Breaking: Henrik Svensmark collapses in live TV debate

14 December, 2009 by

Henrik Svensmark

Henrik Svensmark

Henrik Svensmark is one of the key scientists responsible for advancing solar theories of global warming. Reports are that he was participating in a live debate on Danish TV when he collapsed, apparently from a heart attack.

More to follow.

UPDATE: Apparently, Svensmark has a pacemaker which kicked in when his heart rate dropped. So it probably wasn’t a heart attack at all, but an arrhythmia. He is now in hospital in a stable condition.

We send our best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Filed Under: Climate

Peter Spencer: hunger strike against carbon scandal

14 December, 2009 by

Peter Spencer

Peter Spencer

Peter Spencer is on the 23rd day of a hunger strike, on a 2 metre platform 10 metres off the ground. As Crikey explains:

Peter says that Federal Government has declared his 5,385 hectare property a carbon Sink without compensating him. Peter had never wanted to clear his land, but under the vegetation management act the entire property is rendered off limits to any form of development.

These effected Australian farmers have been responsible for virtually the entire burden of the Nation’s greenhouse gas emission reductions but their efforts worth billions of dollars have not been recognized or financially rewarded.

These farming families have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about 70 million tonnes since 1990 and by 2010 the saving will be about 83.7million tonnes. To put that into context that is equivalent to eliminating the entire annual emissions of New Zealand or Ireland. Over that same period of time emissions from energy and transport have continued to skyrocket.

Hide the takings

Peter’s hunger strike has gathered support from grassroots people from Australia, the US, UK, Pakistan and Malaysia. On the Peter Spencer Hunger Strike causes site over 150 people have been lobbying frantically to  get the mainstream media to cover the story and for politicians to intervene on Peter’s behalf.

Peter’s supporters have been bombarding State and Federal Labor, Liberal and National Party Politicians and the mainstream media to bring attention to his cause.

But Peter’s story is being stonewalled by the mainstream media and Politicians of all colours and creeds. So far they have managed to have Peter’s story covered by 2GB’s Alan Jones with a live interview with Peter Spencer and his barrister Peter King by mobile phone on Tuesday morning and one with Alastair McRobert who is at the property with Peter onThursday morning and a 5 minute spot on Channel 9’s A Current affair on Thursday night (the video above).

Fairfax Media, News Corporation and the ABC have steadfastly refused to run the story except for The Telegraph which ran a small piece last Sunday on page 42 titled He’s the Darryl Kerrigan of Climate Change.

[Read more…]

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Copenhagen Day 7 – China, again

14 December, 2009 by

Day 7

Day 7

China looks like the best hope of scuppering any deal at Copenhagen, and since such a deal will achieve virtually nothing for the climate (remember the Kyoto 0.07˚C) but plunge millions of people back into poverty, a deal of this kind is the last thing we need.

China and other developing nations were yesterday maintaining the tough stance they had taken in these negotiations from the start. They argue that developed nations owe a “carbon debt” to the developing world for emissions already in the atmosphere and that the existing international negotiating mandate does not require developing countries – even China, the world’s largest emitter – to make binding emission-reduction targets that can be internationally checked.

But the US, Australia, the European Union and other developed nations have said a draft agreement from the conference negotiations reflecting that stance is totally unacceptable and no basis for any Copenhagen deal.

US chief negotiator Todd Stern said: “The United States is not going to do a deal without major developing countries stepping up.”

Senator [Penny] Wong said such a result would not deliver the environmental outcome that was the whole point of the Copenhagen talks.

The developed countries point out that 97 per cent of the growth in greenhouse gases between now and 2030 will come from the developing world, with China contributing about half of that. Erwin Jackson of Australian think tank The Climate Institute said leaving one of the world’s biggest emitters out of a new treaty would be fatal.

“Without a treaty that fairly covers all major emitters, global action will be undermined and political support would collapse into a meaningless pledge and review system,” he said. (source)

There are also problems over the verification of voluntary developing nation cuts, with China and India both stating that it’s their own business. Some media outlets are already contemplating failure, as the Herald Sun puts it:

‘Fizzer’ fears for summit

We can only hope.

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Robyn Williams defends Climategate scientists

14 December, 2009 by

Nothing to see here

Nothing to see here

Robyn Williams is the ABC’s science correspondent and a fully paid-up alarmist. And guess what, despite not having read the Climategate emails himself, decides, based on comments from alarmist journals, that they have no effect whatsoever on the alarmist cause. There’s a surprise:

So what do the emails reveal? I hesitate to pronounce. I haven’t read them. Instead, I called those who have, such as Fred Pearce from New Scientist. He said, in an NS editorial, that any suggestion the informal emails formally compromise the science is ‘ludicrous’. (I broadcast Pearce on The Science Show last week). The Economist, always rigorous in its analysis of major issues, said much the same.

