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It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard. First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper. [snip]

Three article excerpts... From JunkScience.com: So, greenhouse [effect] is all about carbon dioxide, right? Wrong. The most important players on the greenhouse stage are water vapor and clouds [clouds of course aren't gas, but high level ones do act to trap heat from escaping, while low-lying cumulus clouds tend to reflect sunlight and thereby help cool the planet -etl]. Carbon dioxide has been increased to about 0.038% of the atmosphere (possibly from about 0.028% pre-Industrial Revolution) while water in its various forms ranges from 0% to 4% of the atmosphere and its properties vary by what form it is in...

Corrected online: 16 February 2010 Climatologist Phil Jones answers his critics in an exclusive interview with Nature. Phil Jones holds himself defensively, his arms crossed tightly in front of his chest as if shielding himself from attack. Little wonder: Jones has spent the past three months being vilified for his central role in what is now called 'climategate'. Jones was director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, when, last November, more than 1,000 e-mails and documents were illegally... --snip-- Jones says that he is unconvinced that the MWP was a global...

Three Major Firms Pull Out of Climate Change Alliance ConocoPhillips, BP America and Caterpillar pulled out of a leading alliance of businesses and environmental groups pushing for climate change legislation on Tuesday, citing complaints that the bills under consideration are unfair to American industry. The sudden pullout of three corporate giants from a leading alliance of businesses and environmental groups could be the death knell for climate change legislation languishing on Capitol Hill. ConocoPhillips, BP America and Caterpillar's announced Tuesday they will pull out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, citing complaints that the bills now in Congress are unfair...

Here’s why it’s possible that doubling CO2 won’t make much difference.The carbon that’s already up in the atmosphere absorbs most of the light it can. CO2 only “soaks up” its favorite wavelengths of light and it’s close to its saturation point. It manages to grab a bit more light from wavelengths that are close to its favorite bands but it can’t do much more, because there are not many left-over photons at the right wavelengths.The natural greenhouse effect is real, and it does keep us warm, but it’s already reached its peak performance. Throw more carbon up there and most...

HOUSTON, Feb. 16, 2010 -- ConocoPhillips [NYSE: COP] today announced that it will not be renewing its membership in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). This action enables the company to better focus its efforts on ensuring fair and equitable treatment of the transportation sector and its consumers and on expanding opportunities for greater near-term GHG reductions through increased use of natural gas. "As an active member of USCAP, we owe a great deal of credit to our colleagues, both companies and non-government organizations alike," said Jim Mulva, ConocoPhillips chairman and chief executive officer. "USCAPÂ’s diverse membership and high-level commitment...

Proponents of global warming in the U.K. can't seem to decide whether or not global warming is real. From the Telegraph.co.uk Prof Peter Liss, acting director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), said sceptics were endangering the lives of generations to come by making unsupported claims. "The evidence is hugely for there being substantial climate change due to man's activities and if you want to argue against that case you have to produce some evidence." Prof Liss spoke after the Norwich-based UEA launched an independent review of the CRU~s work. An international furore erupted up after...

IPCC head Rajendra Kumar Pachauri must be scared to get out of his bed in the morning. During the past few weeks, the reputation of his agency, has fallen off a cliff. There was that humiliating retraction after it emerged that statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate. But that was only the start: * Their claims about disappearing mountain ice was based on anecdotal evidence in a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine. * The IPCC’s panel had wrongly reported that more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level because it had...

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995By Jonathan Petre Last updated at 5:12 PM on 14th February 2010 - Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing - There has been no global warming since 1995 - Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information. Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has...

Yet again,  we have a situation where the data doesn’t match the full-gloss coloured graphs produced by the PR agency for global warming called the IPCC.Frank Lansner and Nicolai Skjoldby have started a new blog Hide The Decline, and posted that Scandinavian data shows clearly that temperatures got markedly cooler from 1950-1970, before they began rising again, and even after the warming, they only appear to be back where they were. But, all the IPCC graphs minimize the cooling. It would be reasonable to conclude from the data that the temperature today in Scandinavia is roughly similar to that of the 1930’s....

