The battle of Amazongate

Dr Richard North
"..With no more evidence than he had to support the original assertion that 40 percent of the forest was at risk from a slight reduction in precipitation, the "lead scientist" has honed a new alibi. It is all a misunderstanding. The IPCC has not got it wrong, dear me no. We have misinterpreted what it has said.

Understandably, Booker and I disagree."

----------------------------
Booker, North, and Willis on the IPCC Amazongate affair (WUWT)

A few men make Victoria much warmer

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Retired school principal Kenskingdom was alarmed by this Bureau of Meterology graph, showing a strong warming trend for Victoria: ...He checked the data from which the trend, and found it had first been adjusted and turned into “high quality” data. As a BOM spokesman assured him:

On the issue of adjustments you find that these have a near zero impact on the all Australian temperature because these tend to be equally positive and negative across the network (as would be expected given they are adjustments for random station changes).

Actually, no, though. You see, Kenskingdom discovered that the adjustments served to exaggerate Victoria’s warming remarkably: "

Dr Silvia Roth the future UK market for solar panels

Telegraph
“The British market does not exist so far,” she said. “I think the UK is more of a region for wind energy. If you look to your weather it is not really the region for solar. In Germany, in principle it is the same. I don’t see the German market as an important market in the long term. We are not really a sunny country.”

Power rationed on 'green island' Eigg after mild weather causes drought

Telegraph
"But when the inhabitants of the remote Scottish island of Eigg put their faith in the wind and rain to provide all their electricity they did not reckon for one thing – mild weather.Now the 95 residents are being asked not to use kettles, toasters or other kitchen appliances after uncharacteristically mild weather caused a critical shortage of power."

-------------

Ha ha ha ha ha! (Telegraph)
"Truly you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. But it gets even better. Go on: guess how they’ve decided to “solve” the problem. Think of the stupidest way you could spend you money on power generation in a place where there really isn’t that much sun.

Yep:

The trust is now planning to spend part of its £300,000 share of the prize money on more solar panels to prevent a repeat of the shortages in future years."

Greenhouse Theory disproven in 1909, 1963, 1966, 1973...but still refuses to die

The Hockey Schtick
"Robert W. Wood, a professor of experimental physics at the Johns Hopkins University, was perhaps the first "skeptic" of the greenhouse gas "heat trapping" theory, and in 1909 performed a series of classic experiments which disproved its three major assumptions. ....."

"United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Greenhouse gases make up only about 1 per cent of the atmosphere, but they act like a blanket around the earth, or like the glass roof of a greenhouse -- they trap heat and keep the planet some 30 degrees C warmer than it would be otherwise. "

Lord Lawson: 'We need to get off this carbon-cessation hook’

Telegraph
"Lord Lawson of Blaby, one of the most prominent sceptical voices in the climate change debate, has warned that it is “madness” for Britain to try to lead the world in reducing carbon emissions. .....“We have said with an extraordinary post-imperial arrogance that we are going to show the world what it should do,” the former chancellor cautions. “We are going to be a great example. Well, we have been an example of what not to do – by damaging our own economy to no conceivable purpose.”

I'd rather stick my hand in a bag of amphetamine-injected rattlesnakes than put my trust in tonight's BBC Panorama documentary on 'Global Warming'

Telegraph
"..Tonight’s Panorama is a case in point. Here is a blog by the programme’s producer Mike Rudin describing the piece of glib Warmist propaganda he is foisting on the licence-fee paying public this evening.

See if you can spot the weaselry in this summing-up paragraph:

There is genuine uncertainty and disagreement about the exact scale and speed of human-induced global warming and crucially what we should do about it. But I was surprised to find how much agreement there is on the fundamental science.

Yep, what Rudin is trying to do is revive Al Gore’s discredited idea that there is a “Consensus” on global warming.

And here’s the cheaty way he goes about demonstrating it."

