A More Conservative Union

Michael Mann's Climate Stimulus

2010-01-20T00:17:00.002-04:00

A case study in one job 'saved.'

As for stimulus jobs—whether "saved" or "created"—we thought readers might be interested to know whose employment they are sustaining. More than $2.4 million is stimulating the career of none other than Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann.
Mr. Mann is the creator of the famous hockey stick graph, which purported to show some 900 years of minor temperature fluctuations, followed by a spike in temperatures over the past century. His work, which became a short-term sensation when seized upon by Al Gore, was later discredited. Mr. Mann made the climate spotlight again last year as a central player in the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, which showed climatologists massaging data, squelching opposing views, and hiding their work from the public.
Mr. Mann came by his grants via the National Science Foundation, which received $3 billion in stimulus money. Last June, the foundation approved a $541,184 grant to fund work "Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing," which will contribute "to the understanding of abrupt climate change." Principal investigator? Michael Mann.
He received another grant worth nearly $1.9 million to investigate the role of "environmental temperature on the transmission of vector-borne diseases." Mr. Mann is listed as a "co-principal investigator" on that project. Both grants say they were "funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009."
The NSF made these awards prior to last year's climate email scandal, but a member of its Office of Legislative and Public Affairs told us she was "unaware of any discussion regarding suspending or changing the awards made to Michael Mann." So your tax dollars will continue to fund a climate scientist whose main contribution to the field has been to discredit climate science.

Danny Glover Blames Haiti Earthquake on Global Warming

2010-01-19T00:53:00.001-04:00

Man Dies in Miami of Hypothermia

2010-01-13T00:55:00.000-04:00

Cold temps and no heat led to hypothermia for an elderly man

By TODD WRIGHT

Getty Images

A 77-year-old man died of hypothermia Tuesday in what could be considered the first death in Miami that could be attributed to the record cold weather that has lingered in the city.

Wilfredo Arreyes died at Jackson Memorial Hospital and his roommate Miguel Alemon, 93, is still in critical condition after the two spent days in the frigid cold weather with no heat or covers in their apartment on Northwest 10th Avenue and Northwest 2nd Street in Little Havana.

The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's Office will do an autopsy to determine if something else may have contributed to the Arreyes' death.

Police and fire rescue officials found the two men inside their apartment huddled together on Friday night. Arreyes was already unconscious and Alemon was semi-conscious, officials said. There was no heat in the apartment and there did not appear to be any covers for the men to get warm.

Temperatures have dipped into the 30s several times over the past two weeks and freeze warnings have been in effect for Miami and other parts of South Florida for a few days now.

Police were notified of the plight of the men by a third roommate, who was out of town and became concerned after he couldn't get his phone calls answered.

Putin Worries About Global Warming

2010-01-13T00:49:00.002-04:00

NOVO-OGARYEVO, January 11 (Itar-Tass) -- Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has urged power engineering specialists to fix energy failures without delays, Itar-Tass quotes him saying during a meeting with the regional development minister, Viktor Basargin, on Monday.

Putin said the country had entered the heating season on time, and “the national energy suppliers have been working practically without failures.”

However, he said, there are certain problems, and they need to be solved without any delay. Those affected do not care about statistics, he remarked.

The country, said Putin, had entered the season in a tougher environment than it was expected.

“In addition to the global warming challenges, we need to address 'global cooling' effects and to do so promptly,” he said.

In his opinion Russia has proved prepared for the cold weather better than many Western European countries.

“Yet, our own problems are many, too. Many are due to the breakdowns of thermal power trunk pipelines. We need to oversee the process, to promptly react in case of any failure and provide support for municipalities and regions,” Putin said.

Weather-related death toll rises to 22 as Britain braces for biggest freeze in 30 years

2010-01-08T00:22:00.001-04:00

(NEODAAS/University of Dundee)

Nasa satellite picture of Britain doused in snow received by the University of Dundee

The death toll from Britain’s biggest freeze for decades reached 22 today as the country prepared for its coldest night so far, bringing the promise of even more treacherous conditions.

Thousands of homes have been left without power, schools have closed and travellers have faced chaos as the weather hit roads, rail services and airports over the last two days. The disruption is estimated to have cost businesses around £700 million.

Councils continued to struggle with a growing salt emergency as police warned drivers in many areas not to travel unless their journey was essential.

The AA expect to have attended 20,000 breakdowns today - compared with about 9,000 for a normal Thursday - and warned that conditions were expected to remain “treacherous”.
Times Archive 1836 The snow storm

Only two or three of the mail coaches have arrived in London

* Big Ben frozen, 1947

* More snow today, 1962

Related Links

* Deaths during Britain's big freeze

* National Grid issue warning over gas supplies

* Ice-bound Britain struggles to work

Multimedia

* PICTURE: Nasa image of snowy Britain

* LIVE: updates on travel and weather

* PICTURES: British snowscape

Meanwhile, the shutdown of an offshore Norwegian gasfield pushed Britain's gas infrastructure into emergency mode, forcing the closure of industrial companies in the north of England in order to preserve supplies to homes, shops and offices.

Although major airports stayed open, some air passengers had long waits for their flights, particularly at Gatwick, on the outskirts of south London, where more than 130 flights were cancelled. EasyJet had to axe more than 100 flights and British Airways was among other carriers that had to cancel some services.

The body of Philip Hughes, 45, from Slough, was recovered from beneath ice at the Lakeside Country Club in Surrey where he was watching the the world darts championship. A spokesman said it appeared to have been a “tragic accident”.

His death brings to 22 the toll of people killed by conditions related to the weather since the cold snap began on December 18.

One of the suppliers of rock salt, Cleveland Potash, said it was struggling to meet demand with a spokesman saying that Cheshire’s salt mine, the biggest supplier of rock salt in the country, only had a few days’ supply left.

Harrow council, in north-west London, described its wait for supplies of rock salt as “pretty outrageous” as it came close to completely running out.

In the House of Commons, Sadiq Khan, the Transport Minister, said the Government was doing “everything possible” to keep the UK’s road network open.

However Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said: “This is not a dress rehearsal, it is the real thing, and everything must be done to get the supply moving and avoid the situation of London running out of salt to keep the roads open.”

National Grid, which operates Britain's gas network, issued a warning this morning that the system would run short of supply when pressure dropped in Langeled, a pipeline that brings gas from Norway to a terminal at Easington on the East coast of England.

With demand for fuel at record levels, some gas companies cut off supplies to some industrial customers on interruptible contracts. These special contracts are often chosen by energy-intensive companies, such as chemical businesses, steel, glass or cement makers, who get cheaper rates if they agree to be cut off in exceptional circumstances. The pipeline later reopened.

Temperatures in part of the UK dropped as low as -17 in some areas last night, but were predicted to fall to their lowest level yet tonight, with some regions set to suffere conditions similar to a domestic freezer. Forecasters said temperatures of minus 20C could be expected in some of the Highland glens while Manchester could expect -11 and London -3.

In other news:
Times Archive 1836 The snow storm

Only two or three of the mail coaches have arrived in London

* Big Ben frozen, 1947

* More snow today, 1962

Related Links

* Deaths during Britain's big freeze

* National Grid issue warning over gas supplies

* Ice-bound Britain struggles to work

Multimedia

* PICTURE: Nasa image of snowy Britain

* LIVE: updates on travel and weather

* PICTURES: British snowscape

* Gordon Brown and the Cabinet have been forced to postpone planned visits to the South and the South West over the next couple of days because of concerns that the trips might divert the efforts of police and other authorities from dealing with the impact of snow.

* Farmers are facing a race against time to get food to starving sheep trapped in snow-covered fields. Blizzards and drifting snow have prevented farmers from moving sheep to fresh pastures. Instead, the animals are stuck on land without grazing. The problem has been intensified by a shortage of hay.

* A priest and 18 other passengers stranded at Gatwick slept in the airport’s chapel on Wednesday night. Although airport rules ban people from sleeping in the prayer room, Minister Kes Grant from south London led the crowd in there because “people just needed to sleep somewhere and I knew about the chapel”.

* Wildlife are struggling to survive in the harsh weather conditions, conservation groups have warned. The RSPB has urged householders to improve birds’ chances of survival by putting food out, including fat balls and crushed peanuts.

* Insurers say they have seen a sharp rise in home and motor claims as a result of the freezing weather. Many firms reported an increase of up to 50 per cent in the number of claims, particularly for burst pipes.

* A 10-year-old boy had to rescued after plunging down a manhole outside a property development in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The manhole had been covered by a piece of carpet and obscured by thick snow.

* Sales of shovels have soared by 40 per cent compared with the same week last year. Robert Dyas, the home and garden retailer, said that sales of de-icer and scrapers had also risen by 50 per cent year-on-year.

* An RAF Chinook helicopter forced to make a precautionary landing in Winterborne Whitechurch, Dorset on Monday night has been turned into a local tourist attraction after snow left it grounded. Engineers could not reach the Chinook so the four man crew gave tours of the cockpit to local schoolchildren.

* The Organic Milk Suppliers Co-operative, which supplies more than 80 per cent of organic milk to supermarkets, said it may have to dump more than 100,000 litres due to devastating weather conditions which have hampered storage, collection and deliveries.

* Antony Jinman is using the wintry conditions to train for a trek to the Arctic. The 28-year-old usually has to train at night by dragging tyres but the snow and ice means he has spent the past few days using his top-of-the-range Artic sleigh.

* A sledge company has been selling 14,000 sledges a day since the snow started falling, up from its normal 2,000 daily total for this time of year. Sledge.co.uk, based in Glenmore, near Inverness said it had now sold out of sledges and was awaiting new supplies.

* A 16-year-old boy was killed and his mother seriously injured after they were involved in a car crash and then hit by lorry as they tried to reach the hard shoulder on foot. The pair were travelling on the A1 near Richmond, North Yorkshire at around 10pm on Wednesday night.

Next Arctic Blast colder and a serious threat

2010-01-07T00:51:00.002-04:00

Check local weather:

	Severe Weather Outlook		National Forecast

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Next Arctic Blast colder and a serious

James Wilson, Lead Meteorologist, The Weather Channel

Jan. 6, 2010 7:36 pm ET

Midwest | View Regional Video

Snow and strong winds will engulf the Midwest with a renewed batch of arctic air following close behind through Thursday.

Accumulations of 3 to 6 inches (locally up to 8 inches) are possible along the path of this latest winter storm. Cities included are Omaha, Neb., Kansas City, Mo., Des Moines, Iowa, Moline, Ill. St. Louis, Mo., and Indianapolis, Ind.

Moisture from Lake Michigan will enhance snowfall in the Milwaukee, Wis. to Chicago, Ill. corridor. Total accumulations of 8 to 12 inches are in the forecast for Thursday.

Behind the snow, strong winds gusting between 30 and 40 mph will develop through the Plains by tonight and spread eastward to the near the Mississippi River Thursday. Blowing and drifting snow is likely to lead to dangerous travel and the potential for near-blizzard or blizzard conditions in some locales.

Bitter cold air will keep the mercury from rising above zero in the Dakotas, northern Nebraska and western Minnesota Thursday. Wind chills will bottom out in the -20s, -30s and even -40s across these states.

Farther east, highs will range from the 0s and 10s in the upper-Mississippi Valley to the 20s in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley.

By Friday morning, lows from Kansas and western Missouri northward to the Dakotas and Minnesota will be below zero. The coldest readings, -20s and -30s, are expected in the Dakotas and northern Minnesota.

South | View Regional Video

A cold front will quickly move through the South tonight through Thursday.

Enough cold air will be in place to produce light snow beginning overnight in northern Arkansas and spreading to northern Mississippi and Tennessee by early Thursday morning.

During the day and into Thursday night, light snow will push across northern Alabama eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia and North Carolina.

Just south of this light snow corridor, a wintry mixture is possible.

Accumulations with this system will generally be on the light side with a dusting to an inch in most locations. Some spots may locally see up to 2 inches, especially in the higher terrain.

Rain showers will spread from the central Gulf Coast to southern Georgia and northern Florida.

Gusty winds will develop behind the system in Oklahoma and Texas tonight while spreading to the lower-Mississippi Valley Thursday.

Another shot of arctic air from the Midwest will keep temperatures well below average right through the weekend.

Highs Thursday will range from the 10s in far northern Oklahoma and northern Arkansas to the 50s along the Gulf Coast. Southern Florida will rise into the 60s.

Lows in the 10s and 20s will be common Friday morning. Northern Arkansas and the northern half of Oklahoma will hold in the 0s. Far south Texas and coastal Southeast will fall into the 30s.

Northeast | View Regional Video

Northwest flow from low pressure in the Canadian Maritimes will continue to bring snow showers to far Northern New England and western New York Thursday. Mostly sunny skies are expected along the I-95 corridor with increasing cloud cover coming through the day and into the evening.

Snow from the Midwest system will eventually push into western Pennsylvania and West Virginia by late in the day and into the evening. Light snows will then head across the rest of the region Thursday night into Friday.

Behind the quickly departing storm, lake-effect snows will develop and continue into the weekend southeast of Lakes Erie and Ontario.

Colder air will flood into the region after Thursday's highs peak in the 20s and 30s.

By Friday, expect 10s and 20s across western New York, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New England. Highs will top out in the low 30s from near New York City southward to the eastern Mid-Atlantic.

Even colder temperatures, up to 20 degrees below average, are expected by Saturday. Lows will be in the 0s, 10s and low 20s over the weekend.

West | View Regional Video

The Southwest is the place to be for those suffering from the prolonged cold east of the Rockies. Highs will be in the several degrees above average 70s in southern portions of California and Arizona Thursday and Friday.

Montana, Wyoming and Colorado will not be so lucky with highs topping out in the 0s and 10s and wind chills well below zero. Portions of eastern Montana will be in the -0s and -10s with wind chills in the -30s and -40s.

Precipitation under an expansive area of high pressure will be rather limited. Some scattered snow showers are possible through the higher terrain from Nevada to the Southern Rockies.

Elsewhere, an offshore Pacific system may bring some showers in the Pacific Northwest later in the day and into the evening.

Chilly politics: Gore ice sculpture back in Fairbanks

2010-01-07T00:50:00.002-04:00

Link: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner Two Fairbanks businessmen are still so annoyed by former Vice President Al Gore's stand on global warming that they have commissioned another "Frozen Gore" ice sculpture for display in front of a liquor store. This year's version features Gore blowing smoke -- but only when a truck exhaust is connected. Businessmen Craig Compeau and Rudy Gavora say they'll commission the sculpture annually until Gore comes to Fairbanks to debate climate change. "Before we start carbon taxing ... let's try and educate ourselves," Compeau said. The Frozen Gore Web site also has pictures of last year's creation.

Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years

2010-01-06T00:29:00.000-04:00

Mon Jan 4, 12:28 AM ET

By HYUNG-JIN KIM, Associated Press Writer Hyung-jin Kim, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jan 4, 10:33 am ET

SEOUL, South Korea – Seoul residents slogged through the heaviest snowfall in modern Korean history after a winter storm dumped more than 11 inches (28 centimeters) Monday, forcing airports to cancel flights and paralyzing traffic in South Korea's bustling capital.
The snow and icy roads snarled traffic in and out of Seoul, and at least three people died in traffic accidents. Many commuters squeezed into packed subways to get to work, and a Cabinet meeting was delayed because ministers were stuck in traffic.
The snowfall, which continued through Monday afternoon, was the heaviest in a single day since Korea began conducting meteorological surveys in 1937, the state weather agency said.
Gimpo International Airport in western Seoul canceled 224 flights before resuming service Monday afternoon when the snowfall stopped, airport official Choi Choon-ja said.
More than 20 flights between Incheon International Airport, just west of Seoul, to cities in China also coping with snowfall were canceled. More than 100 flights to other regions were delayed, Incheon airport official Kang Soo-kyung said.
In southern South Korea, three people were killed in a traffic accident blamed on icy roads, according to the Yonhap news agency. However, officials said no deaths or serious property damage was directly related to the heavy snowfall.
About 3,600 workers and 5,000 soldiers were mobilized to clear the snow in Seoul and surrounding Gyeonggi Province, officials said.
The snow and freezing temperatures didn't stop 50-year-old Park Hee-soon from delivering milk and yogurt to homes and offices in western Seoul. However, Park — trudging through the streets in her regular yellow uniform — said the snow and ice were dangerous.
"I slipped on streets several times today, and my back hurts because of that," she said.
The snow forced American figure skater Michelle Kwan to cancel appearances in South Korea on Monday. The five-time world champion, visiting the country as goodwill ambassador for the U.S. State Department, had been slated to give a master class to South Korean figure skaters.
She is scheduled to meet with students, U.S. soldiers and participate in a Special Olympics event this week, U.S. Embassy officials said.
Beijing also was digging out Monday from a weekend winter storm.
More than 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) of snow accumulated in the city center Sunday, according to China's National Meteorological Center. State media called it the highest snowfall in the capital in a single day in January since 1951. Upward of 8 inches (20 centimeters) was recorded in the suburbs of Changping near the Great Wall of China.
Hundreds of flights from Beijing were canceled or delayed Sunday because of the snowfall.
Primary and middle schools were closed in Beijing and the nearby port of Tianjin, and with snow plows in short supply, more than 300,000 people were assigned to clear snow in the capital with shovels, scrapers and brooms.
Heavy snow also blanketed Sapporo on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, forcing the main airport to cancel nearly 80 flights since last Wednesday.
In South Korea, not everyone was complaining.
"It's something unique in Seoul," Kang Kyung-hye, a 58-year-old housewife, said after taking a photo of the snow-covered statue of 15th-century ruler King Sejong downtown.
Nearby, dozens of police in neon uniforms used shovels and shields to clear away the snow and helped push cars stuck in snowdrifts.
___
Associated Press writers Christopher Bodeen in Beijing and Shino Yuasa in Tokyo contributed to this report.

As Britain told to expect snow for 'next 10 days', how is the rest of the world is coping with this Arctic weather?

2010-01-04T01:05:00.002-04:00

When Britain woke up on the first day of the New Year it was met with freezing cold temperatures, feet of snow in places and the promise of travel chaos.
And now, three days into 2010, forecasters have warned to expect continued snowfall for the next 10 days - bringing with it added stress for commuters heading back to work after a festive break and children returning to school tomorrow.
Yet as Britain struggles to cope with the freezing weather conditions, other countries throughout the world are also finding themselves in the same predicament.

CHINA

Snow storms today have caused chaos in China's capital of Beijing, grinding aeroplanes to a halt and causing severe traffic delays.
Around 90 per cent of all flights were either delayed or cancelled, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.

Paramilitary policemen stand guard in front of the late Chairman Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing

In addition, major roads in Beijing and Tianjin, as well as nearby provinces Hebei, Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, were forced to close due to the heavy snow.

The snow shows no sign of stopping, however, and temperatures are expected to drop to -16C in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday, causing more problems for those attempting to returning to work after a three-day New Year holiday.

Primary and middle schools in Beijing will be closed tomorrow as people are unable to drive their cars in the heavy snow

Authorities in Beijing and Tianjin announced today there will be no classes at primary and middle schools tomorrow as the snow had caused traffic chaos.

INDIA

Not a country usually associated with snow, India has experienced severe problems since Saturday when snowfall and a dense blanket of fog began to cause chaos.
More than 30 people died in cold-weather related incidents in Northern India over the past 24 hours, with 10 of those losing their lives in train accidents caused by the fog.

More than 40 people were injured, and 10 killed, in train accidents in India caused by the bad weather. Here, Indian Central Reserve Police Force soldiers patrol a railway track as a train moves during heavy snowfall in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir

Meanwhile, 24 homeless people have also died in the Uttar Pradesh state since Saturday due to the severe drop in temperature.
Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir were all hit with heavy snow, while Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and Delhi also recorded snowfall over the past 24 hours.

A Kashmiri man struggles to see through the snow as he walks in Srinagar

Flights from New Delhi were grounded or delayed yesterday because of poor visibility, Shashanka Nanda, a spokesman for the Delhi International Airport Limited said, before adding that conditions had improved today.

RUSSIA

A country much more used to dealing with high levels of snow, Russia saw temperature lows of a chilling -20C in Moscow today.

