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I’d like to bring some points to the attention of your readers that were raised in an article in the Independent published on 11th May 2013 It would appear to indicate a major shift in the UK’s government attitude to climate change. “The Government is facing an exodus of senior energy and climate change advisers amid growing concerns that decisive action to tackle global warming is falling victim to Treasury intransigence.” … “A Government offshore energy industrial strategy document, due to have been published this month, is understood to have been delayed after Treasury objections. At the same time as...

“We discovered that organic compounds such as those formed from forest emissions or from vehicle exhaust, affect the number of droplets in a cloud and hence its brightness, so affecting climate,” said study author Professor Gordon McFiggans, from the University of Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences. “We developed a model and made predictions of a substantially enhanced number of cloud droplets from an atmospherically reasonable amount of organic gases. “More cloud droplets lead to brighter cloud when viewed from above, reflecting more incoming sunlight. We did some calculations of the effects on climate and found that the...

From the UK’s BBC comes this news item: Trillion-euro shortfall facing EU energy sector – Lords Committee Under the obligatory photo of chimneys spewing steam, is a totally uncritical article on the final report from an eight-month inquiry by the UK’s House of Lords into the EU power sector. The report accuses the EU of having a muddled energy policy, but the horribly disturbing aspect of this report is that their lordships are the ones that are muddled. For example, they say that a muddled Brussels energy policy is putting off big investors. Well, they really got that wrong. Brussels’...

I have made an 82% correlation between the sunspot cycle and the Global Temperature Anomaly. The correlation is obtained through a non linear time series summation of NASA monthly sunspot data to the NOAA monthly Global Temperature Anomaly.

Excerpt: The Equator Principles are ten principles for lending by international banks that work to the detriment of poor nations. Under pressure from environmental groups, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and 76 other banks in 32 countries adopted the Principles. These principles demand that banks lend in an “environmentally and socially responsible manner,” which sounds good. But a top objective of the Equator Principles is “to promote the reduction of emissions that contribute to climate change.” Lending capital is restricted for coal mines, oil refineries, and other hydrocarbon projects desperately needed to build the economies of developing nations....

Theories that can be easily tested should have a high degree of consensus among researchers. Those involving chaotic and less testable questions – climate change or economic growth, physiology or financial markets – ought to have a greater level of scientific disagreement. Yet this is hardly the case for climate science. In the Paradox of Consensus, we illustrate that the greater the level of consensus for certain classes of hypotheses (those that are difficult to test) the less truth we should assign to them. ------------------------------------------------------- In our view, the fact that so many scientists agree so closely about the earth’s...

To begin with I was the only critical voice in New Zealand. Last week I attended a packed meeting of the Press Club in Wellington to hear Lord Monckton tear apart the IPCC and everything connected with it. The University scientists will not listen to him. But one of the organisers of the meeting was from the Music Department. But, surely, we are at the beginning of the end. The globe has stopped warming; even when measured by the botched-up biased system that they favour. The Kyoto Protocol is dead. Emissions by former members are in steady decline compared with...

There is so much good news about the collapse of the EU's carbon trading scam, that I'm not sure where to begin. But let's start with the fact that it has really, really annoyed Bryony Worthington - the activist from the hard-left anti-capitalist pressure group Friends of the Earth who wrote the most economically suicidal piece of legislation in British history, the Climate Change Act. ------------------------------------------------------- When Cameron came into power he took what some of us recognised straight away as a massive gamble with the UK economy: he decided to stake all on a revival driven by green jobs,...

The European Parliament just voted down a measure that would have attempted to revive its carbon market, likely dooming it to a slow and undignified death. This was a last-ditch effort to drive the EU’s carbon price back to a level that would incentivize green reforms. And it failed. --------------------------------------------------- The EU has been the global laboratory testing the green agenda to see how it works. Today’s story means that the guinea pig died; the most important piece of green intervention in world history has become an expensive and embarrassing flop. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of this for...

More and more likely that double CO2 means <2°C: New study Yes, it warms the planet – just not as much as thought The results of a new approach to calculating the effect of CO2 – using empirical observations – suggest it has a lower impact on the climate than previously thought, and its effects are being over-estimated by the IPCC. Publishing in the American Meterological Society’s Journal of Climate, a new paper called An improved, objective Bayesian, approach for applying optimal fingerprint techniques to estimate climate sensitivity, Nicholas Lewis applies objective Bayesian techniques and uses more up-to-date observational data...

