Climategate

"Carbon (Dioxide) trading is now the fastest growing commodities market on earth.....And here’s the great thing about it. Unlike traditional commodities markets, which will eventually involve delivery to someone in physical form, the carbon (dioxide) market is based on lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no-one. Since the market revolves around creating carbon (dioxide) credits, or finding carbon (dioxide) reduction projects whose benefits can then be sold to those with a surplus of emissions, it is entirely intangible." (Telegraph)

This blog has been tracking the 'Global Warming Scam' for over ten years now. There are a very large number of articles being published in blogs and more in the MSM who are waking up to the fact the public refuse to be conned any more and are objecting to the 'green madness' of governments and the artificially high price of energy. This blog will now be concentrating on the major stories as we move to the pragmatic view of 'not if, but when' and how the situation is managed back to reality. To quote Professor Lindzen, "a lot of people are going to look pretty silly"


PS: If you have arrived here on a page link, then click on the HOME link...

Sunday 31 March 2013

Coldest Easter Sunday ever!: And spring is set to be chillier than winter for the first time in 38 years

Daily Mail
"After the coldest Easter Sunday on record, you’d hope for a brief respite from the Arctic weather. But it seems spring is shaping up to be colder than winter was, with no sign of temperatures warming up. The bank holiday weekend was yesterday confirmed as the coldest Easter since records began in 1960, with temperatures dipping well below freezing."

Government's climate watchdog launches astonishing attack on the Mail on Sunday... for revealing global warming science is wrong

Daily Mail
"The official watchdog that advises the Government on greenhouse gas emissions targets has launched an astonishing attack on The Mail on Sunday – for accurately reporting that alarming predictions of global warming are wrong. We disclosed that although highly influential computer models are still estimating huge rises in world temperatures, there has been no statistically significant increase for more than 16 years. Despite our revelation earlier this month, backed up by a scientifically researched graph, the Committee on Climate Change still clings to flawed predictions. ......The Committee on Climate Change claims such forecasts must be right because world temperatures have previously matched computer models’ ‘outputs’ for most of the past 60 years. Yet as this newspaper pointed out, for almost all of that 60-year period the models were not making predictions – because they did not yet exist. Instead, the models had recently been making ‘hindcasts’ – backward projections based on climate simulations and tailored to actual temperatures. The evidence shows the models collapse when they try to forecast the future."

Benny Peiser (2005): It is Cold That Kills

Climate Depot
"Throughout history, moderate warming has significantly contributed to enhanced living standards. Hardly a month goes by without predictions that global warming will result in increased rates of disease, infections and deaths. The World Health Organisation (WHO) claims that some 150,000 deaths every year can be attributed to the effects of climate change. These assertions, however, are misleading on two counts. First of all, most climatologists would agree that it is impossible to associate local climate fluctuations (let alone the flux of local disease levels due to environmental variability) to global average temperature (1). Moreover, every health expert knows only too well that the most significant risk to human health is not due to warmer temperatures, but to cold winters and cold stress. In Europe and Russia alone, more than 100,00 people die on average each year as a result of cold temperatures during the winter months."

Saturday 30 March 2013

Remember this...

24,000 'died because of cold homes' last winter: Fears grow that figure could be higher this year because of spiralling bills (Daily Mail, 30 November 2012)....

Owen Paterson proves a gale of fresh air in Westminster

Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph
" Another issue due to make headlines will be a major Bill on Britain’s water policy, soon to come before Parliament. “It is vital that we find ways to reverse the tendency in recent years to charge customers ever more for water while supplying them with less. "We desperately need to build more reservoirs to store all that water which keeps falling out of the sky — contrary to the long-fashionable belief that, thanks to global warming, we can expect nothing in the future but endless droughts.” Mr Paterson smiles as he says this. In private he laughs a lot and is much more genially relaxed than he sometimes appears to be in public. And, of course, his pragmatic scepticism about climate change, like his enthusiasms for shale gas and GM crops, is yet another reason why he has become such a hate figure for the green pressure groups. He enjoys the irony of the fact that, as a practical environmentalist, he is demonised by fanatical ideologues who know rather less about nature and the environment than he does — just as he does in being the pragmatic Eurosceptic who knows considerably more about how the EU system of government works than those ideological Europhiles like his Labour opposite number, for whom “Europe” is little more than “a cosy abstract idea”.

No Real Global Warming For 22 Years

Real Science
"Most of the warming from 1992 to 1997 was due to recovery from the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. Temperatures are about the same in 2013 as they were in 1991."

Dr. Michael Mann, Smooth Operator

WUWT
"People sometimes ask why I don’t publish in the so-called scientific journals. Here’s a little story about that. Back in 2004, Michael Mann wrote a mathematically naive piece about how to smooth the ends of time series. It was called “On smoothing potentially non-stationary climate time series“, and it was published in Geophysical Research Letters in April of 2004. When I read it, I couldn’t believe how bad it was. Here is his figure illustrating the problem: ....."

Friday 29 March 2013

You know how your energy bills are SO much worse than they were?

The Register
"Analysis The government's Department of Energy and Climate Change, with the current minister as mouthpiece, has just pushed out a report claiming that its green policies are saving us money now and will save us even more in coming decades. Can it be true? We can save the planet - or anyway reduce carbon emissions - and it not only costs nothing, but puts money in our pockets?
In a word, no: of course not. If that was true there would be no need for government action, we'd be acting to reduce carbon emissions on our own. And indeed, once you skip the foolish tinned quotes and bogo-stats in the executive summary, the report itself (pdf) makes it very clear that in fact green policies are already to blame for most of the sustained climb in electricity prices we've suffered over the past decade - and that it's going to get a lot worse. ..."

Climate Models Are So Flawed They Fail History

Investors.com
"Environment: The alarmists want to place the world in servitude to the models that are predicting global warming. But those models can't even reconstruct the past. A researcher at Sweden's University of Gothenburg analyzed climate models to see how closely their predictions fit with history, in this case, precipitation in China from 1961 to 2000. What Tinghai Ou found should crimp the alarmists' plans to establish regimes that punish and limit man's use of fossil fuels. "Only a few climate models were able to reproduce the observed changes in extreme precipitation in China over the last 50 years," says the university's Department of Earth Sciences. Ou himself said that the "results show that climate models give a poor reflection of the actual changes in extreme precipitation events that took place in China" during the period he examined. "Only half of the 21 analyzed climate models were able to reproduce the changes in some regions of China," he said. "Few models can well reproduce the nationwide change." Ou's work is important. If the models can't get the past right, how can they be trusted to predict future climate? Seems more like guesswork than solid science to us."

It’s the cold, not global warming, that we should be worried about

Telegraph
" By now, the Energy Secretary will also have realised another inconvenient truth – that, for Britain, global warming is likely to save far more lives then it threatens. Delve deep enough into the Government’s forecasts, and they speculate that global warming will lead to 6,000 fewer deaths a year, on average, by the end of the decade. This is the supposed threat facing us: children would be less likely to have snow to play in at Christmas, but more likely to have grandparents to visit over Easter. Not a bad trade-off. The greatest uncertainty is whether global warming, which has stalled since 1998, will arrive quickly enough to make a difference.
It’s daft to draw any conclusions from this freakish, frozen spring. But in general, the computer-generated predictions do not seem as reliable as they did when Al Gore was using them to scare the bejesus out of us. A few weeks ago, scientists at the University of Washington found that man’s contribution to global warming may have been exaggerated – by a factor of two. The natural cycle of heating and cooling, they discovered, plays a far bigger role than they had imagined. Mr Davey’s fuel bill taxes may do nothing for the planet. But they will certainly lead to poorer, colder homes and shorter lives."

Thursday 28 March 2013

Unpaid students to review AR5. This is rigorous expert science right?

JoNova (Australia)
"The Risk Monger (David Zaruk) was astonished to receive an advertisement from the Dutch government looking for 60 young PhD students to help with the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. They salary is “none”. But they are not just looking for any old student. You don’t need experience, but to qualify you need “an affinity with climate change”. I guess they are not looking for skeptical students who feel an affinity with logic, reason, and empirical evidence? The reasons for asking the unpaid students is actually described as an “ambitious plan” to do a “thorough review” because there were “errors in the fourth assessment report…”. O.K.

Britain Blocks Climate Change From G8 Agenda

WUWT
"...Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now."

Spring Freeze set to make March the coldest since bitter winter of 1962 as parents are separated from their children by snow drifts for a WEEK

Daily Mail
"The Met Office said from March 1 to 26, the UK mean temperature was 2.5C, which is 3C below the long-term average - making it the joint fourth coldest in the UK, in records going back to 1910. ......The Met Office said this March was likely to be the fourth coldest on record for England, joint third coldest for Wales, joint eighth coldest for Scotland and sixth coldest for Northern Ireland. This March joined 2006, 2001, 1995, 1987, 1979, 1970 and 1962 as years when the month saw some significant snowfall. The coldest March in the UK was in 1962, at 1.9C, followed by 1947, 2.2C, 1937, 2.4C , and 1916 and 1917, 2.5C. The cold weather is expected to continue through the Easter weekend and into April."