Those travelling on trains at stations near the Russian city of Vorkuta, attempted to continue their journeys despite the freezing conditions.

A worker tries to clear the train tracks while a man, unaware of the train approaching him, attempts to cross

Workers also tried to sweep snow from the train tracks, but found it was falling too fast to clear.
However, two men making the most of the snow were Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin who decided to take to the slopes in Krasnaya Polyana near the Black Sea resort of Sochi in southern Russia.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (right) and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on their skiing trip

The pair relax on a snowmobile after exerting themselves skiing

The duo donned heavy jackets and goggles as they skiied together, with Putin looking serious as the pair indulged in some seemingly serious political conversations.

GERMANY

The snow caused more problems with flights in Germany, with one jet veering off the runway at Dortmund airport in western Germany.
The Air Berlin Boeing 737-800 broke to abort the take-off due to a 'technical irregularity', but none of the 165 passengers and six crew members were injured.

All passengers and crew were left unharmed after the Air Berlin plane aborted its take-off

The plane was not damaged but flights from the airport were cancelled or diverted for a large part of the day.
Airline spokeswoman Diane Daedelow said: 'A combination of the snowy weather and the speed the plane was travelling at forced the plane to skid off the runway.'
Over 30 flights from Frankfurt airport were also cancelled this morning.

Snow covers the trees on the mountain Schauinsland in the Black Forest, Germany

Tourists photograph each other beside the snow-covered concrete steles at the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin

AUSTRIA

While they are much more accustomed to dealing with snow, even native Austrians were struggling to cope with the freezing lows of -8C at night and -3C during the day.

But one creature happy to bound around in the fluffy snow was a mix breed dog called Lotta, who seemed entirely unconcerned as she became coated in snow during her run in Unken, in the Austrian province of Salzburg.

Lotta bounds through the snow in Salzburg

Meteorologists have predicted continued light snowfalls for the upcoming days in Austria.

Copenhagen climate summit: activists who contributed nothing but obstruction

2009-12-30T01:23:00.002-04:00

If I ever see another singing, dancing, sloganising polar bear, I shall do my best to melt its ice-floe, says Geoffrey Lean.

Oxfam has made a useful contribution - but the bears are unbearable

Just how dumb – and self-indulgent – is this? On Wednesday morning the Copenhagen summit, widely seen as the last chance to stop global warming running out of control, stood – in boy wonder Ed Miliband's words – at "four minutes to midnight". Ministers from around the world had just arrived at the deadlocked talks in a last-minute attempt to rescue them. And green activists chose the moment to try to shut everything down.
Thousands of protesters, organised by Climate Justice Action – a worldwide coalition of grass-roots groups – stormed the conference centre, blocking its entrance as they tussled with police and stopping delegates from entering. Gordon Brown, trapped inside, was prevented from starting his shuttle diplomacy with other heads of government to try to negotiate a deal.

Environmental groups inside the centre, meanwhile, shouted and banged drums to try to drown out proceedings. Indeed, many did their best to disrupt things throughout: staging sit-downs in the cavernous, crowded Bella Centre, in which the talks have been held – hindering negotiators from getting to key meetings – and holding noisy protests.
Now, don't get me wrong. Many green groups played really important parts both in the run-up to Copenhagen and at the conference itself. The World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam remained constructively on top of the proceedings. Greenpeace characteristically carried out its gadfly role, while the even more radical, virally spreading 350 campaign did much to mobilise pressure for tougher emissions reductions. And other, less well-known organisations – such as the unappetisingly named Stakeholder Forum and Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development – did patient, valuable work to try to get important issues that might otherwise have been neglected into the agreement.
But they were outweighed by thousands of activists who contributed nothing but obstruction. They were dubbed "policy tourists" by the more engaged groups, but that seems over-generous: they seemed mainly interested in having a good time and staging stunts for the cameras. If I ever see another singing, dancing, sloganising polar bear, I shall do my best to melt its ice-floe. And that goes for the climate-sceptic Ursus maritimus that turned up at one point, megaphone in paw, howling imprecations about the scientists who wrote the hacked and much-hyped emails.
In fairness, much of the blame lies with the Danish government and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which organised the summit. In an attempt to be inclusive, they accredited 46,000 people in a centre that holds 15,000. Most came from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), ranging from serious institutes to industry lobbyists, as well as the policy tourists.
The rationale was that they would not all turn up at once – but enough did to create chaos. Huge queues snaked around the centre, with people waiting up to 10 hours to get in. Substantial figures such as John Prescott and Lord Stern, of the eponymous report, were among those left in the cold for hours.
Do them good to suffer like anyone else, you might say – but they had something to contribute, unlike the demonstrators inside. Ian Johnson – a former vice-president of the World Bank in charge of environmental issues, with vast experience of making difficult negotiations work – also queued for hours, only to be frogmarched out of the centre by security guards because the policy tourists had filled the place up.
Those who did get in found a centre so jammed up that it became dysfunctional, contributing to the bad-tempered atmosphere that bogged the talks down in fractious manoeuvring and points of order. Busy delegates had to wait for half an hour to get cold and indifferent food, progress was difficult, and the sheer press of people inhibited the chance corridor encounters that traditionally lubricate such negotiations.
But when the organisers tried to cut the number of NGO representatives to a far from ungenerous 1,000, you'd have thought from the outrage that they were sending tanks into Tiananmen Square. Fifty organisations – including Friends of the Earth, the World Development Movement, Cafod and Christian Aid – fumed at the "undemocratic"` and "draconian" measure.
The irritated authorities responded by cutting the numbers to just 300 … and suddenly the policy tourists were gone and the blessedly polar-bear-free centre started functioning. It may be no coincidence that that was also the first day – even closer to midnight – when any progress was made in the negotiations.
Canada is visited by an unwelcome jest
Danes are much the jolliest of the Scandinavians (which, admittedly, is not saying much) but, even so, there have not been many laughs in Copenhagen over the past two weeks. There has, though, been one successful hoax – and no, before you ask, I am not referring to the constant claims by extreme climate sceptics that the 200-year volume of science behind global warming adds up to the greatest con ever perpetrated.
The victims were the Canadians, widely excoriated as the most climate-unfriendly government in the industrialised world since the departure of George W Bush – not least for allowing their carbon dioxide emissions to rise by more than 20 per cent instead of cutting them as they agreed to do under the Kyoto Protocol; and for developing their vast tar sands to make the world’s dirtiest fuel.
Activists put out a hoax press release, supposedly from the Canadian government, announcing that it was reversing its position and taking on one of the world’s toughest reduction targets because “taking full responsibility for our emissions is just Canadian good sense”.
For good measure, it followed up with a fake video of a supposed Ugandan delegate welcoming the U-turn. The media was duly fooled, to everyone’s embarrassment.
The official response, when it came, was even stranger than the hoax. Canada’s environment minister Jim Prentice called the prank a “moral misfire” and denounced its “cruelty, hypocrisy and immorality”.
Poor lamb – your heart bleeds for him, doesn’t it?

The New Climate Litigation

2009-12-28T02:26:00.002-04:00

How about if we sue you for breathing?

Fresh from the fiasco in Copenhagen and with a failure in the U.S. Senate looming this coming year, the climate-change lobby is already shifting to Plan B, or is it already Plan D? Meet the carbon tort.
Across the country, trial lawyers and green pressure groups—if that's not redundant—are teaming up to sue electric utilities for carbon emissions under "nuisance" laws.
A group of 12 Gulf Coast residents whose homes were damaged by Katrina are suing 33 energy companies for greenhouse gas emissions that allegedly contributed to the global warming that allegedly made the hurricane worse. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and seven state AG allies plus New York City are suing American Electric Power and other utilities for a host of supposed eco-maladies. A native village in Alaska is suing Exxon and 23 oil and energy companies for coastal erosion.
What unites these cases is the creativity of their legal chain of causation and their naked attempts at political intimidation. "My hope is that the court case will provide a powerful incentive for polluters to be reasonable and come to the table and seek affordable and reasonable reductions," Mr. Blumenthal told the trade publication Carbon Control News. "We're trying to compel measures that will stem global warming regardless of what happens in the legislature."
Mull over that one for a moment. Mr. Blumenthal isn't suing to right a wrong. He admits that he's suing to coerce a change in policy no matter what the public's elected representatives choose.
Cap and trade or a global treaty like the one that collapsed in Copenhagen would be destructive—but at least either would need the assent of a politically accountable Congress. The Obama Administration's antidemocratic decision to impose carbon regulation via the Environmental Protection Agency would be even more destructive—but at least it would be grounded in an existing law, the 1977 Clean Air Act, however misinterpreted. The nuisance suits ask the courts to make such fundamentally political decisions themselves, with judges substituting their views for those of the elected branches.
And now that you mention it, the U.S. appeals courts seem more than ready to arrogate to themselves this power. In September, the Second Circuit allowed Mr. Blumenthal's suit to proceed, while a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit reversed a lower court's dismissal of the Katrina case in October. An en banc hearing is now under consideration.
But global warming is, well, global: It doesn't matter whether ubiquitous CO2 emissions come from American Electric Power or Exxon—or China. "There is no logical reason to draw the line at 30 defendants as opposed to 150, or 500, or even 10,000 defendants," says David Rivkin, an attorney at Baker Hostetler and a contributor to our pages, in an amicus brief in the Katrina case. "These plaintiffs—and any others alleging injury by climatic phenomena—would have standing to assert a damages claim against virtually every entity and individual on the planet, since each 'contributes' to global concentrations of carbon dioxide."
In other words, the courts would become a venue for a carbon war of all against all. Not only might businesses sue to shackle their competitors—could we sue the New York Times for deforestation?—but judges would decide the remedies against specific defendants. In practice this would mean ad hoc command-and-control regulation against any industries that happen to catch the green lobby's eye.
Carbon litigation without legislation is one more way to harm the economy, and the rule of law. We hope the Fifth Circuit will have the good sense to deflect this damaging legal theory before it crash-lands at the Supreme Court.

Time for a Climate Change Plan B

2009-12-22T00:23:00.002-04:00

The U.S. president is in deep denial.

By NIGEL LAWSON

The world's political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward.
Just one more heave, just one more venue for the great climate-change traveling circus—Mexico City next year—and the job will be done.
Or so we are told. It is, of course, the purest nonsense. The only breakthrough was the political coup for China and India in concluding the anodyne communiqué with the United States behind closed doors, with Brazil and South Africa allowed in the room and Europe left to languish in the cold outside.
Far from achieving a major step forward, Copenhagen—predictably—achieved precisely nothing. The nearest thing to a commitment was the promise by the developed world to pay the developing world $30 billion of "climate aid" over the next three years, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Not only is that (perhaps fortunately) not legally binding, but there is no agreement whatsoever about which countries it will go to, in which amounts, and on what conditions.
The reasons for the complete and utter failure of Copenhagen are both fundamental and irresolvable. The first is that the economic cost of decarbonizing the world's economies is massive, and of at least the same order of magnitude as any benefits it may conceivably bring in terms of a cooler world in the next century.
The reason we use carbon-based energy is not the political power of the oil lobby or the coal industry. It is because it is far and away the cheapest source of energy at the present time and is likely to remain so, not forever, but for the foreseeable future.
Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable to us in the developed world (although I see no present evidence of this). But in the developing world, including the rapidly developing nations such as China and India, there are still tens if not hundreds of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of malnutrition, preventable disease and premature death.
The overriding priority for the developing world has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available source of energy: carbon energy.

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Corbis

Moreover, the argument that they should make this economic and human sacrifice to benefit future generations 100 years and more hence is all the less compelling, given that these future generations will, despite any problems caused by warming, be many times better off than the people of the developing world are today.

Or, at least, that is the assumption on which the climate scientists' warming projections are based. It is projected economic growth that determines projected carbon emissions, and projected carbon emissions that (according to the somewhat conjectural computer models on which they rely) determine projected warming (according to the same models).
All this overlaps with the second of the two fundamental reasons why Copenhagen failed, and why Mexico City (if our leaders insist on continuing this futile charade) will fail, too. That is the problem of burden-sharing, and in particular how much of the economic cost of decarbonization should be borne by the developed world, which accounts for the bulk of past emissions, and how much by the faster-growing developing world, which will account for the bulk of future emissions.
The 2006 Stern Review, quite the shoddiest pseudo-scientific and pseudo-economic document any British Government has ever produced, claims the overall burden is very small. If that were so, the problem of how to share the burden would be readily overcome—as indeed occurred with the phasing out of chorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the 1987 Montreal Protocol. But the true cost of decarbonization is massive, and the distribution of the burden an insoluble problem.
Moreover, any assessment of the impact of any future warming that may occur is inevitably highly conjectural, depending as it does not only on the uncertainties of climate science but also on the uncertainties of future technological development. So what we are talking about is risk.

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Not that the risk is all one way. The risk of a 1930s-style outbreak of protectionism—if the developed world were to abjure cheap energy and faced enhanced competition from China and other rapidly industrializing countries that declined to do so—is probably greater than any risk from warming.
But even without that, there is not even a theoretical (let alone a practical) basis for a global agreement on burden-sharing, since, so far as the risk of global warming is concerned (and probably in other areas too) risk aversion is not uniform throughout the world. Not only do different cultures embody very different degrees of risk aversion, but in general the richer countries will tend to be more risk-averse than the poorer countries, if only because we have more to lose.
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 the future arise.
This enables us to pocket the benefits of any warming (and there are many) while reducing the costs. None of the projected costs are new phenomena, but the possible exacerbation of problems our climate already throws at us. Addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. And adaptation does not require a global agreement, although we may well need to help the very poorest countries (not China) to adapt.
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 was U.K. chancellor of the exchequer in the Thatcher government from 1983 to 1989. He is the author of "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming" (Overlook Duckworth, paperback 2009), and is chairman of the recently formed Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org).

How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

2009-12-18T00:57:00.002-04:00

The East Anglia emails are just the tip of the iceberg. I should know.

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS

Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).
But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."
The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.

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Martin Kozlowsk

That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.

A refereed journal, Climate Research, published two particular papers that offended Michael Mann of Penn State and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of "paleoclimate" studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium.
In fact, that period, known as the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.
Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous "hockey stick" article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent "Little Ice Age" (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.
Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn't like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU's own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," he wrote in one of the emails. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."
After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn't toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones's line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.
This happened to me and to the University of Alabama's Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene.
GRL is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was "in the skeptics camp." He emailed Michael Mann to say that "if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official . . . channels to get him ousted."
Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that "It's one thing to lose 'Climate Research.' We can't afford to lose GRL." In this context, "losing" obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.
Soon the suspect editor, Yale's James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU's Phil Jones that "the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there."
It didn't stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that "If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available—raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations—I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals."
Messrs. Jones and Santer were Ph.D. students of Mr. Wigley. Mr. Santer is the same fellow who, in an email to Phil Jones on Oct. 9, 2009, wrote that he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap" out of me at a scientific meeting. He was angry that I published "The Dog Ate Global Warming" in National Review, about CRU's claim that it had lost primary warming data.
The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to "skeptics" (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn't publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.
Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.
Mr. Michaels, formerly professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia (1980-2007), is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Copenhagen climate summit: Al Gore condemned over Arctic ice melting prediction

2009-12-17T00:30:00.002-04:00

Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, has become embroiled in a climate change spin row after claiming that the Arctic could be completely ice-free within five years.

Al Gore Photo: AP

Speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, Mr Gore said new computer modelling suggests there is a 75 per cent chance of the entire polar ice cap melting during the summertime by 2014.
However, he faced embarrassment last night after Dr Wieslav Maslowski, the climatologist whose work the prediction was based on, refuted his claims.

Dr Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, told The Times: “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at.
“I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
The blunder follows the controversy over hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which sceptics claim suggest scientists manipulated data to strengthen their argument that global warming is man-made.
Mr Gore, who narrated the Oscar-winning climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, told the conference that record melting of Polar and Himalayan ice could deprive more than a billion people of access to clean water.
Alluding to Dr Maslowski’s work, he said: “These figures are fresh, I just got them yesterday.
"Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some of summer months could be completely ice free within five to seven years.
"There are more than a billion people on the planet who get more than half of their drinking water – many of them all of their drinking water – from the seasonal melting of snow melt and glacier ice."
His projection strongly contradicted forecasts made eight months ago by the US government agency that the ice cap may nearly vanish in the summer by 2030.
Dr Maslowki said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.
He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean.”
Following Dr Maslowski’s comments, Mr Gore’s office later said the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.
Mr Gore’s speech also provoked criticism from leading members of the climate science community, who described the projection as “aggressive”.
Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Times: “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics.
“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”
Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said: “It's possible but not likely. We're sticking with 2030."
Average global temperatures have increased by 1.3F (0.74C) in the past century, but the mercury has risen at least twice as quickly in the Arctic.
Scientists say the make up of the frozen north polar sea has shifted significantly in recent years as much of the thick year-round ice has given way to thin seasonal ice.
In the summer of 2007, the Arctic ice cap dwindled to a record low minimum extent of 1.7 million square miles in September. The melting in 2008 and 2009 was not as extensive, but still ranked as the second and third greatest decreases on record.

Copenhagen summit veering towards farce, warns Ed Miliband

2009-12-17T00:23:00.002-04:00

Climate talks at least 18 hours behind schedule as world leaders set to arrive in Copenhagen

Ed Miliband gestures during a press briefing at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Photograph: Anja Niedringhaus/AP

The climate change summit in Copenhagen was in jeopardy tonight with the complex negotiations falling far behind schedule as the climate secretary, Ed Miliband, warned of a "farce".
With just two days remaining, the inability to overcome disagreements about the shape of a deal to combat global warming led to hours of inaction today , while outside the negotiations police clashed with protesters who broke through a security cordon but failed in an attempt to storm the conference centre.
"We have made no progress" said a source close to the talks. "What people don't realise is that we are now not really ready for the leaders. These talks are now 18 hours late."
More than 115 world leaders arrive tomorrow and on Friday and had expected only to bargain over the final details in a prepared draft agreement but the earlier impasse could condemn the talks to failure.
For the first time frustrated negotiators spoke openly of – at best – reaching a weak political agreement that would leave no clear way forward to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions.
That would mean the negotiations staying in limbo well into next year, increasing the damage caused by global warming.
The day saw thousands of protesters take to the streets to demand a strong deal by Friday but, while they clashed with police, they failed in their objective to enter the conference centre.
A key meeting of 25 government ministers from different countries, chosen to streamline the negotiations, was 18 hours behind track tonight , having failed to meet for the entire day. The group, along with another 25 "shadow" ministers, had been scheduled for its first meeting in the early hours of Wednesday but it was delayed. Ministers from developing countries were shocked to find that, instead of making progress on producing the slimmed-down draft agreement for the leaders, talks starting at 5.45am had seen the document increase in complexity.
Miliband said people around the world would be rightly furious if negotiators failed to get a deal because the talks were delayed not over substance, but over the process. "It would be a tragedy if we failed to agree because of the substance. It would be a farce if we failed to reach agreement because of the process," he said.
"People will find it extraordinary that this conference that has been two years in the planning and involves 192 countries, which is such an important thing, such important stakes, is at the moment being stalled on points of order."
There was, however, some progress on other important issues. The US and China appeared to resolve some of their differences and a proposal from the Ethiopian prime minister on climate funding closed the gap between rich and poor countries. At the heart of the impasse is the fate of the Kyoto protocol, signed in 1997. It is the only legally binding agreement on climate change and requires industrialised nations – but not developing nations – to cut their emissions. Rich nations want a fresh treaty, arguing the world has changed and the major emerging economies such and China and India must commit to curbing their huge and fast growing national emissions. But the developing nations argue that rich nations grew wealthy by polluting the atmosphere and must take primary responsibility for it, which can only be guaranteed by Kyoto.
China, India, South Africa and Brazil brought one half of the talks to a halt in expectation that the Danish presidency was going to introduce a new text which would effectively kill Kyoto. "Things are getting held up by procedural wrangling," said Miliband. "People can kill this agreement with process arguments. It will be tragedy if we cannot reach an agreement on substance, but it will be a farce if we cannot agree on process."

The Copenhagen Shakedown

2009-12-16T01:03:00.002-04:00

Developing countries understand the real costs of climate change.