"...The world of mining is one in which everyone is constantly aware of how engineering results can be tampered with or misrepresented to rip off investors. And in 2003, when McIntyre first saw the hockey stick graph, it reminded him uncomfortably of some stock promoter’s over-optimistic revenue projection. McIntyre asked lead “hockey stick” author Michael Mann for the underlying data and was startled when Mann had trouble remembering where he had posted the files to the Internet. “That was when the penny dropped for me,” McIntyre says. “I had the sense that Mann was pulling together the data for the...

This weekend top global warming expert Professor Phil Jones admitted that global warming was a fraud. * Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ has gone missing * There has been no global warming since 1995 * Warming periods have happened before – but NOT due to man-made changes Jones admitted this weekend that there has been no significant global warming in the last 15 years. But, that didn’t stop these fraudsters from bilking the EU and US for £800,000 ($1,253,624.84) annually for the last 20 years. EDP24 reported: Over the last 20-year period, CRU’s budget has been an average of...

Here’s the short version of that BBC interview. (Wow? Was it really the BBC?) This major re-framing of the story and admission of facts are part of the ClimateGate Virus epidemic. Journalists are starting to ask better questions, and researchers are starting to give better answers. OK, it’s not exactly a grilling, but neither is Roger Harrabin allowing the UN to promote its scare campaign without a few seriously-pointed questions. This represents almost as big a turnaround for Harrabin as for Jones (which I’ll expand on below). Only two years ago, he claimed skeptics were funded to spread uncertainty, and likened them...

By now, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) should require no introduction, so let’s get right to it.  In a BBC Q&A and corresponding interview released Friday, the discredited Climategate conspirator revealed a number of surprising insights into his true climate beliefs, the most shocking of which was that 20th-century global warming may not have been unprecedented.  As the entire anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory is predicated on correlation with rising CO2 levels, this first-such confession from an IPCC senior scientist is nothing short of earth-shattering. Of course, much will be made of Jones’s...

Doctor Phil Jones is director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), and is one of the principals who's emails are at the center of the Climategate scandal. He sat down for an interview with the BBC yesterday and seemed to have backed away from some of the stances of the climate change moonbat community, the biggest of which is that maybe the science saying that there is man-made global warming is not settle. Other major revelations include

We now take you live to a storm within the ranks of America’s weathercasters. It is a quiet controversy about global warming. At least one local broadcaster had been hoping to keep it quiet. But after considerable persuasion last week, the Fox affiliate WDAF reluctantly allowed its chief meteorologist, Mike Thompson, to explain in an e-mail to The Kansas City Star why he breaks from the scholarly worldview of the causes of climate change. “It has become completely political — it’s not about science at all,” he wrote in an e-mail. “If science were the objective, then we would be...

Well it happened, right on schedule. On Monday I interviewed Princeton physicist William Happer on the questionable science behind the great global warming scare. He pointed out to me that the alarmists have a "heads I win, tails you lose" philosophy. Any natural event that occurs can be made to fit into their theory. Sure enough, a major magazine soon came out with an article in which the author pointed out that the snowfall blanketing the nation’s capital was actually the sort of thing you’d expect to see if the theory of man-made global warming was correct. "It’s unbelievable," said...

<p>Finally, one of the chief scientists at the center of the “Climategate” scandal admitted this weekend that there has been no significant global warming in the last 15 years.</p> <p>Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.</p>

Global warming's snowball fight By Dana Milbank Sunday, February 14, 2010 (For your convenience, op-ed is posted below to Body of Comment)

Climate experts have been forced to admit another embarrassing error in their most recent report on the threat of climate change.In a background note – released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last night – the UN group said its 2007 report wrongly stated that 55% of the Netherlands lies below sea level. In fact, only 26% of the country does. The figure used by the IPCC included all areas in the country that are prone to flooding, including land along rivers above sea level. This accounts for 29% of the Dutch countryside."The sea-level statistic was used for...