By: Larry Bell

President Obama has put salvation from dreaded climate catastrophes on his action agenda hot list. During his inaugural address he said: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” He went on to shame anyone who disagrees with this assessment, saying, “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and powerful storms.”

This sort of scary presidential prognostication isn’t new. He previously emphasized at the Democratic National Convention that global warming was “not a hoax”, referred to recent droughts and floods as “a threat to our children’s future”, and pledged to make the climate a second-term priority.

As much as I hate to nit-pick his doomsday scenarios, it might be appropriate to correct a few general misconceptions before getting back to that “overwhelming judgment of science” stuff.

Read the rest at: Forbes

There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy

By 16 concerned scientists (see end of article)

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the “pollutant” carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal

By Jim Hopkins

About a year ago, almost to the day, in this column, you may recall a bold prediction, fearlessly made. But lest you don’t, which is highly likely, since most of us wouldn’t remember a Higgs bison if we saw one in a game park, here it is again, much as it appeared 12 months ago:

If you’re worried about all the things you have to worry about, cheer up. Here’s one thing you won’t have to worry about any more. Global warming (remember, this was a prediction) will be the Great Disappearing Act of 2011. It will sink like a stone, exit stage left and generally melt away. Whoopee!

Inspired by the sneaky leaking of all those dodgy East Anglian emails – proof positive of scientific fraud, collusion and deceit – the prediction relied on one basic assumption.

Journalists never admit they’re wrong (see phone hacking). They just stop being wrong. When caught with their sceptical pants down and the spotty globes of their credulity exposed, they simply drop the story and move to something else.

Which is precisely what’s happened. Global warming has left the building.

Where once there were hundreds of horror stories, a daily dose of frightening features, a nightly stack of belching chimneys on the telly (mainly belching steam, in truth, but they still looked really scary) we’ve now got, well, (nervous cough, awkward shuffle) ummm, sweet Fanny Adams, to be frank. There has been a trickle of terror but, by and large, the whole calamitous narrative is a goneburger.

The end isn’t nigh (or nowhere near as nigh as it was). Doomsday’s stuck in the waiting room, reading an old copy of National Geographic and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are back in the barracks.

Read the rest at the New Zealand Herald.

By Tom Nelson

Email 856, Phil Jones: “FOI is causing us a lot of problems in CRU….It would be good if UEA went along with any other Universities who might be lobbying to remove academic research activities from FOI”

email 856:

“FOI is causing us a lot of problems in CRU and even more for Dave, as he has to respond to them all. It would be good if UEA went along with any other Universities who might be lobbying to remove academic research activities from FOI. FOI is having an impact on my research productivity. I also write references for people leaving CRU, students and others. If I have to write a poor one, I make sure I get the truth to the recipient in a phone call.”

Read the rest at Tom Nelson’s Blog.

From the Blaze

On Tuesday, a skydiving team from the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) parachuted down on Toti beach, near the city where the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is taking place.

The skydivers carried two signs, one reading “Climategate 2.0 Science Not Settled”, the other “No New Treaty CFACT”. According to a CFACT press release, the dramatic entrance into Durban, South Africa, was to bring attention again to the Climategate 2.0 emails, which were leaked last month.

“Media covering COP17 are kidding themselves if they think they can ignore and wish away Climategate 2.0,” said CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker in the press release.  “Lord Monckton, the folks from Climate Depot and I will carry our message by parachute if that’s what it takes to wake up this conference and place the Climategate evidence of corrupted science where the world must see it.”

Read the rest at The Blaze.

• 5,000 leaked emails reveal scientists deleted evidence that cast doubt on claims climate change was man-made
  Experts were under orders from US and UK officials to come up with a ‘strong message’
• Critics claim: ‘The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering’
• Scientist asks, ‘What if they find that climate change is a natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us all’

By Rob Waugh

More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of ‘massaging’ evidence of man-made climate change.

Following on from the original ‘climategate’ emails of 2009, the new package appears to show systematic suppression of evidence, and even publication of reports that scientists knew to to be based on flawed approaches.

And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.

One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message.’

The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.

‘Humphrey’, said to work at Defra, writes: “I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story.”

Read the rest at the Daily Mail.

By Cory Kampschroer

A small group of demonstrators was on hand in Minneapolis today for the arrival of a global warming author and speaker. Dr. Michael Mann spoke Wednesday at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Mann is a physicist and climatologist and is best known as one of the originators of a graph of temperature trends in the past one-thousand years, known as the ‘hockey stick graph.’

Members of the organization, Minnesota Majority, protested Mann’s Minneapolis speech calling it “fraudulent.” Dan McGrath was among the roughly 10 people protesting, calling Mann “among the most guilty parties in what we call the global warming scam.”

Read the rest at KSTP.

Creator of discredited “hockey stick” chart caused US, world much harm, say demonstrators

Dr. Michael Mann was welcomed to Minneapolis today by a group of demonstrators who blame Dr. Mann’s research and publications for damage to the US and world economies and fostering distrust in scientists. The demonstrators believe Mann’s oft-referenced work to prove anthropogenic global warming theory is fraudulent and showed up at the Minneapolis convention center where he was speaking at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America to tell him so.

