Canada first nation to pull out of Kyoto protocol
Canada on Monday became the first country to announce it would withdraw from the Kyoto protocol on climate change, dealing a symbolic blow to the already troubled global treaty.
Environment Minister Peter Kent broke the news on his return from talks in Durban, where countries agreed to extend Kyoto for five years and hammer out a new deal forcing all big polluters for the first time to limit greenhouse gas emissions.http://www.reuters.com/resources_v2/flash/video_embed.swf?videoId=226709026&edition=BETAUS
Canada, a major energy producer which critics complain is becoming a climate renegade, has long complained Kyoto is unworkable precisely because it excludes so many significant emitters.
"As we’ve said, Kyoto for Canada is in the past … We are invoking our legal right to formally withdraw from Kyoto," Kent told reporters.
The right-of-center Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which has close ties to the energy sector, says Canada would be subject to penalties equivalent to C$14 billion ($13.6 billion) under the terms of the treaty for not cutting emissions by the required amount by 2012.
"To meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the equivalent of either removing every car truck, all-terrain vehicle, tractor, ambulance, police car and vehicle off every kind of Canadian road," said Kent.
Environmentalists quickly blasted Kent for his comments.
"It’s a national disgrace. Prime Minister Harper just spat in the faces of people around the world for whom climate change is increasingly a life and death issue," said Graham Saul of Climate Action Network Canada.
Source:http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/13/us-kyoto-withdrawal-idUSTRE7BB1X420111213
Frozen Planet fakery row: BBC filmed tender scene of mother polar bear with newborn cubs at Dutch ZOO
The BBC’s landmark wildlife documentary was four years in the making and took intrepid cameramen to the ends of the Earth to film.
But now it’s been revealed the method used to capture key scenes might send a chill down the spine of Frozen Planet viewers.
Instead of being filmed in a sub-zero natural habitat, the BBC has admitted a polar bear and her cubs that were the centrepiece of the show were caught on camera in a zoo.
On thin ice: Sir David Attenborough with an anaesthetised polar bear in Svalbard during episode seven of the hit show Frozen Planet
Preparing for the new arrivals: The fake nest being built in a German zoo, ahead of the birth of the polar bear cubs
Not as it seems: The ‘den’ in the wildlife park was constructed out of plaster and wood, built below the zoo’s polar bear enclosure. It was fitted with cameras shortly before the birth
The breathtaking footage was watched by more than eight million viewers. It showed a polar bear tending her newborn cubs but the snow was fake and real Arctic shots were mixed with zoo scenes.
The scene was filmed last Christmas in the comfort of a Dutch wildlife park enclosure made of plaster and wood.
Situated beneath the zoo’s polar bear enclosure, the den was fitted with cameras shortly before the cubs’ birth.
Documentary makers have been accused of misleading the audience into believing the footage was gathered by daring cameramen in the wilderness.
The filming of the moving scene is explained by producer Kathryn Jeffs in a hard to find clip on the programme’s website.
Chinese 2,485 year tree ring study shows natural cycles control climate, temps may cool til 2068
A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan tree rings by Liu et al 2011 shows, with detail, that the modern era is a dog-standard normal climate when compared to the last 2,500 years. The temperature, the rate of change — it’s all been seen before. Nothing about the current period is “abnormal”, indeed the current warming period in Tibet can be produced through calculation of cycles. Liu et al do a Fourier analysis on the underlying cycles and do brave predictions as well.
In Tibet, it was about the same temperature on at least four occasions — back in late Roman times (those chariots!), then again in the dark ages (blame the collapse of industry), then in the middle ages (the Vikings?), then in modern times (blame the rise of industry).
Clearly, these climate cycles have nothing to with human civilization. Their team finds natural cycles of many different lengths are at work: 2-3 years, 100 years, 199 years, 800 years, and 1,324 years. The cold periods are associated with sunspot cycles. What we are not used to seeing are brave scientists willing to publish exact predictions of future temperatures for 100 years that include rises and falls. Apparently, it will cool til 2068, then warm again, though not to the same warmth as 2006 levels.
On “tree-rings”
Now some will argue that skeptics scoff at tree rings, and we do — sometimes — especially ones based on the wrong kind of tree (like the bristlecone) or ones based on small samples (like Yamal), ones with aberrant statistical tricks that produce the same curve regardless of the data (Mann’s hockey-stick), and especially ones that truncate data because it doesn’t agree with thermometers placed near air-conditioner outlets and in carparks (Mann again). Only time will tell if this analysis has nailed it, but, yes, it is worthy of our attention.
