The Manchurian Candidate

A commenter at Watts Up With That asks:

Is Al Gore the fabled Manchurian Candidate?

No. The Manchurian Candidate’s real name is Teh Won.

They Have Climate All Rapped Up

H/T Insane Clown Posse @ Bunyipitude and Insane Clown Posse II @ Bunyipitude

Climate Justice

I'm trying to figure out what a Just Climate™ actually is. But there is no doubt that what ever it is, we need it. Well I need it. For sure. Which is why I’m all for Climate Justice. How much will it cost to move the climate of Central America to Northern Illinois? It is unjust that my heating bills are so high this early in the season.

I do have a proposal that will reduce the cost of justice some. The move only need be done during the months of Dec., Jan., Feb., and March. That should reduce the costs by 2/3rds over a year ’round solution.

Two New Reports Say....

Geoffrey Lean is Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago. (according to the mast head at Telegraph.UK) Well he has got a hold of two new super scientific reports that say that for sure glaciers are melting and it is all man's fault.

But I don't want to discuss that directly. What I want to look at are some of the comments.

coltek on Jan 27th, 2010 at 2:37 pm

Apparently there are also a lot of glaciers that have not heard of this report.

I detect a note of scepticism. But in fact there is a list of expanding glaciers. And that is not the only list. I have a list of twelve more glaciers that haven't heard of global warming. And the first on that list of 12? Himalayan glaciers are growing, not shrinking. Oh. The humanity! How embarrassing for the IPCC. And wouldn't you know it, some folks who do not claim to be scientists have predicted that if the Himalayan glaciers keep growing at their present rate they will cover the Earth in 47,359 years(plus or minus 3.29 months) or less . It is way worse than we thought.

Rocky on Jan 27th, 2010 at 3:38 pm

Has anyone noticed that whenever a climate doom claim gets blown out of the water, at least one other “piece of important research” miraculously pops up to take its place within about 48 hours – usually “worse than we thought”?

Coincidence? And of course having seen all the other “peer reviewed” “science” fall by the wayside, we are going to believe this one.

Climate Scientists can work really fast. Peer review (was it reviewed?) that normally takes months can be done in a matter of days if the science is right.

JohnRS on Jan 27th, 2010 at 4:16 pm

Just a quick thought Geoff, while you’ve got your investigative journo hat on, who funded the studies at The University of Calgary and World Glacier Monitoring Service?

Not that nice IPCC lot was it?
Or Dr P? Or the WWF?

Perish the thought that there might be a bit of rent seeking going on here!! In the spirit of fairness you will check and let us know though, wont you?

As the Who put it so “We won’t get fooled again”

A Classical Music Fan. Me Too!

cheshirered on Jan 27th, 2010 at 5:13 pm

Geoffrey, I’m afraid nobody is taking these claims of man made climate change seriously any more.

Well, apart from extremists, eco-nut jobs and those whose job – or reputation, depends on perpetuating the myth.

Glaciers melting, sea ice melting, rain, hurricanes, fluffy bunny wunnies drowning blah blah…heard it all before and back then it depended on what we were told was legitimate, peer-reviewed fully verifiable data that put the science of global warming ‘beyond debate’.

How hollow that claim sounds now.

The credibility of all that previously ’settled’ data has now completely and totally collapsed under the collective weight of Climategate, IPCC data corruption, Pachauri’s inane utterances, deliberate lies and a host of failed computer models that failed miserably to predict the recent halt in rising temperatures and current cooling since around 2002.

There is nothing of this theory left that deserves to be taken seriously, and that includes journalists who refuse to address the obvious deficiencies in their own argument.

In short, it’s over for AGW.

Public support for Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming (CMMGW) even in the USA is dropping precipitously. And speaking of precipitation, time for another song.

Hamish Redux on Jan 27th, 2010 at 5:40 pm

I’ve heard that by 2035, or possibly 2350, there will be no polar bears in the Himalayas.

Hamish, it is worse than we thought. They are already gone.

iain on Jan 27th, 2010 at 9:45 pm

Mr Lean,

as you can see from the above comments (ALL the above comments!)

