Cambridge academic caught on plane with £100,000 in a box of chocolates jailed over £2.8m green energy scam

WUWT
A Cambridge academic who stole £1m from a government green-energy project has been jailed for four years.
Dr Ehsan Abdi-Jalebi, 37, was stopped by Border Force officers at Heathrow with £100,000 in cash in a Thorntons Continental chocolate box as he boarded a flight to Tehran in May 2016.
The discovery prompted an investigation by the National Crime Agency, which found he had used fake documents to siphon off money into his own accounts from funding allocated to the development of renewable energy projects.
He had used the funds to develop a property in Iran worth £900,000 and to lease a Maserati sports car as well as a property in Cambridge.
Abdi-Jalebi had won international acclaim for his work on wind turbines and set up his technology firm Wind Technologies Ltd in 2006.
But, he dishonestly received project funding to the value of £2.8m in grant money from Innovate UK, the EU and The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC)."

Carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. power sector have declined 28% since 2005

WUWT
U.S. electric power sector carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) have declined 28% since 2005 because of slower electricity demand growth and changes in the mix of fuels used to generate electricity. EIA has calculated that CO2 emissions from the electric power sector totaled 1,744 million metric tons (MMmt) in 2017, the lowest level since 1987."

The senselessness of climate conferences

NoTricksZone
.....But nobody is interested in the fact that despite this, there has hardly been a global rise in temperature in 16 years (since 2002) and record emissions of 500 billion tons of CO2 in this period. Instead there has been a strongly decelerated warming, sometimes even called a “hiatus”. But acknowledging this would possibly jeopardize next year’s planned climate conference."

PEER-REVIEWED SCIENCE : The Medieval Warm Period Was Indeed Global And Warmer Than Today

Climatism

WHEN prosecuting the case for “unprecedented” man-made Global Warming, the first thing you need to make sure of is that no recent climate era was as warm or warmer than the present, even if that means having to rewrite the past to fit your narrative.
THE Medieval Warm Period, also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum (due to conditions favoured for crops, life and civilisation to thrive) existed a short time ago in the climate record, from c. 950 to c. 1250., and has remained a thorn in the side, ever since, for today’s Global Warming Climate Change activist movement." ......
BY pure coincidence, in the year 1995 the IPCC made a decision to make the Medieval Warm Period disappear: .....
ACCORDING to multiple lines of “peer-reviewed science”, the Medieval Warm Period was indeed ‘global’ and was as warm, if not warmer than today.....

THE ‘INCONVENIENT’ PAST

THERE is absolutely nothing unusual about today’s so-called Global Warming aka Climate Change.
LOOK at how many periods of warmth our planet has enjoyed during the past 10,000 years alone.
CIVILISATIONS flourished during those warm periods (“climate optimums”), and collapsed when they ended.
DID humans cause the Minoan warm period of about 3,300 years ago?
DID humans cause the Roman warm period of about 2,100 years ago?
DID humans cause the Medieval warm period of about 1,000 years ago?
WHAT about all of those other warm periods? Should we blame Fred Flintstone, perhaps?

My Tucker Carlson Interview Last Night, and Calling Out Bill Nye & James Hansen

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D

".....If their evidence for human-caused climate change is so good, they shouldn’t have to fake evidence to support their claims. I realize Bill Nye isn’t part of the climate research establishment, but he has a huge influence on public perception and scientific understanding. James Hansen also has had a huge influence on the public debate, and yet broke NASA rules by speaking to the press and Congress without management approval (and also likely violated the Hatch Act by campaigning politically..yes, he did, ThinkProgress, because he was a member of the Senior Executive Service, which has special Hatch Act rules.. I know because I was one of them, and I resigned NASA rather than have my hands tied).
This is the state of climate science today: if you support the alarmist narrative, you can exaggerate threats and connections with human activities, fake experiments, break government rules, intimidate scientific journal editors (and make them resign),and even violate the law.
As long as you can say you are doing it for the children."

