The greatest scandal connected to global warming is not exaggeration, fraud or destruction of data to conceal the weakness of the argument. It is those who are personally profiting from promoting this fantasy at the expense of the rest of us.
Al Gore is the most visible beneficiary. The world’s greatest climate-change fear-monger has amassed millions in book sales and speaking fees. His science-fiction movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award for best documentary and 21 other film awards. He was co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Gore was laying his own foundations. As he was whipping up hysteria over climate change, he cannily invested in “green” firms that stood to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) from increased government regulations and sweetheart deals from connected politicians and bureaucrats. The multimillionaire climate dilettante was given a free pass by reporters, who refused to ask him hard questions about the degree to which he was profiting from the panic he was causing.
With the global-warming story line unraveling, the New York Times allowed Mr. Gore to run what amounted to an unpaid advertisement for his brand of climate-change hysteria. This screed, published Saturday, reiterated his claim that the world faces an “unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.” That’s pretty good rhetoric for the person with the largest carbon footprint in the world.
Al Gore’s defense of global-warming hysteria in Sunday’s New York Times has many flaws, but I’ll focus on just one whopper — where the “Inconvenient Truth” man states the opposite of scientific fact.Gore wrote, “The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States.”
It’s an interesting theory, but where are the facts?
According to “State of the Climate” from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Global precipitation in 2009 was near the 1961-1990 average.” And there was certainly no pattern of increasing rain and snow on America’s East Coast during the post-1976 years, when NOAA says the globe began to heat up.
Insulated by an outer crust, the surface of the earth acquires nearly all of its heat from the sun. The only exit for this heat to take is through a door marked “Radiation.” And therein lies a tale…
Recently, I chanced upon an Atmospheric Science Educator Guide [PDF] published by NASA. Aimed at students in grades 5 through 8, it helps teachers explain how so-called “greenhouse gases” warm our planet Earth.
These guides are interesting on a number of levels, so I recommend that you look them over. But what caught my eye was this:
Question: Do all of the gases in our atmosphere absorb heat?
Answer: (Allow students to discuss their ideas. Don’t provide the answer at this time.)
Indeed, that’s a good one to think over yourself. Almost all of what we’re breathing is nitrogen and oxygen — do these gases absorb heat? Lakes and rocks absorb heat, after all, and thereby reach a higher temperature. So can nitrogen and oxygen molecules do the same?
Well, I won’t keep you hanging. After allowing students to discuss it, the instructor is instructed to give them the final verdict.
Answer: No. Only some gases have the unique property of being able to absorb heat.
These are the infrared-absorbing “greenhouse gases,” of course, substances like carbon dioxide water vapor, and not nitrogen and oxygen.
Now, is something wrong here? Most definitely, for NASA has a finger on the scale. Let’s review a few basics that NASA should have outlined.
Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will defend his handling of a crisis that has shaken the world’s faith in his organisation at a meeting of environmental leaders in Bali.
By Geoffrey Lean
He will try to save his job and shore up support for the IPCC in the wake of the discovery of errors in its latest report.
He is attending a special closed meeting of environment and climate ministers in the fringes of the annual assembly of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Governing Council, the biggest such event since Copenhagen climate summit that ended in confusion and recriminations last December.
The governments are publicly backing Dr Pachauri, who they re-elected unopposed less than 18 months ago - the EU said last night that he had “done a good job, in general” and “deserves full confidence”. However privately, officials have expressed a wish that he will decide to step down before long.
The IPCC was engulfed in crisis when it emerged that it had relied on unsubstantiated reports from environmental groups to make a headline-grabbing prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayas would disappear by 2035.
Dr Pachauri’s robust response to counterclaims that that the glaciers were not melting so rapidly - which he dismissed as “voodoo science” – only increased pressure on his position.
The Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works released a report today titled, “‘Consensus’ Exposed: The CRU Controversy.” The report covers the controversy surrounding emails and documents released from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). It examines the extent to which those emails and documents affect the scientific work of the UN’s IPCC, and how revelations of the IPCC’s flawed science impacts the EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.
The report finds that some of the scientists involved in the CRU controversy violated ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and possibly federal laws. In addition, the Minority Staff believes the emails and accompanying documents seriously compromise the IPCC-based “consensus” and its central conclusion that anthropogenic emissions are inexorably leading to environmental catastrophes.
In its examination of the controversy, the Minority Staff found that the scientists:
Obstructed release of damaging data and information;
Manipulated data to reach preconceived conclusions;
Colluded to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science “consensus”; and
Assumed activist roles to influence the political process.
Climate scientists who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet
By Fred Guterl
One of the most impressive visuals in Al Gore’s now famous slide show on global warming is a graph known as the “hockey stick.” It shows temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rising slowly for most of the last thousand years and turning steeply upward in the last half of the 20th century. As evidence of the alarming rate of global warming, it tells a simple and compelling story. That’s one reason the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included the graph in the summary of its 2001 report. But is it true?