The U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen was supposed to be the moment when the world came together to save us from an excess of carbon dioxide. Like all such confabs, it's coming down instead to cold, hard cash.
On Monday, the so-called G-77—in effect, the Third World—walked out of the talks for several hours in protest of the unwillingness, as they saw it, of rich countries to foot the bill for averting or mitigating climate catastrophe in the developing world. The negotiations have since resumed, but with the most difficult questions set aside and expectations lower than ever.
More than anything else, Monday's walkout revealed the real reason that the developing world is in Copenhagen in the first place: They see climate change as a potential foreign-aid bonanza, and they are at the table to leverage the West's environmental angst into massive transfers of wealth.

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In theory, the money is supposed to help poor countries pay for their transition to a carbon-neutral future. But the developed world has been pouring trillions of dollars into development aid in various forms for decades, with little to show for it. The reasons are well-known: Corruption, political oppression, government control of the economy and the absence of rule of law combine to keep poor countries poor. And those factors also ensure that most aid is squandered or skimmed off the top.Recasting foreign aid as "climate mitigation" won't change any of that.
Still, Copenhagen's fixation on who pays for these huge wealth transfers is instructive because it lays bare the myth that greening the global economy is a cost-free exercise. The G-77 scoffed at a European offer of €7.2 billion ($10 billion) over three years. Instead, the Sudanese chairman of the group, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, suggested in an interview with Mother Jones magazine that something on the order of a trillion dollars, or more, would be appropriate.
"The world's scientists and policy decision makers have publicly stated that this is the greatest risk humanity has ever faced," says Mr. Di-Aping. "Now if that's the case, it's very strange that $10 billion is considered adequate financing." Mr. Di-Aping deserves credit for taking the climate alarmists on their own terms and drawing consistent conclusions.
Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the Malthusian 1972 classic "The Limits to Growth," also served up some climate honesty in a recent interview with Der Spiegel. "I lived long enough in a country like Afghanistan to know that I don't want us to have to live like that in the future. But we have to learn to live a life that allows for fulfillment and development, with the CO2 emissions of Afghanistan." Mr. Meadows's chilling corollary: "If you want everyone to have the full potential of mobility, adequate food and self-development, then . . . one or two billion" people is about all the population the planet can sustain.
Given that the world's population is now about 6.8 billion people, that's not likely to happen. Nor is the developed world about to reinvent itself as a greener version of Afghanistan, much less fork over trillions of dollars to avert the supposed catastrophe it has done so much to trumpet. If the summit at Copenhagen achieves nothing else but to expose the disconnect between climate alarm and climate "solutions," it may even be worth it.

Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don't add up

2009-12-15T00:51:00.002-04:00

Al Gore's office admitted that the percentage he quoted in his speech was from an old, ballpark figure

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.
The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.
The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.
Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal.
World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal.
Meanwhile, five hours of negotiating time were lost yesterday when developing countries walked out in protest over the lack of progress on their demand for legally binding emissions targets from rich nations. The move underlined the distrust between rich and poor countries over the proposed legal framework for the deal.
Last night key elements of the proposed deal were unravelling. British officials said they were no longer confident that it would contain specific commitments from individual countries on payments to a global fund to help poor nations to adapt to climate change while the draft text on protecting rainforests has also been weakened.
Even the long-term target of ending net deforestation by 2030 has been placed in square brackets, meaning that the date could be deferred. An international monitoring system to identify illegal logging is now described in the text as optional, where before it was compulsory. Negotiators are also unable to agree on a date for a global peak in greenhouse emissions.
Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”
Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.
“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Maslowki, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.
He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” he said. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at, based on the information I provided to Al Gore’s office.”
Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”

Copenhagen summit carbon footprint biggest ever: report

2009-12-15T00:49:00.002-04:00

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The Copenhagen climate talks will generate more carbon emissions than any previous climate conference, equivalent to the annual output of over half a million Ethiopians, figures commissioned by hosts Denmark show.

Green Business | COP15

Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the Dec 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, most of it from their flights.
This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, and is the same amount produced each year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians -- the vast difference is due to the huge gap in consumption patterns in the two countries -- according to U.S. government statistics about per person emissions in 2006.
Despite efforts by the Danish government to reduce the conference's carbon footprint, around 5,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be created by the summit and a further 40,500 tonnes created by attendees' flights to Copenhagen.
The figure for the flights was calculated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while the domestic carbon footprint from the summit was calculated by accountants Deloitte, said Deloitte consultant Stine Balslev.
"This is much bigger than the last talks because there are many more people here," she said, adding that 18,000 people were expected to pass through the conference center every day.
"These are preliminary figures but we expect that when we do the final calculations after the conference is over, the carbon footprint will be about the same."
Deloitte included in their calculations emissions caused by accommodation, local transport, electricity and heating of the conference center, paper, security, transport of goods and services as well as energy used by computers, kitchens, photocopiers and printers inside the conference center.
Accommodation accounted for 23 percent of the summit's greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen, while transport caused 7 percent. Seventy percent came from activities inside the conference center, she said.
"We have been forced to put up some temporary buildings in order to provide the delegation rooms because the number of participants is so much larger than expected," said Balslev.
"For instance the U.S. delegation has ordered an area that's five times as big as last year."
The temporary buildings housing delegation offices are not well insulated and are warmed by oil heaters, so this area is the most energy-wasteful, she said.
The researchers assumed that 60 percent of conference participants would catch public transport to and from the conference but Balslev said that was probably optimistic.
Balslev said most of the energy used by the conference was from coal fired power stations that power the electricity grid, but some was from wind power.

Developing Countries Walk Out of U.N. Climate Talks

2009-12-14T15:42:00.002-04:00

By ALESSANDRO TORELLO and SPENCER SWARTZ

COPENHAGEN -- Tensions flared Monday at the United Nations climate summit, as representatives from a group of poor nations briefly walked out of the conference to protest the slow pace of negotiations, and European Union officials expressed exasperation with the U.S. and China.

The Group of 77, which represents developing countries as well as large emerging economies such as Brazil, India and China, walked out of the negotiations in the morning, a Brazilian diplomat said. The delegates returned to the conference later Monday, but the underlying issues remained unsolved, Swedish Minister Andreas Carlgren said. Sweden represents the European Union, as it holds the six-month rotating presidency of the 27-country bloc until the end of the year.
The turbulence inside the Copenhagen conference was matched by disturbances and disorganization outside, as hundreds of people waited in line for hours in chilly weather to gain access to the conference center. Meanwhile, Danish police arrested and detained more than 1,000 protestors who staged demonstrations outside the climate conference Saturday and Sunday. Danish lawmakers passed new legislation ahead of the climate conference allowing preventative detention, under which people can be held by police for up to 12 hours.

Getty Images

Participants at the conference walked past a globe on Thursday, when a walkout by developing countries stalled negotiations.

The official proceedings of the climate conference are heading into their second week. World leaders, including President Barack Obama, are expected to arrive late this week ostensibly to clinch a deal to curb worldwide greenhouse gas emissions and establish new mechanisms for subsidizing efforts by poor countries to adopt low-carbon energy technology or adapt to the effects of rising global temperatures. Among the more high profile groups demanding action are representatives of island nations who have warned their low-lying countries could be swamped if melting polar ice caps raise ocean levels.
At the heart of the disputes in Copenhagen are sharp disagreements over money, which came to the fore again Monday.
Mamadou Honadia, who is part of the negotiating team for the African nation of Burkina Faso, said the G-77 had resumed talks with rich-nations, but was still unhappy that industrialized countries weren't giving longer-term financial commitments to poorer states.
"We need to see developed nations give us a plan of what (financial) transfers will come in five years, ten years and how much over the years ahead, and we aren't seeing that," he said.
The EU has pledged €7.2 billion ($10.5 billion) in financing between next year and 2012 to jump-start the fight against climate change in developing countries.
A Nigerian delegation official said earlier Monday that a key reason for the walkout was under funding from rich nations. He said the E.U. offer for just over €7 billion in short-term funding was "pathetic."

Journal Community

Vote: Should developed nations finance the efforts of developing nations to reduce greenhouse gases?

At a press conference late Monday, European officials expressed indignation that some developing countries had criticized the EU's offer.
"We are the only part of the world that has put money on the table, and we're criticized for it," said Stavros Dimas, the EU environment commissioner.
Another official -- Jo Leinen, a member of the European Parliament from Germany -- called on the U.S. and China to set more aggressive targets for controlling their emissions, saying the two countries' offers aren't sufficient to stabilize the climate.
"There is a lot of mistrust between the countries -- you could see that it was a frozen atmosphere outside [the Bella Center] and a frozen atmosphere inside," Mr. Leinen said. Referring to China and the U.S., he added, "It would be helpful if two of the main stakeholders could come out of their very reserved and defensive positions."
The Copenhagen summit seeks to find a new agreement on international rules to limit global warming after 2012. Developing countries want to keep the structure of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol --which mandates rich nations, but not poorer countries nor the U.S.--to cut greenhouse gas emissions, with a new document to supplement it.
A member of the Chinese delegation said the country stands by the position that provisions under the Kyoto Protocol must be respected in any new pact. But U.S. negotiators have said they won't support subsidies for China. The U.S. also never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, in part because U.S. lawmakers objected to the proposal that rich nations should accept steady cuts in their use of fossil fuels, while China, India and other developing nations wouldn't face such restrictions and could, in theory, continue to expand their manufacturing at the expense of U.S. rivals.
Another sensitive issue in the Copenhagen talks surfaced Monday as China lashed out at the U.N. office in charge
of approving carbon credits after it rejected 10 Chinese wind farm projects earlier this month and accused China of fudging the numbers to make them eligible for international subsidies.
"If you reject wind power, what else is there?" said Sun Cuihua, an official at the National Reform and Development Commission which overseas the U.N.-sanctioned clean development mechanism that creates carbon credits.
Under the CDM mechanism, rich countries can invest in carbon-abatement projects in poor countries and get carbon credits that can be traded.
"They say that we made up the electricity prices; that is not a responsible thing to say," Ms. Sun told reporters at a meeting where Chinese windfarm owners and developers issued a statement protesting the U.N. decision.
—Shai Oster contributed to this article. Write to Alessandro Torello at alessandro.torello@dowjones.com and Spencer Swartz at spencer.swartz@dowjones.com

Developing countries boycott UN climate talks

2009-12-14T13:32:00.000-04:00

By MICHAEL CASEY

COPENHAGEN (AP) - China, India and other developing nations boycotted U.N. climate talks on Monday, bringing negotiations to a halt with their demand that rich countries discuss much deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.
Representatives from developing countries - a bloc of 135 nations - said they refused to participate in any formal working groups at the 192-nation summit until the issue was resolved.
The African-led move was a setback for the Copenhagen talks, which were already faltering over long-running disputes between rich and poor nations over emissions cuts and financing for developing countries to deal with climate change.
However, the move Monday was largely seen as a ploy to shift the agenda to the responsibilities of the industrial countries and make emissions reductions the first item for discussion when world leaders begin arriving Tuesday.
"I don't think the talks are falling apart, but we're losing time," said Kim Carstensen, of the World Wildlife Fund. The developing countries "are making a point."
The dispute came as the conference entered its second week, and only days before over 100 world leaders including President Barack Obama were scheduled to arrive in Copenhagen.
"Nothing is happening at this moment," Zia Hoque Mukta, a delegate from Bangladesh, told The Associated Press. He said developing countries have demanded that conference president Connie Hedegaard of Denmark bring the industrial nations' emissions targets to the top of the agenda before talks can resume.
Poor countries, supported by China, say Hedegaard had raised suspicion that the conference was likely to kill the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which limited carbon emissions by wealthy countries and imposed penalties for failing to meet those targets.
Poor countries want to extend that treaty because it commits rich nations to emissions cuts and imposes penalties if they fall short. The United States withdrew from Kyoto over concerns that it would harm the U.S. economy and that China, India and other major greenhouse gas emitters were not required to take action.
"We are seeing the death of the Kyoto Protocol," said Djemouai Kamel of Algeria, the head of the 50-nation Africa group.
It was the second time the Africans have disrupted the climate talks. At the last round of negotiations in November, the African bloc forced a one-day suspension until wealthy countries agreed to spell out what steps they will take to reduce emissions.
An African delegate said developing countries decided to block the negotiations at a meeting hours before the conference was to resume. He was speaking on condition of anonymity because the meeting was held behind closed doors. He said applause broke out every time China, India or another country supported the proposal to stall the talks.
U.N. climate chief Yvo De Boer said Hedegaard was holding informal consultations with delegates "to get things going."
In Washington, The White House on Monday announced a new program drawing funds from international partners to spend $350 million over five years to give developing nations clean energy technology to curb greenhouse gas emissions and reduce global warming.
The program will distribute solar power alternatives for homes, including sun-powered lanterns, supply cleaner equipment and appliances and work to develop renewable energy systems in the world's poorer nations.
The funding plan grew out of the Major Economies Forum (MEF) established among the world's top economies earlier this year.
The U.S. share of the program will amount to $85 million with the remainder coming from Australia, Britain, Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland, the White House said in a statement.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Energy Secretary Steven Chu is to coordinate with partners in the group to insure immediate action on the program.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's office said he would arrive in Copenhagen on Tuesday - two days earlier than previously planned - in an attempt to inject momentum into the climate talks.
"His view is that these negotiations can't wait until the last minute. He believes that we have learnt the lessons from the G-20, that it takes leadership to get involved and try to pull together what is required as soon as possible," Brown's spokesman Simon Lewis told reporters in London.
Lewis denied that Brown - facing a national election by June - was seeking to personal credit if a deal is struck. "He is not seeking to push himself forward, but he has taken a personal view that it is important that, if world leaders can, they should get there early," the spokesman said.
Earlier Monday, British Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said it's up to him and his counterparts in Copenhagen to help bridge that gap between rich and poor countries and "not to leave everything" to the world leaders.
"There are still difficult issues of process and substance that we have to overcome in the coming days," Miliband said. "Can we get the emission cuts we need? We need higher ambition from others and we will be pushing for that."
---_
Associated Press Writer Arthur Max contributed to this report.

Category 17 Winter Storm "Al Gore" Leaves Behind Shivering Nation

2009-12-11T00:32:00.000-04:00

By CAROLYN THOMPSON

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - A deadly, windy storm that has paralyzed a wide swath of the nation for days left bitter cold behind as it finally made its exit Thursday, with temperatures below freezing in several states and gusts that made it feel as cold as minus 25.
Power failures in the Midwest, dozens of lost hunters in the West and howling winds that helped blow over a bus in New York provided just a few lingering miseries from the first major storm of the season.
Emergency rooms took in people who had slipped and fallen, overdone shoveling or reached their hands into clogged snowblowers, while tow trucks freed drivers from the sides of icy roads and everyday residents simply struggled to get around in the frigid winds.
"Like I stuck my face in the freezer," was how Bincy Mathew described the feeling in Chicago on Thursday, complaining about his watering eyes: "I think they are going to freeze up."
Aileen Azares, 42, of Dallas, spent part of the day taking photos in Chicago's Millennium Park, where sculptures sported snow hats and icicle beards. Azares wore a pink scarf but was still cold.
"Right now my ears are hurting," Azares said.
The days-old storm made its first punch in the West before plowing across two-thirds of the country with heavy snow, icy winds, and even lightning and thunder before preparing to blow out to sea off Maine.
In northern Arizona, 25 to 30 elk hunters remained stranded for a fourth day in below-freezing weather, and searchers feared the parties would run out of food and heating fuel before the next storm hit, possibly over the weekend.
The Coconino County Sheriff's Office said the hunters were trapped by the 2 to 3 feet of snow that fell Monday. Authorities received several reports of stranded or overdue hunting parties but expected to get more calls as the elk hunting season drew to an end Thursday.
"The storm just hit when everyone was out in the field," said sheriff's spokesman Gerry Blair.
Michigan residents hunkered down under a blizzard warning as the coldest air of the season crossed Lake Michigan. More than 120,000 people lost power in the state, in the middle of a swath from Iowa to West Virginia and up to Maine where residents were in the dark at some point.
High snow totals, fueled by winds blowing over lakes Erie and Ontario, were possible for parts of New York through Saturday, including south of Buffalo and north of Syracuse.
While less than three inches of snow fell on Buffalo, winds gusting between 50 mph and 60 mph blinded drivers, grounded flights and forced most schools to close. Frequent thunder and lightning lit up the sky before dawn.
A double-decker bus carrying 12 passengers from New York City to Toronto overturned on the New York State Thruway near Buffalo when the driver made an unsafe lane change during the worst of the storm early Thursday, state police said. Nine on board were taken to hospitals with injuries not considered life threatening.
"The winds were just whipping the snow back across the road, and you couldn't get a lane or two cleared or kept cleared," State Police Capt. Michael Nigrelli said.
In Rochester, where a blustery 28-degree day finally dispatched an unseasonably mild fall in upstate New York, Mike Hartman said he was getting in shape for ski season with a lunchtime jog around Cobbs Hill Park with his Chinese shar-pei dog and a friend.
"I did enjoy the mild weather, but I'd rather have snow than sleet and rain and a temperature in between freezing and not freezing," he said.
At least 17 people have died in the meandering storm, including a man found Wednesday outside his pickup truck in central Iowa and a North Carolina driver killed when a tree was blown onto his pickup.
Wisconsin hospitals dealt with an influx of patients, including Lloyd Gleason, who lost a finger and fractured two others in a snowblower. He was one of six victims of snowblower accidents who went to St. Mary's Hospital in Madison on Wednesday.
"I just didn't think the thing was working, and it was," he told WISC-TV.
The Upper Midwest was left under a dome of arctic air that forecasters said would linger into the weekend. As often, the coldest spot was International Falls, a small city along the Canadian border that has proclaimed itself the "Icebox of the Nation."
Jake Haney, who fuels planes at the International Falls Airport, said it was 13 below zero with a steady wind when he got to work at 6:30 Thursday morning. He expected to spend about four hours of his 10-hour shift outside but said he'd be fine as long as he left no exposed skin.
"I enjoy it, kind of," Haney said. "I've lived here my whole life, so I'm used to it at least. It's fresh air. It's better than being trapped inside."
---

The real inconvenient truth

2009-12-11T00:28:00.000-04:00

The whole world needs to adopt China's one-child policy

Diane Francis, Financial Post

Read more: http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2314438#ixzz0ZLpjPI4w
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Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world's leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.

The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.
A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.
The world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity's soaring reproduction rate.
Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world's leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.
The intelligence behind this is the following:
-If only one child per female was born as of now, the world's population would drop from its current 6.5 billion to 5.5 billion by 2050, according to a study done for scientific academy Vienna Institute of Demography.
-By 2075, there would be 3.43 billion humans on the planet. This would have immediate positive effects on the world's forests, other species, the oceans, atmospheric quality and living standards.
-Doing nothing, by contrast, will result in an unsustainable population of nine billion by 2050.
Humans are the only rational animals but have yet to prove it. Medical and other scientific advances have benefited by delivering lower infant mortality rates as well as longevity. Both are welcome, but humankind has not yet recalibrated its behavior to account for the fact that the world can only accommodate so many people, especially if billions get indoor plumbing and cars.
The fix is simple. It's dramatic. And yet the world's leaders don't even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah about climate science and climate fraud, announcements of giant wind farms, then cap-and-trade subsidies.
None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world's big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development.
China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy. Its middle class grows, all its citizens have housing, health care, education and food, and the one out of five human beings who live there are not overpopulating the planet.
For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pastureland into desert as is now the case, or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.
The point is that Copenhagen's talking points are beside the point.
The only fix is if all countries drastically reduce their populations, clean up their messes and impose mandatory conservation measures.
dfrancis@nationalpost.com

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Copenhagen climate summit: Blindfolds are hiding the crucial issues at Copenhagen

2009-12-10T00:33:00.000-04:00

It is now obvious that the science behind rising CO2 levels is far from settled, writes Christopher Booker.