Winter Kills: 80,000 died of the flu last winter in the U.S., the highest death count in decades

sunshine hours

An estimated 80,000 Americans died of flu and its complications last winter — the disease’s highest death toll in at least four decades.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, revealed the total in an interview Tuesday night with the Associated Press.

Flu experts knew it was a very bad season, but at least one found the size of the estimate surprising.

“That’s huge,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert. The tally was nearly twice as much as what health officials previously considered a bad year, he said."

 

Elon Musk sued for fraud by SEC, Tesla electric car company stock tanks

WUWT
“It’s an easy case,” said Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “He said in the tweet he had financing, and apparently he didn’t. … It’s about as straightforward as you can get.”

NASA: The chill of solar minimum is being felt in our atmosphere – cooling trend seen

WUWT
"We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”

Canada — And The World — Abandon Green Energy Agenda

WUWT
"....The most consequential change of all, however, occurred in the United States, where the Democratic Party — adherents to the global warming orthodoxy — first lost control of the Congress and then the presidency to the Republicans under President Donald Trump, an outspoken critic of the global-warming lobby. When Trump abandoned the Paris climate accord in favour of coal and other carbon-based fuels, the world’s leaders rose up almost as one in outrage. Today, with the U.S. having revived its coal industry, having become the world’s largest oil producer and having propelled its once-moribund economic growth rates past the others, those world leaders are following America’s lead while falling silent on Paris. The once-powerful United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, formerly a fixture in the news, is defanged and forgotten, having lost its U.S. funding and its relevance."

We Are Living Nineteen Eighty-Four

JoNova(Australia)

Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the progressive agenda. 

In Orwell’s world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry, rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead, regimented ideology — the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of one’s life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality — warps everything from the use of language to private life.

Newspeak and Doublethink "

Ex-BHP Chief: Scrap Paris Now

JoNova(Australia)
Ex-chairman of BHP (1997-99), Jerry Ellis  (left) ex-chancellor of Monash University, and an ex-director of ANZ Bank, has called for Australia to dump the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Ellis’s intervention puts cat among climate pigeons. 

The alarmists like to lie that sceptics are a fringe group. Ellis is hardly fringe. His former BHP continues to promote the story about human-caused catastrophic CO2 warming, as does Monash University. Ellis is an awkwardness for both.

By coming out against climate alarmism, Ellis, 91, is giving added respectability to scepticism, much as ex-PM Tony Abbott did with his London sceptic speech of last October.[i] The credibility of the sceptic case, of course, rests not on authority figures but data such as the more than two-fold exaggeration of warming since 1980 by the climate models on which the CO2 scare is based."

Climate Mafia At Work

Real Science
During March of 2015, I predicted that Carl Mears at Remote Sensing Systems RSS, under extreme pressure from the climate mafia,  would alter his data to match the fraudulent surface temperature data sets.

Look for the satellite data to be adjusted to bring it into compliance with the fully fraudulent surface temperatures. The Guardian is now working to discredit UAH, so it seems likely that RSS will soon be making big changes – to match the needs of the climate mafia. Bookmark this post.

That is exactly what happened. The RSS web page used to have this graph, showing how badly climate models have failed. “The simulations as a whole are predicting too much warming” They have since altered their graph and changed the text to say : “there is a small discrepancy between the model predictions and the satelllite observations.” One would expect that Dr. Carl Mears would know how to spell satellite, and that he would also notice that even after he changed the data there is still a very large discrepancy between the models and observations, with observations falling at the very lower end of the model range.  But let’s look how he changed the data. He simply got rid of his error range (light blue) and moved the temperature (black line) up to the very top of his error range.
Even after doing this data tampering, RSS still shows the current temperature outside the model 95% confidence range (yellow.)
Prior to the data tampering, RSS agreed quite closely with the other satellite data set from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, but they now show an extra 0.15 degrees of warming.
The only two people who were qualified to review this data tampering by RSS, Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy, were not consulted and the changes were not submitted for peer review to them.
Here are Dr. Spencer’s predictions from January, 2017.

