Tag Archives: global

by | December 17, 2009

Blizzard hits in Copenhagen as World Leaders Discuss Global Warming

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by | December 12, 2009

Copenhagen: Protesters behave like children . . . again

climate-change

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Copenhagen today as part of a global protest to demand governments across the world agree a binding new global deal to tackle climate change.

The march and rally in the Danish capital, the world’s largest ever protest about global warming, comes at the halfway point of the United Nations’ climate summit in the city.

“Let’s dance, sing and be happy, because power is in your hands,” Nnimmo Bassey, director of Friends of the Earth International told the crowd, as he kicked off the first part of the march, the Flood, from Halmtorvet.

Official police estimates put the number of protesters at 25,000, but organisers said as many as 100,000 had joined the march from central Copenhagen, waving banners that read “Nature doesn’t compromise” and “Climate Justice Now”.

Although most of the march has been peaceful, a small group threw bricks at police early on. So far there have been 21 arrests, and police are currrently kettling about 200-300 marchers in Amagerbrogade.

Police spokesman Rasmus Bernt Skovsgaard said: “There was some cobblestone-throwing and at the same time people were putting on masks. We decided to go for preventive detentions to give the peaceful demonstration the possibility to move on.”

To mark the Global Day of Action on climate change, campaigners were also staging events around the world, including a four-minute “flashdance” with lights outside the Houses of Parliament, with volunteers across London collecting messages from citizens to deliver to MPs.

Phil Thornhill, from the Campaign against Climate Change in the UK, said on behalf of the Global Climate Campaign: “Every year of inaction sees us slide closer to the point where a tragedy of unprecedented scale becomes irreversible.

“As politicians fail to find the collective will to overcome inertia, international rivalries, and the all-pervasive power of vested interests, ordinary people all around the world will be demanding decisive action now, not later when the fate of billions could be already have been sealed and the catastrophe will have become unstoppable.”

Among the protesters in Coppenhagen were the actor Helen Baxendale, model Helena Christensen and former Irish president and UN high commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson.

Baxendale said thousands of people from all over the world were trying to encourage their leaders to take “firm and fair action” on climate change.

She told Sky News it was “inspiring”, adding: “It’s fantastic to join with so many other people from all over the world.

“I think it’s also important that people come and make their voices heard as well. I think, in the end, that’s what will make real, positive change.”

Christensen added: “They will be very bad politicians if they do not hear us by now.”

Environment ministers started arriving in the city today for informal talks before world leaders join the summit late next week.

Initial reaction to the negotiating text submitted yesterday underscored the split between the US-led wealthy countries and developing countries still struggling to catch up with the modern world.

The tightly focused document was meant to lay out the main themes for environment ministers to wrestle with as they prepare for a summit of around 110 heads of state and government at the end of next week.

Wealthy countries, including the US, Japan and Norway, as well as the European Union, criticised a draft agreement for not making stronger demands on developing countries underscoring the difficulties in reaching a deal.

US delegate Jonathan Pershing said the draft failed to address the issue of carbon emissions by emerging economies.

“The current draft didn’t work in terms of where it is headed,” he said.

But European delegates also criticised the US, insisting it could make greater commitments to push the talks forward. Both the US and China should be legally bound to keep whatever promises they make, said the Swedish environment minister, Anders Carlgren.

China has made voluntary commitments to rein in its carbon emissions but doesn’t want to be bound by international law to do so. Its position is that the US and other rich countries have a historical responsibility to cut emissions and any climate deal in Copenhagen should take into account a country’s level of development.

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by | December 5, 2009

Obama decides to ignore Climate-Gate

alfred-e-newman ObamaThe controversy swirling around the leaked e-mails of climate scientists apparently trying to downplay data and exclude dissenting opinions has led to calls for President Obama to skip this month’s climate summit in Denmark until the e-mails can be investigated.

Instead, the White House announced Friday that Obama was doubling down on his commitment to the summit’s goals and moving his visit later in the month, hoping it will secure a “meaningful” agreement.

The scandal being referred to as “Climate-gate” has rallied global warming skeptics, who say the threat is exaggerated — let alone caused by humans. In some of the e-mails stolen by hackers and posted online, scientists at Britain’s University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit appear to discuss hiding or deleting data that may contradicts global warming claims. Others discuss ways of keeping competing research out of peer-reviewed journals.

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the most prominent figure to call on Obama to boycott the conference in Copenhagen in the wake of the e-mails’ release.

