By Sarah Palin — With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue. “Climate-gate,” as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle — the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.
The e-mails reveal that leading climate “experts” deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What’s more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.
This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I’ve always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics.
So many new developments: which story do we pick? Maybe best to summarise, instead. After all, it’s not like you’re going to find much of this reported in the MSM.
2. Danes caught fiddling their carbon credits. (Hat tip: Philip Stott) Carbon trading is the Emperor’s New Clothes of international finance. It was invented by none other than Ken Lay, whose Enron would currently be one of the prime beneficiaries in the global alternative energy market, if it hadn’t been shown to be (nearly) as fraudulent as the current AGW scam. It is a licence to fleece, cheat and rob. Still, jolly embarrassing for the Danes to get caught red handed, what with their hosting a conference shortly in which the world’s leaders will try, straight-faced, to persuade us that carbon emissions trading is the only viable way of defeating ManBearPig.
3. Hats off to The Daily Express – the first British newspaper to make the AGW scam its front page story.
The piece was inspired by another bravura performance by Professor Ian Plimer, the Aussie geologist who argues that climate change has been going on quite naturally, oblivious of human activity, for the last 4,567 million years.
4. BBC finally gets round to reporting – sort of – that Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia may have been up to no good. It’s true that this report on their website is so hedged with special pleading for the temporarily suspended director Phil Jones the man might have written it himself. But on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning, I did hear the newsreader reporting it as more than just a routine theft story. Which is a start.
5. Legal actions ahoy! Over the next few weeks, one thing we can be absolutely certain of is concerted efforts by the rich, powerful and influential AGW lobby to squash the Climategate story. We’ve seen this already in the “nothing to see here†response of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the jet-setting, troll-impersonating railway engineer who runs the IPCC and wants to stop ice being served with water in restaurants. This is why those of us who oppose his scheme to carbon-tax the global economy back to the dark ages must do everything in our power to bring the scandal to a wider audience. One way to do this is law suits.
Alan Carlin — the EPA scientist whose skeptical report was hushed — thinks Obama and the EPA just placed a terrible bet with the politically motivated CO2 endangerment finding. Carlin has carried out or supervised economic and scientific research on public policy issues for over 40 years — first at The RAND Corporation, and since 1971 at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
By Alan Carlin
On Monday, the EPA announced its endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. One can infer from the timing of the announcement that the administration may have taken this action at this time in order to bring something to the table at the Copenhagen COP15 meeting.
From a scientific viewpoint, it was an odd time to do so — given that the very recent Climategate disclosures would presumably have taken some time to digest and analyze for their possible effects on vital conclusions. So the timing may have been based more on the political, rather than the scientific, factors involved.
But from a larger viewpoint, the U.S. president who was going to find a way to resolve partisan bickering in Washington has now embarked on a major escalation of the conflict — by using the power he holds over executive branch agencies to fight his enemies in Congress over the issue of global warming.
Although the EPA has always been, organizationally, an arm of the administration in power, until this administration the EPA has generally been able to maintain the appearance (if not the reality) of being science-based.
That is now much harder to maintain.
Originally, the rumor was that the purpose of the endangerment finding would be to pressure Congress into approving a cap and trade bill. Now, it appears fairly clear that the administration will not be able to gather the needed votes in the Senate to pass the bill — at least this year, and probably even next year, either with or without an endangerment finding. So there would seem to be little reason to push the endangerment finding now — unless they intended to use it as the basis for negotiating at COP15.
Some Major Political Risks
This EPA endangerment approach carries major risks for the administration. The first risk is that the EPA’s apparently politically motivated endangerment finding may be overturned in the now-inevitable court reviews.
The second risk is that when greenhouse gas regulations should be announced — and certainly when they should ever be implemented — the full responsibility will obviously fall onto the administration, rather than being shared between the administration and Congress (which is what would occur if Congress ever adopted a cap and trade bill). If constituents end up being unhappy with the resulting regulations, and particularly the greatly increased energy costs and decreased employment that will result, it will be obvious who was responsible.
And there may well be some very unhappy constituents.