An iceberg is pictured in Ilulissat fjord in Greenland Photo: Reuters

As we are engulfed from all sides by suffocatingly one-sided coverage of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, three hugely important issues have been largely stuffed away from sight.
The first of these is the matter of cost: the scarcely believable bill our politicians wish to land us with as the price of their proposals to meet the supposed threat of global warming. Few people have even begun to take on board the astronomic scale of the sums involved – the International Energy Agency talks blithely of $45 trillion - because on this politicians and media have in recent days remained more than ever silent.

Already under last year’s Climate Change Act - on the Government’s own figures – we in Britain alone are committed to shell out £18 billion every year from now until 2050. That is £725 for every household in the land, which we will all have to pay in rocketing energy bills and regulatory costs, crippling ‘green’ taxes on everything from cars to airline tickets, subsidies to windfarms and heaven knows what else.
But even this may look like a gross underestimate when we realise that it is now the law of the land that, over the same 40 years, Britain must cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by a staggering 80 percent or more. Not a single one of the 463 MPs who nodded through the Climate Change Act, with only three voting against, could have begun to explain in practical terms how this target could be met.
Short of an as-yet undreamed of technological revolution, this could not possibly be achieved without closing down not just most of our transport system and electricity supplies but virtually all of our current economic activity.
What is being proposed at Copenhagen is that not dissimilar measures should be imposed on every country in the developed world, threatening to transform our existing way of life out of all recognition.
The second very important question which has received nothing like enough attention over what is happening in Copenhagen is how the politicians can hope to get round the yawning gap between the richer nations of the West and those developing nations led by China, India, Brazil and South Africa, with some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
It is this seemingly unbridgeable gulf, at the heart of the international debate since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which has led even the organisers of the conference publicly to voice doubts that they will get the universally binding treaty they are after.
The Western nations want everyone to sign up to crippling targets for reducing their CO2 emissions (China having already overtaken the US as the world’s biggest emitter). But the developing countries argue that, since the ‘CO2 problem’ is historically all our fault, as the countries which led the way to industrialisation, there is no way they can agree to any binding targets until they have been allowed to catch up economically with the West.
The best they can offer is that, in order to bribe them to make at least token gestures towards curbing their own carbon emissions, we in the developed countries should pay them hundreds of billions of dollars a year - at the very moment when we ourselves are accepting targets designed to make our own economies progressively very much less productive.
In other words, as we are faced with yet another colossal bill, their own economies will continue to forge ahead, pouring out so much CO2 that the global level will almost certainly continue to rise, All of which leads round to the third hugely important issue which those organising the Copenhagen conference are only too anxious to brush aside – the inescapable fact that the science on which all this frenzy of activity is based has recently begun to look considerably shakier than it did only a few years ago.
The first thing any of us in the West need to be sure of, as we face by far the largest bill in the history of the world, is that the science being used to justify this is 100 percent reliable.
Ultimately the whole case for a Copenhagen treaty rests on the projections of the computer models relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). These show that, as CO2 levels continue to rise, so temperatures must follow, leading inexorably to catastrophe - unless mankind takes the most drastic action to cut down on its emissions of CO2.
But as more and more eminent scientists have recently been pointing out, the only reason why the computer models predict that rising CO2 must cause temperatures to rise is that this is what they were programmed to show.
What world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT and Professor Will Happer of Princeton have been arguing is that the models are fatally flawed because they do not take proper account of all sorts of other factors which play a key part in shaping the world’s climate - such as shifts in ocean currents, the effects of magnetic activity on the sun and the ‘feedback’ from clouds and water vapour, far and away the most important greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, which counteracts any impact from the rise in CO2.
The greatest ally this growing army of ‘sceptical’ scientists can point to is what has actually been happening to the climate in recent years. No one can predict with certainty where temperatures will be in 100 years time, But the one thing that is indisputable is that, as CO2 levels continue to rise, the trend in global temperatures has not recently been rising as the computer models predicted, but has been flattening out and even dropping.
In other words, it becomes increasingly clear that the models were wrong - because their programming was biased according to a theory which now looks ever more questionable. Yet it is on their projections that the world is now faced with by far the most expensive set of measures ever proposed by politicians in history.
For months in the run-up to Copenhagen we have been subjected to an unremitting bombardment of scare stories: how the ice caps and glaciers are melting much faster than predicted, how sea levels will rise much higher than anyone imagined, how we face ever more hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves.
Yet every time one of these scares is subjected to proper objective scientific examination it can be found either that these disasters are not happening as claimed or that they have been exaggerated far in advance of anything the evidence can justify.
The importance of Copenhagen is that we are at last arriving at the moment of truth. On one hand we are waking up to the scarcely imaginable cost of what our politicians are proposing, just when on the other the reliability of the evidence on which all this is based is being called into question more than ever before.
Despite our having for years been assured by politicians from Al Gore to President Obama that ‘the science is settled’, it is now obvious that it is nothing of the kind. Not least has this been confirmed by ‘Climategate’ and the leak of that ‘dodgy dossier’ from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, for years at the centre of driving the scare over global warming as the most influential source of temperature data in the world. Far from Copenhagen being the end of the debate, the real debate is only just beginning.
Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History’ (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p&p. To order call 0844 871 1416 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk

Climategate: another smoking gun…

2009-12-10T00:31:00.002-04:00

Despite the Al-Gore-Kool-Aid-drinkers’ best efforts to suppress it, the Climategate scandal continues to blossom and flourish. (Or should that be putresce and pullulate?)
I think my favourite comic detail this week just has to be the one about the amazing not-so-fast-shrinking glaciers. As you’ll know if you’ve been reading reports like this scare stories about glaciers retreating “faster than predicted” are a central plank of the IPCC’s case that we should carbon-tax ourselves back to the Dark Ages NOW. According to the IPCC, the Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035.
Or should that be 2350? Yep it seems those scientific experts who make the IPCC’s reports so famously reliable and trustworthy have a bad case of numerical dyslexia. The mistake was spotted by a Canadian academic:

J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.
He is astonished they “misread 2350 as 2035″.
In its 2007 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: “Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.
“Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035,” the report said.
It suggested three quarters of a billion people who depend on glacier melt for water supplies in Asia could be affected.
But Professor Cogley has found a 1996 document by a leading hydrologist, VM Kotlyakov, that mentions 2350 as the year by which there will be massive and precipitate melting of glaciers.
“The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates – its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2350,” Mr Kotlyakov’s report said.
Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and “misread 2350 as 2035″.
“I do suggest that the glaciological community might consider advising the IPCC about ways to avoid such egregious errors as the 2035 versus 2350 confusion in the future,” says Mr Cogley.

Well quite.
But just when you think it can’t get any better, along comes this cracker of an expose at Watts Up With That, courtesy of scientist Willis Eschenbach.
Eschenbach has been looking more closely into one of the big unanswered questions of the great Climate Wars: how reliable is the climate data used by the IPCC?
He focuses on just one country, Australia, and on one weather station – at Darwin Airport – and compares the raw temperature data recorded at the station with the “adjusted” version of the data.
Here’s what he found:

Notice the anomaly? It’s not exactly difficult. The blue line is the trend on the raw data, showing a slight cooling. The red line is the data once it has been adjusted by scientists at the Global Historical Climate Network – which is one of the main sources of temperature data used by the IPCC. Eschenbach finds the extremity of this “homogenization” adjustment rather shocking:

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

But just how shocking is this discovery. We-e-ll – as Eschenbach reminds us, it is only one weather station. Also, he points out, it is quite normal for scientists to make these homogeneity adjustments, as he explains quoting the GHCN:

Most long-term climate stations have undergone changes that make a time series of their observations inhomogeneous. There are many causes for the discontinuities, including changes in instruments, shelters, the environment around the shelter, the location of the station, the time of observation, and the method used to calculate mean temperature. Often several of these occur at the same time, as is often the case with the introduction of automatic weather stations that is occurring in many parts of the world. Before one can reliably use such climate data for analysis of longterm climate change, adjustments are needed to compensate for the nonclimatic discontinuities.

What he can’t fathom at all, though, is the mind-boggling scale of these adjustments. They can only be explained in terms of scientists with a very particular agenda.

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

Do read the full piece. Its wonderfully revealing of the dirty tricks used by the scientists pushing AGW to exaggerate their case. And what’s particularly damning is that it shows how the Climategate scandal extends far, far beyond those so far implicated at the Climatic Research Institute at the University of East Anglia.
Here is the GHCN in context:

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

In other words the most important temperature data record in the world – even more important than CRU – has been found cheating. Here is Eschenbach’s conclusion:

Now, I want to be clear here. The blatantly bogus GHCN adjustment for this one station does NOT mean that the earth is not warming. It also does NOT mean that the three records (CRU, GISS, and GHCN) are generally wrong either. This may be an isolated incident, we don’t know. But every time the data gets revised and homogenized, the trends keep increasing. Now GISS does their own adjustments. However, as they keep telling us, they get the same answer as GHCN gets … which makes their numbers suspicious as well.
And CRU? Who knows what they use? We’re still waiting on that one, no data yet …
What this does show is that there is at least one temperature station where the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling. In addition, the average raw data for Northern Australia is quite different from the adjusted, so there must be a number of … mmm … let me say “interesting” adjustments in Northern Australia other than just Darwin.
And with the Latin saying “Falsus in unum, falsus in omis” (false in one, false in all) as our guide, until all of the station “adjustments” are examined, adjustments of CRU, GHCN, and GISS alike, we can’t trust anyone using homogenized numbers.

Still feel confident, do you, all you warmists who’ve been gloating about all that data allegedly proving that we’re living through times of quite unprecedented hotness?

Climategate: Gore falsifies the record

2009-12-09T14:14:00.003-04:00

Andrew Bolt

Wednesday, December 09, 2009 at 06:54pm

Al Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle:

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?
A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.

And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue:

Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.
A: I think it’s been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you’re referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn’t be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.

In fact, thrice denied:

These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.

In fact, as Watts Up With That shows, one Climategate email was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on November 12 - just a month ago. The emails which have Tom Wigley seeming (to me) to choke on the deceit are all from this year. Phil Jones’ infamous email urging other Climategate scientists to delete emails is from last year.
How closely did Gore read these emails? Did he actually read any at all? Was he lying or just terribly mistaken? What else has he got wrong?
(Thanks to readers Sinclair and Peter.)

Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak

2009-12-09T01:14:00.002-04:00

Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol

• Read the 'Danish text'
• In pictures: Copenhagen day two

John Vidal in Copenhagen
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 December 2009 14.09 GMT
Article history

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents. Photograph: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.
The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.
The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.
The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.
The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks".
A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:
• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;
• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable";
• Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance;
• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.
Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.
"It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process," said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.
Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: "This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed."
Hill continued: "It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks."
The text was intended by Denmark and rich countries to be a working framework, which would be adapted by countries over the next week. It is particularly inflammatory because it sidelines the UN negotiating process and suggests that rich countries are desperate for world leaders to have a text to work from when they arrive next week.
Few numbers or figures are included in the text because these would be filled in later by world leaders. However, it seeks to hold temperature rises to 2C and mentions the sum of $10bn a year to help poor countries adapt to climate change from 2012-15.
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The Copenhagen Concoction

2009-12-08T00:46:00.000-04:00

The U.N.'s climate confab runs into the reality of costs and science.

For months, the U.N. climate change summit that began yesterday in Copenhagen has been billed as the world's last best hope to match the scientific consensus on global warming with a policy consensus. But now it turns out there is little of either, and Copenhagen looks like it will go down as one of the more remarkable cases of political hubris in recent memory.
That's no bad outcome, given the ambitions of Copenhagen's organizers to impose heavy new carbon taxes on top of a struggling world economy. The Australian Senate last week defeated Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's cap-and-trade legislation, largely due to its job-killing potential in the coal-producing continent. Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, said Thursday "there is no question of India accepting a legally binding emission reduction cut." China has promised to cut the rate of growth in its carbon emissions, which would nevertheless double over the next decade even on the most optimistic scenario.
As for the U.S., it has become clear even to liberals that it was not the Bush Administration alone that was standing in the way of a global climate deal. Last Thursday, nine Senators sent a letter outlining the terms of their support for cap-and-trade legislation, including that every other country enact and enforce carbon legislation of their own. And those were Democrats.

View Full Image

Associated Press

A delegate walks in front a light installation at the entrance of the Bella centre of the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

President Obama has promised an 83% cut in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (from their 2005 level) by 2050. But such extravagant pledges are only possible when everyone knows they won't happen. Yesterday's announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency that it will regulate carbon as a dangerous pollutant is an attempt to run around Congress in order to impress Copenhagen's conferees, but it is also deeply undemocratic and betrays the lack of broader public support. (See below.)

***

So what exactly is the point of Copenhagen? The question needs to be asked all the more insistently in the wake of last month's disclosure of thousands of documents and emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), long considered an authoritative center of temperature data, modeling and forecasts.
At a minimum, the emails demonstrate the lengths some of the world's leading climate scientists were prepared to go to manufacture the "consensus" they used to demand drastic steps against global warming. The emails are replete with talk of blacklisting dissenting scientists and journals, manipulating peer review and avoiding freedom of information requests.
Nor can the emails be dismissed as a handful of scientists showing their petulant streak. Scientific research must be subject to testing, verification and, if necessary, disproof. Otherwise, its conclusions are worthless. That's especially true if the basic data on which the climate records are based are deleted, as seems to have been the case with the CRU, or if the elaborate computer models used to forecast climate turn out to be poorly designed, as also seems to be the case.
The core question raised by the emails is why their authors would behave this way if they are as privately convinced of the strength of their case as they claim in public. The Earth's climate is a profoundly complex system, sensitive, dynamic and subject to a dizzying range of variables interacting in ways that remain poorly understood. Carbon dioxide is only one of those variables. Climate scientists failed to anticipate the absence of warming in the last decade, a point that Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, privately conceded in one of the disclosed emails was a "travesty."
Given this, the public is entitled to wonder how exactly climate scientists can state with such certainty that temperatures have never been higher, or that they are sure to rise in the coming decade, to say nothing of the rest of the century. The public is also entitled to know how the climatologists can suggest the precise degrees by which the Earth will warm, or why a warmer Earth is, on balance, worse than a colder one. Is there a "correct" global average temperature?
The public also has a right to wonder whether the bulk of the scarce financial resources available to mitigate ecological risks ought to be devoted primarily to climate change rather than to other threats to the environment and public health. For several years, Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg has been convening meetings in Copenhagen of some of the world's leading economists to consider that very question. Overwhelmingly they have concluded that the world's dollars, euros and yen are better spent on tackling diseases such as AIDS or malaria or problems such as malnutrition and run-of-the-mill pollution than on hugely expensive (and dubiously effective) carbon-mitigation schemes.
This conclusion is only common sense: Given the choice between spending $100 to feed a hungry child in the present or combat a notional climate problem that might or might not have real consequences a century hence, most of us would surely choose the former. We would do so, moreover, with the confidence that the technologies of the future will be better suited to deal with whatever climate problems might then exist.
A typical retort is that "we can't afford to wait until it's too late," but one may as well ask whether the child in our example should go hungry while the developed world spends its money on global warming mitigation in the Third World. Yet that is exactly what the conferees at Copenhagen seem prepared to do, to the tune of billions of dollars per year.
Even if the Earth does warm by a degree or two this century, the world will be better able to cope with any consequences the more prosperous it is. The worst policy would be to impose higher energy and other costs that reduce global growth for decades. The proponents of cap and trade point to this or that study claiming that a tax on the world's main current energy supplies (oil, natural gas, coal) is cost free. But this also defies common sense. The Chinese and Indians don't believe it, and neither do middle-class Americans who can't easily afford hundreds of dollars a year in extra electricity or transportation costs.
Meanwhile, none of the "green" energy sources—wind, solar or biofuels—has so far proved even remotely efficient or scalable, while often entailing serious environmental consequences of their own. These industries exist mainly because governments have thrown tens of billions in subsidies at them, and still they can't compete with carbon sources.
Much of the momentum for Copenhagen is now driven by the alternative fuels industry and its investors, who stand to lose vast sums unless governments artificially raise the price of carbon. These include our friends at Kleiner Perkins, the ecoventure capital fund that includes Al Gore as a partner. And of course that part of the political class congenitally eager to redistribute taxpayer monies also wants to dispense "carbon credits" to friends and political donors.

***

By now, the idea that global warming represents the gravest threat to humanity has become totemic in much of the world, a belief invested with religious fervor and barely susceptible to rational discussion, let alone debate. Yet it remains telling how quickly a sense of reality has reasserted its cold grip in light of the choices Copenhagen now brings starkly into view.
Mr. Obama has delayed his trip to the conference until its final day, when he thinks he might salvage some kind of deal. Perhaps he will. Then again, Copenhagen is more likely to prove that it takes more than environmental faith and political opportunism to forge a genuine global consensus.

Obama administration formally declares danger of carbon emissions

2009-12-08T00:40:00.002-04:00

By Juliet Eilperin and David Fahrenthold

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 7, 2009; 2:16 PM

The Obama administration formally declared Monday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public's health and welfare, a move that lays the groundwork for an economy-wide carbon cap even if Congress fails to enact climate legislation.
The move, announced by Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson, comes as the largest climate change conference in history gets underway in Copenhagen. It finalizes an initial "endangerment finding" by the government in April.
Speaking in an ornate room at EPA headquarters, Jackson said that greenhouse gases are "disrupting the natural balance in our atmosphere and changing our climate . . . The overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows the threat is real."
Jackson said that she did not know when the EPA would reveal detailed plans for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, or if the agency would wait to see if the U.S. Senate passes climate legislation early next year. Jackson said that legislation was still the best way to tackle the problem -- but said she was not trying to prod Congress with Monday's finding.
Instead, Jackson said, the administration was bound to follow the U.S. Supreme Court's order in 2007 to determine if these emissions endanger public health.
"There are no more excuses for delay," she said. "This administration will not ignore science and the law any longer."

Jackson will speak at the U.N.-sponsored climate conference Wednesday; her address is titled "Taking Action at Home." President Obama, who will attend the end of the U.N. talks Dec. 18, has sent a series of recent signals to the international community that the United States will curb its carbon output as part of a new global climate deal.
The endangerment finding stems from a 2007 Supreme Court decision in which the court ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases qualify as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. It could trigger a series of federal regulations affecting polluters, from vehicles to coal-fired power plants.
Businesses argue that such a finding would mean even emitters as small as a mom-and-pop grocery store would be forced to comply with onerous greenhouse gas regulations. The administration has crafted rules that would exempt facilities that emit less than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide or its equivalent annually. But it remains unclear whether that exemption would hold up in court.
"An endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery."
Business leaders warned that EPA regulations on greenhouse gases would be tied up in litigation for years and that the announcement was politically motivated to coincide with the opening of the international climate change summit in Copenhagen.
"This action poses a threat to every American family and business if it leads to regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Such regulation would be intrusive, inefficient, and excessively costly," said the American Petroleum Institute president Jack Gerard in a statement. "There was no compelling deadline that forced EPA's hand on this decision. It is a decision that is clearly politically motivated to coincide with the start of the Copenhagen climate summit."
Facilities that produce at least 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide or its equivalent yearly account for nearly 70 percent of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources.
Environmentalists said the scientific finding will spur Congress, which has yet to enact a final climate bill, to take action. The House passed a bill in June, but the Senate will not take up its version until 2010.
Bill Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, said officials on the state and local level "are extraordinarily pleased that President Obama is making this endangerment finding. It will trigger subsequent measures to continue on the road toward making significant progress to address the global warming problem."
Staff writer Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

Webb warns Obama on taking action in Copenhagen

2009-12-07T15:22:00.002-04:00

*UPDATE on quote
Looks like a fellow Democrat has concern with the president's handling of the the cap and trade issue upon Mr. Obama's trip to Copenhagen. Senator Jim Webb (D - Va.) wrote to the administration last week warning President Obama that the White House does not have unilateral power to commit the United States to any standards agreed upon at the upcoming climate change conference in Denmark.:

Dear Mr. President:
I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the Administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed upon at the upcoming United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties 15 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The phrase “politically binding” has been used.
Although details have not been made available, recent statements by Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern indicate that negotiators may be intending to commit the United States to a nationwide emission reduction program. As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country.
I would very much appreciate having this matter clarified in advance of the Copenhagen meetings.
Sincerely,
Jim Webb
United States Senator

Senator Webb's office told the Washington Times Water Cooler the president has not replied back in writing, and the decision to write the president a letter on this issue comes from Mr. Webb's concern about issues of constitutional checks and balances.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Webb said, "If we're going to make binding commitments, the Senate needs to be an obligatory player in that process." The spokeswoman also noted Mr. Webb's concern with the vague commitment from China and India on the issue of cap and trade.

