QandO

Archive for the ‘Environment’ Category

Did you happen to catch the Audi commercial during “The Big Game” last night (btw, congrats Saints)?  It is, I suppose, an attempt at humor.  And it’s a good commercial, I guess, because I remember which product it was pushing.   But in reality I found it to be a bit scary.  Why?  Because it foretells something which I would hope is unlikely, but – at least at a state level – I believe couldbe entirely possible in some places.  Don’t forget, California was talking about drive-by thermostat monitoring and restricting car colors that could be sold in the state.   So this isn’t at all beyond the possible at some future date in a state near you:

~McQ

The population of Britain is apparently finally catching on to the scam that’s been perpetrated by the man-made global warming crowd, and skepticism is thankfully on the rise:

“It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period,” Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News.

“The British public are sceptical about man’s contribution to climate change – and becoming more so,” he added.

“More people are now doubters than firm believers.”

A definite “deficit of trust” developing about the “science” of global warming – particularly that trying to hang the blame on the activities of man.

And in more “deficit of trust” news, India has declared it will form it’s own scientific panel to study climate since it finds the IPCC unreliable:

The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.

[...]

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

I think India picks up the fatal problem with the current “science” – it’s more of a form of evangelism than it is real science, and “facts” are manipulated (or made up) to fit.

The Dutch government is also “not amused”. The Dutch environment minister, Jaqueline Cramer, has called for a complete investigation of the 2007 IPCC report. A Dutch magazine uncovered the fact that it incorrectly states 55 percent of the country lies below sea level:

When Cramer heard of that blunder she wrote a letter to the IPCC, saying she was “not amused” there were mistakes in the scientific report she bases the Dutch environmental policies on. Now she is confronted with errors in the data about her own country. “This can’t happen again,” the minister told reporters in The Hague on Wednesday. “The public trust in science and politics has been badly damaged.”

Ya think?

Cramer puts her finger on the problem governments are now confronting given the errors, some relatively trivial and some profound, in the IPCC’s report. When will that sort of concern surface here? As recently as the SOTU, President Obama still holds to the alarmist line that the “science is overwhelming” when, in fact, the “science” is being overwhelmed by revelations of data manipulation, fraud and made-up “facts”.

~McQ

The fact that a former railroad engineer has been previously touted as the “world’s leading climate scientist” pretty much sums this whole IPCC/AGW scam in a nutshell.

Of course I’m talking about Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the man directly responsible for ensuring the scientific credibility of that report. As we’re learning it has as much scientific credibility as an Al Gore movie.

There are now calls for him to step down as the chair of that panel. The latest has come from John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , who says Pachauri should have acted to correct the record immediately after learning that the Himalayan glacier claim contained in the IPCC report had been refuted – even if its correction would have caused embarrassment in Copenhagen.

But of course he didn’t – which brings us to the “what did he know and when did he know it” question.

A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported.

The IPCC issued a correction and apology on January 20, three days after the error had made global headlines. Mr Sauven said: “Mistakes will always be made but it’s how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said ‘we made a mistake’. It’s in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn’t.”

Sauven’s absolutely correct in as far as his assertion goes. But this wasn’t a mistake as Sauven claims. At the point Pachauri learned this claim was untrue and chose not to reveal that, it became fraud. Additionally, a “mistake” is something altogether different than the deliberate inclusion of data which has no basis in scientific fact. Pachauri and those on the panel who included this report knew it had no accepted research to back it and that it had not been peer reviewed. And, of course, the glaciers aren’t the only such problem that’s been found in the IPCC report. We now know the Amazon rain forest claim in the report has been refuted as well and have learned that it’s basis was a paper by the WWF on logging – not global warming – destroying up to 40% of the area.

Sauven’s real concern here is to attempt to save the scientific credibility of both the report and the panel. It’s not going to happen. It is becoming common knowledge that the base data used by the panel to formulate its conclusions are, at best, questionable (CRU). And now we have two examples of decidedly unscientific work being included with the implicit claim that it was researched, peer reviewed and the findings conclusive. They were not. How much more remains to be found that further make the report a scientific laughing stock

But while Sauven’s attempt may not bear the fruit he’d like, it would be nice, just once, to see some public official held accountable for the mess he or she has made. But then, we’re talking about the UN here – the same organization which recently shut down it’s own internal ethics and corruption organization because it was finding too many problems in both areas. Pachauri is probably safe to continue in his position for as long as he desires.