Winter - get used to it (Australia)

weatherzone.com.au
"Melburnians and Canberrans may be used to wearing black scarves, skivvies and coats at this time of year, but how long can they keep it up?They, along with Adelaideans and Sydneyites and everyone in between, may need the extra layers every day for another week, at least.Most of those who live in the south of the country are used to cold, mixed in with some relatively mild days. But this winter is a bit different.The recent cold is not a brief burst but a long-lasting one which could go well into next week, potentially the longest cold spell in three years.The last time Melbourne stayed colder than 14 degrees for more than a week was in 2007.It's also been three years since Sydney stayed colder than 17 for more than a week and Canberra colder than 12 for more than a week.For Adelaide it's been two years since there's been a seven day period in which it has failed to warm to 16 degrees.One can conclude that for much of southeastern Australia this cold spell is looking like the longest in three years.Frost will also be a feature. This morning Oakey in southern Queensland dipped to minus six degrees, their coldest in six years.

Don't expect noticeable warming too soon.

Amazongate: the missing evidence

Christopher Booker, Telegraph
"...Nothing did more to excite attention over the effect of climate change on the rainforest than the exceptional drought of 2005, just when the IPCC’s 2007 report was being compiled. Since then, however, abnormally heavy rainfall in the region has brought disastrous floods to Brazil, both last year and again last week.

In other words there is a real mystery here. Nothing so far made public seems to justify an assertion that the IPCC’s specific claim is “supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence”. In view of all the controversy this issue has aroused over several months, it might seem odd that, if such evidence exists, it hasn’t been produced before. Is it not now a matter of considerable public interest that we should be told what it is? "

----------------------------
Where is the evidence? (Dr Richard North)

Is it Science or Is it Politics?

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog
"...It cannot be both ways. Either the IPCC is a politicized body consisting only of people with a single political view on emissions, or it is policy neutral with no implications of being a contributor for a particular political agenda. If the former then the IPCC is deeply compromised and biased and if the latter then the PNAS paper is built on a flawed assumption."

How Lord Oxburgh of Persil washed the Climategate team whiter than white (pt 2)

Telegraph
"...But now we learn from Bishop Hill that support for a whitewash by Lord Oxburgh’s panel may not have been as unanimous as we previously thought. After putting in an FOI request, he has got hold of some of the panellist’ notes. The ones from Michael Kelly, Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge are particularly illuminating. Steve McIntyre has picked the most damning."

Paul Driessen asks some inconvenient questions

WUWT
"A few questions for President Obama :How exactly does the President plan to create his new Green Jobs Economy? ......America needs decisive leaders who understand what government can (and cannot) do to stop the Gulf gusher, clean up the mess, and get business, jobs and prosperity back on track. Instead, President Obama sounds like an anti-business Community Organizer in Chief – pointing fingers, making baseless claims about ending our “addiction to oil,” and leaving no crisis unexploited to promote job-killing cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy agendas. ..."

'Climate change sceptics have smaller members, uglier wives, dumber kids' says new study made up by warmists

Telegraph
"....And how many scientists, with bachelor of science degrees or higher, have signed the Oregon Petition expressing doubts about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)? 31,000 plus. And how many of the supposed 2500 climate scientists responsible for the IPCC “consensus” were actively involved in the sections to do with AGW? 53. And how many scientists does it require to successfully falsify – ie prove wrong – a shabby, tired old theory like “Phlogiston”, or “Geocentrism”, or “Dangerous, unprecedented Man Made Global Warming?” One.

But guess how BBC Radio 4 reported the story this morning? Yep. “98 per cent of scientists support global warming theory.”

Golfing Obama whacks yachting Hayward

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"A shocking look:

BP chief Tony Hayward is at the centre of another PR debacle after watching his yacht at a prestigious race around the Isle of Wight. ....You wouldn’t catch Obama goofing off on a yacht while the US battles the greatest oil spill in history. No, sirree: Meanwhile, President Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden enjoyed a round of golf on Saturday...
... It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.