Wednesday 27 March 2013

What planet are they living on? As freezing Britain faces a grave energy crisis, ministers unveil more green gimmicks and eco taxes. What folly

Daily Mail
"Nothing better illustrates the insanity of the shambles our politicians have led us into than the fact that, just when we are closing down our coal-fired power stations in the hope of saving the planet, the Chinese are building 363 more of them, the Indians a further 455 and even the Germans another 20 - adding far more CO² to the world's atmosphere every week than Britain puts out in a year. The disaster we face is only made harder to bear by the realisation that experts were predicting it a decade ago, yet so lost were our politicians in their bubble of green make-believe that they were unable to listen. So how are we to get out of this mess? If we had a grown-up government, capable of looking at the evidence, the first thing it would do would be to admit we have a quite unprecedented crisis on our hands - one that can only be met by junking all that childish wishful thinking which has shaped our national energy policy for 20 years. Such a government would scrap Osborne's ridiculous 'carbon tax'. It would stop closing down the coal-fired power stations on which we depend for more than 40 per cent of our electricity. It would repeal the Climate Change Act, described as 'the most expensive suicide note in history'. And it would stop pouring massive subsidies into the generation of electricity from wind turbines. Such a government would recognise that our only hope of keeping bills down, our lights on and the economy running is to go flat out to exploit Britain's vast reserves of the cheap shale gas, which in America has more than halved gas prices in the past four years. But we do not have such a government. Our bills will continue to soar. Our lights will go out, just as that electricity chief was predicting last week. And while Ed Davey continues to prattle about his 'heat network schemes', our poor country will find itself having to stumble in the cold and the dark through a self-inflicted crisis that is unique in the developed world."

£286 green tax on energy bills: But ministers insist 'efficient appliances' will SAVE us money

Daily Mail
"The average power bill is now £1,267 – with £112 of that going on green taxes, including an £18 wind farm subsidy. ..... By 2020, green taxes will have risen by more than 150 per cent, ensuring each family contributes £286, according to the Department for Energy and Climate Change. ..... But John Constable, of the charity Renewable Energy Foundation, said: ‘DECC is clearly embarrassed by the terrifying costs of its ever-growing range of green policies, and is covering up with a whitewash of wildly optimistic assumptions about energy efficiency."

Tuesday 26 March 2013

Welcome to blackout Britain

Telegraph
"With the bad weather causing long-term power cuts, the fragility of our energy infrastructure is becoming frighteningly apparent ......“Until now it hadn’t dawned on people that the cuts of 1974 could happen today,” Hughes says. “Most people don’t think of the state of our energy infrastructure until shortages affect them in a very personal and direct manner.”

Global warming: if only we'd listened to the experts, eh?

Telegraph
"Actually, though, if you'll look at the facts – something that the Warmists appear increasingly loath to do – what you'll realise is that our winters ARE getting colder. That there has been no statistically significant warming since January 1997. That the CAGW hypothesis is looking increasingly threadbare. And that, therefore, the billions if not trillions that Britain and the other Western industrialised economies have spent "combatting climate change" have very likely been utterly wasted."

How the lies on global warming snowballed

Daily Mail
"Thirteen years ago, the global warming gravy train was only just getting into gear. Since then we’ve lived through a decade of global cooling. Far from being a thing of the past, snowfalls are still very much with us. This has been the coldest winter in 30 years. Rather than admit they were wrong, the so-called ‘experts’ simply changed the rules. Out went ‘global warming’, in came ‘climate change’. The Government’s outgoing chief scientist was yesterday still insisting that the world is heating up. When confronted with evidence to the contrary, he tried hilariously to argue that the weather we are currently experiencing is being caused by all the carbon we released into the atmosphere 25 years ago. Yep, the snow which has Britain in its grip this week has been a quarter of a century in the making. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Actually, the global warming, sorry ‘climate change’ head-bangers will believe anything which reinforces their zealotry. Unshakeable faith in ‘climate change’ is now the official religion of the Met Office, Whitehall, the EU, the UN and the BBC. We are all paying for this lunacy through our gas and electricity bills, which are inflated by heavy subsidies for inefficient and ludicrously expensive ‘green’ energy sources. In the name of saving the planet, our countryside and coastline have been scarred by useless wind farms. Meanwhile, India and China open another coal-fired power station every five minutes. We are closing perfectly good power stations to meet arbitrary EU carbon targets. Soon this bovine stupidity will lead to the lights going out across the country. It is industrial and economic suicide."

Flagship Daily DIE WELT Stuns Germany: “Scientists Warn Of Ice Age”, Cites New Peer-Reviewed Russian Study

NoTricksZone
"Mentioning the lethal “100-year, record-smashing” spring cold and snow spreading across Europe over the past month has for the most part been avoided like the plague by Germany’s mainstream media. The silence over the record cold and frost, which has killed thousands and cost billions, has been ear-ringing. Yet some leading dailies are breaking ranks, and have begun to examine the phenomenon critically and openly."

An Hour of Darkness. Or Light!

Climate Change Dispatch
"We derive electricity from burning coal, from natural gas, from nuclear fission, and from hydroelectricity generated by huge dams. The least amount of electricity we use comes from oil and, in particular from wind and solar, a bare two percent or so. These latter two sources exist only because of government subsidies and mandates. Without these they could not compete against far more affordable and effective sources. Oil, of course, fuels all our vehicles.
What Americans generally have not absorbed is the fact that the large, multi-million dollar funded environmental organizations oppose every form of energy we use. .......Not that long ago, Greens were spreading nonsense about peak oil , saying that the Earth was running out of this energy source, but new reserves of oil are being found all the time. Between 1945 and 2010, the United States alone produced 167 billion barrels of oil, more than eight times more oil than the amount of proven oil reserves it had in 1944. Oil doesn t merely fuel our cars and trucks, but as fracking techniques have been developed, more and more of it is available. Between 1980 and 2010, the U.S. produced 77.8 billion barrels of oil and still had 20.7 billion barrels of oil reserves left.
What Americans should keep in mind during Earth Hour is that we have a White House that has done everything in its power to deprive us of the coal, oil and natural gas that we have at our disposal. It has restricted the exploration and extraction of billions of barrels of oil from offshore of our east and west coasts, and in Alaska. It has generated regulations that have already shut down coal-fired plants and is seeking to impose greater restrictions despite the fact that we have enough coal to keep them operating for hundreds of years."

Monday 25 March 2013

Dumb as a Potato: Cold Winters Caused by Global Warming.

hauntingthelibrary
"I’d say that “You can’t make this stuff up” except that obviously you can make this stuff up. The Grauniad offers a laughable new argument that lack of Arctic sea ice is responsible for cold winters. Here it is: ....."

The UK Energy Crisis in 3 simple awareness-raising pictures

The Register
"They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, we’re about to save you reading 3,000. The UK is running out of gas. Very rapidly indeed. So much so, that shortly after Easter cuts and rationing may be introduced, with industrial users and hospitals getting preferential treatment. This month is the coldest March in years, and thus the UK’s gas fuel stores have run down to 10 per cent of the nation's capacity. A year ago it was 49 per cent. While other countries have hundreds of days of supply, the UK has tens. According to Reuters, stores of gas will run out by 8 April at this rate. .......There's no shortage of blame to go round in the UK Energy Crisis. But it should be noted that our finest climate experts consistently forecast warmer and milder winters than we have experienced. "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," one expert predicted in 2000. The politicians have prioritised accordingly."

New paper finds the Sun controlled climate change of Asian continent over past 12,000 years

The Hockey Schtick
"A paper published today in Global and Planetary Change reconstructs climate change during the past 12,000 years and finds the Sun has governed climate change of the Asian continent during the Holocene. According to the authors, "Spectral analysis of our results demonstrates periodic changes of 1500, 1000 and 500 years of relatively warm and cold intervals during the Holocene of Siberia. We presume that the 1000 and 500 year climatic cycles are driven by increased solar insolation reaching the Earth surface and amplified by other still controversial mechanisms." Solar amplification mechanisms include via ozone, clouds, and ocean oscillations."

NOAA: More and more people at risk of extreme weather

JunkScience.com
"It’s called population growth."

Ukraine Declares State of Emergency as Spring Starts With “record snowfalls”.

hauntingthelibrary
" month’s worth of snow fell in less than 24 hours as record cold and snow hit Ukraine and Russia. Military and civilian forces are being deployed in a desperate effort to keep entrances to shops and metro stations clear of snowdrifts, let alone the roads. Weather forecasters are saying this Spring is likely to be the coldest in decades, with the freezing wintery weather expected to grip until the end of the month with temperatures well below freezing:..."