This report positively concludes that an alleged near unanimous scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), that “the science is settled”, is overstated. The report finds a robust, critical scientific discourse in climate related research, yet it highlights that a “consensus-building” approach to science might represent a politicised and unscientific belief in science – a belief in tension with the ethos of “normal science”. The report calls for a continuing questioning, critical, and undogmatic public debate over man-made global warming, and a clearer separation between science and policy. –Consensus and Controversy, SINTEF April 2013 By insisting on scientific consensus and...

From The Earth Institute at Columbia University comes another tree ring hockey stick. I have to laugh though at the choice of graphic for the press release, which shows a weather event (Euro heat wave) in 2003, rather than showing us the science, like maybe a reconstruction. I wonder what absurd assumptions or tricks (like Zombie proxies) Mr. McIntyre will find in this one that he hasn’t already – Anthony Fueled by industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Earth’s climate warmed more between 1971 and 2000 than during any other three-decade interval in the last 1,400 years, according to new regional temperature...

After a foray in a cult, one of the first steps on the path back to reality is the process of deprogramming. Could it be that this step is now being self-administered by the German mainstream media? It appears so. Now that the global mean temperature curve has drifted out of and below the IPCC’s projected range, panic is breaking out. The mother of German green weeklies, Die Zeit, appears to be taking measurements at the back of the house in preparation for the installation of a back door! Rahmstorf is back there with them, trying to talk them out...

There’s no money to run White House tours, but apparently there’s money to pull one of Al’s pet projects out of mothballs. Satellite shelved after 2000 election to now fly By SETH BORENSTEIN WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is proposing dusting off and finally launching an old environmental satellite championed by Al Gore but shelved a dozen years by his 2000 rival George W. Bush. Obama proposed Wednesday spending nearly $35 million in his 2014 budget to refurbish a satellite, nicknamed GoreSat by critics, that’s been sitting in storage after it was shelved in 2001, months after Bush took...

Some people wonder if Michael Mann is simply an activist masquerading as a scientist, this lends credence to that idea. I wonder if Dr. Mann has ever visited weather stations in China to understand what is going on there? I have. I had to laugh when I saw this quote from Mann in Seth Borenstein’s most recent AP article: “The study is important because it formalizes what many scientists have been sensing as a gut instinct: that the increase in extreme heat that we’ve witnessed in recent decades, and especially in recent years, really cannot be dismissed as the vagaries...

Following the wet summer in the UK last year, the Met Office provided the Environment Agency with a briefing document, giving an overview of the weather. This was discussed at the September Board Meeting of the Environment Agency, which Met Office officials attended. As far as I know, this document, which I obtained through FOI, has never entered the public domain. It is brutally honest in admitting how little the Met’s scientists understand about what affects our climate, and, in particular, what caused the unusual weather last year. This is in stark contrast to many of the hyped up claims,...

So, NASA’s in-house celebrity activist James Hansen says the following in explaining his departure from a lucrative perch — salary alone: $180k per year — one that proved extremely lucrative while there was a useful foil in the White House: “‘As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,’ he told the Times.” Hogwash. Not that “Job 1″ for Hansen at NASA was attentiveness to ethics guidelines or anything, but the rules say no such thing. See 5 C.F.R. Part 6901.103 (c) and 5 C.F.R. 2635.805. Indeed, on top of that cool $1 million-plus in outside cash tossed Hansen’s...

I write in rebuttal to the March 31 letter by WWU geology faculty criticizing Dr. Don Easterbrook. I have a Ph.D in geophysics and have published research papers on climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. In 2006 I testified before the US Senate on global warming. Additionally, I am the author of a three-volume history of science. I have never met Don Easterbrook. I write not so much to defend him as to expose the ignorance exhibited in the letter authored by WWU geology faculty. Their attack on Dr. Easterbrook is the most egregious example of pompous buffoonery since...

David Rose’s October 2012 article in the MailOnline generated a multitude of responses around the blogosphere. The article was titled Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it. There have been so many blog posts about the article it’s not practical to list them all. SkepticalScience—a blog run by advocates of human-induced global warming, not global warming skeptics—attempted to counter the Rose article a number of times. They included a YouTube video in their January 2013 effort 16 More Years of Global Warming. The following YouTube video On...

Freeman Dyson is a physicist who has been teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since Albert Einstein was there. When Einstein died in 1955, there was an opening for the title of “most brilliant physicist on the planet.” Dyson has filled it. So when the global-warming movement came along, a lot of people wondered why he didn’t come along with it. The reason he’s a skeptic is simple, the 89-year-old Dyson said when I phoned him. “I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic,” Dyson said. ------------------------------------------------------ Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models...