Mort Zuckerman says Obama is a president who can speak but not lead:

America right now appears to be unreliable to traditional friends, compliant to rivals, and weak to enemies. One renowned Asian leader stated recently at a private dinner in the United States, “We in Asia are convinced that Obama is not strong enough to confront his opponents, but we fear that he is not strong enough to support his friends.”

Ugliness – The blacklist of climate science

WUWT
"Judith Curry, a climate expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology – who was not part of the analysis – called the study “completely unconvincing” while John Christy of University of Alabama claimed he and other climate sceptics included in the survey were simply “being blacklisted” by colleagues."

'Academic embarrassment': Prof. Jon Krosnick Exposed for 'faulty' climate polls -- 'Skewed, propagandized and presented intellectually dishonest and shallow polling analysis'

Climate Depot
"Stanford University's Jon Krosnick has either been distorting climate polling to suit his ideological position for years or he is an utterly incompetent pollster. The solid bet is on the former.Professor Krosnick's polling results are so woeful that both Pew Research Center Survey and Gallup polling recently took the time to harshly reprimand him for his shoddy work."

Antarctic glacier melting due to hidden ice ridge (rather than climate change)

Daily Mail

"An underwater ridge could explain why a major glacier in the Antarctic is melting more quickly than ever before, according to a new study.Scientists used a robot submarine to make a 3D map of the ocean under the ice shelf at the end of the Pine Island Glacier in western Antarctica.They discovered that the ice was no longer resting on a subsea ridge that had slowed the glacier's slide until the early 1970s.The discovery means that the glacier's more rapid melting in recent years could be due to the flow of warmer sea water beneath it rather than climate change, as had previously been believed."

The real villain of the Gulf oil-spill disaster: not BP but PC

Telegraph
"..And while we’re on the subject of the warped, self-destructive tactics of eco-zealots, lets not forget the disastrous role America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has played in all this. Thanks to the EPA’s bizarre sense of ecological priorities, the US government initially turned down an offer from the Dutch to provide 4 oil skimmers capable of scooping up 146,000 barrels of spilt oil per day.

The Dutch offered to fly their skimmer arm systems to the Gulf 3 days after the oil spill started. The offer was apparently turned down because EPA regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.

This crazy decision has since been rescinded. But as I’ve argued before, for Obama and his eco-fascist chums in the global green movement, the more damage this disaster is allowed to do to the image of Big Oil and Big Carbon the better. For them this crisis isn’t a disaster at all. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime."

Firms paid to shut down wind farms when the wind is blowing

Telegraph

"Britain's biggest wind farm companies are to be paid not to produce electricity when the wind is blowing. ..The National Grid fears that on breezy summer nights, wind farms could actually cause a surge in the electricity supply which is not met by demand from businesses and households. The electricity cannot be stored, so one solution – known as the 'balancing mechanism' – is to switch off or reduce the power supplied.The system is already used to reduce supply from coal and gas-fired power stations when there is low demand. But shutting down wind farms is likely to cost the National grid – and ultimately consumers – far more. When wind turbines are turned off, owners are being deprived not only of money for the electricity they would have generated but also lucrative 'green' subsidies for that electricity."

Why Obama turned down specialized foreign ships to clean up the Gulf

The Hockey Schtick
"President Obama has repeatedly said his Administration is doing everything in its power to expedite the oil clean-up and mitigate the damage. But in the two weeks immediately after the spill, 13 foreign governments reached out and offered their assistance. The U.S. response? Thanks, but no thanks. .....Presidents can suspend the Jones Act in emergencies, as George W. Bush did after Hurricane Katrina. But the Obama Administration continues to maintain that this isn't necessary and that there are "no pending requests" for waivers. But Florida Republican Senator George LeMieux disagrees and says his constituents want all the foreign help possible. We sympathize with the President's lament on Monday that "I can't dive down there and plug the hole. I can't suck it up with a straw." But there's no excuse for turning away ships that can clean up the oil merely because that might offend Mr. Obama's union friends."

