USA First

Archive for the ‘Climategate’ Category

December 24, 2009
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce
By Alexander Cockburn

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. It became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.

Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics, the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

Many of the landmines in the CRU e-mails tend to buttress longstanding charges by skeptics (yours truly included) that statistical chicanery by professor Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the 20th century, a historical fact that makes nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the 20th century. Here’s Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an e-mail Sept. 22, 1999: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

Now, in the fall of 1999, the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important “Summary for Policymakers” – essentially a press release, one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into nonexistence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in 20th-century temperatures.

Briffa’s reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-20th-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a “problem and a potential distraction/detraction.” So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa’s reconstruction. The CRU’s Jones happily applauded Mann’s deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over “Mike’s Nature trick.”

Other landmines include e-mails from Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On Oct. 14, he wrote to the CRU’s Tom Wigley: “How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

Only a few weeks before Copenhagen, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that “we are no where close to knowing” how the supposedly proven AGW warming model might actually work, and that therefore geoengineering – such as carbon mitigation – is “hopeless.”

This admission edges close to acknowledgment of a huge core problem: that “greenhouse” theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body without compensation. Greenhouse gases in the cold upper atmosphere cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. (Readers interested in the science can read Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner’s “Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics,” updated in January 2009.)

Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly across the past eight years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance.

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention – geoengineering – could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it’s a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it’s a terrible tragedy.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/12/24/anthropogenic_global_warming_is_a_farce.html

December 22, 2009
Other Consequences of Climategate
By Ed Timperlake

The consequences of “Climategate” are lost opportunity costs that should have been directed at real global pollution problems. The hothouse atmosphere at East Anglia from cooking the books on a huge fraud has significant consequences that will play out over time. “Global Warming” shamans have sent the world on the fool’s errand of looking for man-made carbon footprints while very real environmental problems have fallen by the wayside.

On a micro-level, some involved in this scientific fraud will have their reputations destroyed. Along the way, nasty invectives will be leveled, which will make for fun reading. I specifically found it interesting to read Nobel Laureate Al Gore lie to defend the liars. His statement was a total fabrication when he said scientific e-mails were ten years old. The latest one was sent just months ago.

One can just imagine the sense of loss felt by environmental activists who were planning on making billions protecting the world from greenhouse gases. The real threat is not pollution as defined by the simple act of breathing and emitting CO2, but the pollution of industrial waste pumped into the atmosphere at specific locations and also dumped into streams, rivers, and oceans. It is a proven scientific fact that chemical toxins directly impact groundwater.

While the East Anglia con artists were looking skyward, the real problem was symbolically right under their feet.

One of my most beloved possessions is a personal letter from President Bush ‘41 thanking me for my role as an Assistant Secretary, Department of Veterans Affairs, in making “progress toward settling the complex questions about the environmental hazards of warfare.” The questions the VA had been dealing with on my watch were about Agent Orange and “Gulf War Illness.” Both are very real and very deadly.

Of the 2,709,918 Vietnam veterans that served in Southeast Asia, around 800,000 are still alive. Almost 59,000 were killed in action, and around another 100,000 were severely disabled. Claims have been made about Vietnam vets having higher suicide rates, more substance abuse problems, and higher incidences of homelessness. Regardless, the number of soldiers from the war alive today is evidence that Vietnam vets paid a high price for their service. Many soldiers were killed by Agent Orange — not climate change from a carbon footprint.

The National Academy of Science and the VA link exposure to Agent Orange to such horrible diseases as Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, and prostate cancer. Another real tragedy is that the sons and daughters of Vietnam vets have a higher incidence of spina bifda. That determination was the first time the US has linked adult exposure to toxic chemicals to birth defects. A lot of Vietnam veterans were killed before their time by Agent Orange — not climate change and a carbon footprint. Also, the world should not forget that Vietnamese families are also paying a high price for ongoing exposure to Agent Orange in their groundwater.

For our next generation of veterans, one cause of the growing problem of “Gulf War Illness” is exposure to Iraq chemical munitions inside bunkers that were blown up in Desert Storm. Even today, some residual chemical munitions (yes, WMDs) have been found. However, on an ever-bigger “environmental hazards of warfare” front, there is really grim news.

Serving in the DoD, I was responsible in 2003 for visiting the Iraq Port of Umm Qasr. Before my visit, I hosted at the Pentagon a senior representative of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP). The man, a highly educated French engineer, warned me about the cancer-causing, toxic nature of the Persian Gulf.