A. No one believes this drivel any more.

B. No one cares.

You now have the worst accolade any journalist can have.
You are boring.

Ah a sceptic. (Well it is a Brit paper. And I do like the Brit spelling.)

MSimon on Jan 27th, 2010 at 11:53 pm

Crisis in the Rockies? What about the crisis on the Great Plains? Just 18,000 years ago Chicago was covered by a mile of ice. I blame global warming.

Hmmmmmm. That name looks familiar. I think the reference to Chicago in a Brit paper gives the show away. I confess. Guilty as charged.

JohnT on Jan 28th, 2010 at 1:14 am

Gimme all your money – or the glacier gets it!

John has been watching far too many American gangster movies. He must be an Edward G. Robinson fan.

andrewb on Jan 28th, 2010 at 6:54 am

The only way the “World Glacier Monitoring Service” (I can’t believe there is such a specific organisation) is going to get attention and funding is if it cries wolf. 2035 sounds good, but unbelievable… 2350 and no-one will be interested..

SOONER THAN YOU THINK FOLKS! Cheques payable to….

So many cynics. So little time. That is all the fun we have time for now folks. But tune in tomorrow for the next episode of It's Worse Than We Thought.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Failed Grade Nine Science

Rex Murphy says the "we lost the data" excuse would not pass muster in a ninth grade science fair. Climate "science" is different.

Tell Me The Climate Is Not Changing

Louisiana is having some snow.

Louisiana got its earliest snowflakes ever as people across the South awakened to a dusting of powder.

Snow started falling in the region late Friday and continued into Saturday morning.

Snow also caused a few cancellations Saturday at Washington's Dulles International Airport.

The National Weather Service says several Louisiana towns reported two to three inches of snow.

It is getting harder all the time to Hide the Decline.

And yeah. One early snow fall does not a climate make. I wonder if two record early snowfalls in Houston are closer to a climate? We will know in two years. Or twenty.

Kiwi Scientists Cooking The Books?

The Briefing Room which helped break the CRU data dump story (Climategate): Verifying The CRU Files, has a new blockbuster out about climate "science" in New Zealand. NZ’s NIWA accused of CRU-style temperature faking.

UPDATE 15:49 NZDT - NIWA's news release in response to this story appears to have been delayed, and according to a radio news report a few minutes ago Rodney Hide, leader of the minority Act Party and a minister in the National Government, is now calling on his Cabinet colleague, Climate Change Minister Nick Smith, to "please explain" [normal transmission now resumes]

The New Zealand Government's chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn't there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain's CRU climate research centre.

Well yeah. The IPCC is a UN job. Why wouldn't it be a world wide conspiracy? I mean. You know. If it really is a conspiracy.

Any way. The Briefing Room (TBR) has details graphs and data. And from what I can tell some one leaked the data to TBR. You know climate science could get so leaky that it no longer holds water.

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962

Hide The Decline

And wouldn't you know it. There is a book due out on 1 December called:

The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with "Climate Change" Turning Out to Be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History?

I think "blunder" is too nice a word. It is looking more and more like fraud.

You can have a look at the "hide the decline" e-mail at Climate Files Hacked. You can also search the e-mail files at CRU e-mail Search Online

Tommy James Draggin' The Line.

H/T Watts Up With That

Check It Out

George Monbiot, one of the staunched supporters of the CO2 causes global warming belief, says that based on the ClimateGate revelations the science needs to be re-evaluated.

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

Monbiot also had this to say:

I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.

There is no certainty that the e-mails were illegally obtained. But that is a a minor quibble.

The point is that the release of this information has rightly or wrongly cast the whole enterprise into a disreputable light. The only way to fix the situation is to:

Do A Climate Audit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

It Is All Al Gore's Fault

By now you have all heard that a bunch of formerly secret e-mails and data relating to climate science have been revealed. It is casting serious doubt on the integrity of a number of the big names in the field and also adding to doubt about the size of the role of CO2 in climate change.

