Climategate in Review

All AGW computer models predicted a steady increase in global temperatures. However, for the past 11+ years, the global temperatures have not increased, and in fact, decreased, despite a continuing rise in CO₂, countering the theory of a causal connection between increasing carbon dioxide and rising temperatures.

A close group of climate scientists (Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa, Malcolm Hughes, Robert Bradley, Tim Osborn, et al) "peer-reviewed" one another's papers, insuring that only those which supported the view of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) as an imminent worldwide danger, would make it through their process. Quoting Phil Jones:

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

Scientific journals which published climate research were either headed up by "true believers", or else pressure was applied by the AGW scientists to insure that dissenting opinions were never published. Non-compliant journals were harassed and "punished".

"The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn't have cleared a 'legitimate' peer review process anywhere. That leaves only one possibility--that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board."

"I told Mike that I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted--the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper, which will be ignored by the community on the whole..."

"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'."

"I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board..."

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor."

The East Anglia basic historical climate data used to forecast future climate trends was heavily manipulated to "produce" the desired results.

"I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. ... I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have"

"So, if we show Keith's series in this plot, we have to comment that 'something else' is responsible for the discrepancies in this case. Perhaps Keith can help us out a bit by explaining the processing that went into the series and the potential factors that might lead to it being 'warmer' than the Jones et al and Mann et al series?? We would need to put in a few words in this regard. Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates"

"Indeed, if the non-temperature signal that causes the decline in tree-ring density begins before 1960, then a short 1931-60 period might yield a more biased result than using a longer 1881-1960 period."

The code for the computer climate models was freely manipulated in order to force the desired results. Despite their best efforts, the programmers could never get these programs to run properly, occasionally producing nonsensical results. And the data sets used by these programs were clearly in a hopeless state. Here are samples of some of the code comments left by the programmers:

"stop in 1960 to avoid the decline"

"stop in 1940 to avoid the decline"

"but why does the sum-of-squares parameter OpTotSq go negative?!!"

"and already I have that familiar Twilight Zone sensation."

"this renders the station counts totally meaningless."

"Oh yeah - there is no 'supposed', I can make it up. So I have :-)"

"As we can see, even I'm cocking it up!"

"yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases"

"recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY REMOVED"

"Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!"

"artificially removed (i.e. corrected) the decline"

"we know the file starts at yr 440, but we want nothing till 1400"

"It's botch after botch after botch."

"Oh, GOD, if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite."

"As far as I can see, this renders the [weather] station counts totally meaningless."

"So what's going on? I don't see how the 'final' precip file can have been produced from the 'final' precipitation database, even though the dates imply that. The obvious conclusion is that the precip file must have been produced before 23 Dec 2003, and then redated (to match others?) in Jan 04."

"You can't imagine what this has cost me -- to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO [World Meteorological Organization] codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a 'Master' database of dubious provenance ..."

"OH F--- THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done, I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases."

East Anglia's Phil Jones wrote that he was using Michael Mann's "Nature trick" to "hide the decline" in actual temperature data. This was the same "trick" previously used by Mann to produce the infamous "hockey stick" temperature graphs which has since been totally discredited.

East Anglia scientists broke the UK's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws by refused to release the raw global temperature record data used in their climate computer models, despite repeated requests by scientists interested in attempting to review and reproduce their results.

When East Anglia scientists could no longer evade the FOIA requests to release their data, they then reported that all of the original global temperature data had been conveniently destroyed, insuring that no one would ever be able to check their results. However, in an email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann dated 02/02/05, Jones states:

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

And magically, it happened!

Shortly after the East Anglia scandal broke, it was revealed that the New Zealand government's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was also found to have been manipulating its own temperature data to manufacture a rising trend.

Scientists from East Anglia created the website RealClimate.org in order to promote the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) message. William Connolley, a Green Party activist and software engineer, was one of the nine member on the newly formed team. He became an editor at Wikipedia and, starting in 2003, began rewriting climate-related entries so as to eliminate all references to information contradicting the AGW story.

"'He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band,' Solomon explains. 'Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world's most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.'"

"Through his role as a Wikipedia administrator, Connolley is said to have created or rewritten 5,428 unique Wikipedia entries."

"'When Connolley didn't like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand,' Solomon wrote. 'When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.'"

"Facts about the Medieval Warm Period and criticism of global warming doctrine were purportedly scrubbed from Wikipedia's pages."

It was next discovered that, like East Anglia, NASA had been stonewalling Freedom of Information requests for over two years. Once the information was released, it was discovered that they too had been manipulating the temperature data and issuing false findings.

Additional research into the temperature data for both Darwin, Australia and Russia show the extent of fraud used in manipulating the temperature data.

A researcher reported that important tree ring growth data, used as a proxy for temperature reconstruction, was held by Queens University of Belfast, but that the University refused to make the data available for analysis.

A former top climate scientist and NASA manager was convicted of defrauding the government of $50,000 by diverting these NASA climate funds to his wife's company, highlighting the role that government funding of climate research plays in driving the researchers to produce "results" that will keep the funds flowing.

Ground-based temperature data sets such as those maintained by the Hadley Centre Climatic Research Unit, greatly exaggerate temperature rise when compared to the more reliable satellite-based readings taken of the lower troposphere.

The IPCC governmental advisory report's claimed that the Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than anywhere else in the world and would be gone by 2035. Whoops, that estimate came from a report that predicted their demise by the year 2350. Sorry, for the alarm, it was just a typo! Additionally, the Himalayan glaciers were reported to currently cover 500,000 square kilometers when, in fact, the actual glaciers span roughly 33,000 square kilometers. Missed it by just over 1,500%!

It was also revealed that Syed Hasnain, who made the original prediction, realized this and other errors in the IPCC report back in 2008, but did not inform the head of the IPCC, saying:

"My job is not to point out mistakes."

Of course, it was also later determined by Michael Zemp from the World Glacier Monitoring Service, that:

"There are simply no observations available to make these sorts of statements."

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN climate change panel, said that besides the Himalayan glacier error, there may be other errors in the IPCC report, but was not more specific.

The IPCC advisory report's claim that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters such as hurricanes and floods, was shown to be based upon a 2007 unpublished report that had not been subjected to peer-review. By the time the paper was actually published in 2008, it included the disclaimer:

"We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

It was discovered that the IPCC claim that global warming might destroy 40% of the Brazilian rainforest, was based upon an unsubstantiated claim by eco-campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

It was discovered that the IPCC report incorrectly stated that 55% of the Netherlands was below sea level, when the actual figure is only 26%. Fact checking at the IPCC was so lax, that even simple errors such as this could and did find their way into its report.

The IPCC published inaccurate data on the global production of wave powered electricity, which was also wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.

It was further discovered that the IPCC report contained:

• Claims based upon information in press releases and newsletters.
  
  
• Multiple examples of statements based upon student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.
  
  
• Claims that were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups, including the Defenders of Wildlife.

While doomsday predictions point to recent annual decreases in the total amount of Arctic ice, the record increases in the accumulating Antarctic ice and snow is conveniently ignored.

"The doomsday portraits of Antarctica's glaciers reacting to a global climate change should be blurry at best. Consensus on changes in ice sheet thickness and their causes is difficult, and therefore of limited use on either side of the global warming debate."

Data concerning the warming of other planets in the solar system, indicating the sun as a major influence of earth's temperature rise, has been ignored by the AGW supporters.

"But how do we square the fact that almost every planet in our solar system is simultaneously undergoing temperature change and volatile weather patterns. Does this not suggest that global warming is a natural cycle as a result of the evolving nature of the sun?"

"Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period. Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena."

Warming trends in temperature data sets around the world are now seen to be due to local factors such as land development (Urban Heat Island Effect), and not attributable to actual global warming. Any actual warming experienced across the earth during the past 30 years is well within the normal temperature fluxuations seen at least twice before in the past 1,000 years. Quoting John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and a former lead author on the IPCC:

"The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change"

Phil Jones, the East Anglia Climate Research Unit scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal, admitted the following:

• He lacks "organizational skills", has trouble "keeping track" of information, and that his record keeping is "not as good as it should be", as excuses for how he came to "lose" (some say intentionally destroy) all of the important original temperature data.
  