His well-made point was that because of evaporation, for twenty-three hours of each day, water flows into the gulf — and only for one hour a day does it flush itself. Essentially, the gulf is a man-made devil’s brew of every nasty chemical in the world, from chemical munitions used in the Iran-Iraq war (and also by Saddam against his own people) to rocket motors and warheads and bunker oil in sunken ships to simple raw open sewers. Gulf water can kill you.

When I visited Umm Qasr, the locals quipped, “Turn on the water and see what we are having for dinner.” It was that disgusting.

The costs of war in that part of the world, according to my UNDP visitor, are now horrendous, including extremely high cancer rates for children. He even claimed that if they can afford it, poor fisherman burn their catch rather than feed it to their families.

We should immediately stop trying to blame mankind for the complex ebb and flow of the earth’s climate since creation. There are real life-and-death issues that are specifically geographically located. With investigation and intelligent mitigation efforts, a concentrated scientific focus could make a profoundly positive impact on humanity.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/other_consequences_of_climateg.html

By Chris Flood

Published: December 21 2009 11:40 | Last updated: December 21 2009 11:40

Carbon prices dropped sharply on Monday in response to disappointment at the outcome of the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, which ended with an agreement that fell well short of its goals for significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

“This (accord) is a very disappointing outcome,” said Trevor Sikorski, director at Barclays Capital: “I see nothing here that should drive investment in the carbon commodity and low carbon technology.”

Mr Sikorski warned that the outcome of the Copenhagen conference was “bearish for the market and bearish for the world.”

European Union allowances for December 2010 delivery, the benchmark contract for pricing European carbon emissions, dropped 8.7 per cent to €12.40 a tonne in early trading before recovering slightly to trade 5.7 per cent lower at €12.80 a tonne.

One dealer described the market as like “a falling knife” but said that a rise in European gas prices had helped to support the carbon market.

UN-backed certified emissions reductions for December 2010 delivery fell 6.6 per cent to €11.05 a tonne, their lowest level since June 23.

Dr Emmanuel Fages of Societe Generale/Orboe said: ”Copenhagen illustrated the failure of the UN process in dealing with climate change but drop in carbon prices is due purely to sentiment and fundamentals will reasset themselves. The pre-2012 supply and demand outlook has not changed and post 2012, the market is still pricing in a 20 per cent cut in emissions.”

The European Union said the accord (which is weaker than a legally binding treaty) was not ambitious enough to persuade it to raise its target for cutting carbon from a 20 per ent reduction to a 30 per cent cut by 2020.

Dr Fages said EUA carbon prices could drop to as low as 10 euros a tonne in the first quarter of 2010 as market participants, who have been oversupplied with quotas, would know for certain how much carbon had been emitted in 2009.

“Copenhagen showed that we cannot reply on the UN and the whole process of dealing with climate change has to be much more bottom up than top down,” said Dr Fages.

Eugen Weinberg, head of commodity research at Comerzbank said: ”Everybody is disappointed by the outcome of the Copenhagen meeting but it was an important step to have direct talks betweeen the largest polluters and we have to wait to see what individual countries will opt to do under the non-binding goals that will be published at the end of January.”

Mr Weinberg said the importance of the US Climate bill currently being debated in the US Senate “could not be understated” as passing the legislation would allow for the development of linkages between US and European carbon markets and would support EUA prices as a target for a 30 per cent cut by 2020 could be revived.

”But if the bill fails, it could be a real disappointment for the market and it would be difficult to see positive catalysts going forward,” warned Mr Weinberg.

Mark C. Lewis, analyst at Deutsche Bank, said the Copenhagen Accord would cast uncertainty over the future of post-2012 carbon offset trading schemes under the Kyoto Protocol called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

“The development of new CDM projects is likely to slow over the course of next year, and perhaps significantly so,” said Mr Lewis.

Meg Brown analyst at Citigroup said the settlement at Copenhagen would perpetuate uncertainty about the outlook for the carbon market post 2012.

“International offset markets were hoping for detail on how CDM would be expanded, perhaps including sector-specific benchmarks and an expansion of the market’s size,” said Ms Brown: “Heavy industry must wait longer for clarification of emission liabilities and international abatement mechanisms.”

“The lack of a political framework is seen as bearish because a lot of hedge funds and financial institutions had pinned their hopes on quite a significant and important alternative to other commodities markets,” said Jean-François Cauvet at Paris-based carbon market broker COER2.

Crude oil prices moved higher on Monday, supported by colder weather in the US and Europe.

Nymex January West Texas Intermediate rose 15 cents to $73.51 a barrel. The January contract expires at the close on Monday and February West Texas Intermediate, which becomes the benchmark from Tuesday, traded 50 cents higher at $74.91 a barrel.

