Note: Previous Links have been Archived under More News
Full daily Summaries
and all previous links featured on UKT
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(16-02-2010)
“Impartial” inquiry descends into farce
Steve Watson
The so called “independent” investigation into the climategate emails scandal has descended into farce before it is barely off the ground as a third member of the six man panel has been revealed to hold strong views on human induced climate change.
The impartiality of glaciologist Geoffrey Boulton has been questioned after he admitted he firmly believed that human activities were causing global warming.
Professor Boulton, who was officially appointed to the investigative team by civil servant Sir Muir Russell, has also written numerous articles indicating a strong belief in anthropogenic warming.
In a 2005 paper Boulton penned for Edinburgh University, he wrote that the argument regarding climate change was “over”.
It has also been revealed that Boulton was one of a group of scientists and meteorologists who signed a statement in December, in the wake of the climate research scandal, pledging their continued support for the IPCC and their unwavering conviction that global warming is being caused by humans.
The statement read:
We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities.
The evidence and the science are deep and extensive.
They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.
That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method.
Boulton’s views clearly contradict the founding principle of the inquiry – to appoint experts who do not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.
Boulton told The London Times: “I may be rapped over the knuckles by Sir Muir for saying this, but I think that statement needs to be clarified. I think the committee needs someone like me who is close to the field of climate change and it would be quite amazing if that person didn’t have a view on one side or the other.”
As if that wasn’t enough, Boulton actually worked at the University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences – where the Climate Research Unit (CRU) is housed – for 18 years until 1986. His biography on the “independent” commission website fails to mention this fact.
The controversy comes within hours of the resignation of another member of the so called “impartial” panel. Dr Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature magazine, stood down on Thursday, after it was disclosed he had previously given an interview in which he defended the actions of researchers at the CRU.
Campbell had been a member of the panel for just six hours when his statement dating from December 2009 was cited, in which he said:
“The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the
e-mails there are one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong.
In fact, the only problem there has been is on some official restrictions on their ability to disseminate data. Otherwise they have behaved as researchers should.”
Both cases come as little surprise, given that the head of the “investigation”, Muir Russell, is a member of one of the most vehemently pro man-made global warming advocacy organizations in Europe.
While absurdly billing himself as impartial and unconnected to climate science, Russell is intimately involved with The Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The RSE has thrown its weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and living standards.
This organization has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.
A February 2009 response to the Climate Change (Scotland) Bill outlines the organization’s staunch advocacy for the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.
The head of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in Britain, and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson has issued the following statement regarding the lack of impartiality of the investigative panel:
“As the first person to call for an independent inquiry into ‘climategate’, I regret that what has been announced today is defective in a number of ways. The inquiry will wholly lack transparency, with the hearings held in private, and no transcripts to be published.
The terms of reference, while better than nothing, are inadequate in a number of ways, not least the failure to include the question of the efforts made by CRU scientists to prevent the publication of papers by dissenting scientists and others, contrary to the canons of scientific integrity.
And the objectivity and independence of the inquiry is seriously called into question by the composition of Sir Muir Russell’s team, in particular the Editor in Chief of Nature, who has already published an editorial on the matter strongly supportive of the CRU scientists and accusing their critics of being ‘paranoid’.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(16-02-2010)
The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faces a fresh challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that the evidence for global warming is 'unequivocal'.
In its most recent report, the panel said there was no doubt that temperatures are rising and that man is largely to blame.
But some researchers, including a former IPCC report author, say that widespread and systematic tampering of the data mean the case for global warming has been grossly overstated.
The claim will further erode trust in the panel, which has been caught making unfounded claims several times in recent weeks.
These include using a student's essay and an article from a climbing magazine to make claims about reductions in ice on mountains around the world in a report used by governments around the world to set environmental policy.
In a separate development, the academic at the centre of the Climategate email scandal, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble 'keeping track' of the information.
Professor Phil Jones, of UEA's prestigious Climatic Research Unit, told the BBC there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'.
He also admitted that in the past 15 years there had been no 'statistically significant' warming,
although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.
The latest doubts concerning the IPCC centre on data collected from thermometers at thousands of weather stations around the world.
Critics say many have been moved from the countryside to cities, where concrete's ability to store heat makes temperatures higher.
Others were sited in fields that have since become built-up or simply dispensed with all together, greatly skewing the data.
John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama, and a lead author of the IPCC's 2001 report, has looked at weather station records from three separate sites in the Africa and America.
He told the Sunday Times: 'The results are the same for each one.
'The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent data rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.'
Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate-change sceptic, said: 'It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully, country by country, removed higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.
'The thermometers were marched towards the tropics, the sea and airports near bigger cities.
'Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.'
But the IPCC says the argument doesn't explain why the oceans are getting warmer or rising or why the proportion of land covered by winter snow has fallen.
Kevin Trenberth, a US climate scientist and IPCC report author said: 'It is not just temperature records that tell us that the world is warming.
'We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five times since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40 per cent and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.'
- Physical? if you look at sea changes over thousands of years you will find countries and continents have changed due to sea advances where land has disappeared or land has been created in other instances where seas have receded! It's called Natural Landforms where land is created by natural cycles! (Ed)
See Also:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(16-02-2010)
One tries to be forbearing but honestly, the science behind the “global warming” campaign is beginning to look like roadkill.
If you are going to start and mastermind a science-based global campaign urging governments to require their exhausted taxpayers to fork out not billions but trillions to prevent a catastrophe that may be 50 to 90 years away, you had better be sure your science is impeccable.
- First we are told via leaked e-mails that the leading “scientists” have been cherry- picking only the convenient data that suit their case. That is not science: that is propaganda.
- Then we learn the fanatics have tried to airbrush from history chronicled facts such as the Medieval Warm Period (still unexplained).
- Next the scare story about the melting Himalayan glaciers is revealed as having been made up, and now we learn that the linkage between droughts and floods with global warming is also bunkum.
Would it not be smart to get the facts right first and then spend the trillions?
See Also:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(16-02-2010) - Christopher Booker
Why is the British Council spending taxpayers' money on the recruiting of 100,000 "international climate champions"?
Last December, our television screens were filled with scenes of young demonstrators from all over the world parading through the streets of Copenhagen to call for action to halt global warming. Few people will have been aware, though, that they were being funded with the aid of millions of pounds from British taxpayers. What makes this even more curious is that the money was provided by a body set up to promote British culture internationally.
Last Sunday, when I reported on some of the ways in which an array of British ministries have poured hundreds of millions of pounds into projects related to climate change, I overlooked one branch of government which has been as active in the cause of saving the planet as any – the British Council, created more than 70 years ago to stage lectures on Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and to spread the use of the English language.
In recent years, however, on the initiative of Lord Kinnock when he was its chairman, the British Council has been hijacked to promote the need for action on climate change. In answer to a Freedom of Information request, we can now see some of the curious ways in which the British Council has been spending our money.
More than £3.5 million has gone on recruiting a worldwide network of young "climate activists" in over 70 countries to engage in climate change propaganda – what Marxists used to call agitprop – and to pressure their politicians to join the worldwide struggle.
Under a programme called Challenge Europe, £1.1 million has been paid out to fund young "climate advocates" in 17 countries across Europe, including Britain itself.
But £2.5 million has been spent on a more ambitious project to recruit a global network of 100,000 activists in 60 countries across the world, led by 1,300 young "International Climate Champions", to participate in "international peer networks, both in person and online, to share ideas, projects and experiences".
Of this sum, £303,093.24 went to China; £71,262.91 to Brazil; £53,006.25 to Japan; £70,132.88 to India (including £11,000 to Dr Pachauri's Teri institute); £77,507.89 to oil-rich Qatar; and £50,000 to the US.
There was £120,000 for a dozen different countries in Africa, including £14,000 to fund climate champions in starving Zimbabwe.
All this, it is comforting to know, is being led by the climate-change activist Dr David Viner, formerly employed by East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (the focus of the "Climategate" emails scandal), who is most famous for the prediction he made in 2001, that within a few years winter snow would become "a very rare and exciting event".
No doubt the climate champions we are funding in the eastern US will have been grateful for our support last week as they tried to explain the several feet of snow across the region which broke records established in the 1880s. What it all has to do with Macbeth or Pride and Prejudice is something of a mystery.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(16-02-2010)
Donald Trump has called for Al Gore to be stripped of the Nobel Peace prize he was awarded for campaigning on climate change.
The billionaire tycoon said record-breaking snow storms proved that the former US Vice-President was wrong on global warming, and that policies aimed at tackling carbon emissions were harming America's economy.
His comments follow a string of high-profile attacks on climate change advocates.
Scientists have been forced to defend themselves after embarrassing admissions that some of their evidence was faulty.
Gore has become one of the world's leading global warming activists since his documentary An Inconvenient Truth became a surprise hit in 2006. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
But Trump, who hosts the US version of The Apprentice, said the Nobel Committee should now strip him of the award following one of the worst ever winters in eastern America.
He said in a speech: 'With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore.'
He added: 'Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn't care less.
'It would make us totally non-competitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America's stupidity.'
A crowd of 500 at the businessman's Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, New York, stood up and cheered the remarks, the New York Post reported.
Washington DC and surrounding areas were buried under more than two feet of snow last week in blizzards that President Barack Obama dubbed 'Snowmageddon'.
But organisers of the Winter Olympics 3,000 miles away in Vancouver, Canada, had to ship in extra snow to ensure the games could go ahead despite unseasonably warm weather.
Many scientists have gone to great lengths to explain that the record snowfalls do not disprove man-made global warming, while some have even said climate change could have contributed to the storms.
But they face a growing movement of climate change sceptics in Britain and the US.
The scientific community has been forced onto the back foot following claims that climate data has been 'manipulated' to bolster the case for action on carbon emissions.
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has resisted calls for his resignation after the body admitted a series of mistakes, including a false claim included in an influential report that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.
The panel has been mired in controversy since the leaking of emails from the climate change unit at The University of East Anglia, which appeared to show that data used to bolster the IPCC's claims had been manipulated.
Critics also claim the UEA's researchers acted to stop papers they did not like from being published in journals and refused to share their data with sceptics.
This week the unit's former head Professor Phil Jones, performed a majot u-turn and admitted there had been no 'statistically significant' global warming in the last 15 years.
And new research cast serious doubt on temperature records from around the world which have been used as evidence for global warming.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(10-02-2010)
The United Nations panel on climate change is facing fresh criticism today as The Sunday Telegraph reveals new factual errors and poor sources of evidence in its influential report to government leaders.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming.
But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:
- The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.
- Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.
- New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.
- More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.
They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007.
Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate.
Last weekend, this paper revealed that the panel had based claims about disappearing mountain ice on anecdotal evidence in a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
And on Friday, it emerged that the IPCC’s panel had wrongly reported that more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level because it had failed to check information supplied by a Dutch government agency.
Researchers insist the errors are minor and do not impact on the overall conclusions about climate change.
However, senior scientists are now expressing concern at the way the IPCC compiles its reports and have hit out at the panel’s use of so-called “grey literature” — evidence from sources that have not been subjected to scientific scrutiny.
A new poll has revealed that public belief in climate change is weakening.The panel’s controversial chair, Rajendra Pachauri, is facing pressure to resign over the affair.
The IPCC attempted to counter growing criticism by releasing a statement insisting that authors who contribute to its 3,000-page report are required to “critically assess and review the quality and validity of each source” when they use material from unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources. Drafts of the reports are checked by scientific reviewers before they are subjected to line-by-line approval by the 130 member countries of the IPCC.
Despite these checks, a diagram used to demonstrate the potential for generating electricity from wave power has been found to contain numerous errors.
The source of information for the diagram was cited as the website of UK-based wave-energy company Wavegen. Yet the diagram on Wavegen’s website contains dramatically different figures for energy potential off Britain and Alaska and in the Bering Sea.
When contacted by The Sunday Telegraph, Wavegen insisted that the diagram on its website had not been changed. It added that it was not the original source of the data and had simply reproduced it on its website.
The diagram is widely cited in other literature as having come from a paper on wave energy produced by the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in 1991 along with data from the European Directory of Renewable Energy.
Experts claim that, had the IPCC checked the citation properly, it would have spotted the discrepancies.
It can also be revealed that claims made by the IPCC about the effects of global warming, and suggestions about ways it could be avoided, were partly based on information from ten dissertations by Masters students.
One unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on people living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development.
The IPCC also made use of a report by US conservation group Defenders of Wildlife to state that salmon in US streams have been affected by rising temperatures. The panel has already come under fire for using information in reports by conservation charity the WWF.
Estimates of carbon-dioxide emissions from nuclear power stations and claims that suggested they were cheaper than coal or gas power stations were also taken from the website of the World Nuclear Association, rather than using independent scientific calculations.
Such revelations are creating growing public confusion over climate change. A poll by Ipsos on behalf of environmental consultancy firm Euro RSCG revealed that the proportion of the public who believe in the reality of climate change has dropped from 44 per cent to 31per cent in the past year.
The proportion of people who believe that climate change is a bit over-exaggerated rose from 22 per cent to 31per cent.
Climate scientists have expressed frustration with the IPCC’s use of unreliable evidence.
Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, the biggest funder of climate science in the UK, said: “We should only be dealing with peer-reviewed literature. We open ourselves up to trouble if we start getting into hearsay and grey literature. We have enough research that has been peer-reviewed to provide evidence for climate change, so it is concerning that the IPCC has strayed from that.”
Professor Bob Watson, who chaired the IPCC before Dr Pachauri and is now chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, insisted that despite the errors there was little doubt that human-induced climate change was a reality.
- If the land stayed frozen for for the next five years they would still be claiming climate change (warming) is a reality! (Ed)
But he called for changes in the way the IPCC compiles future reports.
“It is concerning that these mistakes have appeared in the IPCC report, but there is no doubt the earth’s climate is changing and the only way we can explain those changes is primarily human activity,” he said.
Mr Watson said that Dr Pachauri “cannot be personally blamed for one or two incorrect sentences in the IPCC report”, but stressed that the chairman must take responsibility for correcting errors.
Another row over the IPCC report emerged last night after Professor Roger Pielke Jnr, from Colorado University’s Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research, claimed its authors deliberately ignored a paper he wrote that contradicted the panel’s claims about the cost of climate-related natural disasters.
A document included a statement from an anonymous IPCC author saying that they believed Dr Pielke had changed his mind on the matter, when he had not.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(07-02-2010)
Global warming is set to become global cooling this century, a leading analyst claimed yesterday.
Professor Michael Beenstock said theories of climate change are wrong.
He warned climatologists have misused statistics, leading them to the mistaken conclusion global warming is evidence of the greenhouse effect.
He told London’s Cass Business School that the link between rising greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures is “spurious”, adding: “The greenhouse effect is an illusion.”
The economics professor from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said that just because greenhouse gases and temperatures have risen together does not mean they are linked.
He claims that the real cause of rising temperatures is the sun, which he says is at its hottest for over 1,000 years but is “beginning to stabilise”.
Professor Beenstock said: “If the sun’s heat continues to remain stable, and if carbon emissions continue to grow with the rate of growth of the world economy, global temperatures will fall by about 0.5C by 2050.”
Citing predictions by climatologists in the 1970s of a new Ice Age, Professor Beenstock said: “I predict that climatologists will look equally foolish in the years to come. Indeed, it may be already happening.”
The Met Office said the first decade of this century is the warmest since records began 160 years ago, and 2009 the fifth warmest year.
It maintains that rising carbon dioxide levels increase temperatures. Since the Industrial Revolution CO2 levels have risen 37 per cent.
Meanwhile, Professor Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit – the expert at the centre of the Climategate scandal – said he had considered suicide and had death threats over leaked emails which appeared to show scientists rigging the data.
Prof Jones, 57, has stood down during a probe and accepts he should have worded some of his emails differently. But he added: “I stand 100 per cent behind the science. I did not manipulate or fabricate any data.”
MPs have called on the Government to consider a carbon tax of £100 a ton “or higher” to force down greenhouse gases. But there are fears it could push up fuel and food prices.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(02-02-2010)
- IPCC sources student's essay to make melting ice claims
- Climate boss uses 1.8litre car to make a 1mile journey to work
- Chief scientist: 'Climategate' emails 'were hacked by spies
The UN's climate change panel has been caught making unfounded claims for the third time in just two weeks.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used a student's essay and an article from a climbing magazine to make claims about reductions in ice on mountains.
The IPCC has also been found to have used data that had nothing to do with global warming to warn of looming catastrophe in the Amazon rainforest.
The revelations came at the end of a bad month for the climate change body, whose reports are used by governments to make environmental policies.
The head of the panel had already been forced to make a humiliating apology after claims that Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 25 years were exposed as nonsense.
The IPCC also came under fire for exaggerating links between climate change and storms.
Earlier, experts at the University of East Anglia's world-leading research unit were accused of manipulating data on global warming in the 'Climategate' scandal over leaked emails.
Last night the Government's former chief scientist said foreign spies had probably been behind email hacking at the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia.
It's Irrelevant who was behind the email hacking, the point is.. if this wasn't done, none of us would be none the wiser of the fact that we are being conned and that the manipulation of data was taking place.
Of course this is the main issue with the Natural Process Denialists (warmists). Not the security as such, but the fact they are being exposed time and time again! (Ed)
Sir David King said the leaking of the unit's emails going back 13 years bore all the hallmarks of a skilled intelligence operation from a foriegn government rather than opportunist hackers.
He said more than 1,000 emails and 2,000 documents were stolen from a back-up server used by the University of East Anglia since 1996, and recent links were carefully timed to destabilise the Copenhagen climate change summit.
'It's the sophistication of the operation', he told the Independent.
'A very clever nerd can cause a great deal of disruption and obviously make intelligence services very nervous, but a sophisticated intelligence operation is capable of yielding the sort of results we've seen here.'
The first of the two new blunders centres on a claim in the IPCC's most recent report that global warming was to blame for reductions on mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and in Africa.
A table accompanying the claim cited two papers as sources.
One was an article in Climbing News, based on evidence from climbers about the changes they saw.
The other was a dissertation by a geography student studying for the equivalent of a master's degree in Switzerland and quoting interviews with mountain guides.
Professor Richard Tol, an environmental economist and one of the authors of the 3,000-page report, told The Sunday Times: 'These are essentially a collection of anecdotes. Why do they do this? It is quite astounding.'
He said it was unlikely the claim had influenced any policy decisions, but it indicated 'sloppiness' on the part of those drawing up that particular section of the report.
In the same 2007 report, the IPCC said that up to 40 per cent of the Amazon was at risk of being replaced with barren 'savannahs'.
But the claim came from a report published by the green campaigning charity WWF, which based its findings on a study into logging published in the journal Nature in 1999.
The claims about the Himalayan glaciers was also lifted from an unsubstantiated WWF report.
Critics said the reliance on green lobby groups made a mockery of the IPCC's claim to be impartial and accused the organisation of cherrypicking alarmist papers.
Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: 'These reports do not appear to be peer-reviewed, but are produced by campaigning organisations which are known to exaggerate problems. It is a clear indication that they are using the wrong literature.'
The Government is understood to have contacted the IPCC about the errors and urged it to ensure scientific standards are 'rigorously' upheld.
But Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said the mistakes should be seen in the light of the thousands of pages of evidence in the report.
Declaring a 'battle' against 'siren voices' who denied global warming was real or caused by humans, he said:
'It is right that there's rigour applied to all the reports but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there.
'We know there are observed effects that point to the existence of manmade climate change.
'That's what the vast majority of scientists tell us.'
That's what the vast of THEIR hand picked scientists tell us and does not include a vast amount of scientists that state otherwise. And when they say scientists do they mean idiots like Dr Rajendra Pachauri who has NO QUALIFICATIONS in climate science AT ALL? Couple of years ago I read a report which the government listed many people as scientists.
When we took a closer look it revealed that these so called climate change experts were nothing more than industrialists (one was the owner of a shoe manufacturing company, another a owner of a fast food chain and with most others we could easily categorise into similar groups) there may have been a few genuine climatologists but the number of qualified climatologists was so low that the list was a complete joke! Skeptic climatologists would have outnumbered those on the list by hundreds to one.
Any scientists that go against this myth are shunned, ignored and jobs have been lost as a result. Grants have been taken away and these people lost their careers for not towing the fraudulent line!
What we would like to see now is a list of these 'so called experts' and what REAL qualifications they hold. However, this will never happen! (Ed)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(02-02-2010)
Doomsday warnings that the Amazon rainforest is threatened by climate change were yesterday said to be based on an unsubstantiated claim.
A startling report by the United Nation’s climate watchdog in 2007 said that global warming could wipe out 40 per cent of the Amazon jungle.
The Intergovernmental Panel on climate change said that even a slight change in rainfall could lead to savanna grassland replacing swathes of the rainforest.
But yesterday, it emerged that the claims were based on a 2000 report by environmental activists WWF about the Brazilian Amazon.
But the IPCC extended the WWF claim about Brazil to cover the whole of the Amazon.
There were also claims that the IPCC had based its report on reductions of mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa on a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine.
Earlier this month, the IPCC – whose reports have shaped world reaction to the threat of climate change – retracted a claim that the Himalayas’ glaciers will have melted by 2035.
It was also accused of claiming that climate change was linked to natural disasters such as hurricanes despite warnings that the research did not support this.
Details emerged as Gordon Brown hailed the commitment of the most polluting nations, including Britain, to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Copenhagen Accord as a “turning point”.
But climate change sceptic Jim McConalogue, of the European Foundation, said:
“How can the Government justify spending billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on an unfounded climate change policy, which does not stand up to any public or expert scrutiny?
“The cracks are only just now appearing but the Government must abandon their climate change policy.” The IPCC yesterday stood by its Amazon research – and its central claim that man is changing the climate. It said its authors are allowed to refer to reports, such as the WWF study, which have not been reviewed by other experts.
Climate secretary Ed Miliband vowed to fight the “siren voices” who deny global warming is real or caused by humans.
He admitted the IPCC’s glacier study was a “bad mistake”. But he said: “The truth is it doesn’t undermine decades of climate research and the overwhelming majority of scientists say that.
I think science is improved when criticised and improved when opened up. What I think is irresponsible is to suggest that one fact that was wrong about a glacier undermines the overall picture on climate change.”
WWF said it is launching an internal inquiry into the study.
A spokesman said: “WWF cannot answer for the use of the 2000 report by other institutions.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(02-02-2010)
Ed Miliband, the weird blobby egg creature with dark hair on top currently doing untold damage as Britain’s Energy and Climate Secretary, has declared war on Climate Sceptics.
According to the Observer:
The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband.
If the UK did not invest in renewable, clean energy, it would lose jobs and investment to other countries, have less energy security because of the dependence on oil and gas imports and contribute to damaging temperature rises for future generations.
“There are a whole variety of people who are sceptical, but who they are is less important than what they are saying, and what they are saying is profoundly dangerous,” he said.
“Everything we know about life is that we should obey the precautionary principle; to take what the sceptics say seriously would be a profound risk.”
Could the New Labour government’s zeal to impose this eco-fascist vision on Britain at any cost have anything to do with the curious case of the Information Commissioner who barked but didn’t bite?
Christopher Booker points up the mystery in his latest column:
There is something very odd indeed about the statement by the Information Commission on its investigation into “Climategate”, the leak of emails from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Gordon Smith, the deputy commissioner, confirms that the university’s refusal to answer legitimate inquiries made in 2007 and 2008 was an offence under S.77 of the Information Act. But he goes on to claim that the Commission is powerless to bring charges, thanks to a loophole in the law – “because the legislation requires action within six months of the offence taking place”.
Careful examination of the Act, however, shows that it says nothing whatever about a time limit. The Commission appears to be trying to confuse this with a provision of the Magistrates Act, that charges for an offence cannot be brought more than six months after it has been drawn to the authorities’ attention – not after it was committed. In this case, the Commission only became aware of the offence two months ago when the emails were leaked – showing that the small group of British and American scientists at the top of the IPCC were discussing with each other and with the university ways to break the law, not least by destroying evidence, an offence in itself.
The Commission is thus impaled on a hook of its own devising. By admitting that serious offences were committed, it is now legally obliged to bring charges. And if these were brought under the 1977 Criminal Law Act, alleging that the offences amounted to a conspiracy to defy the law, there is no time limit anyway.
The real mystery therefore is how the Commission came to misread the very Act which brought it into being. Undoubtedly a successful prosecution involving such world-ranking scientists would be extraordinarily embarrassing, not just to the Government but to the entire global warming cause. So what has persuaded the Commission not to do its duty?
I think we should be told. (As Private Eye would be asking were it remotely interested in investigating the AGW scandal which unfortunately, for some bizarre reason known only to its editor, it isn’t).
UPDATE: Climategate.com has been looking into this scandal and is similarly disgusted. It believes there may have been “willful nonfeasance or malfeasance by government officials.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(02-02-2010)
Green taxes fail to meet their objectives, are way in excess of that needed to meet the claimed cost of CO2 emissions and are causing “serious harm” to areas of the country and industries least able to cope, according to a report on the topic by the Taxpayers’ Alliance.
The report, titled “The Case Against Further Green Taxes,” says that “taking an average of the most widely quoted official and academic estimates of the social cost of CO2 emissions shows that green taxes in the UK are already well in excess of the level they need to be to meet these social costs.
“The social cost of Britain’s entire output of CO2 was £11.7 billion in 2005 but in the same year, the total net burden of green taxes and charges was £21.9 billion,” the TPA says.