Global Average Sea Surface Temperatures Continue their Plunge

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
"..What this shows is an unusually large increase in reflected sunlight over the last several months, probably due to an increase in low cloud cover.At this pace of cooling, I suspect that the second half of 2010 could ruin the chances of getting a record high global temperature for this year. Oh, darn."

Where Gulf Spill Might Place on the Roll of Disasters

New York Times
"From the Oval Office the other night, President Obama called the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.” Senior people in the government have echoed that language. The motive seems clear. The words signal sympathy for the people of the Gulf Coast, an acknowledgment of the magnitude of their struggle. And if this is really the worst environmental disaster, the wording seems to suggest, maybe people need to cut the government some slack for failing to get it under control right away. But is the description accurate? Scholars of environmental history, while expressing sympathy for the people of the gulf, say the assertion is debatable. "

$7-a-gallon gas? The folly of O's oil-spill 'fix'

New York Post
" So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?Good question, because such measures wouldn't do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's now-famous words, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste -- and what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."
... Now the president is repackaging cap-and-trade -- again -- as a long-term solution to the oil spill. But it's the same old agenda, a huge energy tax that will raise the cost of gasoline and electricity high enough so that we're forced to use less.

The logic linking cap-and-trade to the spill in the Gulf should frighten anyone who owns a car or truck. Such measures force up the price at the pump -- Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs thinks it "may require gas prices greater than $7 a gallon by 2020" to meet Obama's stated goal of reducing emissions 14 percent from the transportation sector."

Winter strikes with a vengeance

News24
"Cape Town - Winter has struck with a vengeance in the Western Cape with some towns recording their first snow falls in almost 20 years.Several mountain passes in the Southern Cape and the Eastern Cape had to be closed after heavy snowfalls. Tourists expecting sunny skies in Cape Town were greeted by snow on Table Mountain, where the temperature never rose above 1°C. It was the heaviest snowfall on the mountain since 2003."

H/T P Gosselin

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South Africa Hit With Hard Start To Winter (E.M.Smith)

IPCC Disinformation

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog
"Not only did the IPCC misrepresent the science of disasters and climate change, but went so far as to issue a highly misleading press release to try to spin the issue and put an unprepared IPCC WG2 chair on the BBC to try to defend the undefensible."

Obama tries to oil out of the blame

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"..And John Hinderaker fact-checks Obama’s address and discovers it’s as dishonest as one of Rudd’s. For instance, in using this as an excuse to push his global warming agenda and cap-and-trade bill, Obama says:

We consume more than 20% of the world’s oil, but have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean - because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.

In fact, says Hinderaker:

This howler is a favorite canard of Democratic politicians. As is so often the case, they are relying on the public’s ignorance. Most people don’t realize that in the U.S., oil isn’t counted as part of our “reserves” unless it is legally available for drilling. Thus, ANWR, to take one of many examples, isn’t counted toward the total “reserves.” The U.S. government could cause our reserves to skyrocket overnight by opening new areas, on land and in shallow water, to drilling. But the U.S. is the only country in the world that has deliberately chosen not to develop its own energy resources. No one else is that dumb.

UPDATE

But Obama, anxious to show he’s in charge, now gives negotiations with BP over compensation and recovery his full attention:

According to a White House schedule, President Barack Obama was slated to attend the meeting for roughly 20 minutes starting at 10:15 a.m. The meeting was still going—though the president had long left—several hours later."

Obama’s Green Dream Will Be America’s Next Nightmare

P Gosselin
"...It perhaps could serve as a reminder for President Obama, who thinks passing cap & trade and stopping reliance on fossil fuels will somehow plug the hole. My feeling is that Obama is using the oil disaster as a political instrument to drive through a dangerous cap & trade law.

Cap & trade means subsidising industries. Governments can do this as long as they can afford it. But that’s rarely the case. Most often they cannot. Europe is a prime example for Obama to look at."

