Posts Tagged ‘global warming’

Hundreds die as cold wave in Europe provides a taste of what a little ice age could do

February 3, 2012

As Europe freezes in Siberian weather and people die it is not so difficult to imagine what life would be like in the throes of a Little Ice Age. Humans have endured and survived during the ice ages but have only developed and thrived and expanded when the Earth goes through its  interglacial periods.

It is global cooling and the potential for a little ice age that poses the real threat to humans. Not some fantasy about anthropogenic global warming. The demonisation of carbon dioxide in the assumed – but unproven – belief that it contributes to global warming will turn out to be one of the most wasteful contentions of modern science.

If only it was that easy to change the climate!

NoTricksZone reports:

Germany’s no. 1 daily Bild (by circulation numbers) reports on the Killer Cold now paralyzing Europe and Asia, and calls it the worst in 25 years. The cold has hit Eastern Europe especially hard, with temperatures plummeting to -30°C throughout the Ukraine and Poland. So far the cold has claimed 139 lives, with 3 in Germany.

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No need to panic about global warming

January 28, 2012

This piece appeared in the WSJ signed by 16 scientists:

No need to panic about global warming

There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.

Editor’s Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article: 

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed. …. 

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Climategate 2.0: What’s in the encrypted 200,000 emails?

December 6, 2011

While I have been travelling over the last week, the IPCC Durban circus has been performing to dwindling audiences.

The Climategate 1 and 2 emails that have been released so far (about 1,000 + 5,000) are focused mainly on a 3-way nexus between a group of rather mediocre scientists, a few willing (and gullible) reporters and some of the bureaucrats/politicians who have seized on the advantages of fear-mongering.

The mediocrity of the so-called climate scientists is palpable. Michael Mann leaves out data whwnever he feels like it, Phil Jones can’t fathom the intricacies of an Excel table,  Tom Wigley (appropriate name) tries to get the PhD’s of his opponents retracted, etc …….. . And all for “The Cause”.

We have seen the blatant lobbying activities of Harrabin and Revkin undermine the reputation of the BBC and the New York Times. At least George Monbiot does not pretend to be anything other than a lobbyist. Harrabin’s pompous defence of his blinkered view is particularly nauseating.

Now we find that the IPCC itself was not averse to falsifying data when it felt the message needed strengthening.

The Global warming fraternity have been busy defending themselves, denying that what they have been engaged in has been bad science or bad journalism. But the politicians and bureaucrats have escaped scrutiny — at least so far.

But there are 200,000 further emails waiting to be un-encrypted by the release of a decrypting phrase  (the emails themselves have already been released). And some bureaucrats, some IPCC functionaries, some carbon trading entrepreneurs  and some amoral, fear-mongering politicians have to wait their turn.

But they will probably not have to wait very long!!!!

“the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are” – Alex Kirby BBC environmental correspondent

November 24, 2011

As if the lopsided reporting by Roger Harrabin and Richard Black was not bad enough, the email exchange between Phil Jones  and Alex Kirby of the BBC  puts the BBC’s “impartiality” about global warming firmly in the dock.

Incidentally Kirby’s publicity blurb has this to say about him:

Alex has no scientific education, and is convinced that the widespread distrust and misunderstanding of scientists in industrial societies is a threat to human development.

Alex Kirby

WUWT:

Climategate 2.0 email 4894.txt shows just what Alex Kirby of BBC thinks of climate skeptics as he conveys it to Dr. Phil Jones. Clearly, there an incestuous relationship between climate science and the BBC.

date: Wed Dec  8 08:25:30 2004
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.xx.xx>
subject: RE: something on new online.
to: “Alex Kirby” <alex.kirby@bbc.xxx.xx> 

At 17:27 07/12/2004, you wrote: 

Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to
spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can
well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we
are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any
coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and
being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an
expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them
say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it
clear that we think they are talking through their hats.
—–Original Message—–

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

Another gem in the comments by FrancisT reveals that the BBC was in bed with the global warming fanatics but note that Kirby was considered to be not too expensive(!!??)

