way to bring down energy bills, saying that new localised power plants could produce both energy and heat, with results from Massachusetts showing 40 percent of total energy can be from CHP.

The former Environment Secretary also went on to call for more nuclear power in the UK, saying that small nuclear reactors could be integrated with CHP. He said that while nuclear power is incredibly useful, there are simply not enough sites to build enough big reactors. Britain should instead therefore build more, smaller nuclear plants.  He said: “Small factory built nuclear plants, could be located closer, say within 20 to 40 miles, to users and provide a CHP function.  Installed near urban areas, they can deliver electricity and power district heating schemes or, in industrial areas, provide a combination of electricity and process heat.”

Finally, Paterson called for various domestic appliances, including refrigerators, to be fitted with sensors that can switch them off for short periods when they are not in use, which the former minister claimed could save as much as 1.2GW – equivalent to a large nuclear power plant.  Only a combination of these factors, he said, can help Britain “keep the lights on”.

Climate Change, But Not As We Know It

Hanging Out for 2013

Hopeless Causes

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Shout Louder

The animus of Babel lurks in the heart of every Unbeliever to one extent or another.  Conformity, oneness, uniformity, and group-think all manifest the ideology of Babel, the desire to have one unified Borg-like mind on everything.  We have always sensed the presence of this animus in the Global Warming crusade.

A danger was allegedly facing the entire race.  Only concerted, unified effort would avoid the inevitable calamity.  A unified effort required both group-think and One Mind. One language. Unbelievers, whose hearts lust after that ancient One-Tower, were always going to get suckered.  More often than not they wanted the Global Warming narrative to be true because it justified re-erecting that ancient monolith. In a perverse way, One World Government is a comforting prospect to those who live apart from God.

Naturally those who dissented were regarded as dangerous traitors.  They had to be silenced.  At root, as with ancient Babel, it was never science which was driving the enterprise but a lust to unify the world in its rebellion against the Creator.  It appeared, for a time, that the cause was big enough, the implications horrendous enough, and the urgency pressing enough that Babel, like Mordor, would be rebuilt. The Necromancer was taking a new shape.

But time was always going to be the greatest enemy–time, and the decree of the Living God.  More and more we are observing holes, cracks, detritus, and decay in the latest re-emergent One Tower.  Now, even Environment Editors in national newspapers are eschewing group-think.

Plant growth, ocean studies show climate science far from settled

• The Australian
• October 15, 2014 12:00AM

One paper — published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science — says plants will absorb 130 billion tonnes more carbon dioxide this century than current models suggest. This amount is equal to about four years worth of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. The research says the contribution of increasing CO2 to plant growth has been underestimated by as much as 16 per cent.

Graham Lloyd

Environment Editor

Sydney

NEW research into plant growth and ocean life highlights how much there is still to learn about the way nature responds to rising levels of carbon dioxide and what this means for climate change. 

New research does not suggest there is no longer anything to worry about from rising levels of CO2, but with some people suggesting the “hiatus” in global warming has now hit 18 years, and with fresh uncertainty about the sensitivity of the climate system to CO2, the new findings provide further pause for thought. One paper — published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science — says plants will absorb 130 billion tonnes more carbon dioxide this century than current models suggest. This amount is equal to about four years worth of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. The research says the contribution of increasing CO2 to plant growth has been underestimated by as much as 16 per cent.

There are still uncertainties but this knowledge has the potential to reduce forecast levels of warming. In particular, it provides great encouragement for reforestation and other land-based ­approaches to sequester CO2.

Other research, from Western Australia and published in Geophysical Research Letters, says plankton in the Arctic Ocean increased production and stored more carbon in response to greater UVB radiation. Contrary to expectations, Arctic plankton production increased by almost 40 per cent in more than three-quarters of the plankton communities sampled.

An analysis of the findings said this would combat the impacts of increased Arctic warming and increase food in the Arctic Ocean.

What both research findings show is natural systems are complex, difficult to model and not fully understood. Models have been unable to accurately predict several key issues, including the unexpected growth in Antarctic sea ice to record levels. The ­reality is models will always be only as good as the information they process. That’s why science will ­always be a long way from settled.

It was the little boy who stunned the crowd by stating the obvious about the emperor’s nudity.  If rising CO2 levels were true, a fourth form science pupil could have told us that this would naturally be good for plant growth, since CO2 is the greenist of all gases.  More greenery means more food in the food chain–which is a good thing.

It is an irony of the age that a fourth form science student can see things more clearly than the “cleverest” people on the planet.  That’s why we are confident that science has never been at issue here.  It is all about the Black Tower and who can succeed in being atop its heights.

Grade Inflation

Snake-Oilers, Not Scientists

UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon has squandered millions of dollars holding a media-event in New York City in the vain attempt to galvanize greater action of “climate change”.  His platform speakers were a long chain of A-listers–movie stars and politicians.   But he had to have someone more credible.  A scientist, perhaps.  An actual climatologist would be good.  And he had one lined up.

Ban, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, former US Vice President Al Gore and scientist Rajendra K Pachauri warned that time was short. By 2020, Ban said, the world must reduce greenhouse gases to prevent an escalating level of warming. Five years ago, leaders pledged to keep world temperatures from increasing by another 3.6 degrees Celsius.

Pachauri, who headed a Nobel Prize-winning panel of scientists that studied the issue, and Ban told world leaders the effects of global warming are already here, pointing to a UN building that flooded during the devastating Superstorm Sandy in 2012.  Pachauri said it will get worse with droughts, storms and food and water shortages. He foresaw even more violent climate-driven conflicts.  And, Pachauri said, “a steady rise in our death toll, especially among the world’s poorest. How on Earth can we leave our children with a world like this?”  [NZ Herald.  Emphasis, ours.]