Some will also, rightly, point out this is just Tibet, not a global average. True. But the results agree reasonably well with hundreds of other studies from all around the world (from Medieval times, Roman times, the Greenland cores). Why can’t we do solid tree-ring analysis like this from many locations?
The BBC: less trustworthy, more dangerous than a cannibal polar bear
oday’s endangered polar bear story du jour comes, you won’t be at all surprised to hear, from the BBC’s news website. An "environmental photojournalist" named Jenny E Ross took a photograph of a polar bear eating a cub – and concluded, as of course any self-respecting environmental photojournalist would, that this was probably the result of "climate change".
"This type of intraspecific predation has always occurred to some extent," she told BBC News.
"However, there are increasing numbers of observations of it occurring, particularly on land where polar bears are trapped ashore, completely food-deprived for extended periods of time due to the loss of sea ice as a result of climate change."
Don’t you just love that having-it-both-ways fudge? On the one hand, she concedes that polar bears have been doing this kind of thing since time immemorial. On the other, for all that, it’s just gotta be climate change hasn’t it – because, well, isn’t just about everything the result of climate change these days?
Certainly is if you work for the BBC as we were reminded yet again last night on the final episode of Frozen Planet. This was the episode so tendentious that it wasn’t even included in the package sent for broadcast in the US. But apparently here in Britain we’ve been simply too naughty to deserve such a let-off. No, like POWs captured at the Imjin River, we have to sit there and be indoctrinated by the Commissars at our Re-education camp.
What’s particularly depressing is that the Chief Re-education Commissar in this case was none other than David Attenborough. Cosy, nice, whispery, reverend, sensitive, super-dooper, brother of Dickie, gorilla-hugging doyen of all that was ever wonderful about the BBC David Attenborough.
Climategate 2 shows more AGW chicanery
Climategate 2 Emails Loaded with Bombshells
New and explosive revelations continue to emerge from the Climategate 2 emails, two weeks after the 5,000-plus emails were first publicly unveiled. While Climategate 2 does not share the “novelty factor” of Climategate 1, the contents of the Climategate 2 emails are at least as appalling as Climategate 1. Most importantly, the Climategate 2 emails show scientists at the forefront of global warming activism acknowledging serious flaws in alarmist global warming theory, working together to hide data contradicting alarmist global warming theory, and taking concerted and nefarious action to ruin the careers of scientists and peer-reviewed science journal editors who publish studies and data that undermine alarmist global warming claims.
Global warming activists and their sympathetic media allies are attempting to paint the Climategate stories as merely frustrated scientists understandably acting catty in response to incessant personal attacks from global warming skeptics. Such a storyline is about as accurate and believable as painting the Watergate scandal as Richard Nixon merely and understandably acting catty in response to incessant personal attacks from Democrats and a hostile media.
Emails:bombshells
Cooper: Climategate 2.0 further clouds global warming findings
Just in time for the Durban, South Africa, climate summit that began Monday, two publications appeared that will reduce the already low expectations that anything will be done to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
The more spectacular has been dubbed Climategate 2.0. It consists of around 5,000 e-mails, many of them refreshingly vulgar. The exchanges were mostly among individuals featured in Climategate 1.0, which helped scuttle the 2009 Copenhagen summit.
The new batch shows that, for example, many so-called climate scientists were fully aware that proof of melting tropical glaciers was bunk, but treated such evidence as “dirty laundry.” Others complained of “nitpicky jerks” who found anomalous data. They grew fretful about anthropogenic global warming skeptics having “extreme religious views.” One such miscreant apparently “has links to the Vatican.” Who knew that conspiratorial Catholics were inspired global warming deniers?
It is not all so comical. Climate superstar Michael Mann of Penn State, the inventor of the hockey stick graph that wrongly showed unprecedented increases in mean global temperatures in recent decades, was particularly irate about critics of “the cause.” His reference was not to science, but to “the PR battle.”
His British counterpart, Phil Jones of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia, told how he searched in vain for a Japanese scientist who would state that increased numbers of tornadoes in that country resulted from global warming. Another climate research unit scientist wanted to claim that the Great Barrier Reef was disintegrating because of global warming, though he knew that fertilizers and starfish did the damage.
