Shock: SMH publishes sceptical climate article

27 January, 2010 by

Turning sceptical?

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are to the global warming religion what L Ron Hubbard is to scientology, so to see even a few shards of agnosticism creeping in is fairly surprising, and encouraging:

The claims made about the science have been rash, asserting dogmatic certainty about human-induced warming when the reality is that the overall picture is quite unclear. This has now backfired, with the IPCC admitting mistakes in its 2007 report, and the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, which the IPCC has drawn heavily upon, shown to have been, at the least, devious in the results it has made public.

There may be some link between the rashness of the global warming campaign and the haplessness of the politics that has followed. The best current bet is that, after Copenhagen, emission controls is dead as a serious international issue. And further, only some environmental disaster that can be convincingly linked to climate change will rekindle it. The ”sceptics” have won the politics.

The clumsy politics is international and local. An emissions trading scheme, as proposed by the Australian Government, is very bad policy. It is a form of taxation on carbon under another name. To tax carbon will lead to thousands of pages of regulation – a godsend to bureaucracy, but paralysing for initiative and industry.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

The billion dollar hoax

27 January, 2010 by

Herald Sun

Andrew Bolt, writing in the Herald Sun, sums up the recent climate debacles:

ONCE global warming was the “great moral challenge of our generation”. Or so claimed the Prime Minister.

But suddenly it’s the great con that’s falling to bits around Kevin Rudd’s ears.

In fact, so fast is global warming theory collapsing that in his flurry of recent speeches to outline his policies for the new decade, Rudd has barely mentioned his “moral challenge” at all.

Take his long Australia Day reception speech on Sunday. Rudd talked of our ageing population and of building stuff, of taxes, hospitals and schools – but dared not say one word about the booga booga he used to claim could destroy our economy, Kakadu, the Great Barrier Reef and 750,000 coastal homes.

What’s happened?

Answer: in just the past few months has come a cascade of evidence that the global warming scare is based on often dodgy science and even outright fraud.

Here are just the top 10 new signs that catastrophic man-made warming may be just another beat-up, like swine flu, SARS, and the Y2K bug.

  1. Climategate
  2. The Copenhagen Farce
  3. The Himalayan Scare
  4. Pachauri’s response
  5. Pachauri’s conflicts
  6. The green hand revealed
  7. More fake IPCC claims
  8. New research on our gases
  9. New Australian research
  10. The world still won’t warm

Read it all here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Garnaut urges Rudd to call early climate change election

26 January, 2010 by

Enough, already

Much as I dislike having to post about the over-exposed Ross Garnaut (who we are all thoroughly sick of), it is unfortunately necessary in this case, as he is urging Kevin Rudd to call a double dissolution election in order to get the ETS passed. I guess that would be to try and scare the Opposition into supporting it, is it? Well, we have news for you, mate: bring it on.

If Rudd thinks he can win an election on climate change, after the disaster in Copenhagen, after the warmist camp and the IPCC have been shaken to their very foundations by Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate and all the other “gates” that will happen in the next few months, after Pachauri has been shown to be hopelessly mired in conflict in his role as IPCC head, after the ETS has been exposed as a pointless tax that will do nothing for the environment, then he is even more deluded than we give him credit for.

Actually, Kevin Rudd hasn’t even mentioned climate change this year! Not once! Hardly the sign of a top priority policy is it? But Garnaut wades in anyway, and the ABC lurves it:

Professor Garnaut says it is unlikely this Parliament will support the legislation, so the Government should consider calling a double dissolution election.

“One would have to say at the moment, there’s not much prospect for this Parliament, so it will take a double dissolution election,” he told ABC Radio’s AM program.

“Or it can put the legislation to a new parliament with a different Senate after July 1, 2011. There’s the two options.

“I think that there should be support for the Government if it presses ahead with the double dissolution, but obviously it’s got lots of calculations to make there.”

