America's Highest Ranked Climate Charlatans: Obama and Kerry

FNF

In the May 27 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Joe Bast, the president of the free-market think tank, the Heartland Institute, and Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama, teamed out to write about “The Myth of the Climate Change 97%.” While demolishing this Big Lie, they noted that “Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.”

Obama’s and Kerry’s problem, along with all the other climate change charlatans, is that is the Earth is now into its 17^th year of a natural cooling cycle based on lower radiation from the Sun, itself in a natural cycle. It is the Sun, not mankind that determines the climate of the Earth.

The Petition Project in which 31,073 U.S. scientists, over 9,000 of whom have a Ph.D. in a scientific field, participated says “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

“The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of ‘settled science’ and an overwhelming ‘consensus’ in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists.”

Chatting With ‘A Climate Heretic’

Quadrant Online (Australia)
Doing science by consensus is not science at all, says the climatologist all the alarmists love to hate. Not that the enmity bothers Judith Curry too much -- and certainly not as much as the debasement of impartial inquiry by which the warmist establishment keeps all those lovely grants coming"

I’ll see your 97 percent, and raise you 3 percent

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
But I think a more significant statistic — one that doesn’t rely on opinions, but on facts — is that 100% of climate scientists don’t know how much of the warming in the last 50-100 years is natural versus human-caused.
They dance around this issue with weasel words and qualitative language. Because they don’t know. They can say “most” warming is human caused…but how do they know that? They don’t.
You see, we have no idea how much natural climate variations figure into the climate change equation.
For example, this proxy reconstruction of past temperatures suggests climate change is the rule, not the exception:

Bast and Spencer on Consensus

JunkScience / Wall Street Journal
Opinion
The Myth of the Climate Change ’97%’
What is the origin of the false belief—constantly repeated—that almost all scientists agree about global warming?
By Joseph Bast And Roy Spencer
May 26, 2014
Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists,” he added, “tell us this is urgent.”
Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.”
Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research. ....[snip]....We could go on, but the larger point is plain. There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem."

Key to the modern world – the sinister groupthink

Christopher Booker, Telegraph

Some time back, a reader drew my attention to the book in which, 40 years ago, a Yale professor of psychology, Irving Janis, analysed what, with a conscious nod to George Orwell, he called “groupthink”. It is a term we all casually use (which even he derived from another writer), but he identified eight symptoms of groupthink. One is the urge of its victims to insist that their view is held as a “consensus” by all morally right-thinking people. Another is their ruthless desire to suppress any evidence that might lead someone to question it. A third is their urge to stereotype and denigrate anyone who dares hold a dissenting view. Their intolerance of “independent critical thinking”, as Janis put it, leads them to “irrational and dehumanised actions directed against outgroups”.

Of course, there is nothing new about this. Hostility to heretics and dissenters has characterised the more extreme forms of religious and political belief all down the ages. But as someone who tends often to come to views differing from those held by many other people – what Ibsen called that “majority” that is “always wrong” – I am quite sensitive to the power and prevalence of groupthink in our own time. It is particularly evident in views widely held on several subjects I regularly write about here, from climate change and “renewable energy” to everything its acolytes like to describe as “Europe”. It is their groupthinking intolerance that prompts them to stereotype anyone daring to disagree with their “consensus” as “deniers”, “flat-Earthers”, “creationists”, “xenophobes”, “homophobes”, “bigots”, “racists” or “fascists”.

But another characteristic of groupthink that Janis doesn’t fully explore in his book is that those caught up in these mindsets have never actually worked out their thinking on the subject for themselves. They have taken on their belief-system, and the reasons for supporting it, ready-made and wholesale from others. That is why it is impossible to have any intelligent dialogue with, say, zealots for man-made climate change or the European Union, because they have not really examined the evidence for themselves but have come to a set of opinions that are skin-deep and second-hand. They can only parrot the mantras they have picked up from others."

Britain's potential new oil bonanza revealed: 4.4BILLION barrels found beneath The Weald in Sussex Hampshire and Kent - but will the Greens let us get at it?