The correspondence also featured a few understated critics. Peter Thorne of the U.K. Met Office (formerly the Meteorological Office) wrote Jones that relying on a single and questionable study to support tropical warming was “downright dangerous.” Putting “political spin” on the data, he said, “might not be too clever in the long run.”
Tom Wigley, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., wrote Mann that one of his graphs was “very deceptive.” Douglas Maraun of the climate research unit said Mann’s response to the hockey stick fraud was “not especially honest.”
Climategate 2.0 indicates that a few honest climate scientists have survived. The second publication, by Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, is called What’s Wrong with the IPCC? This study on how the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conducts its business removes the last glimmer of scientific probity.
Caribou supposedly roasted by global warming found unharmed
Another one for the Climate FAIL file…
USA Today/Associated Press, in 2009:
“They believe the insidious impact of climate change, its tipping of natural balances and disruption of feeding habits, is decimating a species that has long numbered in the millions and supported human life in Earth’s most inhuman climate.”
But, darn those Caribou, they just aren’t acting the way they are supposed to….
A vast herd of northern caribou that scientists feared had vanished from the face of the Earth has been found, safe and sound — pretty much where aboriginal elders said it would be all along.
“The Beverly herd has not disappeared,” said John Nagy, lead author of a recently published study that has biologists across the North relieved.
Those scientists were shaken by a 2009 survey on the traditional calving grounds of the Beverly herd, which ranges over a huge swath of tundra from northern Saskatchewan to the Arctic coast. A herd that once numbered 276,000 animals seemed to have completely disappeared, the most dramatic and chilling example of a general decline in barren-ground caribou.
[…]
“Many of the community people reported that elders think this is nothing new. Caribou move.”
Caribou move? Who knew? Can’t they model that?
Climategate II Emails Show US/British Govs Colluded W/Scientists to Suppress Anti-Warming Data
This past Tuesday more than 5,000 emails were leaked online as follow-up to the first set Climategate emails released two years ago. These emails go even further than the first set in showing a systemic suppression of evidence, and even reports being published that the scientists knew were based on bogus approaches, but since the findings were pro-global warming the papers were blessed by the University of East Anglia and the rest of the ruling members of the climate change Cosa Nostra. This time not only are the scientists implicated but so are members of the British and US governments
For example there was this message from the British Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra):
One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message’.
The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.
‘Humphrey’, said to work at Defra, writes: ‘I cannot 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 their story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.’
They were assured by the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the now infamous Professor Phil Jones) that the findings would stand up.
Yet one of the newly released emails, written by Prof. Jones – who is working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – said: ‘Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden.
And who was a party to suppressing that data?
‘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.
In another email Professor Jones happily reported
‘I’ve been told that Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is above national Freedom of Information Acts.
‘One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.
Not all scientists were happy with this approach but some seemed happy to being a party to concealing and destroying evidence.
The lead author of one of the reports, Jonathan Overpeck, wrote, ‘The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out.’
This time even the "science world" is coming down hard on the climate scientists.
Andrew Orlwowski, UK science site The Register’s science correspondent comments on one email that says, ‘What if climate change turns out to be a natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us all’
‘The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.’
Clive Crook, a commentator for the Atlantic, who described the earlier inquiries into the Climategate emails as ‘ineffectual’ and ‘mealy mouthed’, reportedly said, ‘The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me.
The climatologists in the climate change Cosa Nostra, are claiming the release of these emails is despicable, they are not (as of this writing) claiming the emails are bogus. Which based on the evidence shows that we have been lied to not only by members of the scientific community but by the
Department of Energy of the United States Government. Hopefully congress will investigate why the DOE is supressing information.
Latest Climategate Emails: BBC ‘In Cahoots With Climategate Scientists’
Imagine if it were discovered that free-market think tanks were caught vetting scripts of Fox News programs, intervening to prevent free-market sceptics from receiving air time, and consulted with the network about how it should alter its programing in a free-market direction. The howls of outrage would be loud, long and unrelenting from other news networks, the wire services, and leading U.S. newspapers.