Professor Garnaut also backed a Greens proposal for an interim scheme which would set the price of carbon at $20 a tonne while negotiations continue for a permanent ETS.

“Let’s not kid ourselves that we’re ahead of the game – there’s no danger of that. Lots of countries are doing major things,” he said. [Just look at Europe, struggling to keep its population warm in freezing temperatures because energy prices have gone through the roof – Ed]

“At this stage we’re one of the laggards. And us coming up with a field and ceasing to be a laggard would help the debate in the United States.” [The US legislation is virtually sunk, and nothing Australia does will make the slightest bit of difference, pal – Ed]

Back to planet earth, you can read the rest of it here (if you really must).

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Today's "Gate" – Amazongate

26 January, 2010 by

Still there?

Another day, another spurious paper from IPCC AR4, as reported by James Delingpole in the UK Telegraph:

AGW theory is toast. So’s Dr Rajendra Pachauri. So’s the Stern Review. So’s the credibility of the IPCC. But if you think I’m cheered by this you’re very much mistaken. I’m trying to write a Climategate book but the way things are going by the time I’m finished there won’t be anything left to say: the battle will already have been won and the only people left who still believe in Man Made Global Warming will be the eco-loon equivalents of those wartime Japanese soldiers left abandoned and forgotten on remote Pacific atolls.

Here’s the latest development, courtesy of Dr Richard North – and it’s a cracker. It seems that, not content with having lied to us about shrinking glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and rising sea levels, the IPCC’s latest assessment report also told us a complete load of porkies [Cockney rhyming slang, “pork pie” = lie – Ed] about the danger posed by climate change to the Amazon rainforest.

This is to be found in Chapter 13 of the Working Group II report, the same part of the IPCC fourth assessment report in which the “Glaciergate” claims are made. There, is the startling claim that:

At first sight, the reference looks kosher enough but, following it through, one sees:

This, then appears to be another WWF report, carried out in conjunction with the IUCN – The International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The link given is no longer active, but the report is on the IUCN website here. Furthermore, the IUCN along with WWF is another advocacy group and the report is not peer-reviewed. According to IPCC rules, it should not have been used as a primary source.

There’s much more. Read it here. There is also a list of other WWF papers cited in IPCC AR4 at No Frakking Consensus.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Andy Pitman's laughable excuses "why the sceptics are winning"

25 January, 2010 by

Feels hard done by

They don’t, interestingly, include the obvious one: the “consensus” science is riddled with errors, fudged data and spin, is hugely politicised, and the IPCC is starting to resemble a bunch of losers who will be so discredited that they won’t be able to show their faces in polite society for decades. No, Prof Pitman (UNSW) chooses to avoid that one, clearly missing the irony of trying to make this point so soon after Climategate, Glaciergate and Hurricanegate, and all the other “-gates” yet to come.

So here they are, in all their gruesome glory (from the ABC… where else?):

  • “Sceptics are so well funded, and so well organised” – so the $70 billion or so thrown at alarmist scientists to try to prove AGW since the mid 1990s (which, by the way, they still haven’t managed to do) is just loose change, I guess? Are you admitting that the alarmists are a disorganised rabble?
  • “They have nothing else to do. They don’t have day jobs…” – [so ludicrous that no comment is required – Ed]
  • “…so they can put all their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science to the general public” – Sorry, but we can’t hold a candle to your celebrity warm-mongers like Al Gore, James Hansen, Tim Flannery, Robyn Williams etc etc (continued p 94). They’re the real misinformation experts here.

And then the best one of all [cue violins]:

  • “All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily, for no funding and no pay, whereas the sceptics are being funded to put out full-scale misinformation campaigns and are doing a damn good job, I think.”