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The Great Wind Farm Disaster (ctd.) (Telegraph)

WUWT Arctic Sea Ice News #9

WUWT
"The topic this week is verification of data sources. NSIDC reports :At the end of the month, extent fell near the level recorded in 2006, the lowest in the satellite record for the end of May

That sounds bad! Let’s see how 2010 compares with ten, twenty and thirty years ago : ....Ice looks healthier than 30 years ago

Margaret Thatcher: Climate Sceptic

Telegraph,James Delingpole
"Of course, as a huge fan of Margaret Thatcher and her mighty achievements, I find this reasonably consoling. But not, I should say, quite consoling enough. Sweet God in heaven, what was the woman thinking in 1988? Was Sir Crispin Tickell really that silver-tongued? Did it not occur to her that being an ambassador to the UN, he might be ever so slightly unsound? Did no one tell her that before he took up global warming as a cause he was a great advocate of global cooling? Was it really just a cynical ploy to use AGW as a means to help crush Britain’s coal miners while bigging up the nuclear power industry in order to bolster her Trident programme? Perhaps we shall never know. But by golly is it a blot on her copybook."

What's Wrong with the Sun?

The Hockey Schtick
* "Something appears to have changed inside the sun, something the models did not predict. But what?"
* "These findings have thrown our best computer models of the sun into disarray."
* "high solar activity has a disproportionate warming influence on northern Europe"
* "The ultraviolet is varying much, much, much more than we expected"
* "The heat input into the stratosphere is much more variable than we thought"
* "solar activity is just one natural source of climate variability."

-------------------------------
Massive space storms forecast as sun awakens from ‘deep slumber’(Daily Mail)
"The Sun follows an 11-year cycle of high and low periods of solar activity. It is now leaving a notably quiet phase and scientists expect to see a sharp increase in the number of solar flares as well as unprecedented levels of magnetic energy."

Environmental Scientist: "Climategate is the Greatest Scientific Scandal in my Lifetime"

The Hockey Schtick
"If the science is solid, why stoop?" (PDF download)

The IPCC consensus on climate change was phoney, says IPCC insider

National Post
"The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

H/T Climate Depot

Powering down

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"Surely the NSW Government isn’t quite so mad yet as to want to cut the state’s throat:

BUILDING coal-fired power plants will be banned in NSW as part of a new climate change policy expected to go to Cabinet next week.With the Federal Government’s abandonment of a national emissions trading scheme, the State Government will move to curb greenhouse gas emissions with a clean energy policy which bans dirty power plants.However, Treasury officials said a ban could push electricity prices even higher for consumers already hit with a 13 per cent price rise on July 1 as much-needed new energy would have to come from more costly sources.

But we know the Rudd Government is capable of anything:

FARMERS with water rights along the Murray River fear they and other irrigators will be scapegoats for the federal government’s failure to implement an emissions trading scheme when a new water policy for the Murray-Darling Basin is announced in the next few weeks.They claim the government is preparing to severely cut irrigation water entitlements to demonstrate its green credentials and to satisfy concerns about the health of the basin.”It looks as though we are going to be the sacrificial lamb leading to the federal election,” said Cheryl Rix, the general manager of Western Murray Irrigation at Dareton, in far south-west NSW."

Was Margaret Thatcher the first climate sceptic?

Telegraph,Christopher Booker
".. Mrs Thatcher played an important part. It is not widely appreciated, however, that there was a dramatic twist to her story. In 2003, towards the end of her last book, Statecraft, in a passage headed "Hot Air and Global Warming", she issued what amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views.

She voiced precisely the fundamental doubts about the warming scare that have since become familiar to us. Pouring scorn on the "doomsters", she questioned the main scientific assumptions used to drive the scare, from the conviction that the chief force shaping world climate is CO2, rather than natural factors such as solar activity, to exaggerated claims about rising sea levels. She mocked Al Gore and the futility of "costly and economically damaging" schemes to reduce CO2 emissions. She cited the 2.5C rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind.

In other words, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology."