My solution to the current situation? Audit all the material.

But that is not my main point here. I want to give credit where credit is due. If Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet none of this would have been possible.

If you want to read about my meager contribution to the development of the Internet you can look here. I guess that means I had something to do with the revelations as well. Heh.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Some Verification Of Hadley CRU Files Hacked

I have posted Climate Files Hacked about the release by anonymous ftp of the contents of hundreds of files and thousands of e-mails. Some have questioned their authenticity. I have partial verification from Real or Fake.

Steve McIntyre (Comment#23773) November 19th, 2009 at 6:08 pm

I’m having trouble getting into CA right now.

I made up a pdf of the emails to help browse through them and it’s over 2000 pages. Every email that I’ve examined so far looks genuine. There are a few emails of mine that are 100% genuine.

It is really quite breathtaking.

Yes. It is breathtaking.

Update: 20 November 2009 1009z

TBR.cc reports that the Hadley Center admits that the files are real.

The director of Britain's leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine's TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine.

In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, "It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails."

"Have you alerted police"

"Not yet. We were not aware of what had been taken."

Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach by colleagues at the website RealClimate.

WOW It is real. This is going to do a LOT of damage to the AGW Community. Big damage.

TBR.cc recommends Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming.

You might want to give it a look.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Climate Files Hacked

I just got a tip from Jccarlton at Talk Polywell that some one has hacked a lot of Hadley CRU files on Climate Science. You can get what details that are currently available at Watts Up With That. What has been released so far is full of bombshells. Like this e-mail.

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx



Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK

It looks like the scam may be coming to an end. Take that Al Gore. Because it looks like you may no longer be able to take it to the bank.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Row Bust

There is a report from the UK that the melting of the arctic is not as bad as previously thought.

The extent of Arctic sea ice has been decreasing since the late 1970s. In 2007 it decreased dramatically in a single year, reaching an all-time low. At the time it was widely reported that this was caused by man-made climate change and that the rate of decline of summer sea ice was increasing.

Modelling of Arctic sea ice by the Met Office Hadley Centre climate model shows that ice invariably recovers from extreme events, and that the long-term trend of reduction is robust — with the first ice-free summer expected to occur between 2060 and 2080. It is unlikely that the Arctic will experience ice-free summers by 2020.

Well that is a relief.

Of course that leaves out the true meaning of row bust.

A scantily clad model in a boat with oars.

Technically the lady in question is rowing a shell not a more pedestrian row boat. But what the hey. She is cute and she has her hands on the oars. I would classify the picture as barely safe for work. YMMV.

H/T Watts Up With That

Climate Models Are Not So Hot

It looks like the scientists who have predicted unending global warming caused by CO2 emissions may be in serious error.

No one knows exactly how much Earth's climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study this week suggests scientists' best predictions about global warming might be incorrect. The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth's ancient past. The study, which was published online today, contains an analysis of published records from a period of rapid climatic warming about 55 million years ago known as the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM.

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

If this study holds up we are going to be wasting vast sums of money (robbed is a better term) if Waxman-Malarkey passes the Senate.

This is nothing new for regular readers of this blog. I have thought for a long time that the models were not well connected to reality. What is new is that the nails are getting more frequently pounded into the AGW coffin. People are starting to lose faith - especially considering the cold summer we have been having in much of the USA.

Consider a couple of books that have come out in the last year:

Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming

Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

It seems that the faith is starting to lose adherents. It seems that the science is not so settled.

Even the guys at Real Climate are starting to hedge their bets.

Nature (with hopefully some constructive input from humans) will decide the global warming question based upon climate sensitivity, net radiative forcing, and oceanic storage of heat, not on the type of multi-decadal time scale variability we are discussing here. However, this apparent impulsive behavior explicitly highlights the fact that humanity is poking a complex, nonlinear system with GHG forcing – and that there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond.

Say, weren't they very big promoters of "the science is settled" meme. Yes they were. I guess that now a days the science is not so settled. Some one call Al Gore. Stat.