Earth Hour's dim bulbs

Quadrant Online (Australia)
"Earth Hour was celebrated last night with suitable enthusiasm in the inner-city municipality of Burchett Hill -- indeed it is still being celebrated. The city council, dominated by the Greens Party, has voted to extend the occasion and rename it Earth Week. .....Councillor Rhiannon said that council had "democratically removed the voluntary element, which had robbed previous Earth Hours of their full potential" and every household and business in the municipality was now obliged to switch off all electric power for a week "under pain of heavy financial sanctions, such as tripling of the rates for offenders." ....BUT....There are also exemptions for "special cases with particular needs". .....Saucy Girl Adult Escort Agency & Entertainment Suites ("sizzling hot chicks the way U like them"), Railway Place, Burchett Hill (exempted on special application of Platinum Loyalty Cardholder Councillor C. Thomson). ....
ED This is a must read on 'Green' activists - very funny but true.

Sunday 24 March 2013

The amazing satellite image which shows how one tiny town (pop. 14,716) has fracked enough oil and gas to light up 'Saudi America'

Daily Mail
" Williston, North Dakota, is one of the fracking capitals of the U.S.- Local farmers have become millionaires after oil companies bought their mineral rights - The Brakken formation contains 200,000 miles of vast oil deposits"

Zealots who will let the lights go out

Daily Mail
"A well-run state should never be taken by surprise. It should have plans for every reasonable contingency, and then a few more besides. But it is clear that the current blast of cold weather – not that unlikely in March – has exposed huge and worrying gaps in our energy plans. More significantly, it has shown that the virtual takeover of Whitehall by Green zealots has actively prevented this country from making wise plans for the future. Experts have been warning for more than a decade that Britain faces a power crisis in 2015, as North Sea gas supplies tail off, elderly nuclear power plants shut down and the EU Large Combustion Plant directive forces the closure of several coal-fired generating stations, one of which was actually switched off forever on Friday, when demand was at its peak. In an age when so much of our economy and society are wholly dependent on computers, power cuts would be far more damaging than they were in the days of Ted Heath and his Three Day Week. One obvious and straightforward escape route is available, the swift and widespread exploitation of shale gas, or fracking. As The Mail on Sunday shows today, this has transformed the energy position in the USA, simultaneously cutting costs and reducing carbon emissions. While Britain cannot expect a boom of the same size, there is no doubt that this country contains substantial shale gas reserves. Yet the Green lobby, for no clear reason, opposes such a move. Ministers must challenge this pig-headed dogmatism, before the lights go out."

Too much green energy is bad for Britain

Telegraph
" It is time for the Coalition to tear up its energy policy before the lights really do go out. The first priority must be to repeal the Climate Change Act of 2008, with its brutal, punishing targets: reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, and 26 per cent by 2020. These targets have already had a disastrous effect, forcing the closure of coal-fired power stations, and increasing tax-funded subsidies on wind power. Next month, electricity bills will soar even higher, thanks to a new tax on carbon dioxide produced by coal-fired and gas-fired power stations. There are good intentions behind a green energy policy, and no one would wilfully want to damage the environment. But green technology – in its current incarnation, anyway – is just too inefficient and expensive to meet our energy needs. In some of the worst weather for more than 30 years, green power still only provides a tiny fraction of our energy needs. Solar power is of limited use in our cold, dark, northern climate. And wind power isn’t much better – cold weather doesn’t necessarily mean windy weather."

UK's coldest spring since 1963 claims 5,000 lives: Pensioners worst affected - and experts say final toll could be 'horrendous'

Daily Mail
"Freezing Britain's unusually harsh winter could have cost thousands of pensioners their lives. This month is on track to be the coldest March for 50 years – and as the bitter Arctic conditions caused blackouts and traffic chaos yesterday, experts warned of an 'horrendous' death toll among the elderly. About 2,000 extra deaths were registered in just the first two weeks of March compared with the average for the same period over the past five years."

March Cold Records Smashed Throughout Germany…Wind Chill Down To -33°C…”Event Of The Century”!

NoTricksZone
[headline:]"100-year event in March - Greenland icy air smashes cold records in the East - Cold records were set during the night at many locations in the eastern part of Germany. “The windchill pushed felt-temperatures down to – 30°C.”

Trend To Colder Winters Continues in UK

WUWT
"Figures released by the Met Office show the UK mean temperature for the 2012/13 winter finishing at 3.31C. This is below the long term 1981-2010 average of 3.83C. The winter ranked 43rd coldest since 1910, and continues the trend towards colder winters. In the last five years, only 2011/12 has been above the 1981-2010 average. The average over these five years has been 3.03C. Interestingly, the average winter temperature for 1911-2013 stands at 3.52C, so by 20thC standards the last few years have been genuinely cold. The mild winters between 1998 and 2008 increasingly look to be the exception rather than the rule,..."

Deep drifts, high winds and now deadly ice: Britain faces perfect winter storm as forecasters warn of perilous conditions until 'White Easter''

Daily Mail
"Spring remains on hold with the big freeze forecast to continue until after Easter with temperatures dipping to -5C. And this month is on course to be the coldest March for more than half a century with a 'Beast from the East' wind making it feel even colder. The Met Office warned of more biting winds and sub-zero temperatures for the Easter Bank Holiday weekend. And forecasters are reluctant to pinpoint just when the weather will finally start to warm up. More snow is expected in the Midlands tonight, with scattered showers persisting throughout the week in the North East of England and Scotland. Fresh snow fell in Wrexham this morning, though there is none predicted for this evening or next week, the Met Office said The south will be mostly dry throughout the week, although temperatures will struggle to get much above freezing. Met Office forecaster Helen Roberts said: 'In a word it will be cold next week. 'Even in January and December we would not be expecting the type of snow we have had for the last few days. It is very unusual for this time of year. 'The first half of March was around two degrees lower than we would normally expect for this time of year. 'There is still some time to go in March, but we are certainly looking at some unseasonably wintry conditions for the rest of the month and foreseeable future".

Saturday 23 March 2013

Europe Shock Freeze…Catastrophe Winter Continues…German Televison Warns: “Coldest Night In 100 Years”!

NoTricksZone
"German RTL television online reports on the nasty wave of bitter cold now currently gripping Germany and Eastern Europe. The report’s title: “Germany Continues To Shiver: Coldest Night In 100 Years Threatens.”

It’s payback time for our insane energy policy

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" As the snow of the coldest March since 1963 continues to fall, we learn that we have barely 48 hours’ worth of stored gas left to keep us warm, and that the head of our second-largest electricity company, SSE, has warned that our generating capacity has fallen so low that we can expect power cuts to begin at any time. It seems the perfect storm is upon us. The grotesque mishandling of Britain’s energy policy by the politicians of all parties, as they chase their childish chimeras of CO2-induced global warming and windmills, has been arguably the greatest act of political irresponsibility in our history.
.....This is all insane in so many ways that one scarcely knows where to begin, except to point out that, even if our rulers somehow managed to subsidise firms into spending £100 billion on all those wind farms they dream of, they will still need enough new gas-fired power stations to provide back-up for all the times when the wind isn’t blowing, at the very time when the carbon tax will soon make it uneconomical for anyone to build them."

An update on my solar power project – results show why I got solar power for my home (hint: climate change is not a reason)

WUWT
"And, with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) running amok with cap-and-trade regulation frenzy, with refusal of coal and nuclear energy, relying on green wind power mostly for the future, combined with a looming national Carbon Tax, finding a way to generate your own electricity is in my opinion, the best hedge against future cost increases. Climate concerns don’t even rate with me on this issue, I’m thinking more about my financial future and the health and comfort of my family, and that’s why I got a solar system – it’s a hedge against the green energy and climate madness."

What happened to “Earth Hour”? Celebrate: It’s the “Power Hour” tonight!

JoNova (Australia)
"Remember all the fuss? What happened to Earth Hour 2013? It’s that time-of-year for the hour of Green Darkness. But how times have changed. On Their-ABC, the only mention I can find is this: “Is Earth Hour dead?“ The Age and The SMH pay lip-service to Earth Hour with an article in today. But there is nothing like the hype of previous years. The Guardian puts on the best spin, but concede Lomborg might be right. Even the Huff Po is telling us it’s a waste of time. It appears Lomborg took the fun out of it by pointing out that Earth Hour was a waste-of-time token that produced more emissions than it saved."

Friday 22 March 2013

Here comes Team Obama's carbon tax

Fox News
"The Treasury Department’s Office of Environment and Energy has finally begun to turn over documents about its preparations for a carbon tax in response to transparency warrior Chris Horner’s Freedom of Information Act request. The documents provide solid evidence that the Obama administration and its allies in Congress have every intention of implementing a carbon tax if we fail to stop them." (h/t Climate Depot)

Climategate: the role of the social sciences

Bishop Hill
"A new paper in Climatic Change looks at Climategate and wonders whether upholders of the IPCC consensus haven't been shooting themselves in the foot. ...."

Nunavut (Canada’s Arctic) Temperature Falling From -8C to -12C Per Decade For Last 3 years

sunshine hours
"I looked at Nunavut stations with Normals (anomalies) calculated by Environment Canada that have data for the last 3 years. (Most recent Nunavut Data Here. I’m looking at stations with data in column D) Temperature is falling. From -8C to -12C per decade. Amazing. Sure. Only 3 years. But did anyone else tell you this news? "

Adopt a polar bear? Have you seen what they do?