What kind of a scientist is Rajendra K. Pachauri?  His Wikipedia page tells all.  He is a pseudo-climate scientist.
 

Pachauri was born in Nainital, India. He was educated at La Martiniere College in Lucknow and at the Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in Jamalpur, Bihar. He belongs to the Special Class Railway Apprentices, 1958 Batch, an elite scheme which heralded the beginning of mechanical engineering education in India. He began his career with the Indian Railways at the Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi. He joined the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, USA, where he obtained an MS in Industrial Engineering in 1972, and a PhD with co-majors in Industrial Engineering and Economics in 1974.  His doctoral thesis was titled, A dynamic model for forecasting of electrical energy demand in a specific region located in North and South Carolina. He lives in Golf Links, New Delhi. 

Dr Pachauri is a railway engineer.  His science degree is in Industrial Engineering, and Economics.  He is an advocate, a provocateur, and ideologue.  His scientific credentials amount to little more than knowing something railways and trains.   He is absolutely not qualified scientifically to comment upon the climate.  He is a Clayton’s expert.  Exactly the kind of scientist the Global Warming propagandists admire.  Climatologist he is not.  Physicist he is not.  Geographer he is not.  He is a useful tool.  His propagandising at Ban Ki Moon’s little gathering reveals everything about the credibility of the Global Warming Movement. 

These chaps are beyond shame.  They represent a modern incarnation of snake-oil salesmen. 

The End is Nigh

Fashionable Nutters

The Climate Change Doomsday Cult has tossed up more than its fair share of nutters.  If you stupidly, but genuinely, believe that “the end is nigh” for the human race, let alone the planet, then such desperate times call for desperate measures.  We can understand the logic, just as we grasp the logic of those who have believed that the world will end at midnight on the 13th of June, 2001 (or whenever) and who have traipsed out into the desert to set up survivalist compounds, thereby avoiding the worst of Armageddon.

In each case, the logic is sound; it’s the premises that are false.  The Climate Change Doomsday Cult has  this one distinction from apocalyptic forbears, however.  It has managed to capture the fears and febrile imagination of the chattering classes and the Commentariat, normally too urbane and sophisticated to get taken in by Doomsday cults.  Here are a couple of examples of the elites having been suckered.  First, the Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, as reported in BreitbartNews: 

NEW YORK CITY — New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Sunday during the People’s Climate March that the city’s private sector buildings may be mandated to be retrofitted to adapt to the city’s green house gas emission reduction plan. “We are now the largest city on the earth to adopt the 80/50 standard. We are going to retrofit all of our public buildings. We are going to work with the public sector. We are going to work with the private sector to retrofit their buildings. I’ve said very clearly, I think the private sector is ready and willing. I think it’s in all of our interests,” he said. “It’s a matter of survival. We’ll work with them. We’ll incentivize. We’ll support. If that is not moving fast enough, we will move to mandates because we have to get there. This is a matter of survival.” 

Mayor de Blasio announced he was committed to an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, beginning with sweeping regulations among buildings in the city.

The cost impost upon New York City will be horrendous.  Unintended perverse effects will follow: businesses migrating out of the city, owners of buildings going bankrupt; buildings being abandoned, economic growth (also known as employment, wages, and the ability to provide for families) will lag.  The only growth industry will be the power, organs, officials, and rules and regulations of the city government.  De Blasio is going to command and control New York into becoming a giant survivalist compound.  Paradoxically this will bring upon the city the equivalent of a nuclear winter, albeit by other means.  His plan will cause the alleged disasters hectored abroad by the Climate Change Doomsday Cult to come into being. But it’s all OK, because New Yorkers’ very survival is at stake. 

And here are some examples of the Climate Change Doomsday Cult in action the UK:

Actress Emma Thompson, arguably best known for her Best Actress Oscar in Howards End and for her courage in naming her daughter Gaia, has declared that anyone who doesn’t believe in climate change is “bonkers”.  . . .

“Unless we’re carbon free by 2030 the world is buggered,” Ms Thompson claimed, apparently unaware that the trace gas carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of almost every industrial process and that if anyone took her prescription seriously then Western Civilisation would be brought grinding to a halt and the world would indeed be “buggered.”

Yup.  Doomsday is looming.  Here is another version of the Climate Change Doomsday Cult, this time from a fashion designer.

Emma Thompson and Gaia weren’t the only celebrities lending their expertise to the climate march. Also present was fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who averred:

“A triad of [fossil fuel] monopolies, banks and politicians are ruining the planet. If runaway climate change kicks in then within a generation, there will be very little habitable on the planet and the suffering will be unimaginable.”

Could these icons of the Commentariat be wrong?   Yes.  Their passion may be compelling–but that’s always been true of Doomsday Cults.  Here is the “other side” of the argument, as summarised in the New York Post, soon to become the ex-New York Post (we confidently predict, if the madcap mayor has his way): 

Oregon-based physicist Gordon Fulks sums it up well: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”
Consider:

•  According to NASA satellites and all ground-based temperature measurements, global warming ceased in the late 1990s. This when CO2 levels have risen almost 10 percent since 1997. The post-1997 CO2 emissions represent an astonishing 30 percent of all human-related emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. That we’ve seen no warming contradicts all CO2-based climate models upon which global-warming concerns are founded.
• Rates of sea-level rise remain small and are even slowing, over recent decades averaging about 1 millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges and 2 to 3 mm/year as inferred from “adjusted” satellite data. Again, this is far less than what the alarmists suggested.
•  Satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.
•  A 2012 IPCC report concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era. The NIPCC 2013 report concluded the same. Yes, Hurricane Sandy was devastating — but it’s not part of any new trend.

