Alarmist scientist found guilty of smearing journalist

2 December, 2011 by

Rahmstorf - smeared journalist

Again, standard operating procedure for alarmist scientists on the climate change funding bandwagon: smear your critics. Except this time the journalist didn’t stand idly by and do nothing, she took legal action – and won. From No Tricks Zone:

Der Spiegel today has a story on IPCC bigwig and ultra-alarmist Stefan Rahmstorf, who is also a lead scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and elite member of the Hockey Team. For those of you who may not recall, Rahmstorf is the outlier oceanographer that projects a sea level rise of about 1.4 meters, even when the rest the world, including real observations, all point to something that is about 1/7 of that.

It’s a bit late at night here and so the main points only. Der Spiegel starts:

“Renown climate scientist and German government advisor Stefan Rahmstorf was found guilty of a blog attack against a journalist.  According to the opinion of a state court, he made untruthful assertions. Also the ‘Frankfurter Rundschau’ has come under fire.”

A State Court says he’s guilty of making untruthful assertions. Interpret that how you wish. The Frankfurter Rundschau is a sort of daily that former East German comrades lean towards. On the Rahmstorf ruling by the court, we reported about it here.

To make a long story short, journalist Irene Meichsner wrote a critical report about the IPCC, which appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau daily, to which Rahmstorf reacted quite nastily. He asserted at his blog that the journalist had been dishonest, sloppy, had never read the IPCC report, and that she even lifted text from another source (Richard North and Jonathan Leake). For a journalist, such accusations are of course career threatening and thus deadly serious.

Meichsner didn’t stand for it, took the case to court, and won. (source)

Telling the truth about the IPCC is so uncomfortable for those involved that in desperation they resort to this kind of action. Maybe those promoting “the cause” should be a little more careful of smearing their opponents in future. Play the ball, not the man (or in this case, woman).

See here for an earlier story on the alarmism of the Potsdam Institute.

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NSW government "censored" inconvenient sea level data

1 December, 2011 by

A report on Channel 7’s news at 6pm this evening alleges that sea level data, showing rates of rise far lower than those projected, were censored to avoid conflicting with government policy on climate change.

Sea levels at Fort Denison are rising at only 1mm per year or less, flatly contradicting the apocalyptic projections of the state and federal governments. Doug Lord, a global warming believer and coastal manager at the climate change department until February 2010, said “Both papers were accepted and at the last minute both were withdrawn on instructions from the department.”

Angus Gordon, a coastal engineer, accused the department of a cover-up, and of suppressing the data in order to support the federal government’s position on climate change.

If the allegations are true, none of this should come as any surprise, especially after the release last week of Climategate 2.0. It is the modus operandi of governments and alarmist scientists the world over, namely to censor or suppress dissent, or in this case data, which contradicts their pre-conceived agenda of dangerous global warming, and thereby giving them the freedom they need to mislead the electorate into accepting draconian and extreme climate change policies.

There is little reason to doubt that these kinds of practices are commonplace, given the federal government’s desperation to convince the public of the “reality of climate change” and the need to take urgent action – hence the carbon tax.

Once again, the integrity of climate science and its associated disciplines has been tarnished by political motivations and politically correct environmental agendas.

[Note: as you will see from the YouTube clip, the report on 7 News was rather superficial – but typical for a network news bulletin – and contained significant ambiguities, in particular regarding the roles of the state/federal governments and the timeline of events, especially given the change of government in NSW earlier in the year. Hopefully further details will emerge.]

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TONIGHT: 7 News to run exclusive on Gillard's climate policy

1 December, 2011 by

UPDATE: Brian Wilshire on 2GB last night said:

“I’m told that Channel 7 at 6.00 tomorrow night in their news will have an exposé of what the government… has done and shouldn’t have done regarding the illusion of global warming, what they sometimes like to call climate change. They are letting the cat out of the bag tomorrow night, so I am told. I don’t have the details but I will be watching in anticipation.”

[Download the podcast for iTunes here, and skip to 1 hr 5 min 30 secs.]

7 News have just confirmed that they will be running an exclusive on Julia Gillard’s climate policy:

Fingers crossed…

Be sure to tune in!