Spiked
"How did the polar bear, a vicious killing machine that is thriving, become the poster boy of climate-change alarmism? ......Save the whale? That’s so 1970s. Now it’s the mighty polar bear that has become the poster child of the environmental movement. But are polar bears really facing extinction, or are they just a photogenic vehicle for promoting alarm about global warming? ...
Crockford’s first point is that polar bears represent a ‘conservation success story’. The biggest threat to the bears in the past was hunting. Since 1973, when restrictions on hunting were introduced, it is commonly agreed that polar-bear numbers have bounced back from a low of around 10,000 to between 20,000 and 25,000. In addition, four sub-populations of polar bears are currently listed as ‘zero’, says Crockford, because they haven’t been surveyed. Add in those animals, and she argues that the true population figure could easily be between 27,000 and 32,000.
The only population shown to have declined in recent years - a fall in numbers described by Crockford as ‘modest’ - is the one in the western Hudson Bay area. Even here, claims that polar-bear numbers continue to decline are based on data that is ‘unpublished, woefully out of date, or both’, says Crockford. Polar bears have actually shown a remarkable ability to survive and thrive after months without food."

WWF Slaps Down Polar Bear Protection Bill So it Can Keep Using Them as Global Warming Mascot

hauntingthelibrary
"Most shockingly of all, though, is the cynical maneuvering of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Faced with the possibility of increased protection under the CITES rules on trading animal furs and parts, the WWF said they would OPPOSE any such increased protection. Asked why on earth a charity supposedly devoted to protecting animals would be against a law which gave them greater protection, WWF “wildlife trade policy analyst” Dr Colman O’Criodain mumbled the following “justification” - ..."

Greenland ice melt overestimated due to satellite data algorithm issue

WUWT
"This is an interesting admission: The melt extent algorithm used by Greenland Ice Sheet Today has been overestimating the melt extent, and as a result, daily images posted on this site in February and March may have indicated melt where none occurred. This makes you wonder what other kinds of issues remain undetected in the satellite data. NSIDC has had to issue corrections in the past, when it was pointed out that their data and reality didn’t match."

Climate Alarmists Repeating The Same Nonsense Since Nixon Was President

Real Science
"...02 Feb 1972 – Scientists fear for Arctic Sea ice ....."

Lewandowsky and Cook in spectacular carcrash

Bishop Hill
"There has been great hilarity overnight, with Stefan Lewandowsky and Skeptical Science's John Cook making complete fools of themselves again. It started when Barry Woods was examining the supplementary data to Lewandowsky's latest paper, the one that analysed sceptic reactions to his previous carcrash paper on various blogs and tried to present these as evidence of "conspiracy ideation". ......"

IPCC Lead Author calls Lewandowsky “deluded”

JoNova (Australia)
"People across the UK are rolling in the aisles in laughter. Lewandowsky’s latest paper, “Recursive Fury” (which has just reappeared), categorized a comment by Richard Betts under the heading “Excerpt Espousing Conspiracy Theory” (in the supplemental data). But instead of being a comment from a rabid tin-foil-hat skeptic, Betts turns out to be Head of Climate Impacts at the UK Met Office and an IPCC lead author. When Betts was informed about this by Barry Woods, he tweeted “Lewandowsky et al clearly deluded!”

Get ready for freezing Friday: Britain braced for weekend of severe disruption as flooding, heavy snowfall and blizzards wreak havoc

Daily Mail
"The current bout of icy weather gripping most of Britain is being blown in from the snowy wastes of Scandinavia and Russia, the Met Office said today. High pressure to the north and east is pushing cold air across the UK towards a lower pressure area in the Mediterranean, with little chance of a reversal. Robin Thwaytes, a forecaster with the agency, told MailOnline: 'The pattern is that the weather is very blocked at the moment. 'We have got high pressure to the north and east and low pressure down in the Mediterranean and that's creating an easterly flow that's bringing in the cold from Finland and north-west Russia.'

Blizzards, 60mph gales and panic buying: 36 hours of snow chaos on the way

Daily Express
"HEAVY snow is expected over the next 36 hours as Britain shivers on the coldest March weekend for 50 years."

Thursday 21 March 2013

Study Shows Southwest Droughts Of The Past “Were More Severe, Persistent Than Any Of The Last 100 Years”!

NoTricksZone
"The U of A Science News website has an interesting report on precipitation reconstructions using tree rings. The reconstruction goes back some 470 years in the Southwest, covering most of Arizona, western New Mexico and parts of northern Mexico. ...."

Don’t Turn Off the Lights

WUWT
"Earth Hour This Saturday Is a Colossal Waste of Time and Energy. .....-No Lights to Turn Off- On the evening of March 23, 1.3 billion people will go without light for the rest of the night—just like every other night of the year. With no access to electricity, darkness after sunset is a constant reality for these people."

UK Pays A High Price For Listening To NASA Snake Oil Salesman

Real Science
"Yesterday, the head of SSE, one of the six major energy companies, warned that Britain is facing the possibility of black-outs within the next three years because the country needs more electricity generation. Ian Marchant, the chief executive of gas and electricity firm, suggested the Government has failed to prepare adequately for the closure of many of Britain’s coal plants by 2015. “The government is significantly underestimating the scale of the capacity crunch facing the UK in the next three years and there is a very real risk of the lights going out as a result,” said Mr Marchant said."

Hot, hot, hot? Not, not, not! Another flawed global warming study

The Tribune-Review
" Like “scientists” manipulating data to fit preordained conclusions, The New York Times and other mainstream media hyped a new study's climate-clucking claims while ignoring its methodology's fatal flaws. “Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years” read The Times' headline. The Times asserted that the study “confirms” warming during “the past century, believed to be a consequence of human activity, exceeded any warming episode during (the last 1,500 years).” Yet the study, published in Science, purports to reconstruct 11,300 years' worth of temperatures, based on mostly marine fossils from 73 sites — which raises huge red flags."

Wednesday 20 March 2013

Berlin Sets 100-Year March Snow Record…High Profile German Meteorologist Turns Skeptic

NoTricksZone
"I recall getting a bit agitated a year or so ago because Jung once repeated the usual global warming rubbish we always hear in the media. But now that Germany has recorded its 5th colder than normal winter in a row and Berlin and Hamburg find themselves digging out from record snow, Jung apparently has looked at the science and data for himself and now seems to conclude that the CO2 theory is indeed over-hyped after all."

A case of little substance

Bishop Hill
"There are a lot of people venting about David Rose's article in the Mail on Sunday and I keep pressing them to be clear about whether Rose has got anything of substance wrong.As far as I can see, the only person who has made any kind of a case is James Annan.......Like so many others, this looks as though it's being seen to be rude to the sceptic rather than actually making a case of any substance."

Even scientists are cooling on climate change

Daily Express
"WHAT do Peter Lilley, Andrew Tyrie, Philip Davies Christopher Chope and I have in common? We were the only MPs to vote against the 2008 Climate Change Bill, which is to say we had by then considered all the evidence and found it wanting. For years we have endured insults. Behind the scenes Fiona Bruce, normally the most courteous of broadcasters, called me a “flat-earther” to my face. Others branded us “deniers” as if we were disputing the holocaust. The Al Gore film was accorded the status of Holy Writ. David Bellamy lost his job. Doubting scientists were scorned. Nigel Lawson found it difficult to get his book An Appeal To Reason published.In short there was an orthodoxy which was enforced with all the rigour of communism or fascism or, for that matter, the Spanish Inquisition. Dissenters must not be heard and global warming became a religion. Well the dissenters have now been proved right. Heaven knows how many billions of pounds later the world is now being told that actually the warming is so far off predictions that all bets are off and indeed the world’s temperature is static or falling. So all those wind farms were in vain, as were all those expensive carbon-saving measures inflicted on industry and passed on in costs to you and me. If I could tell that from the published Hadley Centre figures, the scientists must have known for years yet only now do they admit it. Why? Heaven forbid that it should be because of all that money tied up in their research."

The Washington Post Eilperin emissions trick

WUWT
"Take glance at this article from the Washington Post. The photo at the top is purest propaganda, blatantly and deliberately deceiving readers and smearing a private company: .......And what do you suppose those black, deadly-looking plumes of “emissions” really are? Condensing steam, that’s what. Just plain water. Plumes of condensing water vapor normally look white and benign, but by artfully choosing a vantage point to the east of the plant, and a time just after sunset, AP photographer Charlie Riedel managed to make the pretty white plumes look black and threatening."

Tuesday 19 March 2013

Another hockey stick smashed

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
" The latest attempt to revive Michael Mann’s long discredited “hockey stick” - allegedly showing unprecedented warming - has been exposed as a fake. The paper by geologist Shaun Marcott has been checked by Steve McIntyre, who found Marcott altered his ocean core data, his key proxies for 20th century temperatures: ..."

FOIA, Government-Funded Climate Science and Hole-Digging

JoNova (Australia)
"FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act. Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000. It was climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, conspiring to evade the UK FOIA that probably inspired Climategate, with Mr FOIA, as the “hacker” calls himself, releasing over 220,000 documents and emails beginning in November 2009. In a recent email he explained: “The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.” By providing public access to emails and documents from leading climate scientists, Mr FOIA exposed how tricks, adjustments, and corrections, were routinely applied to climate data to support the propaganda of the largely government-funded global warming industry. ....."