“This means that green taxes and charges are already £10.2 billion in excess of the level they need to be to meet the social cost of Britain’s CO2 emissions. This excess is equivalent to over £400 for each household in Britain.
“Green taxes are therefore already too high if they really are a means of internalising environmental externalities rather than simply revenue-raising measures.”
The TPA report says that “green taxes have become enormously popular amongst all the main political parties in recent months. The Government has doubled Air Passenger Duty; the Conservatives have indicated that they will ‘rebalance’ the tax system from taxing income to taxing carbon emissions, and the Liberal Democrats have proposed raising Vehicle Excise Duty for the most polluting vehicles to £2,000 a year.”
The report says that “calling for new or higher green taxes allows politicians to portray themselves as responsible defenders of the environment. Higher green taxes can also be sold as a sensible economic move towards taxing ‘bads’, such as CO2 emissions or landfill waste, rather than ‘goods’ like corporate profit or earned income.”
It continues: “Our audit also casts doubt on the rosy picture of green taxes that has often been presented. Green taxes and charges are not always a benign alternative to more traditional forms of taxation: they can impose substantial costs on, amongst others, Northern manufacturers, the NHS and the less well-off.”
According to the TPA, Fuel Duty is already over 50p per litre of regular unleaded petrol, and Vehicle Excise Duty raises almost £20 billion above the amount spent on roads.
“This is between 3.6 and 40.9 times higher than the level needed to ensure that drivers cover the official and academic estimates of the social cost of CO2 emissions, costing each motorist an average of between £548 and £743 each year,” the TPA report says.
“Ignoring road spending, Fuel Duty alone raises more than five times the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s estimate of the social cost of Britain’s entire annual output of CO2 emissions.
“Further increases in taxation on motorists are not justified on environmental grounds; indeed, Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty should actually be significantly reduced.
“Given that middle class and poorer households spend proportionately more on motor oils (including petrol) than richer households, reducing Fuel Duty would be a progressive move,” the TPA said.
Without expressing an opinion as to the veracity or otherwise of ‘Climate Change’, the TPA report makes the following interesting remarks:
“Under the Climate Change Levy, which taxes the use of energy in industry, commerce and the public sector, the North East, England’s poorest region, pays over 35 percent more as a proportion of regional Gross Value Added than the South East, England’s richest region outside London.
“The Climate Change Levy is contributing to the continuing decline in manufacturing, with 1 million manufacturing jobs lost since the levy was introduced.”
Turing to air passenger duties and taxes, the TPA says that the “doubling of Air Passenger Duty” is actually likely to have increased total emissions from air travel, incentivising longer flights within the short-haul and long-haul bands.
“We also estimate that the levy costs the tourist industry £156 million a year.”
Finally, the TPA report says that its conclusions “raise serious questions about the merits of imposing new or higher environmental taxes. We hope that politicians of all parties will take our findings seriously.”
The British National Party certainly does take these findings seriously, in contrast to every other party which actively seeks to increase “green taxes” even further.
*The TPA report can be downloaded in full by clicking here.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(01-02-2010)
Climate secretary Ed Miliband broke his silence on the ongoing row about man-made climate change by declaring war on the 'siren voices' who denied global warming was real or man-made.
Miliband said the by the 'climategate' controversy that appeared to show that vital data was suppressed or manipulated by climate scientists, as well as the more recent revelation that the Intergorvernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had exaggerated claims about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayan mountains.
'It's right that there's rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there,' he told the Observer.
He pointed to a wealth of research used to support the argument that climate change is man made - the physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, CO2 concentrations and observed increases in temperatures.
How true is this so called wealth of research? and what about the wealth of research that says climate change is not 'Man Made'? Here we have a True Communist who only see things his way in the traditional true communist fashion! It is he who should not be trusted!
'There are a whole variety of people who are sceptical, but who they are is less important than what they are saying, and what they are saying is profoundly dangerous,' he said.
Dangerous to him that is, his job depends on the climate scam and Labour depends on this new commodity that has been invented the Carbon Credits!
Furthermore unemployment is going up not down therefore they need climate change to synthetically create job in the ' 'Green Employment area' to drastically reduce and spin the unemployment figures. Only the other week when Labour said unemployment is down we published a list if companies with total job losses from them for a three month period that Labour were referring to.
The Job losses completely outstripped Labour's claim, it was an out and utter lie that Labour spun again!
The danger of climate scepticism, he said, was that it would foster dissent against unpopular decisions such increases in energy bills and investment in wind turbines, which are essential to tackle environmental issues.
The danger here lies as one commentator stressed in the Daily Mail:
Ed Milliband said "The danger of climate scepticism, he said, was that it would foster dissent against unpopular decisions such increases in energy bills and investment in wind turbines, which are essential to tackle environmental issues."
Let me just rephrase that for you Ed.
"The danger of climate scepticism, he said, was that it would foster dissent against unpopular decisions such TAX RISES , which are essential to tackle THE HOLE WE HAVE GOT OURSELF INTO WITH OUR TAX & SPEND POLICIES AND POLICY OF REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH.
And another commentator hits the nail on the head:
Again, a Miliband Boy demonstrates Labour cannot tell the difference between right and wrong.
The deliberate witholding of data held by the University of East Anglia was not a "mistake". It was out and out suppression of facts which did not suit the warmists purpose and this was proven by the findings last week that the University was guilty of breaking the Freedom of Information Act. A loophole in the law left them without charge.
The head of the IPCC has now been proven beyond all doubt to be untrustworthy.
Miliband should be investigating the way British taxpayers money is paid to the likes of this man instead of trying to suppress valid argument.
One more comment and true to a Tee:
The danger comes from those, like Mr Miliband, who jump on a bandwagon without understanding the whole picture. There can be no argument that climate does not change. There can be no argument that there has been a recent period of 'warming'.
There can be huge disagreement about the extent & cause of the 'warming'. There have also been periods of cooling. Much depends on the timeframe you select.
There is, as yet, insufficient understanding of climate and the impact of mankind on it. Pollution, deforestation, overpopulation all have some effect.
What certainly does NOT help are wild claims based on unproven models.
It is in out own best interests to conserve energy resources and to look for the most efficient & 'clean' way of providing energy but this does not have to mean that we destroy our lives to do it. Wind power does not work. It always needs backup so can never be the sole source of energy. 'Renewable' energy is a contradiction of the basic laws of physics. Shut up Miliband!
However, climate change scepticism has been growing ever since the leaked emails controversy at the University of East Anglia, and last week's revelations about IPCC work has fueled the flames.
The accusation is that chairman Rajendra Pachauri may have known before the Copenhagen summit that the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are supposed to be melting was hugely exaggerated in its report.
Mr Miliband defending the report, pointing to the thousands of pages of evidence in the IPCC's four-volume report in 2007.
'No doubt when the next report comes out it will suggest there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied,' he told the Observer.
He admitted that the Copenhagen summit was a disappointment, with no formal agreement being reached, but said there were some important achievements, including the agreement by countries responsible for 80% of emissions to set domestic carbon targets.
The climate secretary warned activists against despair, saying: 'There's a message for people who take these things seriously: don't mourn, organise.'
Related:
Flight taxes are being raised to help bail out the banks, Alistair Darling admitted yesterday. In an extraordinary intervention, the Chancellor said the higher air passenger duty being introduced tomorrow was needed to plug gaps in the national finances. He made no attempt to justify the move - which will add £340 to the ticket for a family of four flying long haul - on environmental grounds, the official reason for the tax.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(01-02-2010) Christopher Booker
The IPCC is beginning to melt as global tempers rise.
It is now six weeks since I launched an investigation, with my colleague Richard North, into the affairs of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the hugely influential body which for 20 years has been the central driver of worldwide alarm about global warming.
Since then the story has grown almost daily, leading to worldwide calls for Dr Pachauri's resignation. But increasingly this has also widened out to question the authority of the IPCC itself.
Contrary to the tendentious claim that its reports represent a "consensus of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" (most of its contributors are not climate experts at all), it has now emerged, for instance, that one of the more widely quoted scare stories from its 2007 report was drawn from the work of a British "green activist" who occasionally writes as a freelance for The Guardian and The Independent.
Last week I reported on "Glaciergate", the scandal which has forced the IPCC's top officials, led by Dr Pachauri, to disown a claim originating from an Indian glaciologist, Dr Syed Husnain, that the Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035.
What has made this reckless claim in the IPCC's 2007 report even more embarrassing was the fact that Dr Husnain, as we revealed, was then employed by Dr Pachauri's own Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). His baseless scaremongering about the Himalayas helped to win Teri a share in two lucrative research contracts, one funded by the EU.
The source the IPCC cited as its "scientific" authority for this claim, however (as Dr North first reported on his EU Referendum blog), was a propagandist pamphlet published in 2005 by the WWF, the environmentalist pressure group, citing a magazine interview with Dr Husnain six years earlier.
Dr North next uncovered "Amazongate". The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears.
This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.
A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report.
These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.
Little of this has come as a surprise to those who have studied the workings of the IPCC over the years. As I show in my book The Real Global Warming Disaster, there is no greater misconception about the IPCC than that it was intended to be an impartial body, weighing scientific evidence for and against global warming. It was set up in 1988 by a small group of scientists all firmly committed to the theory of "human-induced climate change", and its chief purpose ever since has been to promote that belief.
The blatant bias of each of its four reports has been pointed out by scientists – notably the rewriting of key passages in its 1995 report after the contributing scientists had approved the final text. This provoked a magisterial blast from Professor Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, who wrote that in all his 60 years as a scientist he had never seen "a more disturbing corruption" of the scientific process, and that if the IPCC was "incapable of following its most basic procedures", it was best it should be "abandoned".
The centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report was Michael Mann's notorious "hockey stick", the graph purporting to show temperatures in the late 20th century soaring at an unprecedented rate – later exposed as a statistical artefact. Another new book, The Hockey Stick Illusion by A W Montford, brilliantly tells the bizarre tale of how Mann's colleagues, calling themselves "the Hockey Team" and now at the heart of the IPCC, managed to resurrect the discredited graph for inclusion in its 2007 report.
Montford's book, if inevitably technical, expertly recounts a remarkable scientific detective story. And of course, it was incriminating leaked emails between members of the Hockey Team that were at the centre of the recent "Climategate" scandal at the University of East Anglia.
Most disturbing of all are the glimpses the story gives of the inner workings of the IPCC, an institution now so discredited and scientifically corrupted that only those determined to shut their eyes could possibly defend it. This is now compounded by the recent revelations by Dr North and myself in these pages of how its chairman, Dr Pachauri, has built a worldwide network of business links which provide his Delhi institute with a sizeable income.
It is noticeable how many of those now calling for Dr Pachauri's resignation, led by Professor Andrew Weaver, a senior IPCC insider, are passionate global warming believers. Fearing that Pachauri damages their cause, they want him thrown overboard in the hope of saving the IPCC itself. But it is not just Pachauri who has been holed below the waterline.
So has the entire IPCC process. And beyond that – and despite the pleading of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and the BBC that none of this detracts from the evidence for man-made global warming – so has the warmist cause itself. Bereft of scientific or moral authority, the most expensive show the world has ever seen may soon be nearing its end.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(01-02-2010)
He is the climate change chief whose research body produced a report warning that the glaciers in the Himalayas might melt by 2035 and earned a Nobel Prize for his work – so you might expect Dr Rajendra Pachauri to be doing everything he can to reduce his own carbon footprint.
But as controversy continued to simmer last week over the bogus ‘Glaciergate’ claims in a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which he heads – Dr Pachauri showed no apparent inclination to cut global warming in his own back yard.
On Friday, for the one-mile journey from home to his Delhi office, Dr Pachauri could have walked, or cycled, or used the eco-friendly electric car provided for him, known in the UK as G-Wiz.
But instead, he had his personal chauffeur collect him from his £4.5million home – in a 1.8-litre Toyota Corolla.
Hours later, the chauffeur picked up Dr Pachauri from the office of the environmental charity where he is director-general – The Energy and Resources Institute – blatantly ignoring the institute’s own literature, which gives visitors tips on how to reduce pollution by using buses.
Dr Pachauri – who as IPCC chairman once told people to eat less meat to cut greenhouse gas emissions – was driven to an upmarket restaurant popular with expatriates and well-off tourists just half a mile from his luxurious family home.
As he waited outside the institute office for Dr Pachauri, the chauffeur said: ‘Dr Pachauri does use the electric car sometimes but most of the time he uses the Toyota.’
The electric car might be kinder to the environment and more suitable for short trips, explained the chauffeur – who has worked for the environmentalist for 19 years – but it was simply too small for Dr Pachauri and a driver to share. ‘When he uses it, he has to use it by himself,’ he said.
At his office, Dr Pachauri has at his disposal four electric cars obtained by the institute last year from REVA – the Indian company that makes the G-Wiz cars seen in many British cities.
The institute bought the battery-powered cars with the express aim of reducing pollution on short trips by staff around town. One of those cars has been set aside for his personal use.
The chauffeur said Dr Pachauri’s family owned or ran a total of five cars. Dr Pachauri used three: the company Toyota, the REVA and an older ‘Ambassador-style car’ – a reference to the smoke-belching, Indian-made Hindustan Ambassador car, based on the vintage British Morris Oxford, that is a common sight at taxi ranks in Delhi.
The family’s two other cars are owned by Dr Pachauri’s wife and his grown-up son, also a scientist.
The five-star lifestyle and considerable wealth of Dr Pachauri – who is said to wear suits costing £1,000 each – has come under growing scrutiny since he was forced to acknowledge the error of the claims in an explosive 2007 IPCC report that the Himalayan glaciers might melt within 25 years.
The humiliating climbdown over the report, which was masterminded by Dr Pachauri and which led to the organisation sharing the Nobel Prize with Al Gore, was followed by calls for him to step down from the UN panel, which he has chaired since 2002.
On Friday, at the institute’s swish city-centre offices, where the foyer walls are covered with pictures of Dr Pachauri meeting politicians and dignitaries and receiving awards for his environmental work since he took up his role as its head in the Eighties, he declined to comment on recent calls for his resignation. He said: ‘I am very tied up – I am just too tied up to talk to you just now.’ Continued
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(28-01-2010)
The climate change issue is falling apart therefore in desperation they claim fair hearing should be given to skeptics and data should be provided which was originally ignored when FOI requests were made. However, how do they intend on doing that considering they admitted throwing out the original data? Provide the doctored data and keep the Lie alive?
Climate change sceptics should be given a fair hearing because there are “substantial uncertainties” surrounding global warming, the Government’s chief scientific adviser said yesterday.
Professor John Beddington urged scientists to be more open with their data and admitted that recent unreliable statements about climate change have been “unfortunate”.
But he warned that it was “unchallengeable” that man is changing the climate. (This is debatable and not unchallengeable! (Ed)
His even-handed tone contrasts with a statement by his predecessor, Professor Sir David King, who in 2004 declared climate change was “more serious even than the threat of terrorism”.
But in recent months the consensus over man-made climate change has been rocked. Last year emails leaked from East Anglia University’s Climate Research unit appeared to show scientists rigging statistics to strengthen the case for blaming man for global warming.
This month the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to retract an earlier claim that the Himalayas’ glaciers will all have melted by 2035. The IPCC was also criticised for linking natural disasters to climate change despite warnings about the research.
And yesterday the respected journal, New Scientist, said the IPCC needs to become more open to criticism because “its closed world of peer review is no longer possible, let alone desirable”.
It said that man-made climate change “is happening, is dangerous and requires urgent action”. But it added: “Scientists should welcome the outside world in to check them out. Their science is useless if no one trusts it.”
Climate change skeptic Hugh Bladon of the Association of British Drivers said recent events had led to a rethink. He said: “Professor Beddington has been forced to admit these uncertainties because the whole edifice of global warming has been blown apart. People have every right to be sceptical about man-made climate change.”
In an interview Professor Beddington said that public confidence in climate science would be boosted by greater honesty about its uncertainties. He said: “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper scepticism. Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed."
“Certain unqualified statements have been unfortunate. We have a problem in communicating uncertainty. There’s definitely an issue. If there wasn’t, there wouldn’t be the level of scepticism.”
He said with all the predictions there has to be a caveat saying: “There’s a level of uncertainty about that. It’s unchallengeable that CO2 traps heat and warms the Earth and that burning fossil fuels shoves billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where you can get challenges is on the speed of change. When you get into large-scale climate modeling there are quite substantial uncertainties."
“On the rate of change and the local effects, there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves.”
Urging scientists to release their data, he said this room for doubt should not be an excuse to do nothing about climate change. He said: “Some people ask why we should act when scientists say they are only 90 per cent certain about the problem. But would you get on a plane that only had a 10 per cent chance of landing?”
Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the UEA, backed Professor Beddington. Prof Hulme, who says there is “no doubt at all” that humans are having a detectable effect on the climate, added: “Professor Beddington is right to say that, if arguments and critiques are honest, fair and challenging, they should be generally welcomed by scientists and politicians. Science needs critiques, challenges and questioning.”
(16-02-2010)
For more than a decade multiculturalism and environmentalism have been the twin ideological pillars of the Labour state.
Ruthlessly enforced with propaganda and oppression, the two doctrines have been used to justify bureaucratic expansion, increased taxation, the curtailment of liberties and social revolution.
Labour’s determination to impose these two dogmas on society has been accompanied by an air of zealous certainty. Questioning the existence of man-made climate change or the benefits of mass immigration is treated as a form of vicious, uncaring extremism.
“The science is settled,” screeches Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband at anyone who dares challenge his hardline green agenda, while other Left-wing politicians throw accusations of racism at opponents of the diversity fetish. Yet cracks are now beginning to show in Labour’s ideological edifice.
The iron convictions of recent years are no longer supportable. Last week the publication of documents showed that, contrary to noisy official propaganda about the universal benefits of multiculturalism, Labour has disgracefully pursued a mass immigration policy based on its narrow political interests.
One Whitehall paper even stated that migration had “opened up new opportunities for organised crime,” not something any Labour minister ever admits in public.
A report from a highly respected House of Lords committee demolished the Government’s boasts that unprecedented levels of migration boost economic prosperity. It said the destruction of effective borders has driven down wages and imposed a huge burden on public services.
The belief in man-made global warming now looks just as weak. A string of scandals has revealed the extent to which environmentalists have been willing to manipulate climate data for political ends.
With breathtaking cynicism activists have used massaged figures to manufacture a public mood of panic over the future of the planet, thereby justifying their radical socialistic programme of huge tax grabs, state intervention, mass surveillance and the removal of property rights.
Yet as the devious methods of the green ideologues come under increasing scrutiny so the evidence for man-made global warming evaporates. The Climate Change Research Unit at East Anglia University has been at the centre of a storm over leaked e-mails that appeared to show a willingness to hide the real truth in the quest to support the politicians. Records have gone missing, graphs have been distorted, sceptical scientists have been excluded.
Yesterday Professor Phil Jones, recently suspended as director of the unit over the e-mail scandal, confessed he had trouble “keeping track of information” and did not do “a thorough job”. Most importantly, he admitted that since 1995 there has been “no statistically significant” global warming.
So there we have it. One of the scientists in charge of climate change analysis says that there is absolutely no basis for all the hysteria that the politicians have generated. The green crusade is shot to pieces.
It is shameful we have been taxed and bullied because of a massive political fraud, just as the case for mass immigration is so riddled with lies.
As the foundations of these two ideologies crumble it is striking to see the similarities between them.
Both involve constant guilt-tripping by the State, with ordinary decent citizens made to feel ashamed of everything from patriotism to car ownership. Both have created an atmosphere of fear in which basic liberties are suppressed.
So in the name of the Government’s “war on climate change” spy cameras are placed in wheelie bins and huge fines are imposed for putting out rubbish on the wrong day. In the same way it is now impossible to have open discussion about multiculturalism and that is the way zealots want it.
A high priest of the liberal establishment, the journalist Andrew Marr, once wrote an article in which he called for “the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress” in the campaign for diversity. The government had to “stamp hard” on politically incorrect thoughts, he argued, for “repression can be a great, civilising force for good”, exactly the sort of language beloved of dictators.
Environmentalism and multi-culturalism have been imposed through constant propaganda.
Driving through Margate on Saturday I sat behind a municipal bus with an advertisement urging me to “go greener” to “help save the planet”, just like all those fashionable notices in state buildings urging me to “celebrate diversity”.
Both ideologies have led to a massive burden on the public through the cost of welfare for migrants and rising taxes and energy bills to pay for the green agenda. Each creed has created its own expensive bureaucracy, with the public sector now awash with diversity co-ordinators, equalities managers, and sustainability officers.
The advocates of both ideologies tend to be appalling hypocrites. Just as the loudest political advocates for multiculturalism rarely live on inner-city housing estates so the leading green campaigners, like the US politician Al Gore, could not care less about their own carbon footprints as they travel around by limousine and jet.
Left-wing ideology provides an extremely lucrative living as well as the chance to feel self-righteous.
Our independent nationhood is being destroyed by Left-wing ideologues filled with hatred of Britain and a longing for EU and world government. We can only hope that the exposure of their spectacular dishonesty has not come too late.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(28-01-2010)
(Partial cuts were made to this story as already mentioned in previous article)
Scientists must be more 'honest and open' about the uncertainties of global warming, the Government's chief scientific adviser declared yesterday.
Last week, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was forced to apologise after wrongly claiming most of the Himalayan glaciers would vanish within 25 years.
The warning, which appeared in the IPCC's 2007 report, turned out to be taken from a news story from New Scientist magazine in the late 1990s based on an interview with a glacier expert. The expert later admitted his comment was speculation.
The same report also exaggerated claims that global warming will increase the number of tropical storms.
In November, leaked emails appeared to show scientists at the University of East Anglia manipulating data to strengthen the case for man-made climate change - and debating ways to stop sceptics getting hold of their raw temperature data.
Professor Beddington said public confidence in climate science would be boosted by greater honesty about its uncertainties.
He said that the false claim about glaciers in the IPCC report revealed a wider problem with the way that some evidence was presented.
'Certain unqualified statements have been unfortunate,' he added.
Professor Beddington also said that computer climate modelling resulted in 'quite substantial uncertainties' that should be communicated.
'On the rate of change and the local effects, there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves.'
The UN is under increasing pressure to reform the IPCC - and include research from sceptical scientists in its reports.
Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation thinktank, said of Professor Beddington's remarks: 'His public rebuke is a highly significant development which we hope will help to restore some much needed balance and realism to the climate debate.'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(28-01-2010)
The scientific unit at the heart of the climate change emails scandal broke the law by hiding data from sceptics.
Researchers at the University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for the data.
The decision by the Information Commissioner's Office comes months after controversial emails from the university's Climatic Research Unit, a global leader in its field, were released on to the internet.
In one email the head of the unit, Professor Phil Jones, asked a colleague to delete emails relating to a report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In another message, Professor Jones told how he had persuaded the university to ignore Freedom of Information requests from sceptics.
Others showed how an eminent climatologist admitted it was a 'travesty' scientists could not explain a lack of global warming in recent years.
The Information Commissioner's Office yesterday revealed the university had failed in it duties under the Freedom of Information Act.
But it is powerless to prosecute those involved because the complaint was not made within six months of the offence, as required under the Act.
Deputy Information Commissioner Graham Smith said Freedom of Information requests were 'not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation'.
The circumstances surrounding the emails are the subject of an inquiry commissioned by the university, and separately by Norfolk police.
Phil Willis, LibDem chairman of the parliamentary science and technology select committee-which is conducting its own inquiry, called on the university to honour the data requests as soon as possible.
'I think that is an extremely serious charge. I don't think you can have the inquiry unless you have all the issues relating to it out in the open,' he told the Guardian.
'Given the seriousness of this issue, the fact that it has caused global consternation, and has given ammunition to the climate sceptics - to have such a serious breach and for there to be no recourse in law requires urgent attention by the Government,' he added.
'If there has been a breach in this situation then the most honourable thing for the university to do would be to honour the request in its totality with all speed.'
A spokesman for the university said that it was not aware of Mr Smith's statement that it broke the law.
She said: 'The way Freedom of Information requests have been handled is one of the main areas being explored by Sir Muir Russell's independent review.
The revelations came after the Government's chief scientific adviser declared scientists must be more 'honest and open' about the uncertainties of global warming.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(18-01-2010)
Fresh doubts were cast over controversial global warming theories yesterday after a major climate change argument was discredited.
The International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit its key claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was lifted from a 1999 magazine article.
The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation” and not backed up by research.
It was also revealed that the IPCC’s controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, described as “the world’s top climate scientist”, is a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics and no formal climate science qualifications.
Dr Pachauri was yesterday accused of a conflict of interest after it emerged he has a network of business interests that attract millions of pounds in funding thanks to IPCC policies.
One of them, The Energy Research Institute, has a London office and is set to receive up to £10million from British taxpayers over the next five years in the form of grants from the Department for International Development.
Dr Pachauri denies any conflict of interest arising from his various roles.
Yesterday, critics accused the IPCC of boosting the man-made global warming theory to protect a multi-million pound industry.
Climate scientist Peter Taylor said: “I am not surprised by this news. A vast bureaucracy and industry has been built up around this theory. There is too much money in it for the IPCC to let it wither.”
Professor Julian Dowdeswell, a glacier specialist at Cambridge University, said: “The average glacier is 1,000ft thick so to melt one even at 15ft a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”
The IPCC was set up by the UN to ensure world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change. It issued the glacier warning in a benchmark report in 2007 that was allegedly based on the latest research into global warming.
