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Old November 29th, 2009 #61
The Bobster
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http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/...and_the_f.html

November 29, 2009
Global Warming Fraud and the Future of Science
By J.R. Dunn

The East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) revelations come as no real surprise to anyone who has closely followed the global-warming saga. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) thesis, to give it its semi-official name, is no stranger to fraud. It is no real exaggeration to state that it was fertilized with fraud, marinated in fraud, stewed in fraud, and at last served up to the world as prime, grade-A fraud with nice side orders of fakery and disingenuousness. Damning as they may be, the CRU e-mails are merely the climactic element in an exhaustively long line.

A short tour of previous AGW highlights includes:

The Y2K Glitch. This episode involved the NASA/GISS team led by James Hansen, possibly the most fanatical and unrelenting of all warmists -- a man who makes Al Gore look like a skeptic. (Among other things, Hansen has demanded that warming "deniers" be tried for "crimes against humanity.") While examining a series of NASA temperature graphs, Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, himself not so much a skeptic as an anti-warming Van Helsing, uncovered a discontinuity occurring in January 2000 that raised temperatures gathered over widespread areas by 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit. McIntyre had no easy time of it, since Hansen refused to reveal what algorithm he'd used to process the data, forcing McIntyre to perform some very abstruse calculations to figure it out.

Once notified, Hansen's team promised to correct the error, stating that it was an "oversight." When the corrected figures were at last released, they rocked the church of warming from bingo hall to steeple. Vanished was the claim that the past few years were "the warmest on record." Now 1934 took precedence. A full half of the top ten warmest years occurred before WWII, well prior to any massive CO2 buildup.

No explanation has ever been offered. We have a Y2K glitch that behaves like no other computer glitch ever encountered, uniformly affecting a large number of sources distributed almost nationwide. Although the incident trashed all recent data and raised uncomfortable questions about the warming thesis as a whole, NASA itself made no effort at an investigation or inquiry. All that we're ever going to hear is "oversight." I guess that's how they do things at NASA/GISS.

The Arctic Ice Melt. We've been informed for the better part of a decade that Arctic ice was melting at an unprecedented rate, and that the North Pole would be ice-free in twenty, thirty, or forty years, depending in the hysteria level of the media platform in question. In truth, ice thinning was due to a cyclical weather pattern in which winds blow ice floes south into warmer water. Everybody involved knew that this cycle occurred, everyone had seen it happen previously since time out of mind. But it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Worse yet, when the weather returned to its normal pattern two years ago, large numbers of scientists put in considerable effort to suggest that the "new" ice was thinner than usual and would vanish in a flash as soon as the temperatures went back up. The media went along with the joke. The Germans have a phrase to cover such eventualities: "this crew should be stripped of their trade." (Several expeditions setting out for the Pole to "call attention" to the coming Arctic catastrophe had to stop short due to icy conditions. In one case, both women involved suffered serious frostbite.)

The Poor Polar Bears. Closely related is the saga of the polar bears, staring extinction in the face due to warming, while somewhere beyond the aurora, Gaia weeps bitter tears. This was evidently inspired by a single photograph (you've seen it -- the entire world has at this point) of a woebegone polar bear crouched on a melting iceberg. That bear had to be sulking over allowing a nice, juicy seal to escape, because it was in no danger. Out of the twenty major polar bear populations, only two are known to be decreasing. Estimates of bear population (there are no exact figures) have increased over the past forty years, from 17,000 to 19,000 to the current number of 22,000 to 27,000. The bears are becoming pests in municipalities such as Churchill and Point Barrow (as clearly shown here). Despite all this, the bear was put on the U.S. "endangered" list just last year.

The Hockey Stick That Wasn't. The "hockey stick" is a nickname for a chart prepared by Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University professor and leading warmist. The chart purports to show temperature levels for the past millennium, and consists of a straight line until it reaches the late 20th century, when it suddenly shoots upward, creating the "hockey stick" profile. This chart was a major feature of International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on global warming and is a commonly used media graphic.

This chart creates immediate doubt in anyone knowledgeable about the climate of the past millennium, which more resembles a roller coaster than a straight line. It developed -- in yet another impressive McIntyre takedown, this time with an assist from Ross McKitrick -- that Mann was utilizing an algorithm that would produce hockey sticks if you fed it telephone numbers. (Mann is the "Mike" mentioned in the CRU e-mails, and this is one of his "tricks.") Despite this disclosure, Mann has never withdrawn the chart, offered an explanation, or made a correction. The chart remains an accepted piece of evidence among warmists.

Tree-Ring Circus. Due to the fact that direct temperature measures for past epochs are lacking, climatologists utilize "proxy measures," such as tree rings, glacial moraines, and lake sediments. Tree rings have played an important part in the warming controversy as evidence backing the claim that temperatures have been consistently lower worldwide until recently. A crucial series of measurements utilized by Mann, among others, involves trees located on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. How many trees were measured, you ask? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?

