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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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NASA: Global warming continues unabated

23 January, 2010 by

Hansen (L), Homer (R)

So screams the headline on News.com.au, which then breathlessly reports:

THE past decade was the warmest ever on Earth, according to a new analysis of global surface temperatures released by NASA. The US space agency also found that 2009 was the second-warmest year on record since modern temperature measurements began in 1880. Last year was only a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest yet, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with the other hottest years, which have all occurred since 1998. According to James Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, global temperatures change due to variations in ocean heating and cooling. “When we average temperature over five or 10 years to minimise that variability, we find global warming is continuing unabated,” Mr Hansen said. (source)

Warmest ever? On earth??! Was someone around 8000 years ago with a thermometer at the peak of the Holocene climate optimum? Hysterical nonsense. The Medieval Warm Period (just 1000 years ago) and the Roman Warm Period were almost certainly warmer, and it says nothing of previous warming events. Only later do they concede that modern records began just 130 years ago (a blink of an eye in geological terms). Let’s remember who we’re dealing with here. NASA’s GISS is headed up by James Hansen, an über-alarmist who would do anything to keep the global warming bandwagon rolling. GISS is based on surface temperature records which are “homogenised” (i.e. adjusted) to take account of various factors, but guess what, the adjustments are almost always upwards! Gee, that’s a surprise! And recently it has been revealed that many surface stations are simply left out of the surface temperature record – especially the cooler ones… For example, Bolivia has no stations whatsoever contributing to the GISS temperature record. So the temperature for Bolivia, which includes snow capped peaks and high cold deserts, is just “made up” from readings 1200 km away i.e the beaches of Chile, Peru and of course the Amazon jungle (see here)! The only reliable temperature indication today is the satellite record, which shows no significant warming since 2001:

No statistically significant warming since 2001

And in any event, what’s the big deal about this decade being warmer than the last? It’s hardly surprising considering we’re coming out of a mini Ice Age just a few hundred years ago. But that would spoil a good story, wouldn’t it? And in a great twist, James Delingpole reports that Hansen has put his stamp of approval on an enviro-loony tome:

Reader Michael Potts has drawn my attention to yet further evidence of Dr Hansen’s radical, virulently anti-democratic instincts. He has lent his support to an eco-fascist book advising on ways to destroy western industrialisation through propaganda, guile and outright sabotage. In a scary new book called Time’s Up – whose free online version titled A Matter Of Scale you can read here – author Keith Farnish claims:

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization.

Like so many deep greens, Farnish looks forward to the End Times with pornographic relish (masquerading as mild reasonableness):

I’m rarely afraid of stating the truth, but some truths are far harder to give than others; one of them is that people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses. Step outside of civilization and you stand a pretty good chance of surviving the inevitable; stay inside and when the crash happens there may be nothing at all you can do to save yourself. The speed and intensity of the crash will depend an awful lot on the number of people who are caught up in it: greater numbers of people have more structural needs – such as food production, power generation and healthcare – which need to be provided by the collapsing civilization; greater numbers of people create more social tension and more opportunity for extremism and violence; greater numbers of people create more sewage, more waste, more bodies – all of which cause further illness and death.

He believes – as the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt does – that mankind is a blot on the landscape and that breeding (or for that matter, existence) should be discouraged:

In short, the greatest immediate risk to the population living in the conditions created by Industrial Civilization is the population itself. Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity. That is one reason for there to be fewer people, providing you are planning on staying within civilization – I really wouldn’t recommend it, though.

Among his proposed solutions to this problem are wanton destruction:

Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage.

Needless to say, our friend Dr James Hansen thinks this book is the bees knees. Here is his puff on the Amazon website:

Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the ’system’ is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests – they will not look after our and the planet’s well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort.

Nice. Read it all here.

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