Sea Ice News #13

WUWT
"This summer we have had confirmation that Arctic ice behaviour has everything to do with wind. During June, winds were circulating clockwise in an inwards spiral, which caused ice extent to diminish and ice concentration to remain high. Around July 1, the patterns reversed and we have seen counterclockwise winds pushing ice away from the pole. As a result, ice area/extent has scarcely changed and instead we see a gradual decline in average ice thickness. ......In other words, the widely claimed polar meltdown continues to be nothing more than bad fiction.

Parliament misled over Climategate report, says MP

WUWT
"Parliament was misled and needs to re-examine the Climategate affair thoroughly after the failure of the Russell report, a leading backbench MP told us today.

“It’s not a whitewash, but it is inadequate,” is Labour MP Graham Stringer’s summary of the Russell inquiry report. Stringer is the only member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology with scientific qualifications – he holds a PhD in Chemistry.

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How independent was the panel? (The Register)
"Muir Russell's team heard only one side of the story, failing to call witnesses who were the subjects of the emails - Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit is mentioned over one hundred times in the archive - who may have given a different perspective. Nor was any active climate scientist supportive of climate change policy but critical of the CRU team's behaviour - Hans Storch or Judith Curry, let alone the prominent sceptics, for example - summoned. Stringer feels their presence would have provided vital context.

University of East Anglia Vice Chancellor Edward Acton

The panel included Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet and a vocal advocate of mitigation against climate change (in 2007 he described [3] global warming "the biggest threat to our future health") and Geoffrey Boulton a climate change advisor to the UK government and the EU, who spent 16-years at the University of East Anglia [4] - the institution under apparently 'independent' scrutiny.

In several areas the CRU academics were given the benefit of the doubt because a precedent had been set - often by the academics themselves.

The British establishment has a poor record of examining its own conduct. The 1983 Franks Report into events leading up to the Falklands Invasion exonerated the leading institutions and decision-makers, so too did the Hutton Report into the Invasion of Iraq.

For Stringer, policy needs to be justified by the evidence."

Amazongate: At last we reach the source

Christopher Booker, Telegraph
"The IPCC's attempts to hide the truth about its exaggerated claims on the deforestation of the Amazon have ended in defeat......Last week, after six months of evasions, obfuscation, denials and retractions, a story which has preoccupied this column on and off since January came to a startling conclusion. It turns out that one of the most widely publicised statements in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a claim on which tens of billions of dollars could hang – was not based on peer-reviewed science, as repeatedly claimed, but originated solely from anonymous propaganda published on the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group.

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The source of Amazongate (Dr Richard North)
"..the WWF have now been forced to admit that its source of information about the Amazon, on which the IPCC relied, was an anonymous tract on the webpage of an obscure Brazilian advocacy group – illustrated here and called Fire in the Amazon. This webpage is not based on any known or identified research and is not peer reviewed."

Never mind the Climategate whitewash – what about our new £50 billion annual climate bill?

Telegraph
"So the Sir Muir Russell inquiry into Climategate was, pretty much, a whitewash. But then we’d already guessed that. The danger with all these official cover-ups – reported with salivating glee by the Warmists’ drooling useful idiots in the Mainstream Media – is that they distract from the main point.

And the main point, at least as far as British taxpayers are concerned is this: under the terms of the 2008 Climate Change Act we are the only country in the world legally committed to making swinging reductions in CO2, the harmless trace gas which helps plants grow and which we really need more of not less in order to soften the blow of the imminent global cooling.

How much is this lunacy going to cost us? The figure which used to be quoted was £18 billion per annum. Apparently this has now more than doubled.

The new figure our glorious Coalition intends to squander – every single year for the next 40 years – is £50 billion, all in order to deal with a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

IPCC “one sided”

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"..The wording of a statement on between 3000 and 5000 more heat-related deaths a year in Australian cities had suggested that all of the projected increase would be the result of climate change, whereas most of it would be caused by the rising population and an increase in the number of elderly people. "

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We're shocked, shocked!(Dr Richard North)
"Following the release of over 1,000 e-mails and other material from the University of East Anglia's (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU, the so-called Independent Climate Change Email Review, headed by Muir Russell, has concluded of the unit's scientists that "their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt". Furthermore, the review found nothing in the e-mails to undermine IPCC reports.

So says Richard Black of the BBC and we are shocked, utterly shocked – that anyone could have thought that the review might have found otherwise. Its full 160-page report can be downloaded here, and you will immediately see what I mean. "

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'Climategate' professor gets his job back (Telegraph)

Weather is not climate, and Australia is not warm

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)


Alice Springs:

An appeal has been launched for donations of blankets and dry bedding as rain forces people out of Alice Springs town camps on what is likely to be the town’s coldest day on record.

Sydney last week:

Sydney’s week of cold weather continues, with the city recording its coldest June morning since 1949 when temperatures dived to 4.3 degrees.