The planet is no longer warming. The brief warming episode of the late 20th century completed its course in the mid 1990s, and is now extinct. These are now uncontroversial statements. They are based on hard data which has been available for many years on the websites of many official agencies. But somehow those agencies found ways to interpret the data differently, and to continually sidestep the elephant in the room. ------------------------------------------------------ Now the whole house of cards finally tumbled, with Rajendra Pachauri, official spokesman for the IPCC, confirming in Melbourne that global temperatures had plateaued for 17 years. ------------------------------------------------------...

A retired Western Washington University professor testified to a Republican-controlled state Senate committee Tuesday that climate change stopped in 1998 and that human-caused greenhouse gases are not responsible for fluctuations in the Earth's temperatures or melting polar ice caps. The startling testimony from emeritus professor Don Easterbrook is at odds with an apparent consensus among climate scientists and climate-science literature about human causes behind the the rise in global temperatures over the past century. His testimony came one day after the Legislature sent Gov. Jay Inslee a bill that sets up a legislative work group to study Washington's best strategy...

The new study, by Shaun Marcott, Jeremy Shakun, Peter Clark and Alan Mix, was based on an analysis of 73 long-term proxies, and offered a few interesting results: one familiar (and unremarkable), one odd but probably unimportant, and one new and stunning. The latter was an apparent discovery that 20th-century warming was a wild departure from anything seen in over 11,000 years. News of this finding flew around the world and the authors suddenly became the latest in a long line of celebrity climate scientists. The trouble is, as they quietly admitted over the weekend, their new and stunning claim...

James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, will retire from NASA this week, giving himself more freedom to pursue political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases. Science Times Podcast Marveling at the efficiency of a killer in the skies and NASA’s household name on climate change takes his fight for the earth’s future into retirement. His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.

In today’s The-Scientist pity-me piece, Michael Mann goes out of his way to assert (he) is an “accidental” public figure. Why? He and/or his lawyer may feel that his status as “public figure” will have adverse implications in the libel suit he filed against Mark Steyn and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. But Michael Mann has been a voluntary public figure since at least 1998. He first volunteered to be a public figure as early as April 22, 1998 when he appeared on NBC Nightly News to discuss his hokey stick study. You can’t promote yourself and your work in the...

In November, I and CEI sued the Department of the Treasury to produce emails and other records mentioning “carbon”. See Joint_Scheduling_Agreement PDF I sought emails and other documents from two offices: Environment and Energy (really), and Legislative Affairs. This action after the administration first ignored us, which they followed with an unfortunate stumble, trying to delay us with fees — even absurd and surely anti-’green’ ones, like $1,800 to photocopy electronic mail, typically copied on a disc for no charge — which fees, even when they’re not mindlessly trumped up like that one, not-for-profit groups which disseminate government information are...

Every once in awhile, an idea comes along that makes you ask, “gee why hasn’t anybody seen this before?”. This one of those times. This video below is something I almost didn’t watch, because my concerns were triggered by a few key words in the beginning. But, recommended by a Facebook friend, I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did, because I want every one of you, no matter what side of the climate debate you live in, to watch this and experience that light bulb moment as I did. The key here is to understand that desertification is...

It seems to be a trend now, last October it was Seimens who gave up on solar, now it is British Petroleum, who has been in the solar business nearly 40 years, and has made the last closure announcements, finalizing what they announced in 2011. In the news today: (Reuters) – British oil major BP shut down the remnants of its solar unit on Wednesday, drawing a line under the business on which most of its Beyond Petroleum tagline of the early 2000s was premised. The unit, which BP has been scaling back since 2008, is the latest sun energy...

While some claims have been made that “Alaska is Ground Zero for Global Warming” it turns out that the state of Alaska was significantly below normal in 2012. For example, Fairbanks had the coldest year in the 21st century so far, and it was also the second coldest year in more than 40 years accroding to the data presented in this report below.

Does the bullet point list for solutions to global cooling at right look familiar? It reads almost like some of the manifestos we get from warmists today, including the suspension of Democracy as the article in the Owosso Newspaper clearly demonstrates. Thanks to Poptech for the compilation. During the 1970s the media promoted global cooling alarmism with dire threats of a new ice age. Extreme weather events were hyped as signs of the coming apocalypse and man-made pollution was blamed as the cause. Environmental extremists called for everything from outlawing the internal combustion engine to communist style population controls. This...