  
• The world was quite possibly warmer in medieval times than now (as many have been reporting for years), suggesting that global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon after all.
  
  
• There has been no "statistically significant" warming of the earth over the past 15 years.

Sounds like "cover your ass" time to me!

An examination of the data used to support the IPCC claims of a man-made increase in hurricanes and cyclones was cherry-picked to show the desired results. When all data was examined, no statistically significant increase is observed.

In Britain, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) both call for scientific data and evidence compiled by climate researchers to be made publicly available for scrutiny. The RSC said:

"The apparent resistance of researchers from the CRU at the University of East Anglia to disclose research data has been widely portrayed as an indication of a lack of integrity in scientific research. ... It may also be necessary to incorporate an independent auditing system into peer review with the ability to demand access to raw data sets to ensure best practices are being adhered to."

Dr Don Keiller, deputy head of life sciences at Anglia Ruskin University said:

"What these emails reveal is a detailed and systematic conspiracy to prevent other scientists gaining access to CRU data sets. Such obstruction strikes at the very heart of the scientific method, that is the scrutiny and verification of data and results by one's peers."

Professor Darrel Ince, from the department of computer science at the Open University said:

"A number of climate scientists have refused to publish their computer programs; what I want to suggest is that this is both unscientific behaviour and, equally importantly ignores a major problem: that scientific software has got a poor reputation for error."

Three of the world's four global temperature datasets have been shown to be be seriously tainted. This includes the data from: 1. East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU); 2. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS); and 3. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). The remaining Japanese dataset remains to be investigated.

Japanese scientists, investigating arctic wind patterns determined that:

"Much of the record breaking loss of ice in the Arctic ocean in recent years is down warming"

"The study does not question that global warming is also melting ice in the Arctic, but it could raise doubts about high-profile claims that the region has passed a climate "tipping point" that could see ice loss sharply accelerate in coming years."

The UN admitted that a 2006 study showing that livestock (meat) production was responsible for 18% of the total greenhouse gas emissions — exceeding those produced by transportation — was flawed and overstated the impact. The UN had used this study to recommend less meat and milk production worldwide in the name of environmentalism.

Nils-Axel Morner, the formerly chairman of the International Commission on Sea Level Change (INQUA), after spending the past 35 years studying sea levels around the world, declared that the talk about rising sea levels was a "colossal scare story". Quoting from the article:

"Despite fluctuations down as well as up, 'the sea is not rising,' he says. 'It hasn't risen in 50 years.' If there is any rise this century it will 'not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm'. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about."

"The reason why Dr Morner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on 'going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world'."

"Germans citizens are rapidly losing faith in global warming following the Climate-gate scandals, according to a new report in Der Spiegel."

"Many people have little faith in the information and prognosis of climate researchers, The Local [a German news site] explained, with a third questioned in the survey not giving them much credence."

Mike Hulme and Martin Mahony, from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, write in a paper entitled, Climate Change: what do we know about the IPCC?, that the consensus claims made by the IPCC in support of manmade global warming are fabrications. They state (pages 10-11):

"Claims such as '2,500 of the world's leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate' are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields."

Over 31,000 American scientists have signed a petition stating that there is no convincing evidence that human-related activities are causing catastrophic climate change, and urge the U.S. government to reject the Kyoto global warming agreement, along with all other similar proposals.

Arctic ice volume has increased 25% since May of 2008.

"In 2008, less than half of the ice (47%) was greater than two metres thick. Now, more than 75% of the ice is greater than two metres thick. In 2008, 18% of the ice was more than three metres thick. This year that number has increased to 28%. There has been nearly across the board ice thickening since 2008. There was slightly more 4-5 metre ice in 2008, due to the big crunch in the summer of 2007."

A very inconvenient fact.

In response to criticism over it corrupted temperature data (due to urban heat effects) and the fact that 90% of their climate measuring sites do not meet the government's own standards for obtaining accurate temperature measurements, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has simply redefined the nature of its collection methods so as to reassert the validity of the use of its data. On the NOAA website, it makes the following statement:

"But for detecting climate change, the concern is not the absolute temperature — whether a station is reading warmer or cooler than a nearby station placed on grass — but how that temperature changes over time."

All of which is so much handwaving, because if temperature increases are due to urban heat island effects, then it makes no difference whether those increases are absolute or relative, they have nothing to do with actual global temperature trends. NOAA then goes on to state:

"Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years? No."

As the article's author points out:

"This is another clearly deceptive political answer. If one actually looks at the temperature trend in the United States over the last 50 years, you will see something quite different from what NOAA says. From 1960 to the late 1970s, the United States temperature was clearly falling. From that point on, there was a two-decade warming trend through the 1980s and 1990s. That warming trend ended in the late 1990s and there has been no warming since."

The IPCC apparently relied upon the opinion of a single scientist, J. Lean, to author the chapter in its climate report which states that solar activity is not a major influencer of earth's climate. This conclusion runs counter to scientific research put forward by others such as Dr. Willie Soon, Henrik Svensmark and Nir Shaviv. The Norwegian government first noted the lack of evidence backing up the IPCC conclusion, and a representative stated:

"I would encourage the IPCC to [re-]consider having only one solar physicist on the lead author team of such an important chapter. In particular since the conclusion of this section about solar forcing hangs on one single paper in which J. Lean is a coauthor."

The article continues with the following statement:

"Dr. Soon has presented solar irradiance data showing global temperatures during the past century have almost precisely mirrored solar output. The Danish National Space Center further reported that solar output by the end of the 20th century had reached its highest amount in at least 1,000 years."

Long after the infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph was discredited by showing that the data used to produce it had been heavily manipulated by its author Michael Mann, Mann himself now back-pedals in an attempt to distance himself from accepting full responsibility for its intent and use. As quoted from an article in the UK Telegraph:

"[S]peaking to the BBC recently, Prof Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, said he had always made clear there were "uncertainties" in his work.

'I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate,' he said. "

Oh, well OK then ....

A new review of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, concluded that the IPCC's 2007 report was biased towards overstating the negative consequences of any global warming, while ignoring the beneficial effects.

"Maarten Hajer, director of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which is funded by the Dutch government, said the IPCC's summary conclusions focused on the potential dangers of climate change because 'that is what the politicians wanted to know.'"

"But since the 2007 report's publication, he said, 'the times have changed,' and the public now is demanding a fuller, more transparent look at how the IPCC comes up with its conclusions.'"

In addition, the Dutch agency determined that the IPCC had made "another significant error" in projecting a 50-60% decrease in anchovy production off the west coast of Africa, due to "an erroneous interpretation of the literature references."

"The literature in fact suggests a 50% to 60% decrease in 'extreme wind and seawater turbulence, with some effects on the anchovy population that were not quantified'."

It is hard to believe that a supposedly scientific community, using peer review procedures, could allow errors of this magnitude to propagate through its literature for years by accident. Every new fact uncovered casts doubt on the validity and objectivity of all other aspects of the IPCC organization and on every one of its conclusions.

On April 14, 2010, The University of East Anglia reported that their own internal investigation, headed up by Lord Oxburgh, had concluded that Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, and other members of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) had conducted themselves in an exemplary manner, and all were exonerated of any wrongdoing.

However, on July 19th, Anthony Watts reports:

"Now from Bishop Hill we learn that it appears that the Oxburgh investigation let Dr. Phil Jones endorse what evidence (papers he's published) to review."

So much for conduction an impartial inquiry! For additional information on the true nature of the "investigation", see the accompanying Climate Audit article by Steve McIntyre.

[It also makes one wonder about the independence and accuracy of a similar internal investigation conducted by Penn State, which similarly cleared its professor, Michael Mann, of any wrongdoing.]

Further research into the satellite-based weather data compiled by the U.S. government-funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reveals that the record is seriously corrupted and may be inaccurately reporting values up to 15 degrees Fahrenheit in excess of actual real-world temperatures. For example:

• Reports that temperatures in the great lakes had increased by 10-15 degrees where unfounded and completely at odds with common sense observations.
  