The scientists behind the report now admit they relied on a news story published in the New Scientist journal in 1999. The article was based on a short telephone interview with scientist Syed Hasnain, then based in Delhi, who has since said his views were “speculation”.
The New Scientist report was picked up by the WWF and included in a 2005 paper.
It then became a key source for the IPCC which went further in suggesting the melting of the glaciers was “very likely”.
Yesterday, Professor Murari Lal who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said: “If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, then I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.”
Last year the Indian government issued its own scientific research rejecting the notion that glaciers were melting so rapidly.
Before the weakness in the IPCC’s research was exposed, Dr Pachauri dismissed the Indian government report as “voodoo science”.
The revelations are the latest crack to appear in the scientific consensus on climate change.
It follows the so-called climate-gate scandal in November last year when leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit appeared to show scientists fiddling the figures to strengthen the case for man-made climate change.
The scandal prompted critics to suggest that many scientists had a vested interest in promoting climate change because it helped secure more funding for research.
Last month, the Daily Express published a dossier listing 100 reasons why global warming was part of a natural cycle and not man made.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(18-01-2010)
The Met Office may be dropped by the BBC following complaints about its inaccurate weather forecasts.
The state-owned forecaster has recently been criticised for predicting it would be a 'mild' winter when we have just shivered in the biggest deep freeze for 30 years. And last year it infamously predicted a 'barbecue summer'.
The blunders could not have come at a worse time for the Met Office, which has provided forecasts for the BBC for nearly 90 years, as its contract with the broadcaster expires in April.
The contract has been put out to tender to ensure 'best value for money' and the BBC has begun talks with Metra, the national forecaster for New Zealand, as a possible alternative.
Metra already produces graphics for the BBC, including the 3D weather map that prompted a flood of complaints when it was introduced in 2005.
Weather Commerce, Metra’s UK subsidiary, has already usurped the Met Office in supplying forecasts to Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose.
A source close to Metra told the Sunday Times: 'The BBC is not happy with the service it has been getting from the Met Office; it thinks it’s too expensive.
'We have the ability to provide a bespoke service that will undercut it. Because we already produce the graphics we’ve got a foot in the door, so we’re optimistic.'
A Met Office spokesman said: 'We provide the BBC with a range of forecasts and data for the whole of the UK and are hoping that successful relationship is going to continue.
'We have always been in the strongest position to provide the BBC with accurate and detailed weather forecasts and warnings for the UK.'
The spokesman also defended the Met Office's record, saying seasonal forecasts, like those it made for this winter, are 'new and experimental' while its three and five-day forecasts are 'more accurate and detailed'.
Last summer, after a Daily Mail investigation found the Met Office's weathermen get the three-day forecast wrong more than one day in four, a spokesman said: 'Forecasting the weather in this country is extremely difficult - it's notoriously changeable.'
The new tender document states that the BBC is seeking a single forecaster to provide meteorological data and presenters for five years. Only companies with a turnover of more than £10million have been invited to apply.
A BBC spokesman said: 'It is common practice to look at the options available when a contract is about to expire to ensure we get the best value for money for our licence fee payers.
'It wouldn't be appropriate to comment any further due to its commercial sensitivity.'
Forecasters today warned the milder weather of the weekend could be only a temporary reprieve - and more snow is on the way.
A spokesman for MeteoGroup, the weather division of the Press Association, said: 'There is a risk of some wet snow looking ahead to Tuesday night and Wednesday. There is rain coming from the west and we are expecting that to be preceded by snow in central England and north Wales.'
Another forecasting organisation, Positive Weather Solutions, said winter could have 'a sting in the tail', with snow and low temperatures at the start of April leaving the North East and Scotland looking 'like a Christmas picture postcard'.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Climategate: Doomsday scare tactics Speeded up to counteract Email Exposure Damage
Exposed Emails that could cast doubt and allege the manipulation of scientific data on global warming has taken a twist with an increase in scare tactics to counteract the damage.
marklynas.org the website of environmentalist and climate change attempt to minimise the damage of the leaked emails by attacking sceptics instead, and referring to them as deniers.
They say:
Instead of targeting high-profile science communicators like Al Gore, climate deniers are now encouraging mistrust of those who collect and interpret global warming data. (First published by the Guardian.)
UPDATE: Statements have been produced by Phil Jones and others (Funny though as this link for the explanation of what the emails mean is non existent. when you visit their link you are greeted by 'Sorry, but the page you requested does not exist' at UEA explaining more of the details contained in the exposed emails, and what they mean. There is also a graph showing precisely what “trick” was used and what was meant by “hiding the decline”. Yeah? where is it?
The theft and web publication by climate change deniers of private emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit is an extremely worrying development in the tortured politics of global warming.
They then make excuses (as follows) on behalf of these scientists that they are not up to public scrutiny as Politicians such Al Gore, in other words scientist aren't used to lying their asses off as politicians do on a daily basis therefore are more vulnerable to being caught out!
Although high-profile individuals have been targeted and unfairly vilified before – Pennsylvania University’s Michael Mann comes to mind, with his “hockey stick” palaeoclimate graph – most of the ire of the denial movement has so far been reserved for big-hitters like Al Gore. Gore can take it. Politics is his job.
But the “exposure” of private correspondence from a much larger group of scientists – and the out-of-context quotation of certain sentences as “revealing” some hidden subterfuge – suggests a dangerous shift in strategy. Instead of targeting the science communicators (myself included), the deniers are now declaring war on the scientists themselves. Like the creationists they unconsciously mimic, they make no distinction between the political and the scientific sphere – it is open season in both.
And the strategy is simple. Given that scientists are one of society’s most trusted groups (unlike journalists or politicians), the climate denial movement has begun a battle to undermine public trust in climate scientists themselves. No more will the legions of anonymous researchers who collect and interpret data from meteorological stations, satellites and ice cores be considered above the fray – they now run the risk of personal attacks, exposure of their private lives and vilification.
It is important to understand the significance of this. (Here it comes) Scientists are not politicians. They are not used to communicating publicly. They trust in their objectivity, the objectivity of their peers, and the rigour of only citing work published in learned journals. They will have private views, but are very used to keeping these out of their work – indeed the entire scientific method is based on conducting research which can be replicated by peers in order to check its accuracy and objectivity. (Really? Is this why data was dumped and Foi requests were avoided?)
They go on to say:
Some of the scientists whose private emails have been exposed write for the blog RealClimate, where they argue that the revealed correspondence shows “no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy … no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data” and so on. But as George Marshall, a writer on climate change who specialises in the psychology of denial on the issue, puts it: “This is hardly the point. This is an orchestrated smear campaign and does not require balance or context.”
So an exposure is now a smear campaign eh? Seems they now are attempting to smear sceptics as suffering from some sort of mental disorder (isn't that what the nazis attempted with the Jewish People when they claimed that the Jews were inferior and mentally challenged before committing genocide?) anyway, go read their hysterical rantings HERE as this is about as much as I can stomach for one day. (Ed).
And now the Doomsday scenario Articles.. 'What if..' 'Could' 'May'and 'Might' are mainly the scientific basis for their arguments!
Rising temperatures and sea levels brought on by climate change could have devastating effects on British wildlife from salmon to wildfowl, the Environment Agency warned.
Polar bears are beginning to cannibalize each other as global warming destroys its hunting grounds. The images, taken in Hudson Bay, Canada, show a male polar bear carrying the bloodied head of a polar bear cub it has killed for food.
For example, in places where annual rainfall may increase by 20 percent as a result of climate change, the groundwater might increase as much as 40 percent. Conversely, the analysis showed in some cases just a 20 percent decrease in rainfall could lead to a 70 percent decrease in the recharging of local aquifers -- a potentially devastating blow in semi-arid and arid regions.
A report by UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), entitled Climate Change: Implications for Agriculture in the Near East, has said the food security of those who are poor, malnourished or dependent on local food production could be adversely affected by climate change.
Soaring temperatures and declining rainfalls caused by climate change could wipe a billion dollars a year off Australia's wheat industry within 30 years, a study suggests.
The nightmare scenario of a shutdown in the meridional ocean current which drives the Gulf stream was dramatically portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow. The climate disaster film had Europe and North America plunged into a new ice age practically overnight. Although no scientist thinks the switch-off could happen that quickly, they do agree that even a weakening of the current over a few decades would have profound consequences.
A related discussion has ensued among international-security experts who believe climate-change-related damage to global ecosystems and the resulting competition for natural resources may increasingly serve as triggers for wars and other conflicts in the future.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions” during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.
Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book.
McAleer, a veteran journalist and film maker, has recently made a documentary “Not Evil Just Wrong’ which takes a sceptical look at the science and politics behind Global Warming concerns.
He asked Professor Schneider about his opinions on Climategate – where leaked emails have revealed that a senior British professor deleted data and encouraged colleagues to do likewise if it contradicted their belief in Global Warming.
Professor Phil Jones, the head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, has temporarily stood down pending an investigation into the scandal.
Professor Schneider, who is a senior member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he would not comment on emails that may have been incomplete or edited.
During some testy exchanges with McAleer, UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistants twice tried to cut short McAleer’s question.
However as the press conference drew to a close Professor Schneider’s assistant called armed UN security guards to the room. They held McAleer and aggressively ordered cameraman Ian Foster to stop filming. The guard threatened to take away the camera and expel the film crew from the conference if they did not obey his instructions to stop filming Professor Schneider.
The guard demanded to look at the film crews press credentials and refused to allow them to film until Professor Schneider left the room.
McAleer said he was disappointed by Professor Schneider’s behaviour.
“It was a press conference. Climategate is a major story – it goes to the heart of the Global Warming debate by calling into question the scientific data and the integrity of many scientists involved.”
“These questions should be answered. The attempts by UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistant to remove my microphone were hamfisted but events took a more sinister turn when they called an armed UN security officer to silence a journalist.”
Two officers corralled the film crew and one officer can be seen on tape threatening the cameraman. The Guard can also be heard warning that if the crew did not stop filming their would seize the equipment and the journalists expelled from the conference.
McAleer says he has made an official complaint about the incident.
“I have met Mr Christopher Ankerson the UN’s head of security for the conference and he has confirmed it was Professor Schneider’s staff who asked the security guards to come corral us at the press conference. Mr Ankerson could not say what grounds the security guard had for ordering us to stop filming.”
“This is a blatant attempt to stop journalists doing journalism and asking hard questions. It is not the job of armed UN security officers to stop legitimate journalists asking legitimate questions of senior members of the UN’s IPCC.”
Professor Schneider was interviewed for McAleer’s “Not Evil Just Wrong” documentary but lawyers later wrote to McAleer saying he was withdrawing permission for the interview to be used.
McAleer, who is from Ireland, has gained quite a reputation for asking difficult questions of those who have been promoting the idea of man-made Global Warming.
His microphone was cut off after he asked former vice-president Al Gore about the British court case which found that An Inconvenient Truth had a nine significant errors and exaggerations. Almost 500,000 people have watched the incident on youtube.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've always liked David Bellamy. I grew up with him on my TV screen, enjoying like millions of other kids, his informative and fun explanation of the environment we all share.
I'm a climate change sceptic, but thanks to people like David, I have grown into a man who wants to save energy and protect our environment. My house has the latest energy saving double glazing, extra insulation, a condensing boiler and I've been using energy saving light bulbs for years. I moan about doors being left open, lights being left on, the kettle being too full, my daughter's long showers and the TV playing to itself.
I've grown up thanks to David, and others like him, to be an anally retentive, environmentally aware, energy saver. And I'm glad, because I do believe we must conserve energy and protect our environment. But I am far from convinced that CO2 is causing global warming. When asked why, I usually ramble on about stuff I've read lately that puts that doubt into my head. It's not always easy to get the point across in a coherent manner.
Those who support Global Warming have no such problem, all they have to say is that "it's the consensus, the data is undeniable, the debate is over, and anyone who disagrees is a idiotic denier". But we know from recent events that it's not the consensus, the data is not reliable and the debate is far from over.
The data has been destroyed/manipulated/hidden, and those idiotic deniers have been silenced by those setting their own lucrative agenda. Wherever you look in the climate change camp, you will find people with something to gain from maintaining the CO2 myth. I truly believe that when our ancestors look back, they will judge us as bloody idiots for spending billions fighting a life giving gas, whilst people are dying from disease, war and famine.
Anyway, the following is what David Bellamy has to say on the matter. I like it because he achieves what I so often fail to do - he gives a coherent explanation of why the debate is a long way from over:
There is no evidence of carbon dioxide being a poison, or that it is capable of causing a warming Armageddon. What follows is a summary of the proof — straight from real science, peer-reviewed over the past 232 years by legions of physicists, thanks to Newton’s Principia.
Remember the famous picture of Miss Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blown high? Even at the age of 76, when I see this picture my temperature goes up — followed by the amount of carbon dioxide I exhale. Never the other way ’round. Now, thanks to the study of a series of ice cores, this appears to be an inconvenient truth for the global warming industry.
Al Gore used this ice core data to claim that carbon dioxide made the temperature of the world rise, threatening life on earth, because there was a correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and the world’s average temperature. Yet the data from the much-celebrated Vostok ice cores paints a very different picture: Up goes the temperature, followed by a rise in carbon dioxide.
Effectively flattening Gore’s dreams of hedging his funds.
There is no evidence of carbon dioxide being a poison, or that it is capable of causing a warming Armageddon. What follows is a summary of the proof — straight from real science, peer-reviewed over the past 232 years by legions of physicists, thanks to Newton’s Principia.
Remember the famous picture of Miss Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blown high? Even at the age of 76, when I see this picture my temperature goes up — followed by the amount of carbon dioxide I exhale. Never the other way ’round. Now, thanks to the study of a series of ice cores, this appears to be an inconvenient truth for the global warming industry.
Al Gore used this ice core data to claim that carbon dioxide made the temperature of the world rise, threatening life on earth, because there was a correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and the world’s average temperature. Yet the data from the much-celebrated Vostok ice cores paints a very different picture: Up goes the temperature, followed by a rise in carbon dioxide.
Effectively flattening Gore’s dreams of hedging his funds.
More troubles lie ahead for the warmists. Independent researchers have pointed out that crucially important pieces of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) evidence were based on false statistical analysis. For starters, take a look at historical evidence from the last 1,000 years. There was a worldwide Medieval Warm Period — no, not just in Europe — and a few centuries prior to that period it was warm enough for the Romans to produce red wine on the borders of Scotland.
The warmists did their best to hide this inconvenient truth, too. In 2006, Dr. David Deming of the University of Oklahoma testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. He stated that soon after he had published a paper on borehole temperature based on historical data in the journal Science, he received an email from a major climate change researcher which read:
We have to get rid of the medieval warm period.
Michael Mann, one of the divas of global warming, had done just that. He published a reconstruction of past temperatures from AD 1000 to the present … in which the Medieval Warm Period conveniently vanished.Warmist believers joined in, flag-waving and sandwich-boarding, calling Mann critics “deniers” and worse.
Over the past 5,000 years? There was not just one, but three periods when it was warmer than today. And yet life on Earth survived. Climate change is natural, and warmer periods occur without human CO2 emissions being the cause. Just looking at the last decade, world temperature is falling as CO2 rises — big emitters China and India have been stocking up their coal sheds. Increases in CO2 rarely coincide with rises in the Earth’s temperature — so how can CO2 be the driver of global warming, let alone climate change?
Following the spread of this evidence, the warmists began to see the lights of the skeptic train rushing down their tunnel of hype. Those with the most to lose dropped the term “global warming,” replacing it with “climate change” — which has been happening since the first living thing was there to record the evidence. With this new term, they gave themselves a spurious license to carry on frightening law-abiding citizens with waterlogged tales of unprovable tipping points just around the corner.
Meanwhile, one of Britain’s mainstream scientific groups, NERC, sidestepped this troublesome term by blaming everything on “environmental change” in their publication Planet Earth.
We have had at least 75 major temperature swings in the past 4,500 years — all in great part explicable by solar cycles, volcanic activity, and those little rascals El Nino and La Nina. Those “warming” oceans? The recent trend is one of cooling, not the warming predicted by legions of modelers and their models. Since 2007, the Arctic ice cap has been increasing in area, heading back towards the norm again. Yes, the Northwest Passage was navigable this year — but it has been that way on a number of occasions, just since 1850. Thanks in great part to prevailing winds changing direction, as they are wont to do.
During the past 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, all the civilizations of the world came to fruition — and they mainly prospered in the warmer periods.
There are now more polar bears dining on seals in the Arctic than when I was filming there some 30 years ago, thanks to good wildlife management. So good, in fact, that the global warmists did their best to lock out the lead manager on that project from an important meeting discussing polar bear population — a matter that Al Gore would use to falsely frighten children across the world.
Sea levels have been behaving themselves, slowly rising ever since the end of the Little Ice Age. However, much to the chagrin of the warmists, they have remained stationary since 2006 — against all their predictions. Those who had bothered to read the IPCC’s 2007 report might have noticed the following from Chapter 5:
Finally, the global average sea level rise for the last 50 years is likely to be larger than can be explained by thermal expansion and loss of land ice due to increased melting and thus for this period it is not possible to satisfactorily quantify the known processes causing sea level rise.
We can only guess why the likes of the BBC chose not to report this good news.
Just this year, the data behind Michael Mann’s hockey stick was finally released. Mann had used only 12 carefully selected tree ring sequences to prepare his story — omitting 34 that didn’t suit his purpose. This is surely one of the most scandalous examples of cherry picking on record, a blatant attempt to keep the world scared of carbon dioxide, and to keep reputations and research budgets safe. A gravy train, of jet-set travel to conferences in choice locations around the globe, each well-laced with top cuisine for the top tables and adulation from a regular caravansary of hangers-on, swelling a spurious and unscientific consensus.
I have spent over 50 years of my life talking to and about plants, while doing my bit to recycle carbon dioxide to keep the living world going round and round. Today, children are taught that carbon dioxide is a poison. No — it is odorless, colorless, and non-toxic. We drink it in fizzy drinks and lager, and it puts the rise in our daily bread. Most importantly, it is one of the most important components of all life — photosynthesis converts CO2 into oxygen and carbon, life’s main building blocks. As long as plants have sufficient water and nutrients, their growth is enhanced by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. CO2 is the free airborne fertilizer of the world.
Many experiments prove this fact of a carbon-rich atmosphere, experiments corroborated by millions of farmers across the world who cash in on the use of enhanced carbon dioxide in their greenhouses.
Many even burn fossil fuel to boost production. Carbon dioxide plays a vital part in providing the 18 billion daily meals that do their best to feed the growing number of people across the world.
The once-starving people of parts of the Sahel and Sahara deserts have returned to farm their lands, thanks to the shade of trees that now grow on some 300,000 square kilometers of their tribal lands, thanks in great part to rising levels of carbon dioxide.
The last thing Africa needs is to reduce its non-existent carbon footprint. Likewise, the last thing the economy of the world needs is to spend trillions of taxpayer money trying to solve the credit crunch by raising taxes to win a non-existent carbon dioxide war. The cost of the global warming scam is rising fast, and soon will pass the hundred billion dollar mark. Money that could have been spent solving real problems.
This August, right in the middle of the BBC’s promised barbecue summer (which didn’t come to pass), the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit disclosed that it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature records. Despite the fact that they own some of the most powerful computers in the world, the reason they advanced was “an alleged lack of storage space.” The very foundation of the global warming argument was gone forever. Draw your own conclusions — sabotage or desperation?
Remember the millennium bug, or the dot-com bubble? Tens of thousands of the highest-paid and most computer-literate people fell for it, and rued the day. Now we see folks forced to stand by and watch biodiesel, palm oil, and soya swallow up their biodiverse, sustainably farmed rangelands.
Earth’s climate has remained within the limits tolerated by life for several billion years. During this time, the planet has experienced unimaginable volcanic events which liberated huge amounts of CO2. It has collided with extraterrestrial objects, triggering either an increase or decrease of temperature. Even the energy flow from the sun has varied over such a span of geological time.
And yet — here we are! Life remains. The global temperature is now well within life’s limits, the present-day is cooler than much of previous geological time, and you may soon have the opportunity to buy a secondhand private jet from the worlds first carbon-neutral billionaire.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is now obvious that the science behind rising CO2 levels is far from settled, writes Christopher Booker.
As we are engulfed from all sides by suffocatingly one-sided coverage of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, three hugely important issues have been largely stuffed away from sight.
The first of these is the matter of cost: the scarcely believable bill our politicians wish to land us with as the price of their proposals to meet the supposed threat of global warming. Few people have even begun to take on board the astronomic scale of the sums involved – the International Energy Agency talks blithely of $45 trillion - because on this politicians and media have in recent days remained more than ever silent.
Already under last year’s Climate Change Act - on the Government’s own figures – we in Britain alone are committed to shell out £18 billion every year from now until 2050. That is £725 for every household in the land, which we will all have to pay in rocketing energy bills and regulatory costs, crippling ‘green’ taxes on everything from cars to airline tickets, subsidies to windfarms and heaven knows what else.
But even this may look like a gross underestimate when we realise that it is now the law of the land that, over the same 40 years, Britain must cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by a staggering 80 percent or more. Not a single one of the 463 MPs who nodded through the Climate Change Act, with only three voting against, could have begun to explain in practical terms how this target could be met.
Short of an as-yet undreamed of technological revolution, this could not possibly be achieved without closing down not just most of our transport system and electricity supplies but virtually all of our current economic activity.
What is being proposed at Copenhagen is that not dissimilar measures should be imposed on every country in the developed world, threatening to transform our existing way of life out of all recognition.
The second very important question which has received nothing like enough attention over what is happening in Copenhagen is how the politicians can hope to get round the yawning gap between the richer nations of the West and those developing nations led by China, India, Brazil and South Africa, with some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
It is this seemingly unbridgeable gulf, at the heart of the international debate since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which has led even the organisers of the conference publicly to voice doubts that they will get the universally binding treaty they are after.
The Western nations want everyone to sign up to crippling targets for reducing their CO2 emissions (China having already overtaken the US as the world’s biggest emitter). But the developing countries argue that, since the ‘CO2 problem’ is historically all our fault, as the countries which led the way to industrialisation, there is no way they can agree to any binding targets until they have been allowed to catch up economically with the West.
The best they can offer is that, in order to bribe them to make at least token gestures towards curbing their own carbon emissions, we in the developed countries should pay them hundreds of billions of dollars a year - at the very moment when we ourselves are accepting targets designed to make our own economies progressively very much less productive.
In other words, as we are faced with yet another colossal bill, their own economies will continue to forge ahead, pouring out so much CO2 that the global level will almost certainly continue to rise, All of which leads round to the third hugely important issue which those organising the Copenhagen conference are only too anxious to brush aside – the inescapable fact that the science on which all this frenzy of activity is based has recently begun to look considerably shakier than it did only a few years ago.
The first thing any of us in the West need to be sure of, as we face by far the largest bill in the history of the world, is that the science being used to justify this is 100 percent reliable.
Ultimately the whole case for a Copenhagen treaty rests on the projections of the computer models relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). These show that, as CO2 levels continue to rise, so temperatures must follow, leading inexorably to catastrophe - unless mankind takes the most drastic action to cut down on its emissions of CO2.
But as more and more eminent scientists have recently been pointing out, the only reason why the computer models predict that rising CO2 must cause temperatures to rise is that this is what they were programmed to show.
What world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT and Professor Will Happer of Princeton have been arguing is that the models are fatally flawed because they do not take proper account of all sorts of other factors which play a key part in shaping the world’s climate - such as shifts in ocean currents, the effects of magnetic activity on the sun and the ‘feedback’ from clouds and water vapour, far and away the most important greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, which counteracts any impact from the rise in CO2.
The greatest ally this growing army of ‘sceptical’ scientists can point to is what has actually been happening to the climate in recent years. No one can predict with certainty where temperatures will be in 100 years time, But the one thing that is indisputable is that, as CO2 levels continue to rise, the trend in global temperatures has not recently been rising as the computer models predicted, but has been flattening out and even dropping.
In other words, it becomes increasingly clear that the models were wrong - because their programming was biased according to a theory which now looks ever more questionable. Yet it is on their projections that the world is now faced with by far the most expensive set of measures ever proposed by politicians in history.
For months in the run-up to Copenhagen we have been subjected to an unremitting bombardment of scare stories: how the ice caps and glaciers are melting much faster than predicted, how sea levels will rise much higher than anyone imagined, how we face ever more hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves.
Yet every time one of these scares is subjected to proper objective scientific examination it can be found either that these disasters are not happening as claimed or that they have been exaggerated far in advance of anything the evidence can justify.
The importance of Copenhagen is that we are at last arriving at the moment of truth. On one hand we are waking up to the scarcely imaginable cost of what our politicians are proposing, just when on the other the reliability of the evidence on which all this is based is being called into question more than ever before.
Despite our having for years been assured by politicians from Al Gore to President Obama that ‘the science is settled’, it is now obvious that it is nothing of the kind. Not least has this been confirmed by ‘Climategate’ and the leak of that ‘dodgy dossier’ from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, for years at the centre of driving the scare over global warming as the most influential source of temperature data in the world. Far from Copenhagen being the end of the debate, the real debate is only just beginning.
Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History’ (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p&p. To order call 0844 871 1416 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite the poor sound quality of this video it is another must watch. In the video David Bellamy explains why he has not been seen on television for 10 years because he refuses to bow down before the new religion of global warming.
Waking up freezing this morning, I can well believe what he says in the video about the cycle of sunspots and depressed me by revealing that the world temperature is actually going to get colder over the next 30 years.