'We need 2,500 more wind turbines': Chris Huhne calls for tougher climate targets

Daily Mail
"Environment Minister Chris Huhne yesterday urged the EU to set tougher climate change targets which could see an extra 2,500 wind turbines going up around Britain.The Liberal Democrat used his first EU talks since taking office to call for a 30 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions across Europe by 2020. .....The current target of 20 per cent is expected to cost Europe about £40billion, but analysts estimate that the 30 per cent target will take this to £67billion."

ED: Remember it is the poor that have to pay the price - literally

Millionaire Chris Huhne finds new ways to waste your money

Telegraph
"The precise relationship between CO2 and global temperatures is still ill-understood by scientists. They don’t even know how much of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is anthropogenic and how much has been released from the oceans as a result of warming periods many hundreds of years ago."

ED: The underlying argument is that it is the poor that pick up the bill for
buying what is fresh air (Carbon credits)....

U.S. Northeast Carbon Permits Draw Record Low Price

Bloomberg
"Carbon dioxide permits in the U.S. Northeast’s cap-and-trade program tumbled to a record low price at auction amid a surplus of the pollution rights and doubts that Congress will create a national emissions market this year."
H/T Climate Depot

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Carbon Bubble (Telegraph)

How Many IPCC Scientists Say So?

Donna Laframboise
"A statement is not true just because thousands of scientists say it is. .... We the public have been misinformed, repeatedly, about the number of IPCC scientists who've explicitly endorsed the human-climate-change link.

If the planet really is in peril, we need clarity about facts such as these - not spin.

How doubts about global warming are on the rise after 'big freeze' winter and emails row

Daily Mail
"..Researchers said the growing doubts had been fuelled by the coldest winter in three decades and the row over leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.These appeared to show that scientists manipulated data on temperature records, although two inquiries ruled out malpractice.The Ipsos Mori survey of 1,822 people for Cardiff University found 40 per cent believed the seriousness of global warming was exaggerated."

Evidence About The 1970s Global Cooling Consensus Keeps Piling Up

Omniclimate
"..That means that pieces of the global cooling puzzle do suggest that cooling was a widely-held view in the 1970s. Admittedly, such an agreed view did not last the whole decade: rather, it concerned the 1972 to 1975 period."

Antarctica 4°C Warmer during last Interglacial

The Hockey Schtick
"..The end of the last major ice age is evident ~18,000 years ago. Since the current interglacial peak ~6000 years ago, the ice core data show Antarctica has cooled. Ice core data from Greenland also show cooling over the past 8000 years. Doomsday news reports and the IPCC have claimed that rising CO2 will cause a 4°C increase and that the earth has not experienced temperatures 4°C higher than the present over the last 55 million years. Alarmist scientists have claimed a 4°C temperature rise would "change the world beyond recognition", cause the Saharan desert to stretch into Europe, mass extinction, all rivers to dwindle to a trickle, etc., none of which occurred with 4°C higher temperatures 130,000 years ago. "

As Nick Clegg's Spanish wife gets a job with a Madrid wind farm firm targeting Britain, one man pens her an irate letter

Daily Mail

"If your husband's coalition government wishes to save large sums of money, it could end the subsidies for this fad that encourages people (mostly the wealthy) to install them, at £50,000 a pop, in the delusional belief that they are saving the planet. ....Wind power is bound to become a major political issue as more British people find they have a fight on their hands to protect their environment against government decisions.Under EU law, we are obliged to generate 32 per cent of our electricity from 'renewable' sources by 2020, and wind farms are one of the cheapest solutions."

I'd rather my wife made land mines than worked in the wind farm industry

Telegraph
"If there’s an industry in the world that deserves to be stigmatised more than any other, it’s the despicable, reprehensible, money-grubbing, mendacious, taxpayer-fleecing, bird-mangling, landscape-ruining, economy-blighting wind farm business. "

Meet the green who doubts ‘The Science’

spiked-online.com
"I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there’s no real consensus among the scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example is presented as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas, therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn’t settled. There’s a huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted that carbon dioxide on its own is not a problem. So, you can double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50 years from now at the current rate of emissions."