Von Storch/Spiegel Slam “Climate Science Hijacked By Politicians Who Claim Decisions Are Without Alternatives”"

NoTricksZone
"Many of the harsh words are aimed, not surprisingly, at Germany’s notoriously alarmist and catastrophe-obsessed Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which is directed by Prof. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber."

Monday 18 March 2013

When will this green madness cease?

Telegraph
"When is a bird not a bird? When it's one of the millions of avian species splattered, decapitated, clunked, winged, brained or otherwise condemned to death by a wind turbine. Mysteriously, in the eyes of environmentalists – and bird conservation bodies such as the Audubon Society and the RSPB – all those deaths, no matter how rare the species involved, are acceptable collateral damage in the great war to save the world from the unproven threat of "man-made global warming." If you want more details of their dishonesty and hypocrisy, read here. Isn't it funny, though, how this bird-killing dispensation only seems to apply to those modes of energy-generation approved by green activists? Consider this report, from the Times, explaining why the development of Britain's spectacular shale gas reserves is proving so painfully slow:.."

Warmest Temperatures In 4,000 Years? Not So Fast, Global Warming Alarmists

Forbes
"The Marcott proxy reconstruction shares much in common with the Mann hockey stick. Marcott is a young, recently graduated Ph.D. student whose asserted temperature reconstruction has launched him out of obscurity into media fame. As was the case with Mann’s hockey stick, objective scientists quickly pointed out serious flaws in the Marcott reconstruction. Also similar to the Mann hockey stick, the media is ignoring the devastating critiques of the Marcott reconstruction and misleading the public into believing that we finally have a study showing essentially the same thing that Mann claimed before his hockey stick was discredited."

Sunday 17 March 2013

No respite in weather as wintry conditions expected to continue into April

Telegraph
"After months of being frozen by blizzards and drenched by downpours, Britons could be forgiven for expecting a little relief as winter turns to spring. But forecasters say the miserable conditions will continue into April. ....Temperatures would normally be “well into double figures” by this time of the year, according to the Met Office."

Obama By-Passes Gas

WUWT
"President Obama continues his Global War on Cheap Energy™, this time under the guise of avoiding “spikes” in gasoline (petrol) prices. He wants to pass gas without regrets and move post-haste to electricity and biofuels, although both are more expensive than gasoline and diesel for road and rail transport. According to the Associated Press, in a speech at the Argonne National Laboratories Obama said: The only way to break this cycle of spiking gas prices — the only way to break that cycle for good — is to shift our cars entirely, our cars and trucks, off oil..... "..... Carter spent millions and millions of dollars on solar and wind and allied unconventional energy sources … and we’re now in the next century he warned us about. Look around you. Do you see any sign of the money Carter spent? People are STILL subsidizing the sun and the wind, the Government is subsidizing rich people to buy $50,000 electric cars, and after thirty-five years of studies and millions of dollars in subsidies, wind and sun and biomass for electricity and biodiesel all added together still total less than 1% of global energy production. And despite that pathetic record of wasted subsidies, the proponents like Obama claim success is just around the corner … the same corner it’s always been just around …"

The Great Green Con no.2: How councils duped by bad science hire 'eco' snoopers - but slash OAPs' benefits

Daily Mail
"Councils spend on a huge range of green jobs from Carbon Officers to Climate Change Managers while their grants are being cut - Green staff spending has increased at three times rate of inflation ....And the MPs and peers who benefit from green causes Twenty MPs and peers who help shape ‘green’ legislation have personal interests in campaign groups and firms which stand to benefit from such laws."

Hottest summer record in Australia? Not even close, says UAH satellite data

JoNova (Australia)
"There are probably only ten people in Australia who haven’t heard it was the Hottest Ever, Record Summer Downunder. And they were probably born yesterday. Summer here was so scorchingly awful it was Angry. This Summer was not just hot-hot it was heat-on-Steroids-hot. But a funny thing happened on the orbit overhead. Check out the UAH satellite data on summers since the UAH records began. The graph below (thanks to Ken) is the temperature data from the NASA satellites, processed by UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville). How many Australians know that satellites, which circle the planet 24 hours a day monitoring vast swathes of air above the surface, disagree with the BOM? The satellite data shows that the summer of 2012-2013 was close to ordinary, compared with the entire satellite record going back to 1979. Not a record. Not even extreme?"

The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along

Daily Mail
"No, the world ISN'T getting warmer (as you may have noticed). Now we reveal the official data that's making scientists suddenly change their minds about climate doom. So will eco-funded MPs stop waging a green crusade with your money? Well... what do YOU think? The Mail on Sunday today presents irrefutable evidence that official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed. The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. These moves have already added £100 a year to household energy bills."

McIntyre finds the Marcott ‘trick’ – How long before Science has to retract Marcott et al?

WUWT
"Steve McIntyre has made what I can only describe as a stunning discovery as to why there is a sharp uptick in the main Marcott et al graph being touted by the media from its publication in Science."

Saturday 16 March 2013

The Marcott-Shakun Dating Service

Climate Audit
"Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix did not use the published dates for ocean cores, instead substituting their own dates. The validity of Marcott-Shakun re-dating will be discussed below, but first, to show that the re-dating “matters” (TM-climate science), here is a graph showing reconstructions using alkenones (31 of 73 proxies) in Marcott style, comparing the results with published dates (red) to results with Marcott-Shakun dates (black). As you see, there is a persistent decline in the alkenone reconstruction in the 20th century using published dates, but a 20th century increase using Marcott-Shakun dates. (It is taking all my will power not to make an obvious comment at this point.) .........The moral of today’s post for ocean cores. Are you an ocean core that is tired of your current date? Does your current date make you feel too old? Or does it make you feel too young? Try the Marcott-Shakun dating service. Ashley Madison for ocean cores. Confidentiality is guaranteed."

Wind farms are Chris Huhne's greatest crime

Telegraph,Christopher Booker
" For all the acres of newsprint devoted to the downfall of Chris Huhne, it may one day seem that his greatest crime was his plan to cover Britain’s countryside and seas with 32,000 hugely expensive and useless windmills. Yet this criminally absurd policy continues under his successor, Ed Davey, just as if Huhne were still in office."

So many years of no warming means it’s time to rethink

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
" Some argue that the duration of the standstill is too short to be meaningful. Thirty years is taken to be the baseline for observing climate changes and fifteen years is too short. This report argues that 15 years is not an insignificant period; what has happened to make temperatures remain constant requires an explanation. The period contains important information and should not be dismissed as having no climatic importance. The recent warming period began about 1980 after four decades of globally stable temperatures thus the years of constant temperature are about equal to years when temperatures increased. This is not a trivial observation.
Calculations based on ensembles of climate models suggest prolonged standstills of about ten years can occur once every eight decades. Standstills of 15 years are much more difficult to explain. This report shows, that if we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change."

Attenborough should check his facts on polar bears

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"It is now seven years since Sir David was first wheeled out by the BBC as the main cheerleader in its campaign to whip up panic over man-made global warming. In two documentaries, he presented himself as a one-time “climate sceptic” who had now been convinced by the evidence. The only problem was that, as he repeated a series of familiar alarmist mantras, there was little sign that he had checked the evidence for any of them: not least his claim that, thanks to the melting of Arctic ice, the world’s polar bear population, already down by a quarter, could be facing extinction. ....Vainly, in the face of this avalanche of propaganda, did an array of experts and bodies such as the US National Biological Service and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature point out that, thanks to curbs on hunting in the Seventies, the world’s polar bear population had, in fact, risen from 10,000 in 1966 to 25,000 or more in 2006; that all but one of their 19 main groups were significantly increasing in numbers; and that, based on observed data rather than highly questionable computer models, there was not a shred of evidence of any threat to the bears from climate change."

Marcott’s uptick – a result of proxy sign inconsistency

WUWT
"Shades of upside down Tiljander. McIntyre is delving further into the Marcott proxy issue and it looks almost certain now there’s a statistical processing error (selection bias)."

Friday 15 March 2013

8th Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Daily Record For 2013 – 5th in a row

sunshine hours
"Day 73 (March 14) had Antarctic Sea Ice Extent set its 8th daily record – the 5th in a row. 2013 broke the old record from 2008 by 32,420 sq km. 2008 had broken the previous record (2001) by 240,070 sq km. 2008 was an amazing year for Antarctic Sea Ice. Did you know that on day 1 in 2008, the old record was broken by 1,391,120 sq km which had occurred in 1996? Too bad the NSIDC “scientists” ignore Antarctica. It would have made a great story."

A Quarter Century Of Arctic Devastation

Real Science
"Arctic ice area is almost identical to the same date in 1989."