Interesting piece mentioned is the bit about the importance of C02 and the fact that because of it, trees are now starting to grow again in deserts and why the zealots of the new climate change religion will not debate with those who point out the weaknesses in their case.
As well as the fact that the climate zealots have falsified data, as revealed in the leaked emails story here, to show that temperatures were actually falling.
In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
And then of course we also learn that scientists who support the false religion have admitted to throwing away the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. Now this is an incredible thing to do, as it prevents other academics from being able to check the calculations on which the new religion is built.
And those who tell the truth are branded as "climate saboteurs" and "deniers" by people like the lying rat Ed Miliaband, the slime that passes for our energy secretary.
Of course the money grabbing masters of us, the European Union have dived into the new religion, not because they believe it but because it gives them an excuse to tax the people they rule over illegally to the hilt.
This is not about science any longer. It is pure politics of control by tax hungry governments, businesses that are benefiting from the myth and sandal wearing, cycle riding morons.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suffering from Naturephobia, Nature-Denier Brown Calls Realists "Flat-Earthers"
Somehow we think the term 'Flat-Earthers is more applicable to Warmists!
The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.
World leaders meet in Copenhagen next week seeking a global deal on cutting carbon emissions. But the debate has been clouded by a row over accusations that British scientists manipulated data on global temperatures.
The United Nations yesterday announced an investigation into the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Critics of the scientific consensus on climate change claim emails say emails from the unit’s servers show researchers manipulated evidence to support their theory.
Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, has dismissed the claims as “complete rubbish” but the scandal has thrown the scientific world into turmoil and has been raised by some countries as a reason not to strike a deal in Copenhagen.
Mr Brown last night insisted that the science on climate change in settled, and accused those who question the consensus of being outdated.
He said: "With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn't be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”
Greg Clark, the Conservative shadow energy secretary, told the Daily Telegraph the emails were a cause for concern.
“This has clearly concerned a lot of people, including myself. You need to be able to rely on the scientific opinion. It is important that we should be able to have confidence in the research,” he said.
Announcing a review of the case, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the matter could not be “brushed under the carpet”.
Climate sceptics around the world are using the crisis to argue that man made global warming is not proven and therefore there is no need for a deal to curb greenhouse gas emissions or pay to help poor countries adapt. In the US, the controversy has prompted leading global warming sceptics in the Republican Party to call for hearings in Congress, in a bid to thwart Barack Obama’s plans for energy reform.
They hope to hold the hearings before the president arrives in Copenhagen on next week for his solo appearance at the international climate talks, where he will offer to cut US emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020.
Senator James Inhofe, the senior Republican on the environment and public works committee, has already launched investigation into the emails and called for academics in the US who had communicated with Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the row, to keep any relevant emails and documents.
“This idea that some of the science is being manipulated and some scientists are not being heard is our biggest fear,” Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Sen Inhofe said. The Government's latest climate change advert is being investigated by the advertising watchdog after triggering 785 complaints from the public.
It has also been disclosed that the Government's chief scientist, John Beddington, was forced to defend controversial claims in the television campaign, which features a father reading his daughter a frightening bedtime story about global warming.
Clearcast, the body that vets adverts, questioned the scientific evidence used in the campaign. Part of its role is to ensure controversial topics are kept impartial
Dr Beddington and Robert Watson, the energy department's main scientific adviser, responded to Clearcast with a furious letter leaked to Channel 4 news, which states: "We are both surprised and disturbed that the premise of the television campaign is being questioned, given the incontrovertible nature of the science that underpins the campaign material."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A particularly asinine editorial in the Times today opines, in the wake of the global warming scandal at the University of East Anglia:
Of course, not all sceptics are worth listening to, either. If we are to be sceptical about the work of reputable and learned meterologists [sic] and palaeoclimatologists then we must be all the more so about the counter-claims of their armchair critics. No impartial observer could fail to note that this debate has a formidable array of international scientists on one side, and (with some notable exceptions) noisier, less qualified pundits on the other.
No impartial observer could fail to note that this is total codswallop. A formidable array of no fewer than 700+ international scientists, a number of them current or former participants in the IPCC, have registered their scepticism of the theory with the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
These and other sceptical scientists include, for example, Dr Christopher Landsea, a former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones and an IPCC author, who discovered that the IPCC was telling lies about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes.
Then there is Dr Richard Lindzen, a much garlanded professor of meteorology at MIT and another IPCC author, who says that the IPCC’s politicised summary of its defining 2001 report created the false impression that climate models were reliable when the report itself indicated precisely the opposite, with numerous problems with the models including those arising from the effects of clouds and water vapour.
There is Zbigniew Jaworowski, former chairman of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, who says the IPCC’s ice-core research is wrong and that therefore it has ‘based its global warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false’.
There is Dr Tom Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and another IPCC reviewer, who says that ‘most leading geologists throughout the world know that the IPCC’s view of Earth processes are implausible if not impossible’, and that climate change scientists have launched ‘a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil-fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction’.
There is Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, who has written: ‘I believe that global warming is the biggest scientific scam ever. There is no evidence to prove that the current climate variations are not a natural cycle.’
There is Gerhard Gerlich, of the Institute of Mathematical Physics at the Technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina in Braunschweig in Germany, and Dr. Ralf D. Tscheuschner, who have written:
‘The horror visions of a risen sea level, melting Pole caps and developing deserts in North America and in Europe are fictitious consequences of fictitious physical mechanisms, as they cannot be seen even in the climate model computations. The emergence of hurricanes and tornados cannot be predicted by climate models, because all of these deviations are ruled out. The main strategy of modern CO2-greenhouse gas defenders seems to hide themselves behind more and more pseudo- explanations, which are not part of the academic education or even of the physics training...The derivation of statements on the CO2 induced anthropogenic global warming out of the computer simulations lies outside any science’.
Are these what the Times would call ‘noisier, less qualified pundits’ who are sceptical of the theory for which the paper has so foolishly expressed its support?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The village of Martinstown in Dorset has long had a special place in the hearts of meteorologists.
On 18 July 1955, it experienced the heaviest rain ever recorded in the UK over a 24-hour period. Until last week that is.
Now the dubious honour belongs to Seathwaite and the residents of Martinstown have sent their sympathies to the people of Cockermouth.
Experts at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) have been poring over their records to see how unusual it is for Seathwaite to experience intense rainfall. The village, apparently, gets regular mentions in the British Hydrological Society's "chronology of hydrological events", going back to 1800.
"There is a record of 8.52 inches (204 mm) on 12 Nov 1897 and 7.52 inches (191 mm) 26 Nov 1861; 6-inch totals are not uncommon in the record. This is one of the wettest parts of the country, and clearly has seen some very notable rainfall totals in the past. However, the recent rainfall seems to eclipse anything previously seen, by some margin."
According to the Lake District National Park, Seathwaite is actually the wettest inhabited place anywhere in England, experiencing around 3500mm of precipitation each year. But even the oldest inhabitants will never have seen anything like the rain the village suffered last week.
"Flooding during the autumn/winter season is relatively common in the UK," says Jamie Hannaford from CEH. "However, the magnitude of the provisional rainfall totals (for Seathwaite) suggests this is a monumental event, and perhaps a 'record-breaker'."
The Met Office has a list of "record-breakers" on its website - still awaiting confirmation of the Seathwaite downpour, one assumes.
What strikes me about these lists is that the 12 rainfall events span more than a hundred years and if you were going to pick a period that has seen exceptional precipitation, it would be the period between June 1953 and June 1956. Three extraordinary, record-breaking rainstorms hit the UK in three years. No-one attributed them to climate change then.
The CEH has been thinking about the question of whether the Cumbrian floods can be laid at the door of global warming.
"This flooding is occurring in a part of the country which has become wetter in the recent past. The latest research from the UK Climate Projections team (UKCP09) indicates that winter rainfall has increased in the north-west of the UK since the early 1960s. Other research suggests that extreme rainfalls have also increased in frequency in northern and western areas of the UK, and one recent study which involved CEH scientists found that, over the last 50 years, the daily maximum rainfall has increased by 25% in northern and western areas relative to the previous 50 years."
The CEH experts have also identified increases in river flows leading to floods in the area over the last 30-40 years, but they cannot be sure of the cause.
"Whether this is due to climate change is an open question; these records are fairly short, and increases in rainfall and flow over this period may reflect variability associated with changes in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic," they suggest.
Indeed, trying to see the Cockermouth floods in an historical context, they are even more equivocal. "(T)rends over a longer period (more than 50 years) are generally much less compelling, and in general, there is limited evidence for long-term trends in flood frequency or magnitude anywhere in the UK."
So, in trying to answer the question of my title, this post must end with the cliched pay-off from a thousand TV news reports: "It is too early to tell".
Comments:
Fascinating to see the photos of Martinstown.Reminds me of my mother's anecdotes about 1938 Cumbria.
So,if it is climate change it must be a change we are revisiting rather than one which is new.
Apart from the fact that Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite have been overfull to the point of non recognition of their landscapes for weeks now and that both of them are sources of the River Derwent which runs through the heart of Cockermouth along with the River Cocker which itself is no mean beast when in full spate, it seems astonishing to me that no recent anticipatory action was taken to ready both Cockermouth and Workington against the flooding which was inevitable in my opinion once there came a sustained, prolonged bout of rain for which we are famous.
Further, the infrastructure problem here in Cumbria was not caused by the sudden rainfall alone. Our roads and bridges have been for decades neglected by overuse and lack of suitability for the size and volume of traffic using them. The reason the road bridges collapsed in Workington and partly why we lost the heroic PC Barker is because roads and bridges built in Victorian times for pack horses and minimally maintained since have been for thirty years or more hammered by articulated lorries big enough to house a family thundering over the bridges relentlessly in pursuit of profit for greed driven leaders of British and European industries.
The economy reigns above all things and it's so important to the lifeblood of the country we haven't even the time to stop and wonder when the day of reckoning will come. Well, it came to Cumbria last Friday and given the intentions of this useless Government to further flood this county with nuclear power stations galore and wind farms wherever they can't fit the power stations, I'll predict that if the road infrastructure including bridges isn't rapidly brought into line with 21st century requirements,this beautiful county is in for more of the same difficulties though next time not necessarily caused by the weather.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interesting that people say that if the storm front had blown through as normal there would not have been a problem.The point is that on this occasion the front did stall with catastrophic consequences.
This disaster like many is due to the failure of human beings ( particularly those in charge) to pick up on the warning signs and take action before disaster strikes.Now we are in the position of spending millions of pounds on repairs when we could have more wisely spent thousands on proactive defences to prevent the occurrence in the first place.
We are told that this is a one-in-a-1000 year event and that we do not need to spend money to prepare for it as it won't happen that often.Unfortunately when it does happen lives are lost,communities are devastated, the lives of people are disrupted and millions of pounds of insurance damage is incurred.In that light spending thousands on preparations is probably cheap at the price.
One does wonder how often these rivers were dredged and what actual action was taken to reinforce defences there? Hilary Benn tells us they were reinforced in the 1990s but it would be interesting to see what they actually did.Was it a case of defences to a price or to a standard?
Excessively heavy rain does produce lots of ground water. Often local drains cannot handle the flow and areas become flooded.What lessons do we learn from that? Do we merely accept the floods or do we take action to reduce their effect? Given that rainfall is set to increase and water levels are set to rise do we start installing much bigger drains in the future?
Do we have backup plans so that if a river floods it floods into previously designated non-vital areas? Do we start to ensure that public utilities are built in locations protected from floods as a matter of policy and planning? And do we avoid building houses close to rivers to prevent these disasters in the first place.Maybe too we also need to reflect on the folly of communities only having one route in and out into them to avoid communities being cut off in disasters like this.
Further, do we need to look at some of our meandering rivers and make them take water back to the sea much quicker or where rivers come together perhaps we re-route them so they do not overflow? We don't seem to have learnt the lessons of Boscastle and Tewkesbury.
It doesn't really matter what causes climate change. All that matters is that we are prepared for the consequences of those changes.That is not to say that we do not try to find the cause and take affirmative action if necessary or possible but that we have anticipated the worse it can do and are prepared to deal with it.The truth is it is probably a mixture of human and natural action.
I suspect that lots of other areas are ill-prepared for increased levels of rainfall, rising river levels or rising sea levels.As a government we are ill-prepared as we are not willing to spend the thousands of pounds necessary to avoid million pound disasters and governments seem to lack the common sense so obvious to everybody else.
Over the coming years, I expect to see more events like this because the sad truth is that governments very often do not learn from previous disasters or expediency sets in and they try to do things on the cheap.Maybe if the government went back to doing things to a standard not a price we would all be better off.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not only is Cumbria a victim simply of weather, the affected areas should not have been inhabited. It totally blows me away that people think they can live anywhere near a river. History shows that rivers flood every so often - so why do people act surprised? Hilary Benn shows the incredible ignorance that he has inherited from his father in his stupifying 'once in a thousand years' nonsense. Even if that were true it would prove the point that it does happen irrespective of any warming.
If I had a house in the middle of a moor, I'd expect it to get struck by lightning. If I had a house on top of a hill I'd expect it to get wind damage. If I had a house on a clifftop I'd expect coastal erosion. The two homes I have bought in my life I have made sure that they were nowhere near rivers or canals, because I have the intelligence to know that my feet would get wet. Why don't others have this intelligence?
The destruction to property WAS man-made, but not anything to do with any warming. It was the incredible stupidity of living anywhere near a river - especially one that has flooded before (that will be all of them then).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Population Increases therefore more homes and facilities have to be built. Where does this building take place? Well what was Once Green Land. The more concrete and tarmac you pour over natural land the more flooding you will get. Why? To state the bleedin obvious.. where the hell is the water from rainfall supposed to go if these natural soakaway's are now nothing but concrete! And of course let's not forget the insanity of our leaders decisions as in the recap of this 2007 news report below!
Ministers unveiled plans to build three million new homes by 2020 yesterday and defied widespread warnings by insisting that some will have to be built on flood plains.
Yvette Cooper, the Housing Minister, told the Commons there would have to be a significant increase in housebuilding over the next decade to keep up with demand.
Unveiling the Government's new housing green paper, she stressed that the number of households is projected to grow by around 223,000 a year. However, the number of new homes being built for them to live in is currently only rising by 185,000 each year.
Miss Cooper said that by 2016, ministers wanted to see 240,000 homes being built each year. A total of £8 billion will be spent to build 70,000 affordable homes in each of the next three years, including 45,000 new council houses annually.
She insisted that it was inevitable that some of these new homes would be built on flood plains and warned critics not to "play politics" with the issue.
"What we are not saying is that there should be no housebuilding anywhere in the city of York, which is on a flood plain - the Romans built it on a flood plain - or around 10 Downing Street. That's also on a flood plain," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"The thing about 10 Downing Street is that it's protected by the Thames barrier. There are very good flood defences in place. That's what you've got to take account of.
"I really hope that people will not play politics with the dreadful flooding and the misery that we have seen in order to whip up hostility to new housing.
"We have got to both provide people with proper protection and make sure new homes are built in safe areas and are properly protected.
"But I don't think that misinformation being used just to whip up hostility against housing is fair on those people who desperately need affordable housing now."
There wouldn't be a massive need if Immigration was curbed! (Ed)
However, her stance was challenged by opposition politicians and the insurance industry, who warned that it would be foolhardy to allow more building in areas at risk of flooding.
Nick Starling, the director of general insurance and health at the Association of British Insurers, argued that ministers should ban any new homes being built in areas at high risk of flooding.
"The devastation caused by the recent floods shows the importance of planning for the future. We need a fresh approach to house building to take account of the increasing risk of flooding and to ensure sustainable communities," he said.
"New homes should not be built in high-risk areas of the floodplain. They must be planned and designed with flooding in mind, with greater use of flood-resilient building materials."
Jill Craig, of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, stressed that recent events had shown the Government's decision to cut spending on flood defences last years was "incredibly short-sighted."
She added: "Any decision to base many new homes on flood plains will necessitate large spending on flood defences."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As we said before 'what's the point' It will be bias from the beginning!
PCC and establishment lackey Russell
set to whitewash email scandal
A civil servant who is a member of one of the most vehemently pro man-made global warming advocacy organizations in Europe which also has direct ties to the IPCC has been handed the job of whitewashing the investigation into the University of East Anglia, while absurdly billing himself as impartial and unconnected to climate science.
Meanwhile, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has ludicrously announced that it will conduct its own investigation into the climategate scandal, despite the fact that the suspects involved have intimate ties to the IPCC, with one of the primary scientists accused of manipulating climate data being a lead author of the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports.
“The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading body for assessing climate change science,” reports the Daily Mail.
IPCC chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri told the BBC the claims were serious and he wanted them investigated.
“We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,’ he said.”
“We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.”
Having the IPCC investigate climategate would be like Ken Lay heading up the Enron enquiry.
One of the primary climategate suspects, Kevin Trenberth, is a lead IPCC author, having been influential in crafting the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports.
Professor Phil Jones, who infamously wrote of the need to “hide the decline” in global warming, is also a primary IPCC contributor, having been in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports.
In addition, another climategate suspect, Michael Mann, was the creator of the debunked “hockey stick” graph, which was “Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher than they are today.”
There is little pretense about the fact that the UN will merely absolve its own scientists of blame, the larger scam is the notion that civil servant Sir (Alastair) Muir Russell, who has been picked to head the investigation into East Anglia University, after an earlier trial balloon to have the inquiry headed by warmist advocate Lord Rees was shot down, is impartial, when he is a member of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, a vehemently pro-man made global warming organization.
“As a measure of how out of touch UEA is, they apparently have little idea that the title “former civil servant” does not inspire much confidence from skeptics, since it has been “civil servants” who have been blocking access to the data and procedures all along,” writes Anthony Watts.
Russell has pitched himself as someone with “no links to either the university or the climate science community,” yet he is firmly a member of the academic establishment, being the former Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow.
Russell is the quintessential establishment lackey, having been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2001.
There’s little doubt that Russell is an establishment insider who has been tasked with whitewashing the whole affair. He is a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an offshoot of the same organization that Lord Rees is a part of. The Royal Society of Edinburgh “provides annual grants totaling over half a million pounds for research” in Scottish universities, a sizeable portion of which goes to research attempting to validify claims about man-made global warming.
The RSE has thrown its weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and living standards.
This organization has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.
A February 2009 response to the Climate Change (Scotland) Bill outlines the organization’s staunch advocacy for the hypothesis of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.
Earlier this year, The Royal Society of Edinburgh elected Professor Peter Smith to become one of its members. Smith just happens to be the Convening Lead Author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. He has also been a lead author for numerous other IPCC reports over the past thirteen years.
How can a proud member of an organization that is aggressively pushing measures to cut CO2 in the name of halting alleged man-made global warming, while also having a direct relationship with the UN IPCC, bill himself as being totally impartial and unconnected to climate science?
The climategate scandal has grown wings and taken flight. This is a scandal within a scandal, the notion that the very crooks caught manipulating data can appoint their own allies to “investigate” their wrongdoing and think nothing of it, while claiming that such individuals are impartial and independent, is beyond belief.
The only real investigation of climategate has to occur at the congressional or parliamentary level, preferably both, and it has to be completely open and transparent – not sneakily wrapped up behind closed doors by organizations like the IPCC and members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, both of whom have a massive stake in protecting and upholding the entire climate change fraud.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chinese scientists claim to be able to control the weather. But is so-called geoengineering more than wishful thinking? And, if so, should we be worried?
The unseasonal snow that fell on Beijing for 11 hours on Sunday was the earliest and heaviest there has been for years. It was also, China claims, man-made. By the end of last month, farmland in the already dry north of China was suffering badly due to drought. So on Saturday night China’s meteorologists fired 186 explosive rockets loaded with chemicals to “seed” clouds and encourage snow to fall. “We won’t miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from a lingering drought,” Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, told state media.
The US has tinkered with such cloud seeding to increase water flow from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California since the 1950s, but there remains widespread scientific sniffiness in the west at such attempts at weather control.
Such doubts have not stopped China claiming mastery over the clouds. Officials said the blue skies that brightened Beijing’s parade to celebrate 60 years of communism last month were a result of the 18 cloud-seeding jets and 432 explosive rockets scrambled to empty the sky of rain beforehand. Last year, more than 1,000 rockets were fired to ensure a dry night for last year’s Olympic opening ceremony.
“Only a handful of countries in the world could organise such large-scale, magic-like weather modification,” Cui Lianqing, a senior meteorologist with the Chinese air force, told the Xinhua news agency after last month’s parade.
Magic or not, there is growing interest in such attempts to deliberately steer the weather, and on a much larger scale. Next spring, a group of the world’s leading experts on climate change will gather in California to plan how it could be done as a way to tackle global warming, and by whom. The ideas, some of which, similar to cloud-seeding, involve firing massive amounts of chemicals into the atmosphere, can sound far-fetched, but they are racing up the agenda as pessimism grows about the likely course of global warming.
As interest grows, so does concern about whether such techniques, known as geoengineering, could be developed and unleashed by a single nation, or even a wealthy individual, without wide international approval. “What will happen when Richard Branson decides he really does want to save the planet?” asks one climate expert. If China thinks it can make cloud seeding work, then what about geoengineering?
“If climate change turns ugly, then many countries will start looking at desperate measures,” says David Victor, an energy policy expert at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Logic points to a big risk of unilateral geoengineering. Unlike controlling emissions, which requires collective action, most highly capable nations could deploy geoengineering systems on their own.”
Victor is a heavyweight policy analyst, but one of his most impressive academic feats could have been to smuggle the name of the world’s favourite secret agent into the sober pages of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. “Geoengineering may not require any collective international effort to have an impact on climate,” he wrote in an article published last year. “A lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of the [Bill] Gates bank account, could force a lot of geoengineering on his own. Bond films of the future might [enjoy incorporating] the dilemma of unilateral planetary engineering.” Move over, Goldfinger.
In a world where action on global warming has created new markets in carbon worth billions of pounds, countries are not the only players. Geoengineering would require investment and the private sector is already eyeing up opportunities. Two companies have emerged with a business plan based on dumping iron in the sea and then selling carbon offsets based on the extra pollution supposedly soaked up by the resulting algal bloom. And in their new book, Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner talk approvingly of Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, whose company, Intellectual Ventures, is exploring the possibility of pumping large quantities of reflective sulphur dust into the Earth’s stratosphere through a patented 18-mile-long hose held up by helium balloons.
This is the point where most people will shake their heads, say the whole silly idea will never happen, and skip to the crossword. They could be right, but the global warming story has a tendency to outpace most attempts to predict its path.
A decade ago, an unproven idea called carbon sequestration, that would see carbon emissions from power stations trapped under the ground, was talked up by a small group of advocates, but was dismissed by most people as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Renamed carbon capture and storage, the idea is now mainstream energy policy in countries including Britain, despite still being unproven and dismissed by many as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Last month, the International Energy Agency said the world should build 100 full-scale carbon-capture power stations by 2020, and 850 by 2030.
If the geoengineering narrative follows a similar arc, then how long until nations or individuals that have the most to lose, or are the first to accept that the required massive emission cuts are impossible, turn to the presently unthinkable option? The US government, under President Bush, has already lobbied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to promote geoengineering research as “insurance”. When the Royal Society recently carried out an investigation of the options, senior figures privately expected it to dismiss the whole concept as nonsense. Instead the society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, concluded in September that methods to block out the sun “may provide a potentially useful short-term backup to mitigation in case rapid reductions in global temperature are needed”. The society stressed that emissions reductions were the way to go, but recommended international research and development of the “more promising” geoengineering techniques.
Of all the apparent obstacles to geoengineering, cost is not likely to be among them. Compared with the expense of investing in renewable energy and phasing out fossil fuels, the cheapest geoengineering options come with a price tag of just a few billion pounds, perhaps 1% of what it could cost to tackle global warming through emissions cuts.
Alan Robock, an expert on volcanos and climate at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has looked at how much it might cost to carry out one of the most commonly discussed geoengineering options, to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption by filling the high atmosphere with sulphur compounds, which reflect sunlight.
The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 threw so much shiny sulphurous dust into the atmosphere that temperatures across a shaded Earth dropped a year later by about 0.5C. The 1815 explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia triggered the notorious “year without a summer” and widespread failure of harvests across northern regions including Europe, the north-east US and Canada.
Robock has worked out the likely cost of technology needed to deposit a million tonnes of sulphur in the stratosphere each year, an amount equivalent to a Mount Pinatubo eruption every four to eight years, and which scientists think could be enough to cancel out the global warming caused by a continued rise in carbon emissions.
The cheapest option could be to use giant mid-air refuelling aircraft, such as the US air force’s KC-10 Extender, filled with sulphur dioxide or hydrogen sulphide gas. It would be a round-the-clock operation, with nine aircraft each required to fly three sorties a day. In a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Robock and his colleagues say it could be done for “several billion” dollars a year. The results have forced Robock to revise a high-profile list of 20 objections to geoengineering he published last year. “It turns out that being way too expensive is not the case.”
With such a catalogue of potential disasters waiting to unfold, there must be a law against geoengineering? The international rulebook is fuzzy on this issue. The only international framework that directly covers many geoengineering techniques, the 1976 Environmental Modification Convention, designed to stop nations at war from meddling with each other’s weather, has never been tested. The 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty could be used to regulate activities and experiments in those shared spaces, but releases to the atmosphere are legally more problematic because nations have sovereignty over their own airspace.