H/T Climate Depot

Trying to Hit a Mosquito with a Sledgehammer

World Climate Report
"But in a recent paper in Nature, Oxford University’s Peter Gething and colleagues from Oxford and the University of Florida took a careful look at global malaria data to see if the predicted trend was correct. They uncovered data from around the year 1900 showing where malaria was observed. These data not only show where malaria occurred, but also different categories of endemicity (in locations where the disease is continually present, the categories depict the approximate percentage of mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite). 1900 is a key time because of the lack of prior malaria intervention efforts. The authors then used a current model of the parasite’s transmission to create a map at the same scale for the year 2007. The 1900 and 2007 maps are shown in Figure 1a and 1b, respectively. It’s then a simple matter to subtract the two maps to show how malaria endemicity has changed over the last 100 plus years (in this case, this is a subtraction of categories). This is shown in the bottom Figure (1c), where red shows increasing malaria and blue decreasing malaria.

There is virtually no red on the map."

Obama's Oil Crisis Politics

WSJ
"Not too many weeks ago it looked as if President Obama's cap-and-tax program for energy was dead for this year. But with the political and media left whacking the President for his handling of the worst spill in U.S. history, Democrats have suddenly decided that this is one more crisis that shouldn't go to waste. ....Cap and trade will do little or nothing to end U.S. oil dependence. It will merely make a globally traded commodity more expensive domestically. Oil consumption will naturally decline somewhat, but the reality is that there isn't a viable oil substitute—especially for the transportation that accounts for about 70% of U.S. consumption. Electric cars are years if not decades away from commercial viability, while ethanol isn't energy-dense enough to get a jet off the tarmac. Maybe hot air balloons? "

May data: little change

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)

"The El Nino seems to be ending, and the latest UAH satellite data suggests the global temperature has stayed at the same slightly elevated level for three months. The next few months will be interesting. "

Warming in Last 50 Years Predicted by Natural Climate Cycles

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
"This is powerful evidence that most of the warming that the IPCC has attributed to human activities over the last 50 years could simply be due to natural, internal variability in the climate system. If true, this would also mean that (1) the climate system is much less sensitive to the CO2 content of the atmosphere than the IPCC claims, and (2) future warming from greenhouse gas emissions will be small."

Updated: Low Climate Sensitivity Estimated from the 11-Year Cycle in Total Solar Irradiance

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
"I think the methodology I have presented is the most physically-based and easiest way to estimate climate sensitivity from the 11-year cycle in solar flux averaged over the Earth, and the resulting 11-year cycle in global surface temperatures. It conserves energy, and makes no assumptions about the temperature being in equilibrium with the forcing. "

Low-lying Pacific islands 'growing NOT sinking' as sea levels rise

Daily Mail

"Low-lying islands in the Pacific are 'growing' to counter rising sea levels, a study has found.Scientists feared that many small islands would disappear under rising sea levels caused by climate change.But researchers in New Zealand measured 27 islands where ocean levels have risen 4.8 inches in the past 60 years and found that just four had diminished in size.Coral debris eroded from encircling reefs was pushed up on to the islands' coasts by winds and waves as weather patterns changed.Professor Paul Kench, of Auckland University's environment school, said this showed that islands are coping with the changes.He said: 'It has been thought that as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown. But they won't. The sea level will go up and the island will start responding.'They've always changed, but the consistency [with which] some of them have grown is a little surprising.' Tuvalu, a coral-island group that climate change campaigners have predicted will be drowned, has its highest point just 14 feet above sea level but has actually grown in the past 60 years, the study in New Scientist found.The research, which appeared in this week's New Scientist, found that seven of Tuvalu's nine islands had grown by more than 3 percent on average over the past 60 years."