The answer is twelve: a number perfectly adequate to trigger international panic, overthrow the capitalist system, establish Green totalitarianism, and completely turn Western culture on its head.

But it turns out that further measurements were in fact made in the area, involving at least thirty-four other trees. And when this data is added to the original twelve, then the warming evidence disappears into the same branch of the Twilight Zone as the grip of Mann's hockey stick. Another "oversight", you understand.

We could go on to mention the automated U.S. weather stations chronicled by the tireless Anthony Watts, which were conscientiously placed next to air-con vents, atop sewage plants, in parking lots, and in one case, in a swamp (as many as 90% may be giving spurious high readings). We could mention the glaciers that are vanishing worldwide...except where they aren't, or the endless papers demonstrating that the coral reefs -- along with various birds, animals, insects, and plants -- are facing extinction even though no warming whatsoever has occurred for twelve years. (And in the thirty years before that, the total rise was 1.25 degrees Fahrenheit, easily within normal variation.) Powerful stuff, this warming -- it maims and destroys even when it's not happening.

It's within this context that the East Anglia e-mails must be judged. The vanishingly small number of legacy media writers who are paying attention behave as if the messages comprise some kind of puzzling anomaly, with no relation to anything that came before. In truth, they stand as the internal memos from the East Anglia branch of the Nigerian National Bank, which can save us from the horrors of global warming after payment of a small up-front fee.

There is always a deeper level to the damage caused by fraud. It strains social relationships, generates cynicism, and debases standing institutions. What has suffered the most damage from AGW is faith in the scientific method, the basic set of procedures -- it could be called an algorithm -- governing scientific investigation. These procedures embody simplicity itself: you examine a phenomenon. You gather data. You construct a hypothesis to explain that phenomenon. And then...

Well, first, let's cover what you don't do.

•You don't manipulate data (as CRU chief scientist Phil Jones stated he was doing in the now-famous "Mike's trick" e-mail, not to mention throughout the now-famous source code).

•You don't fabricate data (as one CRU scientist did while compiling weather-station data. Running into problems, he states, "I can make it up. So I did." He adds an evil smiley face. This e-mail has gone under radar up until now. It can be found in the comments on James Delingpole's blog.).

•You don't deny data to other investigators (as Hansen, Jones, and, it appears, everybody else in the warming community has done at one time or another).

•You don't destroy evidence (as the members of the CRU did following a Freedom of Information request).

•You don't bury contradictory data (as Jones and several colleagues did in an attempt to undercut the impact of the Medieval Warming Period).

•You don't secretly manipulate the argument from behind the scenes (as the CRU staff did with the website Realclimate.org., screening comments to allow only those that supported the warming thesis).

•You don't secretly undercut your critics (as Mann advised the CRU to do concerning the scientific journal Climate Research: "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.").

•You don't try to get a journal editor critical of your case fired (as the CRU staff evidently succeeded in doing with an editor for Geophysical Research Letters).

What you do, if you are a serious scientist operating according to the established method, is attempt to thwart your hypothesis. Test it to destruction; carry out serious attacks on its weakest points to see if they hold up. If they do -- and the vast majority of hypotheses suffer the indignity embodied in a phrase attributed variously to Thomas Huxley and Lord Kelvin -- "a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact" -- then you have a theory that can be published, and tested, and verified by other scientists. If you don't, you throw it out.

None of this, amidst all the chicanery, fabrications, and manipulations, appears to have been done by anyone active in global warming research, the CRU least of all. From this point, we are forced to conclude that AGW is not science, and that any "consensus" that can be drawn from it is a consensus of fraud.

(The late-breaking revelations of temperature manipulations at New Zealand's NiWA institute -- another one of Mike's tricks? -- merely underlines the lesson of CRU. Now that the dam has busted, we'll be hearing dozens of stories like this over the weeks and months to come.)

The West is a technological society. Science is as responsible for making us what we are as any other factor, including our democratic system of government. The two are in fact complementary, each supporting and encouraging the other across the decades since this country was established. (And yes, I am aware that Britain and Germany were both centers of scientific progress, both of them nations liberalized by the example of the United States. Even the utterly authoritarian Bismarck was forced to heed the voice of the people despite his inclination to do anything but.)

The technology developed from scientific research has created a world that would be unrecognizable to our forebears of even a century ago. Technology has transformed diet, health, communications, and transportation. It has doubled lifespans in advanced countries. Prior to the modern epoch, few ever caught a glimpse of the world past their own farming fields. India, China, and Africa were wild myths, the Pacific and Antarctica utterly unknown, the planets and stars merely pretty lights in the sky. Technology opened the world -- not just for everyday men and women, but for invalids, the disabled, and the subnormal, who once lived lives of almost incomprehensible deprivation. Technology was a crucial factor in the dissolution of ancient empires and the humbling of aristocracies.