Global Temperature Standstill Is Real

GWPF
"After reviewing the scientific literature the report concludes that the standstill is an empirical fact and a reality that challenges current climate models. During the time that the Earth’s global temperature has remained static the atmospheric composition of carbon dioxide has increased from 370 to 390 ppm. “The standstill is a reality and is not the result of cherry-picking start and end points. Its commencement can be seen clearly in the data, and it continues to this day,” said Dr David Whitehouse, the author of the new report. The report shows that the temperature standstill has been a much discussed topic in peer-reviewed scientific literature for years, but that this scientific debate has neither been followed by most of the media, nor acknowledged by climate campaigners, scientific societies and prominent scientists."

James Hansen’s Policies Are Shafting The Poor

WUWT
"Now, James Hansen is the NASA guy who is leading the charge to stop all forms of cheap energy. Coal is bad, terrible stuff in his world. He calls trains of coal “death trains”. He wants to deny cheap energy to all of those folks in the bottom half of the graph above. Well, actually, he wants to deny access to cheap energy to everyone, but where it hurts is the bottom half of the graph. For example, the World Bank and other international funding agencies, at the urging of folks like Hansen, have been turning down loans for coal plants in developing countries. But as you can see, if you deny energy to those folks, that is the same as denying them development. Because when there’s less energy, there’s less income. The two go hand in hand. So what James Hansen is advising is that we should take money from the poor … actually he wants to deny them cheap energy, but that means denying them income and the development that accompanies it."

No Uptick in Marcott Thesis

Climate Audit
"Reader ^ drew our attention to Marcott’s thesis...... Marcott’s thesis has a series of diagrams in an identical style as the Science article. The proxy datasets are identical. However, as Jean S alertly observed, the diagrams in the thesis lack the closing uptick of the Science. Other aspects of the modern period also differ dramatically."

The Marcott Hockey-stick: smoothing the past and getting a spike from almost no data?

JoNova (Australia)
"There are two factors in the new Marcott paper that are major red flags. For one, there is hardly any data in the modern end of the graph. Ponder how researchers can find 5,000 year old formanifera deposits, but not ones from 1940? Two: they’ve smoothed the heck out of longer periods. Marcott et al clearly say there is “…essentially no variability preserved at periods shorter than 300 years…” So if there were, say, occurrences of a warming rise exactly like the last century, this graph won’t show them."

Marcott’s hockey stick uptick mystery – it didn’t used to be there

WUWT
"At Climate Audit, Something odd has been discovered about the provenance of the work associate with the Marcott et al paper. It seems that the sharp uptick wasn’t in the thesis paper Marcott defended for his PhD, but is in the paper submitted to Science."

Whitehouse and the temperature standstill

Bishop Hill
"In the latest report from GWPF, David Whitehouse has examined the 21st century temperature standstill and the history of attempts to, ahem, deny its existence..."

Thursday 14 March 2013

Check out Climate Depot's coverage of Climategate 3.0 page

Climate Depot
" Climate Depot's coverage of Climategate 3.0 page"

Leading International Geologist Peter Ziegler: “Sun Is Driving Climate, Not CO2.”

NoTricksZone
"Labohm then writes that Peter Ziegler has also recently completed a presentation based on peer-reviewed literature and current measurements, where he shows that the sun is mainly driving climate change, and not CO2."

Australia Misleads the World About the IPCC

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
"IPCC personnel are not the world’s “leading climate scientists.” They were chosen partly due to gender, age, and geographic considerations."

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Mr. FOIA speaks: "It's time to tie up loose ends and dispel some of the speculation surrounding the Climategate affair"

Tom Nelson
"I've received the following unsolicited email from a person unknown to me:..."

More News from RC/FOIA

Climate Audit
"Tom Nelson and Bishop Hill have released the following letter from Mr FOIA. I was one of several people who received the following letter: ..."

Snow: hundreds stranded with more travel chaos to come

Telegraph
" After the coldest March day in 26 years a party of 120 German students were stuck in Hastings town hall when families due to look after them could not reach them. Volunteers made tea and coffee for the teenagers as they were forced to bed down for the night. The worst areas affected were Sussex and Kent, where the A23 between Crawley and Kent was at a standstill, along with the M23, A26, A27 and A29 after 4inches of snow fell. Two pedestrians miraculously escaped serious injury when bystanders managed to pull them free after they were trapped by a falling tree in Jersey. Rescue services were forced to treat them at the scene as two more trees fell and blocked the road. A spokesman for Jersey and Fire Rescue Service said: "It is currently snowing heavily in Jersey, with around 15cm of snow on the ground. It is the most snow we have had since the 9cm in 1962."

Climategate 3.0

Bishop Hill
"This message from FOIA was forwarded to me."

Climategate: FOIA – The Man Who Saved The World

Telegraph
"FOIA – the anonymous leaker who brought the Climategate and Climategate II emails to light has emerged briefly from the shadows. He has released to selected parties (not me) the password to the cache of Climategate II emails in the hope that someone will have the time and energy to sift through them in search of exciting new revelations about the ongoing "Climate Change" scam. No doubt we'll hear much more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I think it's worth dwelling on some of the clues he offers as to his identity and motivation."

ClimateGate III — the password is out

JoNova
"FOIA has been in touch with skeptics today. Here is the email below, sorry, without that password. There are 220,000 emails in the file. There may be private information which could cause grief that is not related to taxpayer funded work. Obviously that large file is not in a form that can be released publicly yet. I do hope people are very very careful with the password.
This is your chance to understand why FOIA did what they did, and your chance to say thanks to the person who quite possibly saved us from a bureaucratic coup in Copenhagen in 2009. The draft treaty promised to take up to $140 billion from some and redistribute it to others. As Christopher Monckton revealed, sovereign nations would be ceding powers to a group of foreign officials, but the document did not have the words “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot”.
To all those who think, post hoc, that Copenhagen was never going to succeed anyway, I say that in November 2009, when I asked the carbon traders which outcome the money was betting on. The answer was: we don’t know. The players are out of this market."

Climategate 3.0 has occurred – the password has been released

WUWT
"A number of climate skeptic bloggers (myself included) have received this message yesterday. While I had planned to defer announcing this until a reasonable scan could be completed, some other bloggers have let the cat out of the bag. I provide this introductory email sent by “FOIA” without editing or comment."

Validity of Marcott et al. PART II

WUWT
"The Marcott et al. conclusion that “Global temperatures are warmer than at any time in at least 4,000 years” is clearly contrary to measured real-time data and thus fails the Feynman test, i.e., it is are wrong. ......The Marcott et al. conclusion that “Global temperature….. has risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels of the Holocene within the past century.” A heat spike like this has never happened before, at least not in the last 11,300 years” is clearly contrary to measured real-time data and thus fails the Feynman test, i.e., their conclusion is wrong. ........"

Tuesday 12 March 2013

How the IPCC writes its own ticket

Quadrant Online
"The end of this week (March 15) marks the cut-off for scientific papers if they are to be cited in the Working Group I contribution to the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, due in 2014. Unless the papers are published or accepted for publication the report cannot refer to them. The final expert review of the draft document ended on November 31, 2012, some 15 weeks ago. But according to IPCC procedures, the draft document can still be modified to accommodate new papers."

EU's 'green' petrol will drive up prices by the end of the year and could damage your car

Daily Mail
"Millions of drivers have been warned about higher fuel costs and even engine damage if they use a new ‘green’ petrol. Britain has signed up to an EU directive which says suppliers must dilute petrol with environmentally-friendly alternatives such as ethanol made from corn. The new petrol is called E10 and is 10 per cent ethanol. It is due to be launched in the UK later this year, alongside standard petrol and other green fuels."

Stranded for TWELVE HOURS: Hundreds of motorists are stuck all night and Eurostar suspended as snow storm wreaks havoc

Daily Mail
"Hundreds of drivers were left stranded in their vehicles in freezing conditions for up to 12 hours overnight as snowfall continued to wreak havoc across the country this morning. Motorists were stuck for hours in the bitter cold in long tailbacks on the A23 and M23 in Sussex as ice and snow made roads across much of the South East impassable. Conditions on the A23 were still being described as treacherous this morning while just one lane was open on the M23. The M20 and M25 were also affected by the poor weather."

Let’s play hockey – again

Climate Etc. (a forum for climate researchers, academics and technical experts from other fields)
"'The MWP did not completely disappear in this new paper, it turned into a <0.1°C blip colder than 1961- 1990. This is quite curious' ....'There are at least 96 proxy studies of Europe, N. America, S. America, Asia, & Aus/NZ with quantitative estimates of MWP temps, plus 109 more with qualitative estimates, & an additional 116 providing evidence that it was a significant, centuries long event that came & went fairly suddenly. How has MWP almost disappeared again, just in time to perhaps go missing in UN IPCC AR5?'

Dr. Judith Curry on new 'Hockey Stick' paper:

Climate Depot
"'I personally don't see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century' .....'Mike's Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions'

Monday 11 March 2013

Validity of “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years”

WUWT
"It seems that Marcott et al isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Dr. Easterbrook takes a good hard look at the paper. ......"Eighty percent of the source data sites were marine, so temperatures from 80% of the data set used in this paper record ocean water temperatures, not atmospheric temperatures. Thus, they may reflect temperature changes from ocean upwelling, changes in ocean currents, or any one of a number of ocean variations not related to atmospheric climates. This in itself means that the Marcott et al. temperatures are not a reliable measure of changing atmospheric climate."