A third risk is that they will not be able to contain the EPA’s actions, since the law clearly specifies that much smaller sources are subject to regulation than they now contemplate, and legal action may force the EPA to regulate smaller sources whether it wants to or not.
Secretary-General, United Nations
New York, NY
United States of America
8 December 2009
Dear Secretary-General,
Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ – the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.
Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.
We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.
Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:
1.Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
2.Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
3.Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
4.Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
5.The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
6.Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
7.Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
8.Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
9.Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
10.Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.
It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do so.
Signed by:
1.Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, Dr. Sci., mathematician and astrophysicist, Head of the Russian-Ukrainian Astrometria project on the board of the Russian segment of the ISS, Head of Space Research Laboratory at the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
2.Göran Ahlgren, docent organisk kemi, general secretary of the Stockholm Initiative, Professor of Organic Chemistry, Stockholm, Sweden
3.Syun-Ichi Akasofu, PhD, Professor of Physics, Emeritus and Founding Director, International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska, U.S.A.
4.J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Civil Engineering, University of Pretoria, South Africa; Member, UN Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, 1994-2000, Pretoria, South Africa.
5.Jock Allison, PhD, ONZM, formerly Ministry of Agriculture Regional Research Director, Dunedin, New Zealand
Since President Obama cannot get a formal climate treaty ratified by the US Senate, he instead plans to sign an “executive agreement” which will commit the United States to most of the same terms included in the original draft of the treaty but will not be called a “treaty”.
This video was exhibited to kick-off the UN climate conference on Monday. It requires no additional explanation. Double-click the video to go to the Youtube site if you feel compelled to leave a comment for the producers.
Deliberately timed to coincide with the start of the United Nations’ climate conference in Copenhagen, the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday declared that carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gas that’s essential to life on Earth, poses a threat to human health and welfare. This determination clears the way for the federal government to begin restricting energy production and restructuring the entire American economy.
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The EPA cited a 2007 Supreme Court ruling declaring that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act, but the science upon which that ruling was based has now been called into question when emails and internal documents between the UN’s leading climate change scientists were leaked to the public. Contained with in the files was evidence of suppression, manipulation and destruction of climate data. The emails revealed that the entire historical climate record that is the basis for all determinations of climate change is based on inaccurate data and has been manipulated to match a political and economic agenda.
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If the EPA acts unilaterally to restrict carbon dioxide emissions, the impact on the economy could be even worse than a cap and trade law enacted by Congress. The reasons for this move by the Obama Administration’s EPA appear to be two-fold: First, to establish authority for President Obama to make enforceable agreements at the UN’s climate conference even in lieu of a treaty or Congressional approval; and Second to give the administration leverage to coerce the Senate into enacting a cap and trade law just to lessen the economic damage that could be wrought by the EPA’s heavy-handed restrictions of CO2.
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At this moment, our national economy is under threat by carbon regulation schemes on three fronts: The Copenhagen conference designed to create a world carbon regulatory authority which could undermine our sovereignty; The cap and trade bill that’s been passed by the House of Representatives and now awaits Senate approval; and the Obama Administration’s decision that it can regulate carbon dioxide via the EPA even without approval by Congress.
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For a preview of what this could mean to American families, one can look to Germany, where due to restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions, electricity costs three-times more than in the US and gasoline is now $8.00 per gallon.
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You must make your voice heard loud and clear right now. This is no longer a far-away possibility. It’s happening as you read this. Time’s up.
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Take Action: If you don’t think it’s a good idea to dramatically slash domestic energy production at a cost of trillions of dollars and untold American jobs over the politics of a discredited climate scare, pick up your phone and call the White House right now. Tell the Obama Administration you won’t stand for this unparalleled fleecing of the American public. Call (202) 456-1111 to be heard today.
Representative F. James Sensenbrenner (R – WI) questions Dr. John Holdren, President Obama’s Science and Technology advisor regarding ClimateGate, calling the tactics used by some climate experts as “scientific fascism.â€
Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN’s negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol
By John Vidal
The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.
The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.
The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.
The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol’s principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.
The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as “a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks.”
A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:
Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;
Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called “the most vulnerable”;
Weaken the UN’s role in handling climate finance;
Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.
Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.
“It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process,” said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.
Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: “This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed.”