Dr Pachauri did not return calls yesterday but he told Indian television at the weekend that he believed attacks on him were being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits because of actions against climate change recommended by the IPCC.He added: “My credibility has been established because I was re-elected chairman in 2008 by all the countries of the world. They must have been satisfied with what I did in terms of the fourth assessment report [published in 2007] because they have given me the mandate of completing the fifth assessment report [to be released over 2013 and 2014] which I intend doing.”

Of course, his re-election took place well before the revelations about glaciers and rainforests (and while he can’t be held responsible for the temperature fiasco, before that as well). If he remains in his position and produces the next edition of the report, it’s scientific credibility will immediately be called into question before the first paragraph is read.

If the UN wants to have its next attempt at cobbling together a narrative useful for demanding the redistribution of global wealth outlining the problems of man-made global warming, it had best can Pachauri.

~McQ

Another day, another revelation of fudged numbers in the so-called “settled science” of man-made global warming.  The Guardian has a piece about Phil Jones and what appears to be made-up data about temperatures in China.  You can read it here.

But Andrew Bolt has the bigger story that is strarting to finally emerge. That is how complicit the media – to include the Guardian – have been in promoting the alarmist screed over the years.

The only real things that’s changed now is the media’s willingness to see the fraud and fiddling that was always part of the great global warming scam. To finally see the fraud and fiddling that bloggers have written about for years.

Indeed. Now that there’s blood in the water, they’re interested (well at least the UK media is) in the story and the fraud. But:

For nearly three years, mathematician Douglas Keenan has campaigned to get the University of East Anglia, the University of Albany, the IPCC and the media to accept that a key piece of evidence behind the IPCC’s claims that the world was warming was based on a study that was wrong, if not outright fraudulent. Keenan described not just the tricking up of results to hide the urban heat island effect, but the disgraceful efforts by climate scientists and University of Albany administrators to hush up the scandal.

And, for three years Keenan was ignored by the media which showed very little skepticism when it came to alarmist claims.  Instead, they kept promoting the alarmist agenda until it could no longer be supported and only then, when confronted by factual evidence that couldn’t be waved away, did they finally decide to look into the growing scandal.

But now there’s a great change. There is now a race on to uncover the next big IPCC scandal, and I doubt the great climate change scare can survive. The papers will, of course, take the credit.

Well, they’ll certainly try. But there are years of blog archives which are available to point out where the credit really goes for helping to expose one of the most massive “scientific” frauds ever perpetrated. And it isn’t “the papers”.

~McQ

It started as a trickle and is now turning into a flood.  More claims found in the “bible of the alarmists”, the UN’s 2007 IPCC report, have been found to be false.

The two latest have to do with extreme weather increases and the disappearance of the Amazon rain forest.

The IPCC 2007 report claimed that global warming was leading to an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Like its claims about the glaciers, this was also based on an unpublished report which had not been subject to scientific scrutiny — indeed several experts warned the IPCC not to rely on it.

The author, who didn’t actually finish his work until a year after the IPCC had used his research, has now repudiated what he sees has its misuse of his work.

His conclusion: “There is insufficient evidence to claim a statistical link between global warming and catastrophe loss.”

Yet it was because of this — now unproved — link that the British government signed up to a $100 billion transfer from rich to poor countries to help them cope with a supposed increase in floods and hurricanes.

Peer review? Obviously impossible since the work hadn’t even been finished by the time the IPCC report was published. And much the same has been found concerning the IPCC claim that 40% of the Amazonian forests were at risk from global warming and would likely be replaced by “tropical savannas” if temperatures continued to rise.

This claim is backed up by a scientific-looking reference but on closer investigation turns out to be yet another non-peer reviewed piece of work from the WWF. Indeed the two authors are not even scientists or specialists on the Amazon: one is an Australian policy analyst, the other a freelance journalist for the Guardian and a green activist.

The WWF has yet to provide any scientific evidence that 40% of the Amazon is threatened by climate change — as opposed to the relentless work of loggers and expansion of farms.

What was that question that alarmists like to ask about the IPCC report? Oh, yeah – “how can 2,500 scientists be wrong?” Here’s how – take unfinished research, fudged data and un-peer reviewed work and publish it claiming it is none of those things, that’s how.

The good news?

The sceptics may be about to get their first scalp. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman often wrongly described in the media as the world’s leading climate scientist (he’s actually a railway engineer), at first attacked those who questioned the IPCC’s alarming glacier prediction as “arrogant” and believers in “voodoo science”.