H/T VG at Watts Up With That

Cross Posted at Classical Values

White Roses

By now you have probably heard of Energy Secretary Chu's plan to paint the roofs in America white to fight global warming.

He should have had a talk with Alice about the big mistake that was made in Wonderlandby painting the roses red. So how about some appropriate mood music?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Another Denier

The boss of Climate "the sky is falling" Alarmist James Hansen Dr. John Theon says Hansen is an embarrassment.

NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,” Theon, the former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA Headquarters and former Chief of the Atmospheric Dynamics & Radiation Branch explained.

“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote.

But what about those super fantastic climate models that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that that CO2 is going to doom the world?

Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.

Nice try Dr. Theon, but The ONE is pushing hard for a coal industry and electrical power destruction bill. However, he has plans to replace coal fired electrical plants with high cost solar cells. No doubt he has found the secret of dark energy. Only 3 years 11 months 3 weeks and one day to go.

I Lost My Home To Global Warming

It appears that Global Warming is already causing people to lose their homes in China.

The hydroelectric dam, a low wall of concrete slicing across an old farming valley, is supposed to help a power company in distant Germany contribute to saving the climate — while putting lucrative "carbon credits" into the pockets of Chinese developers.

But in the end the new Xiaoxi dam may do nothing to lower global-warming emissions as advertised. And many of the 7,500 people displaced by the project still seethe over losing their homes and farmland.

"Nobody asked if we wanted to move," said a 38-year-old man whose family lost a small brick house. "The government just posted a notice that said, 'Your home will be demolished.'"

The dam will shortchange German consumers, Chinese villagers and the climate itself, if critics are right. And Xiaoxi is not alone.

Similar stories are repeated across China and elsewhere around the world, as hundreds of hydro projects line up for carbon credits, at a potential cost of billions to Europeans, Japanese and soon perhaps Americans, in a trading system a new U.S. government review concludes has "uncertain effects" on greenhouse-gas emissions.

One American expert is more blunt.

"The CDM" — the 4-year-old, U.N.-managed Clean Development Mechanism — "is an excessive subsidy that represents a massive waste of developed world resources," says Stanford University's Michael Wara.

So you have to ask yourself - what does Al Gore have against the people of China? I suppose it is nothing personal. Just business.

Forced relocations have become common in China as people in hundreds of communities are moved to clear land for factories and other projects, provoking anger and occasionally violent protests. But what happened here is unusual in highlighting not just the human costs, but also the awkward fit between China's authoritarian system, in which complaints of official abuse abound, and Western environmental ideals.

Those ideals produced the Clean Development Mechanism as a market-based tool under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement to combat climate change. The CDM allows industrial nations, required by Kyoto to reduce emissions of gases blamed for global warming, to comply by paying developing nations to cut their emissions instead.

Companies thousands of miles away, such as Germany's coal-burning, carbon dioxide-spewing RWE electric utility, accomplish this by buying carbon credits the U.N. issues to clean-energy projects like Xiaoxi's. The proceeds are meant to make such projects more financially feasible.

As critics point out, however, if those projects were going to be built anyway, the climate doesn't gain, but loses.

Such projects "may allow covered entities" — such as RWE — "to increase their emissions without a corresponding reduction in a developing country," the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its December review.

Wait a minute. Are you telling me that carbon credit trading may just be a wallet extraction scheme? I wonder if destroying people's houses will lower their CO2 emissions? There could be profit in that. And if the people were just killed outright that is another area with great profit potential. I wonder how many tons of carbon offset a person should be worth? It seems like getting rid of them when they are young should be worth a lot more than just getting rid of old folks.

Of course we could preemptively solve the problem by requiring parents to buy a lifetime of carbon credits before they are allowed to have children. That would put an end to global warming for sure.

Cooling The Planet

Since water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas isn't it time to outlaw hot water and hang those who boil it?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Climate Curse

We have computers. We have code. We have scientists. The sky is falling. Give us your money.

Prompted by this discussion at Talk Polywell

Prediction

Summer is due to global warming. Winter is due to natural variation.