Daily Mail

Official analysis by British Geological Survey reveals billions of barrels

Report was commissioned by Department for Energy and Climate Change

It estimates that there are 4.4billion barrels-worth of oil under Weald Basin

How much of it may be recoverable is not yet known - test drilling will tell

New discovery is a tenth of what has been extracted from North Sea

Report says it's unlikely there's any shale gas potential in the area

Discovery will have implications for politicians and Britain's energy market

New plans to allow energy firms to drill in exchange for £20,000 per well

Green MP Caroline Lucas says fracking on huge scale will be 'disastrous'

WSJ corrects John Kerry: "worst that can happen" is spending trillions of dollars on a problem that we can't do anything to stop

The Hockey Schtick
"If we make the necessary efforts to address this challenge—and supposing I'm wrong or scientists are wrong, 97% of them all wrong—supposing they are, what's the worst that can happen?" Mr. Kerry said. "We put millions of people to work transitioning our energy, creating new and renewable and alternative; we make life healthier because we have less particulates in the air and cleaner air and more health; we give ourselves greater security through greater energy independence—that's the downside."

So the "downside" of addressing climate policy is more jobs, cleaner air, more energy security, and we save the planet too. Makes you wonder why there aren't already 100 Senate votes for this miracle. Perhaps that's because the "energy policy" Mr. Kerry is talking about includes vast new political control over the economy, starting with taxes and limits on carbon energy, subsidies for his favored energy sources, and new and costly regulations on much of the American Midwest, South and West.

The "worst that can happen" is that we spend trillions of dollars trying to solve a problem that we can't do anything to stop; that we misallocate scarce resources in a way that slows economic growth; that slower growth leads to less economic opportunity for Boston College grads and especially the world's poor, and that America and the world become much less wealthy and technologically advanced than we would otherwise. All of which would make the world less able to cope with the costs of climate change if Mr. Kerry is right."

Antarctica’s ice losses on the rise – with a sanity check

WUWT
....Three years of observations show that the Antarctic ice sheet is now losing 159 billion tonnes of ice each year — twice as much as when it was last surveyed. See below for some sanity check calculations on why 159 billion tonnes really isn’t much more than a flyspeck in the scheme of things.   ..........
And so, the loss of 0.159 159 cubic kilometers of ice per year is apparently headline worthy, because at that rate of loss, it would take 169,811 years to lose all the 27 million cubic kilometers of Antarctic ice.
I’m pretty sure we’ll have gone through a few ice ages by then.
(Update: I made an error in the initial post with units, where I conflated kiloton/gigaton in one step, fixed)

Stavins and Tol on IPCC WG3

Judith Curry
.....True to its classic wicked messiness, there is no unambiguous way to separate natural from anthropogenic climate change, or to separate climate change impacts from other confounding factors, or to separate the solutions from the broader issues of population increase, underdevelopment, mismanagement, and corrupt governments."

FT: ‘No one trusts Washington on climate change’

WUWT
The Financial Times, a major international business newspaper, the main competitor to the Wall Street Journal, has just published an article, highlighting the insignificance of the impact Obama’s National Climate Assessment has had, on American public opinion.
According to the FT,

“Americans have been receiving such warnings for a decade. None has managed to rouse the country from its seeming indifference.”
“… the authors seem to have forgotten that weather is not the same thing as the climate.”.
“Former US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman wrote recently of having watched a debate at which “all the Republican candidates chuckled at a question on climate change – as if they had been asked about their belief in the Tooth Fairy””

....
The Wall street Journal summed it up this way:
Obama’s Climate Bomb

He’s flogging disaster scenarios to promote his political agenda.

May 8, 2014 7:25 p.m. ET

Supervising the Earth’s climate—or at least believing humanity can achieve such miracles—may be the only political project grandiose enough for President Obama. So it shouldn’t surprise that after reforming health care and raising taxes, the White House is now getting the global-warming band back together, though it is still merely playing the old classics of unscientific panic.
On Wednesday the White House released the quadrennial National Climate Assessment, an 829-page report."