The question occurred to Steven McIntyre when he opened his newspaper one morning in 2002 and there it was—the hockey stick. It was published with an article on the debate over whether Canada should ratify the Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. McIntyre had little knowledge of the intricate science of climate change; he didn’t even have a Ph.D. He did have a passion for numbers, however. He also had some experience in the minerals business, where, he says, people tend to use hockey-stick graphs when they are trying to pull one over on you. “Reality usually isn’t so tidy.”
As every climate scientist must know by now, McIntyre’s skepticism of the hockey stick launched him on a midlife career change: he has become the granddaddy of the global warming “denial” movement. McIntyre asserted that the data of Michael Mann, head of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, did not support his conclusions, and that a true graph of temperatures would suggest a cyclical cause of recent warming. Following in his footsteps, a cottage industry of amateur climatologists have dug into the climate literature, tried to poke holes in the arguments, and demanded supporting data from scientists, sometimes under the auspices of Freedom of Information Act requests.
The scientists have resisted these efforts just as fiercely. For the past six years the conflict has played out in blogs, in the halls of Congress, and in deliberations of the IPCC. It came to a crescendo with the theft of private e-mails from the University of East Anglia in England in November, which raised questions about the scientific objectivity of several prominent researchers, including Phil Jones, who resigned in December as head of the Climatic Research Unit.
The battle between “alarmists” and “deniers” has taken a huge toll, not just on the reputations of Jones and the other “climategate” scientists. It has also damaged the credibility of climate science itself, and threatened more than a decade of diplomatic efforts to engineer a global reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. The effort, which has kept a forward momentum since the Kyoto meeting in 1997, came to a cold stop in Copenhagen in December. The conference was originally intended to bring the U.S. and China into a global agreement, but produced nothing of substance. Indeed, the climate project bears a striking resemblance to health-care reform in the United States—stalled by a combination of political resistance and hubris.
What went wrong? Part of the blame lies, of course, with those who obstructed the efforts of the IPCC and the individual scientists, including bloggers who tried to sandbag scientists with spurious FOIA requests, and the perpetrators (as yet unknown) of the hack at the Climatic Research Unit. Part of the blame also falls on the climate scientists themselves. Many of them—including perhaps Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC head—may have stepped too far over the line from science to advocacy, undermining their own credibility. Some scientists, as a result, are now calling for a change in tone from antagonism to reconciliation. Climate science, they say, needs to open its books and be more tolerant of scrutiny from the outside. Its institutions—notably the IPCC—need to go about their business with greater transparency. “The circle-the-wagons mentality has backfired,” says Judith Curry, head of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
The first thing to fix is the institution that has borne the brunt of the recent public-relations disaster: the IPCC itself. Recently there have been several minor revelations of sloppiness. A line in the group’s 2007 report stating that glaciers in the Himalayas will melt entirely by 2035 turns out to have come not from the peer-reviewed literature, but from a 1999 article in New Scientist, a popular magazine in the U.K. More damaging, IPCC chairman Pachauri has been acting as a consultant to financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus, an investment firm. Although he says he has donated the proceeds to the nonprofit organization he founded in Delhi to promote charitable programs in sustainability, many people have wondered whether the head of a scientific organization that calls itself “policy neutral” should be consulting with banks. Some have called for his resignation.
Texas and several national industry groups on Tuesday filed separate petitions in federal court challenging the government’s authority to regulate U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
Texas, which leads U.S. states in carbon dioxide emissions due to its heavy concentration of oil refining and other industries, will see a major impact if U.S. mandatory emissions reductions take effect.
In December, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide endanger human health, opening the door for the agency to issue mandatory regulations to reduce them.
Texas said it had filed a petition for review challenging the EPA’s “endangerment finding” with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Texas has also asked the EPA to reconsider its ruling.
“The EPA’s misguided plan paints a big target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers and the hundreds of thousands of Texans they employ,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said.
The National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association also said on Tuesday they filed a petition challenging the EPA in federal appeals court.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and U.S. iron and steel makers have also signaled they would file lawsuits.
More embarrassments for the U.N. and ’settled’ science
Wall Street Journal Editorial
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.
Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there’s no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC’s headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.
Michele wanted to get both sides of the global warming debate represented in the discussion, so her first guest was Jay Drake-Hamilton, science policy director for Fresh Energy. She advocated for federal dollars to weatherize homes and buildings and renewable energy sources, while arguing that global warming is going to cause increasingly extreme weather events like the snowstorms on the east coast.
I countered that the global warming theory is unraveling before our eyes, citing climategate, Phil Jones’ recent admissions of missing data, lack of warming and unreliable tree ring data to back my case.