As Paul Johnson has pointed out, a technological breakout appeared imminent at a number of points in the past millennium. Consider the anonymous Hussite engineer of the 15th century who left a notebook even more breathtaking than any of Leonardo da Vinci's, or the revolutionary English Levelers of the 17th century who dreamed of flying machines and factories. If a breakout had occurred at those times, the consequences would have been unimaginable. But the Hussites were destroyed by the German princes, the Levelers by the reestablishment of the English crown. It required the birth of a true democratic republic in the late 18th century to provide the setting for a serious scientific-technical takeoff, one that after two hundred years has brought us to where we stand today, gazing out at the galaxies beyond the galaxies, with the secret of life itself within reach.

It is this, and no less, that scientific fraud threatens. This is no trivial matter; it involves one of the basic elements of modern Western life. When scientific figures lie, they lie to all of us. If they foment serious distrust of the scientific endeavor -- as they are doing -- they are creating a schism in the heart of our culture, a wound that in the long run could prove even more deadly than the jihadi terrorists.

Such failings are not relegated only to climatology. The apparent success of the climate hustlers has infected all areas of research. Over the past decade, stem-cell studies have proven a hotbed of fraud. Recall Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean biologist who claimed to have cloned various higher animals and isolated new stem cell lines to worldwide applause. Suk was discovered to have faked all his research, prompting the South Korean government to ban him from taking part in any further work. Nor was he alone. Researchers throughout the field have been caught fabricating and manipulating data, and at least one large biotech company has developed a habit of announcing grand breakthroughs to goose its stock prices.

A number of factors are responsible, among them the grant-making process, which rewards extravagant claims and demands matching results, and the superstar factor, in which media adulation creates a sense of intellectual arrogance -- as in the case of Dr. Suk -- unmatched since Galileo's heyday. But the major problem lies in politics, specifically as involves ideology.

In both major recent cases of fraud, science had become entwined and infected with ideology to a point where its very nature was transformed. It was no longer science in the classic mold, boldly asking basic questions without fear or favor. It had become an ideological tool, carrying out only such research as met with the approval of political elites. Stem-cell research became enmeshed with the abortion question. Embryonic stem cells, obtained by "processing" aborted babies, received the lion's share of funding and attention despite their showing no potential whatsoever. Adult stem cells, obtainable from bone marrow, skin cells, or virtually any other part of the body, were shunted aside despite extraordinarily promising research results. This bias permeated the entire field and distorted all perceptions of it -- one of the reasons Dr. Suk was so wildly overpraised was his willingness to attack Pres. George W. Bush for limiting embryonic stem-cell exploitation.

The climatology story is no different. Environmentalist Greens needed a threat -- one that menaced not only technological civilization, but life on earth itself. They have promoted an endless parade of such threats since the 1960s -- overpopulation, pollution, runaway nuclear power, and global cooling -- only to see them shrivel like old balloons. They required a menace that was overwhelming, long-term, and not easily disproven. With global warming, the climatologists gave them one. In exchange for sky-high funding, millennial scientists -- the heirs of Bacon, Copernicus, and Einstein, men who bled and suffered for the sake of their work -- continually inflated the nature and extent of the CO2 threat by using the sleaziest methods available, as we now know. The result has been complete intellectual degradation.

Scientists were once among the most trusted figures in Western public life -- similar to bankers, priests, and doctors, but in a real sense, standing above them all. Scientists were honored as truth-tellers, aware that their reputation for veracity and seriousness was their only real asset. And while exceptions existed (read the story of Blondlot and his N-rays, for one example), the public took them at their own valuation.

That has ended. The concept of unblemished scientific integrity is now one with the scholastic monasteries and the academy at Athens. Scientists today are well on their way to becoming an amalgam of the cheap politician and the three-card monte dealer. They are viewed by the less educated as a privileged class making alarming and impudent claims for their own benefit. The better-informed find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being unable to defend something we once admired.

The next set of questions in physics cannot be answered without equipment costing billions at the very least, and possibly much more. Will a disbelieving public pay for that? We are facing serious dilemmas concerning breakthroughs in biology, not only in stem-cell technology, but also in neurology and synthetic biology -- breakthroughs that threaten to distort the very nature of humanity itself. Should we leave the solutions up to people who want us to pick a card, any card?

The collaboration between science and democracy is one of the great achievements of human history. It is now threatened by the behavior of people at the very heart of that collaboration. If it is destroyed, a treasure of unparalleled value will have vanished. This treasure will be nearly impossible to replace. If the Western world wishes to continue its magnificent upward journey, then we have to save science from itself. An errant and corrupt climatology is the place to start.
 
Old November 29th, 2009 #62
Sándor Petőfi
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Quote:
Scientists were once among the most trusted figures in Western public life -- similar to bankers, priests, and doctors, but in a real sense, standing above them all.
Well there's your problem!