Climate change does produce one thing: Funding

St Louis Post-Dispatch

I laughed when I saw the climate change article on Page 1 of the Post-Dispatch on May 7.  Apparently President Obama wants us to start thinking about climate change because we’re not. Out of 15 things we think are important, climate change came out dead last. Silly us — we talk about how we’re going to get our kids to day care or why the furnace is making a funny noise when we should be discussing climate change. The nerve.
Interestingly, our air is cleaner now than it’s ever been and we have more energy than we've ever had, but the Obama administration is reducing our fuel sources to green energy. Green energy is fine as long as other people are paying for it. In Missouri, the demand for solar panels dried up as soon as the subsidy for them disappeared. California has mandated renewable energy, and their electric rates are already three times higher than ours and will climb another 46 percent. Is this what we want?
Concerning climate change, the majority of forecast calamities over the past half century including acid rain, the "population bomb," killer bees and the ozone hole have proved to be only moderate concerns. But they did produce one thing — funding. So now climate change is the new calamity — and funding source.
Rich Iezzi  •  St. Louis

Antarctic Sea Ice At Record Levels

CCNET

Antarctic sea ice has expanded to record levels for April, increasing by more than 110,000sq km a day last month to nine million square kilometres.
 

The National Snow and Ice Data Centre said the rapid expansion had continued into May and the seasonal cover was now bigger than the record “by a significant margin’’.

“This exceeds the past record for the satellite era by about 320,000sq km, which was set in April 2008,’’ the centre said.

Increased ice cover in Antarctic continues to be at odds with falling Arctic ice levels, where the summer melt has again pushed levels well below the average extent for 1981-2010. The centre said while the rate of ­Arctic-wide retreat was rapid through the first half of April, it had slowed.

The April Arctic minimum was 270,000sq km higher than the record April low, which occurred in 2007. The Antarctic sea ice extent anomalies were greatest in the eastern Weddell and along a long stretch of coastline south of Australia and the southeastern Indian Ocean. The centre said the increased ice extent in the Weddell Sea region appeared to be associated with a broad area of persistent easterly winds in March and April, and lower-than-average temperatures."

Big Green’s untold billions Mainstream media don’t know Big Green has deeper pockets than Big Oil

CFACT and the Washington Examiner

Invisible fact: the environmental movement is a mature, highly developed network with top leadership stewarding a vast institutional memory, a fiercely loyal cadre of competent social and political operatives, and millions of high-demographic members ready to be mobilized as needed.
That membership base is a built-in free public relations machine responsive to the push of a social media button sending politically powerful “educational” alerts that don’t show up on election reports.
Big Oil doesn’t have that, but has to pay for lobbyists, public relations firms and support groups that do show up on reports.
You don’t need expert skills to connect the dots linking Keystone XL to Alberta’s oil sands to climate change to Big Green.
On the other hand, you do need detailed knowledge to parse Big Green into its constituent parts. I spoke with CFACT senior policy analyst Paul Driessen, who said, “U.S. environmental activist groups are a $13-billion-a-year industry — and they’re all about PR and mobilizing the troops.
“Their climate change campaign alone has well over a billion dollars annually, and high-profile battles against drilling, fracking, oil sands and Keystone get a big chunk of that, as demonstrated by the Rockefeller assault.”
Driessen then identified the most-neglected of all money sources in Big Green: “The liberal foundations that give targeted grants to Big Green operations have well over $100 billion at their disposal.”

Got Warming ?

$2.6 Billion For Climate Research

NALOPKT
Sometimes I come across things by accident.
NOAA have this overview on their website of the recent National Climate Assessment. ......
The idea that this is some sort of “independent science report” is laughable. It is a political report through and through, written and overseen by the government for the government.
And the authors certainly are not going to put at risk any of that lovely $2.6 billion research money, are they?

The Bullying of Bengtsson and the Coming Climate Disruption Hypocalypse

Roy Spencer Ph D
Lennart Bengtsson being bullied by colleagues is only the latest example of bad behavior by climate scientists who have made a deal with the devil. They have exchanged their scientific souls for research grants, prestige, and easy access to scientific journals to publish their papers.   .....