Adelaide:

Oppressive summer heatwaves are the normal weather-related bugbear for Adelaide residents but locals are currently shivering through their coldest week since 1982.

Perisher:

New South Wales (NSW) ski resorts were reveling in one of the best ever opening weekends, with plenty of natural snow and record levels of artificial cover.

Melbourne:

Melbourne has experienced its wettest June in nine years...

Inland:

DURING the coming days, heavy rain will spread across the country’s interior, with amounts expected to rival their July records in some locations."

Staggering ETS poll result

NZ Herald (New Zealand)
"..Take, for example, the incredible Emissions Trading Scheme that kicked in last week. Many of us can't quite work out how much it's going to cost us - but it is going to cost us...all of us. My power company told me the ETS would add an average $5 a month to my bill. Petrol prices, as if they weren't high enough already, will also go up in price. Let's not forget the increase in GST coming up too. .....WeatherWatch.co.nz ran a poll last week about the ETS. The question was simple. Do you support it? The answers were either "Yes", "No", or "I don't understand what the ETS is".

This poll has become one of our most popular polls ever but the results were the clearest we've ever had.
Do you support the ETS?

Yes - 2%

No - 97%

I don't know what the ETS is - 1%

Catastrophism collapses

Financial Post
"G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy...These leaders’ collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.

Kevin Rudd, Australia’s gung-ho global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia’s conservative opposition leader, also gung-go on global warming, lost his job in an anti-global-warming backbencher revolt. The U.K.’s gung-ho global-warming leader during last year’s G8 and G20 meetings, Gordon Brown, likewise lost his job.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had vowed to “save the human race” from climate change by introducing a carbon tax by the time of the G8 and G20, was a changed man by the time the meetings occurred. He cancelled his carbon tax in March, two days after a crushing defeat in regional elections that saw his Gaullist party lose just about every region of France. He got the message: Two-thirds of the French public opposed carbon taxes.

Spain? Days before the G20 meetings, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, his popularity and that of global warming in tatters, decided to gut his country’s renewables industry by unilaterally rescinding the government guarantees enshrined in legislation, knowing the rescinding would put most of his country’s 600 photovoltaic manufacturers out of business. Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi similarly scrapped government guarantees for its solar and wind companies prior to the G8 and G20, putting them into default, too.

The U.K may be making the biggest global-warming cuts of all, with an emergency budget that came down the week of the G20 meetings. The two government departments responsible for climate-change policies — previously immune to cuts — must now contract by an extraordinary 25%. Other U.K. departments are also ditching climate-change programs — the casualties include manufacturers of electric cars, the Low Carbon Buildings Program, and, as the minister in charge put it, “every commitment made by the last government on renewables is under review.“ Some areas of the economy not only survived but expanded, though: The government announced record offshore oil development in the North Sea — the U.K. granted a record 356 exploration licences in its most recent round.

Support for global-warming programs is also in tatters in the U.S., where polls show — as in Europe — that the great majority rejects global-warming catastrophism. The public resents repeated attempts to pass cap and trade legislation over their objections, contributing to the fall in popularity of President Barack Obama and Congress. Public opinion surveys now predict that this November’s elections will see sweeping change in the United States, with legislators who have signed on to the global-warming hypothesis being replaced by those who don’t buy it."

H/T Climate Depot

See no evil

Dr Richard North
"A Dutch inquiry into the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report has produced its own report which has found "no errors that would undermine the main conclusions" on probable impacts of climate change. This is the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), which was asked by the Dutch parliament to carry out an inquiry after two mistakes were identified in the IPCC's 2007 report.

The Agency is a temple to warmism. One of its departmental directors is Dr Joop Oude Lohuis, a strong advocate of the Pachauri doctrine of eating less meat to avoid climate change, while one of the authors to this report, Bart Strengers, is also an IPCC contributor. It is about as tainted as it is possible to be - and it shows. "

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The Economist on Dutch IPCC Report (Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog)
"Perhaps the most worrying thing about the PBL report, though, is a rather obvious one about which its authors say little. In all ten of the issues that the PBL categorised as major (the original errors on glaciers and Dutch sea level, and the eight others identified in the report), the impression that the reader gets from the IPCC is more strikingly negative than the impression which would have been received if the underlying evidence base had been reflected as the PBL would have wished, with more precise referencing, more narrow interpretation and less authorial judgment. A large rise in heat related deaths in Australia is mentioned without noting that most of the effect is due to population rather than climate change. A claim about forest fires in northern Asia seems to go further than the evidence referred to—in this case a speech by a politician—would warrant.