Opec is meeting in Angola this week but the oil producers’ group is not thought likely to call for any changes in its current production quotas.

“We expect prices could ease somewhat after the Opec announcement as participants will be reminded that Opec will not be doing anything to tighten supplies anytime soon,” said Edward Meir, an analyst with MF Global.

ICE February Brent added 65 cents at $74.40 a barrel.

US natural gas prices also moved higher, with Nymex January Henry Hub up 12 cents, or 2.1 per cent, at $5.902 per million British thermal units.

So what’s cooking: is it the planet, or just the evidence?
Mark Aveyard

Last Updated: December 20. 2009 8:19PM UAE / December 20. 2009 4:19PM GMT What we have just witnessed in Copenhagen was a rare spectacle in global affairs: a massive exercise in political groupthink reaching its pinnacle precisely as the rational foundation for it began to unravel in a very public way.

Even as records confirmed the authenticity of the controversial “Climategate” e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain, true believers at the UN conference were still in denial (the first stage of grief), acting as if CRU were some minor outpost in the climate research landscape. In fact, it is a world leader in global-warming research.

Stretching back over ten years, e-mail records show a culture of corruption at CRU in which researchers fabricated trends in climate data, concealed modifications to their computer models from public scrutiny, attempted to evade Freedom of Information requests and tried to isolate sceptical colleagues in the scientific community.

Among those at the UN who bothered to address the Climategate bombshell, the response generally took the following form: the scandal doesn’t matter much because thousands of scientists have signed letters supporting the theory of man-made global warming. That’s like portraying presidential elections in Iran as models of democratic behaviour; when the outcome is predetermined by those in power, counting ballots is merely an artful conceit.

I would like to trust the signed declarations of scientists supporting the global warming “consensus”. But in my experience, when it comes to political causes, professors are not the Socratic gadflies of academic lore. Scepticism isn’t a habit of academics today any more than candour is a habit of politicians.

You don’t win many elections by divulging everything you believe, and you don’t get promoted in academia by telling your senior professors what you really think of their politics. As a result, on some campuses, being openly sceptical about global warming means that you risk being labeled a “denier” – and we all know to which ghastly event in European history that term usually applies.

I am not strongly committed to any position on global warming, except the position that science ultimately must serve truth above politics. I am more sceptical about the man-made component of the theory than the question of warming by itself. The public form of this debate carries little scientific content. I have met dozens, maybe hundreds, of global-warming alarmists, inside and outside academia, and not more than a handful had any grasp of the basics of climate science. Typically, the more passionate they are, the less informed they appear (a rule with too few exceptions in politics not to be useful). In these discussions, the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age might as well be mythical eras in a lost epic by JRR Tolkien.

In defence of Copenhagen’s mission, Scientific American and other publications predicted that CRU’s sins would have no effect on the scientific “consensus”, pointing to research at other climate laboratories. But this evades the central question: if trusting CRU was a mistake, why should we trust the researchers at, say, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies ?

The long-term damage of Climategate, though, doesn’t concern the public standing of any particular laboratory. The general damage to scientific credibility is a graver issue. The scandal has undermined trust in scientists and science itself. Any open society that funds research and uses it to guide political decisions must protect the public’s trust in science.

Few of us have the time or the ability to scrutinise the raw data of any research programme. We trust that researchers will behave ethically, allowing nature, not their preconceptions, to guide their conclusions. But money and politics can ruin a lot of good things. You don’t get millions of dollars in government grants by claiming that the sky isn’t really falling. Apocalypse is good for business at universities. And you don’t get interviews with the BBC and 60 Minutes by saying “I don’t know” to all the big questions, even if you really don’t know and no one else does either.

Those who lose sleep over carbon emissions need to face the CRU scandal head-on. It is emboldening researchers who have been holding their tongues about climate change despite deep reservations. What we will see in the next few months is the exposure of a “consensus” that isn’t entirely consensual. Members of the American Physical Society (APS)are openly questioning its stance on global warming. The committee charged with crafting the group’s position is headed by Robert Socolow, described by one APS member as someone “whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming”.

This month 141 climate-science researchers signed a letter to the UN questioning the presuppositions behind Copenhagen, especially the primary evidence behind the alarmist position, the computer modelling of climate trends: “Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.”

If the issue is settled in the minds of climate scientists, who are these people? And why did the UK’s Meteorological Office (a frequent collaborator with East Anglia) announce that it would be reviewing 160 years of temperature data in the wake of the scandal?