2011 Email #2403 (1)

Regarding ECF and a media person. You could try Alex Kirby if Roger Harrabin is not free. Joe Smith will have other contacts. The other possibility is for a European link, possibly via a German magazine. Finally, if we try, we could penetrate The Economist as I have contacts there.
2011 Email #3935 (1)

1. Media involvement. I would suggest Roger Harrabin might be a better (alternate?) invitee to Alex Kirby. Simon Torok has recently had contact with him about media coverage of Jo’berg and he is also on the Advisory Board of Tyndall.
2011 Email #4028 (1)

>> > > phone
>> > > > chat with Alex Kirby, BBC, some time before the conference, where we
>> may

2011 Email #4655 (1)

For more mainstream people, I agree that Alex Kirby would make a good job
and is probably first choice. He would certainly come cheaper than Humphreys

Searchable data base for Climategate 2 emails already online

November 23, 2011

I am not quite sure who put this together but its appearance within about 24 hours of the original data dump on a Russian server is pretty impressive.

Climategate 2 | FOIA 2011 Searchable Database

ReadMe:

This website is provided as a research resource for mining the recently leaked climate communications. Every effort has been made to redact personal contact information such as email addresses and telephone numbers. The redaction algorithms are currently tuned to be quite stringent, and they will inadvertantly obfuscate other details as well. We will continue to tune the software to improve the quality of the results.

This database was assembled in a very short space of time, and at present only provides the most rudimentary tools for exploring this vast trove of material. We will be improving the quality of the search tools and adding further metadata to the database over the course of the next few weeks.

The investigative capabilities of the on-line community when engaged is quite formidable (as I have remarked on earlier).

Roger Harrabin, BBC’s in-house global warming lobbyist has been at it since 1997

November 23, 2011
BBC journalist Roger Harrabin

Image via Wikipedia

I had posted earlier about the revelations that the BBC’s Roger Harrabin (with the help of his pal Joe Smith) had been acting as a mole within the BBC to lobby on behalf of the global warming orthodoxy in which he had a vested interest.

Well, it would seem that he gave up being an objective journalist and became a lobbyist some time ago. He has been lobbying hard since at least 1997. The CIES web page from August 18th, 2000:

Media & Environment Programme


Developed by Dr Joe Smith and Roger Harrabin (BBC Today Programme), the programme consists of a series of indepth seminars designed to broaden and deepen media thinking about global environmental change and sustainable development issues and to improve the academic and policy communities’ understanding of the setting and constraints of media reporting.

Programme co-directors:
Dr Joe Smith
Mr Roger Harrabin

Programme contact details:
Email: jhs125@cam.ac.uk or tel: +44 (0)1223 740135

Details of previous seminars:

The Changing Environmental Agenda – BBC Editors (1997)

Climate Change Meeting – senior editors (1997)

Reporting Sustainable Development:
The Challenge to the Media – BBC Editors (1997)

The Kyoto Outcome: Implications for UK Business (1997)

Reporting Sustainable Development:
The Challenge to the Media – BBC Editor’s Seminar (1998)

Here we go again – Climategate 2.0

November 22, 2011

Update 2100 CET: This has finally reached the Nature News Blog and the bits they quote are telling – especially in the light of the IPCC having to acknowledge that for the next few decades the global warming signal may be much smaller than the signals due to natural climate variation.

“I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present [climate] reconstructions,” one researcher is quoted as having allegedly remarked.

Another remark reads: “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably.

Indeed!

===================================

The Global Warming Climate Change scam.

When it reads like a scam, talks like a scam and sings like a scam — it is most definitely a scam!

From the Air Vent:

It happened again.I woke up to find a link from FOIA.org on a thread.   Thousands of emails unlocked with 220,000 more hidden behind a password.  Despite the smaller size of the Air Vent due to my lack of time, there were twenty five downloads before I saw it once.  As before, there are some  very nice quotes and clarifications from the consensus.  Below is a guest post in the form of a readme file from the FOIA.org group. – Jeff

/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”

“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.

“Poverty is a death sentence.”

“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”

Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.

This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches.  A few
remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets.

The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons.  We are not planning
to publicly release the passphrase.

We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics such
as…

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BBC has been just a lobby group for global warming since 2006

November 20, 2011
BBC journalist Roger Harrabin

The less than objective “reporting” on global warming from the BBC was always fairly obvious but the role of Roger Harrabin, one of its senior environmental correspondents in driving that policy is now becoming clear. Christopher Booker has a long article in The Telegraph:

The BBC’s hidden ‘warmist’ agenda is rapidly unravelling 

Since 2006, the BBC has relentlessly promoted the global warming orthodoxy as a pressure group in its own right.