  
• NOAA reported idiotic surface temperatures as high as 600 degrees F in residential areas of Wisconsin and a boiling 400+ degrees F in northern Lake Michigan.

Investigations have revealed that the temperature sensors is at least five of the weather satellites are seriously degraded and reporting inaccurately.

"The U.S. physicist [Dr Charles R. Anderson] agrees there may now be thousands of temperatures in the range of 415-604 degrees Fahrenheit automatically fed into computer climate models and contaminating climate models with a substantial warming bias. This may have gone on for a far longer period than the five years originally identified. Anderson continues, 'One has to marvel at either the scientific incompetence this reveals or the completely unethical behavior of NOAA and its paid researchers that is laid open before us.'"

"Dr. Anderson sums up saying; 'It is now perfectly clear that there are no reliable worldwide temperature records and that we have little more than anecdotal information on the temperature history of the Earth.'"

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the carbon "offset" trading project which was initiated by political insiders like Al Gore, to make a fortune off of the anticipated draconian "Cap-and-Trade" regulations that were to come out of Washington D.C. and other governmental bodies, collapsed, due in no small part to the changing political winds resulting from the Climategate affair.

"Unlike most real markets, the carbon market was created by banks and governments so that new investment opportunities could seamlessly dovetail with specific government policies. It's a fantasy casino based on a doctrine of pure science fiction. Certainly, gaming the system has always been at the top on the agenda of the new green eco-trader. Most people, investors included, might innocently ask the fundamental question, "what's the point of having a CO2 commodities market?" The answer to that question should be obvious by now, and you can certainly look to the initial stakeholders in the various international climate trading bodies for a "Who's Who" list of individuals that have actively been pushing the global warming concept from its inception."

The Global Warming Policy Foundation of the UK reports that an international panel's review of all 18,531 sources referenced in the UN's IPCC report reveal that 5,587 were not peer reviewed, qualifying them as "grey literature" rather than as sound science, and despite IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri's statement: "The IPCC uses only peer-reviewed scientific literature."

R. S. Knox and D. H. Douglass, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, recently published a paper in the International Journal of Geosciences titled, Recent energy balance of Earth, which disputes the ocean warming data and conclusions previously reported by J. M. Lyman and others. Rather than showing a positive rate of change resulting in a net energy storage increase, the data actually demonstrates a negative rate of change. As stated in the abstract:

"A recently published estimate of Earth's global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993-2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003-2008) warming/cooling rate because of a 'flattening' that occurred around 2001-2002. Using only 2003-2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from -0.010 to -0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance."

The InterAcademy Council (IAC), a consortium of the world's top scientific academies, conducted a review of the the UN's IPCC report and determined the following:

"A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was 'little evidence' for its claims about global warming."

"It also said the panel had emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made 'substantive findings' based on little proof."

Also of interest is the following comment concerning IPCC chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri:

"Dr Pachauri has been accused of a conflict of interest, which he denies, after it emerged that he has business interests attracting millions of pounds in funding. One, the Energy Research Institute, is set to receive up to £10 million in grants from taxpayers over the next five years."

The faulty and manufactured global climate data was used to craft the Kyoto Protocol, which has then become the justification for significant pieces of legislation, such as California's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Once this legislation was in place, regulators then applied tactical lessons learned from the Climategate "scientists", by exaggerating their estimates of pollution levels in order to further support their intervention into both personal behavior and business processes. As the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

"California grossly miscalculated pollution levels in a scientific analysis used to toughen the state's clean-air standards [...] The pollution estimate in question was too high - by 340 percent, according to the California Air Resources Board"   [Emphasis added]

"Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, offered no explanation when The Chronicle questioned her about the diesel emissions miscalculation. [...] Nichols was emphatic, though, when asked whether she has concerns about other scientific calculations made by air board scientists. 'No, no, no, no, no, no, no and no,' she said."

On October 8, 2010, Hal Lewis, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) after sixty-seven years of membership. Here are a few excerpts from his letter of resignation:

"For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

[...]

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me ..."

William Connolley, a climate science blogger, was stripped of his editing position at Wikipedia, for his actions in falsifying and distorting the encyclopedia's climate science record.

"His career as a global warming propagandist has now been stopped, following a unanimous verdict that came down today through an arbitration proceeding conducted by Wikipedia. In the decision, a slap-down for the once-powerful Connolley by his peers, he has been barred from participating in any article, discussion or forum dealing with global warming. In addition, because he rewrote biographies of scientists and others he disagreed with, to either belittle their accomplishments or make them appear to be frauds, Wikipedia barred him — again unanimously — from editing biographies of those in the climate change field."

Upset with a cultural trend that is now moving away from a belief in the inevitability of an AGW climate crisis, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has organized a group of climate researchers to fight back in an attempt to re-ignite a fire under this issue, which would then insure continued government research funding and the imposition of carbon legislation that is now all but dead. As John Abraham of St. Thomas University said:

"This group feels strongly that science and politics can't be divorced ..."

"The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed."

If the AGU is not willing to rely upon the "truth" of their position, then what are they counting on? Science is an intellectual pursuit concerned only with the facts of reality, while government (i.e., politics) is a repository of force. Apparently the AGU is now preparing to apply a bit of force in order to "prevail"! Well, they've already tried subterfuge and lying, so what's left?

Using $1.1 million in grant money from the Joyce Foundation (of which Barack Obama was then a board member!), Richard Sandor founded the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in 2000. The purpose of the exchange was to profit from what appeared to be the inevitable carbon cap-and-trade environmental regulations soon to be coming from governments around the world, and Al Gore was a major investor in this scheme. However, the Climategate scandal stuck a wrench into the political machinery, forestalling the passage of these bills, and the CCX along with it's counterpart, the European Climate Exchange (ECX), were sold to Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) on April 30, 2010. Now, just six months later, ICE has announced that it will suspend all carbon trading before the end of the year.

"Al Capone tried to use Prohibition to muscle in on a piece of all the action in Chicago. The CCX's backers wanted to use a new prohibition on carbon emissions to muscle in on a piece of, quite literally, all the action in the world."

"But according to an advisory posted to the exchange's website, participants simply didn't want to trade in carbon credits without a legal requirement that they do so."

Tom Nelson states: "After claiming that he never deleted any emails, Phil Jones now admits deleting emails."

As reported in the UK Guardian on 11-24-09, Phil Jones is quoted as saying:

"Some of the emails probably had poorly chosen words and were sent in the heat of the moment, when I was frustrated. I do regret sending some of them. We've not deleted any emails or data here at CRU. I would never manipulate the data one bit - I would categorically deny that."   [Emphasis added]

However, in a new article in Nature dated 11-15-10, when asked about deleting emails, he had this to say:

"When Jones is now asked if he deleted such messages, he says: 'No, I deleted e-mails as a matter of course just to keep them under control.'

"Then Muir Russell was correct? Had Jones broken the spirit of the law? 'Not necessarily, if you've deleted them ahead of time,' he says. 'You can't second guess what's going to be requested.' Jones goes back and forth on his motivations. Deleting e-mails would simplify his life if people requested them in the future, but that was not why he got rid of them, he says. 'I deleted them based on their dates. It was to keep the e-mails under control,' he repeats."   [Emphasis added]

What is the real purpose of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?

Bernard Potter of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung, interviewed IPCC joint chairman Ottmar Edenhofer, and in an article titled IPCC Official: "Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World's Wealth", summarized his conclusion as follows:

"Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated."

Specifically, Edenhofer had these comments:

"[I]f global emission rights are distributed [...] on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there."

"Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War."

"[O]ne must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore."

"[W]e need to see that successful climate policy requires other global trade and financial policies."

"[T]here is always the risk that individual rationality leads to collective stupidity. Therefore, one cannot solve the climate problem alone, but it has to be linked to other problems. There must be penalties and incentives: global CO2-tariffs and technology transfer."