Climate is always changing. The earth is always getting warmer or colder, and sometimes these changes are rapid. Are we now in a warming trend that justifies a radical restructuring of the global economy, including a surrender of personal and corporate liberties to politicians and bureaucrats? Are human beings the primary source of global warming?

If you’ve already made up your mind, you can find scientists and evidence on both sides to support your view. For those of us who think either scenario is possible, knowing whom to trust just got harder.

Mark Aveyard is assistant professor of international studies at the American University of Sharjah

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091221/OPINION/712209923/1080

Mark Davis: The gift of ‘Climategate’ is a fresh start

09:06 AM CST on Saturday, December 19, 2009

Santa makes his rounds later this week, but I’ve already received one of the best gifts ever: the complete unmasking of one of the most insidious movements of recent history – the radical effort to force reckless and needless constraints onto the human race in an attempt to change the planet’s climate.

If I had been told last year that a scandal called “Climategate” would reveal in 2009 the depths of treachery that would infect the so-called science behind assertions of man-made global warming, I would have been thrilled. But I would have asked for just a little extra something.

I would have asked for this monumental and wholly deserved embarrassment to explode just before the opening gavel of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, an orgy of clergy and parishioners in the tawdry church of anthropogenic climate change.

The curtain finally fell on this 12-day global dog-and-pony show Friday, amid shattered dreams of launching a new initiative to dash the world’s economies against the rocks of a contrived menace.

My gratitude knows no bounds. Not just for political reasons; this was a genuinely dangerous cult whose success would have exacted a profound toll on the quality of life of the human race.

The Climategate e-mail release is a watershed moment in the history of hoaxes. But while it reveals just the tip of the fraudulent climate change iceberg, it is also at long last a victory for those who wish to be good stewards of the planet’s environment without crippling human productivity.

And for having endured the braying lectures of those who have preached this dishonest scripture for years, from high political priests like Al Gore to the annoying deacons filling the Hollywood wing of environmental delusion, I am going to enjoy this for a while.

This is not ordinarily how I roll on the fairly rare recent occasions when my political side prevails. Dangerous inattention to national security raises my hackles, but on virtually everything else – health care, taxes, even abortion – I recognize there are differences and debates that must play themselves out among those with varying views. I’m always ready to engage with vigor tempered by openness to opposing positions.

It is time for the global environment to be addressed in that fashion. While there is no reason to conclude that man can change the Earth’s temperature in any significant way, our existence will always have some effect on the environment. A frank conversation must take place over how to balance human needs for jobs and energy against the effects we have on our air, water and land.

But for too long that discourse has been hijacked by those who would relegate us to unproven alternative energy sources while gutting the methods that have made American productivity unmatched in human history.

The radical left’s hostility toward capitalism, leading to a poisonous bias in science funding toward those who sing from the global warming hymnal, led to decades of scientists saying man was heating the planet and that we could cool it by suffocating our economies with draconian limitations.

And for a while there, they were widely believed. Drunk on this falsely earned power, they crowed that the debate was settled and that their claims of man changing the Earth’s temperature were proven. The planet’s history of rising and falling temperature cycles dating to before factories and SUVs made no difference to these people. Even the global cooling scare of the 1970s – in many ways a more environmentally offensive decade than the current one – was conveniently forgotten.

But now their radical politicization of science has been outed and their pretense of caring about the planet stripped away. My favorite metaphor for these discredited neo-Marxist souls is watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside.

I don’t know if sanctimonious blowhards like Al Gore will ever be properly chastened by the uncovering of the scam they have perpetrated. But for those wishing to enjoy a playing field made honest, it is time for a constructive debate about how to maintain the global economy in a responsible way that honors the planet and the needs of the people who live on it.

That means embracing green technologies that actually work – which will not require a dime of taxpayer subsidy. We all want a clean and healthy world. From hybrid cars to low-emissions home products to solar panels and wind farms, plenty of planet-friendly technologies have won favor in the marketplace, and we are better for them.

And we are surely better off for the dawn of this new day allowing us to dispense with the absurd narcissism that man can change the planet’s temperature, or that we know better than God what its ideal temperature should be.

This frees us for the important human business of taking care of the Earth in a way that meets the needs of both planet and man.