The climate scare, Fulks sighs, has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus.” . . .The costs of feeding the climate-change “monster” are staggering. According to the Congressional Research Service, from 2001 to 2014 the US government spent $131 billion on projects meant to combat human-caused climate change, plus $176 billion for breaks for anti-CO2 energy initiatives.

Federal anti-climate-change spending is now running at $11 billion a year, plus tax breaks of $20 billion a year. That adds up to more than double the $14.4 billion worth of wheat produced in the United States in 2013.  Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculates that the European Union’s goal of a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, currently the most severe target in the world, will cost almost $100 billion a year by 2020, or more than $7 trillion over the course of this century.

Lomborg, a supporter of the UN’s climate science, notes that this would buy imperceptible improvement: “After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference.”  Al Gore was right in one respect: Climate change is a moral issue — but that’s because there is nothing quite so immoral as well-fed, well-housed Westerners assuaging their consciences by wasting huge amounts of money on futile anti-global-warming policies, using money that could instead go to improve living standards in developing countries.

That is where the moral outrage should lie.

Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition. Bob Carter is former professor and head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia.

Begging Bowls and Ebbing Tides

Samoan Peril: Please Help

Uh, oh.  It looks as though charity is growing coldly disdaining.  The Samoan Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi put out the begging bowl last week in the UK.  Global warming was about to inundate his island country paradise.  Samoa needs the world’s help.  Some cynics thought the sub-text was, “Please send money.” 

His moving plea was published in The Guardian, long time shill for global warming propagandists.  But, if the Guardian’s readership is any guide, it appears as if there is growing scepticism about global warming, even amongst the Guardian‘s readership.  James Delingpole, writing for Breitbart London,  takes a peek:

The Prime Minister of Samoa has launched a heartfelt plea in the Guardian newspaper on behalf of his allegedly drowning Pacific nation. (H/T Bufo 75)

Unless concerted international action is taken to deal with the threat of ‘climate change’, apparently, small islands like his will be “inundated by rising sea levels.” 

Tragically, it looks as if this request by the splendidly named Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, is destined to fall on deaf ears.  Even a fair chunk of the Guardian’s impeccably green, left-liberal readership, it seems, is now sufficiently well-informed to appreciate that sea levels aren’t actually rising in any dramatic, significant or unprecedented way, and that the “drowning Pacific islands” meme is just a piece of a Third World blackmail designed to guilt-trip richer Western nations into stumping up more aid.

Here’s one comment:

I’m afraid that, just as was the case with the Maldives story, this is an utter fraud being attempted by a money grubbing politician. Check the facts about what is happening.

And:

So, Mr. Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, just how much money do you want?

And:

And even more to the point, only 7 percent of Samoan land area is below 5m above sea level. So the plea for action for small, vulnerable nations like ours, seems a bit of a stretch as far as Samoa is concerned, even though some other places may be going the way of Atlantis.

Still another commenter points unhelpfully to the fact that most Pacific Islands are in fact growing not sinking.

Samoa, incidentally, is hosting the third international conference on small island developing states (Sids), which will be attended by the planeloads of the usual enviro-loon suspects, including no less a personage than the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

This news has left at least one of the Guardian’s commenters cruelly unmoved:

I’ve got a brilliant idea for you. Video conference.

Gosh, people can be so heartless, sometimes, can’t they?

And the comments thread has not warmed at all.

One Samoan commentator wrote:

Maybe you Brits you move to Samoa, as their highest mountain is 6096 ft, much higher than your Ben Nevis.  Seriously, a mountainous island lamenting about drowning, more “climate change” inspired clap trap.

The critical comment provoked one “true-blue” global warmer to opine:

This is the saddest, most narrow-minded collection of comments I have seen in a long while. It’s really frightening how people who could be well-informed choose not to be because that way they can maintain their comfortable lifestyles without the inconvenience of a troubled conscience. The climate is changing whether you want to accept that or not. The fact that random people still feel the need to, at the slightest provocation, publish their opinions which go against a prime minister at the frontline of the issue plus 97% of relevant experts really blows my mind.

Please, if you are writing to the Guardian, make sure your facts are accurate.  It’s 96.00457% of relevant experts, silly.  And how does one get to be admitted to the group, “relevant experts” one wonders?  Just maybe there is a teensie weensie bit of tautologous circularity at play.  Just sayin’.

Letter From the UK (About The Global Warming Scam Turning to Toast)

Mann v Steyn: If This Trial Ever Goes Ahead Global Warming Is Toast

by James Delingpole  

15 Aug 2014

Breitbart UK

Mark Steyn has published his latest brief in his protracted court case with discredited climate scientist Michael Mann (who is suing him for libel) and it’s a corker.

Here’s a sample:

The audacity of the falsehoods in Mann’s court pleadings is breathtaking. For example, on page 19 of his brief below dated January 18, 2013, he cites the international panel chaired by the eminent scientist Lord Oxburgh, FRS as one of the bodies that “exonerated” him, whereas on page 235 of Mann’s own book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, he states explicitly that “our own work did not fall within the remit of the committee and the hockey stick was not mentioned in the report.” It is deeply disturbing that a plaintiff should make such fraudulent claims in his legal pleadings. It is even more disturbing that the first such fraudulent claim – to be a Nobel Laureate and thus in the same pantheon as Banting, Einstein, and the Curies – should have led to the amended complaint and the procedural delays that then followed. It would be even more profoundly damaging were his other transparently false claims to be entertained for another two years before trial.