In an article titled "What happened to the 'warmest year on record': The truth is global warming has halted", David Rose reports the following:

"But buried amid the details of those two Met [British Meteorological] Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole."

"Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US Vice President Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped."

"The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?"

Never fear. It doesn't matter if it gets warmer or colder. It doesn't matter if it rains, snows or there is a prolonged drought. It doesn't matter if the weather is one thing here and something completely different elsewhere on the globe. It doesn't matter because the advocates of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) will confirm that every bit of climate data, no matter what it happens to be, is a positive indicator of global warming. Quoting Anthony Watts in The Daily Caller:

"From the Independent, March 20th, 2000:

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become 'a very rare and exciting event.' 'Children just aren't going to know what snow is,' he said."

"Now, for the second year in a row, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales is covered with snow. Meanwhile, AGW proponents like the Guardian's George Monbiot are furiously spinning to make it look like AGW causes more snow, rather than less, as the CRU scientist said 10 years ago."

And, quoting Dr. Richard North of the EU Referendum, commenting on George Monbiot's (i.e. "Moonbat") new defense of global warming:

"It is not that he [Monbiot] does not have a case (even if it is not very good). What makes him so deservedly look the fool it that he, alongside the climate establishment, has spent the last decade or more trying to convince us that milder winters are a sure sign of global warming. Now, in the manner of Winston Smith, Moonbat seems to believe that he can rewrite history and we will not notice."

We knew it was coming. With industrial carbon credit trading off the table for now, the environmental movement shifts its focus to the individual. As reported on EurActive, a European environmental site, in an article titled "Rio+20: UN hears fresh ideas to 'green' economy":

"A UN meeting this week took stock of stakeholders' expectations for the Rio+20 summit on sustainable development, set to take place in 2012."

"The 2012 summit is expected to agree on a political document that will guide action on sustainable development policy for decades to come and give birth to a World Environment Organisation."

"A report summarising the submissions suggests that the green economy will rely on 'rigorously enforced environmental laws, taxation based on environmental impact' and 'personal carbon quotas'."

"Personal carbon quotas relate to the maximum quantity of CO2 each of us may emit into the atmosphere per year without increasing the level of current global emissions."

"On the economic aspects of green legislation, stakeholders admitted that 'a transition to a green economy will involve some winners and some losers'."

"Some stakeholders even called for political commitments to stabilise the world's population to deal with increased pressure on natural resources. In late 2009, a UN report suggested that halting the rise in Earth's population would be a major help in the fight against global warming."

If you are a U.S. citizen, just how much of your money is wasted on 'Climate Change'? According to Art Horn in his PJ Media article, it is $10.6 million each and every day.

"This year, your government will spend in the neighborhood of $4 billion on global warming research, despite the fact that there has been no global warming since 1998, and despite all of the billions that have been spent so far yielding no conclusive evidence that using fossil fuels to make energy has any significant effect on Earth's temperature.

Check the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 2011 budget request, and go to chapter 15: Climate Change in the FY 2011 Budget. The numbers are staggering. In 2011, your government will spend $10.6 million a day to study, combat, and educate about climate change."

Christopher Booker writes in The Telegraph, that the BBC and the British government's MET (meteorological) Office continue to play fast and loose with climate data and its reporting to the general public. For example, on the BBC program Horizon airing on 01-24-11, Booker reports:

"The most telling moment, however, came in an interview between [Sir Paul] Nurse and a computer-modelling scientist from Nasa, presented as a general climate expert although he is only a specialist in ice studies. Asked to quantify the relative contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere by human and natural causes, his seemingly devastating reply was that 7 gigatons (billion tons) are emitted each year by human activity while only 1 gigaton comes from natural sources such as the oceans. This was so much the message they wanted that Nurse invited him to confirm that human emissions are seven times greater than those from all natural sources.

This was mind-boggling. It is generally agreed that the 7 billion tonnes of CO2 due to human activity represent just over 3 per cent of the total emitted. That given off by natural sources, such as the oceans, is vastly greater than this, more than 96 per cent of the total. One may argue about the "carbon cycle" and how much CO2 the oceans and plants reabsorb. But, as baldly stated, the point was simply a grotesque misrepresentation, serving, like many of the programme's other assertions, only to give viewers a wholly misleading impression."

Booker continued to give other example of bending the facts during the show. He then turned to a discussion of the MET Office's 01-20-11 issuing of a press release with the headline, "2010 &mdash a near record year", which claimed that 2010 was hotter than any other year in the past decade. Booker continues:

"When [Dr Benny Peiser and Dr David Whitehouse, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation] examined the original data from which this claim was derived — compiled by the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and the Met Office's Hadley Centre — it clearly showed 2010 as having been cooler than 2005 (and 1998) and equal to 2003. It emerged that, for the purposes of the press release, the data had been significantly adjusted.

Comparing the actual data for each year, from 2001 to 2010, with that given in the press release shows that for four years the original figure has been adjusted downwards. Only for 2010 was the data revised upwards, by the largest adjustment of all, allowing the Met Office to claim that 2010 was the hottest year of the decade."

And so it goes with the propaganda machine.

David Evans, a mathematician and engineer who has been consulting with the Australian Greenhouse Office and Department of Climate Change for over nine years, modeling carbon pools in agricultural systems, recently spoke to an Anti-Carbon-Tax Rally in Perth, Australia. These are excerpts from his remarks:

"Let's set a few things straight. The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s."

"The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas."

"Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. ... During the warming of the late 1970s, '80s and '90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. ... This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide."

"This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s."

"At this point, official "climate science" stopped being a science."

"Finally, to those who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions: Sorry, but you've been had. Yes, carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming, but it's so minor it's not worth doing much about."

Read the complete article for the full story.

In 2005, the United Nations predicted that by 2010, there would be 50 million "climate refugees" created as a result of the consequences of climate change. This information was posted on their website, accompanied by a map showing the areas to be devastated by flooding, desertification, increased hurricane activity and ice cap and permafrost melting.

Gavin Atkins of Asian Correspondent recently wondered What happened to the climate refugees?, and investigated the claims by looking at census data for many of the areas predicted to be most vulnerable. He discovered that populations in many of these regions had not decreased as people fled the purported havoc of global warming, but instead had increased substantially during the past decade.

After Atkins article was published on April 11th and picked up by other news agencies, the UN quickly and quietly tried to cover up this latest mistake by removing the page and map from their site. However, thanks to Google Cache, both were able to be retrieved and can be viewed as part of the Daily Caller's article.

But have no fear, for the UN, instead of apologizing for their gross error, is now stating that there will certainly be 50 million climate change refugees, only by 2020!

In Forbes, Patrick Michaels discusses the steady stream of incorrect climate predictions that the United Nations has made over the past decade, from climate refugees (see above), to lost glaciers, to melting polar ice caps, to widespread destruction of rainforests, to severe coastal flooding, to droughts. He then makes the following very important observations:

"Is all of this due to chance?"

"Scientists, as humans, make judgemental errors. But what is odd about the UN is that its gaffes are all in one direction. All are exaggeration of the effects of climate change. ... No one has found analogous errors in the other direction."

"In an unbiased world there should be an equal chance of either underestimating or overestimating the climate change and its effects, which allows us to test whether this string of errors is simply scientists behaving normally or being naughty."

"What's the chance of throwing a coin six times and getting all heads (or tails)? It's .015. Most scientists consider the .050 level sufficient to warrant retention of a hypothesis, which in this case, is that the UN's climate science is biased."

In Forbes, James Taylor discusses the latest attempt by climate science researchers to fudge the data in order to create the desired end result.

"Faced with the embarrassing fact that sea level is not rising nearly as much as has been predicted, the University of Colorado's NASA-funded Sea Level Research Group has announced it will begin adding a nonexistent 0.3 millimeters per year to its Global Mean Sea Level Time Series. As a result, alarmists will be able to present sea level charts asserting an accelerating rise in sea level that is not occurring in the real world."

"United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) computer models project approximately 15 inches of sea level rise during the 21st century."