 
Old November 30th, 2009 #63
Leshrac
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The mythbusters guys can very well be considered scientists because they TEST THEIR SHIT OUT.

They don't run around making crackpot theories (sort of...) then declaring them as valid; they actually run the damn thing
 
Old December 4th, 2009 #65
Alex Linder
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Gore chickens out, a rundown on the various liars
http://www.examiner.com/x-11224-Balt...-at-Copenhagen
 
Old December 6th, 2009 #66
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http://cbs3.com/topstories/global.wa...2.1352782.html

U.N.: Hacked E-mails Don't Impact Warming Proof
United Nation's Climate Official Yvo de Boer Leaked Documents From University of East Anglia Doesn't Alter Evidence But May Fuel Skepticism

COPENHAGEN (AP) ― The world is entering talks on a new climate pact with unprecendented unity and leaders must seize the moment to create a turning point in the battle against global warming, the U.N.'s top climate official said Sunday. At a news conference, Yvo de Boer called on the 192 nations represented at the U.N. climate summit starting Monday "to deliver a strong and long-term response to the challenge of climate change."

Even so, he worried that e-mails pilfered from a British university would fuel skepticism among those who believe that scientists exaggerate global warming.


"I think a lot of people are skeptical about this issue in any case," de Boer told The Associated Press earlier Sunday. "And then when they have the feeling ... that scientists are manipulating information in a certain direction then of course it causes concern in a number of people to say 'you see I told you so, this is not a real issue.'"

E-mails stolen from the climate unit at the University of East Anglia appeared to show some of world's leading scientists discussing ways to shield data from public scrutiny and suppress others' work. (No bias there, eh?)

Those who deny the influence of man-made climate change have seized on the correspondence to argue that scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence about global warming.

"This correspondence looks very bad," de Boer said, but noted that the matter was being investigeted by the university, police and the head of the U.N.'s expert panel on climate change. He also defended the research — reviewed by some 2,500 scientists — that shows man has fueled global warming by burning fossil fuels.

"I think this is about the most credible piece of science that there is out there," he said.

U.S. climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing called the science on global warming "very robust, very substantial." He told AP that the controversy surrounding the leaked e-mails came at an "unfortunate" time, just before the long-awaited U.N. talks, "but has no fundamental bearing on the outcome." (So obviously the game is already rigged.)

Climate skeptics meeting in downtown Copenhagen for a panel discussion organized by a Danish nationalist party said the leaked e-mails highlighted the limitations of global warming research.

"There has been a lot of this kind of activity going on, there has been suppression of view points," said Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.

Negotiators in Copenhagen are trying to set targets for controlling emissions of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases, including by the leading contributors, China and the United States. They will also seek agreement on how much rich countries should pay to help poor nations to deal with climate change.

De Boer told a news conference that Copenhagen must be a "turning point" in the international response to climate change. He said climate targets announced in the runup to the summit were boosting the chances of success — even though they fall short of what scientists say is needed to avoid dangerous levels of warming.

"Never in the 17 years of climate negotiations have so many different nations made so many firm pledges toghether," De Boer said. "It's simply unprecdented."

De Boer told AP "it's going to be two weeks of thorough negotiation to try and get the ambition level up and to get the financial specifics on the table."

The emissions cuts offered have disappointed scientists and poorer nations facing damaging climate change. They say greenhouse gases, by 2020, must be reduced by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 output to keep temperatures in the less dangerous range of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above preindustrial levels.

The European Union approaches that target, pledging to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels, and more if others agree. Awaiting U.S. congressional action, however, the Obama administration could make only a provisional offer of a 17 percent reduction by 2020 from 2005 levels. Against 1990, that represents only a 3 to 4 percent cut, experts say.

The developing world, for the first time, is offering its own actions: clean energy projects and other steps to slow the growth of their emissions.

China says it will, by 2020, reduce gases by 40 to 45 percent below "business as usual," that is, judged against 2005 figures for energy used versus economic output. India offers a 20 to 25 percent slowdown in emissions growth.
 
Old December 6th, 2009 #67
Hugo Böse
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Where ever there is the odor of bullshit just follow the scent of money, 95% of time it will lead you to the truth and the exposed bullshiter´s true motives. Almost everybody is getting something out of this except mid to small sized (often) privately owned businesses and the hapless employees, consumers and tax payers, in other words the majority of whites living in the West are fixing be plundered severely just so that big business has a captive market and politicians can frolic on the international circus and grab the power to micromanage their "subjects" down to the smallest detail.
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Last edited by Hugo Böse; December 8th, 2009 at 03:50 PM.
 
Old December 7th, 2009 #68
The Bobster
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In that vein, NBC (GE) is running a series of scaremongering reports every night this week. For me this will be "won't watch" TV.
 