It is clear from the ease with which Mann lies about things that would not withstand ten minutes of scrutiny in a courtroom that he has no intention of proceeding to trial.”

For the full background to the case, read this. But all you really need to know is that Michael Mann is exploiting the flaws in the US legal system to try to draw out proceedings as long as possible in order to exhaust – or bankrupt – Steyn into submission.

Unfortunately for Mann he picked the wrong victim.
Steyn is a fighter who knows his way round the courts having battled a similarly vexatious and vindictive case in Canada when he was accused of Islamophobia – or some similar nonsense – by something called the Ontario Human Rights Committee. Plus, Steyn is astute enough to appreciate exactly what’s at stake here.

This, if Steyn is successful, could be the moment the dam bursts: the one where the global establishment is finally forced to acknowledge the fraudulence, the corruption, the mendacity, the trickery, the deception, the junk science, the big money and the official complicity which for the last two or three decades have been underpinning the Great Climate Change Scam.

This isn’t about hurt feelings or a damaged professional reputation, let alone an ill-chosen and imprecise turn of phrase. It’s about the very principle of freedom of speech.

And not just about freedom of speech either, important though that is.

This, if Steyn is successful, could be the moment the dam bursts: the one where the global establishment is finally forced to acknowledge the fraudulence, the corruption, the mendacity, the trickery, the deception, the junk science, the big money and the official complicity which for the last two or three decades have been underpinning the Great Climate Change Scam.

Up till now the response of the climate alarmist establishment (and that would include everyone from the Obama administration to the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia to the Royal Society and NASA GISS to the IPCC to the Prince of Wales to Vice and Grist to John Podesta, Tom Steyer and Michael Mann) in the face of criticism has been to deny, rebuff, bully, insist, conceal, bluster, misrepresent and sue.
They have got away with it not least because they are backed by such vast sums of money – far in excess of anything climate sceptical scientists receive, not just from governments and the United Nations and the European Union but also through various rich and powerful foundations which left-wing billionaire donors use as a political laundering process. (It’s all there in this Senate Minority Report).

They have also got away with it because of the complicity of the scientific, political and media establishment.
This was especially noticeable in the wake of Climategate. To any objective observer there was no mistaking the malfeasance and dishonesty revealed among the private emails of the “scientists” at the heart of the global warming scam. (These are the guys who write the IPCC reports which our governments use to justify hiking our taxes, driving up our energy prices and carpeting our countryside with wind turbines). Yet they got away with it by rigging at least four inquiries into the affair – either by deliberately not asking the right questions or stuffing the investigation panels or both.

Hence Steyn’s point in his brief. Mann and his supporters are forever claiming they were exonerated. But they simply never were – for reasons which become perfectly clear when you read the detailed report compiled by Andrew Montford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation and which any court of law, were it to do its job, would fairly swiftly establish.

No wonder Mann (and his anonymous – but evidently very rich – backers) are fighting so hard to delay the process for as long as possible. If this ever goes to trial they’re all toast.

This is what I’ve always found so thoroughly enjoyable about the global warming debate. It’s not one of those issues where there’s right and wrong on both sides and it’s really a matter of opinion which one you favour. Quite simply it’s a very straightforward battle between, on the one hand a bunch of lying, greedy shysters, fanatical, misanthropic, anti-capitalist eco-loons, bent, grant-troughing scientists, grubby politicians and despicable, rent-seeking millionaires and billionaires; and on the other a handful of brave, honest, rigorous, seekers-after-truth.

Under full disclosure in a US court system all this stuff would come out. It would have to because otherwise – so far as I understand US judicial process – the trial would be prejudiced and invalid. And if and when it does come out only one side can emerge as the winner because only one side is telling the truth or has facts to support its argument.

No wonder Mann (and his anonymous – but evidently very rich – backers) are fighting so hard to delay the process for as long as possible.

If this ever goes to trial they’re all toast.

The Ugly American Re-Emerges From the Closet

Boss Hogg’s Soft-Imperialism

One of the reasons the climate change charade has been mocked in the “third world” is the persistent disquiet that it is a “first world” issue, with the unfortunate by-product of oppressing poorer nations by impeding their economic and social development.  In other words, the “third world” sees the climate change circus as Western soft-imperialism.

One response of the poorer nations has been to say, “If you want us to impede our own economic development, pay us big time in compensation.”  Unfortunately, since the Global Financial Crisis the West has run out of money.  So, the traction of the climate change crusade has disappeared in the Southern Hemisphere quicker than a politician’s integrity. 

But pompous, paternalistic and imperialistic Westerners just don’t get it.  They have not washed their ears out in a long time.  And this is where the syndrome of the offensive, ugly American rears its head again.  Consider the supercilious, condescending, paternalistic US Secretary of State, John Kerry.
  He was addressing a US-Africa Leaders summit, and good ol’ boy, Boss Hogg John told those southern peasants the way things were going to be:

During the Africa Summit “Resilience and Food Security in a Changing Climate” panel, Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience that “8,000 children die every day” and in sub-Sahara Africa, one in four suffer from chronic hunger.

Then a few minutes later, he stressed how creating new farms would cause too much carbon pollution so they need to discourage more farm land.  In other words: For the Obama administration, starvation in Africa will be solved by combating climate change not more farms.