Saudi Arabia calls for 'climategate' investigation

2009-12-07T12:16:00.002-04:00

: Delegates follow the opening ceremony of the Climate Conference in Copenhagen on Monday.

COPENHAGEN — Saudi Arabia called for an independent investigation into “climategate” Monday, warning that the scandal over stolen emails threatened to undermine the global-warming negotiations beginning here.

“We believe this scandal — or what has been referred to as the ‘climategate’ scandal — we think this is definitely going to affect the nature of what could be trusted in our deliberations,” the Saudi Arabian negotiator said.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has promised to investigate the scandals, although its chairman said Monday that he said it provided no basis for questioning the science behind global warming.

But the Saudi negotiator told delegates that “the level of confidence is certainty shaken.”

Guide to Climate Change

2009-12-07T00:27:00.002-04:00

A collection of our editorials and op-eds.

Review and Outlook

Dec. 3: The Real Copenhagen Agenda
Dec. 2: Global Warming Revolt
Nov. 30: The Economics of Climate Change
Nov. 27: Rigging a Climate 'Consensus'
Nov. 24: Global Warming With the Lid Off
Nov. 24: Climate Science and Candor
Nov. 17: Copenhagen's Collapse
Oct. 29: Sins of Emission
Oct. 4: The 'Absurd Results' Doctrine
Aug. 12: More Cap-and-Trade War
July 24: Listening to India
July 13: King Canute at the G-8
July 6: The Carbonated Congress
June 26: The Cap and Tax Fiction
June 6: 'Worse than Fiction'
June 2: Pelosi's Chinese Climate Change
March 19: Canberra's Carbon Awakening
March 5: Climate Change Astrology
Dec. 12, 2008: Obama's Carbon Busters
Dec. 10, 2008: The 'Green Jobs' Myth
Oct. 20, 2008: Obama's Carbon Ultimatum

Commentary

Dec. 4: Richard Lester: The High Costs of Copenhagen
Dec. 3: Daniel Henninger: Climategate: Science is Dying
Dec. 2: Mike Hulme: The Science and Politics of Climate Change
Nov. 30: Richard Lindzen: The Climate Science Isn't Settled
Nov. 30:Bret Stephens: Climategate: Follow the Money
Nov. 29: Bjorn Lomborg: Climate Change and Melting Glaciers
Nov. 26: Kim Strassel: 'Cap and Trade Is Dead'
Nov. 22: Bjorn Lomborg: Cyclones and Global Warming
Nov. 18: Anne Jolis: Revenge of the Climate Laymen
Nov. 15: Bjorn Lomborg: Ethiopia, Malnutrition and Climate Change
Nov. 12: Kim Strassel: The EPA's Paranoid Style
Nov. 11: Holman Jenkins: The Economic Uses of Al Gore
Nov. 9: Bjorn Lomborg: Global Warming as Seen From Bangladesh
Nov. 11: Bjorn Lomborg: Climate Change and Malaria in Africa
Oct. 27: Bret Stephens: Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics
Oct. 25: The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew: Our Indivisible Environment
Oct. 22: Bjorn Lomborg: The View from Vanuatu on Climate Change
Oct. 21: Kirsten Gillibrand: Cap and Trade Could Be a Boon to New York
Oct. 6: Tim Groser: Cutting Carbon, Feeding the World
Aug. 28: Bjorn Lomborg: Technology Can Fight Global Warming
Aug. 24: David Shoenbrod and Richard Stewart: The Cap-and-Trade Bait and Switch
Aug. 4: Bret Stephens: Global Warming and the Poor
July 22: Bret Stephens: Al Gore's Doomsday Clock
July 20: William Antholis: India and Climate Change
July 3: Kim Strassel: The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic
June 26: Kim Strassel: The Climate Change Climate Change
June 25: Martin Livermore: Cap and Trade Doesn't Work
May 23: Scott Carson: How Boeing Fights Climate Change
May 22: Bjorn Lomborg: The Climate-Industrial Complex
May 15: Mitch Daniels: Indiana Says 'No Thanks' to Cap and Trade
April 24: Kim Strassel: Global Warming Overreach
April 3: F. James Sensenbrenner Jr.: Technology Is the Answer to Climate Change
March 24: Fred Krupp: Carbon Caps Are the Best Policy
March 6: Kim Strassel: The Climate Change Lobby Has Regrets
Feb. 25: Holman Jenkins: Obama Needs a 'Not To Do' List
Feb. 20: Max Schulz: Don't Count on 'Countless' Green Jobs
Jan. 28: Holman Jenkins: Detroit Takes One (More) For the Team
Dec. 12, 2008: Tim Wilson: A Bad Climate Trade-off
Dec. 3, 2008: Ralph Nader and Toby Heaps: We Need a Global Carbon Tax
Nov. 24, 2008: Jeff Swartz: CEOs Can Have a 'Huge Impact' on Climate Change

Forget climate change - save the planet from the thermomaniacs

2009-12-07T00:14:00.000-04:00

At last people are telling David Cameron that his bunny-hugging has the potential to cause extreme economic and political damage, writes Simon Heffer.

The voice of reason

Although I risk immediately being branded mentally defective for saying so, I am not convinced by the notion of man-made global warming. My lack of conviction, I would be the first to admit, is based on nothing resembling great scientific understanding: I have not so much as an O-level in physics or chemistry. All I do know is this: that the planet has heated up and cooled down at various points in its history without any help from factories, lorries or a beef-farming industry. Other planets have done, and continue to do, the same: I am still waiting for an answer to John Redwood's excellent point that the surface temperature of Mars has risen over the past few decades "and they are still looking for the 4x4s that did it". I therefore remain, in the phrase of Sir Antony Jay, the creator of Yes Minister, a firm thermosceptic.
Various other factors have contributed to an acceleration of my thermoscepticism. There was Lord Lawson's detailed and challenging riposte to the Stern report. There is Christopher Booker's superb recent book, The Real Global Warming Disaster, which I recommend that you all read. There is the hectoring tone of the BBC on the question, where any contributor to any programme who appears to be a thermo-denier is treated with incredulity and astonishment.
Also, thermomania has become the latest rallying point for the Leftist rent-a-mob, which finds it a suitable focus for its hatred of capitalism and the established order. That so many respectable people feel happy getting into bed with international anarchy would be funny were it not so threatening to our futures.
The latest blow to the thermomaniacs is the leak of emails from the University of East Anglia which suggest a complete unwillingness to engage with the opposite point of view. This was rather how the church used to behave before Martin Luther, and it enforced its will by torture and burnings at the stake. With those sanctions not currently available, the thermomaniacs prefer simply to pretend that the argument has only one side.
That argument – well, their argument – seems also to have reached ludicrous levels. We are told to stop eating beef because eructating bovines are also damaging the planet. This is an object lesson in the madness of these people. Not only is there no proof that every time a cow passes wind a flower dies, but such absurd claims are made with an utter disregard for the economy of large parts of the world (mainly the Third World) that depend on such farming. Mind you, the only time I ever attended a Green Party conference, 20 years ago, I heard a woman tell the assembly (to their agreement) that the population of this country would have to be halved to 30 million; though she failed to explain how this would be achieved.
Nutters, anarchists, anti-capitalists, fanatics, absolutists: why are these people taken seriously? Three cheers for the Australians, who this week have started to rise up against this indoctrination and lunacy. Three cheers for David Davis and the Tories who think like him, who are at last telling Dave that this particular bit of grandstanding and bunny-hugging has the potential to cause the most extreme economic and political damage. At last, there is recognition not just that there are two sides to every story, but that when politicians conspire to limit argument, it is always an attack on the public interest.
So if, next week, the Copenhagen summit passes from fraudulence to complete collapse, and misery and panic break out, no one should feel it is the end of the world – yet.

Americans Skeptical of Science Behind Global Warming

2009-12-07T00:12:00.002-04:00

Most Americans (52%) believe that there continues to be significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming.
While many advocates of aggressive policy responses to global warming say a consensus exists, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 25% of adults think most scientists agree on the topic. Twenty-three percent (23%) are not sure.
But just in the last few days, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs seemed to reject any such disagreement in a response to a question about global warming, “I don't think … [global warming] is quite, frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore.”
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s Very Likely. Just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.
This skepticism does not appear to be the result of the recent disclosure of e-mails confirming such data falsification as part of the so-called “Climategate” scandal. Just 20% of Americans say they’ve followed news reports about those e-mails Very Closely, while another 29% have followed them Somewhat Closely.
That’s a lower level of interest than has been shown about the White House party crashers and suggests that Americans have had their doubts about the science of global warming for some time.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
One reason for this skepticism may be the role the United Nations has played in promoting the global warming issue. Only 22% of Americans consider the UN to be a reliable source of information on global warming. Forty-nine percent (49%) disagree and say the international organization is not reliable on that topic. Twenty-nine percent (29%) aren’t sure.
Still, 46% of Americans say global warming is a major problem. However, 36% disagree, and 18% remain undecided.
President Obama and other U.S. officials are planning to attend a UN summit in Copenhagen, Denmark next week intended to further advance a proposed international treaty on global warming. Obama recently committed the United States to a 17 percent emissions cut by 2020 if Congress agrees, but critics say such a cut would seriously hurt the U.S. economy.
But then Republicans and voters not affiliated with either major party are more likely than Democrats to see disagreement in the scientific community over global warming and to suspect that data has been falsified.
Even as Obama and senior members of Congress are pushing major anti-global warming initiatives, Americans overwhelmingly believe they should focus on the economy instead. Seventy-one percent (71%) say the bigger priority for U.S. national leaders is stimulating the economy to create jobs. Only 15% say they should focus instead on stopping global warming to save the environment.
The emphasis on jobs is understandable when just 14% of workers report that their firms are hiring. Data from the Rasmussen Employment Index shows that 29% now report that their employers are laying people off.
Interestingly, Republicans feel more strongly than Democrats and unaffiliateds that national leaders should focus on job creation. But recent data shows that Democrats and unaffiliated adults are more likely than Republicans to be unemployed right now.
Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters see a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, although 31% disagree. Forty-seven percent (47%) say global warming is caused primarily by long-term planetary trends, not human activity. Obama, Vice President Al Gore and other climate change activists believe human activity is the chief culprit.
Twenty-nine percent (29%) of adults think their fellow Americans are selfish for putting economic concerns ahead of the fight against global warming, but 47% reject that charge.
Voters express mixed feeling about the bill aimed at fighting global warming that is now working its way through Congress, but by more than two-to-one they say it will hurt the economy rather than help it.
Most voters also think the news media makes global warming look worse than it really is.
As for Gore, despite winning both the Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award for his advocacy of efforts to fight global warming, only 31% of Americans consider him an expert on the topic.
The UN is another leading advocate for major anti-global warming initiatives, but just 29% of voters see that organization as an ally of the United States, while 15% regard it as an enemy. For 47%, the UN falls somewhere in between.

Climategate reveals 'the most influential tree in the world'

2009-12-07T00:04:00.003-04:00

Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit show how the world's weightiest climate data has been distorted, says Christopher Booker.

The magical faraway tree: a larch in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, sampled by Dr Keith Briffa, has been called 'the most influential tree in the world' Photo: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see.
To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of "hockey stick" fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week's Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.
It is therefore vitally important that we should trust the methods by which these men have made their case. The supreme prize that they have been working for so long has been to establish that the world is warmer today than ever before in recorded history. To do this it has been necessary to eliminate a wealth of evidence that the world 1,000 years ago was, for entirely natural reasons, warmer than today (the so-called Medieval Warm Period).
The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the "hockey stick" graph produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick, showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced "hockey stick" graphs whatever random data were fed into it. A wholly unrepresentative sample of tree rings from bristlecone pines in the western USA had been made to stand as "proxies" to show that there was no Medieval Warm Period, and that late 20th-century temperatures had soared to unprecedented levels.
Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the "hockey stick", by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC's fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre's criticisms.
At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.
This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a "hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most influential tree in the world".
But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to "Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the "hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.
A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre's Climate Audit, known only as "Lucy Skywalker". She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)
In other words, what has become arguably the most influential set of evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been as definitively kicked into touch as was Mann's "hockey stick" before it. Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy.
Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at all.
I will only add two footnotes to this real-life new version of the old story. One is that, as we can see from the CRU's website, the largest single source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history.
The other is that the ugly, drum-like concrete building at the University of East Anglia which houses the CRU is named after its founder, the late Hubert Lamb, the doyen of historical climate experts. It was Professor Lamb whose most famous contribution to climatology was his documenting and naming of what he called the Medieval Warm Epoch, that glaring contradiction of modern global warming theory which his successors have devoted untold efforts to demolishing. If only they had looked at the evidence of those Siberian trees in the spirit of true science, they might have told us that all their efforts to show otherwise were in vain, and that their very much more distinguished predecessor was right after all.
Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for
£14.99 plus £1.25 p&p. To order, call 0844 871 1416 or go to
books.telegraph.co.uk

The Climate-Change Travesty

2009-12-07T00:04:00.000-04:00

George Will

By George Will

WASHINGTON -- With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate change meeting. Its organizers had hoped it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone's choices.
China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate change theater, promises only to reduce its "carbon intensity" -- carbon emissions per unit of production. So China's emissions will rise.

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.
Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit in Britain -- a collaborator with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- reveals some scientists' willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer "consensus" and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.
The Washington Post learns an odd lesson from the CRU materials: "Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them." These scientists overstated and censored because they were "goaded" by skepticism?
Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, and were they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be "goaded" into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word "deniers" to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.
Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic manmade warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100 percent certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists' models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future.
The Financial Times' peculiar response to the CRU materials is: The scientific case for alarm about global warming "is growing more rather than less compelling." If so, then could anything make the case less compelling? A CRU e-mail says: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment" -- this "moment" is in its second decade -- "and it is a travesty that we can't."
The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars -- and substantially diminished freedom.
Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet's fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.
Consider the sociology of science, the push and pull of interests, incentives, appetites and passions. Governments' attempts to manipulate Earth's temperature now comprise one of the world's largest industries. Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed, as by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies. Political, commercial, academic and journalistic prestige and advancement can be contingent on not disrupting the (postulated) consensus that is propelling the gigantic and fabulously lucrative industry of combating global warming.
Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's -- especially America's -- population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth's last chance, until the next one.

georgewill@washpost.com

The High Costs of Copenhagen

2009-12-04T01:28:00.002-04:00

What Obama's pledge to reduce emissions by 83% would mean in practice.

By RICHARD K. LESTER

When President Obama goes to the Copenhagen climate change summit next week, he is expected to once again declare that the U.S. will reduce its carbon emissions 83% by 2050. Even though no legally binding agreement is expected, what Mr. Obama says in Denmark will define the U.S. position in subsequent international negotiations. He will not say how the cuts will be accomplished. For Americans, the details are worth knowing.
Annual U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions currently average about 5.5 tons of carbon per person. Achieving Mr. Obama's goal would mean reducing this to 0.63 tons per person by midcentury, taking expected population growth of just under 1% per year into account. If the rest of the world were to do likewise, global carbon dioxide emissions would be 25% lower than today.
Many climate scientists think this would put the world on track to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Of course, other countries may well have a different view of global equity. This includes China, which in the president's version would have to reduce its rapidly increasing per capita emissions to half the current level by 2050.
Most anthropogenic CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels, so there are two main routes to achieving the president's goal. First, the U.S. must reduce the share of fossil fuels—currently 85%—in the energy supply system, which includes everything from electricity generation and transportation to industrial uses. And second, Americans must use energy more efficiently.
The more we do of one, the less we'll need of the other. But ultimately what's required will depend on America's future economic growth.

OpinionJournal Climate Change Archive

Global Warming Revolt
The Economics of Climate Change
Rigging a Climate 'Consensus'
Global Warming With the Lid Off
Climate Science and Candor

Uncompromising environmental advocates argue that the dangers of climate change are so great that carbon emissions must be eliminated regardless of economic impact. Politicians, who must answer to voters, are unlikely to agree. A look at the underlying numbers helps explain.
Assume for now an annual economic growth target of 2% per capita for the next four decades. This would be higher than the disappointing 1.4% of the past decade, but roughly what the U.S. economy has achieved overall since 1970. With this target, the implications of the president's emission reduction goal become clearer.
First start with the key measure of energy efficiency: energy use per unit of economic output. Recently this has been falling by about 2% each year. Suppose that, through more aggressive policies like rewriting building codes to ensure greater energy efficiency, it was accelerated to 3%. In effect, this would mean bringing the rate of progress in every state in the country up to the level of the best state performer. It is not at all clear how this would be possible, but even if it is, meeting the 83% goal would still require extraordinary decarbonization measures on the supply side.
Here is a recipe that would work: Add 30,000 megawatts of new wind turbines every year between now and 2050 (this is nearly four times what was added in 2008, a record year). Add another 35,000 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity annually (more than 100 times what was added last year—a record year for solar, too).
That's just the beginning. Now multiply the nuclear reactor fleet fivefold by midcentury. Retrofit all existing coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage technology. And build twice as many new plants, also with carbon capture. Natural gas could substitute for coal, but only with carbon capture too. By 2050, the electric power system would be four times bigger than today. Two-thirds of the car and truck fleet would be powered by electricity, and the rest would run on advanced biofuels.
All of this would indeed reduce carbon emissions by 83%. It would also practically eliminate America's dependence on oil imports. But could it be done?
Perhaps, though not without enormous effort. Operating a power grid reliably and economically with intermittent solar and wind resources generating 40% of the electricity cannot be done today. Carbon capture and storage has yet to be demonstrated on a large scale. Meanwhile, a still vocal group of environmentalists remains adamantly opposed to nuclear energy—even though it is the only low-carbon energy source that is both scaleable and already generating large amounts of electricity.
Yet falling short on any of these decarbonization measures would require even more of the others, or even greater energy efficiency gains. Failing that, the only way to reach the 83% reduction goal would be through slower or even negative economic growth, i.e., lower living standards. This is a matter of arithmetic; it cannot be wished away.
The president's expected announcement at Copenhagen is probably the minimum needed to keep international climate negotiations alive. But the implications for U.S. energy are radical in scale and scope. The American public, sensing that the new climate policy will bring higher energy costs and a massive new government presence in energy production, remains unconvinced, to judge by recent poll numbers.
A steady stream of cost-reducing innovations in many different fields of energy technology—if sustained over decades—could bring the nation's climate and energy security goals within reach. But there are profound doubts about the government's ability to engineer this. When Mr. Obama returns from Europe, he will face an even tougher audience at home. Unless he can begin to dispel its doubts, his declaration of intent in Copenhagen will ring increasingly hollow.
Mr. Lester is professor and head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, where he is also director of the Industrial Performance Center.