"Satellite measurements, however, show global sea level rose merely 0.83 inches during the first decade of the 21st century (a pace of just 8 inches for the entire century), and has barely risen at all since 2006. This puts alarmists in the embarrassing position of defending predictions that are not coming true in the real world."

"[T]he current pace of 8 inches of sea level rise for the present century is essentially no different than the 7 inches of sea level rise that occurred last century. However, with an artificially enhanced 9.2 inches of sea level rise, alarmists can claim sea level is rising 31 percent faster than it did last century."

Just when the climate alarmists were thinking that things couldn't get any worse for their cause, scientists from the US National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the US Air Force Research Laboratory report that the sun appears to be heading into a sustained period of low solar activity which could result in a dramatic cooling leading to a mini Ice Age within the next decade.

"The Sun normally follows an 11-year cycle of activity. The current cycle, Cycle 24, is now supposed to be ramping up towards maximum strength. Increased numbers of sunspots and other indications ought to be happening: but in fact results so far are most disappointing. Scientists at the NSO now suspect, based on data showing decades-long trends leading to this point, that Cycle 25 may not happen at all."

"An immediate question is whether this slowdown presages a second Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period with virtually no sunspots [which occurred] during 1645-1715. Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. ... This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the 'Little Ice Age' when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes."

"The big consequences of a major solar calm spell, however, would be climatic. The next few generations of humanity might not find themselves trying to cope with global warming but rather with a significant cooling."

Follow the money ...

James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and a very vocal proponent for Anthropogenic Global Warming, is accused of enriching himself by over $1.7 million, through contributions of funds and services from the environmental organizations whose agendas he actively promoted.

"In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Washington, D.C., a group claims NASA is withholding documents that show James Hansen failed to comply with ethics rules and financial disclosures regarding substantial compensation he earned outside his $180,000 taxpayer-paid position as director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies."

"Federal rules prohibit government employees from receiving certain types of income outside their job. Employees are required to file Form 17-60 in writing before any outside activity. And annually, they're required to submit Form SF 278, after receiving outside compensation."

"Mark Hess, chief of communications for the Goddard Space Center, sent Fox News NASA's response to Horner's FOIA request. It said in many cases the documents Horner requested did not exist. Horner claims they should, if Hansen was complying with the law."

Funds and services alleged to have been received include:

• Between $333,000 and $500,000 from the Dan David Foundation
  
  
• $550,000 from the Asahi Glass Foundation
  
  
• $100,000 from the Norwegian Sophie Prize
  
  
• $48,164 from speaking fees
  
  
• $15,000 participation fee waiver from the W.J. Clinton Foundation
  
  
• $720,000 in free legal advice from George Soros' Open Society Institute.

If you can't beat 'em, brainwash 'em!

The state of Maryland had added a mandatory course in "environmental literacy" to the requirements for graduation from high school.

"But what is that? That is the question State Senator J. B. Jennings is asking. "Is it going to be fact-based? Or is it going to be theory-based, which is usually politically, theory driven. And you can think, it's going to be about global warming or climate change."

"The new rule is a regulation from the State Board of Education, not a law passed by the legislature, so it lays out no specifics. Governor Martin O'Malley offers no real details but praises it, saying it will "infuse core subjects with lessons about conservation and smart growth and the health of our natural world."

"That is not really education," says Ebell. "It's propaganda and its designed to raise up a new generation of easily led and poorly educated and misinformed students."

Just how dangerous is climate change? Well, according to the United Nations, it's apparently so deadly that the UN security council is contemplating the creation of an international "Green Helmet" security force that could "step into conflicts caused by shrinking resources" and "keep the peace in an era of climate change".

"'A good first step would be to acknowledge the realities of climate change and its inherent implications to international peace and security,' [German ambassador to the UN Peter Wittig] wrote."

"'The security council should join the general assembly in recognizing climate change as a threat to international peace and security. It is a threat as great as nuclear proliferation or global terrorism,' Marcus Stephen, the president of Nauru, wrote in a piece in the New York Times."

Even though this is all just talk up to this point, a discussion concerning the creation of a military unit that justifies its use of force against people across the globe based upon environmental concerns, is chilling in its implications. This is nothing less than another attempt by the UN to redistribute the worlds wealth and resources through its Agenda 21 program, and to build an armed force that will impose it upon any recalcitrant nation or group of individuals.

New Research conducted at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has demonstrated that the theory of the Dutch physicist, Henrik Svensmark, are correct and that the sun is primarily responsible for the variations in the earth's temperature. As Lawrence Solomon explains:

"CERN [...] has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth's atmosphere. In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth's atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun's magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth's atmosphere (the stronger the sun's magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth."

However, following in the long standing tradition of government funded researchers and the main stream media, these results have been downplayed by CERN and gone unreported by the press. In an interview, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the Director General of CERN said:

"I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them."

Which led Nigel Calder to conclude:

"CERN has joined a long line of lesser institutions obliged to remain politically correct about the man-made global warming hypothesis. It's OK to enter 'the highly political arena of the climate change debate' provided your results endorse man-made warming, but not if they support Svensmark's heresy that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation."

"The once illustrious CERN laboratory ceases to be a truly scientific institute when its Director General forbids its physicists and visiting experimenters to draw the obvious scientific conclusions from their results."

Just as back in October 2010, when Hal Lewis, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) over disputes regarding its climate-change position, now, on September 13, 2011, Nobel prize-winner, Dr. Ivar Giaever, has also resigned from that organization for similar reasons.

In a letter to the APS, Dr. Giaever states:

"Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

New reports from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) indicate that the US Government, the EU and the UN's IPCC have colluded to create hidden communication channels, in order to conceal correspondence relating to the political agenda behind climate change research.

"CEI has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental accounts, which correspondence a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA. This 'cloud' serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars."

"This effort has apparently been conducted with participation — thereby direct assistance and enabling — by the Obama White House which, shortly after taking office, seized for Holdren's office the lead role on IPCC work from the Department of Commerce. The plan to secretly create a FOIA-free zone was then implemented."

"This represents politically assisting the IPCC to enable UN, EU and U.S. bureaucrats and political appointees avoid official email channels for specific official work of high public interest, performed on official time and using government computers, away from the prying eyes of increasingly skeptical taxpayers.'

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project attempts to clarify the controversy surrounding the questionable temperature datasets used by past climate researchers, as noted in a number of the links above. This is being done by reanalyzing data from a far larger number of of temperature measuring stations (39,000 vs. 7,280) and then making the data and analysis public, available for peer review. Preliminary results from land-based measurements only (not including ocean temperature data) support the contention that global temperature is rising. However, as they report on their site:

"Land warms more than oceans, so when we include the ocean we expect the total global warming to be less."

Despite the missing ocean temperature data, the researchers, Richard and Elizabeth Muller and Robert Rohde, issued a preliminary report [no longer available] stating:

"[The BEST] study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1 degree C since the mid-1950s."

"The [BEST] study did not assess temperature changes in the oceans, which according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not warmed as much as land. When averaged in, they reduce the global surface temperature rise over the past 50 years — the period during which human effect on temperature is discernable — to about two thirds of one degree Centigrade."

Notice the implication in the last paragraph that the temperature rise is due to human action, without actually stating it. Only later in the Wall Street Journal did Richard Muller, at the very end of his article, clarify this:

"How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that."

Anthony Watts discusses his agreements and disagreements with the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) preliminary results.

A few of his agreements:

"The Earth is warmer than it was 100-150 years ago. But that was never in contention - it is a straw man argument. The magnitude and causes are what skeptics question."

"[The researchers] admit that the influence in recent decades of oceanic temperature cycles has been unappreciated and may explain most, if not all, of the global warming that has taken place, stating the possibility that the 'human component of global warming may be somewhat overstated.'"

"The findings of the BEST global surface analysis match the finding of other global temperature metrics. This isn't surprising, as much of the same base raw data was used. There's a myth that NASA GISS, HadCRUT, NOAA's, and now Berkeley's source data are independent of one another. That's not completely true. They share a lot of common data from GHCN, administered by NOAA's National Climatic Data. So it isn't surprising at all they would match."