OK, so let’s get this clear.  Starvation and famine are terrible problems in sub-Saharan Africa, but what Africa  must not do is produce more food.   It will contribute to global warming.  Combating climate change is more vital and important (to pompous Westerners) than a few million starving folk in Africa.  And we, good ol boys, are set on telling you ignorants just the way it’s going to be.  Besides, what’s the death of a few million starving African ignorants, huh?  Less people, less global warming.

If one ever needed a reason or justification as to why so many other nations despise the United States one need look no further than the silver-spoon attitudes and opinions displayed by the current US Secretary of State.

Mockery the Best Medicine Now

The Wonderland of Oz and Other Places

We are all aware of the intellectual disingenuousness with which the global warming crusade has been conducted.  At the hands of UN and media propagandists, “global warming” was morphed into “climate change” so than any variability in climate could be claimed as “evidence” of the earth warming.  Colder temperatures thus became “proof” that global warming was actually occurring.  This has led to the perturbing situation we have at present.  Despite no rise in global temperatures for the past 16 years that very phenomenon is evidence of climate change, aka, global warming. 

In that perverse disingenuous spirit, we now present the latest evidence of global warming to alarm all men everywhere.

Firstly, the the whacky land of Oz, which boasts yellow brick roads, talking tin men, and other curiosities:

If you are lucky enough to be reading this from the comfort of your blankets, it might be best to stay there, as Brisbane has hit its coldest temperatures in 103 years.  
 
Not since July 28 1911 has Brisbane felt this cold, getting down to a brisk 2.6C at 6.41am.
At 7am, it inched up to 3.3C.  Matt Bass, meteorologist from BOM, said the region was well below our average temperatures.

“If it felt cold, that’s because it was, breaking that record is pretty phenomenal for Brisbane,” Bass said.  “The average for this time of year is 12C, so Brisbane was about 9C below average, it is pretty impressive really, to have the coldest morning in 103 years is a big record.”  The coldest place across the state was Oakey which got down to -6.1C, which was the coldest temperature for the town since 2011.  [The Australian.]

Secondly, in Antarctica, the lack of melting ice is becoming a concern.

Coldest Antarctic June Ever Recorded

Posted on July 12, 2014 

By Anthony Watts

Story submitted by Eric Worrall
Antarctica continues to defy the global warming script, with a report from Meteo France, that June this year was the coldest Antarctic June ever recorded, at the French Antarctic Dumont d’Urville Station.

According to the press release, during June this year, the average temperature was -22.4c (-8.3F), 6.6c (11.9F) lower than normal. This is the coldest June ever recorded at the station, and almost the coldest monthly average ever – only September 1953 was colder, with a recorded average temperature of -23.5c (-10.3F).  June this year also broke the June daily minimum temperature record, with a new record low of -34.9c (-30.8F).

Thirdly, the US mid-west is enjoying a spectacularly hot summer (not) this year:

Forecasters say the U.S. could see some extreme weather next week – thanks to “a giant trough in the jet stream” expected to dip down from Canada, according to CBS Boston chief meteorologist Eric Fisher.  It’s expected to happen starting Sunday in the Upper Midwest, then keep digging into Tuesday across the central and eastern portions of the nation.

What would that mean?  Very cool air for July taking over the middle and eastern U.S. with 60s and 70s for highs, lots of 40s and maybe even some 30s for lows near the Canada border.  And a lot of stormy weather – possibly severe – Monday and Tuesday in particular, with a heavy rain threat for the East that may pan out Tuesday and Wednesday with a flash flood risk.

“This is a pattern very similar to what we saw all winter,” Fisher said. “It really hasn’t gone anywhere since then – just a few interruptions here and there, but it keeps re-establishing itself.”  [CBS NewsJuly 11, 2014]

All of this, we submit, is evidence of global warming taking place before our very eyes.

Thus, the words of Al Gore, prophet of climate change and inventor of the Internet, provide the right interpretive context to the evidence above:

“We’re way past time where it’s responsible for any national leader to reject the science behind the climate crisis,” Mr Gore said.  [BBC News]

Merely rejecting the “science” behind the climate crisis is way too timid a response.  Now it needs to be not just rejected, but booed and mocked off the stage.  Let’s institute a Day of Mockery and Mickey-taking (“DMM”) for the “science behind the climate crisis”.  It will be far more fun than the “turn-off-the-lights Earth Day” whose own lights are growing dimmer and dimmer in the freezing Brisbane cold. 

Explaining Isis

Deadly Miasma on the Volga, the Potomac, and the Tigris

When Slate published a carefully reasoned piece on Global Warming recently it was panned and lampooned by everyone in the US whose brain was in gear before their mouth engaged.  The vastly erudite thesis offered by the writer was that Isis and the civil wars in Iraq were caused by global warming. 

To prove the point that idiocy is itself global and not restricted to national borders, the piece was subsequently reproduced in New Zealand’s leading national daily, the NZ Herald.  The piece, by Eric Holthaus was entitled, Is Climate Change Destabilizing Iraq? and the answer was an in the affirmative.  On first reading, one is easily duped into thinking that the article was very clever satire.  But no, the author wants to be read without a scintilla of satire.  Here is the thesis:

This year’s major drought [in Iraq] has coincided with the rise of ISIS, which has already used dams as a weapon of war, threatening downstream agriculture and electricity production during its march to gain control of vast swaths of territory in Syria and northern Iraq.