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Gillard and Co to waste $100 million on CO2 tax advertising

1 December, 2011 by

Your taxpayer dollars

[Jaw hits floor in disbelief at the arrogance and shamelessness of this government]. That’s ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS – in other words, an awful lot of nurses, police and teachers:

A $100 million taxpayer funded advertising and information blitz will be waged to sell the government’s carbon tax, despite promises to slash waste in Tuesday’s mini-budget.

The money will go to creating what the opposition has described as a new propaganda unit in the Department of Climate Change and Energy and to fund lobby groups to help sell the tax to consumers.

The figures, contained in Tuesday’s crisis mini-budget, come on top of the $24 million spent this year by the government on advertising the merits of the tax, and following promises to cut back on government ad spending to help bring the budget back to surplus. (source)

Utterly disgusting.

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Durban alarmism: permafrost – again

1 December, 2011 by

It's all over, pal

Funny, isn’t it, that when a stack of emails is released just before a climate conference, revealing climate scientists behaving badly, it’s regarded as malicious, whereas those very same climate scientists are perfectly happy to release alarmist research in an attempt to bolster that very same climate conference. Oops, I forgot for a minute – this is the mainstream media, where double standards are simply par for the course.

Today’s dose of alarmism, courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald (currently battling it out with the ABC for top spot in the climate hysteria stakes):

The threat to climate change posed by thawing permafrost, which could release stocks of stored carbon, is greater than estimated, a group of scientists say.

By 2100, the amount of carbon released by permafrost loss could be “1.7-5.2 times larger than those reported”, depending on how swiftly Earth’s surface warms, they said.

In volume terms, this is about the same as the amount of greenhouse gases released today from deforestation, they say.

But the impact on climate could be 2.5 times greater, as much of the gas will be methane, which is 25 times more efficient at trapping solar heat than carbon dioxide (CO2), they say.

Deforestation today accounts for up to 20 per cent of total greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

The study, published in the British journal Nature, coincides with a 12-day UN conference on climate change, unfolding in Durban, South Africa.

It touches on one of the biggest sources of concern, but also a major area of uncertainty, in climate science.

Permanently iced land covers around a quarter of the land in the northern hemisphere.

In essence, it is a carbon store, holding in icy stasis the organic remains of plants and animals that died millions of years ago.

The worry is that as temperatures rise, the soils defrost, microbes decompose the ancient carbon and release methane and CO2 to the atmosphere. (source)

This is obviously a dumb question, but why didn’t this happen in any of the recent phases of the climate that were warmer than today? And if it did, well, we’re still here aren’t we? That’s the obvious logical flaw in all of these tipping point arguments – if the planet is balanced so precariously on a knife edge, fearful of even the tiniest nudge, how come the climate system hasn’t toppled over and spiralled towards either permanent snowball or permanent hot-house in the last few million years, from which recovery was impossible? Answers on a postcard (from Durban).

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Qatar to host 2012 climate talks

30 November, 2011 by

It's a tough life on the UN AGW bandwagon

Great choice, then all the delegates can complain about the heat due to “global warming”! Perhaps they’ll also turn the aircon off a la James Hansen…

I long for the day when a climate summit is held in winter, somewhere cold and bleak, like Aberdeen – perhaps they’d appreciate the extra warmth a bit more.

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ABC: Climate change to "kill Australians"

30 November, 2011 by

We're all gonna die

That’s not the article title any more, but it is the title in the URL (see image here). Let’s scare people by saying they will die if we don’t “tackle climate change”… with a pointless carbon tax that will reduce global temperatures by seven ten thousandths of a degree.

The ABC, or Groupthink Central it it should be known, shamelessly and uncritically regurgitates an AAP/AFP article plugging a biased and one-sided report from the Climate Commission on the effects of climate change and health:

A new report is warning more Australians face dying in heatwaves and catching infectious diseases as a result of climate change.

A Climate Commission report out today, titled The Critical Decade, says climate change-related injury, disease and deaths will continue to grow in decades to come unless sustained action is taken.

The Climate Commission report says climbing temperatures will lead to more natural disasters and changing rainfall patterns, which will have an impact on people’s health as much as on the environment.

It includes a worst-case scenario where deaths from hotter temperatures in Queensland and the Northern Territory could multiply tenfold by 2100.

Alarmist tactic number 94, throw in a worst-case scenario and lo and behold, the news agency pick up on it! Brilliant.

Report co-author Professor Lesley Hughes says even a small rise in temperature can be detrimental to people’s health.