Global warming controversy reaches NASA climate data

2009-12-04T01:19:00.000-04:00

Climate change skeptic to sue

By Stephen Dinan

The fight over climate science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding the release of the same kind of information that landed a leading British center in hot water over charges that it skewed its data.
Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data dating as far back as the 1930s.
"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Mr. Horner said. "These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."
The numbers matter. Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed its data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for the hottest years, with 1934 listed as slightly cooler.
Mr. Horner, a noted skeptic of global warming and author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism," wants a look at the data and the discussions that went into those changes. He said he's given the agency until the end of the year to comply or else he'll sue to compel the information's release.
Mark Hess, public affairs director for the Goddard Space Flight Center, which runs the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) laboratory, said officials are working on Mr. Horner's request, though he couldn't say why they have taken so long.
"We're collecting the information and will respond with all the responsive relevant information to all of his requests," Mr. Hess said. "It's just a process you have to go through where you have to collect data that's responsive."
Mr. Horner's fight mirrors one that has sprung up in Britain since the release of thousands of e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, which appear to show researchers shaving their data to conform to their expectations. They also note efforts to try to drive global warming skeptics out of the conversation.
The center's chief has stepped down pending an investigation into the e-mails.
The center has had to acknowledge in response to a Freedom of Information request under British law that it tossed out much of the raw data that it used to draw up the temperature models that have underpinned much of the science behind the global warming theory.
Mr. Horner suspects the same sort of data shaving has happened at GISS, a leading climate change research center. Mr. Hess said he was unfamiliar with the British controversy and couldn't say whether NASA was susceptible to the same challenges to its data.
The White House has dismissed the British e-mails as irrelevant.
"Several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening. I don't think that's anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore," press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this week.
But Republicans on Capitol Hill say the revelations deserve a congressional investigation. Republican leaders also sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson on Wednesday telling her that she should withdraw a series of EPA rules until the climate change science can be better substantiated.
For now, climate scientists are rallying around the British researchers.
Michael Mann, a scientist at Penn State University who is under fire for his involvement in the British e-mail exchanges, said the e-mails' release was timed to interfere with next week's U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. President Obama is planning to attend.
"They've taken scientists' words and phrases and quoted them out of context, completely misrepresenting what they were saying," Mr. Mann told AccuWeather.com in an interview, calling it a "manufactured controversy."
NASA's GISS was forced to update its data in 2007 after questions were raised by Steve McIntyre, who runs ClimateAudit.org.
GISS had initially listed the warmest years as 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921 and 1931, respectively. After Mr. McIntyre's questions, GISS rejiggered the list to show 1934 as the warmest, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006 and then 1931. Since then, the list has been rewritten again so it now runs as 1998, 2006, 1934, 1921 and 1999.
The institute blamed "a minor data processing error" for the changes but said it doesn't make much difference, since the top three years remain in a "statistical tie" either way.
Mr. Horner said he's seeking the data itself, but he also wants to see the chain of e-mails from scientists discussing the changes.
The Freedom of Information Act requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 days. Mr. Horner says he's never received an official acknowledgment of his three separate FOIA requests, but has received e-mails showing that the agency is aware of them.
He said he has provided NASA with a notice of intent to sue under FOIA but that he also hopes members of Congress get involved and demand the release of information.
NASA and CRU data are considered the backbone of much of the science that suggests the Earth is warming as a result of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. NASA argues that its data suggest this decade has been the warmest on record.
On the other hand, data from the University of Alabama-Huntsville suggest temperatures have been relatively flat for most of this decade.

Science is on the Credibility Bubble

2009-12-04T01:04:00.000-04:00

By Daniel Henninger

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.
I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).
Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences-physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering-came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.
This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.
The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims-plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish-evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.
For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton's Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.
Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as "the precautionary principle." As defined by one official version: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The global-warming establishment says we know "enough" to impose new rules on the world's use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science's traditional standards of evidence.
The Environmental Protection Agency's dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant-with implications for a vast new regulatory regime-used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory.
The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."
If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

Climategate: Science Is Dying

2009-12-03T00:48:00.002-04:00

Science is on the credibility bubble.

Daniel Henninger discusses how Climategate is undermining the objectivity of science.

•Podcast

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

The Climate Emails

The Economics of Climate Change
Rigging a Climate 'Consensus'
Global Warming With the Lid Off
Climate Science and Candor
Richard Lindzen: The Climate Science Isn't Settled
Bret Stephens: Climategate: Follow the Money

This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.
The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.
For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton's Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.
Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as "the precautionary principle." As defined by one official version: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The global-warming establishment says we know "enough" to impose new rules on the world's use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science's traditional standards of evidence.

View Full Image

Getty Images

What would Galileo do?

The Environmental Protection Agency's dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant—with implications for a vast new regulatory regime—used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory.

The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."
If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.
Write to henninger@wsj.com

Climategate: The White House Stonewalls with Stupidity

2009-12-02T00:52:00.001-04:00

Robert Gibbs – 1991 North Carolina State BA in poli sci (that’s it for the education indicated on his Wikipedia entry) – is the latest political operative to be seriously questioned on the metastasizing Climategate scandal. Of course, the man happens to be White House Press Secretary, so his response should be of some moment. But Gibbs’ first instinct was to hide behind Director of White House Environment and Climate Change Policy Carol Browner – herself an English major – who has insisted AGW is settled science because thousands of scientists said so – an inane argument in itself. When a reporter noted that thousands of scientists disagreed, Gibbs basically stamped his foot and insisted “I think there’s no real scientific basis for the dispute of this,” – as if this man would know in a million years.
At least during the Middle Ages the public discourse on scientific/religious disputes was held by intelligent people (or mostly). This was ridiculous, as you can see for yourself in the video below. In a way I pity poor Gibbs, because if ever a man was over his head, he is here. He probably believes AGW settled science, but who knows? Who knows what anyone believes these days? So much money and time has been invested. And we all know how unwilling most people are to back down anyway, except for, evidently, Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren who warned in 1971 that a new “Ice Age” was coming. “Ice Age” then, “Hot Spell” now. As John Belushi used to say, “Do the Locomotion.” Meanwhile, on this video, Gibbs seems more like a deer in the proverbial headlights explaining what the administration hopes to achieve in Copenhagen. Maybe he should have spent the time “Doing the Locomotion.” Now there’s a thought. (Hey, he could be the next Belushi.)

Penn State Will Investigate 'Climategate'

2009-12-02T00:39:00.005-04:00

November 30, 2009 02:40 PM ET | Jeff Greer | Permanent Link | Print

Among other things, the Watergate scandal of the 1970s gave us a great naming convention for future scandals. Take "Climategate" at Penn State. That's what people are calling the controversy surrounding leaked E-mails among climate change researchers that climate change opponents say expose the researchers' falsification of data. One Penn State professor is involved in the scandal.
The Penn State administration plans to investigate Climategate and determine if it needs to take further action, the Daily Collegian reports. A little more than a week ago, E-mails exchanged among an English university's climate change researchers were illegally obtained from a server and posted online, the report says.
Climate change opponents say the E-mails indicate that climate change researchers—including Penn State Prof. Michael Mann—exaggerated or fabricated global warming data. And, according to the report, some E-mails indicate that the director of the research unit in question may have contacted researchers and asked them to "delete certain E-mails."
Penn State officials, who will not discuss the matter, are investigating the controversy. If anything requires further inspection, the school will handle it, a spokesman tells the Daily Collegian. A panel will read every E-mail leaked and determine if climate change critics have any ground for their accusations, the report says.
"I would be disappointed if the university wasn't doing all [it] can to get as much information as possible" about the controversy, Mann tells the Daily Collegian.

Climate scientist at center of e-mail controversy to step down

2009-12-02T00:39:00.002-04:00

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 3:45 PM

A scientist who is one of the central figures in the controversy over hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit announced Tuesday that he is stepping down while the university investigates the incident.
Climate skeptics have seized on several e-mails from Phil Jones, director of the university's Climatic Research Unit, to other researchers as evidence that prominent scientists have sought to silence their voice in the debate over global warming. The e-mails were pirated and posted online last month.
"What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible," Jones said in a statement. "After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director's role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support."
East Anglia's Vice-Chancellor Professor Edward Acton said he had "accepted Professor Jones's offer to stand aside during this period. It is an important step to ensure that CRU can continue to operate normally and the independent review can conduct its work into the allegations."
Action added the university will disclose details of the probe, including who will head it and how long it will last "within days."
Marc Morano, who edits the climate skeptic blog, ClimateDepot.com, welcomed the news with an e-mail stating, "One Down: ClimateGate Scientist Phil Jones to temporarily step down... 'pending investigation into allegations that he overstated case for man-made climate change.'"

The Climate Science Isn't Settled

2009-12-01T12:41:00.000-04:00

Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.

By RICHARD S. LINDZEN

Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.

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The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.

That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called "climate forcing."
There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.
The IPCC's Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages. It is, of course, impossible to accurately summarize the 1,000-page assessment in just 20 pages; at the very least, nuances and caveats have to be omitted. However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim.
The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.
But even if the IPCC's iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.
There is some evidence of a positive feedback effect for water vapor in cloud-free regions, but a major part of any water-vapor feedback would have to acknowledge that cloud-free areas are always changing, and this remains an unknown. At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks.
The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today's. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the "Early Faint Sun Paradox."
For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.
There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.
The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.
Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.
Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.
Mr. Lindzen is professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Secrecy in science is a corrosive force

2009-12-01T00:55:00.002-04:00

By Michael Schrage

Published: November 27 2009 11:11 | Last updated: November 27 2009 11:11

With no disrespect to sausages and laws, Bismarck’s most famous aphorism clearly requires updating. “Scientific research” is bidding furiously to make the global shortlist of things one should not see being made.

Understandably so. Sciences at the cutting edge of statistics and public policy can make blood sports seem genteel. Scientists aggressively promoting pet hypotheses often relish the opportunity to marginalise and neutralise rival theories and exponents.

The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.

The source of that shame is a toxic mix of institutional laziness and complacency. Too many scientists in academia, industry and government are allowed to get away with concealing or withholding vital information about their data, research methodologies and results. That is unacceptable and must change.

Only recently in America, for example, have academic pharmaceutical researchers been required to disclose certain financial conflicts of interest they might have. On issues of the greatest importance for public policy, science researchers less transparent than they should be. That behaviour undermines science, policy and public trust.

Dubbed “climate-gate” by global warming sceptics, the most outrageous East Anglia email excerpts appear to suggest respected scientists misleadingly manipulated data and suppressed legitimate argument in peer-reviewed journals.

These claims are forcefully denied, but the correspondents do little to enhance confidence in either the integrity or the professionalism of the university’s climatologists. What is more, there are no denials around the researchers’ repeated efforts to avoid meaningful compliance with several requests under the UK Freedom of Information Act to gain access to their working methods. Indeed, researchers were asked to delete and destroy emails. Secrecy, not privacy, is at the rotten heart of this bad behavior by ostensibly good scientists.

Why should research funding institutions and taxpayers fund scientists who deliberately delay, obfuscate and deny open access to their research? Why should scientific journals publish peer-reviewed research where the submitting scientists have not made every reasonable effort to make their work – from raw data to sophisticated computer simulations – as transparent and accessible as possible? Why should responsible policymakers in America, Europe, Asia and Latin America make decisions affecting people’s health, wealth and future based on opaque and inaccessible science?

They should not. The issue here is not about good or bad science, it is about insisting that scientists and their work be open and transparent enough so that research can be effectively reviewed by broader communities of interest. Open science minimises the likelihood and consequences of bad science.

Debilitating and even fatal side-effects of new drugs might have been detected sooner if pharmaceutical companies had been compelled to share data on all the trials they ran, not just favourable ones. Similarly, the flawed and successfully overturned 1999 child murder conviction of Sally Clark might never have occurred if the statistical errors made by expert witness pediatrician Sir Roy Meadow had been questioned earlier. Data withholding played a distortive and destructive role in the cold fusion frenzy 20 years ago, when two scientists announced they had produced energy by cold fusion, only to be widely and quickly denounced by the scienitific community. Concealment and secrecy invites mischief; too many scientists seeking influence accept the invitation.

Achieving this is simple and inexpensive. It is not done by more rigorous enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act, although that would help. It comes from branding “openness” into every link of the scientific research value chain. Public or tax-deductible research funding should be contingent upon maximum transparency.

Scientists and affiliated institutions that will not make the research process as transparent as the end result will be asked to return the money or risk denial of future funds. University accreditation should be contingent not just upon faculty research and publication but by demonstrating policies and practices that champion data sharing. Professional societies and journals should make data sharing a condition of membership and publication. Researchers must be pushed to be more open at every step of their process.

The Royal Society not only makes data sharing a precondition of publication, it provides up to 10 megabytes of free space for supplementary data on its website. Unfortunately, too many scientific societies and publishers are less than rigorous or insistent about openness. Strip them of their tax-deductible status. Make opennes a condition of tax advantage. Of course commercial and proprietary issues can influence the manner of data sharing and transparency. But the East Anglia emails represent an individual and institutional imperative to err on the side of minimal disclosure even as researchers sought to maximise the academic and political impact of their work. That is perverse.

Public interest suggests scientists and their sponsoring institutions be made as legally, financially, professionally and ethically as uncomfortable as possible about concealing and withholding relevant research information.

If the University of East Anglia had been sharing more of its data and the computer models and statistical simulations running that data, the email hack would have been much ado about nothing.

When doing important research about the potential future of the planet, scientists should have nothing to hide. Their obligation to the truth is an obligation to openness.

The writer researches the economics of innovation and technology transfer at MIT and is a visiting researcher at London’s Imperial College

Gibbs: Despite research dispute, 'climate change is happening'

2009-12-01T00:53:00.002-04:00

The White House on Monday made exceptionally clear that it wants nothing to do with the furor over documents that global warming skeptics say prove the phenomenon is not a threat.

Despite the incident, which rocked international headlines last week, climate science is sound, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stressed this afternoon, and the White House nonetheless believes "climate change is happening."

"I don't think that's anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore," he said during Monday's press briefing.

Climate change skeptics have asserted over the past week that the publication of more than 1,000 private e-mails and documents once housed in the University of East Anglia's computer system refutes most modern global warming evidence.

The documents, unearthed by a blogger who hacked into Climate Research Unit's (CRU) private system, have since touched off an international debate over the veracity of those scientists' works.

But the dispute is proving especially troublesome for the Obama administration as it prepares to head to Copenhagen next week for a climate change summit -- a forum the president will attend.

Not only has the White House faced criticism from the left for offering too few concessions ahead of the meet, it is now fielding dissatisfaction from the right for participating in a summit sponsored in part by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- one of the research organs touched by the CRU spat."I think there's no real scientific basis for the dispute of this," responded Gibbs to questions about those scientists' credibility.

Nevertheless, congressional Republicans this week hope to ramp up their criticism of both global warming policy and the science that informs it.
Most vocal seems to be Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe demanded on Friday a hearing into the IPCC's research to determine whether it "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."

"[T]his thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with," he told reporters, noting it was "interesting" the e-mails surfaced before the Copenhagen summit.

The Web Discloses Inconvenient Climate Truths

2009-11-30T13:26:00.004-04:00

The world cannot trust scientists who abuse their power.

For anyone who doubts the power of the Internet to shine light on darkness, the news of the month is how digital technology helped uncover a secretive group of scientists who suppressed data, froze others out of the debate, and flouted freedom-of-information laws. Their behavior was brought to light when more than 1,000 emails,and some 3,500 additional files were published online, many of which boasted about how they suppressed hard questions about their data.
The emails, released by an apparent whistle-blower who used the name "FOI," were written by scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England. Its scientists are high-profile campaigners for the theory of global warming.
The findings from East Anglia have been at the core of policy reports by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC does not do its own research but compiles information relating to climate change. It has declared the evidence that the globe is warming to be "unequivocal," a claim routinely cited by lawmakers in the U.S. and elsewhere as authoritative.
The IPCC stresses honest science. According to its Web site, its goal is to "assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."
The panel, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, now faces the inconvenient truth that it relied on scientists who violated scientific process. In one email, the Climate Research Unit's director, Phil Jones, wrote Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, promising to spike studies that cast doubt on the relationship between human activity and global warming. "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," he said. He pledged to "keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
In another email exhange, Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Jones: "This was the danger of always criticizing 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."
Other emails include one in which Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit told Mr. Mann that "I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same," and in which Mr. Jones said he had employed Mr. Mann's "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures. A May 2008 email from Mr. Jones with the subject line "IPCC & FOI" asked recipients to "delete any emails you may have had" about data submitted for an IPCC report. The British Freedom of Information Act makes it a crime to delete material subject to an FOI request; such a request had been made earlier that month.
Over the weekend, East Anglia officials disclosed they had disposed years ago of the historic weather data underlying their analysis. This may be one reason they've fought information requests. They say they'll release the data they still have some time next year.
The emails showed how the global-warming group stifled dissent. They controlled the peer-review process, keeping opposing views unpublished, then cited "peer review" as evidence of their "consensus." One of the dissident scientists, Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado, wrote on his blog that the emails show the "collusion to suppress other scientifically supported views of the climate system, and the human role within it, is a systemic problem with the climate assessment process."
These disclosures have led to some soul-searching. "Opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science," wrote George Monbriot, a leading British environmentalist. "There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific." Demetris Koutsoyiannis, a hydraulic engineer who has written on climate change, wrote that scientists who suppressed others "must have felt that this secrecy was their best weapon: to censor differing opinions, to develop 'trick' procedures, to 'balance' the needs of the IPCC, and even to 'redefine' peer review."
This unseemly business reveals another flaw. Why are scholars who review papers allowed to remain anonymous? Reforming scientists and lawmakers might put the question more concretely: How many of the anonymous reviewers who spiked skeptical scientific papers over the years are the people who wrote these emails detailing how they abused peer review to block contrary evidence?
Science was one of the first disciplines to insist on transparency in order to foster competition in data and ideas. In the case of global warming, transparency is better late than never, as policy makers now have the chance to review the facts. Facing up to high-profile flaws is hard for any profession, but honest scientists will cheer how in our digital era eventually the truth will out, and will accept that no scientific hypothesis can be viewed as sacred or can be proved in secret.

Climate Change and Melting Glaciers

2009-11-30T13:25:00.002-04:00

Nepal's poor have more pressing problems.

By BJøRN LOMBORG

Global warming has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series leading up to the December United Nations conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:
Nine years ago, Maya Bishwokarma moved with her family to Kathmandu from Trisuli, a remote village in the hilly Nepal countryside. Their search for a better life has proved elusive. She and her husband and two sons live in a small, two-room house with her brother-in-law's family, near the bank of a small stream that has been converted into an open sewer.
"The life of the poor is more miserable here [than in the countryside]," Mrs. Bishwokarma told a Copenhagen Consensus researcher in June. "Our kids are suffering." The family cannot afford to send their children to a good school.
One of the visible signs of this family's hardship is the lack of basic amenities. Their hut has electricity, but rolling blackouts mean there is no power for as much as 16 hours a day. Even during the wet season, Mrs. Bishwokarma must line up with other local residents to collect water handed out every six days by government officials. Due to a long drought, the price of vegetables and food has soared.
The lack of water in the shadow of the Himalayas may seem like a strong argument for drastic, short-term reductions in carbon emissions. Indeed, the plight of people like the Bishwokarmas has been used by Al Gore and other campaigners to argue for just such cuts. Climate activists argue that there is a link between melting glaciers in the Himalayas and water shortages elsewhere.
On the surface, this makes sense. But when we dig deeper, we find that the Himalaya glaciers are difficult even for scientists to understand. Most suggestions of rapid melting are based on observations of a small handful of India's 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers. A comprehensive report in November by senior glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, released by the Indian government, looked more broadly and found that many of these glaciers are stable or have even advanced, and that the rate of retreat for many others has slowed recently.
Jeffrey S. Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona, declared in the Nov. 13 issue of Science that these "extremely provocative" findings were "consistent with what I have learned independently," while in the same issue of the magazine Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist at Wilfrid Laurier University, agreed that "there is no evidence" to support the suggestion that the glaciers are disappearing quickly.
When glaciers thicken and expand, the summer runoff into rivers decreases. In other words, when climate change does increase glacial melting, the flow of water to poor people like the Bishwokarmas will increase for several decades.
This does not mean that we should cheer on climate change, which will affect the planet in a myriad of complex and challenging ways. It does cast new light on one argument for drastic, short-term carbon cuts. It is important, after all, that we base our response to global warming on the most solid scientific expectations.
What did Mrs. Bishwokarma have to say about such questions? Several times, she asked the Copenhagen Consensus researcher to explain what "climate change" was. When it was explained, she agreed that it was a concern.
But she added that the government of Nepal and others should spend money "first on our everyday problems, then on global warming." To her, with the perspective of living in a slum and unable to send her children to good schools, that prescription makes a lot of sense.
Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank, and author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

2009-11-30T10:37:00.002-04:00

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

CO2 emissions will be on top of the agenda at the Copenhagen summit in December Photo: Getty

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.
There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.
They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.
This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.
But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.
In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.
What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.
The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.
Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.
The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.
Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p.

How to Forge a Consensus

2009-11-27T01:54:00.000-04:00

The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start.