He’s since had to retract the prediction but can’t quite manage an apology — and is now under mounting pressure in his Indian homeland to resign.

And resign he should – the IPCC report, for which he was responsible, seems to be a pack of lies promulgated to advance a political agenda designed to loot rich countries and transfer the wealth to poorer countries under the auspices of “science”. He and that group have, instead, tarnished the reputation of science and set it back at least 50 years. It’s time for a little accountability in this world. Pachauri should resign at a minimum and, if a way can be figured out to do it, brought up on charges of conspiracy to defraud.

~McQ

For those that have chosen to make man-made global warming a form of religion this might come as disappointing news. Americans just don’t really care that much about it. In fact, since it was first measured by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in January of 2007, it has slipped a full 10 points and is now listed as dead last on the people’s priority list.

Dead last among 21 priorities

Global warming is simply not a priority except among Democrats. And even among them it is a minority position – only 43% see it as a top priority while only 11% of Republicans and 25% of independents see it as such.

Is it because they just aren’t buying the hype anymore and don’t believe it is really an urgent problem or is it because other are indeed more urgent problems? As I pointed out previously, since Pew has been tracking it in 2007, it has always been among the lowest of priorities with 38%. It has declined even more each and every year since.

There’s a lesson for the cap-and-traders there who would use global warming as a reason to enact the carbon taxing scheme designed to create a revenue stream for government out of thin air.

Global warming ranks lower among the public than trade policy – which I’m sure is followed with interest and understanding by the masses.  Politicians aren’t dumb – well not completely.  They’ll see that list and figure out what is below the 49 to 50% level and shy away from that for the time being.  That means immigration, tax cuts, financial regulation, the environment and global warming are going to find convenient back burners on which to sit.  Or should.

As an aside,  just because the public isn’t clamoring for tax cuts, it should be clear to all, given this chart, that spending can  not go on as scheduled.  Nope – deficit reduction ranks up there in the 60% range.  No tax cuts?  Cut spending then – big time.  Not piddling little 15 to 25 billion a year “freezes” – cut spending.  Pick a percentage and do it. 3% a year, across the board, for 10 years.  Budget for it.

That’s about the only way the economy will get moving. Government has got to quit sucking up all the available credit for these nonsense projects politicians like to claim will “create jobs”.    If those who think global warming is an important priority want to see it addressed at all, they’d better find a way to satisfy the rest of the country that the other 20 priorities have been successfully addressed.

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

[HT: looker]

~McQ

More information about the now discredited Himalayan glacier claim:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

As is obvious the so-called “science” was nothing more than concocted tripe used strictly for political purposes. And the fact that it was included, without peer review and never double checked raises doubts about the scientific nature of the IPCC report in toto. Lal’s admission is incredible. The fact that it was never further checked by those who put their reputations on the line by signing the IPCC document is equally as incredible.

As we skeptics have been saying since the beginning, this is as much about a political agenda as it is about science, and in the last few months, the science has been found to be severely wanting. This is simply the latest in a long line of credibility destroying revelations which should have now made every thinking person out there a skeptic when it comes to the “science” of AGW.

~McQ

This gets worse and worse – or better and better, depending on which side of the man-made global warming scenario you come down on.  This time it is the Himalayan glaciers:

A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.

Yet it found its way into a science journal, and later was included in the IPCC’s 2007 report as an alleged scientific finding? How many scientists signed that report? And why, now that the CRU and NASA’s GISS data (the basis for the AGW hypothesis) has been called into question and we find the glacier “scientific fact” was based on speculation, not research, should we ever take anything they say seriously?

This is an excellent example of the worth of anything called “scientific consensus”. Cherry-picked and manipulated data along with claims based in pure speculation.

That’s science? That’s what we should base life-changing political policies on?

AGW is dead. I just wonder how long it will take politicians and the religious “environmental” zealots to finally realize that?

~McQ

After the scandal concerning the CRU at the University of East Anglia, this may be the sound of the second shoe dropping.

Data from the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City, both associated with the US Government and the UN’s IPCC, have come under fire from two researchers. Programmer E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologis Joseph D’Aleo have combed through the data and the programming from which conclusions were made about man-made global warming and claim the data used was both cherry-picked and manipulated to produce findings that supported the hypothesis that man was responsible for climate change.