And some of his disagreements:

"The way they dealt with my surfacestation data in analysis was flat-out wrong, and I told them so days ahead of this release. They offered no correction, nor even an acknowledgement of the issue."

"They didn't adequately deal with that 1% [urban regions] in my opinion, by doing a proper area weighting."

"The rush to judgment they fomented before science had a chance to speak is worse than anything I've ever seen."

As expected, promoters of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have jumped on the BEST data, claiming that it undercuts the position of AGW skeptics. For example, the lead-in to an article in The Economist reads:

"A new analysis of the temperature record leaves little room for the doubters. The world is warming."

The article is careful to avoid attributing the temperature rise to man-made causes, but the implication is clear — the doubters are those who are skeptical regarding man's responsibility for these rises. These implications are properly addressed by Matt Ridley on his blog, The Rational Optimist.

An article in the Canadian Free Press reports on the confluence of data pointing towards the possibility of a coming global cooling rather than warming period.

"US solar physicists announced in June 2011 that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth — far from facing a global warming problem — is actually headed into a mini Ice Age. The announcement came from scientists at the US National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the US Air Force Research Laboratory. Three different analyses of the Sun's recent behavior all indicated that a period of unusually low solar activity may be about to begin."

"Fred Dardick reports, 'We are in the midst of the convergence of three major solar, ocean, and atmospheric cycles all heading in the direction of global cooling. Last year the Southern Hemisphere experienced its coldest winter in 50 years and Europe just went through two particularly cold winters in a row, and the cooling trend has just begun. The likelihood of a repeat of the great frost of 1709 is growing every day.' This was the time of the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) and for periods either side of it, many European rivers which are ice-free today — including the Thames — routinely froze over, allowing ice skating and even for armies to march across them in some cases."

From an NPR report:

"A government researcher who wrote a controversial report on dead polar bears was asked to take a polygraph test by a federal agent investigating allegations of scientific misconduct."

"In 2006, Monnett and Gleason published a report describing their sightings of apparently drowned polar bears in the Arctic. The report drew public attention to the plight of the bears as the climate changes and ice melts."

"Last year, someone at the Department of the Interior alleged that acts of scientific misconduct may have been committed in relation to that report."

The UK Mail is reporting that Prof Judith Curry, the second named co-author of the four research papers released by the BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature) team, is refuting the claims of Professor Richard Muller, that the Earth continues to warm at the same rate observed during the last half of the 20th century. Excerpts from the article state:

"Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America's prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller's claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a 'huge mistake', with no scientific basis."

"Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to 'hide the decline' in rates of global warming."

"In fact, Prof Curry said, the project's research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties — a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained."

"'There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn't stopped,' she said. 'To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.'"

"[A] report to be published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past ten years, drawn from the BEST project's data and revealed on its website."

"This graph shows that the trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all — though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly."

And what does Professor Muller have to say about this:

"[H]e admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be 'statistically significant', although, he added, it was equally possible that it was — a statement which left other scientists mystified."

Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is reporting that the greenhouse gas observation satellite, IBUKI, which was launched in June 2009, shows that the most heavily industrialized areas of the world, including most of Europe and the eastern half of the United States, not only contribute less CO₂, but actually act as CO₂ absorbers. Quoting the article:

"Bizarrely, the IBUKU [sic] maps prove exactly the opposite of all conventional expectations revealing that the least industrialized regions are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet."

"Yes, you read that correctly: the U.S. and western European nations are areas where CO2 levels are lowest. This new evidence defies the consensus view promoted by mainstream newspapers, such as the New York Times."

"JAXA boasts that, 'we can reduce the error of the estimated values when we introduce IBUKI's observation data compared to that of the values calculated in a conventional way based on ground observation data.'"

"Thus, the unthinkable could be made real: the greenhouse gas theory of climate change may collapse in the face of empirical evidence that industrialization is shown to have no link to global warming."

Following up on the recently released JAXA satellite data, Jo Nova published the charts for the CO₂ (shown below) and methane measurements, showing that the industrial, first-world countries predominantly act as carbon sinks (blue dots) while underdeveloped, third-world countries are net carbon producers (red dots).

Quoting E.M. Smith from the Chiefio website:

"This isn't that much of a surprise to me. I'd figured out some time ago that trees and bamboo could consume far more CO2 than I 'produce' via burning oil and gas. I've also pointed out that The West is largely letting trees grow, while mowing our lawns and having the clippings 'sequestered' in land fills (along with an untold tonnage of phone books and junk mail?) while the 3rd world is busy burning and cutting down their forests. The simple fact is that 'jungle rot' will beat out my 'gallon a day' of Diesel any time. Basically, we in the west grow far more wheat, corn, soybeans, wood, lawns, shrubs, etc. than we burn oil. In the 3rd world, they burn their sequestering plants. (And it takes one heck of a lot more wood to cook a meal than it does coal via a highly efficient furnace / electric generator / microwave oven.) But it's nice to see it documented in aggregate in the 'facts in the air'."

Anthony Watts reviews the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) data for the past decade in the United States and demonstrates that both summer and winter temperatures reveal a cooling trend.

Additional charts provided in the article break down the data by geographic region. And when the data is examined over the past 15 years, starting in 1996, the trend line is almost completely flat, showing just a slight decrease in average temperature.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been circulating a PDF slideshow which provides talking points used to bolster its ongoing claim for man-made global warming. In one example, the EPA displays two pictures showing the dramatic shrinking of Alaska's Muir Glacier between 1941 and 2004, stating that, "Glaciers in the United States and around the world have generally shrunk since the 1960s."

However, what the EPA so conveniently failed to mention was that there was nothing special about the 1960s date that they cherry picked, and that the Muir Glacier has been melting since at least the year 1760, with ten times the ice loss having occurred prior to the 1960s, as this USGS map reveals:

This is not just a misunderstanding of the data, but a clear example of how the government outright lies to the public as part of its effort to sell its program for expanding regulation and control over our lives.

Climategate 2.0!

It is not as if there was any need to further confirm the junk status of much of what has passed for climate science research, and yet a second round of hacked emails exchanges from the UK's Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have just been released. Apparently culled from the same files taken back in 2009, these focus on the political agenda driving the climate message, and the role that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has played in that regard. As James Delingpole puts it:

"In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism."

Here are a few preliminary excerpts culled from the newly released material relating to the IPCC methodology:

Bob Carter [on centralized decision-making]:

"It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group."

Tom Wigley [on deception by the IPCC]:

"Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]"

Jonathan Overpeck [on letting the ends justify the means]:

"The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what's included and what is left out."

"I agree w/ Susan [Solomon] that we should try to put more in the bullet about "Subsequent evidence" [...] Need to convince readers that there really has been an increase in knowledge — more evidence. What is it?"

Phil Jones [on packing the IPCC]:

"Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital — hence my comment about the tornadoes group."

"Useful ones [for IPCC] might be Baldwin, Benestad (written on the solar/cloud issue — on the right side, i.e anti-Svensmark), Bohm, Brown, Christy (will be [sic] have to involve him ?)

Humphrey/DEFRA [on the governmental agenda]:

"I can't overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don't want to be made to look foolish."

"Somehow we have to leave the[m] thinking OK, climate change is extremely complicated, BUT I accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention."

Phil Jones [on selectively manipulating the message]

"We don't really want the bullshit and optimistic stuff that Michael has written [...] We'll have to cut out some of his stuff."

Michael Mann [on manipulating the propaganda]

"the important thing is to make sure they're loosing the PR battle. That's what the site [Real Climate] is about."

Thomas J. Crowley [on how sociology trumps science]

"I am not convinced that the "truth" is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships"

Leopold Haimberger [on manipulating data to fit preconceptions]

"It is interesting to see the lower tropospheric warming minimum in the tropics in all three plots, which I cannot explain. I believe it is spurious but it is remarkably robust against my adjustment efforts."

Mike Hulme [on religious influences on science]

"My work is as Director of the national centre for climate change research, a job which requires me to translate my Christian belief about stewardship of God's planet into research and action."