“The president’s decision to attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen needs to be reconsidered in light of the unfolding Climategate scandal,” she said in a posting on her Facebook page. “Boycotting Copenhagen while this scandal is thoroughly investigated would send a strong message that the United States government will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices.”

But on Friday, Obama abruptly delayed his arrival at the summit until Dec. 18, the last scheduled day and considered a crucial period when more leaders will be in attendance. Obama is hoping to capitalize on steps by India and China and build a more meaningful political accord, the White House said.

The U.S., India, and China all have specific proposals on the table for the first time, and world leaders are aiming for a deal that includes commitments on reducing emissions and financing for developing countries. They no longer expect to reach a legally binding agreement, as had long been the goal.

The White House is shrugging off the Climate-gate e-mails.

“I think there’s no real scientific basis for the dispute of (global warming),” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said this week.

And Obama’s top science adviser, John Holdren, downplayed the e-mails Friday, telling Congress that the controversy involves a small group of scientists and how they have interpreted and shared global warming data.

“It’s important to understand that these kinds of controversies and even accusations of bias and improper manipulation are not all that uncommon in science, in all branches of science,” he said at a congressional hearing.

“The strength of science is that these kinds of controversies get sorted out over time as to who is wrong, who is right, and how much it matters, by the process of peer-review and continued critical scrutiny by the knowledgeable community of scientists,” he said.

Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Commmittee, on Friday joined Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., in calling on the Obama administration and Congress to investigate the Climate-gate e-mails.

“The very integrity of the report that the Obama administration has predicated much of its climate change policy upon has been called into question and it is unconscionable that this administration and Congress is willing to abdicate responsibility of uncovering the truth to the United Nations,”   the California Republican said in a written statement.

“The administration’s Climate-gate denials and refusal to acknowledge the need for a congressional investigation are a sad abdication of their responsibility to ensure that U.S. policies are not driven by corrupted science and data,” he said.

Some climate change analysts say the e-mails undermine the entire Denmark conference.

“This raises questions about some of the very U.N. science that forms the basis of what’s going to be discussed in Copenhagen,” said Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation and an expert on energy and environmental issues.

“There’s a lot to be concerned about here,” he told Fox News. “At the very least the president shouldn’t agree to anything in Copenhagen until we get to the bottom of Climate-gate and find out just how much there is to global warming that we can still trust.”

Despite a recent decline in global temperatures, the trend over the past 150 years has shown temperatures rising — but the timing of the e-mail scandal is perfect for skeptics, said Heather Conley, senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It doesn’t negate the fact that the global community does need to address its rate of emitting carbon and it needs to develop clean and greener technologies, but it does continue to throw this debate out there,” she said.

The president’s climate czar, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Carol Browner, said she’s sticking with scientists who believe in man’s impact on global warming.

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by | November 24, 2009

Climategate, The end of the myth that is global warming

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

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by | November 21, 2009

Hackers expose fraud in global warming research

globalwarmingI have said this for years.  There is no such thing as global warming.   It has been getting cooler for 11 of the last 15 years.    But researchers are making billions of dollars in research grants keeping this lie alive.   Thats the rub here.  Its all about money and control,  and the dullards that permeate the environmental movement are all a part of it.     JD

LONDON — Computer hackers have broken into a server at a well-respected climate change research center in Britain and posted hundreds of private e-mails and documents online — stoking debate over whether some scientists have overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, said in a statement Saturday that the hackers had entered the server and stolen data at its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research center on climate change. The university said police are investigating the theft of the information, but could not confirm if all the materials posted online are genuine.

More than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists is included in about 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents posted on Web sites following the security breach last week.

Some climate change skeptics and bloggers claim the information shows scientists have overstated the case for global warming, and allege the documents contain proof that some researchers have attempted to manipulate data.

The furor over the leaked data comes weeks before the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, when 192 nations will seek to reach a binding treaty to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases worldwide. Many officials — including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — regard the prospects of a pact being sealed at the meeting as bleak.

In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.

Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.

The scientist’s use of the word “trick” has been seized on by skeptics — who say his e-mail offers proof of collusion between scientists to distort evidence to support their assertion that human activity is influencing climate change.

“Words fail me,” Stephen McIntyre — a blogger whose climateaudit.org Web site challenges popular thinking on climate change — wrote on the site following the leak of the messages.

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.

The University of East Anglica said that information published on the Internet had been selected deliberately to undermine “the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world’s climate in ways that are potentially dangerous.”

“The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way,” the university said in a statement.

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