Rather than laws and treaties, many experts argue that the best way to prevent countries or companies from going it alone is to plunge in and start serious research. “The way to tame the worst forms of unilateral geoengineering is to promote a lot more research, especially [into] the side effects,” Victor says. “One of the biggest dangers is that some governments will try to create a taboo against geoengineering. A taboo would stop a lot of research but it wouldn’t stop determined rogues. That scenario would probably be the worst, because rogues would not abandon their efforts and the rest of us would not have done enough research to know what to expect.”
Mike MacCracken, chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington, is organising the California meeting next spring, which aims to figure out some guidelines. He says large-scale unilateral geoengineering is “not very plausible” and his main concern is fairness to future generations. Once started by anybody, a geoengineering attempt would probably need to be continued by everybody else because it would offer a mask on global warming that could be dangerous to remove.
Read between the lines of most scientific reports on geoengineering and there is a tacit assumption that the idea sounds so extreme that merely discussing it will refocus efforts on emission cuts. But what if the reverse is true? What if a heavily funded research programme, and articles such as this, promote the idea to people who have little interest in moving to a low-carbon world? Full article
Jet contrails above Britain
can block sunshine over 20,000 square miles
Vapour trails caused by jet aircraft over Britain can cause clouds covering 20,000 square miles, according to Met Office research, reducing sunshine by up to 10 per cent.
Analysis of contrails from one large military aircraft circling over the North Sea showed the creation of a thin layer of cloud that, at its peak, covered an area of more than 20,000 square miles.
The Met Office research suggests the collective impact of hundreds of vapour trails can cause a blanket of thin cloud, reducing sunshine for millions who live under busy flight paths.
Contrails, which are clouds of condensed water vapour and soot particles made by the exhaust of jet engines, sometimes disperse within minutes but can also be present in the sky for many hours. They can also act as a catalyst for the formation of further wispy cirrus cloud.
Globally, vapour trails are thought to cut sunshine levels by less than one per cent, but this figure could rise to 10 per cent in areas under busy air corridors, such as the south-east of England, according to The Sunday Times.
The findings echo 2003 research, led Patrick Minnis at NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Virginia, that said contrails “already have substantial regional effects where air traffic is heavy” and that the impact “may become globally significant” because of the growth in air travel.
The Met Office analysis was based on observations of a single military Awacs aircraft circling over the North Sea on a sunny day earlier this year.
Researchers had expected high-level winds to disperse its contrails but instead they appeared to attract more clouds that continued to grow as they were blown southwards until eventually they formed a hazy high-level blanket of cirrus cloud across southeast England.
Jim Haywood, the Met Office’s aerosol research manager who led the new study, told the newspaper: “At its peak the resulting cirrus cloud covered an area of more than 20,000 square miles.”
He added: “Such clouds are normally short-lived but, depending on atmospheric conditions, they can last much longer.”
It is thought that low temperatures at high altitudes can cause ice crystals in the vapour to act as ‘nuclei’ for condensation of more water, resulting in more cloud.
Mr Haywood said aviation-induced cirrus clouds had both a cooling effect, because of sunlight reflected back into space, and a warming effect, because of trapped heat.
“Studies show that, overall, the warming effect is stronger so aviation-induced clouds are helping to warm the planet,” he said.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Like clockwork, they have emerged from the wood: the first of what promises to be an ever increasing wave of Third World “climate change” refugees seeking asylum in the First World.
The inhabitants of some islands in east Papua New Guinea have appealed for “funds to enable them to flee” and have expressed the hope that “decisions made by leaders at the forthcoming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen will offer them hope,” according to the Environment Times news outlet.
The implication of the appeal is that the industrialised world is somehow responsible for “global warming” and that these nations are therefore obliged to take in yet another wave of “refugees” under the excuse of “climate change.”
According to the Environment Times, the relocation effort is headed by Ursula Rakova, a Papua New Guinea islander who quit a job with Oxfam in Bougainville three years ago to set up Tulele Peisa, an organisation that “raises money and campaigns for social justice on behalf of her people.”
Ms Rakova told an audience in Melbourne, Australia: “We have a feeling of anxiety, a feeling of uncertainty because we know that we will be losing our homes. It is our identity. It is our whole culture at stake.”
There is however no firm evidence that the land to which she refers, the Carteret Islands, are being affected by “climate change.” At the best of times, these islands are no more than four or five feet above sea level and are thus always prone to tidal movements.
Even the Environment Times, which is slavishly pro-“climate change,” is forced to admit in its coverage of the “asylum” claim that “Probabaly (sic) due to climate change, the Carteret Islands in north east Papua New Guinea are being submerged by the sea. However, another suggestion is that tectonic movement may be causing the gradual subsidence of the atoll.
“Historically other populated islands, for example Tuanaki in the Cook Islands, are known to have sunk entirely and relatively suddenly from causes that might be unrelated to rising sea levels.”
Nonetheless, the Environment Times continues to say that, “As a result, the people that live on these tiny atoll islands have unwillingly found themselves on the front line of climate change and dependent upon the success or failure of the UN’s climate negotiations in Copenhagen.”
The article goes on to point out that “one problem making their plight all the more pressing is the fact the 1951 Geneva Convention, does not protect environmental refugees, such as those displaced by climate change.
“Sadly, this technicality means that communities such as the Carteret’s cannot, as yet, be granted refugee status under the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and they have subsequently found themselves excluded from the international community’s social welfare, protection and asylum systems.”
In other words, the push will now be on to create a new category of “climate change refugees” which will be yet another channel through which the overpopulated Third World will be able to invade Europe and other First World nations.
As the Environment Times article concludes: “With many millions predicted to be displaced by climate change, supporters of the Islanders have highlighted that the world needs to establish fair, realistic and funded policies which recognise that many of those most affected by climate change include those least able to fund adaptation and those least responsible for humanity’s production of greenhouse gases. Tulele Peisa believe they should not need to sail the waves alone and calls on the leaders of the world to provide moral and political leadership in Copenhagen.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The scientific consensus that mankind has caused climate change was rocked yesterday as a leading academic called it a “load of hot air underpinned by fraud”.
Professor Ian Plimer condemned the climate change lobby as “climate comrades” keeping the “gravy train” going.
In a controversial talk just days before the start of a climate summit attended by world leaders in Copenhagen, Prof Plimer said Governments were treating the public like “fools” and using climate change to increase taxes.
He said carbon dioxide has had no impact on temperature and that recent warming was part of the natural cycle of climate stretching over billions of years.
Prof Plimer told a London audience: “Climates always change. They always have and they always will. They are driven by a number of factors that are random and cyclical.”
His comments came days after a scandal in climate-change research emerged through the leak of emails from the world-leading research unit at the University of East Anglia.
They appeared to show that scientists had been massaging data to prove that global warming was taking place
The Climate Research Unit also admitted getting rid of much of its raw climate data, which means other scientists cannot check the subsequent research.
Last night the head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, said he would stand down while an independent review took place.
Professor Plimer said climate change was caused by natural events such as volcanic eruptions, the shifting of the Earth’s orbit and cosmic radiation. He said: “Carbon dioxide levels have been up to 1,000 times higher in the past. CO2 cannot be driving global warming now.
“In the past we have had rapid and significant climate change with temperature changes greater than anything we are measuring today. They are driven by processes that have been going on since the beginning of time.”
He cited periods of warming during the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages – when Vikings grew crops on Greenland – and cooler phases such as the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850.
And he predicted that the next phase would cool the planet.
Climate change is widely blamed on the burning of fossil fuels which release greenhouse gases such as CO2 into the atmosphere, where they trap the sun’s heat.
The talks at Copenhagen are expected to find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally.
But Professor Plimer, of Adelaide and Melbourne Universities, said that to stop climate change Governments should find ways to prevent changes to the Earth’s orbit and ocean currents and avoid explosions of supernovae in space. Of the saga of the leaked emails, he said:
“If you have to argue your science by using fraud,
your science is not valid.”
The CRU’s Professor Jones has admitted some of the emails may have had “poorly chosen words” and were sent in the “heat of the moment”. But he has categorically denied manipulating data and said he stood by the science. And yesterday he dismissed suggestions of a conspiracy to alter evidence to support a theory of man-made global warming as “complete rubbish”.
But mining geology professor Plimer said there was a huge momentum behind the climate-change lobby.
He suggested many scientists had a vested interest in promoting climate change because it helped secure more funding for research. He said: “The climate comrades are trying to keep the gravy train going.
Governments are also keen on putting
their hands as deep as possible into our pockets.
“The average person has been talked down to. He has been treated like a fool. Yet the average person has common sense.”
But Vicky Pope, head of Met Office Climate Change Advice, said: “We are seeing changes in climate on a timescale we have not seen before.
“There clearly are natural variations. But the only way we can explain these trends is when we include both man-made and natural changes to the climate.
“We have also seen declines in summer sea ice over the past 30 years, glaciers retreating for 150 years, changing rainfall patterns and increases in subsurface and surface ocean temperatures.”
And as the war of words between the rival camps intensified, leading economist Lord Stern dismissed the sceptics as “muddled”.
Lord Stern, who produced a detailed report on the issue for the Government, said evidence of climate change was “overwhelming”. He accepted that all views should be heard but said the degree of scepticism among “real scientists” was very small.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here it comes!
Preventing runaway global warming may be twice as expensive as previously thought and Britain will have to incur billions of pounds of additional debt to cover its share of the cost, according to the world’s most influential climate change economist.
Lord Stern of Brentford said that future generations would find it easier to pay off the debt than to cope with the consequences of climate change.
He called for air passengers to pay a significant proportion of the cost through a new global tax on flights, and shipping should also contribute through a new tax on bunker fuel.
The author of the 2006 Stern review on the cost of tackling global warming admitted that the latest science indicated that he had been too optimistic in that report. Cuts in CO2 emissions would have to be deeper and made more quickly to have a 50-50 chance of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial levels.
Lord Stern said that Britain should pay about $3 billion (£1.8 billion) a year by 2015 to a global fund of $50 billion a year to help poor countries to adapt to climate change. He called on Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, to “make financial commitments to the developing world” in next week’s Pre-Budget Report.
He also urged the European Union to make an unconditional commitment to cutting its CO2 emissions by 30 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020.
The EU has committed only to a 20 per cent cut and said that it would increase this to 30 per cent on condition that other countries made comparable efforts. Speaking yesterday at the London School of Economics, Lord Stern said that the Copenhagen climate change summit was “the most important international gathering since the Second World War”.
He said that the oceans were absorbing less of the CO2 from fossil fuels than he had assumed in 2006. In addition, the effects of CO2 on the climate were “coming through more quickly than we thought”.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So many new developments: which story do we pick? Maybe best to summarise, instead. After all, it’s not like you’re going to find much of this reported in the MSM.
1. Australia’s Senate rejects Emissions Trading Scheme for a second time. Or: so turkeys don’t vote Christmas. Expect to see a lot more of this: politicians starting to become aware their party’s position on AGW is completely out of kilter with the public mood and economic reality. Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme – what Andrew Bolt calls “a $114 billion green tax on everything” – would have wreaked havoc on the coal-dependent Australian economy. That’s why several opposition Liberal frontbenchers resigned rather than vote with the Government on ETS; why Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull lost his job; and why the Senate voted down the ETS.
2. Danes caught fiddling their carbon credits. (Hat tip: Philip Stott) Carbon trading is the Emperor’s New Clothes of international finance. It was invented by none other than Ken Lay, whose Enron would currently be one of the prime beneficiaries in the global alternative energy market, if it hadn’t been shown to be (nearly) as fraudulent as the current AGW scam. It is a licence to fleece, cheat and rob. Still, jolly embarrassing for the Danes to get caught red handed, what with their hosting a conference shortly in which the world’s leaders will try, straight-faced, to persuade us that carbon emissions trading is the only viable way of defeating ManBearPig.
3. Hats off to The Daily Express – the first British newspaper to make the AGW scam its front page story.
The piece was inspired by another bravura performance by Professor Ian Plimer, the Aussie geologist who argues that climate change has been going on quite naturally, oblivious of human activity, for the last 4,567 million years.
4. BBC finally gets round to reporting – sort of – that Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia may have been up to no good. It’s true that this report on their website is so hedged with special pleading for the temporarily suspended director Phil Jones the man might have written it himself. But on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning, I did hear the newsreader reporting it as more than just a routine theft story. Which is a start.
5. Legal actions ahoy! Over the next few weeks, one thing we can be absolutely certain of is concerted efforts by the rich, powerful and influential AGW lobby to squash the Climategate story. We’ve seen this already in the “nothing to see here” response of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the jet-setting, troll-impersonating railway engineer who runs the IPCC and wants to stop ice being served with water in restaurants. This is why those of us who oppose his scheme to carbon-tax the global economy back to the dark ages must do everything in our power to bring the scandal to a wider audience. One way to do this is law suits.
At Ian Plimer’s lunch talk yesterday, Viscount Monckton talked of at least two in the offing – both by scientists, one British, one Canadian, who intend to pursue the CRU for criminal fraud. Their case, quite simply, is that the scientists implicated in Climategate have gained funding and career advancement by twisting data, hiding evidence, and shutting out dissenters by corrupting the peer-review process. More news on this, as I hear it.
Lord Monckton has written an indispensible summary of the Climategate revelations so far.
6. Watch out Green Dave! The Independent reports on the growing backlash within the party to Cameron’s libtard-wooing greenery. Turning to the Independent for a balanced report on environmental matters is a bit like consulting Der Sturmer for a sensible, insightful view on the Jewish question. Still, for once, the house journal of eco-loonery seems to have got it right and the point made by Tory backbencher David Davis is well made:
“The ferocious determination to impose hair-shirt policies on the public – taxes on holiday flights, or covering our beautiful countryside with wind turbines that look like props from War of the Worlds – is bound to cause a reaction in any democratic country.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Government is pressing ahead with plans to roll out smart meters even though the £9billion scheme will help people save just £28 a year.
Power suppliers, rather than distribution networks, will be responsible for installing the meters for gas and electricity in all homes by 2020 at a cost of about £340 per household.
But the devices will save the average household just £28 a year off a typical annual duel fuel bill, meaning it will take around 12 years just to recoup the initial installation costs.
However, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said the savings, which would be around £92 a year for small businesses, would be on top of any costs fed back to consumers.
The savings is also only a fraction of the current average annual gas bill of more than £800 a year and electricity ones of around £445.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband announced today that installing 47 million of the meters in 26 million homes by 2020 will cost between £7 billion and £9 billion.
The meters, which one industry figure branded 'virtually useless' when used alone, aim to help people cut their bills by enabling them to monitor exactly how much energy they are using at different times.
They will also end the need for bill estimates and meter readings, with people instead charged according to exactly how much energy they have used.
There are fears that the cost will be met by consumers, either through upfront charges, or through higher energy bills.
DECC estimates the devices will save around £11.79billion, including a £4.33billion saving for the consumer and a £6.16billion one for energy companies, who will be able to cut costs as they will no longer have to carry out meter readings.
The DECC defended the meters saying that although the average saving would be only £28, this was based on families doing little or nothing with their smart meter to help cut their bills.
It said case studies had shown that if people were more proactive in using the meters they could actually slash around £100 a year off their bills.
Mr Miliband is also expected to announce plans tomorrow for the introduction of a smart grid, which will aim to manage the flows of electricity and increase the use of renewable energy.
However, Joel Hagan, the chief executive of Onzo, which produces smart energy kits, said that smart meters on their own were 'virtually useless' for consumers.
'While smart meters will result in more accurate bills, they will not provide people with the information they need to manage their energy usage and cut costs,' he said.
'Consumers will only change their energy consumption if they can understand how much energy they are using when they switch on the kettle or put the washing machine on.'
He added: 'The Government should make it compulsory for utilities to provide customers with this kind of information - but they should not dictate the way they do it.
'Energy suppliers should be able to decide for themselves how that information is delivered. Energy displays, websites, printed reports and existing channels like email and text messages all have a role to play.'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The scientist at the heart of the climate change email scandal was today interviewed by police about the scandal.
Two plain clothes officers arrived in an unmarked car in the afternoon and took Professor Phil Jones to Norfolk Police's headquarters in nearby Wymondham to give a statement.
Sources said the interview concerned the theft of emails from the university and alleged death threats since the contents of the emails were released, adding he was being treated as a 'victim of crime' rather than a suspect in any criminal investigation.
Detective Superintendent Julian Gregory added: 'He is one of the people assisting police with their enquiries.'
A spokeswoman for the University of East Anglia refused to comment and said Professor Jones would not be adding to a statement he released on Tuesday.
The professor refused to comment at his detached home in Wicklewood, a few miles outside Norwich.
Meanwhile, researchers are calling for Professor Jones to be banned from contributing to agenda-setting United Nations reports.
Eduardo Zorita, an expert in European climate trends, said that future reports from the UN's International Panel of Climate Change would lack credibility if Professor Jones was involved in their compilation.
As director of the University of East Anglia's prestigious Climatic Research Unit, the professor has provided temperature data key to previous reports used by governments around the world when setting climate change policy.
Dr Zorita also said that the content of thousands of emails and documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's computer system and published on the internet confirmed that some global warming research was riddled with 'machination, conspiracies and collusion'.
He and colleague Hans von Storch were mentioned in more than 30 documents, with one email referring to Professor von Storch as 'frankly an odd individual'.
Other emails have been seized on by climate change sceptics as evidence that researchers have been manipulating raw data and discussing ways of evading Freedom on Information requests.
In one of the most damaging emails, Professor Jones seems to suggest using a 'trick' to massage years of temperature data to 'hide the decline'.
In another, he appears to respond to news of the death of climate sceptic John Daly with the words 'in an odd way this is cheering news!'
Others show British researchers apparently dismissing the work of scientists challenging the global warming orthodoxy as 'crap' and a top American climatologist admitting it was a 'travesty' that scientists could not account for the lack of global warming in recent years.
Dr Zorita, of the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht in northern Germany, is an expert in climate change over the past 1,000 years and contributed to the most recent IPCC report.
He said that he was aware that his call for Professor Jones and others who wrote controversial emails to be banned from contributing to future reports could harm his career, but 'the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible any more'.
He said: 'I can confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU files.
'The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.'
The researcher added although he does not believe that manmade climate is a hoax, he and other researchers have been ‘bullied and subtly blackmailed’ to fit in the scientific mainstream.
'In this atmosphere, PhD students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the "politically correct picture",' he said.
'Some, or many, issues about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of these attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture.'
The comments come in the wake of Professor Jones's decision to stand down from his university work while an independent investigation is carried out.
The professor said that he 'absolutely' stands by the science produced by the centre - and that suggestions of a conspiracy to boost the evidence for man-made global warming were 'complete rubbish'.
Issues to be probed include data security and whether the university responded to Freedom of Information requests.
However, the university was tonight unable to confirm if the data that appears to have been manipulated will be reanalysed.
Environmental chemist Professor Peter Liss will become acting director and further details of the review will be released 'within days'.
Professor von Storch, director of the Institute of Coastal research, said: 'This is a brave act on the side of Phil Jones and may be the only way to restore his authority as an excellent scientist.
'What is left for Phil Jones to do is to restrain from doing review work for journals, and, of course, he should stay away from the IPCC and similar assessment exercises.'
He added that the investigation should be led by a non-Briton and include input from climate change sceptics.
Dr Benny Peiser, director of the British-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: 'What is important is that the university comes clean on this and they don't fudge the inquiry.
'We need total transparency on this.
'If they try to set up some kind of whitewash panel which an inquiry that does not have the total trust of the public it will make matters worse.
'We have called for a High Court judge to chair the inquiry just to make sure that trust is restored.'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Moore reviews 'An Appeal to Reason’ by Nigel Lawson.
This book appeared last year, but I am reviewing it now because I have noticed that its arguments are beginning to catch fire. It is a well-known feature of British culture that we usually come to the right view about something in the end, but only after we have indulged the wrong view for too long.
This helps to explain why Nigel Lawson had such difficulty in getting this book published. But as the Copenhagen summit on climate approaches, people are at last beginning to question whether it can really be true that we have only – as Gordon Brown has said – a few days in which to "save the planet". "Nations will vanish and millions lose their homes to rising seas," shouted a headline in a serious paper yesterday, carefully on time for Copenhagen. But we are wearying of being terrified by what are essentially speculations.
Lord Lawson is highly unusual in being an intellectual who has also held political office at the highest level (he was Mrs Thatcher's chancellor). He can therefore master, dissect and expound argument without forgetting how ideas and ideals can be grotesquely distorted by politics. He was also a good journalist, so he can explain things in clear English.
This admirably short book is simple. It goes through the claims made by the principal promoters of action against global warming, and subjects them to analysis. Lawson is careful to choose mainstream bodies or sources – the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Stern report, Al Gore – rather than the lunatics who pullulate at the fringe. But he succeeds in showing that even these apparently respectable institutions and individuals pullulate quite dottily enough.
Take the IPCC's predictions of what might happen 50 or 100 years hence. The idea that this can be done with any accuracy, says Lord Lawson, is "inherently absurd". "We have only to ask ourselves whether the Edwardians, even if equipped with the most powerful modern computers, would have been able to foresee the massive economic, political and technological changes that have occurred over the past hundred years," he says.
But even if you accept the IPCC predictions, look what happens. The IPCC says that world temperature will increase by 2100 by somewhere between 3.2F and 7.2F. A warming of half way between these two points works out at an average temperature increase of 0.05 degrees F per year. In the last 25 years of the past century, temperature increased at the rate of 0.04 degrees per year. (In this century, it has not increased at all!) Has this proved so appalling to manage?
Lord Lawson then notes that the IPCC predicts that, at this level of temperature rise, global food production will actually increase. He takes the IPCC's gloomiest prediction of the economic effects of global warming over the same period. By its own figures, the difference between what would happen with global warming and without it amounts to this: in a hundred years' time, people in the developed world would be "only 2.6 times better off than they are today, instead of 2.7 times, and their contemporaries in the developing world would be "only" 8.5 times as well off as people in the developing world are today, instead of 9.5 times better off".
So this is the projected catastrophe, to avoid which the people of the present generation are being asked to curtail their carbon emissions by 70 per cent. We must tighten our belts for future generations, who even the gloom-mongers believe will be much, much richer than we are.
This is not science, politics or economics, but masochism. Or rather, since our leaders will, on the whole, exempt themselves from the punishments they want to impose, it is sadism.
It is immoral to restrict definite, present benefits in the name of indefinite, distant ones. India and China are currently performing economic miracles which, for the first time, have made hundreds of millions of their citizens comfortably off. They can't do this without increasing their carbon footprint. Should they be forbidden from doing so on the basis of uncertainty piled on uncertainty about what might happen a century hence?
Unlike most politicians, Lawson notices that all the agreements made to control carbon emissions do not work. Sometimes this is because they are not, in fact, agreed. Sometimes it is because they are evaded (Canada, which signed Kyoto, has increased its emissions much faster than the United States, which refused to do so).
Ultimately, it is because the idea of world government which lies behind such deals invariably collapses in the face of reality.
But this does not mean – and here Lord Lawson is optimistic – that people will not find ways of dealing with climate change if (and it is only if) it really is happening. Stern, Gore, the IPCC etc speak as if human beings will not do the one thing most characteristic of civilisation – adapt.
There is no disaster facing us which we cannot mitigate by changing our behaviour over time. The real disaster will be if we cede to politicians what the author calls the "licence to intrude" in everything we do by pretending to "save" a planet which no one has proved will be lost.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A senior Tory attacked the "fixation" of the green movement with imposing ever tougher targets for reducing carbon emissions as having potentially "crippling" costs for the economy.
David Davis, an ex-shadow cabinet member and former party leadership challenger, said the UK was already facing a £55bn long-term price tag for its current policies and warned of a public backlash if more unpopular "green" measures were imposed.
His comments are likely to be seen as a direct challenge to the approach of David Cameron, who has made his commitment to tackling climate change a symbol of the way he has changed the party.
Writing in the Independent today, Davis said it was "unsurprising" that more than half the public no longer believed in climate change as it now appeared that the earth had been cooling rather than warming over the past decade.
"The fixation of the green movement with setting ever tougher targets is a policy destined to collapse," he said.
"The ferocious determination to impose hair shirt policies on the public – taxes on holiday flights, or covering our beautiful countryside with wind turbines that look like props from War of the Worlds – would cause a reaction in any democratic country.
"Many of the people signed up to the green movement instinctively believe in statist, regulatory, dirigiste regimes. They forget these approaches have failed many times before."
Davis said that building wind farms would blight hundreds of thousands of properties and "ruin" lives through the unbearable noise levels, while future predicted power shortages would further undermine public support for action.
"Lights going out around Britain could be an electoral off switch for environmental policy," he said.
He called for the development of an environmental "middle way" with "realistic" measures to reduce emissions without "crippling" the economy while containing the effects of climate change that cannot be prevented.
"Today the economic climate makes people question whether we can afford the expense of these policies," he said.
"We often worry, properly, about the potential effects of global warming on the poorer parts of the world. We should also worry that cutting the world's growth will condemn millions of people to continuing poverty in the decades to come."
Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, said: "The true face of the Tory party is on show today. No amount of riding around with huskies can conceal the fact that the Conservative party have closed their ears to the science.
"David Cameron might cycle for the cameras – but his party is chugging off in the other direction in a fleet of gas guzzlers."
Emily Thornberry, a Labour MP, said: "David Davis is representing the real views of David Cameron's Conservative party. This is the party that persistently fails to take the tough action on climate change and regularly opposes wind farms as 'bird blenders'.
"David Cameron's cycling to work can't cover the fact that he lacks a real green agenda and the strength to stand up to the anti-green rump in today's Tory party."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't eat Beef, Don't eat Pork, Don't eat Lamb and now...