Mark Davis is heard weekdays from 8:30 to 11 a.m. on WBAP-AM, News/Talk 820. His e-mail address is mdavis@wbap.com.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-markdavis_1220edi.State.Edition1.1d27b2e.html

World leaders reach ‘toothless’ late Copenhagen climate change deal – but officials admit it’s ‘not enough’
By Jason Groves and David Derbyshire

Climate change talks ended in farce last night after world leaders claimed they had struck a ‘meaningful deal’ – but admitted it was not enough to tackle global warming.
After hours of acrimonious talks in Copenhagen, President Barack Obama unveiled a face-saving package that failed to include any targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
The fudged deal – backed by Britain, America, South Africa, India, Brazil and China – came after a day of bitter rows and divisions in which the United Nations talks came close to collapse.
President Obama said the deal was an ‘unprecedented breakthrough’ and that countries would add firm commitments next year.
But its flimsy nature was exposed when he admitted targets put forward by countries “will not be by themselves sufficient to get to where we need to get by 2050″.

The deal includes a pledge to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2C – seen as the cut-off point for averting catastrophe – and a pledge to spend £67 billion a year on helping poor countries tackle global warming by 2020.

The agreement said they had agreed to ‘listing their national actions and commitments, a finance mechanism, to set a mitigation target of two degrees Celsius and to provide information on the implementation of their actions through national communications, with provisions for international consultations and analysis under clearly defined guidelines’.
But it has no long-term global targets for emissions cuts or a timetable to turn the agreement into a legally-binding treaty.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the agreement was ‘a vital first step’ but accepted that a lot more work was required to turn it into the legal treaty he had originally wanted to secure at the summit
He said: ‘This is the first step we are taking towards a green and low carbon future for the world, steps we are taking together. First steps are difficult, but they are also necessary.’
He said China opposed turning the proposals into a treaty ‘for the wrong reasons: clinging to their version of what they think international organisations should not do’.
Mr Brown had offered to hand over £7.5 billion in extra cash to developing countries to sweeten the deal. He also offered to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by an eye-watering 42 per cent – 10 times the level offered by the United States.

But in a further humiliation Mr Brown was not included in a list of world leaders personally thanked by Barack Obama for their contribution to the talks.

The 11th-hour deal followed two years of negotiations and a fortnight of intensive talks aimed at saving the planet.

It came after a day of rows which saw the prospects for a meaningful agreement fade amid a row between the West and the developing world about how to share the burden of tackling climate change.

Earlier the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez dubbed the marathon summit ‘Nopenhagen’.

The breakthrough followed talks between US president Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

Failure to reach a substantial deal would be a personal humiliation for Gordon Brown who put his credibility – and billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money – on the line in a desperate bid to clinch an agreement that would seal his place in history.

Speaking during a break between negotiations last night Mr Brown acknowledged there was a real danger the talks would fail.

He said: ‘if we don’t succeed I will have other proposals. This is not the time to put these forward. But we are not going to abandon our climate change agenda.’

Divisions between the US and China lie at the heart of the deadlock.

There had been hopes that President Barack Obama would rescue the talks with a pledge of higher carbon dioxide cuts in the US when he flew in to the Danish capital yesterday.

But he arrived empty handed and launched a thinly veiled attack on China’s refusal to allow international monitoring of its promised future carbon cuts claiming ‘without such accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page’.

He added: ‘While the science of climate change is not in doubt, I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now, and it hangs in the balance.’

It emerged that China’s Premier Wen Jiaboa had not attended any of the leaders’ meetings.

Chinese sources said he was very offended by President Obama’s speech and found it ‘humiliating’.

A successful deal would have seen rich nations pledging to cut carbon dioxide emissions and the creation of a £67 billion fund to help poor countries cope with global warming. The West also wanted the developing world to sign up for cuts in future emissions.
The deadlock left Gordon Brown fuming. Sources said he vented his frustration at the lack of progress, angrily jabbing his fingers at a succession of world leaders during a private meeting and demanding: ‘what are you going to do to make this work?’

Mr Brown had offered to hand over £7.5 billion in extra cash to developing countries to sweeten the deal. He also offered to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by an eye-watering 42 per cent – 10 times the level offered by the United States.

Late last night, environmentalists said hopes of a meaningful deal were ‘almost zero’.

Tony Juniper, environmental campaigner, said: ‘After two years of negotiations and two weeks of talks here in Copenhagen, it’s disgraceful that the so-called world leaders didn’t come up with a better offer to secure the deal that the world desperately needs.

‘The display of rhetoric that world leaders came out with was predictably familiar and it lacked the commitment needed to address this problem as the science demands.’

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was the first to publicly declare the deal dead, referring to the outcome as ‘Nopenhagen’.

Leaders met for a third session behind closed doors last night, working on draft after draft of a political declaration.