Andrew Revkin published the email today at the NYT Dot Earth blog as a comment in that thread, so now I am free to reproduce it here where I was not last night. Below is the comment left by Andy, quoting Annan’s email, bolding added: The climate scientist James Annan sent these thoughts by email: ‘Well, the press release is a bit strange, because it sounds like it is talking about the Aldrin et al paper which was published some time ago, to no great fanfare. I don’t know if they have a further update to that. Anyway, there have...

AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW FROM DOWN UNDER Quite clearly, Dr. Hayhoe and I are both credible professional scientists. Given our training and research specializations, we are therefore competent to assess the evidence regarding the dangerous global warming that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) alleges is being caused by industrial carbon dioxide emissions. Yet at the end of her article Dr. Hayhoe recommends for further reading the websites RealClimate.org and SkepticalScience.com, whereas here at the outset of writing my own article I recommend the websites wattsupwiththat.com and www.thegwpf.org (Global Warming Policy Foundation). To knowledgeable readers, this immediately signals that Dr....

Environmentalists have promoted the theory that human civilization is the main cause of global warming. They argue that Governments worldwide must take immediate drastic action to prevent a catastrophe. The chain of proof in their human-caused climate catastrophe theory is broken in at least six places: -------------------------------------------------- Environmental fallacy #1: Scientists have an accurate measure of warming since 1880. Environmental fallacy #2: Human activities, primarily fossil fuels, are the main cause. Environmental fallacy #3: Scientists can accurately predict future warming scenarios. Environmental fallacy #4: Human-caused warming will lead to an environmental disaster. Environmental fallacy #5: “Green” energy and conservation can...

Error #1: IPCC p. 110: “These previous national U.S. assessments, as well as those for normalised Cuban hurricane losses (Pielke et al., 2003), did not show any significant upward trend in losses over time, but this was before the remarkable hurricane losses of 2004 and 2005.” -------------------------------------- RECOMMENDED CORRECTION: ““These previous national U.S. assessments, as well as those for normalised Cuban hurricane losses (Pielke et al., 2003), did not show any significant upward trend in losses over time, and this remains the case following the remarkable hurricane losses of 2004 and 2005.” CLA Finding: There is no error in the...

An important new paper published today in Global and Planetary Change finds that changes in CO2 follow rather than lead global air surface temperature and that "CO2 released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2" The paper finds the "overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere," in other words, the opposite of claims by global warming alarmists that CO2 in the atmosphere drives land and ocean temperatures. Instead, just as in...

The agency has already approved 17 large-scale solar energy projects on public lands that are expected to produce nearly 6,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 1.8 million homes. The department estimated the resource potential of the newly identified development zones at 23,700 megawatts, enough to power seven million homes, by 2030. Wow! 23,700 megawatts! That’s a lot of megawatts! Right? No. It’s not… If all 285,000 acres were covered with solar PV arrays, the “Hot Spots” could have a generating capacity of about 40,000 MW at a cost of about $252 billion.If the same 285,000 acres were covered...

“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data. ----------------------------------- I covered this over the weekend when Bill McKibben started wailing about the albedo going off the charts. I thought it might be soot related. The PR below and quote above is from NASA Goddard. I had to laugh at the title of their press release, where they cite “Unprecedented...

From the told ya so department, comes this recently presented paper at the European Geosciences Union meeting. 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]. ------------------------------------------------ Here’s the part I really like: of 67% of the weather stations examined, questionable adjustments were made to raw data that resulted in: “increased positive trends, decreased negative trends, or changed negative trends to positive,” whereas “the expected proportions would be 1/2 (50%).” And… “homogenation practices used until today are mainly statistical, not...

The Arabunna people live in the area around Lake Eyre in Southern Australia. It is a hot, hostile desert region, which is no surprise, because … well … it’s in Australia. ------------------------ (Lake Eyre region in South Australia.) ------------------------ A new report from the University of Everybody-Panic is a study of the horrendous future faced by these poor folks: "The first stage of University of Adelaide research released today shows that South Australia’s Arabunna country, which includes Lake Eyre in the far north, is likely to get both drier and hotter in decades to come. “'Temperatures could increase up to...

The tragic thing about the thoughtless use of a stereotype (denier) is that it reveals that you really think of people in terms of its projected meaning. In particular, even in your response you seem to equate the term “skeptic” with “denier of AGW”. ----------------------------------------------- For this honest doubt and skepticism that the highly complex global climate models are correct you have the temerity to socially stigmatize them in a scientific journal with a catch-all term that implies that they are as morally reprehensible as those that “deny” that the Nazi Holocaust of genocide against the Jews? For shame.