France – 2009 Temperature Stations

E.M.Smith
"What Do We Actually Measure in France Today? - In a prior posting we found that there are all of 17 stations in France in 2009 that are used by the GHCN. The overall dT/dt graph was produced (using all historical data in GHCN) and that made a great “hockey stick”. With gently dropping temperatures turned into a rapid rise at the end.A brief inspection of the station list show that it was almost all Airports. Only one station was not flagged as an airport (and a commenter stated that it was, in fact, an airport too).So we surmised that putting all the thermometers at the Airports would cause much of the observed temperature rise (that ‘just happens’ to start right after the non-airports are dropped from the series…)But it nagged at me that I’d not looked at these stations in depth. Was it possible there were some turly great stations here, asking to be contrasted with others? Would there be rampant indications of Tarmac Attack in the record? Just what did those temperatures look like? Well, I’ve finally gotten the set done. Now we will see."

More to Tuvalu than the alarmists claimed

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"HOW embarrassing. Global warming worriers have gone from warning Tuvalu will drown to wishing it damn well had.But look at it now. Not drowning, but waving. And, er ... growing too? You remember Tuvalu, of course, even if you’ve never figured quite where it was.For years this glittering string of atolls has been shoved in your face as the poster islands of the global warming faith - this Eden we were killing with our Western sin.How often we were told it could be the first Pacific nation to be swallowed by the rising seas caused by our evil gases.In fact, warned Al Gore in his An Inconvenient Truth, so dire was this danger that “the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand”.Of course, this claim was as phony as so many Gore made in a film that was honoured with an Oscar, endorsed as accurate by the CSIRO and shown with reverence in every school in the country.As a British judge later ruled, there was no evidence of climate refugees from the Pacific having to be evacuated to New Zealand or anywhere else to escape rising seas.But truth has counted for dangerously little in this debate, and warmists told one Tuvaluan tale after another of an endangered Polynesian paradise that grew steadily more mythical. ....And now we know that Tuvalu, far from drowning, is rising from the seas.It was already clear from the Australian-funded South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that sea levels in the region were rising only microscopically, much as they’d done for centuries before the invention of the motor car or the light bulb.But now New Scientist reports that however fast the seas are rising, Tuvalu and many other low-lying Pacific islands are so far rising even faster, thanks to coral debris, coral growth, land reclamation and deposits of sediment. Some have grown by as much as a third. Auckland University’s Associate Prof Paul Kench, one of the two authors of the study, said he compared historical pictures from the past 60 years to satellite images of 27 Pacific islands.“Eighty per cent of the islands we’ve looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, (grown) larger,” he said.(In fact, the real figure is an even more comforting 86 per cent.) ..."

Tuvalu and many other South Pacific Islands are not sinking, claims they are due to global warming driven sea level rise are opportunistic

WUWT
"We’ve mentioned several times here on WUWT that the claims about sea level rise and sinking islands are overblown. For example, this idiotic publicity stunt by the Maldivian government, signing a legal declaration underwater, demonstrates just how far some people are willing to prostitute their victimhood for financial gain. ...One of the highest profile islands – in a political sense – was Tuvalu, where politicians and climate change campaigners have repeatedly predicted it will be drowned by rising seas, as its highest point is 4.5 metres above sea level. But the researchers found seven islands had spread by more than 3 percent on average since the 1950s.One island, Funamanu, gained 0.44 hectares or nearly 30 percent of its previous area.And the research showed similar trends in the Republic of Kiribati, where the three main urbanised islands also “grew” – Betio by 30 percent (36ha), Bairiki by 16.3 percent (5.8ha) and Nanikai by 12.5 percent (0.8ha).

On the malignancy of trolls

Telegraph
"..I have a similar question to ask about those green activists who believe so passionately in Man-Made Global Warming. If they are really so convinced by the scientific case for their cause, why do they devote so much energy trying to shut dissenting voices out of the argument? And if their motives are really so high-minded and noble, why is it that the methods they use are so cruel, vicious, devious and underhand?"