Mr Brown said leaders were still arguing over whether to commit to keeping the rise in global temperatures below 2C – the widely accepted limit needed to prevent catastrophe. The other major hurdle was the refusal of China and others to allow independent monitoring of their pledges to cut future emissions.

The United Nations was reported to have asked world leaders to plan to stay overnight in Copenhagen because of the deadlock.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1236659/Copenhagen-climate-change-conference-World-leaders-reach-Copenhagen-agreement–officials-admit-enough.html#ixzz0a7UrxFQy

ClimateGate Just Got Much, Much Bigger

by Christopher C. Horner

Over at ICECAP.us Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo has posted an item on a “Russian Bombshell” highly relevant to the ClimateGate scandal. The Russian media first posted the story and now some Brits are loving it.

The long and the short of it is best summarized by the Telegraph’s James Dellingpole: “What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.”

That is, we have yet further evidence that the data is being cooked to make the long-running claim of an increase in global temperatures, and now to diminish the apparent cooling of said temps. As the gang at EU referendum tout, “it is in Soviet Union that the CRU, NOAA, NASA show the greatest warming.”

Around the world temperature stations have been widely decommissioned in rural and higher elevations, and we see an over-emphasis on increasingly urbanized (and therefore warmer) stations in the curious selection process as to what temperatures should count, and how much. The latter point references the fact that the data is then adjusted, and we are also seeing an increase in adjusting urbanized (that is, artificially warm) temperature records not down, but upward.

Excerpted in pertinent part, Joe Writes:

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. …The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations. …

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The reason this cherry-picking is relevant — as is the apparent similar gamesmanship being played with other countries examined in recent days including China and New Zealand — because our NOAA compiles the global dataset and the rest work from it. So when CRU claimed that it “lost” its raw data, what they’re saying is the claim to have lost which stations they chose from NOAA’s compilation, making it impossible for those who wish to check it to discern how they got the answer they did.

If it is what it appears to be, and my dozen years working with these people and the past few weeks peeking further inside thanks to ClimateGate tell me that it is, then this is root-cause corruption.

Meanwhile, they are scrambling madly to stitch up an agreement in Copenhagen politically committing the U.S. to the long-desired wealth-transfer. The question is which moves faster, the collapse of the increasingly likely scientific fraud, or the global governance set.

http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/16/climategate-just-got-much-much-bigger/

December 16, 2009
Climategate’s Stubborn Facts
By Dexter Wright

Mark Twain once said, “Get your facts first, then distort them as much as you please.” By contrast, he also exclaimed, “How empty is theory in the presence of fact!” This pretty well covers the recent controversy over the altered global temperature data from Dr. Jones at East Anglia University in Great Britain.

What are the facts? Well for starters, scientists at the Smithsonian Institution tell us that during what is known as the Medieval Optimum, the Vikings were growing grapes in Greenland. An agronomist at Virginia Tech suggest that if you are planning to start a vineyard, the roots of the vines cannot be exposed to temperatures below 25oF or the vine will die. Even though there were no thermometers at the time of Eric the Red, this gives us a benchmark for reference. There are no vineyards in Greenland today because it is too cold. In fact, the Smithsonian reports that there is evidence which supports the theory that the Viking colonies later collapsed as a result of a dramatically cooling climate.

Other facts seem to stand stubbornly in the way of the global warming theory. Paleoclimatological records show that after the last ice age — about seven thousand years ago — the climate on earth reached a very warm period (much warmer than now) known as the “climatic optimum,” which resulted in green pastures covering what is now the Sahara Desert in Africa. This fact contradicts the popular mantra from former Vice President Al Gore that we are warmer now than ever before.

Geologists tell us that the earth’s climate has changed many times from hot to cold and back again. The prevailing theories are that over the last billion years, there have been at least four major ice ages. Since the end of the last ice age, we have been in what these climatologist say is an interglacial period. In English, this means that the planet has not yet transitioned to a climate of either beach balls or snow balls.

But what about the curve balls in ClimateGate? The swirling controversy concerns the infamous e-mails about the Jones global temperature data set. The recent e-mails published on the internet suggest that the data was deliberately modified to reach a preconceived conclusion. This data was used in the reports generated by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has concluded that Carbon Dioxide (CO2) causes global warming by absorbing infrared radiation. The vast majority of the report documents the measured increase in CO2. The report also represents climate change model predictions as “evidence” of the effects of this increase in CO2. Climate models are computerized forecasting aids, not evidence.