It appears that Iraq is in the midst of a drought, which–if memory would serve–occurs on a reasonably regular basis in that part of the world.  Isis–a Sunni backed offshoot of Al Qaeda–has emerged to capture towns and ruthlessly execute the captured personnel.  Holthaus argues that this “instability” is caused by global warming.  Folk apparently do reckless and terrible things when it gets hot and dry.  

Unfortunately for Holthaus’s thesis, he apparently skipped his fourth form logic class.  Co-incidence, of course, does not indicate, let alone prove, causation.  Unless you happen to be superstitious.  If you are, then black cats crossing one’s path can cause all kinds of evils.  The sad thing is that the religion of global warming has descended into irrational realms now appealing only gullible superstitious mind.  An even sadder thing is that the idiot editors at the NZ Herald published this piece of nonsense without a shred of irony or satire in sight. 

Let’s just review the possible outcomes of the conflict in Iraq, and see how many could reasonably be ascribed to global warming:

1.  Isis triumphantly takes Baghdad (global warming would have made them fearsome and ferocious and invincible on the battlefield.  Global warming drove them to fury.)

2.  The Iraq army capitulates amidst an eructation of cowardice and incompetence.  (Global warming drove them to distraction, so they could not fight).

3. Isis falls apart in a cluster of inter-necine divisions and squabbles.  (The heat drove them mad.)

4. Russia sends fighter jets to Iraq, enabling the Iraqi forces to bomb Isis into retreat.  (The heat on the Volga made Putin reckless.)

5. President Obama makes the Baghdad sky black with armed drones. (Global warming derangement syndrome lies miasmally over the Potomac).

5. Isis proclaims a Caliphate, anoints a Caliph, and calls all Muslims to rise in support of a global Islamic state.  (Global warming made them insane). 

Woops.  They just did that.  So there.  It proves just how much of a clear and present danger global warming really is.  QED.

Years ago, children used to claim when caught out, “the Devil made me do it”.  Eric Holthaus, Slate and the NZ Herald have apparently never grown up.  

Letter From the UK (About Fiddled US Temperature Data)

The scandal of fiddled global warming data

The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record 

By Christopher Booker

21 Jun 2014

The Telegraph

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models.
The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

Letter From the UK (About Obama’s Flunkery)

Obama Flunks his Climate Science 101 at University of California, Irvine

By James Delingpole  

15 Jun 2014

Breitbart London

Denying climate change is like saying the moon is made of cheese, President Obama has said in his latest attempt to persuade an unconvinced world that “global warming” is the most urgent crisis of our time.

Obama was speaking to a crowd of around 30,000 at a commencement ceremony at the University of California, Irvine. Justifying the extravagance of his metaphor he said: “I want to tell you this to light a fire under you.”
Here are some lines from his speech which explain why those present would be better off ignoring their pyromaniacal president’s entreaties.

“I’m not a scientist.” Possibly the only factually accurate words in the president’s entire speech.

“But we’ve got some good ones at NASA.” “Did have some good ones at NASA” would have been more accurate. Problem is, the organisation that put man on the moon is now in the grip of climate alarmists like Gavin Schmidt, successor to activist James “Death Trains” Hansen. In 2012, 49 former NASA astronauts and scientists wrote to protest against the anti-scientific, alarmist position being adopted by Hansen and Schmidt at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). They wrote: “We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data.”

“I do know the overwhelming majority of scientists who work on climate change, including some who once disputed the data, have put the debate to rest.” No, you don’t know, Mr President. You’re just repeating the multiply discredited “97 per cent” consensus meme. And even that figure were accurate – which it isn’t – scientific knowledge is not a numbers game. If it were, we would still be going with the majority view that tectonic plates are a myth, that stomach ulcers are caused by stress, that combustion is caused by phlogiston, that leeches can relieve fever, that malaria comes from the bad air in swamps, etc.

“In some parts of the country, weather-related disasters like droughts, fires, storms and floods are going to get harsher, and they’re going to get costlier.” Technically accurate, utterly meaningless. Given the chaotic nature of weather, records are always being broken somewhere in the future. Increased costliness is a given as populations grow and more expensive houses and offices are built to accommodate their needs.

“Today’s Congress is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence.” Indeed. They’re called Democrats and most of them refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that there has been no global warming since 1997, that the computer models which predicted catastrophic warming have been proved wrong by real world data. If it weren’t such an ugly term you might almost call them “deniers.”

“They will tell you climate change is a hoax or fad.” There is a name for people who say such things. Truth-tellers.

“One member of Congress actually says the world might be cooling.” Only one? Only one person in the whole of Congress knows that the Earth has entered a prolonged cooling period, the result of weak solar activity?

“It’s pretty rare that you’ll encounter somebody who says the problem you’re trying to solve simply doesn’t exist. When President Kennedy set us on a course to the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it. But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anybody saying the moon wasn’t there or that it was made of cheese.” 
As Anthony Watts says, this is ‘grade school level logical fallacy.’ No one said the moon wasn’t there or that it was made of cheese because neither statement is true. There is, on the other hand, a large – and fast-growing – body of evidence, well understood by many distinguished scientists and economists, that the catastrophic man-made global warming “problem” Obama is so keen to fix is, to all intents and purposes, non-existent.

Propaganda Really Works–Sometimes

Smelling Rats

One of the signal attributes of the crusade by global warming apocalyptic warriors is its poor traction.  It is not for want of trying.  The media in general have jumped into the pot and used their respective megaphones.  Politicians have trumpeted the fearful cause from bully pulpits.  Schools have frightened young pupils to death in the attempt to raise a new generation of eco-warriors.  But the public remains spectacularly unmoved.  Why?  Are we all suicidal lemmings? 