The climatologists at the center of last week's leaked-email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of the some of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science, which is as certain as ever.
"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."
Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.
We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. His May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report: "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" does not "read well," it's true. (Mr. Mann has said he didn't delete any such emails.)
But the furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or even whether climatologists are nice people in private. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.
According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges that critics have lobbed at climatologists from outside this clique are routinely dismissed and disparaged.
This past September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who fact-checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds—including some in Mr. Mann's work—on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more-famous papers.
As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted to several colleagues in an email from March 2003, when the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "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!"
The scare quotes around "peer-reviewed literature," by the way, are Mr. Mann's. He went on in the email to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: "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." In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, re-define what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views. It's easy to manufacture a scientific consensus when you get to decide what counts as science.
The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.
Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it.

Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails

2009-11-25T00:33:00.002-04:00

(AP)

A few days after leaked e-mail messages appeared on the Internet, the U.S. Congress may probe whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change.

Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said on Monday the leaked correspondence suggested researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not," according to a transcript of a radio interview posted on his Web site. Aides for Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, are also looking into the disclosure.

The leaked documents (see our previous coverage) come from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

Last week's leaked e-mails range from innocuous to embarrassing and, critics believe, scandalous. They show that some of the field's most prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data ("have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots"), cheered the deaths of skeptical journalists, and plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

One e-mail message, apparently from CRU director Phil Jones, references the U.K.'s Freedom of Information Act when asking another researcher to delete correspondence that might be disclosed in response to public records law: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise." Another, also apparently from Jones: global warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." (Jones was a contributing author to the chapter of the U.N.'s IPCC report titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.")

In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named "Harry" -- possibly the CRU's Ian "Harry" Harris -- was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added:

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

For its part, the University of East Anglia has posted a statement calling the disclosure "mischievous" and saying it is aiding the police in an investigation.

The statement also quotes Jones, CRU's director, explaining his November 1999 e-mail, which said: "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." Jones said that the word trick was used "colloquially as in a clever thing to do" and that it "is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward."

Also unclear is the ultimate impact of the leak, which came before next month's Copenhagen summit and Democratic plans for cap and trade legislation.

On one hand, over at RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt, a modeler for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been downplaying the leak. Schmidt wrote: "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research ... no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords."

On the other, groups like the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, the target of repeated derision in the leaked e-mails, have said: "We have argued for many years that much of the scientific case for global warming alarmism was weak and some of it was phony. It now looks like a lot of it may be phony."

ScienceMag.org published an article noting that deleting e-mail messages to hide them from a FOI request is a crime in the United Kingdom. George Monbiot, a U.K. activist and journalist who previously called for dramatic action to deal with global warming, wrote: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging."

Complicating matters for congressional Republicans who'd like to hold hearings is that East Anglia, of course, is a U.K. university. The GOP may intend to press the Obama administration for details on how the EPA came to rely on the CRU's predictions, and whether the recent disclosure will change the agency's position. Another approach lies in e-mail messages discussing grants from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to East Anglia; one says: "We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious."

The irony of this situation is that most of us expect science to be conducted in the open, without unpublished secret data, hidden agendas, and computer programs of dubious reliability. East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way.

Climate Science and Candor

2009-11-24T10:29:00.002-04:00

Editor's note: The following are emails we've selected from more than 3,000 emails and documents that were hacked last week from computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom. The CRU is the data repository for much of the world's climate research and is a major source for the judgments reached by the U.N.'s climate reports. A nearby editorial ("Global Warming With the Lid Off") puts the emails in their political and scientific context, but readers may want to browse for themselves to get a flavor of the thinking of scientists who are the leading advocates for the belief that global warming is man-made and that nations must re-order the world economy to stop it. We've removed the email addresses and phone numbers, and we've inserted paragraph breaks in some places. The emails are otherwise unedited. The ellipses are the authors' own.
On freedom of information rules and deleting files:
From: Phil Jones
To: "Michael E. Mann"
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
Mike,
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.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Phil Jones
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 11:30 AM
To: Wahl, Eugene R; Caspar Ammann
Subject: Wahl/Ammann
Gene/Caspar,
Good to see these two out. Wahl/Ammann doesn't appear to be in CC's online first, but comes up if you search. You likely know that McIntyre will check this one to make sure it hasn't changed since the IPCC close-off date July 2006! Hard copies of the WG1 report from CUP have arrived here today. Ammann/Wahl - try and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with.
Cheers
Phil
At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:
Mike,
I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !
Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days?—our does! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who'll say we must adhere to it!
Are you planning a complete reworking of your paleo series? Like to be involved if you are. Had a quick look at Ch 6 on paleo of AR4. The MWP side bar references Briffa, Bradley, Mann, Jones, Crowley, Hughes, Diaz - oh and Lamb ! Looks OK, but I can't see it getting past all the stages in its present form. MM and SB get dismissed. All the right emphasis is there, but the wording on occasions will be crucial. I expect this to be the main contentious issue in AR4. I expect (hope) that the MSU one will fade away. It seems the more the CCSP (the thing Tom Karl is organizing) looks into Christy and Spencer's series, the more problems/issues they are finding. I might be on the NRC review panel, so will keep you informed.
Rob van Dorland is an LA on the Radiative Forcing chapter, so he's a paleo expert by GRL statndards.
Cheers
Phil
From: Phil Jones
To: Gavin Schmidt
Subject: Re: Revised version the Wengen paper
Date: Wed Aug 20 09:32:52 2008
Cc: Michael Mann
Gavin,
Almost all have gone in. Have sent an email to Janice re the regional freshening. On the boreholes I've used mostly Mike's revised text, with bits of yours making it read a little better. Thinking about the final bit for the Appendix. Keith should be in later, so I'll check with him - and look at that vineyard book. I did rephrase the bit about the 'evidence' as Lamb refers to it. I wanted to use his phrasing—he used this word several times in these various papers. What he means is his mind and its inherent bias(es).
Your final sentence though about improvements in reviewing and traceability is a bit of a hostage to fortune. The skeptics will try to hang on to something, but I don't want to give them something clearly tangible. Keith/Tim still getting FOI requests as well as MOHC and Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions not to respond —advice they got from the Information Commissioner. As an aside and just between us, it seems that Brian Hoskins has withdrawn himself from the WG1 Lead nominations. It seems he doesn't want to have to deal with this hassle.
The FOI line we're all using is this. IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI—the skeptics have been told this. Even though we (MOHC, CRU/UEA) possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don't have an obligation to pass it on.
Cheers
Phil
On opposing views and their appearance in science journals or reviews:
From: "Michael E. Mann"
To: Phil Jones, Ray Bradley, Malcolm Hughes, S. Rutherford
Subject: Re: Fwd: Soon & Baliunas
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 08:14:49 -0500
Cc: Keith Briffa, Jonathan Overpeck, Keith Alverson, Michael C. MacCracken
Thanks Phil,
(Tom: Congrats again!)
The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn't have cleared a 'legitimate' peer review process anywhere. That leaves only one possibility—that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board. And it isn't just De Frietas, unfortunately I think this group also includes a member of my own department...
The skeptics appear to have staged a 'coup' at "Climate Research" (it was a mediocre journal to begin with, but now its a mediocre journal with a definite 'purpose').
Folks might want to check out the editors and review editors:
[1]http://www.int-res.com/journals/cr/crEditors.html
In fact, Mike McCracken first pointed out this article to me, and he and I have discussed this a bit. I've cc'd Mike in on this as well, and I've included Peck too. I told Mike that I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted—the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper, which will be ignored by the community on the whole...
It is pretty clear that thee skeptics here have staged a bit of a coup, even in the presence of a number of reasonable folks on the editorial board (Whetton, Goodess, ...). My guess is that Von Storch is actually with them (frankly, he's an odd individual, and I'm not sure he isn't himself somewhat of a skeptic himself), and without Von Storch on their side, they would have a very forceful personality promoting their new vision.
There have been several papers by Pat Michaels, as well as the Soon & Baliunas paper, that couldn't get published in a reputable journal. 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?
mike
From: Tom Wigley
To: Timothy Carter
Subject: Re: Java climate model
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 09:17:29 -0600
Cc: Mike Hulme, Phil Jones
Tim,
I know about what Matthews has done. He did so without contacting Sarah or me. He uses a statistical emulation method that can never account for the full range of uncertainties. I would not trust it outside the calibration zone -- so I doubt that it can work well for (e.g.) stabilization cases. As far as I know it has not been peer reviewed. Furthermore, unless he has illegally got hold of the TAR version of the model, what he has done can only be an emulation of the SAR version.
Personally, I regard this as junk science (i.e., not science at all). Matthews is doing the community a considerable disservice.
Tom.
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame—he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about—it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people. Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work—must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
From: Phil Jones
To: Ben Santer
Subject: Re: See the link below
Date: Thu Mar 19 17:02:53 2009
Ben,
I don't know whether they even had a meeting yet - but I did say I would send something to their Chief Exec. In my 2 slides worth at Bethesda I will be showing London's UHI and the effect that it hasn't got any bigger since 1900. It's easy to do with 3 long time series. It is only one urban site (St James Park), but that is where the measurements are from. Heathrow has a bit of a UHI and it has go bigger. I'm having a dispute with the new editor of Weather. I've complained about him to the RMS Chief Exec. If I don't get him to back down, I won't be sending any more papers to any RMS journals and I'll be resigning from the RMS. The paper is about London and its UHI!
Cheers
Phil
On disputes over data and how to handle such disagreements:
From: "Michael E. Mann"
To: Tim Osborn
Subject: Re: reconstruction errors
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 11:18:24 -0400
Tim,
Attached are the calibration residual series for experiments based on available networks
back to:
AD 1000
AD 1400
AD 1600
I can't find the one for the network back to 1820! But basically, you'll see that the residuals are pretty red for the first 2 cases, and then not significantly red for the 3rd case--its even a bit better for the AD 1700 and 1820 cases, but I can't seem to dig them up.In any case, the incremental changes are modest after 1600--its pretty clear that key predictors drop out before AD 1600, hence the redness of the residuals, and the notably larger uncertainties farther back...
You only want to look at the first column (year) and second column (residual) of the files. I can't even remember what the other columns are!
Let me know if that helps. Thanks,
mike
p.s. I know I probably don't need to mention this, but just to insure absolutely clarify on this, I'm providing these for your own personal use, since you're a trusted colleague. So please don't pass this along to others without checking w/ me first. This is the sort of "dirty laundry" one doesn't want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things...
From: Ben Santer
To: Leopold Haimberger
Subject: Re: Update on response to Douglass et al., Dian, something like this?
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:07:03 -0800
Cc: Peter Thorne , Dian Seidel, Tom Wigley, Karl Taylor, Thomas R Karl, John Lanzante, Carl Mears, David C. Bader, Francis W. Zwiers, Frank Wentz, Melissa Free , Michael C. MacCracken, Phil Jones, Steve Sherwood, Steve Klein, Susan Solomon, Tim Osborn, Gavin Schmidt, James J. Hack
Dear Leo,
Thanks very much for your email. I can easily make the observations a bit more prominent in Figure 1. As you can see from today's (voluminous!) email traffic, I've received lots of helpful suggestions regarding improvements to the Figures. I'll try to produce revised versions of the Figures tomorrow. On the autocorrelation issue: The models have a much larger range of lag-1 autocorrelation coefficients (0.66 to 0.95 for T2LT, and 0.69 to 0.95 for T2) than the UAH or RSS data (which range from 0.87 to 0.89). I was concerned that if we used the model lag-1 autocorrelations to guide the choice of AR-1 parameter in the synthetic data analysis, Douglass and colleagues would have an easy opening for criticising us ("Aha! Santer et al. are using model results to guide them in their selection of the coefficients for their AR-1 model!") I felt that it was much more difficult for Douglass et al. to criticize what we've done if we used UAH data to dictate our choice of the AR-1 parameter and the "scaling factor" for the amplitude of the temporal variability. As you know, my personal preference would be to include in our response to Douglass et al. something like the Figure 4 that Peter has produced. While inclusion of a Figure 4 is not essential for the purpose of illuminating the statistical flaws in the Douglass et al. "consistency test", such a Figure would clearly show the (currently large) structural uncertainties in radiosonde-based estimates of the vertical profile of atmospheric temperature changes. I think this is an important point, particularly in view of the fact that Douglass et al. failed to discuss versions 1.3 and 1.4 of your RAOBCORE data - even though they had information from those datasets in their possession.
However, I fully agree with Tom's comment that we don't want to do anything to "steal the thunder" from ongoing efforts to improve sonde-based estimates of atmospheric temperature change, and to better quantify structural uncertainties in those estimates.Your group, together with the groups at the Hadley Centre, Yale, NOAA ARL and NOAA GFDL, deserve great credit for making significant progress on a difficult, time-consuming, yet important problem.
I guess the best solution is to leave this decision up to all of you (the radiosonde dataset developers). I'm perfectly happy to include a version of Figure 4 in our response to Douglass et al. If we do go with inclusion of a Figure 4, you, Peter, Dian, Melissa, Steve Sherwood and John should decide whether you feel comfortable providing radiosonde data for such a Figure. I will gladly abide by your decisions. As you note in your email, our use of a Figure 4 would not preclude a more detailed and thorough comparison of simulated and observed amplification in some later publication. Once again, thanks for all your help with this project, Leo.
With best regards,
Ben
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones
Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer
Phil,
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips—higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip". Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH—just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols. The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note—from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not)—but not really enough.
So ... why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.) This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I'd appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have.
Tom.
From: Gary Funkhouser
To: Keith Briffa
Subject: kyrgyzstan and siberian data
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 15:37:09 -0700
Keith,
Thanks for your consideration. Once I get a draft of the central and southern siberian data and talk to Stepan and Eugene I'll send it to you.
I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. It was pretty funny though - I told Malcolm what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating the response functions—he laughed and said that's what he thought at first also. The data's tempting but there's too much variation even within stands. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have—they just are what they are (that does sound Graybillian). I think I'll have to look for an option where I can let this little story go as it is. Not having seen the sites I can only speculate, but I'd be optimistic if someone could get back there and spend more time collecting samples, particularly at the upper elevations. Yeah, I doubt I'll be over your way anytime soon. Too bad, I'd like to get together with you and Ed for a beer or two. Probably someday though.
Cheers, Gary
Gary Funkhouser
Lab. of Tree-Ring Research
The University of Arizona
From: Michael Mann
To: Phil Jones
Subject: Re: Straight to the Point
Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 13:09:36 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: Keith Briffa, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Tim Osborn
Hi Phil,
SOrry that you have taken such a negative spin from this. I had hoped it was all resolved pretty amicably, and emphasized to Keith and Tim that I was being perhaps overly picky this time PRECISELY to avoid the misunderstanding that happened last time around w/ Science.
Trust that I'm certainly on board w/ you that we're all working towards a common goal. That is what is distressing about commentarys (yours from last year, and potentially, without us having had approprimate input, Keith and Tim's now) that appear to "divide and conquer". The skeptics happily took your commentary last year as reason to doubt our results! In fact, your piece was references in several commentaries (mostly on the WEB, not published) attacking our work. So THAT is what this is all about. It is in the NAME of the common effort we're all engaged in, that I have voiced concerns about language and details in this latest commentary--so as to avoid precisely that scenario. Please understand the above to be a complete and honest statement about the source of my concerns. It really doesn't have anything to do about who did what first, etc. I trust that history will give us all proper credit for what we're doing here.
The millennial-scale trend issue appears to be a source of contention. Malcolm can address the replication issue better than any of us--it's not a problem w/ our reconstruction. Furthermore, WE HAVE EXPLICITLY TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT THE LOSS OF LOW-FREQUENCY VARIANCE IN OUR ESTIMATES OF UNCERTAINTY. I don't know how many times I need to stress this. It is of fundamental importance in framing our conclusions. Our own analysis convinces me that things are already quite uncertain a millennium back in time. With regard to longer timescale variations, the evidence is all over the place. At EGS I saw some convincing evidence that many new paleo proxies indicate steadily decline at least over several millennia, and so do, in large part, the available long borehole estimates (though we should all take that w/ a good dose of NaCl). So I'm skeptical of estimates more than a millennium back in time until we have multiple proxies we can trust at that timescale, and can verify somehow the DC component of the estimates, or at least replicate them. This was my concern about the latest 2000 year recon that was shown. You are right, the Milankovitch forcing argument is ONLY A NULL HYPOTHESIS. I hope I haven't argued anything more than that. That our millennial scale trend, which we reasonably trust, and have some idea of the uncertainties in, is in line w/ that null hypothesis is information that cannot be ignored. That Kutzbach, Berger, and others are showing increasingly convincing model integrations over several millennia suggesting this, is more evidence.In the real word, anything *could* have happened. But lets not loose site of the appropriate null hypothesis here.
I hope the above clears things up somewhat. I'm sorry things have been construed in more negative light than I had ever intended. Call me anytime to discuss, here at the office (not sure how well our schedules overlap though).
Thanks, and sorry for the miscommunication here,
mike
_______________________________________________________________________
From: Phil Jones
To: Tom Wigley
Subject: Re: MBH
Date: Fri Oct 22 15:13:20 2004
Cc: Ben Santer
Tom,
Just got the Science attachments for the von Storch et al. paper for Tim and Keith, so I thought you might like to see them. I've just sent a reply to von Storch as he claims his model is a better representation of reality than MBH. How a model that is only given past forcing histories can be better than some proxy data is beyond me, but Hans seems to believe this. The ERA-40 report and JGR paper are relevant here. ERA-40 is not of climate quality. There are differences and trends with CRU data before the late 1970s and again around the mid-1960s that should include other variables that are calculated. It is so bad in the Antarctic that ERA-40 rejects most of the surface obs (because they get little weight) and they don't begin to get accepted until the late 1970s. Conclusion is that you can't consider ERA-40 for climate purposes. Maybe the next generation, with a considerable efforts in getting all the missing back data in and changes to weights given to surface data might mean the 3rd generation is better. I shouldn't rabbit on about this as I have to go home to drive with Ruth to Gatwick for our week in Florence. A lot of people criticise MBH and other papers Mike has been involved in, but how many people read them fully - or just read bits like the attached. The attached is a complete distortion of the facts. M&M are completely wrong in virtually everything they say or do. I have sent them countless data series that were used in the Jones/Mann Reviews of Geophysics papers. I got scant thanks from them for doing this—only an email saying I had some of the data series wrong, associated with the wrong year/decade.
I wasted a few hours checking what I'd done and got no thanks for pointing their mistake out
to them. If you think M&M are correct and believable then go to this web site
[1]http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/
It will take a while to get around these web pages and you've got to be a bit of nerd and know the jargon, but it lists all the mistakes McKittrick has made in various papers. I bet there isn't a link to this on his web site. The final attachment is a comment on a truly awful paper by McKittirck and Michaels. I can't find the original, but it's reference is in this. The paper didn't consider spatial autocorrelation at all. Fortunately a longer version of the paper did get rejected by IJC—it seems a few papers are rejected! Point I'm trying to make is you cannot trust anything that M&M write. MBH is as good a way of putting all the data together as others.We get similar results in the work in the Holocene in 1998 (Jones et al) and so does Tom Crowley in a paper in 1999. Keith's reconstruction is strikingly similar in his paper from JGR in 2001. Mike's may have slightly less variability on decadal scales than the others (especially cf Esper et al), but he is using a lot more data than the others. I reckon they are all biased a little to the summer and none are truly annual —I say all this in the Reviews of Geophysics paper!
Bottom line - their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility. Must got to Florence now. Back in Nov 1.
Cheers
Phil
From: Tom Wigley
To: Doug Martinson
Subject: Re: Your help, please?
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 10:07:42 -0600 (MDT)
Cc: Kevin Trenberth, Byron Boville, Grant Branstator, Jeff Kiehl, FP Bretherton, Ralph Cicerone, C. Covey, Tom Crowley, J Curry, pdadd@xxxx.xxx, Larry Gates, Lisa Graumlich, Dennis Hartmann, barafu@xxxx.xxx, Thomas Karl, Richard Lindzen, W. Timothy Liu, Joel Sloman, Jerry Marks, Robert Malone , Gerald Meehl, Berrien Moore, Dick Moritz, J. David Neelin, Reginald Newell, Gerald North, James J. O'Brien, W. R. Peltier, Raymond Pierrehumbert, V. Ramanathan, Dave Randall, Eugene M. Rasmusson, David Rind, Alan Cohn, njrosenberg@xxx.gov, Ed Sarachik, Michael E. Schlesinger, Edwin Schneider, Jagadish Shukla, Eric Smith, rsomervi@xxx.edu, Richard Turco, Duane Waliser, Mike Wallace, John Walsh, Wei-Chyung Wang, "P.D. Jones" , Edward Cook, Keith Briffa, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Tim Barnett, Jay Fein, Ben Santer ,
Dear Doug,
In response to Jay Fein's e-mail re den-cen, here are some points (which may merely echo where you are already).
(1) Why study den-cen? Reason is: improve understanding of climate system to aid in detection and prediction. You should read Ch. 8 (detection) of IPCC WGI SAR in this regard.
(2) How to study den-cen? Models and observed data are equally important. Models (coupled O/AGCMs) can only give the internal component of variability, instrumental and paleodata give internal-plus-external.
(3) How useful are paleodata?I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their product. A specific example is the ice core isotope record, which correlates very poorly with temperature on the annual to decadal timescale (and possibly also on the century timescale)---question, how do we ever demonstrate the usefulness or otherwise of ice core isotopes on this timescale?
There are other well known proxy data issues that need careful thought...
(a) Sedimentary records---dating. Are 14C-dated records of any value at all (unless wiggle matched)?
(b) Seasonal specificity---how useful is a proxy record that tells us about a single season (or only part of the year)?
(c) Climate variance explained by the proxy variable--close to zero for ice core isotopes, up to 50% for tree rings, somewhere in between for most other indicators. How valuable are such partially explained records in helping explain the past?
(d) Signal-to-noise problems---a key issue is, what role has external forcing had on climate over the past 10,000 years. There is a tendency to interpret observed changes as evidence of external forcing—usually unjustifiably. Few workers in the area realize that paleo interpretation has a detection aspect, just like interpreting the past 100+ years---only much more difficult. More work is needed on this.
(e) Frequency dependence of explained variance---the classic example here is tree rings, where it is exceedingly difficult to get out a credible low frequency (50+ year time scale) message. Work in this area could reap useful rewards.
(f) Coverage---what about den-cen data from the oceans? We need much more of this, especially in regions that might provide insights into mechanisms (like NADW changes).
(4) Causes. Here, ice cores are more valuable (CO2, CH4 and volcanic aerosol changes). But the main external candidate is solar, and more work is required to improve the "paleo" solar forcing record and to understand how the climate system responds both globally and regionally to solar forcing.
I hope these very hasty ramblings are helpful
Cheers,
Tom
P.S. I've added Ben Santer, Tim Barnett, Ed Cook, Keith Briffa, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley and Phil Jones to your mailing list.