Old December 7th, 2009 #69
The Bobster
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http://cbs3.com/topstories/epa.green...2.1354352.html

EPA: Greenhouse Gases 'Threaten' Americans
CBS News Interactive: Global Warming

WASHINGTON (AP) ― The Environmental Protection Agency took a major step Monday toward regulating greenhouses gases, concluding that climate changing pollution threatens the public health and the environment.

The announcement came as the Obama administration looked to boost its arguments at an international climate conference that the United States is aggressively taking actions to combat global warming, even though Congress has yet to act on climate legislation. The conference opened Monday in Copenhagen.

The EPA lied that the faked scientific evidence surrounding climate change clearly shows that greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people" and that the pollutants — mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

"These long-overdue findings cement 2009's place in history as the year when the United States government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution," said nigger EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson at news conference.

The action by the EPA, which has been anticipated for months, clearly was timed to add to the momentum toward some sort of agreement on climate change at the Copenhagen conference and try to push Congress to approve climate legislation.

"This is a clear message to Copenhagen of the Obama administration's commitments to address global climate change," said Sen. Jackass John Kerry, D-Mass., lead author of a climate bill before the Senate. "The message to Congress is crystal clear: get moving."

Under a Supreme Court ruling, the so-called endangerment finding is needed before the EPA can regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases released from automobiles, power plants, and factories under the federal Clean Air Act.

The EPA signaled last April that it was inclined to view heat-trapping pollution as a threat to public health and welfare and began to take public comments under a formal rulemaking. The action marked a reversal from the Bush administration, which had refused before leaving office to issue the finding, despite a conclusion by EPA scientists that it was warranted.

Business groups have strongly argued against tackling global warming through the Clean Air Act, saying it is less flexible and more costly than the cap-and-trade bill being considered before Congress. On Monday, some of those groups questioned the timing of the EPA's announcement, calling it political.

"The implications of today's action by EPA are far-reaching...individual Americans and consumers and businesses alike will be dramatically affected by this decision," said Charles T. Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association. Drevna, in a statement, said "it is hardly the time to risk the remainder of the U.S. industrial sector in an attempt to achieve a short-term international public relations victory."

Any regulations are also likely to spawn lawsuits and lengthy legal fights.

The EPA and the White House have said regulations on greenhouse gases will not be imminent even after an endangerment finding, saying that the administration would prefer that Congress act to limit such pollution through an economy-wide cap on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Nevertheless, the EPA has begun the early stages of developing permit requirements on carbon dioxide pollution from large emitters such as power plants. The administration also has said it will set the first-ever greenhouse gas emissions standards for automobiles and raise fuel economy to 35 miles per gallon by 2016 to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The EPA's readiness to tackle climate change is expected to give a boost to U.S. arguments at the climate conference opening in Copenhagen this week, where the United States offer a provisional target to reduce greenhouse gases.

While the House has approved climate legislation that would cut emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and about 80 percent by mid-century, the Senate has yet to take up the measure amid strong Republican opposition and reluctance by some centrist Democrats.

Doofus Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., lead author of the Senate bill, has argued that if Congress doesn't act, the EPA will regulate greenhouse gas emissions. He has called EPA regulation a "blunt instrument" that would pose a bigger problem for industry than legislation crafted to mitigate some of the costs of shifting away from carbon emitting fossil fuels.

The way was opened for the EPA to use the Clean Air Act to cut climate-changing emissions by the Supreme Court in 2007, when the court declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Act. But the court said the EPA must determine if these pollutants pose a danger to public health and welfare before it can regulate them.
 
Old December 8th, 2009 #70
The Bobster
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http://cbs3.com/topstories/copenhage...2.1356320.html

Report: 2000-2009 Was Warmest Decade Ever
At Copenhagen Climate Summit, U.N. Weather Agency Also Says 2009 Probably Warmest Year In Some Areas

COPENHAGEN (CBS News) ― This decade has very likely been the warmest in the historical record (despite the fact that temperatures have been falling since 1998), and 2009 will probably end up as one of the warmest years, the corrupt U.N. weather agency announced Tuesday at the second day of the 192-nation climate conference in Copenhagen.

In some areas - parts of Africa, central Asia - this will probably be the warmest year, but overall 2009 "is likely to be about the fifth-warmest year on record," said Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.

The decade 2000-2009 "is very likely to be the warmest on record, warmer than the 1990s, than the 1980s and so on," Jarraud said.

The faked data were released as negotiators at the two-week talks worked to craft a global deal to step up efforts to stem climate change. On Tuesday, delegates were digging into the dense technicalities of "metrics" and "gas inventories," as governments jockeyed for position leading up to the finale late next week, when more than 100 national leaders, including President Obama, will converge on Copenhagen for the final days of bargaining.

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged fellow Europeans to raise their bid on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to pressure the U.S. and others to offer more in the Copenhagen negotiations.

"We've got to make countries recognize that they have to be as ambitious as they say they want to be. It's not enough to say 'I may do this, I might do this, possibly I'll do this'. I want to create a situation in which the European Union is persuaded to go to 30 percent," Brown was quoted as saying by Britain's Guardian newspaper.