“I expect there will soon be a revised TLT product from RSS which shows enhanced warming, too.
Here’s what I’m predicting:
1) neither John Christy nor I will be asked to review the paper
2) it will quickly sail through peer review (our UAH V6 paper is still not in print nearly 1 year after submission)
3) it will have many authors, including climate model people and the usual model pundits (e.g. Santer), which will supposedly lend legitimacy to the new data adjustments.
Let’s see how many of my 3 predictions come true.
-Roy”
Roy Spencer’s Prediction | The Deplorable Climate Science Blog

The climate mafia has many carrot/stick tactics to force compliance, but nearly everyone in the academic community sooner or later falls in line with their demands.

Early Repairs to 500 UK Wind Turbines Will Cost Half a Billion

Guido Fawkes
500 UK offshore wind turbines need vital repairs earlier than expected in an enormous renewable energy blunder which could cost more than £500 million. The turbines, operated by Ørsted and supplied by Siemens, need repairs to the leading edge of blades that eroded after only a few years at sea. At one wind farm off Duddon Sands, Cumbria, all 108 wind turbines have erosion problems, requiring removal and reconditioning. Repair entails the application of a rubber coating, meaning blades must be brought ashore. Costs including repair boat chartering and allowing for lost generation and income are estimated as around £1 million per turbine."

Our Man in Davos reports on ‘6 feet of global warming’

WUWT
Our man in Davos has reported in:
This year we have had record amounts of snow in Switzerland. The railway line is closed to Davos.because of danger of avalanches. The road has only limited capacity.
Davos, normally 10.000 inhabitants, is guarded by 7000 – police and Swiss army and airforce. "

Predictions Of Snowless Winters Go Down In Flames As No. Hemisphere Gets Buried Under Ice

NoTricksZone
With frigid temperatures and heavy snows gripping much of the Northern Hemisphere, this is a quite an embarrassment for climate experts who earlier confirdently claimed snow would become rare due to global warming. Furthermore not only has snow returned with a vengeance, also global surface temperatures over the past 20 years have risen insignificantly."

Global warming theorists are tripping over themselves to explain America's cold winters

Christopher Booker 

One of Shakespeare’s persistent themes in Hamlet is that when people set out to fool others, it will eventually catch up with them. Repeatedly he emphasises that “purposes mistook fall on their inventors’ heads”, that such people end up “hoist with their own petard”, or get caught like a “woodcock” in their own trap.
There was a delightful example of this on our letters page last week, when that well-known propagandist for global warming, Bob Ward, tried to challenge what I had written about the recent series of unusually cold winters in North America.

Mr Ward is employed by the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, sponsored by a climate change-obsessed billionaire, and challenges anyone who publicly questions global warming orthodoxy."

BOM Hiding The Decline In New South Wales

RealScience
The average maximum temperature at Bourke, NSW this year has been 105.8F, with a peak of 113.7F.  The years 1896, 1906 and 1939 were all much hotter, with peak temperatures of 120 degrees in 1896 and 1906.  BOM hides all the pre-1910 data which wrecks their global warming scam. "

--------------------------------
ED: Worth a look here too ( Bourke Climate): weatherzone.com.au

Coldest Start To A Year On Record In The US

RealScience
Afternoon temperatures during the first week of January have been declining in the US for a century, and have dropped more than ten degrees during the last decade.  .......
But January wasn’t always cold like this in the US. During January 1790, Philadelphia was having temperatures over 70 degrees. "

The Frozen U.S. Is Paying a Terrible Price for Green Lies

Breitbart
"The North-Eastern U.S. is experiencing record-breaking cold. Even the very sharks are dying as they swim."
Happily the New York Times is here to put it all in context. It’s all further evidence of global warming, of course!
All is ‘explained’ in a story headed “Why so cold? Climate Change May Be Part of the Answer”  ...
.........The facts need not detain us here – because there aren’t any. It’s just speculation – “could”, “may” – gleaned from conversations with tame “experts” at institutions like the notoriously alarmist and fervently left-wing Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. And there’s plenty more nonsense where this came from, as Thomas Williams reported here earlier....."