What I have just described, and more, characterizes a decade-long relationship between the British Broadcasting Corporation and UK-based climate scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) — except that the BBC is government-funded and disproportionately controls the flow of broadcast news in the UK. What the UK Daily Mail has revealed today as part of its ongoing review of the second set of Climategate emails released before Thanksgiving has caused Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation to write that the BBC is "in cahoots with Climategate scientists." What follows are excerpts from the David Rose’s Daily Mail story (bolds are mine):
… The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade.
They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation 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.
‘Following their lead has meant the whole thrust and tone of BBC reporting has been that the science is settled, and that there is no need for debate,’ one journalist said. ‘If you disagree, you’re branded a loony.’
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.
The document says the policy was decided after ‘a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts’ – including those from UEA.
But although there is now more scientific debate than ever about influences on climate other than CO2, prompted by the fact that the world has not warmed for 15 years, a report from the BBC Trust this year compared climate change sceptics to the conspiracy theorists who blame America for 9/11, and said Britain’s main sceptic think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, should be given no air time.
Rose also reveals:
- That "in private some of those same scientists have had doubts about aspects of the global warming case. For example, Professor Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, admitted there was no evidence that the snows of Kilimanjaro were melting because of climate change, and he and his colleagues agreed there were serious problems with the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph."
- An obsequious regard for Jones’s opinion of the network’s coverage which has to be read to be believed — and even then, readers may have a hard time believing it.
- That certain key players at the Beeb were keenly aware of the conflicted nature of their relationships.
- An insistence by the network in the wake of both Labor and Conservative pushback that "We would reject the claim that the Tyndall Centre influenced BBC editorial policy." Gosh, why would anyone think otherwise?
ClimateGate 2.0: 5,000 New Emails Confirm Pattern of Deception and Collusion by Alarmists
Almost exactly two years since damning email messages were released from Great Britain’s University of East Anglia showing a pattern of deception and collusion between scientists involved in spreading the global warming myth, a new batch of such correspondence has emerged that seems destined to get as little press coverage as the original ClimateGate scandal did in November 2009.
James Delingpole reported in Britian’s Telegraph Tuesday:
Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. This, it seems, is what motivated the whistleblower ‘FOIA 2011′ (or “thief”, as the usual suspects at RealClimate will no doubt prefer to tar him or her) to go public.
The BBC is reporting that these email messages also come from UEA, and number around 5,000. The entire set is available at MegaUpload.
As you might imagine, climate realists across the globe are beginning to sift through these messages. Our friend Tom Nelson has already uncovered some whoppers:
<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run. […]<2884> Wigley:
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 […]<4923> Stott/MetO:
My most immediate concern is to whether to leave this statement ["probably the warmest of the last millennium"] in or whether I should remove it in the anticipation that by the time of the 4th Assessment Report we’ll have withdrawn this statement – Chris Folland at least seems to think this is possible.
<3062> Jones:
We don’t really want the bullshit and optimistic stuff that Michael has written […] We’ll have to cut out some of his stuff. […]
<3373> Bradley:
I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”. […]
<4369> Cook:
I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly can not be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.
Of course, the “Mike” and “Michael” being regularly disparaged by his peers is Michael Mann, the creator of the thoroughly-debunked Hockey Stick graph which so much of this myth is dependent on.
As physicist Lubos Motl notes, these messages “surely show that Michael Mann is a fraudster even according to most of his colleagues.”
Also for those not connecting the names, Jones is the infamous Phil Jones of UEA. Speaking of which:
<2440> Jones:
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
<2094> Briffa:
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.
… <1577> Jones:
[FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.
Briffa of course is Keith Briffa, the man exposed to have manipulated tree ring data in order to assist Mann’s Hockey Stick charade.
As previously stated, realists from around the world are just starting to go through all these thousands of messages, and it will likely be days if not weeks before we know everything they contain.
Regardless, people that have been pushing back on this myth for years are beginning to weigh in.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Ok.), the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee issued the following statement Tuesday:
“Even before the Climategate emails were released in 2009, the so-called ‘consensus’ peddled by the IPCC was already shattered,” Senator Inhofe said. “Nevertheless, the Obama administration is moving full speed ahead to implement global warming regulations that will impose the largest tax increase in American history, significantly raise energy prices, and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs.