The story of the BBC’s bias on global warming gets ever murkier. Last week there was quite a stir over a new report for the BBC Trust which criticised several programmes for having been improperly funded or sponsored by outside bodies. One, for instance, lauded the work of Envirotrade, a Mauritius-based firm cashing in on the global warming scare by selling “carbon offsets”, which it turned out had given the BBC money to make the programme. ……

….

The irony is, however, that just as the BBC adopted its new hard line on climate change, in the real world the story was beginning to shift. Ever more searching questions have come to be asked about the supposed “consensus” on man-made warming, and the BBC’s coverage has come to look ever more one-sidedly absurd.

Last week, even Richard Black, another BBC proselytiser for man-made warming, was gloomily having to reveal the conclusion of a new IPCC report: that, over the next few decades, “climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variabilty”. In plain English, that means the great scare story is over. What a shame. But at what a price. …

Meanwhile the Daily Mail carries the following headline:

(Update! The Daily Mail article has been removed but has been reported here).

(Update 2! The Daily Mail article has now been restored)

BBC’s Mr Climate Change accepted £15,000 in grants from university rocked by global warning scandal

Alarmism is lucrative.

The Sun – not man – heats the earth

October 17, 2011

It would seem obvious – but it has not been – and it is still heresy for the AGW orthodoxy to entertain the notion that carbon dioxide effects are insignificant in relation to solar effects on climate.

A new paper in Energy & Environment, Vol. 22, No. 6 (Sept. 2011)

Long-Term Instrumental and Reconstructed Temperature Records Contradict Anthropogenic Global Warming

by Horst-Joachim LüdeckeEIKE, European Institute for Climate and Energy, PO.Box 11011, 07722 Jena, GERMANY

PDF 

There is no evidence that the temperature changes of the second half of the 20th Century are in any way extraordinary. No impact of the rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere can be found in the data.

One more nail in the AGW coffin.

Abstract:Monthly instrumental temperature records from 5 stations in the northern hemisphere are analyzed, each of which is local and over 200 years in length, as well as two reconstructed long-range yearly records – from a stalagmite and from tree rings that are about 2000 years long. In the instrumental records, the steepest 100-year temperature fall happened in the 19th century and the steepest rise in the 20th century, both events being of about the same magnitude. Evaluation by the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) yields Hurst exponents that are in good agreement with the literature. DFA, Monte Carlo simulations, and synthetic records reveal that both 100-year events were caused by external trends. In contrast to this, the reconstructed records show stronger 100-year rises and falls as quite common during the last 2000 years. These results contradict the hypothesis of an unusual (anthropogenic) global warming during the 20th century. As a hypothesis, the sun’s magnetic field, which is correlated with sunspot numbers, is put forward as an explanation. The long-term low-frequency fluctuations in sunspot numbers are not detectable by the DFA in the monthly instrumental records, resulting in the common low Hurst exponents. The same does not hold true for the 2000-year-long reconstructed records, which explains both their higher Hurst exponents and the higher probabilities of strong 100-year temperature fluctuations. A long-term synthetic record that embodies the reconstructed sunspot number fluctuations includes the different Hurst exponents of both the instrumental and the reconstructed records and, therefore, corroborates the conjecture.

This paper supports the results published by Prof. Sami Solanki back in 2004 and reported in Science Daily here:

Sami K. Solanki, Natalie A. Krivova Can solar variability explain solar warming since 1970? Journal of Geophysical Research,108, doi 10.1029/2002JA009753 (2003)

The authors  concluded  then that “based on a statistical study of earlier periods of increased solar activity, the researchers predict that the current level of high solar activity will probably continue only for a few more decades”.

Solar science re-emerging? and about time too!

October 12, 2011

It has always struck me as incredibly arrogant and amazingly stupid that the climate “scientists” have ignored the effects of the sun for 2 decades – presumably because:

  1. they did not understand the sun,
  2. doomsday scenarios were better for getting funding,
  3. they had such an overweening conviction about man made effects, and
  4. they actually believed their computer models were the greatest thing since sliced bread!
Perhaps that is changing. As Paul Hudson signs off his column on the BBC Weather blog:
This is an exciting time for solar physics, and its role in climate. As one leading climate scientist told me last month, it’s a subject that is now no longer taboo. And about time, too.
Related: New Scientist permits the sun to join the climate club