Christmas puddings are not just bad for your waistline, they are responsible for global warming, according to a report written by a Government quango.
Consumers who want to support British farmers and care about the cutting down on the environmental damage caused by the food chain, should instead think about ice cream and biscuits made with Kentish Cobnuts for their sweet dish at the end of Christmas lunch. Or they should consider a plate of Wensleydale cheese to finish their meal off.
Natural England, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has published a booklet called The Nature of England, designed to educate consumers about where their food comes from and how they can support the best British farming practices.
It has been backed by Prue Leith, the cookery writer, who has suggested various recipes, which do not compromise "our desire to look after our wildlife and landscapes".
In the foreword, she writes: "Even for those who’ve spent a lifetime working with or writing about food, it’s often hard to know which foods to buy, cook and enjoy that support our values, do least harm to the planet and are within our budgets."
While the eggs and flour, which form the two key ingredients in Christmas puddings, usually come from Britain, the spices, sultanas, raisins and candied peel and brown sugar will all be imported.
Most Christmas pudding recipes, such as Delia Smith's "traditional Christmas pudding" also include rum from the Caribbean or stout from Ireland, the zest of lemons and oranges – all of which will be grown or produced abroad and shipped to Britain.
A homemade vanilla ice cream, however, served with hazelnut sables will not only help cut down on the food miles, but also help nourish the British countryside, the booklet recommends.
The report suggests consumers hunt down Kentish cobnuts, a form of home-grown hazelnut. "It’s important to cherish and support food that has a positive relationship with the natural environment – Kentish Cobnuts are a great example to look out for. Occasionally, the endangered hazel dormouse is spotted foraging in cobnut platts."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As it happens I was Green before the word came to mean what it does now.
From a very early age, I hated the ploughing up of this country for the motor car, and grieved at the mad closure of the railways, a view that has now become much more widespread than it was then.
I began bicycling to work before bike lanes had been invented, when Boris Johnson was still at Eton.
To this day I get a sort of red mist when I see great trees being cut down by over-cautious councils, and I gaze with limitless regret on the bleak prairies of Southern England, where hedgerows once grew.
If I can take a ship and a train rather than a plane, I will do.
So it’s no use trying to dismiss me as some kind of petrolhead polluter who wants to cover the planet with runways and motorways, nor to allege I’m in the pay of Big Oil, when I say that I doubt the existence of man-made global warming.
I just doubt it because I am not convinced it’s true. Actually, now that Big Oil has bought into the man-made warming scare itself, I generally get even cruder abuse, being called a ‘denier’ as if I were some kind of Nazi.
And if I mention my doubts at public occasions, I can feel the swelling wrath of the unreasoning mob gathering against me.
There’s seldom time to make more than a few points before you are howled down by righteous zealots.
And that is why I, and anyone seriously interested in this subject, owes a great debt to Christopher Booker, who has set down all the arguments for doubt in a single, concise book that will no doubt be either ignored or abused.
It would be very sad if, as a result, it fails to reach a wide audience. I think anyone remotely concerned about this huge controversy should read this courageous piece of work.
I am not asking you to agree with everything in it, or assuming that you will. I am asking any reasonable person, who is influenced by facts and logic, to consider the case made here.
If you have had doubts but suppressed them for fear of being drowned in anger or contempt, buy this book to arm yourself. If you know any global-warming fanatics, buy it for them for Christmas and ask them, even beg them, to study it carefully.
At the very least, it should allow the debate on this subject to be conducted with more fairness and without such expressions as ‘denier’ being used.
What you will find out is this. That much of what passes for accepted truth is not. Facts have been ruthlessly twisted, suppressed or invented. Scientists are greatly divided on the subject.
Many people – and bodies – presented as experts actually have little or no knowledge of the science involved. Gullible politicians and gullible media men and women have repeatedly fallen for it.
Hucksters, profiteers, world-government fanatics and, of course, the EU (always searching for an excuse to increase its power) have latched on to it.
Huge public subsidies, including the carbon-trading racket and the tragicomic building of hideous, worse-than-useless windfarms, now depend upon it.
But take, just for example, the famous picture of polar bears on a melting ice-floe, supposedly doomed victims of global warming.
The USA’s ex-Vice President, the propagandist Al Gore, got audiences going ‘Aaah!’ by saying the bears had ‘nowhere else to go’. Really? The picture was taken in August, when the Alaskan ice always melts. The polar bears were fine. Think about it.
They can swim and they weren’t far from land. Recent studies show that most polar bear populations are rising.
The world was warmer than it is now in the early Middle Ages, long before industrial activity increased CO2 output, a fact that the warming fanatics have worked very hard to obscure.
Oh, and the most important greenhouse gas by far is not CO2 but water vapour, which is not influenced by human activity at all.
Meanwhile, an English court of law (despite buying the CO2 argument) has identified nine significant errors of fact in Gore’s Oscar-winning alarmist film An Inconvenient Truth, ludicrously being inflicted on children in British schools.
Among these: sea levels are not going to rise by 20ft any time soon; there’s no evidence that atolls in the Pacific have been evacuated because of rising waters; the Gulf Stream is not going to shut down; the drying-up of Lake Chad, the shrinking of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and Hurricane Katrina were none of them caused by global warming; the only polar bears that have drowned were four that died in a storm.
Booker also reminds us that even if all the measures demanded by the warming zealots were put into action, according to their own calculations this would only delay the effects they fear by six years.
In my experience, people who employ alarmism, and who turn with rage on their critics, do so because they lack confidence in their case. Watch their behaviour at the coming Copenhagen climate conference, a festival of panic and exaggerated woe.
This particular frenzy, if not checked, could end by bankrupting the West and leaving us sitting in the cold and the dark whistling for a wind to power our dead computers – while China and India surge on to growth and prosperity because they have had the sense to ignore the whole stupid thing.
* The Real Global Warming Disaster, by Christopher Booker, Continuum Books, £16.99.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The false prophets (should that be “profits”?) of the Church of Global Warming have had it their way for so long that some of them simply can’t cope with the truth and go bananas when the basic tenets of their “global warming-ism” are confronted.
Today we invite readers to view a recent video from mainstream American TV showing how one such “believer” reacted when his “faith” was questioned by a “heretic”!
But, we ask, isn’t this disciple’s reaction typical of how other “believers” have been treating those who dare to question the “faith” for years?
Fury and bluster is no substitute for fact and reason – something the high priests of global warming-ism have clearly yet to learn! Perhaps the next step by those who stand to profit (prophet?) either financially or politically from the promotion of this myth will be to declare “man-made global warming denial” a crime – a surefire way of shutting up the climate change heretics!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Around the world at the moment the wheels seem to be coming off the climate change taxation machine. Fox news, CNN in fact many US news stations are really going to town on this but nothing seems to be reported over here in the newly formed EUK .
Now every one has a different view on the subject of climate change previously called global warming. The name change seems to reflect the inaccurate scientific advice to governments.
Nobody in their right minds would argue against the need for global "good housekeeping" we have a legacy to leave for future generations and a responsibility to that.
Do we really have the full scientific facts behind the "religion" that is climate change?
Will carbon footprint trading really work? that means effectively you will have to buy credits and once you have used your quota you will pay through the nose or trade them with other people?
There are masses of reports and a few rebuttals about the existence of leaked emails from the very people who are responsible for government advice on this matter. Apparently it highlights some very dubious practice and misinformation relayed to the powers that be who are now using the "evidence" to tax you, me, in fact the whole world and its brother!
This is going to be a very hard topic for every one to accept but if its true the implications are massive. In Australia five prominent MPs have resigned in disgust over this matter.
These are liberal MPs who you would normally expect to be backing this issue.
The pro climate change/ taxation lobby are using such arguments as the terrible events in Cumbria to prove their science, but the sad fact of the matter is the millions of pounds difference between the aid handed out to our own people and the ongoing aid instalment to Africa. Whilst we pay millions of pounds a day to be a member the EU state that now owns us but it does not seem to be paying its dues back to our disaster zone.
This meagre million pound payout is really putting the whole situation and intention into perspective.
The scientists that are allowed to publicly comment for climate change seem to dispute that any natural influence or periodic temperature fluctuations are anything to do with the matter, WHY?
It is proved that in medieval times the world went through a temperature rise, there wasn't any 4x4s to transport the grapes grown in the north of England for the Romans was there?
Mars has seen a temperature increase similar to the Earth, again there are no 4x4s on Mars! For if there was I am damn sure somewhere I would have a notice to tax one, or be offsetting my carbon emissions to that of a down trodden space Martian!
If we continue to pay massive amounts of money that we simply haven't got to third world countries to apologise for our carbon emissions wont those countries use the funds to start industrialising themselves and therefore produce even more carbon?
Why have the media in the EUK not jumped on this topic? is it because they feel that its a conspiracy? MPs in Australia obviously don't, American media obviously doesn't? or is it that there might be some massive ramifications for the media that we all know doesn't always tell the truth? If the rest of the world knows about the latest revelations are they knowingly sitting on something? surely not!
There seems to be a need for the correct data to be analysed by independent scientists that can be proved to be unbiased in their work, so before major treaty's are signed we really know the facts? or like the EU take over is it another forgone conclusion?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What's the Point it's probably manipulated Data!
Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data - dubbed Climategate - have agreed to publish their figures in full.
The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, "stolen" by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics.
In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.
The publication will be carried out in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre. The full data, when disclosed, is certain to be scrutinised by both sides in the fierce debate.
A grandfather with a training in electrical engineering dating back more than 40 years emerged from the leaked emails as a leading climate sceptic trying to bring down the scientific establishment on global warming.
David Holland, who describes himself as a David taking on the Goliath that is the prevailing scientific consensus, is seeking prosecutions against some of Britain's most eminent academics for allegedly holding back information in breach of disclosure laws.
Mr Holland, of Northampton, complained to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) last week after the leaked emails included several Freedom of Information requests he had submitted to the CRU, and scientists' private responses to them.
Within hours, a senior complaints officer in the ICO wrote back by email: "I have started to examine the issues that you have raised in your letter and I am currently liaising with colleagues in our Enforcement and Data Protection teams as to what steps to take next."
The official also promised to investigate other universities linked to the CRU, which is one of the world's leading authorities on temperature levels and has helped to prove that man-made global warming not only exists but will have catastrophic consequences if not tackled urgently. Mr Holland is convinced the threat has been greatly exaggerated.
In one email dated May 28, 2008, one academic writes to a colleague having received Mr Holland's request: "Oh MAN! Will this crap ever end??"
Mr Holland, who graduated with an external degree in electrical engineering from London University in 1966 before going on to run his own businesses, told The Sunday Telegraph: "It's like David versus Goliath. Thanks to these leaked emails a lot of little people can begin to make some impact on this monolithic entity that is the climate change lobby."
He added: "These guys called climate scientists have not done any more physics or chemistry than I did. A lifetime in engineering gives you a very good antenna. It also cures people of any self belief they cannot be wrong. You clear up a lot of messes during a lifetime in engineering. I could be wrong on global warming – I know that – but the guys on the other side don't believe they can ever be wrong."
Professor Trevor Davies, the university's Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research Enterprise and Engagement, said yesterday: "CRU's full data will be published in the interests of research transparency when we have the necessary agreements. It is worth reiterating that our conclusions correlate well to those of other scientists based on the separate data sets held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
"We are grateful for the necessary support of the Met Office in requesting the permissions for releasing the information but understand that responses may take several months and that some countries may refuse permission due to the economic value of the data."
Among the leaked emails disclosed last week were an alleged note from Professor Phil Jones, 57, the director of the CRU and a leading target of climate change sceptics, to an American colleague describing the death of a sceptic as "cheering news"; and a suggestion from Prof Jones that a "trick" is used to "hide the decline" in temperature.
They even include threats of violence. One American academic wrote to Prof Jones: "Next time I see Pat Michaels [a climate sceptic] at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."
Dr Michaels, tracked down by this newspaper to the Cato Institute in Washington DC where he is a senior fellow in environmental studies, said last night: "There were a lot of people who thought I was exaggerating when I kept insisting terrible things are going on here.
"This is business as usual for them. The world might be surprised but I am not. These guys have an attitude."
Prof Jones, who has refused to quit despite calls even from within the green movement, said last week in a statement issued through University of East Anglia, "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues."
He suggested the theft of emails and publication first on a Russian server was "a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks".
He added: "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips says there is no evidence of global warming and claims that global temperatures are going down not up.
Watch the full debate at the Question Time website.
Or go directly to the question about global warming
Was the Audience hand picked in the same way as when Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time? You Decide!
Click here to visit and view
Climate change sceptic Professor Fred Singer, and Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the department of the environment debate the issues over climate change and global warming.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How much longer will Al Gore get a pass from the mainstream media? A little bit longer if their failure to react to the devastating revelations of files hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia is a measure.
Their behavior reflects how most, especially from the left, have abetted the scientists who deliberately perverted climate science.
We now know Gore’s errors are based on the global warming fraud orchestrated by a few scientists centered round Phil Jones, Director of the CRU. Emails between those climate scientists, identified by Professor Wegman as publishing together and peer reviewing each other’s work disclose the complete manipulation of climate science and the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Bishop Hill provides a useful summation of some of the outrageous comments and actions. What is missing is the nasty vindictive tone that permeates almost every item.
What are the mainstream media going to do?
How can they ignore the biggest scandal in science history and then claim any credibility?
We already have a strong indication because they either don’t cover it or claim, like Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, there is nothing of consequence. No surprise because he was in direct communication with the CRU gang.
Other left wing outlets have similar reports such as the Guardian in England and Harrabin at the BBC. Delingpole at the Telegraph identifies some vapid responses. Gore Gets a Pass
Gore appears on TV or radio programs, but with tight terms of engagement. He appears alone, will not debate and likely defines the pattern of questions.
He has no qualifications in the subject, has never published any peer reviewed papers, yet is given total credibility.
Indeed, he is not even asked about it. He has produced material on climate with multiple errors but made no attempt to correct them.
He attacks with slurs and invective anyone who dares to question his claims or the errors. Who are the flat-earthers now?
He is never asked about the money he has made exploiting the errors. He is never asked about funding, affiliations or sponsors. He is never asked about his unjustified condemnation of the lifestyle of citizens while his is more profligate than theirs (carbon footprint). When asked it is usually done to allow him to gloss over the facts.
Despite this he obtains invitations to high-rated mainstream programs and is treated with deference and fawning attention by supposedly unbiased hard questioning media. He’s allowed to puff, preen and pontificate from a position of moral superiority. His recent appearance on Larry King’s program is a perfect example of unjustified pandering and lousy journalism.
Interviews are carefully selected to reduce any chance that he face people who know and understand the science. It’s easily controlled on radio or television, but meetings are a bigger problem.
Keynote speeches are relatively easy because it’s normal to have no questions. Some groups are supposedly friendly and expect questions. Such was the case when Gore spoke to a recent meeting of Environmental Journalists. He expected only favorable questions.
At the meeting Phelim McAleer, an independent documentary producer, confronted Gore about inaccuracies in “An Inconvenient Truth.” Gore dodged the question and McAleer’s microphone was disconnected when he pressed for an answer.
The media clip of the event played everywhere but apparently did Gore little harm among mainstream media. They also avoided the real story that Gore clearly assumed he would not be challenged.
This is an absolute condemnation of the journalistic integrity of Environmental Journalists – punctuated by shutting down the microphone. McAleer appears naïve about the behavior of the mainstream media despite having witnessed the machinations within the science. He said, “What I am surprised at is at the conference of environmental journalists, the reactions of the journalists was to shut down the journalists and protect the politician.”
Errors Remain Uncorrected
Gore is back on the circuit pushing his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. Apparently designed for Copenhagen, it offers solutions to the non-existent problem Gore falsely promoted. In all interviews Gore is at his arrogant best, an attitude reflected in a quote on a page at the start of his book.
He quotes the Bible, Deuteronomy Chapter 30, Verse 19, “I’m offering you the choice of life or death. You can choose either blessings or curses.” Clearly Gore sees himself as the one offering you the choice. This is not surprising as Shakespeare said, “Even the Devil can quote the scriptures in his arguments.” In one interview about his book, “He points to pages on the spiritual dimension of climate change, the idea that God gave man stewardship over the earth, and that preserving it for future generations is a sacred obligation.
” But God also told us to tell the truth. Not only does Gore not tell the truth but he denies the truth. In a Newsweek interview he said, “Facts are not enough.”
The definition of delusional is, “An idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument.” You decide.
Unequal Treatment
People with views opposing Gore’s are rigidly held to the truth, required to produce accurate facts and are quickly attacked for even the slightest error. Martin Durkin’s documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle had one small error in the first release. It was immediately and viciously attacked. Durkin withheld the DVD version until that was corrected. Gore’s errors are still uncorrected and he is still training apostles to show the movie and push his false message.
Opponents are rarely invited to mainstream media programs. When they are invited, their qualifications are immediately questioned.
The nature of their participation in climate and publications are challenged. They’re asked about errors they’ve reportedly made or been accused of making. Funding and income are prime targets. Guilt by association with individuals and groups are targeted.
Why isn’t Gore challenged in a similar fashion?
Have people confused the person with the office? He’s no longer Vice President or a politician, yet he seems to get the privileges of the former and allowed laxity with the truth of the latter. He was given a free pass when he appeared before the Senate and Congress. He asked for an unprecedented 30 minutes and then violated the rules completely by submitting his testimony just 1 minute before his House appearance and a few hours before the Senate hearing instead of the required 48 hours.
Gore’s Turn For the Hot Seat
It’s time he was forced to answer questions. He is a private citizen and should be treated in the same way by the mainstream media. A court case would confront him with questions on which he cannot prevaricate.
He’d probably decline to answer, but then he is exposed. A fraud charge is probably the best because he is acknowledged through his Oscar and Nobel Prize as the most renowned messenger of the scientific falsehoods.
He, more than anyone, has perpetuated the myth that CO2 is causing climate change and falsely labeled it a pollutant. He was involved in a meeting at the White House in 1998 with Bill Clinton, Lord Brown of BP and Ken Lay of Enron, apparently laid out the strategy for carbon credits. He then, by all accounts, has profited as much as anyone from the carbon credit market.
Mr. Gore quotes the Bible, he should consider a public view of his actions in light of the following;
“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.” Matthew 7:15
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Australia is leading the revolt against Al Gore’s great big AGW conspiracy – just as the Aussie geologist and AGW sceptic Professor Ian Plimer predicted it would.
ABC news reports that five frontbenchers from Australia’s opposition Liberal party have resigned their portfolios rather than follow their leader Malcolm Turnbull in voting with Kevin Rudd’s Government on a new Emissions Trading Scheme.
The Liberal Party is in turmoil with the resignations of five frontbenchers from their portfolios this afternoon in protest against the emissions trading scheme.
Tony Abbott, Sophie Mirabella, Tony Smith and Senators Nick Minchin and Eric Abetz have all quit their portfolios because they cannot vote for the legislation.
Senate whip Stephen Parry has also relinquished his position.
The ETS is Australia’s version of America’s proposed Cap and Trade and the EU’s various carbon reduction schemes: a way of taxing business on its CO2 output. As Professor Plimer pointed out when I interviewed him in the summer, this threatens to cause enormous economic damage in Australia’s industrial and mining heartlands, not least because both are massively dependent on Australia’s vast reserves of coal. It is correspondingly extremely unpopular with Aussie’s outside the pinko, libtard metropolitan fleshpots.
Though the ETS squeaked narrowly through Australia’s House of Representatives, its Senate is proving more robust – thanks not least to the widespread disgust by the many Senators who have read Professor Plimer’s book Heaven And Earth at the dishonesty and corruption of the AGW industry. If the Senate keeps rejecting the scheme, then the Australian government will be forced to dissolve.
For the rapidly increasing number of us who believe that AGW is little more than a scheme by bullying eco-fascists to deprive us of our liberty, by big government to spread its controlling tentacles into every aspect our lives, and scheming industrialists such as Al Gore to enrich themselves through carbon trading, this principled act by Australia’s Carbon Five is fantastic news.
Where they lead, the rest of the world’s politicians will eventually be forced to follow: their appalled electorates will make sure of it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Climategate” has everybody rethinking global warming. Many are wondering — if leading scientists were tempted to finagle their data, is the evidence for catastrophic climate change weaker than previously thought?
Actually, the evidence was never even evidence.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding — shared by nearly everybody about the nature of anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) — over exactly what constitutes evidence for that theory and what does not.
Remember when we heard that the icebergs were melting, that polar bears were decreasing in number, that some places were drier than usual and that others were wetter, that the ocean was growing saltier here and fresher there, and that hurricanes were becoming more terrifying? Remember the hundreds of reports on what happens when it gets hot outside?
All of those observations might have been true, but absolutely none of them were evidence of AGW.
Diminishing glaciers did not prove AGW; they were instead a verification that ice melts when it gets hot. Fewer polar bears did not count in favor of AGW; it instead perhaps meant that maybe adult bears prefer a chill to get in the mood. People sidling up to microphones and trumpeting “It’s bad out there, worse than we thought!” was not evidence of AGW; it was evidence of how easily certain people could work themselves into a lather.
No observation of what happened to any particular thing when the air was warm was direct evidence of AGW. None of it.
Every breathless report you heard did nothing more than state the obvious: Some creatures and some geophysical processes act or behave differently when it is hot than when it is cold. Only this, and nothing more.
Can you recall where you were when you heard that global warming was going to cause an increase in kidney stones, more suicides in Italy, larger grape harvests in France, and smaller grape harvests in France? How about when you heard that people in one country would grow apathetic, that those in another would grow belligerent, and — my favorite — that prostitutes would be on the rise in the Philippines? That the world would come to a heated end, and that women and minorities would be hardest hit?
Not a single one of these predictions was ever evidence of AGW.
For years, it was as if there was a contest for the most outlandish claim of what might happen if AGW were true. But no statement of what might happen if AGW is true is evidence for AGW. Those prognostications were only evidence of the capacity for fanciful speculation. Merely this and nothing more.
So if observations of what happens when it’s hot outside don’t verify AGW, and if predictions of what might happen given AGW were true do not verify AGW, what does? Why did people get so excited?
In the late 1990s, some places on Earth were hotter than they were in the late 1980s. These observations were indirect — and not direct — evidence of AGW. The Earth’s climate has never been static; temperatures sometimes rise and sometimes fall. So just because we see rising temperatures at one point does not prove AGW is true. After all, temperatures have been falling over the last decade, and AGW supporters still say their theory is true. Rising — or falling — temperatures are thus consistent with many theories of climate, not just AGW.
Climate scientists then built AGW models, incorporating the observed temperatures. They worked hard at fitting those models so that the models could reproduce the rising temperatures of the 1990s, while at the same time fitting the falling temperatures of the 1970s, etc. They had to twist and tweak — and with the CRU emails, it now appears they twiddled. They had to cram those observations into the models and, by God, make them fit, like a woman trying on her favorite jeans after Thanksgiving.
They then announced to the world that AGW was true — because their models said it was.
But a model fitting old data is not direct evidence that the theory behind the model is true. Many alternate models can fit that data equally well. It is a necessary requirement for any model, were it true, to fit the data, but because it happens to is not a proof that the model is valid.
For a model to be believable it must make skillful predictions of independent data. It must, that is, make accurate forecasts of the future. The AGW models have not yet done so. There is, therefore, no direct evidence for AGW.
The models predicted warmer temperatures, but it got cooler.
One of the revealed CRU emails found one prominent gentlemen saying, “We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
It is. But only if you were concerned that the AGW theory will be nevermore.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.
At the very least, the Climategate revelations should weaken our confidence in the above conclusion. At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards. Absent such tactics, it’s possible that more contrarian research would be published in professional journals and the consensus in the field would be less firm.
The New Atlantis agrees:
The evidence of scientific dishonesty supplied by these communications is so copious it’s hard to know where to begin an attempt to describe them. Many of the e-mails brazenly discuss the manipulation of scientific data either to provide the appearance of greater support for global warming science or to undermine the claims of skeptics.
Deutsche Welle:
German climatologist Hans von Storch of the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, remarked that the “unfortunate writing” done by Jones and others has “likely damaged the credibility of climate science.” ...But the fallout may not be entirely negative, he writes; in fact he sees a silver lining for climate science: “I would assume that … a useful debate about the degree of politicization of climate science will emerge.”
Debate In The Age: ABC Melbourne radio Report
Indeed, even warming crusader George Monbiot complains about the new deniers:
I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.
The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people’s denial. Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away.
Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, sums up:
I cannot endorse the actions of this group and hope that an impartial investigation will bring closure to this difficult matter. Inevitably, the public’s view of science will be affected and this will hurt all of science.
Meanwhile, more evidence of how the debate was rigged. Many computer codes leaked from the Climatic Research Unit show how tree-ring data was tortured into confessing there has lately been a huge rise in temperature. Examples:
Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
And:
‘NOTE: recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY’
printf,1,’REMOVED to facilitate calibration. THEREFORE, post-1960 values’
printf,1,’will be much closer to observed temperatures then they should be,’
printf,1,’which will incorrectly imply the reconstruction is more skilful’
printf,1,’than it actually is.