Mann was made infamous by discredited tree ring research used to create the so-called “hockey stick chart” that purported to demonstrate recent, runaway man-caused global warming. His name came up in the “climategate” email scandal that emerged out of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, in connection to a “trick” employed by Dr. Mann for a paper published in Nature Magazine. That trick involved obfuscating the results of proxy temperature data when it didn’t match actual temperatures recorded by instrumentation. Discovery of that trick called into question the validity of the entire pre-instrumentation climate history constructed from Mann’s work.

The hockey stick chart was the key element in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and the United Nations’ 1997 Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s 4th Assessment. The IPCC report has been the underpinning of United States and global warming policy for over a decade. Based upon it’s conclusions, governments have implemented expensive carbon taxes and new overbearing regulations designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, cap and trade schemes, a phased-in ban on incandescent light bulbs, the forced relocation of whole populations of people to make room for carbon credit producing plantations and numerous other far reaching and expensive initiatives.

“There are several reasons for the current economic crisis we’re facing in the United States and globally, but a major contributor has been the suppression of energy production and economic activity by overbearing new regulations, taxes and carbon trading resulting from the misguided belief that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are causing extraordinary warming of the planet,” said Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis. “We feel Dr. Mann’s work has contributed to tremendous economic and societal harm,” he said.

“Where did the medieval warming period go? What decline did he hide? What’s the Nature trick?” are the questions Minnesota Free Market Institute president Kim Crockett wants answers to.

Mann wasn’t available with answers.

Instead, Dr. Mann ironically spoke to the Geologic Society about how some climate scientists in the public arena are “attacked” by their opponents and about how climate scientists are “massively out-manned and out-funded in this battle.”

“His ‘poor me’ routine would be laughable in the face of the trillions of public dollars being poured into the green global warming toilet, if it weren’t for the part about trillions of public dollars being poured into the toilet,” said Davis. “These demonstrators aren’t being paid. In truth, they’re paying people like Mann and they’re turning our tax dollars against us, trying to get even more of our money.”

Dr. Michael Mann will be at the Minneapolis Convention Center Wednesday to give a short lecture to the American Geological Society’s annual meeting.

Mann is probably best known as the infamous creator of the “hockey stick” graph designed to show a rapid, recent deviation from “normal” global temperatures,

Mann’s other notable contribution to climate science was his so-called “Nature trick,” in which he obfuscated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures his own flawed tree ring research indicated. Mann had essentially disproved the reliability of his own work, which was the basis for reconstructing the Earth’s past climate record, the very foundation of the theory that the warming period experienced in the 1990s was outside the Earth’s norms.

Mann will address the geologists with a short talk titled, “Climate Scientists in the Public Arena: Who’s Got Our Backs?” at 1:45 PM.

From the synopsis of the talk posted on the AGS website, it appears that Mann will complain about warmists like himself being singled out and lament that scientists of his ilk are “massively out-funded in this battle” (not) over the realities of anthropogenic climate change.

It’s true that Mann has often been the subject of ridicule. In the wake of the “climategate” email scandals, his “Nature trick” of graph-scrubbing received a lot of attention and his hockey stick chart which was the basis for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has been proven false. Both of these facts have made him a target for satire, prompting him to threaten lawsuits against his detractors in the past. Now it seems, he’s hoping to grab some sympathetic ears among the geologists meeting at the Minneapolis Convention Center on Wednesday.

Perhaps Dr. Mann could use a welcoming committee. If you feel like welcoming one of the inner sanctum of warmist climate scientists to Minneapolis with a hand-made sign of some sort, drop by outside the Convention Center around 1:00 on Wednesday, October 12th. Can’t make it that early in the day? The meeting wraps up at 5:30 – 6:00 PM. You could drop by to bid adieu after work instead.

Update: Two facebook events have been established for a Michael Mann Welcoming Committee.

• See here for the 1:00-2:00 demonstration.
• Minnesotans for Global Warming has set up a facebook event for the 5:00-6:00 demonstration.

Dr. Michael Mann seeks the help of other Climategate players to prevent access to his University of Virginia emails.

By Paul Chesser

Dr. Michael Mann, who under a lesser title at University of Virginia created the famed “hockey stick” chart of 20th-century temperature escalations while leveling the Medieval Warm Period, has enlisted a Climategate Cavalcade of Stars to help him enter as an interested party in a lawsuit in which my organization, American Tradition Institute, seeks to get his old UVA emails and data.