More likely the public is smarter than our so-called betters.  A recent piece in the Washington Post gave five key reasons why the public remains unconvinced, if not downright sceptical, about global warming propaganda.

The Insiders: Five reasons voters don’t believe the White House about global warming

By Ed Rogers
May 8 at 9:55 am

The White House released a third iteration of the “U.S. National Climate Assessment,” claiming it is “the most comprehensive scientific assessment ever generated of climate change and its impacts across every region of America and major sectors of the U.S. economy.” The report emphasizes the need for “urgent action to combat the threats from climate change.” Well, here are five reasons voters don’t believe what the White House says on climate change:

1. Overreach. The White House doesn’t just want it both ways, it wants it every way. Increasingly, when there is a topical weather event, be it a warm typhoon in the Pacific or a cold snap in the United States, we hear it is caused by global warming.  But non-events, such as fewer tropical storms becoming hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico or the frustrating, inconvenient truth that there hasn’t been any warming in the past 15 years, are dismissed as meaningless because we are told you must evaluate climate change over the long term. On Tuesday, President Obama even took time to meet with local and national weather reporters as a way of emphasizing the effects of global warming on today’s weather. The left is inconsistent in its selection of what factors and events “prove” that manmade global warming is real.

2. Hypocrisy. Voters notice that the founding father of the global warming movement, Al Gore, has become fabulously wealthy by selling out to Middle Eastern oil and gas interests. Voters notice the mansions, private planes and the super-wealthy lifestyle.  And Gore is not the only global warming hypocrite. I would guess that after he leaves office, President Obama will never again fly on a commercial airline – and he will probably be traveling by Global Expresses, Gulfstreams and the occasional large Falcon, not even on the more modest, smaller private jets. Voters are on to the fact that the global warming crusaders want us to pay more and live with less — but, of course, the rules don’t apply to the politicians who want everybody else to sacrifice. Not to mention, the people who insult and belittle anyone who has a question about the “science” of manmade global warming are often the same people who categorically dismiss the scientific proof of the viability, safety and reliability of nuclear energy. I have a little test for the global warming crusaders: If you’re not for nuclear energy and against ice cream, your commitment to the cause is questionable.

3. The global warming cause fits too nicely with the president’s left-wing political agenda. The prescriptions for dealing with climate change are the same policy objectives the left has promoted for other reasons for at least the past 25 years. That is, redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, anti-growth, anti-development regulations, etc. Because they don’t have much support from voters, the left has to advance its cause through surreptitious maneuvering rather than forthright advocacy of its specific global warming policies. The left never answers the questions of who pays, how much and for what result.

4. A lack of faith in foreign cooperation. Absent any verifiable, enforceable global warming treaty, any unilateral moves by the United States would be pointless. After all, the left wants us to believe that global warming really is global and that fossil fuels burned in distant lands are every bit as harmful as they are when they are utilized here at home. I would love to see a poll that asks American voters if they think American tax dollars should be spent on global warming remedies in foreign lands. Of course, we all know the vast majority of Americans would say no.  Some say the United States should lead by example, but does anybody believe that if we affirmatively harm our own economy, others will somehow think that is a noble sacrifice and follow suit? The very notion is ridiculous.

5. This administration lacks credibility. For a long time, we have said in America, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we do X, Y or Z?”  Well, in the Obama era, that adage has morphed into, “If he couldn’t get a Web site right, how are we supposed to believe he knows how to control the climate?” Who really believes that a massive government tax and reordering of the economy in the name of stopping global warming or climate change or whatever will go as planned and the world’s thermostat will adjust to something the Democrats find more acceptable? Answer: Almost nobody. Voters don’t believe what the White House says on this issue in part because it has not been credible on so many other important issues. We’ve heard everything from “you can keep your health-care plan” to there is a “red line” in Syria. Why should anyone believe the White House now?

As I’ve said before, voters aren’t stupid. They know when they are not being leveled with. And all the bluster, intimidation and angry frothing won’t make their doubts go away or make the Obama administration any more believable.

When every bit of climate data is cacophonously trumpeted as “proving” human-caused global warming the only thing the rises is not global temperatures, but scepticism.  We urge the apocalypticists to keep at it.  They are doing a wonderful job of convincing sane men of the contrary.

Letter From America (About "Same-old, Same-old . . . ")

Faux-Science  Fascistas

Over the years, we have published a plethora of articles on the subject of Global Warming being a faux-science.  But, the claims to be the only true and genuine science of climate continue to be made.  So we will continue to publish pieces that tear that canard into pieces.

To that end, here is an excellent piece from Patterico:

Is Study of So-Called Climate Change Even “Science”?

Burn the heretic:

In early May, Lennart Bengtsson, a Swedish climate scientist and meteorologist, joined the advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group that questions the reliability of climate change and the costs of policies taken to address it. While Bengtsson maintains he’d always been a skeptic as any scientist ought to be, the foundation and climate-change skeptics proudly announced it as a defection from the scientific consensus.

Just a week later, he says he’s been forced to resign from the group.
The abuse he’s received from the climate-science community has made it impossible to carry on his academic work and made him fear for his own safety. A once-peaceful community, he says in his resignation letter, now reminds him of McCarthyism.

“I had not expect[ed] such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life,” he wrote in his resignation. “Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship.”

When scientists cannot abide people questioning their hypotheses, something besides “science” is going on.

