Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years, experts predict

Telegraph
"Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned. .....Weather patterns were more like those in the late 1970s, experts said, while Met Office figures released on Monday are expected to show that the country is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years."

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'Carousel' frauds plague European carbon trading markets

Telegraph
"It is a building site, formerly a derelict car park, in a deprived part of West London, where the neon glow of curry houses and late-night grocery stores could not be further from the wealth and glamour of London's financial markets.Described as a "consulting" business, this is the address of a UK company that has signed up to trade carbon permits under the European Emissions Trading Scheme in Copenhagen. But there is no trace of its existence on the Companies House database. ......Just a few weeks ago, Europol, the cross-border police force, said that carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals mainly from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland pocketing an estimated €5bn (£4.5bn)."It is estimated that in some countries, up to 90pc of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities," Europol said.Figures from New Energy Finance show the value of the global market falling from $38bn (£23bn) in the second quarter to $30bn in the three months to the end of September after several countries cracked down."

The scariest article you will read this year

Telegraph
" ...But it has the huge advantage, from the climate-fear-promotion industry’s point of view, that it continues to finger CO2 as the real villain of the piece. And so long as they can do that, it means our governments will still have the excuse they need to continue with their insanely expensive directives on carbon emissions; and it means – while most of us are impoverished by our inflated utility bills – that the thieves and fat cats who are on top of the carbon trading scam will get stupendously richer and richer."

The Unbearable Complexity of Climate

Watts Up With That
"Final conclusion? Because climate is a flow system far from equilibrium, it is ruled by the Constructal Law. As a result, there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make any difference to the global temperature, and the Constructal Law gives us reason to think that it may make no difference at all. In any case, regardless of Arrhenius, the “simple physics” relationship between CO2 and global temperature is something that we cannot simply assume to be true."

Welcome to my analysis of Climategate, the climate science scandal that has already eclipsed Watergate in terms of its global political ramifications.

John P. Costella
"Climategate has shattered that myth. It gives us a peephole into the work of the scientists investigating possibly the most important issue ever to face mankind. Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”. Most people are aghast that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long."
"As an increasing number of highly qualified scientists slowly began to realize that the “climate science” community was a facade—and that their vitriolic rebuffs of sensible arguments of mathematics, statistics, and indeed scientific common sense were not the product of scientific rigor at all, but merely self-protection at any cost—the veil began to drop on what has already become clear as the greatest scientific fraud in this history of mankind."

ClimateGate: 30 years in the making

JoNova
"Mohib Ebrahim has created professional timelines for exhibitions, so it must have seemed only natural to him to want to visually piece together the full timeline of ClimateGate, laying out the analysis, graphs, emails and history of the scandal as revealed by dozens of researchers over the past weeks, months and years. ....Think of it as a full poster that shows some key events which built up, year by year, the billion dollar enterprise that now promotes man-made CO2 global warming."(PDF and other formats Download)

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The Skeptics Handbook
"Two free, colorful and concise booklets live here....This booklet has captured attention around the world.Donors have paid for over 160,000 copies so far in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and soon in Germany. Volunteers have translated it into German, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Turkish, Portuguese Danish and Japanese. (Versions in Dutch, Spanish, and possibly Italian are on the way). Updates are placed here, along with translations, as well as places to read comments and links to the web-pages where each part of the handbook will be discussed."

Climategate: the corruption of Wikipedia

Telegraph
"If you want to know the truth about Climategate, definitely don’t use Wikipedia. “Climatic Research Unit e-mail controversy”, is its preferred, mealy-mouthed euphemism to describe the greatest scientific scandal of the modern age. Not that you’d ever guess it was a scandal from the accompanying article. It reads more like a damage-limitation press release put out by concerned friends and sympathisers of the lying, cheating, data-rigging scientists. Which funnily enough, is pretty much what it is."

Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri

Telegraph
"Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all. What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations. ....It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.
The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate. "

Time For Plan B

WSJ
"The time has come to abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B.And the outlines of a credible plan B are clear. First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in future arise. This enables us to pocket the benefits of any warming (and there are many), while reducing the costs. And since none of the projected costs are new phenomena, but the possible exacerbation of the problems our climate already throws at us, addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. Nor does adaptation require a global agreement, although we may well need to help the very poorest countries (not China) to adapt.And beyond adaptation, plan B should involve a relatively modest increased government investment in technological research and development—in energy, in adaptation and in geoengineering.Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Copenhagen debacle, it is not going to be easy to get our leaders to move to Plan B. There is no doubt that calling a halt to the high-profile climate-change traveling circus risks causing a severe conference-deprivation trauma among the participants. If there has to be a small public investment in counseling, it would be money well spent."
(Lord Lawson,chairman Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org)

Dismal outcome at Copenhagen fiasco

FT
"One wonders how a conference to conclude two years of detailed negotiations, building on more than a decade of previous talks, could have collapsed into such a shambles. It is as though no preparatory work had been done. Consensus on the most basic issues was lacking. Were countries there to negotiate binding limits on emissions or not? Nobody seemed to know.From the start, the disarray was total. In this, at least, the attention to detail was impressive. The organisers invited more people to the event than could be accommodated, and were puzzled when they arrived. Delegates queued in the freezing cold for hours, a scene that summed it all up. The organisers had planned a celebration of a grand new global pact – but the party was a disaster and they forgot to bring the agreement.Governments need to understand, even if they cannot say so, that Copenhagen was worse than useless. ..."

Climate change summit accepts 'toothless' US-backed agreement - but deal is not legally binding

Daily Mail
"The fudged deal - backed by Britain, America, South Africa, India, Brazil and China - came after a day of bitter rows and divisions in which the United Nations talks came close to collapse. ....But its flimsy nature was exposed when he admitted targets put forward by countries 'will not be by themselves sufficient to get to where we need to get by 2050'."

Climate summit ends in chaos and 'toothless' deal

Telegraph
"The Copenhagen climate summit ended in chaos and acrimony, forcing leading nations back to the drawing board in the search for a legally-binding deal on emissions."

Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure

Guardian
"The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement last night in Copenhagen, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come...After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord “recognises” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but did not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal....American officials spun the deal as a “meaningful agreement”, but even Obama said: “This progress is not enough.”

Copenhagen accord keeps Big Carbon in business

Telegraph
"The Copenhagen summit achieved its main aim, to maintain the carbon-trading system established by the Kyoto Protocol... Copenhagen was not about global warming but money. The cash that Hillary Clinton so dramatically plonked on the table, rising to $100 billion by 2020, which includes the £1.5 billion offered by Gordon Brown (money which of course he hasn't got) and which like a crazed gambler he last week upped to £6 billion (even more money he hasn't got), was merely a "sweetener" to persuade the developing countries to maintain the money-machine set in motion by Kyoto.This is the new global industry based on buying and selling the right to emit CO2, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year, which through schemes such as the UN's Clean Development Mechanism and the EU's Emissions Trading System is making a small minority of people, including Al Gore, extremely rich."
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Copenhagen: the sweet sound of exploding watermelons