World+Dog don't care about climate change, never have done

The Register
"Seventeen years of continuous surveys covering countries around the world show that people not only do not care about climate change today - understandably prioritising economic misery - they also did not care about climate change even back when times were good.
The new information comes in a study released by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago - a large, long-standing and respected non-profit. The results are based on surveys which began in 1993, back in the boom times, and “are the first and only surveys that put long-term attitudes toward environmental issues in general and global climate change in particular in an international perspective,” according to NORC's Tom W Smith."

Sorry global warming. We're just not that into you.

Telegraph
"In one geography class specifically dedicated to climate change, the first kid to stick up his hand said: "What's wrong with the world getting warmer anyway? It will mean we get nicer summers!" Which is what the kids would no doubt refer to as an epic fail for all the official propaganda we've been fed these last few decades. The boys and girls in that particular class would have been precisely the target audience at which the Labour government aimed its infamous Bedtime Stories advert, the £6 million effort in 2009 commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change to scare impressionable kids witless with tales of a hideous carbon monster which was going to drown their puppies. If the enviro loons can't even manage to brainwash the young with their lies, spin junk science, what chance do they have with grown ups?"

Sunday 10 March 2013

Another Hockey Stick Smoking Gun

Real Science
"The hockey stick shows a sudden unprecedented warming starting about 150 years ago, which is implicitly blamed on humans. ...The only problem is – nothing humans did 150 years ago could have caused this. CO2 didn’t start rapidly rising until much later. Phil Jones has attributed the 1860-1880 and 1910-1940 warming to natural causes, like the sun."

Review of ‘What counts as good evidence for policy?’

Bishop Hill
" It looks at the Institute of Physics seminar on science policy of a few weeks back. Although the seminar has already been reported on here, Mark brings up different aspects of the event, which I thought were interesting. ......Three of the speakers were selling something. Roger Pielke was selling his book. Jonathan Breckon was selling NESTA’s capabilities. Richard Horton was selling his left-wing, medical, state-interventionist ideology. The only person not selling anything was Georgina Mace. She just told the truth as she saw it; so refreshing!" ED: A good read

Saturday 9 March 2013

Look at the graph to see the evidence of global warming

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"What the graphs do not show is the actual level of global temperature, as it is measured above freezing point. In other words, they leave out by far the greater part of the total picture. So the respected Canadian environmental writer, Lawrence Solomon, recently had the bright idea of publishing in his Financial Post newspaper column a graph showing the temperature changes of the past 15 years in proper perspective, using figures from the most prestigious of all official temperature records, compiled by the UK Met Office and its Hadley Centre.
......In recent months, even such fanatical proponents of the warmist orthodoxy as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, James Hansen of Nasa, and the Met Office have all had to concede that since 1997, the warming trend has stalled virtually to a standstill. Of course, there was a modest temperature rise in the 20th century, as a continuation of the warming that began 200 years ago as the world naturally emerged from those centuries of cooling known as the Little Ice Age. But the 0.5C rise between 1976 and 1998 was no greater than the 0.5C rise between 1910 and 1940 (with 35 years of cooling between them, so that the net rise in the past century has been only 0.8C).

New Study claiming global temps highest in 4000 years, contradicted by previous studies -- Media touted study based on 'reconstructed data' from only 73 data sites

Climate Depot
"Analysis: New study has 'disappeared The Ice Age!' -- Study in Science 'completely obliterated the entire paleo record' .......The Science and Public Policy Institute reported in May 2009: “More than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries have contributed peer-reviewed papers providing evidence that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was real, global, and warmer than the present. And the numbers grow larger daily.” Climate Depot has assembled a small sampling of peer-reviewed studies, data and analyses that refute Michael Mann's Hockey Stick temperature claims of unprecedented 20th century warmth."

← NSIDC : Arctic Was Ice Free In The Past Second Massive Fail For The Capital Weather Gang In A Week → Smoking Gun That The New Hockey Stick Is Junk Science

Real Science
"Ten thousand years ago, most of Canada was covered with ice. This would have reflected most of the summer sunlight received there back into space, and would have had a huge cooling effect on the planet. The 1990 IPCC report correctly showed this, with temperatures about 4C cooler than the Holocene Maximum. But the new hockey stick shows temperatures 10,000 years ago within 0.1C of the Holocene Maximum. This is nonsensical and impossible. That huge mass of ice would have kept the planet very cool."

It’s Always Something (the 1924 edition)

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
"89 years ago, Australians opening their newspaper were advised that they were not “safe.” They were told it was a certainty that the human race was “doomed.” The only question was which “disaster” would strike first. Such proclamations were not, said the newspaper, the ravings of an imbecile, but: the firmest conviction of a group of serious scientists of established reputation, who have devoted their lives to a dispassionate and careful examination of geological and astronomical evidence. [bold added] The names of four scientists were listed. The two identified by both a first and last name were Max Valier (who died six years after the publication of the newspaper article) and Hans Hoerbiger (who died seven years after it appeared). The newspaper said the views of these men should be taken seriously because their research was informed by a “daring born of scientific accuracy and a cosmic largeness of vision.” It then listed their four horses of the apocalypse: "

Friday 8 March 2013

Marcott et al claim of ‘unprecedented’ warming compared to GISP ice core data

WUWT
"Now here is a simple scaling of the Marcott et al graph to get an approximate match for the temperature and time scales: ...
"

New 4,000-year temperature reconstruction debunked

Junk Science
"Check out the Greenland ice core for the relevant period of time. As can be plainly seen, modern warming isn’t even close to the “highest” in the past 4,000 years."

Changing sun, changing climate

Quadrant Online
"Scientists have been studying solar influences on the climate for more than 5000 years.Chinese imperial astronomers kept detailed sunspot records, and noticed that more sunspots meant warmer weather. In 1801, celebrated astronomer William Herschel, the first to observe Uranus, noted that when there were fewer spots the price of wheat soared. He surmised that less “light and heat” from the sun resulted in reduced harvests."
"The close relationships between the abrupt ups and downs of solar activity and similar changes in temperature that we have identified occur locally in coastal Greenland; regionally in the Arctic Pacific and north Atlantic; and hemispherically for the whole circum-Arctic region. This suggests strongly that changes in solar radiation drive temperature variations on at least a hemispheric scale.
Close correlations like these simply do not exist for temperature and changing atmospheric CO2 concentration. In particular, there is no coincidence between the measured steady rise in global atmospheric CO2 concentration and the often dramatic multi-decadal (and shorter) ups and downs of surface temperature that occur all around the world."

A Billion Tons of Coal a Year for 3000 years in Norway.

E M Smith
"The basic point is that there’s a heck of a lot of fossil fuels in the world. Loads of it. In 2005 they found 3000 billion tons of the stuff near Norway. Yes, it is under water and nearly impossible to mine at present. But technology changes. Whenever it is desirable enough, we can send small robotic mining machines down to get it."

'Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years'

NYT
" In the new research, scheduled for publication on Friday in the journal Science, Shaun Marcott, an earth scientist at Oregon State University, and his colleagues compiled the most meticulous reconstruction yet of global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, virtually the entire Holocene. They used indicators like the distribution of microscopic, temperature-sensitive ocean creatures to determine past climate. Like previous such efforts, the method gives only an approximation............ Though the paper is the most complete reconstruction of global temperature, it is roughly consistent with previous work on a regional scale. It suggests that changes in the amount and distribution of incoming sunlight, caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit, contributed to a sharp temperature rise in the early Holocene. The climate then stabilized at relatively warm temperatures about 10,000 years ago, hitting a plateau that lasted for roughly 5,000 years, the paper shows. After that, shifts of incoming sunshine prompted a long, slow cooling trend. The cooling was interrupted, at least in the *Northern Hemisphere*, by a fairly brief spike during the Middle Ages, known as the Medieval Warm Period. (It was then that the Vikings settled Greenland, dying out there when the climate cooled again.) Scientists say that if natural factors were still governing the climate, the Northern Hemisphere would probably be destined to freeze over again in several thousand years. “We were on this downward slope, presumably going back toward another ice age,” Dr. Marcott said. Instead, scientists believe the enormous increase in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization will almost certainly prevent that." (H/T Tom Nelson)

*ED This comment ignores studies that CONFIRM that that the MWP was worldwide*
Now see how wrong they are HERE

Our real manmade climate crisis

WUWT
"In his first address as Secretary of State, John Kerry said we must safeguard “the most sacred trust” we owe to our children and grandchildren: “an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate.”
Even the IPCC and British Meteorological Office now recognize that average global temperatures haven’t budged in almost 17 years. Little evidence suggests that sea level rise, storms, droughts, polar ice and temperatures or other weather and climate events and trends display any statistically significant difference from what Earth and mankind have experienced over the last 100-plus years.
However, we do face imminent manmade climate disasters. Global warming is the greatest moral issue of our time. We must do all we can to prevent looming climate catastrophes. But those cataclysms have nothing to do with alleged human contributions to planetary climate systems that have always been chaotic, unpredictable and often disastrous: ice ages, little ice ages, dust bowls, droughts and monster storms that ravaged and sometimes even toppled cities and civilizations. Our real climate crisis is our responses to Mr. Kerry’s illusory crises. It takes four closely related forms."