The European Union has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, compared with 1990, and is considering raising that to 30 percent if other governments also aim high. Government leaders will have an opportunity to make such a move at an EU summit this Thursday and Friday in Brussels.

On Monday, when the climate conference opened, the Obama administration gave the talks a boost by announcing steps that could lead to new U.S. emissions controls that don't require the approval of the U.S. Congress.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the fraudulent scientific evidence surrounding climate change clearly shows that greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people" and that the pollutants - mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels - should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

But with early commitments from Obama and other world leaders heading into the Copenhagen summit remaining short of scientists' demands, the pressure was on major emitters for bigger cuts.

Swedish Environment Minister Anders Carlgren, speaking for the European Union, said it would be "astonishing" if Mr. Obama came for the final negotiation session "to deliver just what was announced in last week's press release." (Meaning the fix is in.)
 
Old December 8th, 2009 #71
George Witzgall
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Quote:
Originally Posted by The Bobster View Post
http://cbs3.com/topstories/copenhage...2.1356320.html

Report: 2000-2009 Was Warmest Decade Ever
At Copenhagen Climate Summit, U.N. Weather Agency Also Says 2009 Probably Warmest Year In Some Areas

COPENHAGEN (CBS News) ― This decade has very likely been the warmest in the historical record (despite the fact that temperatures have been falling since 1998), and 2009 will probably end up as one of the warmest years, the corrupt U.N. weather agency announced Tuesday at the second day of the 192-nation climate conference in Copenhagen.

In some areas - parts of Africa, central Asia - this will probably be the warmest year, but overall 2009 "is likely to be about the fifth-warmest year on record," said Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.

The decade 2000-2009 "is very likely to be the warmest on record, warmer than the 1990s, than the 1980s and so on," Jarraud said.

The faked data were released as negotiators at the two-week talks worked to craft a global deal to step up efforts to stem climate change. On Tuesday, delegates were digging into the dense technicalities of "metrics" and "gas inventories," as governments jockeyed for position leading up to the finale late next week, when more than 100 national leaders, including President Obama, will converge on Copenhagen for the final days of bargaining.

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged fellow Europeans to raise their bid on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to pressure the U.S. and others to offer more in the Copenhagen negotiations.

"We've got to make countries recognize that they have to be as ambitious as they say they want to be. It's not enough to say 'I may do this, I might do this, possibly I'll do this'. I want to create a situation in which the European Union is persuaded to go to 30 percent," Brown was quoted as saying by Britain's Guardian newspaper.

The European Union has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, compared with 1990, and is considering raising that to 30 percent if other governments also aim high. Government leaders will have an opportunity to make such a move at an EU summit this Thursday and Friday in Brussels.

On Monday, when the climate conference opened, the Obama administration gave the talks a boost by announcing steps that could lead to new U.S. emissions controls that don't require the approval of the U.S. Congress.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the fraudulent scientific evidence surrounding climate change clearly shows that greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people" and that the pollutants - mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels - should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

But with early commitments from Obama and other world leaders heading into the Copenhagen summit remaining short of scientists' demands, the pressure was on major emitters for bigger cuts.

Swedish Environment Minister Anders Carlgren, speaking for the European Union, said it would be "astonishing" if Mr. Obama came for the final negotiation session "to deliver just what was announced in last week's press release." (Meaning the fix is in.)
what's your agenda?
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Old December 8th, 2009 #72
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I'm seeking the truth, so take your head (and whatever else) out of your ass.
 
Old December 8th, 2009 #73
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Originally Posted by The Bobster View Post
I'm seeking the truth, so take your head (and whatever else) out of your ass.
I don't believe you are seeking the truth. It seems to me like you are confident you already know the "truth" (that climate change is all a big lie), and you're trying to convince the non-believers.
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Old December 8th, 2009 #74
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UN hits back at climate sceptics amid e-mails row

20:51 GMT, Saturday, 5 December 2009

The UN's official panel on climate change has hit back at sceptics' claims that the case for human influence on global warming has been exaggerated.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it was "firmly" standing by findings that a rise in the use of greenhouse gases was a factor.

It was responding to a row over the reliability of data from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit

Leaked e-mail exchanges prompted claims that data had been manipulated.

Last month, hundreds of messages between scientists at the unit and their peers around the world were put on the internet along with other documents.

Some observers alleged one of the e-mails suggested head of the unit Professor Phil Jones wanted certain papers excluded from the UN's next major assessment of climate science.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8397265.stm

Quote:
Colleague defends 'ClimateGate' professor

16:25 GMT, Friday, 4 December 2009

A colleague of the UK professor at the centre of the climate e-mails row says "sceptics" have embarked on a "tabloid-style character assassination".