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

2009-11-24T10:27:00.002-04:00

By James Delingpole

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.

Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too

2009-11-24T00:40:00.003-04:00

Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions

Nigel Lawson

Exactly a fortnight from today, the United Nations climate change conference opens in Copenhagen. Its purpose is (or was) clear: to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
Under Kyoto, all those developed nations that ratified the treaty (all, in practice, except the US) agreed to cut their carbon emissions to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The successor treaty, to be agreed at Copenhagen, was intended to secure a cut in global emissions, from the developed and developing world alike (and China has now overtaken even the US), of 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, leading to more or less total decarbonisation by the end of the century.
As Gordon Brown declared in his Guildhall speech only a week ago, Copenhagen must “forge a new international agreement ... [which] must contain the full range of commitments required: on emissions reductions by both developed and developing countries, on finance and on verification”.
This is a pretty tall order; and, needless to say, nothing of the sort will be agreed. Even if the Kyoto 5 per cent cut is achieved, it will be only because the developed world has effectively outsourced a large part of its emissions to countries, such as China and India, without Kyoto constraints. Not only is 50 per cent rather more severe than 5 per cent, but (except in the unlikely event of world industry migrating to Mars) a global target removes the escape route of outsourcing emissions.
Moreover there is a strong moral argument, too. The reason we use carbon-based energy is simply that it is far and away the cheapest source of energy, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable for us in the developed world. But in the developing world, there are still tens of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of preventable disease, malnutrition and premature death. So for the developing world, the overriding priority has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available form of energy: carbon-based energy.
Mr Brown’s Copenhagen objective will, happily, not be achieved. But the meeting will still be declared a great success. Politicians do not like being associated with failure, so they will make sure that whatever emerges from Copenhagen is declared a success, and promise to meet again next year. This will at least give our political leaders the time to get themselves off the hook.
The greatest error in the current conventional wisdom is that, if you accept the (present) majority scientific view that most of the modest global warming in the last quarter of the last century — about half a degree centigrade — was caused by man-made carbon emissions, then you must also accept that we have to decarbonise our economies.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I have no idea whether the majority scientific view (and it is far from a consensus) is correct. Certainly, it is curious that, whereas their models predicted an acceleration in global warming this century as the growth in emissions accelerated, so far this century there has been no further warming at all. But the current majority view may still be right.
Even if it is, however, that cannot determine the right policy choice. For a warmer climate brings benefits as well as disadvantages. Even if there is a net disadvantage, which is uncertain, it is far less than the economic cost (let alone the human cost) of decarbonisation. Moreover, the greatest single attribute of mankind is our capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. By adapting to any warming that may occur over the next century, we can pocket the benefits and greatly reduce the disadvantages, at a cost that is far less than the cost of global decarbonisation — even if that could be achieved.
Moreover, the scientific basis for global warming projections is now under scrutiny as never before. The principal source of these projections is produced by a small group of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), affiliated to the University of East Anglia.
Last week an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published in the blogosphere part of their internal e-mail traffic. And the CRU has conceded that the at least some of the published e-mails are genuine.
Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.
It is against all this background that I am announcing today the launch of a new high-powered all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org), which I hope may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy. At the very least, open and reasoned debate on this issue cannot be anything but healthy. The absence of debate between political parties at the present time makes our contribution all the more necessary.
Lord Lawson of Blaby was Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983-89. He will be speaking at an Institute of Economic Affairs debate on climate change at the Institute of Directors in London today

Settled Science?

2009-11-24T00:36:00.000-04:00

Computer hackers reveal corruption behind the global-warming "consensus."

By JAMES TARANTO

"Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach," the New York Times reports. "They added, however, that they could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic." But some scientists have confirmed that their emails were quoted accurately.
The files--which can be downloaded here--surely have not been fully plumbed. The ZIP archive weighs in at just under 62 megabytes, or more than 157 MB when uncompressed. But bits that have already been analyzed, as the Washington Post reports, "reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies":

In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes. . . .

Mann, who directs Penn State's Earth System Science Center, said the e-mails reflected the sort of "vigorous debate" researchers engage in before reaching scientific conclusions. "We shouldn't expect the sort of refined statements that scientists make when they're speaking in public," he said.

This is downright Orwellian. What the Post describes is not a vigorous debate but an attempt to suppress debate--to politicize the process of scientific inquiry so that it yields a predetermined result. This does not, in itself, prove the global warmists wrong. But it raises a glaring question: If they have the facts on their side, why do they need to resort to tactics of suppression and intimidation?
It is hard to see how this is anything less than a definitive refutation of the popular press's contention that global warmism is settled science--a contention that both the Times and the Post repeat in their articles on the revelations: "The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument," the Times claims. The Post leads its story by observing that "few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world's climate," and that "nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal." (As blogger Tom Maguire notes, this actually overstates even the IPCC's conclusions.)
The press's view on global warming rests on an appeal to authority: the consensus among scientists that it is real, dangerous and man-caused. But the authority of scientists rests on the integrity of the scientific process, and a "consensus" based on the suppression of alternative hypotheses is, quite simply, a fraudulent one.
Redefining 'Consensus'
Then again, maybe "consensus" doesn't mean what we thought it did. Consider the first three paragraphs of a New York Times article about economists' views of President Obama's so-called stimulus:

Now that unemployment has topped 10 percent, some liberal-leaning economists see confirmation of their warnings that the $787 billion stimulus package President Obama signed into law last February was way too small. The economy needs a second big infusion, they say.

No, some conservative-leaning economists counter, we were right: The package has been wasteful, ineffectual and even harmful to the extent that it adds to the nation's debt and crowds out private-sector borrowing.

These long-running arguments have flared now that the White House and Congressional leaders are talking about a new "jobs bill." But with roughly a quarter of the stimulus money out the door after nine months, the accumulation of hard data and real-life experience has allowed more dispassionate analysts to reach a consensus that the stimulus package, messy as it is, is working.

So there's one group of economists that thinks the stimulus was insufficient, another that thinks it was harmful, and a third that thinks it was both beneficial and sufficient. This is not normally what one would describe as a consensus.
But then, if you read that third paragraph carefully, you'll see that the Times is claiming a consensus only in the third group, i.e., "more dispassionate analysts," which seems to be defined as those who think the stimulus is working. It's a consensus by tautology! This approach may hold some promise for keeping global warmism alive.

W.H. hits back on climate critics

2009-11-24T00:35:00.000-04:00

: Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey: 'The Obama administration will be able to say to the world we are no longer going to preach temperance from a bar stoll. We are now ready to begin to make a commitment.' Photo: AP

It's been a bad few weeks for the Obama administration when it comes to climate change, as the White House has found itself trapped between a stalled Senate and constant hammering from world leaders on a lack of leadership on global warming.

On Monday, the administration hit back.

"It would be a mistake to conclude that the international community's failure to reach a final treaty in Copenhagen is due to a lack of domestic legislation in the United States," said a senior White House official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity.

The United States, said officials, plans to propose a near-term emissions reduction target as part of a "meaningful submission" the country will present at the talks.

Just what that meaningful submission will be remains unclear. But the White House on Monday was clearly reaching out trying to change the negative narrative on the climate debate, making senior administration officials available to insist the U.S. will head to the climate change conference in Copenhagen next month with a real plan.

Until now, the United States has resisted setting a specific goal for greenhouse gas reduction, arguing that the international negotiators cannot preempt Congress. And expectations for the talks have fallen over the past few months, a change some blame on the inability of Congress to commit to a concrete target.

"That strategy is untenable," Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, on an EU website, wrote of the failure of the United States and China to deliver specific targets. "It provides no global answer. It does not solve the threat of climate change."

But administration officials said that the White House heads into the talks with confidence.

"I think we go into Copenhagen with a very, very strong hand," said one of the officials. "We have done I think more than anyone could have expected us to do in a short time."

The targets, said Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey, will demonstrate U.S. leadership on the climate issue and encourage other nations to make firm commitments.

"The Obama administration will be able to say to the world we are no longer going to preach temperance from a bar stool. We are now ready to begin to make a commitment," he told POLITICO.

Administration officials rattled off a long list of achievements, like new fuel economy standards, a House cap and trade bill, and a joint statement on climate change issued by the United States and China last week.

But White House officials also acknowledged that the international negotiators would have a stronger position had Congress already passed a climate bill.

"We would have preferred that health care be done a long time ago, and we'd be having an energy debate today," the official said.

The goals presented at Copenhagen, said officials, will "take cognizance" of Capitol Hill proposals.

The House passed legislation that would cut greenhouse gases 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. A Senate bill that passed the Environmental and Public Works committee last month called for a 20 percent target, but that version of the bill is expected to be significantly changed by other committees.

U.S. negotiators are holding out hope that a bipartisan effort by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) will give them some momentum heading into the climate talks. The trio of senators is expected to release a framework laying out broad principles of their bipartisan proposal before the conference.

Aides and experts suggested that the White House could introduce a provisional target that would be subject to congressional approval.

But environmental advocates say the targets alone will not be enough to get a deal without presidential assurances that the legislation will eventually become law.

International negotiations learned the power of Congress after lawmakers failed to ratify the 1997 Kyoto climate treaty — an international climate treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions that had been negotiated but not finalized.

"They're looking for that assurance from the president himself that this is going to get done," said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Administration officials said Obama would decide over the next few days whether he would travel to the conference. More than 60 world leaders plan to appear at the conference. Obama will be in the region during the talks to receive his Nobel peace prices in Oslo on Dec. 10.

"Why should they negotiate with us when it's not really clear that this is a huge priority and we are going to put all our political might into making sure we ratify the treaty," said Keya Chatterjee, director of the United States Climate Change Program at the World Wildlife Fund. "It's really really dependent on whether they have the confidence on whether there will be some political support on ratifying the treaty."

Climate Skeptics See 'Smoking Gun' in Researchers' Leaked E-Mails

2009-11-23T01:25:00.000-04:00

NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response

Tropical Cyclone Anja spins over the Indian Ocean. A tempest is blownig over leaked climate change e-mails as well

Hackers broke into the servers at a prominent British climate research center and leaked years worth of e-mail messages onto the Web, including one with a reference to a plan to "hide the decline" in temperatures.

The Internet is abuzz about the leaked data from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (commonly called Hadley CRU), which has acknowledged the theft of 61MB of confidential data.

Climate change skeptics describe the leaked data as a "smoking gun," evidence of collusion among climatologists and manipulation of data to support the widely held view that climate change is caused by the actions of mankind. The authors of some of the e-mails, however, accuse the skeptics of taking the messages out of context, adding that the evidence still clearly shows a warming trend.

The files were reportedly released on a Russian file-serve by an anonymous poster calling himself "FOIA."

In an exclusive interview in Investigate magazine's TGIF Edition, Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley CRU, confirmed that the leaked data is real.

"It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago," he told the magazine, noting that the center has yet to contact the police about the data breach.

TGIF Edition asked Jones about the controversial "hide the decline" comment from an e-mail he wrote in 1999: "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 [sic] from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

He told the magazine that there was no intention to mislead, but he had "no idea" what he meant by those words.

"That was an e-mail from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?" he said.

"Mike" refers to Jones' colleague Michael Mann, who told the New York Times that the "trick" was simply a way of solving a data problem. In this case, the warming trend of the last century was detected in tree-ring samples only until 1960, but it continued in thermometer readings.

Jones' word choice was poor, Mann told the Times, but the calculations were "not something secret."

The Telegraph has posted some of the more scathing excerpts from these emails, which the newspaper suggests points to manipulation of evidence and private doubts about the reality of global warming, though the much of the scientific language in the e-mails is esoteric and hard to interpret.

Others suggest the comments are simply "scientists talking about science." In an interview with Wired, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, points out that "if you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists."

Still, one notable e-mail from the hacked files clearly describes how to squeeze dissenting scientists from the peer review process:

"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?"

Climategate: how the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science

2009-11-23T01:23:00.002-04:00

Here’s what the Times has had to say on the subject:

And the Independent:
(Yep. Nada).
And here’s how The New York Times (aka Pravda) reported it:

Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

(Yep. That’s right. It has only apparently caused a stir among ’skeptics’. Everyone else can rest easy. Nothing to see here.)
And here’s how the Guardian has reported it:

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world’s leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.
The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

(Oh. I get it. It’s just a routine data-theft story, not a scandal. And a chance to remind us of the CRU’s integrity and respectability. And – see below – to get in a snarky, ‘let’s have a dig at the deniers’ quote from Greenpeace).

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: “If you looked through any organisation’s emails from the last 10 years you’d find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world’s leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke.”

Here’s the Washington Post:

Hackers broke into the electronic files of one of the world’s foremost climate research centers this week and posted an array of e-mails in which prominent scientists engaged in a blunt discussion of global warming research and disparaged climate-change skeptics.
The skeptics have seized upon e-mails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain as evidence that scientific data have been rigged to make it appear as if humans are causing global warming. The researchers, however, say the e-mails have been taken out of context and merely reflect an honest exchange of ideas.

(Ah, so what the story is really about is ’skeptics’ causing trouble. Note how as high as the second par the researchers are allowed by the reporter to get in their insta-rebuttal, lest we get the impression that the scandal in any way reflects badly on them).
Here is the BBC:

E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.
A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.
An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.

(Ah yes, another routine data-theft story so dully reported – “the police had been informed, he added” – that you can’t even be bothered to reach the end to find out what information was stolen).
Meanwhile, the Climategate scandal (and I do apologise for calling it that, but that’s how the internet works: you need obvious, instantly memorable, event-specific search terms) continues to set the Blogosphere ablaze.
For links to all the latest updates on this, I recommend Marc Morano’s invaluable Climate Depot site.
And if you want to read those potentially incriminating emails in full, go to An Elegant Chaos org where they have all been posted in searchable form.
Like the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal, this is the gift that goes on giving. It won’t, unfortunately, derail Copenhagen (too many vested interests involved) or cause any of our many political parties to start talking sense on “Climate change”. But what it does demonstrate is the growing level of public scepticism towards Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. That’s why, for example, this story is the single most read item on today’s Telegraph website.
What it also demonstrates – as my dear chum Dan Hannan so frequently and rightly argues – is the growing power of the Blogosphere and the decreasing relevance of the Mainstream Media (MSM).
This is not altogether the MSM’s fault. Partly it is just the way of things that more and more readers prefer their news and opinion served up in snappier, less reverent, more digestible and instant for.
But in the case of “Climate Change”, the MSM has been caught with its trousers down. The reason it has been so ill-equipped to report on this scandal is because almost all of its Environmental Correspondents and Environmental Editors are parti pris members of the Climate-Fear Promotion lobby. Most of their contacts (and information sources) work for biased lobby groups like Greenpeace and the WWF, or conspicuously pro-AGW government departments and Quangos such as the Carbon Trust. How can they bring themselves to report on skullduggery at Hadley Centre when the scientists involved are the very ones whose work they have done most to champion and whose pro-AGW views they share?
As Upton Sinclair once said:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

So don’t expect this scandal to be written up in the MSM any time soon. But why would you want to anyway? It’s all here, where the free spirits and independent thinkers are, on the Blogosphere.
UPDATE: I particularly recommend Bishop Hill’s superb summary of some of the key points of the CRU correspondence.
Also, Andrew Bolt’s summary of the correspondence likely to be most damaging to the reputation – and career, we can but pray – of Professor Phil Jones, the head of the CRU.
And do check out Watts Up With That, whose traffic went through the roof yesterday, enabling to demonstrate scientifically that Hockey Stick is after all a genuine phenomenon – and not merely a figment of Michael Mann’s overactive imagination.

In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes

2009-11-23T01:08:00.002-04:00

Stolen e-mails reveal venomous feelings toward skeptics

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 22, 2009

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.
While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world's climate -- nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal -- public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.
In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes.
"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," Jones replies.
Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who comes under fire in the e-mails, said these same academics repeatedly criticized him for not having published more peer-reviewed papers.
"There's an egregious problem here, their intimidation of journal editors," he said. "They're saying, 'If you print anything by this group, we won't send you any papers.' "
Mann, who directs Penn State's Earth System Science Center, said the e-mails reflected the sort of "vigorous debate" researchers engage in before reaching scientific conclusions. "We shouldn't expect the sort of refined statements that scientists make when they're speaking in public," he said.
Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute who has questioned whether climate change is human-caused, blogged that the e-mails have "the makings of a very big" scandal. "Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research," he added.
The story of the hacking has ranked among the most popular on Web sites ranging from The Washington Post's to that of London's Daily Telegraph. And it has spurred a flood of e-mails from climate skeptics to U.S. news organizations, some likening the disclosure to the release of the Pentagon Papers during Vietnam.
Kevin Trenberth, who heads the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and wrote some of the pirated e-mails, said it is the implications rather than the content of climate research that make some people uncomfortable.
"It is incontrovertible" that the world is warming as a result of human actions, Trenberth said. "The question to me is what to do."
"It's certainly a legitimate question," he added. "Unfortunately one of the side effects of this is the messengers get attacked."
In his new book, "Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth's Climate," Stanford University climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider details the intense debate over warming, arguing that it has helped slow the nation's public policy response.
"I've been here on the ground, in the trenches, for my entire career," writes Schneider, who was copied on one of the controversial e-mails. "I'm still at it, and the battle, while looking more winnable these days, is still not a done deal."