The journal Nature, with its immense and authoritative record surveying the science scene over hundreds of years said this about any ‘fraud’,:

“This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real – or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.” [The kind of language used in this paragraph demonstrates perfectly that Nature is no longer a science journal that can ever be taken seriously – Ed]

This last point is exactly the one with which I led in that discussion following Swindle on ABC TV. The evidence resembles that of a murder case. The detective finds 20 separate leads all pointing to the same villain.

I suggest you read the emails. And then think again about whether the alteration of data, hiding of inconvenient facts, threatening journals that publish inconvenient papers and deleting emails in response to FOI requests is what transparent science is all about.

With journalists like Williams on the case, no wonder the Australian public doesn’t hear anything about climategate from the ABC.

Read it here.

P.S. And if you want more evidence of alarmist journalists playing down Climategate, see AP’s Seth Borenstein being hauled over the coals here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Australia may "foot huge climate change bill"

13 December, 2009 by

Us (L), Them (R)

Us (L), Them (R)

Another global socialism alert, as a fudged deal in Copenhagen will mean that billions of dollars of your hard-earned taxpayer dollars will be sent to developing countries to help them “cope with climate change”, instead of where they should be going, to education, health, law and order and all the other domestic policies that are in such a disastrous mess under Rudd & Co:

AUSTRALIA faces having to make a hefty payout to help developing countries such as China and India cope with climate change in order to clinch a deal in Copenhagen.

Despite Australia facing a domestic Budget deficit of about $50 billion for the coming year, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told The Sunday Mail from Copenhagen that Australia would have to contribute to so-called climate “abatement” funds if India and China were to come into the climate-change tent.

“There are a range of figures flying around,” Senator Wong said. “(British Prime Minister) Gordon Brown has proposed a $100 billion mix of public and private money. We have not indicated a figure but we have indicated we’re prepared to do our fair share.”

Do you remember anything about this in Rudd’s election promises? That they plan to send billions of your dollars to other countries for no justifiable reason? I don’t, and I’m not happy about it.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

UK Daily Mail: Special Investigation into Climategate

13 December, 2009 by

At least the UK gets the story

At least the UK gets the story

This is what we should be reading in Australia. But the ABC and Fairfax won’t touch it (because it rains on their global socialism warming parade), and The Australian is broadly in favour of tackling climate change. So read it here instead:

There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick.

Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward.

Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ – measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates.

However, different proxies give very different results.

For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.

Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD – yet the Earth still warmed.

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America – who is now also the subject of an official investigation –was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.

Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple – I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

Another British scientist – Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre – wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.

Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] – I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem.

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed – but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ – as simple as it was deceptive.

All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.

On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated – but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’

Read it here. (h/t Climate Depot)

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Copenhagen Day 6 – protests dominated by "anti-capitalist speeches"

13 December, 2009 by

Anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist…

Anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist…

The media is full of the protests yesterday for “tough action” on “global warming”, but the reality is that the environmental movement has been hijacked by an extreme left-wing, anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist agenda. Even the Sydney Morning Herald admits it. One of the banners read “Change the politics. Not the climate”! They don’t give a toss about the climate, they only want to change the system. And, naturally, the protests turned violent. What is it with the left and violence?

Tens of thousands of protesters have marched through Copenhagen calling for tough action from the UN climate conference, after police arrested about 400 rioters at the start of the demonstration.

Organisers of the rally had repeatedly urged the crowd to remain calm and friendly before the march began on Saturday, and the speeches were dominated by calls for social justice and critiques of global capitalism.

But soon after the demonstration started, police arrested about 400 protesters, masked youths dressed in black who threw bricks and firecrackers and smashed windows in the city centre.

Around 50 police in riot gear moved in, forcing the protesters to the ground and bundling them into vans. (source)

And in London, Barmy Prince Charlie has kept the climate madness flag flying by issuing a memorandum with Nobel laureates that compares the threat of “global warming” to that of nuclear destruction!

The group of Nobel winners, together with Prince Charles, issued a memorandum which declared the best chance of stopping catastrophic climate change is to keep the predicted temperature rise at or below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F).

Without action, they envisaged three times that temperature rise, which would mean global warming would cause a huge rise in sea levels, and swamp the cities of London, Paris and Copenhagen.