Phil Jones [on circumventing Freedom of Information]:

"I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process"

Keith Briffa [on circumventing Freedom of Information]

"UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails] anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC task."

However, of all the material released so far, the most damning are those where the participants speak casually of their fealty to "the cause" of global warming. This clearly demonstrates that it is not truth that they seek, but a preordained outcome that motivates their efforts, and science be damned. Consider the following — emphasis added:

Michael Mann:

"By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc."

"They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic example, referring to the J. Cimate [sic] paper (which should be finally accepted upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a bit."

I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don't know what she think's she's doing, but its not helping the cause"

Berger:

"Many thanks for your paper and congratulations for reviving the global warming."

The UK's Mail Online reports that the new round of Climategate 2.0 emails show how the British media conspired with the University of East Anglia (UEA) climate scientists to control the information that was presented to the public. Here are a few excerpts from this article:

"Britain's leading green activist research centre spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves"

"[The emails] show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation [BBC] to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output."

"BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA's two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage. "

"In 2007, the BBC issued a formal editorial policy document, stating that 'the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus' — the view that the world faces catastrophe because of man-made carbon dioxide emissions."

Sea-Level Gate:

Scientist Nils-Axel Morner has studied sea level data for 45 years, and has concluded that most of what the IPCC has to say on the subject is an outright fabrication. What follows are a few quotes from his article:

"As someone with some expertise in the field, I can assure the low-lying countries that this is a false alarm. The sea is not rising precipitously. "

"Our findings are straightforward: there is no ongoing sea level rise. The sea level there has been stable for the last 50 years or so, after falling some 20cm in around 1960; it was well below the present level in the 18th century and some 50 to 60cm above the present in the 17th century. So it is clear that sea levels rise and fall entirely independently of so-called 'climate change'."

"But the best-known 'victim' of rising sea levels is, without doubt, the Maldives. This myth has been boosted by the opportunism of Mohamed Nasheed, who stars in a new documentary called The Island President. The film's tagline is 'To save his country, he has to save our planet'. It is a depressing example of how Hollywood-style melodrama has corrupted climate science. Nasheed has been rehearsing his lines since being elected in 2009. 'We are drowning, our nation will disappear, we have to relocate the people,' he repeatedly claims."

"If this is what President Nasheed believes, it seems strange that he has authorised the building of many large waterside hotels and 11 new airports. Or could it perhaps be that he wants to take a cut of the $30 billion fund agreed at an accord in Copenhagen for the poorest nations hit by 'global warming'? Within two weeks of Copenhagen, the Maldives foreign minister Ahmed Shaheed wrote to the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton to express support for the accord."

"The IPCC's Fourth Assessment claimed that 'there is strong evidence' of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: 'Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data with nearly global coverage. This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr-1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century. Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates have occurred in some earlier decades.' Almost every word of this is untrue."

"This is a scandal that should be called Sealevelgate. As with the Hockey Stick, there is little real-world data to support the upward tilt. It seems that the 2.3mm rise rate has been based on just one tide gauge in Hong Kong (whose record is contradicted by four other nearby tide gauges). Why does it show such a rise? Because like many of the 159 tide gauge stations used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it is sited on an unstable harbour construction or landing pier prone to uplift or subsidence. When you exclude these unreliable stations, the 68 remaining ones give a present rate of sea level rise in the order of 1mm a year."

"We must learn to take the environmentalists' predictions with a huge pinch of salt. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. That was last year: where are those refugees?"

Lord Christopher Monckton reports from the UN Climate Summit underway in Durban, South Africa. He summarizes the real purpose of the summit as follows:

"The profiteering UN bureaucrats' ... plans to establish a world government paid for by the West on the pretext of dealing with the non-problem of 'global warming' are now well in hand."

"Behind the scenes, throughout the year since Cancun, the now-permanent bureaucrats who have made highly-profitable careers out of what they lovingly call 'the process' have been beavering away at what is now a 138-page document. Its catchy title is 'Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action Under the Convention'."

"The contents of this document, turgidly drafted with all the UN's skill at what the former head of its documentation center used to call 'transparent impenetrability', are not just off the wall — they are lunatic."

And what are some of the mail points in that document?

• Institutes a New International Climate Court: The purpose of which is to redistribute wealth from Western nations to third-world countries in order to make "reparations" for its "climate debt".
  
  
• Establishes the Rights of Mother Earth: The intent is to place the "rights" of nature above those of man, enslaving humanity to the earth — with the UN's court conveniently sitting in judgment.
  
  
• Bans War and Defense Forces: Because they contribute to climate change.
  
  
• Sets a New Global Temperature Target: This "target" is two degrees C below current temperature levels, which would result in massive human deaths.
  
  
• Sets New CO₂ Emission and Concentration Targets: These targets would require massive deindustrialization efforts, resulting in many more human deaths.

Read the entire report for the details.

Here is a chart showing the geological timeline of the earth's mean temperature. The area to the right indicates the recent history. Sort of puts things into perspective!

Did the U.S. Government Help Hide Climate Data?

A review of the Climategate 2.0 documents reveals that the Department of Energy may have been working in concert with the certain heads of climate research organizations in order to keep publicly funded raw climate data out of the "wrong hands". As reported in the Fox News article:

"Dr. Phil Jones, told colleagues repeatedly that the U.S. Department of Energy was funding his data collection — and that officials there agreed that he should not have to release the data."

"'Work on the land station data has been funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn't be passed on. I got this [agreement] in 2007,' Jones wrote in a May 13, 2009, email to British officials, before listing reasons he did not want them to release data."

"Two months later, Jones reiterated that sentiment to colleagues, saying that the data 'has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.'"

[...]

"[C]limate change researcher and blogger Steve McIntyre forwarded FoxNews.com an email exchange from 2005 in which climate scientist Warwick Hughes asked an official at a DOE lab if he could get the data that the government paid Jones to collect."

"'I am asking you to provide me with the following data ... DoE has been funding [the data] since the 1980s,' Hughes noted in his request.'

"But Tom Boden, of the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, told Hughes at the time that the DOE itself did not have the data, and that 'you will need to contact Phil [Jones] directly. I spoke today with the DOE program manager who indicated Phil was not obligated under the conditions of past or present DOE proposal awards to provide these items.'"

Government agencies have stepped up their efforts to track down the person responsible for leaking the Climategate I and II correspondence. The U.S. Department of Justice has now sent a letter to three of the most prominent climate science skeptics, Tallbloke of Tallbloke's Talkshop, Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Jeff Id of The Air Vent, demanding that they preserve certain correspondence on their computers.

In addition, the UK police conducted a raid on Tallbloke's home and confiscated two computers and a router.

An open letter to all political candidates, signed by sixteen scientists, appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Here are a few excerpts:

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

"Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. [...] But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2."

"This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before — for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. "

"Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy."

"Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of 'incontrovertible' evidence."

The MET (UK Meteorological Office) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit reported that a new assessment of more than 30,000 temperature measuring stations reveal that there has been no warming of the earth during the past 15 years. None.

"Meanwhile, leading climate scientists [stated] that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a 'grand minimum' in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food."

Recent observations of the sun indicate that it is heading into Cycle 25 of sunspot activity.

"According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the 'Dalton minimum' of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C."

"However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the 'Maunder minimum' (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the 'Little Ice Age' when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid."

The MET claims that the solar influence is small when compared to the effects of man-made CO₂, and will have minimal impact on global temperatures, but other experts disagree. Henrik Svensmark, the director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark's National Space Institute states:

"'It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.'

He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming. "

Climate alarmist groups, including 350.org, The League of Conservation Voters and Citizen Engagement Lab, have begun a campaign to replace the 63% of meteorologists who believe that global warming is the product of natural causes with those who will report the weather with a more anthropogenic global warming slant.

"Concerned that too many 'deniers' are in the meteorology business, global warming activists this month launched a campaign to recruit local weathermen to hop aboard the alarmism bandwagon and expose those who are not fully convinced that the world is facing man-made doom."

"'Our goal is nothing short of changing how the entire profession of meteorology tackles the issue of climate change,' the group explains on their website."