“A small rise in average temperature actually means a fairly large rise in the number of days, for example, over 35 degrees [Celsius] every year,” he said.

“So as average temperatures go up, the number of extremely hot days go up in a disproportionate way. So what we’re concerned about with climate change, amongst other impacts, is the impact on heat waves.” (source)

I seem to recall reading that the Little Ice age was pretty shit for humanity as well. Marc at ABC News Watch has more:

Despite his expertise, surprisingly no work by [Paul] Reiter was cited in the climate commission’s  report on Climate change and health. The commission has presented only one side of a complex argument.The lies of omission are the greatest lies of all. The commission’s report is another example of cargo cult science in action. It is clear that the commission has no intention of fulfilling its charter to Explain the science of climate change and the impacts on Australia. It is purely a political body. I have no doubt the ABC in its coverage of this report will once again fail in their duty to ask the hard questions.

And indeed they have. They regurgitate a press release from an alarmist news agency.

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UN still flogging the dead horse of "extreme weather"

29 November, 2011 by

The UN and extreme weather

Doesn’t matter how many times this kind of nonsense is debunked (even by warmist scientists, and played down even by the IPCC just a few days ago), the UN apparatchiks, with their rusted-on political agenda of climate socialism, just cannot let it go, especially when the delegates at Durban are desperate to ratchet up the alarmism:

The world is getting hotter, with 2011 one of the warmest years on record, and increasing temperatures are expected to amplify floods, droughts and other extreme weather patterns around the planet, said a U.N. report released on Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organization, part of the United Nations, said the warmest 13 years of average global temperatures have all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. [Carefully omitting the fact that records only go back about 150 years. Big freaking deal. – Ed]

That has contributed to extreme weather conditions that increase the intensity of droughts and heavy precipitation across the world, it said.

“Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and that this warming is due to human activities,” WMO Deputy Secretary-General Jerry Lengoasa told reporters in Durban. (source)

Yawn, yawn, yawn. No-one’s listening any more – not even the media. Same old spin, same old propaganda, same old BS. The party is truly over, folks, best start getting used to it.

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Climate porn: UK Telegraph's Durban "warmgasm"

28 November, 2011 by

Opening my RSS feed reader this evening I was sprayed by a fetid stream of climate hysteria from the once reputable UK broadsheet:

Climate porn

All this on the day when Canada dumps Kyoto. Yep, the world is certainly rushing ahead, eh Julia and Greg?

No links. If you’re that desperate, you can find them yourself!

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The Durban irrelevance

28 November, 2011 by

Nightmare vegetable

I do not intend to waste much time over the next two weeks commenting on the inevitable nonsense that will emanate from the latest round of pointless climate talks. All the usual celebs will no doubt show up (having arrived by private jet, and then been transferred to their luxury hotels by fossil-fuel powered limousines): Angelina, Leonardo, Bono, Branson etc etc., and all the climate rent seekers will be salivating at the prospect of yet more funding diverted from solving real global problems to doing little for an imaginary one.

Durban is even more of an irrelevance than Copenhagen or Cancun. At Copenhagen, there were genuinely high expectations of a global deal – and look what happened: abject failure. Cancun was a face-saving operation with a worthless “pledge” to keep global temperature rises under 2 degrees – as if you can simply turn a knob on the earth’s climate and it will obediently respond!

And now Durban. Expectations here are so low they are negative. Failure again is a certainty. Nobody is focussed on climate change anymore – the world is suddenly faced with REAL problems. Financial crises that threaten jobs and livelihoods, and the engine of wealth creation that keeps our societies operating.

Add to that the 5000-plus emails from Climategate 2.0, which show, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “the Cause” is kept afloat by a close knit cabal of fanatical warmists, who, in conjunction with compliant mainstream media organisations (including the ABC), will do anything to ensure that dissent is suppressed and uncertainties ignored. “Out of context” they cried in 2009. Not any more! Perhaps Mr FOIA, who has tantalisingly provided a locked archive of 220,000 further emails, may be persuaded to reveal the password if they complain about “context” much more.

Wouldn’t that be a wonderful Christmas present?

UPDATE: The Australian groupthink machine (otherwise known as the ABC) desperately tries to find an alarmist story to keep Durban relevant and “the Cause” alive despite all the collapsing wreckage of climate hysteria strewn around them.

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