Doesn’t it just make your heart bleed? I mean this guy must be on another planet. The climate alarmist movement must be one of the most well funded scientific bandwagon in the history of the freaking planet! And the media happily print anything they say, without question. Try getting a sceptical article printed anywhere in the mainstream media. Oh per-lease, as they say. And of course, in the spirit of full disclosure, the ABC points out that Prof Pitman is co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

Andy Pitman’s home pages are here, by the way, with an email address in case any of ACM’s readers would like to send a donation, or a pair of socks or something.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Glacier claims won grants for TERI

25 January, 2010 by

TERI

The Sunday Times reports, via The Australian, that the dodgy glacier claims were used in an application by Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) to win funding worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It just keeps getting worse:

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to $US500,000 ($555,000) by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a $US4 million EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

The revelation comes just a week after London newspaper The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 — an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week, a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

However, the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI. One of them, announced earlier this month, resulted in the $US500,000 grant from Carnegie. An extract from the grant application published on Carnegie’s website said: “The Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate.

“One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region ‘will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming, resulting in widespread water shortages’.”

The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into “the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region” as the glaciers began to disappear. Dr Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

The money was initially given to the Global Centre, an Icelandic foundation that then channelled it to TERI.

The cash was acknowledged by TERI in a news release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Dr Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt. It said: “According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades.”

The same release also quoted Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

Professor Hasnain now heads Dr Pachauri’s glaciology unit at TERI, which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacial research.

What a tangled web. Who would possibly have thought, just a few months ago, that the credibility of the IPCC and Pachauri himself could have disintegrated so thoroughly in such a short time.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

IPCC "wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters"

24 January, 2010 by

Times Online

What shall we call this one? Hurricanegate? Not content with basing claims in an IPCC report on factoids about glaciers found on the back of matchboxes, it now appears that the IPCC has also wrongly linked global warming to increasing frequency and severity of disasters such as hurricanes and floods. The only thing that is increasing are the floods of misinformation and spin being discovered in supposedly “settled science”:

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

…

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”.

It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: “One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.”

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.

Typical. Just like buses, you wait ages for an IPCC scandal, and then two come along at once. In fact, I will wager that there is a whole fleet about to exit the bus station, as thousands of independent scientists and bloggers tear AR4 apart.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

IPCC: Glacier data included "to pressure policymakers"

24 January, 2010 by

As Anthony Watts puts it, the IPCC is damaged goods and Pachauri is toast. From the UK Daily Mail:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

UK Parliament in investigate Climategate

24 January, 2010 by

CRU investigation

The terms of reference are certainly wide:

The Science and Technology Committee today announces an inquiry into the unauthorised publication of data, emails and documents relating to the work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA). The Committee has agreed to examine and invite written submissions on three questions:

—What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

—Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?

—How independent are the other two international data sets?

The Committee intends to hold an oral evidence session in March 2010.

There are some very encouraging words there: “integrity of scientific research” stands out, plus a look at the other temperature sets! Let’s see if the UK Parliament can live up to our expectations.

Read the press release here. (h/t WUWT)

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Climate sense from Piers Ackerman

24 January, 2010 by

Climate sense

Writing in the Daily Telegraph:

The Prime Minister is left with his September 2008 claim: “After a long period of inaction, we have drawn a line in the sand on climate change. We recognise it as the greatest economic, environmental and moral challenge of our time.”

The day after Rudd declared delay on action on global warming to be “irresponsible” and “reckless”, he told a press conference in Brisbane that Copenhagen was the “clear cut” destination point.

“The end point of that,” he said, “will decide whether or not as a world community we’re serious about the future of the planet.”

The world community, through the UN, has just sent him a message. It doesn’t think the future of the planet is in as serious a plight as he believes. It doesn’t think he is on the right page on global warming.

It has decided that Copenhagen and the hysterical approach to climate change promoted by Rudd and a few others bent on transferring the wealth of the Western nations to the developing world was an over-the-top solution to a problem that increasingly appears to have been based on phoney figures, manipulated data and dodgy science.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:
«Previous Page
Next Page»