National Trust 'warfare' against 25 wind farms

Telegraph
" Sir Simon Jenkins, the Chairman of the Trust, spoke yesterday of the “warfare” in the countryside sparked by a huge number of housing developments and wind farms planned in rural areas. Today the Trust reveals they are opposing or "keeping a close eye" on 25 wind farms that threaten stately homes and unspoilt landscape around the countryside. Britain is building more wind turbines this year than ever before with more than 1,200 turbines due to start spinning throughout the countryside and around the coast over the next 12 months."

Thursday 7 March 2013

Analysis finds droughts not related to man-made CO2

The Hockey Schtick
"Climate alarmists contend that rising global temperatures lead to more severe and longer-lasting droughts on the basis of projections of global climate change produced by mathematical models that are primarily driven by increases in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration; and with respect to the western United States, there has been growing interest in understanding drought in that part of the country in light of the pronounced impact it has had there in recent decades. Therefore, many scientists have conducted research to attempt to better understand the characteristics of historic hydrologic variability in this important region, so that a more proper evaluation can be made of how unusual, unnatural or unprecedented droughts of the recent past have been, which droughts climate alarmists typically claim have been made worse - or even been entirely caused - by CO2-induced global warming. In the following pages, this claim is evaluated by reviewing what scientists have learned in this regard from various studies that have examined historic droughts across the western United States, organizing our review into several sub-domains within the overall region of study."

Fact-checking Flannery’s “Angry Summer” propaganda

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Sack the Climate Commission now. Boot its chief, Professor Tim Flannery, for flogging yet another disgraceful global warming scare. That scare is the commission’s new report, dubbing the past three month’s Australia’s “Angry Summer”. “Angry Summer”? Is that a scientific term? This thin report, by climate commissioner, Will Steffen, claims “Australia’s Angry Summer shows that climate change is already adversely affecting Australians”. It does? How could global warming suddenly give us an “Angry Summer” when even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits there’s been no “statistically significant” warming over the past 15 years? But the commission’s report doesn’t mention that. Instead it picks out one heat wave in Australia it claimed helped give us “our hottest summer”, with “record breaking heat on 8-10 January”. But how does one Australian heat wave prove anything about global temperatures? In fact, our January wasn’t even typical of the world’s weather. As Professor Ole Humlum, an Oslo University geoscientist, notes, “On average, global air temperatures [for January] were near the 1998-2006 average” and the “Southern Hemisphere was mainly at or below average”.

Wednesday 6 March 2013

Graph of the Day: Global Weather Disasters and GDP

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog
"E. Neumayer and F. Barthel. 2011. Normalizing Economic Loss from Natural Disasters: A Global Analysis, Global Environmental Change, 21:13-24. They conclude: "there is no evidence so far that climate change has increased the normalized economic loss from natural disasters."

IPCC Invites In the Activists

Donna Laframboise
"Here we go again. The World Wildlife Fund is an NGO. Greenpeace is an NGO. The people who work for those organizations are not scientific experts. They are advocates, activists, and partisans. They have an agenda. They are paid a salary to advance that agenda.
The public is repeatedly assured that the IPCC is an objective and rigorous scientific body, composed of the world’s top scientists. The public is told it can trust IPCC reports because thousands of “scientific expert reviewers” participate in the IPCC process. .....But there’s the IPCC’s fiction and then there are the facts. The IPCC has a very long, very sordid history of recruiting personnel linked to activist organizations. ..."

Central Europe, Scandinavia Brace For Worst March Temperature Plummet Since 1987!

NoTricksZone
"Over the last few days, Central Europe has been enjoying springlike sunshine with double-digit Celsius temperatures. Some readings rose to near 15°C (59°F). However, this will end brutally by the end of the week. At Twitter, meteorologist Dominik Jung of wetter.net posted the chart of what’s ahead, for example, for the central German city of Hannover: ..."

‘Ground Zero for Global Warming’? State of Alaska temperatures in 2012 refused to cooperate

WUWT
"While some claims have been made that “Alaska is Ground Zero for Global Warming” it turns out that the state of Alaska was significantly below normal in 2012. For example, Fairbanks had the coldest year in the 21st century so far, and it was also the second coldest year in more than 40 years according to the data presented in this report below."

Tuesday 5 March 2013

The models are broken, by the standards warmists set

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"In 2008, Britian’s Met Office noted a 10-year pause, or sharp slowing, in the warming trend and asked this question in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’ annual State of the Climate: Do global temperature trends over the last decade falsify climate predictions? No, it decided. Global warming models wouldn’t be clearly wrong until the pause lasted 15 years: ..... But when Brozek checks for statistically significant warming, the warming pause extends by every measure to more than 15 years:
For RSS the warming is not significant for over 23 years…
For UAH the warming is not significant for over 19 years…
For Hadcrut3 the warming is not significant for over 19 years…
For Hadcrut4 the warming is not significant for over 18 years…
For GISS the warming is not significant for over 17 years...
Once warmists said 15 years of no statistically significant warming invalidated their models. Draw your own conclusions.

Man-made global warming theory is falsified by satellite observations

The Hockey Schtick
"Global warming theory proposes that CO2 traps longwave (infrared) radiation in the troposphere to reduce outgoing longwave radiation [OLR] to space. However, satellite measurements since 1975 indicate that global OLR has instead increased by about 1.3 Wm-2. This is in direct contradiction to global warming theory that "trapping" of radiation by CO2 should have instead reduced* OLR by .93 Wm-2 since 1975."

Wrong Prediction, Wrong Science; Unless It’s Government Climate Science.

Dr Tim Ball
"The IPCC have deliberately misled the world about the nature, cause and threat of climate change and deceived about the accuracy of their predictions (projections), for a political agenda."

Snow Blankets Northern Countries Contrary to Global Warming Predictions meaning Governments are basing Climate Change Policies on Faulty Science say Friends of Science

PRWeb
"Global warming advocates predicted 13 years ago that soon children would never see snow due to climate change. Surprisingly, the recent heavy snowfalls are instead being touted by advocates as evidence of global warming – yet scientific measurements show temperatures on the decline meaning global government climate change policies are being driven by faulty computer models instead of known solar cycles say Friends of Science."

German Doubts Over Renewable Energies Skyrocket…Pollster: “Surprised By The Great Skepticism”

NoTricksZone
"For German standards, the poll produced some shocking results. Heidecke writes: Among the people, skepticism about the transition to renewable energy is growing. According to a poll [...] especially in the Ruhr Region, only a few believe in a rapid transformation of the energy sector. Many are worried about the energy costs.”

Organised astroturfing

Bishop Hill
"Barry Woods alerts us to Al Gore's organised astroturfing organisation, in which people are encouraged to copy text from the Reality Drop website and paste it into climate-related comments threads. George Monbiot has been very vocal against this sort of thing. It will be interesting to see how he responds, particularly since the Guardian's own pages are being targeted. Incidentally, the Met Office are thanked on Reality Drop's "About" page. I wonder what their involvement is?"

The Climate Commission plumbs new depths

Quadrant Online
"Just one day after the IPCC Chairman claimed that global warming had stopped happening 17 years ago, the Australian Climate Commission rushed out a press statement, “The Earth Continues to Warm.”

Has Global Warming Stalled? (Now Includes January Data)

WUWT
"Above, various facts have been presented along with sources from where all facts were obtained. Keep in mind that no one is entitled to their facts. It is only in the interpretation of the facts for which legitimate discussions can take place. After looking at the above facts, do you feel that we should spend billions to prevent catastrophic warming? Or do you feel we should take a “wait and see” attitude for a few years to be sure that future warming will be as catastrophic as some claim it will be? Keep in mind that even the MET office felt the need to revise its forecasts."

Andrew Montford: A Despotism Over The Mind

GWPF
"I don’t know about you, but I think a balanced view of global warming would involve teaching the evidence against global warming as well as the evidence for it. Human activities are “major factors”? Surely they may be major factors. Surely the failure of temperatures to rise in recent years suggests that they may equally be minor factors. Should the attribution statement not be qualified with the fact that it depends on computer models that may be useful as toys for scientists but, having no proven ability to predict future climate, are far being ready to inform policymakers? Will the children be told this? Or are they just pawns of a left-wing educational establishment who must hear the recitation of the global warming dogma?"

Tim Flannery: We predicted everything. There is no “pause in global warming.

JoNova (Australia)
"TIM FLANNERY, CHIEF CLIMATE COMMISSIONER 7-30 Report ABC: “…everything we’re seeing is consistent with what the climate scientists have been telling us now for decades…”
Leigh Sales, ABC PRESENTER : “… … …(no comment)…”
ED:Read the rest......