UPDATE
William Kininmonth, former head of the National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology, tells me he reported in Energy and the Environment on another astonishing attempt to stifle sceptics:
As an invited speaker to an international seminar invited by the Russian Academy of Sciences to discuss the scientific basis of the Kyoto Protocol it was perplexing that the event did not commence on schedule. The delay was particularly odd, as it appeared that the listed speakers were assembled. The program did commence after nearly two hours wait and the reason for the delay became apparent. Sir David King, chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom government, had been lobbying vigorously to have a number of the listed international speakers omitted from the program. He even submitted his own program of speakers! Having failed in his objective, King absented himself from the proceedings for the remainder of the day…
The pre-seminar lobbying by Sir David King further underscored the politicisation of the climate change issue. It became apparent that the objective of the UK delegation was to defend the findings of the IPCC and convince the members of the Russian Academy of Sciences that the science of climate change is settled… The input of independent scientists (at the meeting), who could demonstrate shortcomings in the IPCC findings, clearly would hamper the UK delegation in meeting its objectives and were to be silenced.
Why the UK government would want to take on the role of sheriff in defence of the IPCC is not clear until one remembers that the Blair Government has made the promotion of Kyoto and hence its ‘war against global warming’ a top foreign policy objective for reasons that can only be speculated about.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here it Comes...
Climate excuse for Migrant Workers now!
A new report has shown that Britain does not have the necessary skills to move to a low-carbon economy by 2020 or the training capabilities to fill the gap in green skills.
The Aldersgate Group study, 'Mind the Gap - Skills for the transition to a low carbon economy', states that the Government’s skills strategy is inadequate to meet the needs of a rapid transition to a low-carbon, resource efficient economy.
If the skills gap is not able to be addressed internally and swiftly, skilled migrants on a UK Visa could be needed fill the green skills gap and achieve the environmental targets set by the Government.
A potential measure of attracting needed skills could be the addition of extra points for green skilled migrants under the UK immigration new points-based system.
If Britain cannot bridge the skills gap, expected to be made worse in the next two years as approximately 30 per cent of Britian’s engery workforce retires, the country could lose the expected jobs in carbon capture and storage to China and the UK.
The report said that it is imperative that the "ambition and delivery" of the Government strategy are accelerated with a major recommendation to increase subsidies for offshore wind and the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme accompanied with supporting infrastructure and a corresponding skills strategy to drive investment.
The report proposes that the most significant driver for low carbon, or green, skills is a robust industrial policy to encourage investment in low carbon technology and resource efficiency. Germany was cited as a prime example of this approach.
John Edmonds, Aldersgate Group project chair for the report, said investment in low-carbon skills was vital to build a more resilient and sustainable UK economy.
He said: "The skills gap in the UK economy is well documented, with one in three firms already hampered by a shortage of skilled staff, from those needed to install new technology to scientists and engineers.
The UK needs to fix these skill shortage problems in order to prosper in the modern world," he said.
The Aldersgate Group is lead by a coalition of environmental lobbyists made up of businesses and environmental groups which lobbies on environmental issues.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The scientist at the heart of the climate change scandal was under growing pressure to quit last night.
George Monbiot, a leading environmentalist, said Phil Jones should resign from the Climatic Research Unit over leaked emails that appear to show researchers suppressed scientific data. More emails came to light yesterday, including one in which an American climatologist admitted it was a travesty that scientists could not explain a lack of global warming in recent years.
In another note, UK researchers dismissed the work of scientists challenging global warming as 'crap'. Another appeared to call for pressure on the BBC after a reporter suggested that evidence for rising temperatures since 2001 was thin.
In one of the most damning messages, Professor Jones appeared to respond to the death of a climate sceptic with the words 'in an odd way this is cheering news!'.
The leak has been a huge embarrassment to the climate unit at the University of East Anglia, which is a global leader in its field. Although there is no hint of evidence that climate change is not real, the emails appear to show researchers manipulating raw data and discussing how to dodge Freedom of Information requests.
Yesterday, Mr Monbiot, who writes on green issues, said the emails could scarcely be more damaging. 'I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken,' he said. 'There are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad.
'There appears to be evidence of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a Freedom of Information request. 'Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
'The head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.' Bob Ward, a climate expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, demanded an independent inquiry.
'From what I've seen of the emails, there's not been any new questions raised about the way papers have been put together, but there should be an re-examination of the emails,' he said. The emails - which appeared last week on a Russian website - appear to have been stolen from a university computer server.
Yesterday, Professor Jones refused to quit and denied that researchers had altered evidence to bolster the case for man-made climate change. He added: 'We absolutely stand by the science we produce here at the University of East Anglia and it has been peer reviewed and published.
'Some of the emails probably had poorly chosen words and were sent in the heat of the moment, when I was frustrated. I do regret sending some of them. We've not deleted any emails or data here at CRU. 'I would never manipulate the data one bit - I would categorically deny that.' The university is to conduct an independent review of data security and on its response to 60 freedom of information requests over a short period.
At least half the 36 UK officials and ministers travelling to the climate change talks in Copenhagen are going by air rather than by rail. The Liberal Democrats said the arrangements showed up Labour's hypocrisy on green issues.
The Government said officials had meetings that limited their travel options next month.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Media apologists for Warmists sides with manipulated data Statisticians
The great global warming slanging match – which is increasingly taking over from rational debate – is both illuminated, and will be intensified by, the publication of the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit.
It is clear that people on both sides at times abuse their opponents, seek to suppress their views – and may even massage the data.
Professor Jones's apparent attempts to frustrate Freedom of Information requests, censor scientific papers and urge dismissal of "a troublesome editor" are deeply reprehensible and unworthy of science.
But it also has to be said that American scientists who accepted global warming suffered worse persecution from a Bush administration that deliberately distorted scientific evidence, and that climate sceptics often exhibited gross intolerance of opposing viewpoints.
The unit disputes that data was manipulated – and it is not clear from the extracts that this took place –but the subject at issue, the decline in temperatures since the anomalously hot year of 1998, is an interesting one.
Statisticians given the measurements without being told that they related to climate, so as to avoid any bias, reported that the decline appeared only if 1998 was "cherry-picked" as the starting date by "people coming at the data with preconceived notions". On any longer, and therefore more reliable, basis of measurements, temperatures were going up.
Yet the sceptics do not seem to have engaged with the statistical verdict. Instead they have endlessly insisted that the post-1998 decline proved that global warming had reversed. It is also curious that people such as Lord Lawson – who under other circumstances might have been expected to condemn the hacking of an institution's computers – have leapt so readily upon the results.
Nothing that has been disclosed justifies the sceptics' excited claims that the correspondence reveals that the scientific basis of man-made global warming to be a fraud. That would require the disclosure of a global conspiracy by scientists with the complicity of governments, which is a far-fetched scenario to say the least.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger Helmer says Anglican hierarchy has dropped the gospel in favour of ‘the new religion of climate alarmism’
A Tory MEP has accused the Church of England of having “abandoned religious faith entirely and taken up the new religion of climate alarmism instead”.
Roger Helmer, who resigned from the Tory frontbench in Europe when the Westminster leadership dumped its promised referendum on the Lisbon treaty, used a magazine article to urge the Church to “get back to the gospel”.
Referring approvingly to the work of another writer who said bishops were spending more time “preaching climate change than the gospel of salvation”, Helmer wrote: “The recent multi-faith conference at Windsor suggests that other world religions are taking the same line on climate change. This is particularly ironic at a time when the world is cooling and when more and more scientists around the world are breaking cover to challenge the theory of man-made global warming. Perhaps world religions should have more faith in God, and less in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
The Bishop of Leicester, Tim Stevens, said Helmer had not aired these views when he debated climate change in Leicester cathedral and asked whether “this was merely courtesy, or was it because the opportunity for a platform meant more to him than exposing his views to scrutiny or challenge from a live audience”.
Helmer is one of a growing band of European politicians threatening to cause trouble for the Tory frontbench in the first few months of any government it may form. He and his eurosceptic colleagues insist they will not drop their campaign for a referendum on Lisbon.
Analysis by the leftwing website Next Left has shown that the top 10 Tory bloggers are climate change sceptics. This week Helmer convened a conference of climate change deniers at the European parliament. Speakers included Ross McKitrick, a Canadian professor who has said data indicating global warming has been fiddled; Tom Segalstad, a Norwegian geologist who says human-released CO2 would not have a large effect on the climate; Fred Goldberg, co-author of the polemic The Global Warming Scam; Hans Labohm, a Dutch professor who challenges the existence of global warming; and Professor Fred Singer, who wrote the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Lifted from the excellent Green Arrow site)
In an article that I read the other day and regretfully did not bookmark, the writer stated that the first political party that picks up and runs with the Myth of Global Warming ball and takes it to the people, will be onto a sure fire vote winner.
Well the British National Party as been banging on about it for as long as I can remember and did so again the other day when they reported this story. But they do not go on about it for votes, although those are always welcome, they go on about it because it is the truth and the truth is the currency of the BNP.
Note by UKT: Misinformation
Is this what Linda McAvan is referring to by meaning of Polls?
More than half the population does not believe climate change has been caused by humans. In a poll published just weeks before the global climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, it has been revealed only 41% of British people accept as a scientific fact that the situation is largely man-made.
And the truth of the matter is this. The Global Warming Myth is the new Religion. To even question it is akin to being accused of not believing in the Holocaust, with more tools of the establishment writing articles with screaming statements such as "he is a global warming denier".
Denier. They literally scream it in the same way that ill informed cretins in the middle ages screamed "Witch". As usual their purpose is to silence and drown out the voices of those who speak the truth. If you watch the above video you will understand why.
Now in the video the speaker mentions the now infamous "hockey" graph and I do recommend you read this article here that is written by Christopher Booker that explains it.
In another article here, you can read how our cash strap farmers are being bribed (and who could blame them for accepting) to build wind farms on their land for the benefit of not the British People whose environement will be blighted but for the benefits of the companies that build and maintain them with government grants.
And we the people are then forced to pay higher heating bills whilst using less fuel, increased tax on cars, increased tax on travel, increased taxes on everything we buy, under the excuse of saving the environment and preventing global warming.
And so you can see, what the new religion of Global Warming really is, just another lie to be used to squeeze more blood from taxpayers to profit the individuals who control the multinational companies that are the real destroyers of the planet.
The authoritative Land & People have raised some interesting points with regards to the top video that you can read by following this link.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There were horrified gasps and shouts of “outrageous” from the Far Left and Communist MEPs as Nick Griffin addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg this morning on climate change.
However, the British National Party’s MEP for the North West of England earned the plaudits of some Conservative Party and UK Independence Party MEPs for what was a hard-hitting speech on the liberal elite’s ’scared cow’.
This is what the BNP leader told Parliament.
“Everyone agrees that climate change is the biggest challenge facing humanity.”
That`s the constant claim of the political elite – and it’s a lie!
Everyone does
NOT agree.
Thousands of scientists dispute the very existence of man made global warming, citing natural cyclical changes that saw vineyards in Roman northern England and a Swedish army march over the frozen Baltic at the height of the Little Ice Age in 1658 to Copenhagen.
As an army of global warming zealots marches to Copenhagen, the truth is that their Orwellian ‘consensus’ is based, not on scientific agreement but on bullying, censorship and fraudulent statistics.
In the words of leading climatologist Professor Richard Lindzen:
“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century`s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections contemplated a roll back of the industrial age.”
In fact, there will be no ‘bemused amazement’, for the reason for this hysteria is clear: It is designed to provide the excuse for the political project of the globalists to replace national democracy with New World Order global governance.
It has nothing to do with science and everything to do with a globalist common purpose to tax and control us, while making Billions for corporations in the Green-Industrial complex.
The anti-Western intellectual cranks of the Left suffered a collective breakdown when Communism collapsed. Climate change is their new theology, a secular religious hysteria complete with Pope Al Gore, Carbon Credit indulgences and the persecution of heretics.
But the heretics will have a voice in Copenhagen, and the truth will out: Climate change is being used to impose an anti-human Utopia as deadly as anything conceived by Stalin or Mao.
Explanatory Note – for information
There has been an absence of informed debate on the issue of ´global warming´. This may be demonstrated briefly by reference to the following points:
- 1 There has occurred global warming (shown by the disappearance of surface ice) on Mars and at least one of Jupiter´s moons. There are neither factories nor SUVs on either.
- 2 Satellites have detected nett ice formation over the North Pole since 2006.
- 3 The Earth has been subjected to cyclical warming and cooling for billions of years. Over the past two millennia, vines have been grown by the Romans in the North of England; the climate was warmer during the Middle Ages but there then occurred a period of cooling, which saw the River Thames freeze during the 17th and 19th centuries, for example.
- 4 Contrary to the message communicated by the advocates of global warming and the Al Gore film, Co2 emissions follow global warming; they do not precede it. This is a perfectly natural cyclical phenomenon but it disproves the link between man-made Co2 emissions and ´global warming´.
- 5 There has been global cooling since 1998 – a fact that is not credibly debated.
- 6 Sea levels rise and decline as part of the cyclical pattern, per point 3, above. In former times, the South of England was joined to the Continent but at a time when much of Britain was subjected to glaciation – an undesirable consequence of global cooling.
´Global warming´ sceptics are treated as politically-incorrect ´deniers´. There has been limited debate, with only one side of the argument vented but in strident and alarmist tones. Well qualified scientists who dispute global warming are condemned aggressively – an occurrence that discourages open debate.
There is no debate because to allow fair and objective discussion would blow many of the alarmists arguments away, therefore is the reason for the censorship and denial for two sides of the argument. (Ed)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next you will be told you are responsible and will be paying Green taxes for changes on Mars!
Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.
Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.
Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.
The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.
Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker.
When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, eventually radiating that heat back to warm the thin Martian atmosphere: lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. The temperature differences between the two are thought to be stirring up more winds, and dust, creating a cycle that is warming the planet.
Link acquired from commentator on Green Arrow
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Link acquired from a comment on the Green Arrow site
Editor's Introductory Note: Our planet has been slowly warming since last emerging from the "Little Ice Age" of the 17th century, often associated with the Maunder Minimum.
Before that came the "Medieval Warm Period", in which temperatures were about the same as they are today. Both of these climate phenomena are known to have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, but several hundred years prior to the present, the majority of the Southern Hemisphere was primarily populated by indigenous peoples, where science and scientific observation was limited to non-existent. Thus we can not say that these periods were necessarily "global".
However, "Global Warming" in recent historical times has been an undisputable fact, and no one can reasonably deny that.
But we're hearing far too often that the "science" is "settled", and that it is mankind's contribution to the natural CO2 in the atmosphere has been the principal cause of an increasing "Greenhouse Effect", which is the root "cause" of global warming. We're also hearing that "all the world's scientists now agree on this settled science", and it is now time to quickly and most radically alter our culture, and prevent a looming global catastrophe. And last, but not least, we're seeing a sort of mass hysteria sweeping our culture which is really quite disturbing. Historians ponder how the entire nation of Germany could possibly have goose-stepped into place in such a short time, and we have similar unrest. Have we become a nation of overnight loonies?
Sorry folks, but we're not exactly buying into the Global Hysteria just yet.
We know a great deal about atmospheric physics, (bio) and from the onset, many of the claims were just plain fishy. The extreme haste with which seemingly the entire world immediately accepted the idea of Anthropogenic ( man-made ) Global Warming made us more than a little bit suspicious that no one had really taken a close look at the science.
We also knew that the catch-all activity today known as "Climate Science" was in its infancy, and that atmospheric modeling did not and still does not exist which can predict changes in the weather or climate more than about a day or two in advance.
So the endless stream of dire predictions of what was going to happen years or decades from now if we did not drastically reduce our CO2 production by virtually shutting down the economies of the world appeared to be more the product of radical political and environmental activism rather than science.
Thus, we embarked on a personal quest for more information, armed with a strong academic background in postgraduate physics and a good understanding of the advanced mathematics necessary in such a pursuit.
This fundamental knowledge of the core principles of matter and its many exceptionally complex interactions allowed us to research and understand the foundations of many other sciences. In short, we read complex scientific articles in many other scientific disciplines with relative ease and good understanding - like most folks read comic books.
As our own knowledge of "climate science" grew, so grew our doubts over the "settled science". What we found was the science was far from "settled".. in fact it was barely underway.
It was for a while a somewhat lonely quest, what with "all the world's scientists" apparently having no doubt. Finally, in December 2007 we submitted an article to one of our local newspapers, the Addison Independent, thinking they would be delighted in having at minimum an alternative view of the issue. Alas, they chose not to publish it, but two weeks after our submission (by the strangest coincidence), published yet another "pro-global-warming" feature written by an individual whom, to the best we could determine, had no advanced training in any science at all, beyond self-taught it would appear.
Still, the individual had published a number of popular books on popular environmental issues, was well-loved by those of similar political bent, and was held in high esteem among his peers. We had learned a valuable lesson: Popular Journalists trump coupled sets of 2nd-order partial differential equations every time. Serious science doesn't matter if you have the press in your pocket.
In fairness to the Addison Independent and its editors, our article was somewhat lengthy and technical, and presumably the average reader most likely could not follow or even be interested in an alternative viewpoint, since everyone knew by now that the global warming issue was "settled science". And we confess that we like the paper, subscribe to it, and know a number of folks who work there personally.
They're all good folks, and they have every right to choose what does or doesn't go in their publication. They also have a right to spin the news any direction they choose, because that's what freedom of the press is all about. Seems everyone, both left and right, does it - and it's almost certain we will be accused of doing the same here. And we just may be, as hard as we may try to avoid it. We humans aren't all shaped by the same cookie cutter, and that's a blessing that has taken us as a species to the top of the food chain.
But by then we had been sharing our own independent research of the literature with others via email, and receiving a surprising amount of agreement back in return. (We're in contact with a large number of fellow scientists around the country, dating back to our college days in the 17th century when beer was a quarter a bottle). One local friend, in particular, kept pressing us to publish, and even offered to set up a "debate" with the Popular Journalist who had usurped our original article. This we politely declined, arguing that "debate" cannot prove or disprove science...science must stand on its own.
But then something unusual happened. On Dec. 13, 2007, 100 scientists jointly signed an Open Letter to Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, requesting they cease the man-made global warming hysteria and settle down to helping mankind better prepare for natural disasters. The final signature was from the President of the World Federation of Scientists.
At last, we were not alone...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Most tourists think of packing their swimwear and sun cream for a holiday Down Under.
But they could be in for more of a frosty reception after reports of groups of icebergs floating towards New Zealand and Australia.
Ships in the south Pacific Ocean are being warned to watch out for the icebergs that have split off the Antarctic ice shelves and are drifting north towards New Zealand, officials said today.
Rodney Russ, expedition leader on the tourist ship Spirit of Enderby, spotted one iceberg on Monday 57 miles northeast of Macquarie Island - around 500 miles south of New Zealand.
The iceberg was up to 500ft long and 90 ft high, he said, and the ship's radar located another large iceberg and chunks of ice floating nearby, he added.
Four other icebergs were spotted last week off Auckland Islands, 250 miles south of New Zealand and heading slowly toward the country.
Australian scientists reported another mass of 20 drifting north past Macquarie Island two weeks ago.
Glaciologist Neal Young said satellite images showed the group of icebergs, spread over a sea area of 600 by 440 miles, moving on ocean currents away from Antarctica.
Large numbers of icebergs last floated close to New Zealand in 2006, when some were visible from the coastline in the first such sighting since 1931.
It is rare for whole icebergs to drift so far north before melting, but a cold snap around southern New Zealand and favorable ocean currents have again combined to push the towering visitors to the region intact.
Scientists believe they will break up and melt rapidly as they continue northwards.
In 2000, several massive icebergs broke off from Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf and the Ronne Ice Shelf. One was around 190 miles long and 23 miles wide.
Icebergs are formed as the ice shelf develops. Snow falls on the ice sheet and forms more ice, which flows to the edges of the floating ice shelves. Eventually, pieces around the edge break off.
The unusual sight is likely to furnish evidence for both sides of the argument on global warming.
While some may say it is indicative of the world cooling others will say it shows the opposite and that the iceberg was created precisely because the planet is heating up.
Recent polls have shown that belief in global warming is waning.
Last month, Cardiff University found an increasing number of Britons are becoming more sceptical about climate change.
It found that 29 per cent believe the threat has been exaggerated - compared to just 15 per cent five years ago. One in five are hardened sceptics who believe manmade global warming is a myth.
In the U.S. polls have shown that nearly half of Americans no longer believe in global warming. Continued
and
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was reading the superb article by the writer Richard Cook on his blog here ;
when his ideas suddenly gelled with some ideas I have been working on for a while.
I call this LOCALISED CAPITALISM.
This is the construction of an entire national based banking system based on economic autarky to operate alongside the existing international capitalist banking and trading system.
This would be a 'sealed' internal British banking system based on local banks and local currencies designed soely for internal national strategic infrastructure development, to generate supply and demand for essential industrial and other sectors of the national economy, to develop local energy, agricultural and services production systems and to create local jobs and raise individual and community incomes.
This system would operate as an internal banking system sealed off from all international trading or interference.
The National Bank would supervise the functions and powers of local banks who issue local currencies.
So we have a National banking system which delivers benefits at the community level.
The entire system is double locked and protected from any external crisis in international capitalism - for the National Bank and local banks operate ONLY in the NATIONAL and the COMMUNITY interest.
This in a very basic form is my embryonic new economic model to save Britain and the British economy.
As it is a work in progress, feel free to participate and critique.
My writings are those in the middle of the excerpt from the above article of Richard Cook ;
Except…. and that’s what each person caught up in these travesties must decide. What are you going to do about it?
In mulling over this question, it would be wise to recognize that the dominance of the financial elite has largely been exercised through their control of the international monetary system based on bank lending and government debt. Therefore it’s through the monetary system that change can and must be made.
The progressives are wrong to think the government should go deeper in debt to create more jobs. This will just create an even deeper hole of debt future generations will have to crawl out of.
Rather the key is monetary reform, whether at the local or national levels. People have lost control of their ability to earn a living. But change could be accomplished through sovereign control by people and nations of the monetary means of exchange.
This control has been stolen. It is time to take it back. One way would be for the federal government to make a relief payment to each adult of $1,000 a month until the crisis lifted. This money could be earmarked for goods and services produced within the U.S. and used to capitalize a new series of community development banks. I have called this the “Cook Plan.”
The plan could be funded through direct payment from a Treasury relief account without new taxes or government borrowing. The payments would be balanced on the credit side by GDP growth or be used by individuals to pay off debt. It would be direct government spending as was done with Greenbacks before and after the Civil War without significant inflation.
( This can also be applied via the creation of a National Bank Of Britain that funds the network of local banks which run and regulate registered local currencies.
The local currencies can only be spent in locally designated areas, each note issued is monitored to ensure only stays and is spent in the local area, tax benefits accrue from saved the local currency money in local banks, each local note has designated expiry date which has to be spent in certain time period or it is erased from circulation and any trade made illegal - so each note can be monitored from its creation to destruction in order to prevent criminals abusing the system or from colonists exporting that capital out of the country.
The Bank of Britain supplies and guarantees capital deposits of local banks and payments of the National Income Payment to individuals. The money paid to registered British citizens entitled to the money would go into the accounts of the local banks who will issue the local currency to the registered individual beneficiary.
These local banks which will run this system can be all those all recently nationalised banks which were bought by the government - they can be assimilated into the new system and run their existing systems alongside the new banking system.
This money for the project comes from a Treasury Relief Account set up by the government to fund the new economic system, and with private investment bonds bought by the public with fixed rate income and with guaranteed deposits.
At same time strategic national infra-structure projects can be set up and delivered via the new integrated national banking system.
These would be national projects but run on local development agendas, such as hiring local companies and local workers and incentivisation for industrial companies to re-develop a national industrial complex to re-equip coal mines, build new power projects, supply wave power plant, etc etc.
Set up and invest in local renewable energy projects, canals, coal mines, wave farms, water mills, wind farms, community farms, community home building projects etc - these projects must employ local labour first and only British workers.
The wages paid would be pounds and also local currency money - so that local workers can buy in local shops, and so competition exists to keep prices low as an individual would have a choice to buy a local commodity with local currency income or spend their usual money and welfare cash on buying that project in the pound system eg fruit and vegetables from a local farm shop or from Tesco's or a TV from a local outlet of a British company such as Argos or from a high street shop.
Local currencies could also be spent on national businesses that are owned by and trade in Britain and that have local branches that employ local people - thereby generating both new demand and supply for British products.
The money paid to people in local currencies that could only be spent in listed shops in a specific area - eg local carpenters, plumbers, buy food in local farm shops that produce locally made goods, buy British goods and products eg TV's, fridges and other goods.
Could be paid via Community Banks to those on welfare.
We can raise welfare payments but supply this money in the form of local currencies to be used in local communities.
This is Democratic Localism in action, which in turn becomes Community Building and Industrial Re-development - using the state to knit together a new social network and nexus based on community self sufficiency.
Local businesses could apply for loans and credit , local people to set up local businesses - fund local growth and development.
Only legal and registered British citizens can apply for and recieve these local currency payments.
Money cannot be exported abroad, cannot be given to people other than local people and locally registered shops and businesses in exchange for local goods and services.
Money cannot be swopped or exchanged for pounds or other currencies - criminal offense to be a money changer or use or charge usury in the exchange of the currency for goods and services.
Fixed rate loans for long term energy projects, building local markets and consumer bases for local energy production and energy supply networks - national projects have to be based on localisation of labour and British national based sourcing of infrastructure and industry.
We will leave the money changers in charge of their temples and the international banking and global financial system of privately owned capital, stocks and shares to the bankers and private investors - what we will do alongside the existing system of corporate banking we will create a new form of Localised Capitalism, in other words we will decouple the internal national community economic and money supply system from the international system and create a national banking system that will protect us a nation, as a community and as families and individuals from the ravages and failures of the international banking system.