Professor Andrew Watson rallied to the defence of climate scientist Phil Jones, whose e-mail exchanges prompted claims that data had been manipulated.

There was no evidence of attempting to mislead people, Professor Watson added.

The University of East Anglia has commissioned an independent inquiry into the affair.

"Despite the best efforts of the sceptics, there is no instance in these e-mails that anyone has found so far - and there are millions of people looking - that suggests the scientists manipulated their fundamental data," Professor Watson, from the university's School of Environmental Sciences, stated.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8396035.stm
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Old December 8th, 2009 #75
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Default Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak

Yes, the Grauniad did use that picture.



Quote:
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 December 2009 14.09 GMT

Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak

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

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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ay-danish-text
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Old December 22nd, 2009 #76
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I don't believe you are seeking the truth. It seems to me like you are confident you already know the "truth" (that climate change is all a big lie), and you're trying to convince the non-believers.
Guilty as charged.

Now some information for the non-believers:


Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.


Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.

Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri’s personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.

The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.

The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company).

Although TERI has extended its sponsorship since the name change, the two concerns are still closely linked.

In India, Tata exercises enormous political power, shown not least in the way it has managed to displace hundreds of thousands of poor tribal villagers in the eastern states of Orissa and Jarkhand to make way for large-scale iron mining and steelmaking projects.

Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.

In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.

However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.

Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.

Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.

Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.

TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.

All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.

Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.

It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).

More than three-quarters of the world ‘carbon’ market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata – and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India’s own carbon exchange.

But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.

In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’,

In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.

In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.

The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on. He has become head of Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute, which enjoys millions of dollars of US state and corporate funding. He is on the climate change advisory board of Deutsche Bank. He is Director of the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and was until recently an adviser to Toyota Motors. Recalling his origins as a railway engineer, he is even a policy adviser to SNCF, France’s state-owned railway company.

Meanwhile, back home in India, he serves on an array of influential government bodies, including the Economic Advisory Committee to the prime minister, holds various academic posts and has somehow found time in his busy life to publish 22 books.

Dr Pachauri never shrinks from giving the world frank advice on all matters relating to the menace of global warming. The latest edition of TERI News quotes him as telling the US Environmental Protection Agency that it must go ahead with regulating US carbon emissions without waiting for Congress to pass its cap and trade bill.

It reports how, in the days before Copenhagen, he called on the developing nations which had been historically responsible for the global warming crisis to make ‘concrete commitments’ to aiding developing countries such as India with funding and technology – while insisting that India could not agree to binding emissions targets. India, he said, must bargain for large-scale subsidies from the West for developing solar power, and Western funds must be made available for geo-engineering projects to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.

One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.

As for TERI itself, Dr Pachauri’s main job for nearly 30 years, it is so coy about money that it does not even publish its accounts – the financial statement amounts to two income and expenditure pie charts which contain no detailed figures.

Dr Pachauri is equally coy about TERI’s links with Tata, the company which set it up in the 1970s and whose name it continued to bear until 2002, when it was changed to just The Energy Research Institute. A spokesman at the time said ‘we have not severed our past relationship with the Tatas, the change is only for convenience’.

But the real question mark over TERI’s director-general remains over the relationship between his highly lucrative commercial jobs and his role as chairman of the IPCC.

TERI have, for example, become a preferred bidder for Kuwaiti contracts to clean up the mess left by Saddam Hussein in their oilfields in 1991. The $3 billion (£1.9 billion) cost of the contracts has been provided by the UN. If successful, this would be tenth time TERI have benefited from a contract financed by the UN.

Certainly no one values the services of TERI more than the EU, which has included Dr Pachauri’s institute as a partner in no fewer than 12 projects designed to assist in devising the EU’s policies on mitigating the effects of the global warming predicted by the IPCC.

But whether those 1,700 Corus workers on Teesside will next month be so happy to lose their jobs to India, thanks to the workings of that international ‘carbon market’ about which Dr Pachauri is so enthusiastic, is quite another matter.
 
Old December 22nd, 2009 #77
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobster
and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.
the real story here, though, is the UTTER VASTNESS of the conspiracy, I mean, it's not a few kook scientists trying to put one over on us, there just seems to be a million man army of paid agents of the Jews in every newspaper and magazine and tv station, perpetuating the scam of the day, and nobody ever suspects a thing and go on about their daily lives as if this fact is no big deal and won't affect them seriously.
 
Old January 18th, 2010 #78
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World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

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. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: "If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments."

The IPCC's reliance on Hasnain's 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: "Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.

"Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole massif."

The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain's 1999 interview with the New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was "very high". The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

The report read: "Glaciers in the Himalaya 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."

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: "Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”

Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. "I am not an expert on glaciers.and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about," he said.

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as "voodoo science".

Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public.

The lead role in that process was played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC's finding.

He traced the IPCC claim back to the New Scientist and then contacted Pearce. Pearce then re-interviewed Hasnain, who confirmed that his 1999 comments had been "speculative", and published the update in the New Scientist.