Germany drops carbon target

JoNova(Australia)
Compare the outrage: Germany abandons carbon target, but stays in Paris agreement. US  abandons Paris, but makes actual “carbon” cuts. One of these nations is a global pariah.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany’s would-be coalition partners have agreed to drop plans to lower carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, sources familiar with negotiations said on Monday –

And this is a problem, how?

– a potential embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Oh.? Well, it’s only dates and numbers anyway:

Instead, they would aim to hit the 40 percent target in the early 2020s, the sources said, adding that both parties are still sticking to their goal of achieving a 55 percent cut in emissions by 2030.

Which is more important, paper promises you don’t keep, or lower outputs of “planet destroying gas”? Nevermind about CO2."

Sydney before “climate change” — over 50C, 122F recorded at Windsor Observatory, 1939

JoNova(Australia)
Penrith may have recorded 47.3C for at least one-second this week, but Windsor is only 23 km north-east of Penrith, and on January 13th, 1939, it recorded 122F or 50.5C with an old fashioned liquid thermometer,  not a modern noisy electronic one.
Apparently, climate change makes our extreme heat less extreme.
Furthermore, this was not measured on a beer crate in someones back-yard, but on the historic Windsor Observatory which was built in 1863 by John Tebbutt F.R.A.S who had discovered The 1861 comet, and published many scientific reports in Astronomical Journals. His meteorological observations are published at Harvard in 1899 (among others). Tebbutt died in 1916, so it’s not clear what instrument the 122 F was recorded on in 1939, but a Stevenson Screen had been installed around 40 years earlier, and the measurement was made by Mr Keith Tebbutt, presumably his son."

Sydney “hottest ever” mistake generates fake news

JoNova(Australia)
The BOM announced it was the hottest ever day in Sydney today, then realized it had it wrong, but not before headlines spread across the country. For a million dollars a day you’d think the BOM would check their own “high quality” database. A scientific agency would take great care before announcing “historic all time records”for a city of five million people. A shameless PR agency might see that sort of mistake as an advantage.

It’s careless, piled on rank neglect

Even if the day had been “a record”, the temperatures are often artificially inflated due to site changes, thermometer changes, and the one-second-record effect thanks to the introduction of electronic thermometers, all of which are a product of careless BOM management and analysis. And even over and above that, past temperatures have been adjusted or homogenised downwards — often years after they are recorded — and by secret methods that the BOM will not disclose. I’ll have more information soon on changes at Sydney Observatory, that the BOM don’t make any allowance for."

In tomorrow’s WSJ – a tale of climate cash, collusion, and apparently, corruption

WUWT
Are foundations running state energy policy without transparency?
With President Trump putting economic growth above climate alarums, green activists are turning to progressive states to press their regulatory agenda. Governors from 15 states have formed the U.S. Climate Alliance, for example, to enforce the Paris Climate Agreement despite Mr. Trump’s withdrawal. Fair enough if it’s all above board, but records we’ve obtained suggest that foundations are steering policy behind the scenes without transparency or clear public accountability."

‘The 97% climate consensus’ starts to crumble with 485 new papers in 2017 that question it

WUWT
Author Kenneth Richard found that during the course of the year 2017, at least 485 scientific papers were published that in some way questioned the supposed consensus regarding the perils of human CO2 emissions or the efficacy of climate models to predict the future.
According to Richard’s analysis, the 485 new papers underscore the “significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate and climate changes,” which in turn suggests that climate science is not nearly as settled as media reports and some policymakers would have people believe."

On Science and Nonscience

WUWT
....In the world of scientific journals, there is a quality control mechanism known as peer review. The idea is that a number of independent experts scrutinize a proposed paper, check its correctness and its utility, and suggest changes where necessary. But peer review doesn’t always catch issues with papers before they are published. This is a particular problem when the reviewers work or have worked closely with the authors, and share their conceptual framework. Indeed, where a group of experts on a subject have formed a clique, it’s easy for groupthink to develop. In such a situation, only those ideas with which clique members are comfortable are likely to pass muster and get published."