The Netherlands look more floodable, Asian glaciers more fragile. A suspicion thus gains ground that the way in which the IPCC sythesises, generalises snd checks its findings may systematically favour adverse outcomes in a way that goes beyond just serving the needs of policy makers. Anecdotally, authors bemoan fights to keep caveats in place as chapters are edited, refined and summarised. The PBL report does not prove or indeed suggest systematic bias, and it stresses that it has found nothing that should lead the parliament of the Netherlands, or anyone else, to reject the IPCC’s findings. But the panel set up to look at the IPCC’s workings by Dr Pachauri and Mr Ban should ask some hard questions about systematic tendencies to accentuate the negative."

How come we now have to go to the Chinese for the truth about global warming?

Telegraph
"Another day, another climate fraud whitewash – this time from a Dutch government inquiry, conducted by something called the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. ...Let’s just pause for a moment to consider what’s at stake here. According to the IPCC’s projections – not even predictions, mark you, just projections based on deeply unreliable, garbage-in-garbage-out computer models – the world is on course for a period of catastrophic, unprecedented, man-made global warming which can only be prevented by drastically cutting carbon emissions and destroying the global economy. This will cost us all at least $45 trillion and prolong the recession indefinitely. And an official Dutch investigation now finds that this is all fair and proper and right, even though none of these “projections” is remotely grounded in empirical observation, though the link between the trace gas CO2 and catastrophic global warming remains no more than theoretical, and though the Climategate emails revealed that those scientists most close to the heart of the IPCC process are at best unreliable and incompetent, at worst corrupt, fraudulent and more interested in political activism than in honest science.

So instead, for the truth, we have to rely on those traditional bastions of openness the Chinese. Says World Climate Report: "

'Climategate', 'Amazongate' - when will the truth be told?

Telegraph
"What are we to make of the efforts by the political and academic establishments to hold the line against all those revelations, such as "Climategate", which last winter rocked the authority of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The most obvious feature of the four official inquiries into the "Climategate" emails (a fifth report is due this week from Sir Muir Russell), is that not one has engaged with the central point at issue. This is the evidence from the emails and other documents confirming that the key IPCC scientists involved had been manipulating data to show temperatures having lately shot up to levels unknown in the past 1,000 years.

A familiar example was the IPCC's "hockey stick" graph, created by the American scientist Michael Mann, but shown by the statistics expert Steve McIntyre to be no more than a statistical artefact. Last week, a second inquiry by his own university cleared Dr Mann, again making no attempt to discuss the central issue. Instead, it merely asserted – while acclaiming him as "among the most respected scientists in his field" – that the techniques used to compile his graph were wholly acceptable. Similarly, McIntyre was startled last week to get a dismissive email from Lord Oxburgh, whose Science Appraisal Panel also avoided the crucial issue in its perfunctory five-page report, bizarrely claiming that "the science was not the subject of our study".

New Zealand sacrifices to save the world 0.04 per cent

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"New Zealand Prime Minister John Key had it right the first time, in 2005: I rise on behalf of the National Party to give the good news to the people of New Zealand—that is, the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill is a load of rubbish and the National Party will not be supporting it, for very, very good reasons indeed… ...Five years later: The world’s second national carbon trading scheme ramps up from Thursday with the inclusion of sectors covering half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions, but anger over the scheme could hurt the government. "

Oxburgh and the Jones Admission

Climate Audit
"...This morning, I received the following remarkable response:

Dear Dr Mcintyre,
Thank you for your message. What you report may or may not be the case. But as I have pointed out to you previously the science was not the subject of our study.
Yours sincerly,
Ron Oxburgh

Read it again. The “science was not the subject of our study”. Why would anyone have expected that science would be the subject of study of the Science Appraisal Panel? Well, there’s a good reason why they would. The University of East Anglia and Muir Russell said over and over again that the Science Appraisal Panel would, uh, “re-appraise” CRU’s “science”.

China’s 2,000 Year Temperature History

World Climate Report
"We constantly hear that the warmest years on record have all occurred in the most recent decades, and of course, we are led to believe this must be a result of the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. In most places, we have approximately 100 years of reliable temperature records, and we wonder if the warmth of the most recent decades is unusual, part of some cyclical behavior of the climate system, or a warm-up on the heels of a cold period at the beginning of the record. A recent article in Geophysical Research Letters has an intriguing title suggesting a 2,000 year temperature record now exists for China – we definitely wanted to see these results of this one."

....Comment found about 'Carbon Trading'

"How do you become a carbon analyst or carbon trader?"
"1. Suspend reason and critical thought.

2. Join and begin funding a global socialism organization. The United Nations will do. The more the merrier though.

3. Develop hyperbole about non-facts regarding climate change placing the blame on human activity.

4. Find a washed-up politician to promote your hyperbole, and to blame humanity.

5. Develop a funding structure for researchers who will support your hyperbole and blame humanity.

6. Personally engage in shredding the credibility of any scientist who may question the hyperbole, or may find other reasons to blame besides human activity.

Remember, the public is gullible. "