Hill continued: “It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.”
Some of the most prominent scientists pushing the theory of man-made warming hail from or have ties to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich,England. CRU scientists have played a major role in the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (aka IPCC). CRU has been described as the gatekeeper of the UN’s global warming assessments. Their research is featured prominently in the UN’s Assessment Reports (AR1, AR2, AR3 – and AR4 is the latest) issued by the IPCC that are being used as justification for carbon trading schemes, higher energy taxes, tremendous new government regulation trillions of dollars in public investment and even plans for a new world government entity with the authority to supersede the sovereignty of the United States.
On November 17, 2009 reports of an information leak from CRU computers began to surface. Over 60 megabytes of emails and data files were anonymously posted on a Russian file server. It’s not currently known who is responsible for the leak. CRU blames computer hackers, but many have suggested an internal whistleblower may be responsible. Dr. Phil Jones, director of the CRU has confirmed that the emails and data are genuine. The emails and documents reveal that some of the world’s “foremost” climate researchers have engaged in a pattern of data manipulation, suppression of dissenting views, undermining of the peer review process, destruction of documents requested under Freedom of Information laws and outright fraud. Despite the tremendous implications of the climategate scandal, the mainstream media has been largely silent on the subject, so the No Cap and Trade Coalition put together this ad for the internet and fundraising is underway to fund it for broadcast television.
Highlights social injustice of proposed climate change policies
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The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) announced today that they have joined the No Cap and Trade Coalition in the fight against cap-and-trade legislation and the proposed Copenhagen climate treaty. The coalition is comprised of over 30 state and federal public policy groups and think tanks and maintains a website at www.NoCapAndTrade.com.
Niger Innis, national spokesperson for CORE, will become a spokesperson for the No Cap-and Trade Coalition, helping to spread the message that this dangerous public policy will impede social justice, transfer wealth from the United States to foreign countries and potentially strip the United States of its sovereignty.
“CORE is committed to the coalition’s efforts to stop cap-and-trade as well as the Copenhagen treaty,†said Niger Innis. “This endeavor is a continuation of an almost three year effort that CORE has made in its national energy campaign – CORE believes that access to affordable energy is a civil and human right and will work with the No Cap-and-Trade Coalition to spread this message.â€
“The No Cap-and-Trade Coalition is very excited about working with CORE and having Niger Innis as a spokesperson,†said Jeff Davis of Minnesota Majority, the coalition’s organizer. “We believe his message that cap-and-trade schemes will be devastating to all Americans, but with a disproportionate impact on the poor in this country, will resonate with all people, regardless of politics.â€
On December 7, 2009, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will begin a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark where President Obama intends to consent to an operational agreement with immediate effect if the proposed treaty can’t be agreed upon. The treaty, or any similar executive agreements, could result in a massive transfer of wealth from the United States to third world countries, tax hikes, price inflation, job losses and more damage to the faltering American economy. A draft of the treaty includes establishing a new world government along with a world energy tax. Were such a treaty ratified, it could be a threat to the sovereignty of the United States.
If domestic cap-and-trade legislation were passed, it could result in a loss of 1.9 million American jobs in 2012 and 2.5 million American jobs by 2025. From 2012-2019, the CBO estimates direct government spending at $822 billion with revenue at $845 billion from taxes on energy producers.
The No Cap-and-Trade Coalition has launched a petition on its website at www.NoCapAndTrade.com and through it, has transmitted over 150,000 citizen messages to the president and Congress in opposition to cap and trade schemes. Member organizations have been independently working in the fight against cap-and-trade and the Copenhagen treaty and some are running advertisements to educate the public.
CORE plans to help the No Cap-and-Trade Coalition work with lawmakers to understand that only through the free-market development of technology and the refinement of conservation endeavors, can the United States achieve a sustainable energy policy for this generation and generations to come.
A professor who is accusing global warming skeptics of engaging in tabloid-style character assassination of scientists, called an American climate skeptic “an assh*le†on the December 4, 2009 live broadcast of BBC’s Newsnight program. “What an assh*le!†declared Professor Watson at the end of the contentious debate with Climate Depot’s executive editor Marc Morano. A clearly agitated Watson had earlier shouted to Morano “will you shut up.†Video of BBC “Asshole†clip is here.