Three big companies quit an influential lobbying group that had focused on shaping climate-change legislation, in the latest sign that support for an ambitious bill is melting away.
Oil giants BP PLC and ConocoPhillips and heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. said Tuesday they won’t renew their membership in the three-year-old U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a broad business-environmental coalition that had been instrumental in building support in Washington for capping emissions of greenhouse gases.
The move comes as debate over climate change intensifies and concerns mount about the cost of capping greenhouse-gas emissions.
On a range of issues, from climate change to health care, skepticism is growing in Washington that Congress will pass any major legislation in a contentious election year in which Republicans are expected to gain seats. For companies, the shifting winds have reduced pressure to find common ground, leading them to pursue their own, sometimes conflicting interests.
Last week, the head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Billy Tauzin, said he would step down as president of the industry’s main lobby in Washington, amid criticism from some in the industry over the alliance he made last year with the White House to support health-care legislation.
The administration had worked hard to persuade industry groups to climb aboard its major legislative initiatives—a tack many business interests saw as sensible following the Democrats’ big gains in the 2008 elections. But “unlikely bedfellows make for breakups,” said Kevin Book, managing director of Clearview Energy Partners, a consulting firm.
Spokesmen for ConocoPhillips and BP said the companies still support legislation to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but believe they can accomplish more working outside USCAP’s umbrella. Caterpillar said it plans to focus on commercializing green technologies.
ConocoPhillips’s senior vice president for government affairs, Red Cavaney, said the USCAP was focused on getting a climate-change bill passed, whereas Conoco is increasingly concerned with what the details of such a bill would be.
“USCAP was starting to do more and more on trying to get a bill out without trying to work as much on the substance of it,” Mr. Cavaney said.
A spokesman for USCAP said it intends to continue its work. More than 20 other large companies, including oil company Royal Dutch Shell PLC and industrial heavyweights General Electric Co. and Honeywell International Inc., remain in the coalition with environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council. The USCAP said it expects to add new members in coming months.
“We think there’s momentum to get [a climate bill] done,” USCAP spokesman Tad Segal said. “President [Barack] Obama’s State of the Union address made it clear the administration is behind us.”
You can fool some of the people some of the time, as Abraham Lincoln observed, and you even can fool all the people some of the time. But you can’t fool all the people all the time. Al Gore and his friends got so excited about points one and especially point two that they forgot point three.
Not everybody is on to the global-warming scam, not yet, but all the people — or enough of them — are getting there. “Global warming,” or even “climate change” as Al’s marketing men now insist that it be called, is becoming the stuff of jests and jokes. Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, a Republican, built an igloo of that hot stuff that buried Washington last week on the Capitol lawn and dubbed it “Al Gore’s new home.”
Across the Potomac, the Republicans in Virginia filmed a television commercial called “12 inches of global warming” and invited two Virginia congressmen, both Democrats who voted for the infamous cap-and-trade legislation, to help with the shovel that will become the official state tool before the streets thaw.
One day this week, there was measurable snow on the ground in 50 states. (No report yet from the other seven of the “57 states” President Obama once said he was campaigning to be the president of.) Even Hawaii reported snow on some of its mountain peaks, and several towns in northwestern Florida were lightly dusted, like the powdered sugar on a cop’s doughnut.
A few snowflakes, or even a lot of snowflakes, is hardly proof that the great global-warming scare is a fraud and a swindle, but the collapse of the “science” of global warming is transforming even the sheep into skeptics. Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground — an Internet blog and not to be confused with the violent underground Weathermen of the sordid ’60s — observes that characteristics of climate must be measured carefully over the decades and even centuries, not by occasional blizzards and storms.
But political fraud and scientific swindle can be measured by collapsing “science.” The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Britain was regarded as the leader in climate research and the fount of raw data on which the science was based until leaked e-mails between researchers revealed evidence of doctoring of data and manipulation of evidence. The director of the research unit, professor Phil Jones, was regarded as an archbishop in the Church of Global Warming. He was pressured to resign in the wake of the scandal. Now he has conceded to an interviewer from the BBC that based on the evidence in his findings, the globe might have been warmer in medieval times. If so, the notion that fluctuations in earthly temperatures are man-made is rendered just that, a man-made notion.
With the fraudulent background to climate claims, we should not have expected anything else - we now find the chosen Climategate Inquiry team of five men consisted of at least two pro-climate change scientists! The scandals just keep on coming – the climate garbage is building up on either side of the information highway, and the rats are still spreading their disease.
Boulton the Fifth-Columnist
We should have known the climate inquiry would be slanted. One of the team, Prof Geofrey Boulton, is called upon to resign because he is not impartial. Another panel member has already quit. Boulton, it has been discovered, believes climate change is caused by human activity, making him very unsuitable to be part of an inquiry team. (The Scotsman, 13th Feb 2010).