In other words, these groups want to turn the entire profession of meteorology into a propaganda and indoctrination machine for their views.

"The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows."

"The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall."

"The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps — Greenland and Antarctica — is much less than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy."

"The reason for the radical reappraisal of ice melting in Asia is the different ways in which the current and previous studies were conducted. Until now, estimates of meltwater loss for all the world's 200,000 glaciers were based on extrapolations of data from a few hundred monitored on the ground. Those glaciers at lower altitudes are much easier for scientists to get to and so were more frequently included, but they were also more prone to melting."

Oops!

Forty-nine former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to the current administrator, expressing their displeasure at the space agency's advocacy of anthropogenic, CO₂-based, global warming (i.e., climate change), while ignoring evidence that undermines the theory.

"We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

"The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA's history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.

"As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA's advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA's current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself."

Anthony Watts reports on the newly published paper by Henrik Svensmark, demonstrating the high correlation between supernova events in our region of the galaxy and bio-diversity on the earth. This data supports Svensmark's theory that cosmic rays are the dominant controlling factor of earth's climate. He also inverts the CO₂ model as Watts explains:

"Some geoscientists want to blame the drastic alternations of hot and icy conditions during the past 500 million years on increases and decreases in carbon dioxide, which they explain in intricate ways. For Svensmark, the changes driven by the stars govern the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Climate and life control CO2, not the other way around."

This chart shows the correlation between marine invertebrate genera count (bio-diversity) in blue, and supernova rates in black.

The following chart by Watts, summarizes Svensmark's cosmic ray hypothesis:

According to a paper published back in 2000 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, James Hansen and the GISS team stated:

"..we argue that rapid warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as chlorofluorocarbons, CH4, and N2O, not by the products of fossil fuel burning, CO2 and aerosols..

If sources of CH4 and O3 precursors were reduced in the future, the change in climate forcing by non-CO2 GHGs in the next 50 years could be near zero. Combined with a reduction of black carbon emissions and plausible success in slowing CO2 emissions, this reduction of non-CO2 GHGs could lead to a decline in the rate of global warming, reducing the danger of dramatic climate change."

Oh well, when your previous work doesn't fit today's narrative, bury it!

Global warming: second thoughts of an environmentalist

German green energy investor, Fritz Vahrenholt, rethinks his position on anthropogenic global warming. A few excerpts from his article:

"Scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are quite certain: by using fossil fuels man is currently destroying the climate and our future. We have one last chance, we are told: quickly renounce modern industrial society — painfully but for a good cause."

"For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN's climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realized that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too."

Using tree-ring data, scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, have reconstructed temperatures over the past 2000 years, concluding that there has been an overall cooling trend during that period.

"'We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low,' says Esper. 'Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.'"

"In addition to the cold and warm phases, the new climate curve also exhibits a phenomenon that was not expected in this form. For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years. Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun."

"'This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant,' says Esper. 'However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia.'"

Oops. We're sorry!

"New paper blames about half of global warming on weather station data homogenization.

"Authors Steirou and Koutsoyiannis, after taking homogenization errors into account find global warming over the past century was only about one-half [0.42°C] of that claimed by the IPCC [0.7-0.8°C]."

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmist constantly refer to a 2009 survey that supposedly showed that 98% of all scientists believe in global warming, thus confirming an almost universal consensus on the subject. Is this true?

Larry Bell took a closer look and reported his finding in Forbes. Here is what he discovered:

The survey asked exactly two questions:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
   
   
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

As the following chart shows, of 10,257 surveys sent, only 3,146 responded. Of those respondents, only 77 were found to have had a sufficient level of peer-reviewed publications to be considered suitable subjects. Of that small group, 75 answered yes to question #2.

And this is how the 98% consensus figure was derived!

Read the full articles for a more comprehensive review of the survey methodology.

A new paper to be published by Watts, Jones, McIntyre and Christy, titled, "An area and distance weighted analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends," reanalyzes the surface temperature data measurement stations across the United States.

Using a new classification system designed to better account for the siting of these devices, what this study shows is that temperature data reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has over-reported temperature rises by a factor of two. In other words, the reported North American temperature increases were double the actual amounts, leading to erroneous conclusions derived from this inaccurate data.

The following chart summarizes the findings:

Link: Pre-Print Draft Discussion Paper – [PDF]

Link: Supporting Figures and Tables for Paper – [PDF]

Richard Muller, a physics professor at he University of California at Berkeley and the head of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) team, has been promoting himself as a prior climate skeptic who has recently "converted" to a believer in and supporter of the view that the earth is warming at alarming rates and that that warming is principally due to man's activity in producing CO₂.

The Australian science writer, Jo Nova, takes Muller to task, declaring that of his three major claims, he gets only one half right.

Is the Arctic Pole Melting?

The National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado issued a widely distributed report claiming that Arctic sea ice had diminished to the lowest extent in recent era, breaking the previous low record established in 2007.

Well what constitutes a "record" depends upon what data set you select. Here is the NSIDC ice extent chart, for 1979-2012:

But, as Steven Goddard points out on his Real Science site, satellite data for polar cap ice data did not begin in 1979, but actually extends back to 1967. In the following chart, using data from a 1990 IPCC report, the rapid gain in polar ice between 1974 and 1979 is revealed, demonstrating that ice sheet extent at the poles is cyclical.

Only by selectively cherry-picking the data, are people fooled into believing that what is currently observed in the Arctic is a man-made catastrophe.

Jonathan DuHamel has the following to say in his WryHeat column:

"In an earlier announcement, NSIDC said 'Sea ice extent dropped rapidly between August 4 and August 8. While this drop coincided with an intense storm over the central Arctic Ocean, it is unclear if the storm prompted the rapid ice loss.' NSIDC called the storm 'The Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012' and noted the storm caused 'mechanical break up of the ice and increased melting by strong winds and wave action during the storm.' Nothing to do with global warming. A similar event happened in 2007 to cause the lower sea ice extent reported then."

See his article (link to the right) for additional interesting information.

There has been no global warming — ZERO — during the past sixteen years. Be sure to keep it quiet!

"The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

"The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

"This means that the 'plateau' or 'pause' in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

"The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported. "

The latest revelations out of the UK relate to how the BBC acted as a propaganda machine for the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) movement.

"Guiltiest of all, in my book, is the BBC. Without the BBC's relentless propagandising on behalf of the alarmist cause everywhere from the Today programme to Springwatch to the hysterically doom-mongering reportage of Roger Harrabin and David Shukman the public appetite for climate action at all costs would not have been nearly so strong or undiscriminating. Nor would our politicians have been quite so desperate to prove their green credentials with lunatic policies like the Climate Change Act."

"The damage this has done to our country is incalculable: it has warped the minds of the young and impressionable, giving them utterly misleading notions about the state of climate science and the health of the planet; it has nudged our politicians into making truly fatuous decisions which have a deleterious influence on all our lives; it has lent a veneer of wholly unmerited moral credibility to the schemings of "green" politicians"

While the final report is not due to be released for another year, "expert reviewer" Alec Rawls has leaked the Second Order Draft of AR5, the Working Group I's contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. The full document may be found here.

Quoting from IPCC Draft Report:

"Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties."   [Emphasis added]

And as Rawls then points out:

"The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing changes everything. The climate alarmists can't continue to claim that warming was almost entirely due to human activity over a period when solar warming effects, now acknowledged to be important, were at a maximum. The final draft of AR5 WG1 is not scheduled to be released for another year but the public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself."   [Emphasis added]

Marc Morano of Climate Depot further reports on the findings of Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, who compared differences between the previous AR4 report and the current AR5 draft. Pielke states:

"IPCC AR5 draft shows almost complete reversal from AR4 on trends in drought, hurricanes, floods and is now consistent with scientific literature"

The C3 Headlines site provides the following charts using AR5 data:

and from them concludes:

Anthony Watts also published the following chart which shows how the IPCC models of atmospheric methane, which have for years been projecting an accelerating rise, continue to massively exaggerate the concentrations in relation to reality.