Full one-on-one BBC debate segment between Prof. Watson and Climate Depot’s Morano is in two parts here. The remark was broadcast live on BBC and prompted an on-air apology to viewers from the BBC later in the program for the offensive language. Watson (Email: a.watson@uea.ac.uk) professor at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, which was the source of the disclosed files. Watson’s emails appear in the hacked Climategate files.
Officials gather in Copenhagen this week for an international climate summit, but business leaders are focusing even more on Washington, where the Obama administration is expected Monday to formally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.
An “endangerment” finding by the Environmental Protection Agency could pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions — even if Congress doesn’t pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected.
Many business groups are opposed to EPA efforts to curb a gas as ubiquitous as carbon dioxide.
An EPA endangerment finding “could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said in a statement. “The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don’t stifle our economic recovery,” he said, noting that the group supports federal legislation.
EPA action won’t do much to combat climate change, and “is certain to come at a huge cost to the economy,” said the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group that stands as a proxy for U.S. industry.
Dan Riedinger, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, a power-industry trade group, said the EPA would be less likely than Congress to come up with an “economywide approach” to regulating emissions. The power industry prefers such an approach because it would spread the burden of emission cuts to other industries as well.
Electricity generation, transportation and industry represent the three largest sources of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.
An EPA spokeswoman declined to comment Sunday on when the agency might finalize its proposed endangerment finding. Congressional Republicans have called on the EPA to withdraw it, saying recently disclosed emails written by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia and their peers call into question the scientific rationale for regulation.
The spokeswoman said that the EPA is confident the basis for its decision will be “very strong,” and that when it is published, “we invite the public to review the extensive scientific analysis informing” the decision.
EPA action would give President Barack Obama something to show leaders from other nations when he attends the Copenhagen conference on Dec. 18 and tries to persuade them that the U.S. is serious about cutting its contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions.
The vast majority of increased greenhouse-gas emissions is expected to come from developing countries such as China and India, not from rich countries like the U.S. But developing countries have made it clear that their willingness to reduce growth in emissions will depend on what rich countries do first. That puts a geopolitical spotlight on the U.S.
At the heart of the fight over whether U.S. emission constraints should come from the EPA or Congress is a high-stakes issue: which industries will have to foot the bill for a climate cleanup. A similar theme will play out in Copenhagen as rich countries wrangle over how much they should have to pay to help the developing world shift to cleaner technologies.
“There is no agreement without money,” says Rosário Bento Pais, a top climate negotiator for the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm. “That is clear.”
An endangerment finding would allow the EPA to use the federal Clean Air Act to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, which are produced whenever fossil fuel is burned. Under that law, the EPA could require emitters of as little as 250 tons of carbon dioxide per year to install new technology to curb their emissions starting as soon as 2012.
For two years, our space agency has refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has repeatedly corrected its climate figures. A leading researcher threatens to sue to find more inconvenient truths.
What’s become known as “Climate-Gate” may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn’t honor his FOI requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors.
“I assume that what is there is highly damaging,” says Horner, who suspects, based on the public record, the same type of data fudging, manipulation and suppression that has occurred at Britain’s East Anglia Climate Research Unit. “These guys (NASA) are quite clearly determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this.”
They may have good reason. NASA was caught with its thermometers down when James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, announced that 1998 was the country’s hottest year on record, with 2006 the third hottest.
NASA and Goddard were forced to correct the record in 2007 to show that 1934, decades before the advent of the SUV, was in fact the warmest. In fact, the new numbers showed that four of the country’s 10 warmest years were in the 1930s.
Hansen, who began the climate scare some two decades ago, was caught fudging the numbers again in declaring October 2008 the warmest on record. This despite the fact that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
Scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on that October’s readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. Was Hansen, like his CRU counterpart Michael Mann, trying to “hide the decline” in temperatures?
Screenwriter Roger L. Simon and filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd discuss what the Climategate scandal reveals about the shaky foundations of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth” and consider how the Academy might restore its reputation.
By Sarah Palin — With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue. “Climate-gate,” as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle — the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.
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