Atmospheric chemists will tell you CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere and is measured in parts per million. It seems a bit of a stretch that the tail can wag the dog, especially when CO2 absorbs such a narrow portion of the infrared spectrum. According to Dr. Fred Singer of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, the global climate change models cannot “hindcast” known climatic changes such as the Medieval Optimum, when good, vintage, homegrown wines could be enjoyed in Greenland. As forecasters at the National Hurricane Center will tell you, if a model cannot hindcast, it cannot be relied upon for a forecast. Could it be that the data was tampered with to agree with the global climate models?

Is this an isolated incident of over-pressured scientists caving in to temptation? Well, the cracks in the global warming theory began appearing as far back as 1998. Dr. Sallie Baliunas published a study that linked global temperature fluctuations to solar activity. This theory is not a new one, but meteorologists have been very reluctant to accept this theory because the physical connection has been hard to determine. Dr. Baliunas suggested that solar wind was the physical connection. Dr. Baliunas was maligned by many scientists among the global warming crowd in an attempt to discredit her work.

More recently, Dr. Bill Grey of Colorado State University claimed that the university had cut his funding for hurricane research because of his outspoken opposition to the global warming theory.

Even NASA has been caught making exaggerated claims. Late in 2008, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies reported that October 2008 was the hottest on record. They “corrected” the statement after two meteorologists caught the “error” in the data and posted their findings on the internet.

Another “error” was admitted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center when they under-reported the amount of polar sea ice in the northern hemisphere. It seems they had a “sensor drift” which prevented the detection of ice coverage of more than 190,000 square miles — roughly an area the size of California.

Mr. Gore insists that the debate on global warming is over. With so many questions concerning the validity of the data, how can anyone believe this? John Adams once said that “facts are stubborn things.” But we need to establish the facts concerning the data before the debate can begin.

Will these questions concerning the facts affect the upcoming Senate debate on cap-and-trade? Probably not, because cap-and-trade is not about global warming. It’s about money. Like everything else in Washington, follow the money. The political left sees all the money being made in the energy industry, and they want it…all of it! Carbon-based energy is so intertwined in our economy that if you control the energy industry, you control the world’s economies. And that is the everlasting dream of the political left.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/climategates_stubborn_facts.html

Russian IEA claims CRU tampered with climate data – cherrypicked warmest stations

Steve McIntyre reports on Climate Audit that there’s an email from Michael Mann that is relevant:

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

More bullying from the team.

=============================

Guest post by Jeff Id of the Air Vent

It’s true, and it’s huge. Today another example of CRU having their foot on the scale, Russian papers are reporting that the Russian surface station data was sorted by CRU to use the highest warming stations only.

The article is linked here:

Russia affected by Climategate

A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.

The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.

Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.

Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.

Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.

They specifically state that lack of measurement is not the cause. If they claim the full set of Russian data does NOT support global warming, imagine how different the bright red dot over Russia would look. Again the accusation is completely believable, yet is completely unverifiable because CRU has refused to release the data. This data and code release is the subject of illegal blocking of FOIA’s is one of the keys in the Climategate emials. We need to know the list of stations used and we must have copies of the raw data.

This is a very powerful accusation, which if true could change much about the climate science debate. Many papers are based on this dataset which has the highest trend of the major ground datasets.

Here is a PDF (in Russian) can anyone provide a translation?

http://www.iea.ru/article/kioto_order/15.12.2009.pdf

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/16/russian-iea-claims-cru-tampered-with-climate-data-cherrypicked-warmest-stations/

Bumped – Global Warming Consensus Alert: Climategate

Posted by Marc Vander Maas
on Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Update: Naturally, right after I post this article, new information comes out that makes Climategate look even worse. It’s been noted in the comments that Russian scientists are now saying outright that climate data from Russian weather stations has been tampered with in order to make it appear to substantiate claims of catastrophic man-made global warming:

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The plot thickens! Original post follows…

It’s been some time since we’ve had an update on the State of the Global Warming Consensus, and I’m happy to report that the Global Warming Consensus remains strong and unchallenged. Well, strong and unchallenged barring that little e-mail and data leak from a few weeks ago that is really not an issue at all. I mean, it’s not an issue at all except in the sense that it may have exposed some unethical scientific shenanigans by some of the biggest names in the pro-Anthropogenic Global Warming community, but that’s nothing to lose sleep over. You might lose your job, but you shouldn’t lose sleep. COPENHAGEN OR BUST!