...That climate models do NOT provide good forecasts with demonstrable skill should concern everyone. But as Bengtsson has found out, a scientist advertises this fact at their peril.
Bengtsson has always been a little skeptical, as all good scientists should be. After all, most published science ends up being wrong anyway.
But once he became more outspoken about his skepticism, well…that’s just unacceptable for someone of his stature. That his treatment should lead him to worry about his health and his safety tells us a lot about just how politicized global warming research has become.
This bad behavior by the climate science community is nothing new. It’s been going on for at least 20 years."

Explosive Scandal…”Climate Tricksters” Of German Government “Brazenly Falsify” UN IPCC Recommendations

NoTricksZone
This sunny, warm, spring Sunday morning in Germany brings us yet another spectacular scandal…one that shows how the Environment Ministry of the German government is not really interested in climate science after all, but in using the climate issue as an instrument to generate hundreds of millions of euros for funding pet environmental programs...."

Why Global Warming Alarmism Isn’t Science

Powerline
Science is not a set of dogmas, and it is not a pronouncement by a committee. It is a method. Richard Feynman, perhaps the world’s most eminent physicist, put it this way:

In general, we look for a new law by the following process: First we guess it; then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right; then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.

The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory is based entirely on models, which are programmed by their creators to predict disaster. But we know for a fact that the models are wrong, because they disagree with reality. When the facts collide with a theory, the facts win.
At Watts Up With That?, Don Easterbrook applies the scientific method to the recently-produced National Climate Assessment (NCA). The NCA predicts all kinds of awful consequences from a hypothetical rise in temperature that is based exclusively on models, not on observation. Easterbrook finds that the NCA fails the test of reality. Here are a few examples.  ......."

You must not challenge our consensus, say the warmists

Christopher Booker, Telegraph
The climate sceptics have certainly got pretty excited over Dr Lennart Bengtsson – scarcely a household name but someone they can describe as “a leading climate scientist”. He is the former head of two prestigious European meteorological institutes, and a keen “climate modeller”, who recently defected from the international global-warming establishment to join the advisers of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation. Then last week he had to resign because of “McCarthy”-style pressure from his old warmist colleagues, so intense that he feared for his health. And now he has made front-page news by revealing that a paper he co–authored, claiming that official global warming claims have been exaggerated, was rejected by a leading climate science journal because it would have given ammunition to the “climate deniers”.
All this has produced a storm of counter-protest from the sceptics, claiming that it shows how absurdly intolerant the warmists have become in their desperation to protect their beloved “consensus”. It is true that Lennart was once a cheerleader for their orthodoxy. And it is true that he has recently shown scientific honesty in his growing disenchantment with climate models programmed to assume that rising CO2 levels must inevitably lead to disastrous warming.
But the fact is that it has long been obvious to any dispassionate observer that, as global temperatures have so dismally failed to rise as they predicted, those computer models on which the whole theory rested were hopelessly flawed. Equally, it has long been clear, as we saw with “Climategate”, that the orthodox establishment will stop at nothing to protect its deluded belief system from criticism.
There must always be joy over any sinner who repenteth. But the real honour should go to those proper scientists such as Dr Richard Lindzen, who for years courted derision by pointing out that the emperor had no clothes, because they never lost their grasp on what genuine science is all about. As I once tried to reassure another of them, Dr Fred Singer, when he was in an unusually gloomy mood, “we have two invincible allies in this fight – one is nature, the other is truth”. In fact, the ridiculous hounding of Dr Lennart is only another tiny symptom of how those two allies are slowly winning the day.