The communique is likely to influence world leaders at the forthcoming international conference on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of this year. [Only if they’re completely stupid – oh, they probably are… – Ed]

More than 20 Nobel Laureates, including President Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu, gathered at the meeting in London to discuss the threat of global warming.

After three days the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium concluded that climate change posed a danger of similar proportions to “the threat posed to civilisation by the advent of thermonuclear weapons”.

The memorandum read: “The St James’s Palace Memorandum calls for a global deal on climate change that matches the scale and urgency of the human, ecological and economic crises facing the world today. (source)

After that load of cobblers, we really need some sanity, courtesy of Piers Ackerman:

Professor Kellow, an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth report, said despite the denials made by key scientists whose work has been used to support the global warming theory, the leaked emails show the manipulation of the analysis was “in many ways worse than many of us expected when we knew about this case from the outside without access to these kinds of exchanges”.

“What you have is evidence of a quite clear willingness to manipulate raw data to suit predetermined results, you’ve got a resistance to any notion of transparency, an active resistance to freedom of information requests or quite reasonable requests from scientists to have a look at data so that it can be verified,” Professor Kellow said.

He listed the malpractices as evidence of attempts to subvert the peer-review process, evidence of pressure being placed on editors to reject dissident views on climate science, and then attempts by the lead authors in the IPCC report to keep any opposing peer-reviewed science that has managed to get into the literature out of the IPCC report and, ultimately, ensuring it doesn’t find its way into the all-important summary for policy makers, which, he said, was about all the politicians and bureaucrats read.

The policy makers are now convinced, according to Professor Kellow, that earth’s climate system is like a kind of thermostat in which we can dial in a particular level of CO2 and get a two-degree temperature rise over the next 100 years.

In the professor’s view, “anyone who knows anything about climate science will tell you that that’s nonsense”.

Very expensive nonsense, too, if the farcical plan to salve the consciences of Western Greens by transferring the capital and industries of developed nations to the Third World is agreed to this week in Copenhagen. (source)

Climate sense is hard to come by at the moment…

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Abbott: Rudd's Copenhagen entourage an "unfair expense"

12 December, 2009 by

Rudd wants to rule the world

Rudd wants to rule the world

But surely Statesman Rudd requires all of those 114 delegates (including a personal photographer) in order to appear sufficiently like a future UN secretary general for the unofficial job interview he’s attending? Oh, you guys all think he’s going for climate talks? Ha, ha – good one.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott says the size of the Australian delegation to the UN climate conference in Copenhagen is an unfair expense on tax payers.

The Opposition says Kevin Rudd will be taking 114 people to the conference – a larger contingent than that of Britain or India.

World leaders will be joining the conference next week to try and negotiate a global climate agreement.

Mr Abbott says the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should be focussing on Australia.

“I think it’s in a sense admirable that Kevin Rudd is prepared to risk jet lag for our country,” he said.

“But the people who he’s really got to persuade about his whopping great big emissions tax are here in Australia, not in Copenhagen.”

Rudd cares little for domestic politics at the moment – his focus is the world stage.

Read it here.

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Copenhagen: Armed response to Climategate question

12 December, 2009 by

Climate science is all about open debate, right? Wrong.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

BBC: Clive James on climate change

12 December, 2009 by

Climate sense

Climate sense

Our most famous expat writes on climate change in the BBC magazine:

Over the last 10 years we have heard a lot about how civilisation would be in trouble if it didn’t soon do something drastic about global warming. But this impressive message tended to sound less impressive as time went on. It wasn’t just that the globe uncooperatively declined to get warmer during the last 10 years.

It was that the language of alarm wore out its welcome as it became ever more assertive about what had not yet happened.

The brief, unarguably still hot period, when the world had somehow refused to grow any hotter was soon explained, although it seemed strange that it had not been predicted.

The world, when it resumed warming again would heat up by so many degrees, or so many more degrees than that, and within 10, 20, 25 years – within a single Hermie – there would be the corpses of fried polar bears floating past your penthouse window.

According to the media, scientists were agreed, the science was settled, science said, that all this would happen. The media promoted this settled science, and the politicians went along with the media. The whole deal had the UN seal of approval.

The coming catastrophe that had to be averted wasn’t exactly like knowing when the asteroid would arrive so you could send Bruce Willis, but unless we did something, irreversible damage, if not certain doom, was only a Hermie or two away.

Today, after recent events at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, that supposedly settled science is still the story, but the story is in question. Suddenly there are voices to pronounce that the reputation of science will lie in ruins for the next 50 years.

Read it here. (h/t Climate Realists)

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