For E. Michael Smith this project was quite a test of his computer programming skills. “Opening, unraveling and understanding what is happening in a complex FORTRAN computer code, with 20 years of age and change in it, is a difficult and grueling task,” he says, “and the deeper I dug the more amazing the details revealed. When doing a benchmark test of the program, I found patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked like dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations.” Smith says after awhile, it became clear this was not a random strange pattern he was finding, but a well designed and orchestrated manipulation process. “The more I looked, the more I found patterns of deletion that could not be accidental. Thermometers moved from cold mountains to warm beaches; from Siberian Arctic to more southerly locations and from pristine rural locations to jet airport tarmacs. The last remaining Arctic thermometer in Canada is in a place called ‘The Garden Spot of the Arctic,’ always moving away from the cold and toward the heat. I could not believe it was so blatant and it clearly looked like it was in support of an agenda,” Smith says.

Here are the numbers behind the startling findings of the new research paper. The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures has been reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 in the most recent years. Still, more stations are dropped out in related programs and in the final NASA/GIStemp data file, it drops to about 1,000. That leaves much of the world unaccounted for,” says Joseph D’Aleo of ICECAP.us and SPPI.org, who has released a research study of the global temperature pattern today. “Think of it this way,” he continues, “if Minneapolis and other northern cities suddenly disappeared but Kansas City and St. Louis were still available, would you think an average of Kansas City and St. Louis would provide an accurate replacement for Minneapolis and expect to use that to determine how Minneapolis’ temperature has changed with any hope of accuracy?”

E. Michael Smith pointed out that the November 2009 “anomaly map” from GISS shows a very hot Bolivia, which is covered by high mountains. “One small problem: there have been no temperatures recorded in the NCDC data set for Bolivia since 1990. NASA/GISS have to fill in or make up the numbers from up to 1200km away. This is on the beach in Peru or in the Amazon jungle,” he said.

Given these revelations, and assuming they’re accurate, it calls into question the entire AGW hypothesis since the supporting data is apparently invalid. I have to wonder, other than the sound of crickets, what reaction Al Gore and the rest of the warmist cabal will have to say about this?

~McQ

Probably not. But the probability that the cold weather the world is experiencing might be part of a multi-decadal oscillation (MDO) and a natural cyclical occurrence puts a real dent in the so-called “science” of man-made global warming.

I found it interesting that over the weekend, the New York Times went to great lengths to explain that what was happening wasn’t a “global” event, but instead the product of an “Arctic Oscillation” which has planted a large high pressure cell over England and has diverted the jet stream south of England opening the doors for this arctic blast. That from the paper that will take two hot days in August and blame them on AGW. Says the NYT:

In most years over the past few decades, the opposite has been true: there has been lower-than-average pressure over the Arctic, and higher-than-average pressure over the mid-latitudes — the middle of which cuts through Maine, across the Great Lakes and on to Oregon.

That pattern allows the jet stream to blow unimpeded from west to east and keeps the cold Arctic air largely north of the United States. The result tends to be warmer temperatures across much of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains.

No one is quite sure what drives these flip-flops in air pressure.

Actually that’s not true. In fact many climate scientists have a pretty good idea. MDO’s.

On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.

Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.

As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).

For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.

But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.

‘They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Note the point about the temperature of water.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

Among the “they” saying that is Professor Mojib Latif and a research crew at the prestigious Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University. Latif is also a member of the IPCC. He and his research team have “developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.”

‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

‘They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’

The MDO cycles are pretty obvious for those who will look:

Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.

Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.

As mentioned in the article, in 1922 the Washington Post noted that Greenland’s glaciers were disappearing and that arctic ice was melting – exactly the same phenomenon we’ve experienced as a result of what these scientists say are the MDOs. And Latif is now convinced that the temperature, as reflected by cooling deep in the oceans, is now headed down as a new MDO takes effect. Some of the signs are quite convincing – such as the depth and length of this “cold snap”. Al Gore’s prediction that the arctic ice pack would disappear also seems in jeopardy:

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007…

Professor Tsonis, like Latif, is hardly a denier, but he also isn’t impressed with the computer models which have driven the AGW claims:

‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.

‘These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’

I couldn’t agree more. You remember the Warmergate emails in which the AGW “scientists” wished for a good explanation for why the earth seems to be cooling? Well this is most likely it – and, much to their chagrin, CO2 and man have little if anything to do with it.

And because of that, it will most likely be studiously ignored by the “settled science” Copenhagen crowd.

~McQ