“Remember, the Obama EPA is basing these regulations on its endangerment finding, which relies on the flawed science of the IPCC. Now a recent report by the EPA Inspector General has revealed that EPA cut corners in the process leading up to the endangerment finding: it shows that EPA did not engage in the required record-keeping procedures or conduct an independent review of the science underpinning these costly regulations. If the first Climategate scandal – and the over one hundred errors in the IPCC science that were revealed in its wake – were not enough, the apparent release of the Climategate 2.0 emails is just one more reason to halt the Obama EPA’s job killing global warming agenda.
“The crisis of confidence in the IPCC translates into a crisis of confidence in the EPA’s endangerment finding. The IPCC science has already disintegrated under the weight of its own flaws, and I believe it will only be a matter of time before the endangerment finding follows suit. It’s time for the Obama administration to stop trying to resurrect policies that are all pain for no gain, and get to work on reviving our economy.”
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell issued the following statement Tuesday:
“If there were any doubts remaining after reading the first Climategate e-mails, the new batch of e-mails that appeared on the web today make it clear that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an organized conspiracy dedicated to tricking the world into believing that global warming is a crisis that requires a drastic response,” said Myron Ebell, Director of CEI’s Center on Energy and Environment.
“Several of the new e-mails show that the scientists involved in doctoring the IPCC reports are very aware that the energy-rationing policies that their junk science is meant to support would cost trillions of dollars,” said Ebell.
And Climate Depot’s Marc Morano wrote Tuesday:
“It appears that Climategate 2.0 has arrived to drain what little life there was left in the man-made global warming movement.
“The new emails further expose the upper echelon of the UN IPCC as being more interested in crafting a careful narrative than following the evidence. The release of thousands of more emails is quite simply another victory for science.”
As this is just the beginning of this latest round of email messages from UEA, readers are advised to stay tuned to NewsBusters for regular updates as well as to see how the global warming-loving media are responding.
UPDATE
Tom Nelson has found some remarkable observations concerning these email messages from warmist David Appell:
On a second reading of the stolen UAE emails leaked today, and just reading the README file emails, these sound worse than I thought at first – their impact will be devastating…The original release of emails 2 years ago had a significant impact. My guess is that these are going to throw the science off-kilter for perhaps the rest of this decade, and may well lead some people to rethink how they are doing business (including certain journalists).
CO2 climate sensitivity ‘overestimated’
Global temperatures could be less sensitive to changing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels than previously thought, a study suggests.
The researchers said people should still expect to see "drastic changes" in climate worldwide, but that the risk was a little less imminent.
The results are published in Science.
Previous climate models have tended to used meteorological measurements from the past 150 years to estimate the climate’s sensitivity to rising CO2.
From these models, scientists find it difficult to narrow their projections down to a single figure with any certainty, and instead project a range of temperatures that they expect, given a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial levels.
The new analysis, which incorporates palaeoclimate data into existing models, attempts to project future temperatures with a little more certainty.
Lead author Andreas Schmittner from Oregon State University, US, explained that by looking at surface temperatures during the most recent ice age – 21,000 years ago – when humans were having no impact on global temperatures, he, and his colleagues show that this period was not as cold as previous estimates suggest.
"This implies that the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought," he explained.
By incorporating this newly discovered "climate insensitivity" into their models, the international team was able to reduce uncertainty in its future climate projections.
The new models predict that given a doubling in CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels, the Earth’s surface temperatures will rise by 1.7C to 2.6C (3.1F to 4.7F).
That is a much tighter range than the one produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 report, which suggested a rise of between 2.0C to 4.5C.
The new analysis also reduces the expected rise in average surface temperatures to just over 2C, from 3C.
The authors stress the results do not mean threat from human-induced climate change should be treated any less seriously, explained palaeoclimatologist Antoni Rosell-Mele from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who is a member of the team that came up with the new estimates.
But it does mean that to induce large-scale warming of the planet, leading to widespread catastrophic consequences, we would have to increase CO2 more than we are going to do in the near future, he said.
"But we don’t want that to happen at any time, right?"
"At least, given that no one is doing very much around the planet [about] mitigating CO2 emissions, we have a bit more time," he remarked.
Whether these results mean that the global temperatures will be less responsive to falling CO2 is unclear. "I don’t think we know that, to be honest," remarked Dr Rosell-Mele.
Gabriele Hegerl, from the University of Edinburgh, is cautious about the result in her perspective piece published in the same issue of Science.