John Cook’s consensus data is so good his Uni will sue you if you discuss it

JoNova (Australia)
What bad news for The University of Queensland. Their entire legal staff were on holiday at the same time and this eminent university was protected only by a Law & Society 101 student who staffed the overnight service of FreeLegalAidOnline. A mockfest is ensuing across the Internet. It is so unfair.
A year ago John Cook published another 97% study (the magic number that all consensuses must find). It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (see Anthony Watts view). Cook’s work is obviously impeccable (except for the part about 97% being really 0.3%), but evidently it uses a special new kind of “open data”. The exact date and time each anonymized reviewer reviewed a sacred scientific abstract is commercial and must be kept secret. These volunteer reviewers allegedly stand to, er … lose a lot of money if that data is revealed (they won’t be employed again for no money?). Such is the importance of this that the University of Queensland left the data on secret-secret forum protected by no passwords and then put urls to it on secret forums that were publicly accessible. Brandon Shollenberger had the genius idea of changing the numbers in the url +1, +1, and +1, and voila!  For the crime of finding unhidden non-secret data Brandon received a threatening legal letter, and expects the Feds to arrive any minute. You can’t just type any old numbers into a url.
UPDATE: After I wrote this Brandon published the letter in full and raised some provocative questions. (See below) .......

Study suggesting global warming is exaggerated was rejected for publication in respected journal because it was 'less than helpful' to the climate cause, claims professor

Daily Mail

A scientific study which suggests global warming has been exaggerated was rejected by a respected journal because it might fuel climate scepticism, it was claimed last night.

The alarming intervention, which raises fears of ‘McCarthyist’ pressure for environmental scientists to conform, came after a reviewer said the research was ‘less than helpful’ to the climate cause.

Professor Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading and one of five authors of the study, said he suspected that intolerance of dissenting views on climate science was preventing his paper from being published.

‘The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist,’ he told the Times.

Prof Bengtsson’s paper suggests that the Earth’s environment might be much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought.

If he and his four co-authors are correct, it would mean that carbon dioxide and other pollutants are having a far less severe impact on climate than green activists would have us believe.

The research, if made public, would be a huge challenge to the finding of the UN’s Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the global average temperature would rise by up to 4.5C if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were allowed to double."

UK Times headline tomorrow: Scientists in cover-up of ‘damaging’ climate view – full article

WUWT
Uh oh, another “climategate” like moment is upon us as the law of unintended consequences kicks in. As Dr. Roger Pielke put it:

Appears that Bengtsson can play hardball too.

Plus there is an editorial by Dr. Matt Ridley saying “This bullying of climate sceptics must end“.
Here is the front page of The Times for Friday May 16th, a link to the article follows "

Warmists pressure skeptical scientist to resign

American Thinker
I remember a time when skeptical questioning was regarded as the essence of scientific inquiry. No longer, thanks in large part to the billions of dollars in annual funding that go to “scientists” who push the global warming agenda.  How else to interpret the extraordinary pressures brought to bear on a scientist who turned skeptical towards the prophets of doom?  ....
This sort of pressure to conform to groupthink is an implicit admission of the weakness of Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory. Real science welcomes skepticism as the engine of progress."

Lennart Bengtsson resigns from the GWPF

Judith Curry
JC comments.  I will have much more to write about this in a few days.  For now, I will say that I deeply regret that any scientist, particularly such a distinguished scientist as Bengsston, has had to put up with these attacks.  This past week, we have seen numerous important and enlightening statements made by Bengtsson about the state of climate science and policy, and science and society is richer for this.  We have also seen a disgraceful display of Climate McCarthyism by climate scientists, which has the potential to do as much harm to climate science as did the Climategate emails.  And we have seen the GWPF handle this situation with maturity and dignity"

Climate change scientist claims he has been forced from new job in 'McCarthy'-style witch-hunt by academics across the world

Daily Mail
A globally-renowned climate scientist has been forced to step down from a think-tank after he was subjected to 'Mc-Carthy'-style pressure from scientists around the world.
Professor Lennart Bengtsson, 79, a leading academic from the University of Reading, left the high-profile Global Warming Policy Foundation as a result of the threats, which he described as 'virtually unbearable'.