Jeff Masters and I recently received an interesting email from Ken Towe who has been researching the NCDC historical temperature database and came across what appeared to be some startling inconsistencies. Namely that the average state temperature records used in the current trends analysis by the NCDC (National Climate Data Center) do not reflect the actual published records of such as they appeared in the Monthly Weather Reviews and Climatological Data Summaries of years past. Here is why. ------------------------------------------- Yet as we have seen time and time again, with the exception of a -0.05°C cooling applied for UHI (which is...

The Pacific Institute is pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Gleick back to his position as president of the Institute. An independent review conducted by outside counsel on behalf of the Institute has supported what Dr. Gleick has stated publicly regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute. This independent investigation has further confirmed and the Pacific Institute is satisfied that none of its staff knew of or was involved in any way.

Public confidence in scientific “consensus” regarding the theory of manmade climate change is threatening the believing scientists’ confidence. While polls show that taking action to fight climate change is off the radar of most Americans, the behavior of the theory’s advocates is even more telling. They are behaving like "cornered rats"—taking extreme actions to protect their turf.

Guest post by Dr. Roy Spencer PhD. Since NOAA encourages the use the USHCN station network as the official U.S. climate record, I have analyzed the average [(Tmax+Tmin)/2] USHCN version 2 dataset in the same way I analyzed the CRUTem3 and International Surface Hourly (ISH) data. ------------------------------------- Virtually all of the USHCN warming since 1973 appears to be the result of adjustments NOAA has made to the data, mainly in the 1995-97 timeframe. -------------------------------------- Given the amount of work NOAA has put into the USHCN dataset to increase the agreement between neighboring stations, I don’t have an explanation for this...

The quote above is from Lord of the Rings, an exchange between Gollum and Smeagol, and it encapsulates my latest results from looking into the Shakun 2012 paper, “Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation” (paywalled, at Nature hereinafter Shakun2012). I discussed the paper in my post “Dr. Munchausen Explains Science By Proxy“. Please see that post for the underlying concepts and citations. ------------------- There was excellent agreement between the Shakun2012 data and the ice core records I had downloaded … but there was also a surprise. ------------------- -the big surprise was not what the...

Federal officials hailed Solyndra LLC’s plan to create clean energy when they awarded the company more than a half-billion dollars in loans, but the solar-panel maker’s abrupt closure now threatens to leave behind an environmental mess. The company plans on paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean up its own property in Fremont, Calif., but a separate leased property in nearby Milpitas sits vacant with barrels of unknown chemicals and lead-contaminated equipment, attorneys for the landlord, iStarCTL I L.P., said in recent bankruptcy court filings. The full extent of the potential environmental problem at the leased Solyndra facility remains...

Editor's Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of "No Need to Panic About Global Warming," an op-ed that appeared in the Journal on January 27. This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6. --------- We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. Consider then that by...

The is the first in a multi-part series of articles exposing the lies and misinformation behind legislation mandating the replacement of incandescent light bulbs with potentially unsafe compact florescent light (CFL) bulbs. ------- According to provisions of legislation passed by congress in 2007, the 100-watt incandescent bulb was to be off the shelves this January, followed by a phase-out of the 75-watt version in January 2013 and the 60- and 40-watt versions in January 2014. But last month congress granted consumers a reprieve by including in its spending bill a measure delaying enforcement of the ban until the end of...

The Occupy Wall Street movement has had an incredible ascendency over the last few weeks. But despite its ambiguous aims — one has to wonder how this movement would measure up with other similar movements throughout history. On Rush Limbaugh’s Wednesday show, fill-in host Mark Steyn said he has low regard for Occupy Wall Street — not necessarily because it is a left-wing movement, but, he explained, because it is an imported movement. “I’m not sure how many people know this, but this whole thing — this is the most pathetic revolution in history,” Steyn said. “[French revolutionary] Robespierre would...

One day Energy Secretary Ed Milliband sets out his proposed expansion of the U.K.'s wind power-led alternative energy revolution; the next day, Vestas, the U.K.'s largest wind turbine manufacturer, shuts down a big part of its British operations citing "low demand" and public opposition to onshore wind farms. ----------------------------------------------------- In fact, with fewer than 2,400 wind turbines in operation across Britain currently, the U.K. would still require a further 100,000 to meet its targets. Plenty of scope for massive wind turbine growth, we might think. So why the Vestas pullout?