She says that this is just one particular climate model, and "future work with a range of models would serve to strengthen the result".
Climatologist Andrey Ganopolski, from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, went further and said that he would not make such a strong conclusion based on this data.
"The results of this paper are the result of the analysis of [a] cold climate during the glacial maximum (the most recent ice age)," he told BBC News.
"There is evidence the relationship between CO2 and surface temperatures is likely to be different [during] very cold periods than warmer."
Scientists, he said, would therefore prefer to analyse periods of the Earth’s history that are much warmer than now when making their projections about future temperatures.
However, although good data exists for the last million years, temperatures during this time have been either similar to present, or colder.
"One should be very careful about using cold climates to [construct] the future," he added.
Source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15858603
Climategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails ‘All our models are wrong’
Analysis There was always an element of tragedy in the first “Climategate” emails, as scientists were under pressure to tell a story that the physical evidence couldn’t support – and that the scientists were reluctant to acknowledge in public. The new email archive, already dubbed “Climategate 2.0”, is much larger than the first, and provides an abundance of context for those earlier changes.
“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,” a civil servant wrote to Phil Jones in 2009. “They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”
Having elevated global warming to the most dramatic, urgent and over-riding issue of the day, bureaucrats, NGOs, politicians and funding agencies demanded that the scientists must keep the whole bandwagon rolling. It had become too big to stop.
“The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” laments one scientist, Peter Thorne. While Professor Jagadish Shukla, a lead IPCC author, IGES founder, and one of the most senior climate experts writes that, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”
With the release of FOIA2011.zip, the cat’s now well and truly out of the bag
Read More:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/23/climategate_2_first_look/
BIG SIBERIAN FREEZE TO HIT BRITAIN
BRITAIN faces a sudden shivering end to the exceptionally warm late autumn with temperatures plunging towards Siberian levels.
Winter weather will arrive with a vengeance with temperatures well below zero within the next fortnight.
Experts then predict a bitterly cold December with thermometers falling at least as low as -15C (5F).
Snow could hit the country even earlier than last year when a big freeze at the end of November sent temperatures to -20C (-4F), crippling transport. And some forecasters fear that temperatures could plunge as low or even lower this winter.
Snow on the railways earlier this year
Jonathan Powell of Positive Weather Solutions said: “It will not be as sustained as last year, but these episodes are expected to be severe, with Siberian temperatures.”
Source:http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/281196
“Some one call Al-Gore so that he can bring some global warming with him”
CERN: ‘Climate models will need to be substantially revised’ New atomsmasher research into cloud formation
CERN’s 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised.
The first results from the lab’s CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets”) experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.
This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a “heliocentric” rather than “anthropogenic” approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.
CERN’s director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer warned his scientists “to present the results clearly but not interpret them”. Readers can judge whether CLOUD’s lead physicist Jasper Kirkby has followed his boss’s warning.
“Ion-induced nucleation will manifest itself as a steady production of new particles that is difficult to isolate in atmospheric observations because of other sources of variability but is nevertheless taking place and could be quite large when averaged globally over the troposphere.”
Kirkby is quoted in the accompanying CERN press release:
“We’ve found that cosmic rays significantly enhance the formation of aerosol particles in the mid troposphere and above. These aerosols can eventually grow into the seeds for clouds. However, we’ve found that the vapours previously thought to account for all aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can only account for a small fraction of the observations – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays.”
The team used the Proton Synchotron accelerator (pictured here with Kirkby) to examine the nucleation using combinations of trace gasses at various temperatures, with precision. These first results confirm that cosmic rays increase the formation of cloud-nuclei by a factor of 10 in the troposphere, but additional trace gasses are needed nearer the surface.
Cosmic ray particles don’t just cause cloud nucleation, they also shrink the fonts CERN uses on its graphics…
Read More:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/25/cern_cloud_cosmic_ray_first_results/
The next climate debate bombshell
Get ready for the next big bombshell in the man-made warming debate. The world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory—CERN in Geneva—will soon announce that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in earth’s atmosphere. More cosmic rays mean a cooler planet. Thus, the solar source of the earth’s long, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle will finally
be explained.
Cosmic rays and solar winds are interesting phenomena—but they are vastly more relevant when an undocumented theory is threatening to quadruple society’s energy costs. The IPCC wants $10 gasoline, and “soaring” electric bills to reduce earth’s temperatures by an amount too tiny to measure with most thermometers.