As the Editorial (13th Feb) of The Scotsman newspaper reminds us, members of the Inquiry had to “have no prejudicial interest” or “predetermined view” on climate change. Boulton and the other members knew this, and yet they remained quiet, pretending to be impartial. This is just what we have come to expect from the sneaky, dark side of pseudo-science.
Even better, Boulton worked for 18 years at East Anglia University, the same university of which the Climate Research Unit is a part! For reasons that are not acceptable, the Inquiry is to be held in private – easy to then hide facts and truth and disseminate lies, once again. As The Scotsman said “Sir Muir (Russell) may well have prejudiced the outcome before the inquiry has even started.” I think we can strike-out the words “may well have”… it began as a lie and would have exonerated Jones and pals by sleight-of-hand.
As Dr Benny Peiser and David Whitehouse said “The Russell panel is in need of complete overhaul before it can be taken seriously.” (CCNet-News, 12th Feb). We can only be thankful that the full texts of emails were issued before self-interested scientists tried to remove them from view.
Andrew Montford (13th Feb) said that a “major question mark” is now over the whole of the Russell Review as about half of the five-man panel have been shown “to be wildly unsuitable”. He added: “many will conclude that Muir Russell has set out to produce a predetermined result, not to reach the truth. Maybe they need to start again.” Too darn tootin’! It was another attempt to commit fraud and to mislead. The government and Jones et al have too much to lose in all this. They will try to influence any panel along their own lines. Muir need not ‘start again’ – just get rid of him and find men who will genuinely be impartial.
We can see that the people who set up the inquiry team are just as competent and truthful as the IPCC – neither checks the facts or the truth, and neither care anyway.
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
By Jonathan Petre
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 refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.
The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.
Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.
In Washington, even a snowstorm is a political event. The record snowstorms that have blanketed the capital and shut down cities across the Mid-Atlantic have already sparked a new round of sparring between supporters and skeptics in the global-warming debate.
As city residents trudge through blizzards and shovel out stranded cars, climate-change skeptics have been tossing verbal snowballs at those arguing that the planet is heating up and that human activity is to blame.
Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and a global warming skeptic, acknowledged that one weather event is not enough to prove or disprove the climate-change thesis, but noted that “global-warming alarmists” tend to take any severe-weather incident - heat waves, cold snaps, droughts and floods - as evidence supporting their position.
Mr. Ebell noted that the Washington area is enduring a colder winter than usual. The region typically gets a lot of precipitation this time of year, but it does not typically produce such heavy snowfall.
On the defensive, climate-change experts dismiss the idea that a temporary cold snap and a pair of freakish snowstorms undermine what they say are clear long-term trends. The severity of the recent weather, they say, in fact supports the global-warming argument.
Joseph Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground, a Web-based forecasting site, said in a teleconference for reporters Thursday that the recent weather patterns do not refute the global-warming thesis.
Amid the growing fight over the accuracy of climate data, President Obama is seeking to have the federal government put its imprimatur on the science by calling for the creation of a new federal office to study and report on global warming.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Service office would help federal agencies and businesses prepare for and cope with global changes, similar to how industries have used data from the 140-year-old National Weather Service to create new technologies and provide services.
“This service will be a vital part of our growing body of knowledge on climate change, and will be held to the highest standards of scientific integrity and transparency,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
The NOAA Climate Service office, which requires requires congressional committee approval, has been under development for years and is not designed to stem controversies over the accuracy of climate data, according to NOAA officials. It will cull existing data and programs from various Commerce offices under one roof.
But the proposed office does fall in line with the administration’s effort to act on climate change in Congress and on the world stage. In Congress, the push for capping emissions of carbon dioxide, which some scientists say is causing global warming, has stalled in the Senate.
World leaders, spurred by Mr. Obama, failed to craft a cohesive response to climate changes at the United Nations’ Copenhagen conference in December. They did come up with a non-binding deal that leaders called a “first step” to stemming greenhouse gas emissions.
Developing countries such as China have resisted efforts to cap their emissions as their industries grow more quickly and emit more than developed countries such as the United States.
Mr. Locke said changes to the Earth’s temperatures threaten to melt polar ice caps, raise sea levels, threaten farmers’ crops and change weather patterns. Last month, the National Climatic Data Center reported that the decade that ended in 2009 was the warmest on record worldwide, surpassing the 1990s. Many scientists believe human activity has played a substantial role in the changes.
But others question the legitimacy of that research. The United Nations’ climate talks were overshadowed by the revelation of documents that purportedly showed several prominent researchers selected data that supported their theory that humans caused climate change.
There are big profits in climate hysteria
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