- 1) We set up a new Bank of Britain under a new Emergency Banking Act.
- 2) The Bank of Britain then organises the network of EXISTING nationalised banks already owned by the government to run the new network of local banks alongside their existing services.
- 3) The local banks would be authorised to issue local currencies to local people.
- 4) Issue local currencies to local people
= NATIONAL LIBERATION.
All applications for the new income have to vetted - new NI numbers issued with entitlement card to access the money.
At same restrict access to services only to registered British citizens - local money going to fund local hospitals - a revolution in health care.
Local banks will invest government funding money in local schemes to build local projects and hire local workers and companies for local projects to satisfy local needs with those funds.
150 billion a year from EU.
Plus all other savings.
Inject money into schemes for renewable / nuclear money projects. )
Another method increasingly being used within the U.S. today is local and regional credit clearing exchanges and the use of local currencies or “scrip.” Use of such currencies could be enhanced by legislation at the state and federal levels allowing these currencies to be used for payment of taxes and government fees as well as payment of mortgages and other forms of bank debt. The credit clearing exchanges could be organized as private non-profit regional currency co-operatives similar to credit unions.
These would be immediate emergency measures. In the longer run, sovereign control of money and credit must be returned to the public commons and treated as public utilities. This does not mean exclusive government control to replace bank control. As stated previously, it would be done in partnership between government and private trade exchanges. Nor does it mean government takeover of business, industry, or the banking system, though all should be regulated for the common good and fairly taxed.
This program would lead to a new monetary paradigm where money and credit would be available by, as, when, and where needed, to facilitate trade between and among legitimate producers of goods and services. In this way trade and commerce will come to serve human freedom, not diminish it as is done with today’s dysfunctional partnership between big government trillions of dollars in debt and big finance with the entire world in hock.
Such a change would be a true populist revolution.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The “climate change” theory has taken a hammering with new revelations that a Government-funded research body deliberately falsified data and tried to suppress the news that the earth’s temperature has actually been stable for the past ten years.
The latest revelations — released after an illegal email and data hack into computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (known as Hadley CRU) — indicates that scientists involved in propagating the “climate change” theory have resorted to lies, distortions, cover-ups and smears of opponents, to “prove” their theory.
The “climate change” theory has been used as a political tool against industrialised nations to increase taxes and subsidies to the Third World as “compensation.”
For example, as recently as last week, one Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), claimed that “climate change” was responsible for women in the Philippines turning to prostitution.
“The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade,” Ms Mukherjee said.
The leaked emails, from some of the most prominent scientists pushing the “climate change” theory, indicate how they have used “tricks” to cover up holes in their data.
One of the leaked emails reads (verbatim, including typos):
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Another email reveals that the scientists are aware of the fact that the earth has not been heating up as their projections have always claimed. The emails lament this fact, calling it a “travesty”:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS
09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Another email details how evidence has been suppressed:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Another email discusses how they should hide the fact that there have been periods of warming before, specifically in a period known as the “Medieval Warm Period” (MWP). This warming, which occurred during a non-industrialised era, mirrors current alleged global warming and is therefore an obvious problem for today’s theorists:
…Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…
Yet other emails discuss how to smear those scientists who are sceptical of the “climate change” theory by ensuring that their papers are not “peer reviewed” so that they can be dismissed as cranks in the media:
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?
Only last week, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that “global warming appears to have stalled.”
In an in-depth article on the topic, Der Spiegel said that “climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years.
“The earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year,” the magazine said, quoting a large number of scientists and specialists in the field.
“At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences told Der Speigel. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”
“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community,” Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg added. “We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point.”
Allegations over “climate change” have been used in recent years to make all manner of outrageous demands for compensation from the West’s taxpayers. It has even been used as an excuse why Europe should be obliged to accept “climate change refugees” from the Third World.
The latest revelations will add fuel to the fire of those who consider the entire theory to be bogus and politically motivated.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is just one example of the hundreds of documents and thousands of emails that have been recovered from Britain’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, we noted earlier.
This is a pamphlet (a pdf file) from a company called Futerra, which claims to be “the sustainability communications agency”:
The Rules Of The Game
Evidence base for the Climate Change Communications Strategy
The game is communicating climate change; the rules will help us win it.
Futerra – Recommendations to the Climate Change Communications Working Group:
The principles of climate change communication
Why were the principles created?
The game is communicating climate change; the rules will help us win it.
These principles were created as part of the UK Climate Change Communications Strategy, an evidence-based strategy aiming to change public attitudes towards climate change in the UK. This is a ‘short version’ of a far longer document of evidence that can be found at www.defra.gov.uk.
There is plenty of evidence relating to attitudes towards and behaviour on climate change, general environmental behaviour change and the whole issue of sustainable development communication. As we reviewed the research for these principles, one ‘überprinciple’ emerged:
"Changing attitudes towards climate change is not like selling a particular brand of soap – it’s like convincing someone to use soap in the first place."
At first glance, some of the principles may seem counter-intuitive to those who have been working on sustainable development or climate change communications for many years. Some confront dearly cherished beliefs about what works; a few even seem to attack the values or principles of sustainable development itself.
However, these principles are a first step to using sophisticated behaviour change modelling and comprehensive evidence from around the world to change attitudes towards climate change. We need to think radically, and the Rules of the Game are a sign that future campaigns will not be ‘business as usual’. This is a truly exciting moment.
For the full evidence for these rules, and the climate change communications strategy itself, please visit: www.defra.gov.uk
For the new UK sustainable development strategy please visit: www.sustainable-development.gov.uk
1. blowing away myths
Many of the oft-repeated communications methods and messages of sustainable development have been dismissed by mainstream communicators, behaviour change experts and psychologists. Before we go into what works, our principles make a ‘clean sweep’ of what doesn’t:
1. Challenging habits of climate change communication
Don’t rely on concern about children’s future or human survival instincts
Recent surveys show that people without children may care more about climate change than those with children. "Fight or flight" human survival instincts have a time limit measured in minutes – they are of little use for a change in climate measured in years.
Don’t create fear without agency
Fear can create apathy if individuals have no ‘agency’ to act upon the threat. Use fear with great caution.
Don’t attack or criticise home or family
It is unproductive to attack that which people hold dear.
2. forget the climate change detractors
Those who deny climate change science are irritating, but unimportant. The argument is not about if we should deal with climate change, but how we should deal with climate change.
3. There is no ‘rational man’
The evidence discredits the ‘rational man’ theory – we rarely weigh objectively the value of different decisions and then take the clear self-interested choice.
4. Information can’t work alone
Providing information is not wrong; relying on information alone to change attitudes is wrong. Remember also that messages about saving money are important, but not that important.
2. a new way of thinking
Once we’ve eliminated the myths, there is room for some new ideas. These principles relate to some of the key ideas emerging from behaviour change modelling for sustainable development:
5. Climate change must be ‘front of mind’ before persuasion works
Currently, telling the public to take notice of climate change is as successful as selling tampons to men. People don’t realise (or remember) that climate change relates to them.
6. Use both peripheral and central processing
Attracting direct attention to an issue can change attitudes, but peripheral messages can be just as effective: a tabloid snapshot of Gwyneth Paltrow at a bus stop can help change attitudes to public transport.
7. Link climate change mitigation to positive desires/aspirations
Traditional marketing associates products with the aspirations of their target audience. Linking climate change mitigation to home improvement, self-improvement, green spaces or national pride are all worth investigating.
8. Use transmitters and social learning
People learn through social interaction, and some people are better teachers and trendsetters than others. Targeting these people will ensure that messages seem more trustworthy and are transmitted more effectively.
9. Beware the impacts of cognitive dissonance
Confronting someone with the difference between their attitude and their actions on climate change will make them more likely to change their attitude than their actions.
3 linking policy and style communications principles
These principles clearly deserve a separate section. All the evidence is clear – sometimes aggressively so – that ‘communications in the absence of policy’ will precipitate the failure of any climate change communications campaign right from the start:
10. Everyone must use a clear and consistent explanation of climate change
The public knows that climate change is important, but is less clear on exactly what it is and how it works.
11. Government policy and communications on climate change must be consistent
Don’t ‘build in’ inconsistency and failure from the start.
4 audience principles
In contrast to the myths, this section suggests some principles that do work. These principles are likely to lead directly to a set of general messages, although each poses a significant implementation challenge:
12. Create ‘agency’ for combating climate change
Agency is created when people know what to do, decide for themselves to do it, have access to the infrastructure in which to act, and understand that their contribution is important.
13. Make climate change a ‘home’ not ‘away’ issue
Climate change is a global issue, but we will feel its impact at home – and we can act on it at home.
14. Raise the status of climate change mitigation behaviours
Research shows that energy efficiency behaviours can make you seem poor and unattractive. We must work to overcome these emotional assumptions.
15. Target specific groups
A classic marketing rule, and one not always followed by climate change communications from government and other sources.
5 style principles
These principles lend some guidance on the evidence of stylistic themes that have a high chance of success:
16. Create a trusted, credible, recognised voice on climate change
We need trusted organisations and individuals that the media can call upon to explain the implications of climate change to the UK public.
17. Use emotions and visuals
Another classic marketing rule: changing behaviour by disseminating information doesn’t always work, but emotions and visuals usually do.
6 effective management
These principles are drawn primarily from the experience of others, both in their successes and in the problems they faced:
18. The context affects everything
The prioritisation of these principles must be subject to ongoing assessments of the UK climate change situation.
19. The communications must be sustained over time
All the most successful public awareness campaigns have been sustained consistently over many years.
20. Partnered delivery of messages will be more successful
Experience shows that partnered delivery is often a key component for projects that are large, complex and have many stakeholders.
"First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win." Mahatma Gandhi
If you are inspired or sceptical, have questions or want to know more, then please contact: sustainability communications
020 7733 6363
Please read this carefully. It is deeply chilling.
And, with just a few minor changes, it could have been written by any bureaucrat in the propaganda ministry of the Third Reich. Certainly the techniques are much the same.
Some enterprising people at ‘An Elegant Chaos’ have put together a search engine for the Climate Research Unit (CRU) files. You can also just browse the emails at that site.
You can also download a .zip compacted file of the entire CRU stash of emails and documents from S&L’s server by clicking here.
However, be aware that it is quite a large 63.29 MB file, so it may take some time to download.
Related Articles:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The BBC loves to talk about wind farms, but not about the glaring matter of their costly inefficiency.
When the BBC runs one of its propaganda campaigns in favour of windfarms, as Farming Today was again doing recently, the only point of interest is how many of the basic facts they leave out. One thing they invariably try to conceal is how derisory is the amount of electricity these windmills produce.
Although Farming Today interviewed one of the sternest technical critics of wind turbines, Dr John Etherington, a retired environmental academic who has just published an excellent book on the nuts and bolts of wind power, they asked him with seemingly wide-eyed disbelief how he could justify his claim that turbines generate less than 30 per cent of their capacity.
Yet, as any half-way competent journalist should know, this information is freely available on the climate change department's website. The very last thing the BBC ever wants to admit – though the information is available from the same source – is that the total amount of power produced by all the 2,300 turbines so far built in Britain amounts on average to a mere 900 megawatts, barely the output of a single medium-size conventional power station.
The other point the BBC is always careful to conceal is how much money the developers make from these windmills, thanks to the near 100 per cent hidden subsidy we all pay them through our electricity bills. Farming Today was quite happy to encourage farmers to lease their land by telling them that they could hope to make up to £20,000 a year from each 2 megawatt turbine. What they did not explain was that the same turbine will yield its developer around £400,000 a year –a cool £10 million over its 25-year life. Something else Farming Today neglected to mention was the title of Dr Etherington's book, The Wind Farm Scam.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Data that has been hacked from the Hadley Centre’s Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University – one of the principal academic centres behind anthropogenic global warming theory – appears to reveal an international conspiracy of scientific experts to distort, falsify or suppress evidence in order to exaggerate man-made global warming, and also to vilify AGW sceptics in order to rubbish and bury their own evidence.
If true, a revealed systematic fraud of this magnitude will surely not only bury AGW once and for all but, as Philip Stott anxiously observes, this ultimately inevitable outcome may well bring all of science into disrepute as a result.
The web is alight with excitement over the hacked data. A word of caution, however – although the CRU’s director Philip Jones has confirmed that the material is genuine, with so much of the hacked material now floating around it is possible that some or all of it may take on a different complexion in its true context.
On the face of it, however, it looks extremely damning. Read about it below:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carbon taxes will provide the EU with its own revenue stream
This has been the Global Warming Scam from the offset !
Therefore it seems logical now why the hackers have dug in the servers of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and published the files, including some personal messages, on the internet.
No doubt as we contemplate the figure who has rocketed from obscurity to became "the President of Europe", we have all made silly little jokes about "Mr Rumpy".
After the eight tortuous years it has taken to get the "Constitution for Europe" into place, with all the talk of how vital it was for the EU to have a figurehead to represent Europe on the world stage as the equivalent of the President of the United States, some may now think of the poet Horace's famous line, parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus ("the mountains are in labour, and will give birth to a ridiculous mouse").
But it would be wrong to underestimate Herman Van Rompuy, the first permament president of the European Council. This Belgian economist is a clever and ruthless political operator. Once, to win a political battle, he changed the locks to prevent his opponents entering a crucial meeting. (For details of his character, see the Brussels Journal blog by one of his former colleagues, Paul Belien.)
And the reason why he was very much the preferred candidate of the European Commission is that the one thing for which President Van Rompuy can be relied on is a determination to use all his crafty skills to further the power of our new government in Brussels.
At the heart of the "European project", there has always been one core goal in all it does – to absorb ever more of the powers of national governments into the centre. And almost the only thing we know about Mr Van Rompuy's ambitions in his new office is that he wants "more Europe".
Much of his wish list may have been drearily familiar ever since the Addenino report of 1985: more flying of the "ring of stars" flag, more singing of the "European anthem", EU number plates on cars, EU identity cards.
But the one thing the EU has needed to make its powers complete, and which not even its Constitution could give, was the power to levy its own direct taxes. It is no accident that this is now at the top of Mr Van Rompouy's list – nor that the way in which he plans to raise those taxes is by levying new charges on every kind of activity that emits CO2.
Way back in1991, Brussels first proclaimed its intention to give a "moral lead" to the world in "combating climate change". The following year it published plans for an EU-wide "carbon tax".
Ever since, saving the planet has risen steadily higher on the EU's agenda, as the perfect idealistic cause to justify more new laws – from the landfill directive that has reduced our rubbish collection to chaos, to the legislation that forces us to encumber our countryside with useless wind turbines, and to use nasty, inefficient, mercury-filled light bulbs.
Still the one thing lacking, despite that 1992 proposal for a carbon tax, has been some way to harness this noble cause to provide an almost limitless source of money for the EU itself.
How appropriate then that the coming into force of the EU's constitution should bring to power a man who wishes to see the EU funded entirely from taxes designed to save the world from global warming.
Unfortunately for the President, this has come to pass at just the moment when the scare over global warming is beginning to run out of steam.
The science behind it looks increasingly shaky as the world heads for a Copenhagen conference which, as even its organisers admit, is unlikely to produce anything resembling the much tougher successor to Kyoto that they have striven for so long.
In other words, just when little Mr Rumpy imagines that he has found the Holy Grail of Brussels – an income source that will give the EU more money than it could ever have dreamed of – the cause he is relying on to provide the unlimited bonanza is itself beginning to disintegrate.
As many might think, how neat it would be if both of these great edifices founded on wishful thinking should collapse together, leaving our new Mr President gazing forlornly from the bridge of his slowly sinking ship.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Warmists Propaganda Continues but the reality of flooding is due to bad planning and over development a result of overpopulation in a tiny crowded Nation! Don't blame the People.. It's Government legislation!
Britain should brace itself for more tropical-style deluges of the kind that wreaked havoc on Cockermouth, according to climate experts.
They warn that, although no single event can be attributed to climate change, the warming of the atmosphere caused by greenhouse gases means such disasters will become more frequent.
“We need to follow the example of tropical cities like Kuala Lumpur and Singapore where flooding is a regular event,” said Roger Falconer, professor of water management at Cardiff University.
“They have huge flood drains and roads, all designed to channel water away from danger areas. Britain must learn to think the same way.”
Such warnings are in line with recent studies into how Britain’s climate may change. They suggest summers will become drier and warmer, but winters will be marked by storms, strong winds and more deluges.
Some fear that is already happening. From the 1960s until the 1990s, floods were a rarity in Britain. It meant that when floods struck across the Midlands in 1998, the country was unprepared.
A subsequent government inquiry led by Peter Bye criticised the Environment Agency, then just two years old, and called on it to set up an early warning system.
That system was tested to the limit when floods struck again in 2000, hitting communities stretching from Sussex to Wales.
A further inquiry found that many of the flooded areas were linked to uncontrolled development on flood plains. That led to new planning controls.
There were more hard lessons in January 2005 when Carlisle was devastated by floods that killed three people and forced thousands from their homes.
That was followed by the 2007 floods that hit Tewkesbury, Hull and Doncaster, this time threatening power stations, water supplies and telecommunications.
What the 2005 and 2007 floods also showed was the human cost, with many Carlisle and Hull residents forced to leave their homes for months. Around Britain, some 5m people live in flood-prone areas.
What lies behind the spate of floods? Edmund Penning-Rowsell, professor of geography and director of Middlesex University’s flood hazard research centre, said it was clear that floods were getting more frequent.
He said: “The country has been through wet periods like this before so we still cannot be sure it is climate change, but it fits with the projections and we should expect it to continue.”
Dave Britton, a spokesman for the Met Office, said: “In the UK the projections do suggest this will happen more often. When the atmosphere is warmer it can evaporate more water from the sea and it can hold more moisture. The result is storms and heavy rainfall.”
Part of the answer could lie in huge civil engineering projects. The Royal Academy of Engineering held a conference on “extreme flooding” earlier this month at which it discussed ideas such as building huge storm drains under roads.
Others believe the scale of such events is so huge that Britain must rethink its entire attitude. That means accepting that some flooding is inevitable and putting more effort into educating people living in risk areas.
Cockermouth illustrates the point, with the Environment Agency spending £600,000 on new defences in 1999 and another £100,000 after floods in 2005. These defences were swamped last week.
Phil Rothwell, head of flood strategy at the Environment Agency, said the average cost of refurbishing a house after a flood was £28,000.
He said: “If climate predictions are right, we are going to have more of these heavy rainfall events inundating more areas. As a nation we have to get used to that and manage things differently.
“The future is not about hard engineering. We can’t stop these kinds of floods and, in any case, the nation doesn’t want us to turn its rivers into canals hidden behind huge embankments.”
The Cockermouth floods coincide with some major developments in flood planning. Next month sees the implementation of the EU floods directive which obliges all member countries to prepare for the growing flood risk associated with climate change.
In Britain, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is trying to push the Flood and Water Management Bill through parliament before the next election.
The bill is based on Sir Michael Pitt’s review of the 2007 floods and obliges local authorities to deal with local flood risks, while putting the Environment Agency in charge of national strategy.
The Cumbrian floods could give that bill added impetus. Nick Herbert, the Conservative shadow environment secretary, this weekend said he would support government efforts to pass it into law before next May.
For the people of Cockermouth such measures will, however, seem largely irrelevant as they try to rebuild their lives and homes after the recent destruction.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scientists at a British climate- change research centre discussed ways of dodging Freedom of Information Act requests to release temperature data, it is claimed.
Leaked emails and documents appear to show that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit conspired to keep opponents in
The private messages have been seized upon by climate-change sceptics, who claim one email includes an admittance that robust data to prove the world is warming up simply doesn't exist, and that data which did not support global warming was deliberately suppressed.
The embarrassing emails came to light after hackers targeted the CRU and published the files. Many are from the unit's director, Professor Phil Jones, including one in which he appears to suggest using a 'trick' to massage years of temperature data to 'hide the decline'.
In another, he says: 'I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperat
It seems to show how scientists were able to persuade the FOI officer that requests from a climate- change sceptic, Stephen McIntyre, who runs a website called Climate Audit, should not be treated seriously.
'When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests,' the email says. 'It took a couple of half-hour sessions to convince them otherwise.
'Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA became very supportive. I've got to know the FOI person quite well and the chief librarian - who deals with appeals.'
Another email seems to show that the CRU discussed ways of evading the Freedom of Information Act entirely. The act allows organisations to decline requests for information if the requests are 'repeated or vexatious'.
A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said: 'The selective publication of some stolen emails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way.'
Professor Jones confirmed that the email in which he talked of a 'trick' was genuine. He said: 'The word 'trick' was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.'
Don't any of you three tell anyone that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!'
A further email from Mr Jones raises questions over how the Freedom of Information process was being adhered to at the university.
(28-01-2010)
The world's leading climate change scientists have been caught out making unfounded claims about global warming for the second time in just over a week.
Experts appointed by the United Nations said rising temperatures were to blame for an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
But it has emerged that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based the statement, made in 2007, on an unpublished report that had not been properly reviewed by other scientists.
The report's author has since withdrawn the claim, saying there is not enough evidence to link climate change to worsening natural disasters, and criticised the use of his data as 'completely misleading'.
It follows the IPCC's admission that it was wrong to state in its influential 2007 Fourth Assessment Report that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
That assertion was based on ' speculation' featured in an eight-year-old article in New Scientist magazine.
The latest revelation means more embarrassment for the climate change lobby because worsening natural disasters were a central plank of arguments at the recent UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Barack Obama used the claims when he said last autumn: 'More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.'
Climate change minister Ed Miliband has claimed that floods such as those which devastated parts of Cumbria last year could be widespread if global warming goes unchecked.
He said last month: 'Events in Cumbria give a foretaste of the kind of weather runaway climate change could bring. Abroad, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of south Asia could put millions of people at risk of drought.'
The IPCC's 2007 report said the world had 'suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s', suggesting global warming was to blame.
But the claim was taken from a then unpublished report by Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at London-based consultancy Risk Management Solutions.
When Dr Muir-Wood released the report he added the caveat: 'We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses [damage caused by natural disasters].'
The IPCC said it would investigate the false claim and could withdraw it.
Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the IPCC, said: 'We are re-assessing the evidence and will publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings.'
Dr Muir-Wood attacked the way his evidence was used. He said: 'The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is completely misleading. We could not tell if it was just an association or cause and effect. 'Also, our study included 2004 and 2005 which was when there were some major hurricanes. If you took those years away then the significance of climate change vanished.'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(17-01-2010)
A BBC weather forecaster has suggested that the Met Office's super-computer has a 'warm bias' which has stopped it predicting bitterly cold spells like the one we have just endured.
Paul Hudson said the error may have crept into the computer's climate model as a result of successive years of milder weather.
His claim was rejected by the Met Office but other experts said there could be flaws in the system, which was first developed 50 years ago.
In a blog, the BBC Look North presenter writes: 'Clearly there is the rest of January and February to go, but such has been the intensity of the cold spell...it would take something remarkable for the Met Office's forecast (of a mild winter) to be right.
'It is also worth remembering that this comes off the back of the now infamous barbecue summer forecast.
'Could the model, seemingly with an inability to predict colder seasons, have developed a warm bias, after such a long period of milder than average years?'
The Met Office produces its forecasts by feeding information from sources, including satellites and weather stations, into a 'climate model'. A set of complex equations then predict weather changes.
Mr Hudson appears to be suggesting that data recorded over the past decade of warmer winters could be unduly influencing the computer's calculations.
However, the Met Office denies this, saying 'any small biases' are automatically corrected before it issues seasonal forecasts.
Really? So how come they can't predict weather a week in advance accurately let alone years? and then they label their cock-up's as a phenomena! Next they will be telling us the coming cooling is the work of supernatural entities! (Ed)
The rumpus comes as the BBC considers dropping the Met Office forecasts after almost 90 years.
The contract runs out in April and the broadcaster has been in talks with the New Zealand forecasters, Metra.
Again, accuracy is the issue, with the Met Office coming under severe criticism over the prediction of a barbeque summer last July. The UK suffered a washout.
And its forecast of a mild winter attracted derision as temperatures plunged to as low as -22C in parts of Britain.
A poll commissioned by the Sunday Times this weekend found that 74 per cent of people saying they believed forecasts were inaccurate.
However, the Met Office staff are still in line for a bonus, with a muted pot of £1m to share out.
Metra already produces graphics for the BBC including the 3D weather map that brough complaints when it was introduced in 2005.
A Metra source is quoted as telling the Sunday Times: 'The BBC is not very happy with the service it has been getting from the Met Office, it thinks it's too expensive. We have the ability to provide a bespoke service that will undercut it.
'Because we already produce graphics we've got a foot in the door, so we're optimistic.'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(16-01-2010)
What makes the Met Office forecast seasons of unusual warmth while the weather obstinately provides record-breaking cold, asks Christopher Booker
Barely a month after last predicting, on November 28, that Britain would enjoy "a milder than average winter", the Met Office last week came in for yet another mighty pasting, for failing to forecast the renewed snowfalls and freezing temperatures which brought traffic to a halt again in much of the country. In some northern towns, roadways were so icy that people had to crawl across them on hands and knees.
Two independent forecasters who did foresee the return of Arctic weather, and are predicting that there will be more, are Britain's Piers Corbyn (who relies on solar activity for much of his prediction) and the US meteorologist Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather, who largely bases his forecasts on movements of air and ocean currents. Unlike the UK Met Office, of which both are highly critical, neither has been blinded by imagining that rising levels of carbon dioxide play a key part in shaping the weather.