In 2007, when Fred Singer and I published Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, we weren’t terribly concerned with cosmic rays. We knew the natural, moderate warming/cooling cycle was real, from the evidence in ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites. The cycle was the big factor that belied the man-made warming hysteria of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
.
When Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger discovered the 1,500 year cycle in the Greenland ice cores in 1984, they knew immediately that it was solar-powered. They’d seen exactly the same cycle in the carbon 14 molecules in trees, and in the beryllium 10 molecules in ice cores. Both sets of molecules are formed when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. The cycle had produced a whole series of dramatic, abrupt Medieval-Warming-to-Little-Ice-Age climate changes.
The IPCC, for its part, announced that the sun could not be the forcing factor in any major climate change because the solar irradiation was too small. IPCC did not, however, add up the other solar variations that could amplify the solar irradiation. Nor had the IPCC programmed its famed computer models with the knowledge of the Medieval Warming (950–1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC–600 AD), or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.
The IPCC apparently wanted to dismiss the sun as a climate factor—to leave room for a CO2 factor that has only a 22 percent correlation with our past thermometer record. Correlation is not causation—but the lack of CO2 correlation is deadly to the IPCC theory.
Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute added the next chapter in the climate cycle story, just before our book was published. His cloud chamber experiment showed natural cosmic rays quickly created vast numbers of tiny “cloud seeds” when our mix of atmospheric gases was bombarded with ultra-violet light. Since clouds often cover 30 percent of the earth’s surface, a moderate change in cloud cover clearly could explain the warming/cooling cycle.
Svensmark noted the gigantic “solar wind” that expands when the sun is active—and thus blocks many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise hit the earth’s atmosphere. When the sun weakens, the solar wind shrinks. Recently, the U.S. Solar Observatory reported a very long period of “quiet sun” and predicted 30 years of cooling.
Last year, Denmark’s University of Aarhus did another experiment with a particle accelerator that fully confirmed the Svensmark hypothesis: cosmic rays help to make more clouds and thus could cool the earth.
The CERN experiment is supposed to be the big test of the Svensmark theory. It’s a tipoff, then, that CERN’s boss, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, has just told the German magazine Die Welt that he has forbidden his researchers to “interpret” the forthcoming test results. In other words, the CERN report will be a stark “just the facts” listing of the findings. Those findings must support Svensmark, or Heuer would never have issued such a stifling order on a major experiment.
Al Gore is Frustrated with Climate Realists
I guess according to Al Gore if we can only implement carbon taxes climate change will miraculously stop.
Polar Bear Population Higher than in 20th Century: Is Something Fishy about Extinction Fears?
By Amrutha Gayathri | August 2, 2011 7:16 AM EDT
If polar bears had any clue of the scale of speculation about the extinction threat they are facing due to climate change, they would have probably said, “you’re kidding, right?”
If you think statistics are a pointer towards the growth or decline of a species, it will be interesting to have a look at the estimates published in a 2008 report by U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations ‘may now be near historic highs,'” it read.
J. Scott Armstrong of The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Kesten C. Green of Business and Economic Forecasting, Monash University; and Willie Soon of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, published their findings in 2008, arguing that the claims of declining population among polar bears are not based on scientific forecasting principles.
APNewsBreak: Arctic scientist under investigation
By BECKY BOHRER – Associated Press | AP
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — A federal wildlife biologist whose observation in 2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the global warming movement has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of that article.
Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.” But he has not yet been informed by the inspector general’s office of specific charges or questions related to the scientific integrity of his work, said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
On Thursday, Ruch’s watchdog group plans to file a complaint with the agency on Monnett’s behalf, asserting that Obama administration officials have “actively persecuted” him in violation of policy intended to protect scientists from political interference.
Monnett, who has coordinated much of the agency’s research on Arctic wildlife and ecology, has duties that include managing about $50 million worth of studies, according to the complaint, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press.
The complaint seeks Monnett’s reinstatement along with a public apology from the agency and inspector general. It also seeks to have the investigation dropped or to have the charges specified and the matter carried out in accordance with policy. The complaint also says that investigators took Monnett’s computer hard drive, notebooks and other unspecified items from him, which have not been returned.
Free Speech Zone 