But there is an even deeper and more fundamental problem here. Is study of climate change even “science” to begin with?  In a court of law, jurors are told to take the opinions of experts into account — but not to blindly accept them. And indeed, it would be difficult to blindly accept all expert opinion in an adversarial setting, where you often find “experts” on opposing sides, saying completely different things that cannot be reconciled.  But in the field of “science” we are told to trust the “experts.” To do anything else is to reject “science” and that is ignorant and wrong.

That may be, in fields that actually deserve the name “science.” I’m just not sure that study of so-called “climate change” merits that label.  “Science” is based on the scientific method: scientists propose a hypothesis, and then test it through experimentation. When a result can be reliably replicated, the hypothesis gains credibility. When it cannot, it is discarded.

Under this definition, I’m not sure that study of so-called climate quite deserves to be called “science.” The public has been shown no track record of hypotheses that are reliably confirmed by experimentation. Instead, we are told that over 95% of climate scientists agree on . . . something. (Then we find out that the number is phony, because it proposes a test for determining who supports the “humans cause global warming” theory that includes most skeptics among the supposed supporters.)

You want to know what else more than 95% “climate change” scientists agreed on? That their models predicted high temperatures in 2013 — higher, in fact, than the temperatures turned out to be. Climate change models are routinely wrong, and scientists are being forced to admit it. It’s the biggest issue facing those who study the climate.

Scientists are dealing with a system that is so complex, it’s difficult to make pronouncements. In this respect, it reminds me of economics. There is a priesthood of Keynesians who assure you that, for example, the Obama stimulus will “work” as defined by some set of benchmarks — and then, when those benchmarks are not met, we are told things would have been worse. And we are supposed to believe that because the guy telling us is Paul Krugman, and he has a Nobel Prize and you don’t, so how dare you question him?
That being said, I don’t agree with the idea that economists — or the climate scientists — are the priesthood, and we need only have faith in their pronouncements, no matter how often they’re shown to be wrong.

I don’t think that makes me “anti-science.” I think it makes me pro-science.

Letter From the UK (About Nonsensical Global Warming)

Former NASA Scientist: Global Warming is Stupid

by Nick Hallett 

Breitbart News–London

A former NASA scientist has described global warming as “nonsense”, dismissing the theory of man-made climate change as “an unsubstantiated hypothesis” and saying that it is “absolutely stupid” to blame the recent UK floods on human activity.

Professor Les Woodcock, who has had a long and distinguished academic career, also said there is “no reproducible evidence” that carbon dioxide levels have increased over the past century, and blamed the green movement for inflicting economic damage on ordinary people.

Professor Woodcock is Emeritus Professor of Chemical Thermodynamics at the University of Manchester and has authored over 70 academic papers for a wide range of scientific journals. He received his PhD from the University of London, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a  recipient of a Max Planck Society Visiting Fellowship, and a founding editor the journal Molecular Simulation. (h/t Climate Depot)
Professor Woodcock told the Yorkshire Evening Post:

“The term ‘climate change’ is meaningless. The Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial, that is since the Earth was formed 1,000 million years ago.
The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis [about] our climate [which says it] has been adversely affected by the burning of fossil fuels in the last 100 years, causing the average temperature on the earth’s surface to increase very slightly but with disastrous environmental consequences.

“The theory is that the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel is the ‘greenhouse gas’ causes ‘global warming’ – in fact, water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04 per cent.

“There is no reproducible scientific evidence CO2 has significantly increased in the last 100 years.”

He also said:

“Even the term ‘global warming’ does not mean anything unless you give it a time scale. The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years, if there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us. Global warming is nonsense.”

Professor Woodcock dismissed evidence for global warming, such as the floods that deluged large parts of Britain this winter, as “anecdotal” and therefore meaningless in science.

 “Events can happen with frequencies on all time scales in the physics of a chaotic system such as the weather. Any point on lowland can flood up to a certain level on all time scales from one month to millions of years and it’s completely unpredictable beyond around five days.”

Also, the only reason we regularly hear that we have had the most extreme weather “since records began” is that records only began about 100 years ago.

 “The reason records seem to be being frequently broken is simply because we only started keeping them about 100 years ago. There will always be some record broken somewhere when we have another natural fluctuation in weather. “It’s absolutely stupid to blame floods on climate change, as I read the Prime Minister did recently. I don’t blame the politicians in this case, however, I blame his so-called scientific advisors.”

When asked how can say this when most of the world’s scientists, political leaders and people in general are committed to the theory of global warming, Prof Woodcock answered bluntly:

“This is not the way science works. If you tell me that you have a theory there is a teapot in orbit between the earth and the moon, it’s not up to me to prove it does not exist, it’s up to you to provide the reproducible scientific evidence for your theory. Such evidence for the man-made climate change theory has not been forthcoming.”

This lack of evidence has not stopped a whole green industry building up, however. At the behest of that industry, governments have been passing ever more regulations that make life more difficult and expensive.

“…the damage to our economy the climate change lobby is now costing us is infinitely more destructive to the livelihoods of our grand-children. Indeed, we grand-parents are finding it increasingly expensive just to keep warm as a consequence of the idiotic decisions our politicians have taken in recent years about the green production of electricity.”

Professor Woodcock is the latest scientist to come out against the theory of man-made global warming. James Lovelock, once described as a “green guru”, earlier this month said that climate scientists “just guess”, and that no one really knows what’s happening.

Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, also said that she was “duped into supporting the IPCC” and added “If the IPCC is dogma, then count me in as a heretic.”