The Cleansing of Lennart Bengtsson

Climate Audit
Begtsson’s planned participation in GWPF seemed to me to be the sort of outreach to rational skeptics that ought to be praiseworthy within the climate “community”.
Instead, the “community” has extended the fatwa. This is precisely the sort of action and attitude that can only engender and reinforce contempt for the “community” in the broader society."

Climate Science Defector Forced to Resign by Alarmist 'Fatwa'

Breitbart
His views on the weakness of the "consensus" haven't changed. But as he admits in his resignation letter, he has been so badly bullied by his alarmist former colleagues that he is worried his health and career will suffer.
Bengtsson's recruitment by the GWPF (the London-based think tank set up by former Chancellor Lord Lawson) represented a huge coup for the climate realist cause. The Swedish climatologist, meteorologist, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and winner, in 2006, of the 51st IMO Prize of the World Meteorological Organization for his pioneering work in numerical weather prediction - was by some margin the most distinguished scientist to change sides.
But this, of course, is why he has been singled out for especial vitriol by the climate alarmist establishment - as he describes in his resignation letter."

Shameless Climate McCarthyism on full display – scientist forced to resign

WUWT
In an e-mail to GWPF, Lennart Bengtsson has declared his resignation of the advisory board of GWPF. His letter reads : .......  "It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.  ...."

UPDATE2: David Rose sums it up succinctly with a reference to Monty Python -

@RogerPielkeJr No one expects the Spanish Inquisition. But in climate science and policy, its successors are thriving.—
David Rose (@DavidRoseUK) May 14, 2014

Leading Climate Scientist Defects: No Longer Believes in the 'Consensus'

Breitbart
One of the world's most eminent climate scientists - for several decades a warmist - has defected to the climate sceptic camp.

Lennart Bengtsson - a Swedish climatologist, meteorologist, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and winner, in 2006, of the 51st IMO Prize of the World Meteorological Organization for his pioneering work in numerical weather prediction - is by some margin the most distinguished scientist to change sides.
For most of his career, he has been a prominent member of the warmist establishment, subscribing to all its articles of faith - up to and including the belief that Michael Mann's Hockey Stick was a scientifically plausible assessment of the relationship between CO2 emissions and global mean temperature.
But this week, he signalled his move to the enemy camp by agreeing to join the advisory council of Britain's Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the think tank created by the arch-sceptical former Chancellor Lord Lawson."

Yes, Ben Adler, there are liberal equivalents to climate change denial

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

1) natural climate change denial
2) denial that coal and petroleum work better than unicorn farts as fuels,
3) denial that a small amount of warming is better than killing millions of poor people by restricting access to inexpensive energy,
4) denial that the human-induced component of climate change is anything but catastrophic and an emergency,
5) denial that an increasing number of scientists are becoming skeptics,
6) denial that IPCC scientists were caught red-handed trying to silence the opposition and “hide the decline”,
7) denial of the observations, which show much less warming than any of the climate models can explain over the last 30+ years.
I’m sure I could think of more, but I don’t like to waste any more time than necessary answering such silly claims.
For supposedly being able to understand nuances, these guys can’t admit that most conservatives really do believe that humans have some influence on climate. We just don’t think the scientific and economic evidence supports spreading more misery around the globe than liberal policies have already created."

Obama hopes to win over voters with renewed focus on climate change

LATimes
The White House on Friday also touted the completion of a largely symbolic accomplishment — the installation of solar panels on the White House 28 years after President Reagan removed them and four years after Obama promised to put them back.

From a stage surrounded by racks of tube socks and glitter-encrusted flip-flops in a solar-powered Wal-Mart store in Mountain View, Obama announced a series of corporate pledges to increase renewable energy use and several incremental steps to boost solar generation.

"Together, the commitments we are announcing today prove that there are cost-effective ways to tackle climate change and create jobs at the same time," Obama said. "Inside of Washington, we've still got some climate deniers who shout loud, but they're wasting everybody's time on a settled debate."
--------------------------------------------
Comment: "settled debate" ??? 

They're Back! Solar Panels now atop the White House

Climate Change Dispatch
If the average American knew how much this cost the taxpayer, they'd realize this is not cost-effective at all. Which is specifically why the White House refuses to release the numbers.