Some background: the Global Warming Consensus Watch/Alert series dates back to April of 2007, and from the start has been all about reminding us that the much-vaunted Scientific Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming was not nearly as untouchable as folks like Al Gore would have us believe. The reality of the situation is slightly more nuanced than the Goracle would have us believe: indeed, the planet has been warming over the last century, and has been since the end of the Little Ice Age. The questions being confronted over the last few decades – and most intensely over the last couple of years – are whether the warming that has happened in the 20th century is primarily caused by human activity or is part of a larger natural process; and whether or not the warming poses significant problems for human society in the future. (Dr. Jay Richards had a presentation on this very topic as a part of the 2008 Acton Lecture Series; you can view it here.)

Without going into too much detail, the “debate” over the years has ossified into a sort of stalemate in which AGW supporters hide in their clubhouse, refuse to share their data without frequent appeals to various Freedom of Information Act-type legislation in various countries, and generally hurl vicious invective and threats at those who aren’t convinced that climate change poses an imminent threat to civilization. (This humble blogger’s proudest moment was when a local left-wing “media watchdog” group implied that I was little more than a tool of Satan… er, Exxon. Sadly, “Media Mouse” has gone the way of the dinosaurs, but I’M STILL STANDING, BABY. Albeit without seeing a single dime of that sweet, sweet oil loot.) The major advantage for the AGW side is that they’re peddling a crisis, which is quite interesting to the major media (crises are more fun and profitable to report; remember, “if it bleeds, it leads”) and politicians (who love to have problems to “solve”; it makes for good press and content for constituent newsletters). This, more than anything, is the source of the supposed scientific “consensus” on the dangers of global warming; actual scientists certainly aren’t in uniform agreement on the cause and potential danger of climate change. For example, Richard Lindzen of MIT argued recently in the Wall Street Journal that confident predictions of a climate change-related disaster are unwarrented.

Unfortunately, the money and political momentum have been on the other side of the debate, so expert voices of moderation like Lindzen have been crowded out of public view. But then an interesting thing happened on November 19: a large file of e-mail messages and data from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in the UK leaked onto the web and introduced the world to fun terms like “hide the decline” and “Mike’s Nature Trick.” And while AGW supporters have been frantically reminding everyone that there’s no reason to question the validity of their research because it’s all “peer-reviewed” and therefore unimpeachable, Mark Steyn noted that the leaked documents show that the peer-review process was actively being corrupted in the climate science arena:

Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review.” When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “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.”

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which in essence is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style.

Whatever that is, it certainly doesn’t sound like science to me. Nor does the University of East Anglia CRU’s decision to throw away the raw climate data used to make predictions about global warming, meaning that “…other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.” It should be noted that the only reason we know that little nugget of information is because the Climategate leak finally forced the CRU to act on longstanding Freedom of Information requests from AGW skeptics that they had been actively combatting (see this link again).

AGW supporters have done all they can to make this story go away by trying to turn it into a dastardly tale of computer hacking; Senator Barbara Boxer has gone so far as to claim that the scandal should not be called “Climategate,” but “E-mail-theft-gate.” Allow me to note the trenchant observation of Jim Treacher: Climategate is a story about computer hacking in much the same way Watergate was a story about parking garages. Aside from which, it seems likely that this wasn’t a hacking situation, but rather an internal leak. We’ll see whether or not the leaker gets whistleblower protection should that scenario turn out to be true.

Anyhow, all of that is just a sample of what the pro-AGW community had been dealing with in the weeks leading up to THE MOST IMPORTANT CONFERENCE IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND that is taking place this week in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is of course the big UN climate conference, the outcome of which will determine the fate of mankind and our beloved planet, as this is the last chance we have to stop unchecked global warming and we “cannot compromise with the earth,” which – as we’ve already seen – is a planet in no mood to work with us on this problem. Of course, if the earth is indeed an angry, intransigent planet bent on revenge, many climate scientists have been acting as its henchmen, torturing innocent data into saying what they want it to say in order to give the planet a pretext for its vengeance. By the way, we can all be reassured that the UN Conference is proceeding smoothly. We’re clearly in good hands.

Of course, this post could go on and on and on, and I’ve included a bunch of links that I’ve been gathering over the past few weeks below to give you an even broader view of all that’s been going on. But I’d like to highlight a couple more posts before signing off: First of all, take a look at this post at Anthony Watts’ indispensable blog which describes just how climate scientists determined that average temperatures at the Darwin, Australia airport had been “rising” over the course of the past century. And if you have a little bit of time on your hands, head on over to Iowahawk, where the web’s best satirist gets serious for a bit and explains how you can build your very own hockey stick! It seems to me that between those posts and all the other information we now have as a result of Climategate, we should all at the very least be skeptical of climate change alarmism.

http://blog.acton.org/archives/13220-gwcw-master-climategate-post.html