Cogley said: "The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”

Pearce said the IPCC's reliance on the WWF was "immensely lazy" and the organisation need to explain itself or back up its prediction with another scientific source. Hasnain could not be reached for comment.

The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific concensus over climate change. It follows the so-called climate-gate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried to prevent other researchers from accessing key date. Last week another row broke out when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were likely to rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle6991177.ece
 
Old January 30th, 2010 #79
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7009081.ece

Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen
Most experts believe that the Himalayan glaciers will take centuries to melt
Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.

Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350.

Mr Pallava interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week for Science and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.

“And within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never — and I can say this categorically — ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”

Dr Pacharui has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
 
Old February 4th, 2010 #80
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What a surprise!! Hey, ya gotta keep that grant money coming.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/ho...1&pid=83529737

Penn State climatologist cleared of misconduct
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer



A Pennsylvania State University committee yesterday cleared climate researcher Michael Mann of professional-misconduct charges but said it would further investigate whether the scientist "deviated from accepted practices."

The inquiry was prompted by events in November, when hackers exposed more than 1,000 e-mail messages exchanged among climate scientists, many of which were sent to and from Mann.

No formal allegations were made against Mann, but the university decided to launch the inquiry after a flood of public complaints and accusations against the climatologist.

Mann is best known for using tree rings and other indirect measures to reconstruct Earth's climate over centuries past. Those reconstructions showed temperatures shooting upward in the 20th century in a graph that became known as the "hockey stick."

Yesterday's report, though welcomed by Mann, did not satisfy his critics, who immediately called the university's investigation a "whitewash."

The university panel was chaired by vice president for research Henry C. Foley, but neither he nor his three coauthors would comment on the report or explain why they were calling for a further investigation.

The hacking incident occurred days before world leaders convened in Copenhagen, Denmark, to work out a treaty for curbing carbon emissions.

A number of individuals read through the e-mail messages, picking out alleged examples of misconduct by Mann and others. These were used in blogs, op-eds, and other public forums to discredit the consensus view in the field that human-generated greenhouse gases were becoming a major contributor to climate change.

The issue became known as "climategate."

The e-mail message that has most often been held up as evidence against Mann was written by a colleague. It referred to a "trick" Mann used to display some of his data. The panel concluded that this referred not to any attempted deception but to a technique for displaying data graphically.

University spokesman Bill Mahon said Penn State had received a torrent of complaints from people outside the university who were concerned that something inappropriate had happened.

Many of the complaints were anonymous e-mail, said Mahon, from "folks who have no facts - more along the lines of, 'Fire Michael Mann, he's a horrible person.' "

After sifting through the e-mail, the panel divided the allegations into four categories:

Falsifying or suppressing data.

Deleting, concealing, or otherwise destroying e-mail associated with a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Misusing privileged or confidential information.

Deviating from accepted practices within the academic community.

The panelists concluded that there was "no credible evidence" to charge Mann on any of the first three allegations, but they did not have enough information to draw a conclusion on the fourth. The report did not explain what was meant by "deviating from accepted practices," though it questioned whether the statements in the exposed e-mail sullied the reputation of the university or of science in general.

Spokesman Mahon said the panel was making no specific charges. "It wasn't indicating there was any guilt or lack of guilt. . . . We think we need more information."

The fourth complaint will be investigated by five prominent Penn State scientists: a computer scientist, a physicist, a biologist, and two anthropologists.

Mann said he was pleased with the report. "They absolved me of any wrongdoing on the three serious counts," he said. He added that he wasn't sure what the final charge meant or why he had not been cleared of it.

"Maybe they felt it would be more appropriate for a panel of my peers, rather than a group of administrators," he said.

Still, he said, he hopes that the next panel's review will clear his name.

Already, some are calling into question the panel's conclusion. The Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative group, took out a full-page ad in the student newspaper, Mahon said. "They suggested the inquiry was dishonest and the results were a whitewash."

Within hours of the release of the report, Fox News columnist Steve Milloy issued a statement calling Penn State's inquiry a whitewash.

"Comically, the report explains at length how the use of the word 'trick' can mean a 'clever device,' wrote Milloy, who authors the Web site junkscience.com. "The report ignores that it was a 'trick . . . to hide the decline.' "

Others have pointed out that the phrase hide the decline was used by a different researcher, not Mann, to refer to an apparent decline in temperatures reflected in a certain type of tree ring, not to a decline in global temperatures or anything Mann used in his data.

In 2006, Mann's work was reviewed by a panel assembled by the National Academy of Science, following allegations against the statistical methods he used to graph global temperatures. That report found no evidence of misconduct.

Most climate scientists have defended Mann. Michael Oppenheimer, a climatologist at Princeton University, called Mann a good scientist and an honest one. "The only lack of integrity in this case is on the part of those who stole the e-mails," he said.
 
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