Early this month Mann, who is now at Pennsylvania State University, had his lawyers ask for permission to intervene in ATI’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against UVA. Our request seeks correspondence between Mann and 30-plus other global warming activist scientists who form much of the cabal that created the various predictive reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The university, buttressed by the urgings of groups including ACLU, People for the American Way, Union of Concerned Scientists, and American Association of University Professors, is withholding the meaningful documents ATI seeks. Mann himself said the few thousand documents UVA turned over so far were, more or less, meaningless “boilerplate.” ATI lawyers David Schnare and Chris Horner (also an AmSpec contributor), under a court-order, will be allowed to identify some of the remaining emails the university believes should be kept from public view so as to reduce the number the judge will have to examine, and then ATI and UVA will argue which ones should be disclosed in a court hearing this fall. Dr. Schnare and Mr. Horner are under clear orders that whatever they see they must forever keep confidential unless the court later orders those emails released.

In his attempt to intervene, Mann has called upon friends in academe to bolster his claim that, despite using a taxpayer-funded email system at UVA, that he has the right to prevent the public from seeing what he says are “private” emails. The concept that government-owned, or “public,” does not mean “private” is inconceivable to him (see Exhibit 2, here).

Read the rest at the American Spectator.

By Rosalind S. Helderman

The University of Virginia and a conservative advocacy group have agreed the university will turn over documents in response to a public information request by the group seeking documents related to the work of a former university climate scientist.

U-Va. will comply with the request by Aug. 22.

The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, along with Del. Bob Marshall (R-Prince William), want e-mails and other documents related to the work of global warming researcher Michael Mann.

The university has said the group requested about 9,000 pages of records, and the organization says about 20 percent have been turned over so far.

But the group believes the university has been dragging its feet in producing the records. The university has said it is working as quickly as possible to sift through thousands of pages of records to figure out which should be released.

In an agreement filed in Prince William Circuit Court on Tuesday, the university agreed it will turn over all records, in electronic form, within 90 days–or Aug. 22.

Read the rest at the Washington Post.

By Dr. Tim Ball

Traditionally, the older scientists held to the prevailing wisdom and were challenged by the new, skeptical graduates looking for wider answers. In climatology, the opposite has happened. The so-called skeptics challenging the prevailing wisdom are the professors who have researched and taught the subject for 30 years or longer. Their knowledge is much wider than that of the new young scientists because climate science has stagnated for thirty years. All the funding was directed to only one side of climate science, and that was the side promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and accepted as the ‘official science’ by governments.

It’s now frightening how little climate science is known by both sides of the debate on human causation of global warming. I wrote this sentence before I saw a paper from Michigan State University that found,

Most college students in the United States do not grasp the scientific basis of the carbon cycle – an essential skill in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change.

The professor says students need to know because they must deal with the buildup of CO2 causing climate change. This discloses his ignorance about the science of the carbon cycle and the role of CO2 in climate. It’s not surprising, and caused by three major factors:

1. a function of the emotional, irrational, religious approach to environmentalism;
2. the takeover of climate science for a political agenda; and
3. funding directed to prove the political, rather than the scientific, agenda.

The dogmatism of politics and religion combined to suppress openness of ideas and the advance of knowledge critical to science.

Read the Rest at Dr. Ball’s “A Different Perspective.”

By Larry Bell

I’ve encountered some folks who appear offended by the title of my new book Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax. Why do you call it a “hoax”? they ask. Why not refer to the matter as a debate? The reason is quite simple: A debate describes a discussion in which participants competitively argue opposing points of view that are assumed to be based upon honest positions.

A hoax is a deceptive act intended to hoodwink people through deliberate misinformation, including factual omissions. My book is about the latter (and by the way, it can be ordered through primary vendors, and is currently being featured on “new releases” tables at 200 major Barnes and Noble Stores).

The central lie is that we are experiencing a known human-caused climate crisis, a claim based on speculative theories, contrived data and totally unproven modeling predictions. And the evidence? Much is revealed by politically corrupted processes and agenda-driven report conclusions rendered by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which are trumpeted in the media as authoritative gospel.

S. Fred Singer, former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and University of Virginia professor emeritus commented about these sorry circumstances in the foreword of my book, stating in part:

“Many would place the beginning of the global warming hoax on the Senate testimony delivered by James Hansen of NASA [director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies] during the summer of 1988. More than anything else, this exhibition of hyped alarm triggered my active skepticism about the man-made global warming scare. This skepticism was amplified when I acted as reviewer of the first three IPCC reports, in 1990, 1996, and 2001. Increasingly claims were made for which there was no evidence; in some cases the ‘evidence’ was clearly manufactured. For example, the 1966 report used selective data and doctored graphs. It also featured changes in the text that were made after the scientists had approved it and before it was printed.”

Other fraud is evident through public exposure of e-mail files retrieved from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Scandalous exchanges among prominent researchers who have fomented global warming hysteria confirm long-standing and broadly suspected manipulations of climate data. The communications also reveal conspiracies to falsify and withhold information, to suppress contrary findings in scholarly publications, and to exaggerate the existence and threats of man-made global warming. Many of these individuals have had major influence over summary report findings issued by the IPCC. Still other evidence comes from mouths of government officials, international climate summit organizers and leading science spokespeople recorded in candid public admissions.

Read the rest at Forbes.