Obama seeks to use his personal example to spur American families and businesses to do more to reduce reliance on foreign energy and cut emissions blamed for global warming.

The new solar array, not seen since the Jimmy Carter Administration, and later, George W. Bush (who used it to power a maintenance building and heat some pool water), will be able to power six 50-watt bulbs for 20 hours (unless it rains, snows, or is a cloudy day), far less than his two predecessors.

"Being at the White House, we do have some security concerns. We can’t cover the entire roof, although that would be good from an energy savings standpoint," said James Doherty, the White House usher.

The only way this would be energy efficient is if Obama covered the entire roof, and all the acres of land surrounding the White House, and threw in a couple of wind turbines. But that would be plain ugly for one of the most prestigious presidential residences.
But not ugly enough for Americans to spend vast amounts of money to cover their roofs with solar panels and other so-called clean technology.

Top Ten Good Skeptical Arguments

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
1) No Recent Warming. If global warming science is so “settled”, why did global warming stop over 15 years ago (in most temperature datasets), contrary to all “consensus” predictions?
2) Natural or Manmade? If we don’t know how much of the warming in the longer term (say last 50 years) is natural, then how can we know how much is manmade?
3) IPCC Politics and Beliefs. Why does it take a political body (the IPCC) to tell us what scientists “believe”? And when did scientists’ “beliefs” translate into proof? And when was scientific truth determined by a vote…especially when those allowed to vote are from the Global Warming Believers Party?
4) Climate Models Can’t Even Hindcast How did climate modelers, who already knew the answer, still fail to explain the lack of a significant temperature rise over the last 30+ years? In other words, how to you botch a hindcast?
5) …But We Should Believe Model Forecasts? Why should we believe model predictions of the future, when they can’t even explain the past?
6) Modelers Lie About Their “Physics”. Why do modelers insist their models are based upon established physics, but then hide the fact that the strong warming their models produce is actually based upon very uncertain “fudge factor” tuning?
7) Is Warming Even Bad? Who decided that a small amount of warming is necessarily a bad thing?
8) Is CO2 Bad? How did carbon dioxide, necessary for life on Earth and only 4 parts in 10,000 of our atmosphere, get rebranded as some sort of dangerous gas?
9) Do We Look that Stupid? How do scientists expect to be taken seriously when their “theory” is supported by both floods AND droughts? Too much snow AND too little snow?
10) Selective Pseudo-Explanations. How can scientists claim that the Medieval Warm Period (which lasted hundreds of years), was just a regional fluke…yet claim the single-summer (2003) heat wave in Europe had global significance?
11) (Spinal Tap bonus) Just How Warm is it, Really? Why is it that every subsequent modification/adjustment to the global thermometer data leads to even more warming? What are the chances of that? Either a warmer-still present, or cooling down the past, both of which produce a greater warming trend over time. And none of the adjustments take out a gradual urban heat island (UHI) warming around thermometer sites, which likely exists at virtually all of them — because no one yet knows a good way to do that.

The inconvenient Southern Hemisphere

Judith Curry
....Given the new information now available from the Southern Hemisphere, climate scientists must consider a larger role for natural climate variability in contributing to global temperature changes over the past millennium. "

Top Ten Skeptical Arguments that Don’t Hold Water

WUWT
(Note: this originally published on Dr. Spencer’s blog on April 25th, and I asked if I could reproduce it here. While I know some readers might argue the finer points of some items in the list, I think it is important to keep sight of these.)

Lawson's standpoint

Bishop Hill
Nigel Lawson has a long article in Standpoint magazine, covering the whole gamut of the climate debate, from accusations of denial to climate sensitivity to the language used by the Met Office. Older readers may remember that Lawson was once the editor of the Spectator and his journalistic flair is on prominent display: ..."

From An Expert Lead Author: The Sordid IPCC History Of The 'Hockey Stick' Fabrication

c3headlines
Why did the IPCC go with the unproven, statistical abomination that quickly smeared (irreparably?) the reputation of climate science?