The Bloomberg news agency reported that Australia, Canada, Papua New Guinea and the Maldives were the first to notify the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of their wish to be associated with the Copenhagen accord.This is called being on the wrong side of history.
Canada has formally notified the United Nations that it has embraced the Copenhagen Accord and will cut its carbon emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels.
Federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice says it was the federal government's plan all along to align its position with that of the United States.
Prentice has said that the first step towards a binding international treaty on climate change is for countries to outline their own emission-reduction targets before the UN's official deadline of Jan. 31.
He says that although reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent will be challenging, he believes it is attainable.
Prentice says there's still work to do on getting carbon emitters, including China and the United States, to agree to a binding treaty on climate change.
He warns that it took years to translate the now outdated Kyoto Accord into a treaty after it was initially developed.
It doesn't matter if manmade climate change is based on deceptive scientific and untruthful propaganda, or that cap and trade will cost jobs and prosperity for Canadian families for the foreseeable future.
The truth is too difficult to explain.
It's easy short term votes that count.
Our internal polls show that people will swallow this.
Next!
Lord Christopher Monckton, imperious and articulate, won yesterday’s climate change debate in straight sets…Q & A with the Lord ... click.
Aided by Adelaide’s Professor Ian Plimer, Lord Monckton cruised to victory before a partisan crowd of suits and ties, movers and shakers.
Hundreds of them were there for the sell-out, $130-a-head Brisbane Institute lunch – and scepticism was applauded.
Climate change scientist Professor Barry Brook and teammate Graham Readfearn, The Courier-Mail’s environment blogger, were stoic in argument (even if Mr Readfearn may have foot-faulted once or twice and had to be pulled into line by moderator Ray Weeks).
George Monbiot is cwoss. Weally, WEALLY cwoss. And I don’t blame him one bit. God it must be an awful thing when you’ve squandered half your career acting as cheerleader for a cause which, on closer examination, turns out to have been a complete load of cobblers. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s humiliation after the Hitler Diaries is surely as nothing to what poor George – Britain’s second-most-famous Old Stoic after Perry Worsthorne – must be experiencing now.
I’m afraid I don’t read his Guardian columns as often as I used to. Pre-Climategate, they were a great place to go trolling for Moonbattisms which I could then post up on this site and expose to mockery. But these days there just isn’t time. There are so many bigger stories to report on the collapse of the AGW scam that really Monbiot’s views on the subject are about as relevant as a cavalry trooper’s would have been after the invention of tank warfare.
So I quite understand why a man in as desperate a position as George’s has to grab what few crumbs of consolation he can. That’ll be why he’s got so terribly excited about a blog I wrote the other day – and then spiked – about an orchestrated campaign by a green pressure group to get sympathetic individuals in over 200 constituencies to send letters to their local Tory candidate testing him on his environmental correctness.
Considered the climate Bible by governments around the world, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is meant to be a scientific analysis of the most authoritative research.Recall, dear reader, all the finger wagging and chastisement emitting from warmists that sceptics were not "peer" reviewed, recall, and relish the utter and total fall from grace of the IPCC along with the little green monsters who patrol the blogs.
Instead, it references literature generated by Greenpeace - an organization known more for headline-grabbing publicity stunts than sober-minded analysis. (Eight IPCC-cited Greenpeace publications are listed at the bottom of this post.)
In one section of this Nobel-winning report, climate change is linked to coral reef degradation. The sole source for this claim? A Greenpeace report titled "Pacific in Peril" (see Hoegh-Guldberg below). Here the report relies on a Greenpeace document to establish the lower-end of an estimate involving solar power plants (Aringhoff).
I did chance to read the energy supply chapter that references the Greenpeace figures for installed solar power estimates. Citing activist publications may be the least of the problems with this chapter. I noted that a number of negatives were discussed with regard to nuclear power, including waste, hydrocarbon use in mining, accidents and the threat of terrorism. The section on photovoltaic technologies on the other hand contained no mention of the four tonnes of carbon tetrachloride waste produced when creating 1 tonne of polycrystalline silicon. I believe it is an eco-crime that any hard copy of this biased drivel was ever printed.
Yesterday the London Times broke the latest news on the fate of disgraced British climatologist Phil Jones, of the University of East Anglia (UEA). Jones breached the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming. The Times reports that the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) decided that the UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late.
What the Times and the rest of the media are overlooking is that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), not the ICO, is responsible for announcing the results of the police investigation into the Climategate scandal. The ICO is merely a non-departmental public body which reports directly to Parliament, sponsored by the Ministry of Justice and deals solely with data protection, FOIA regulations, privacy, electronic communications regulations and environmental regulations.
What is not being intelligently reported is that Jones is still liable as lead conspirator in the UK’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and may face prosecution under the United Kingdom Fraud Act (2006). If convicted of the offense of fraud by either false representation, failing to disclose information or fraud by abuse of his position, he stands liable to a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment.
In a nationwide raid, police impounded copies of a banned book which called for violence against women. Beating of women is justified as “discipline,” so long as no bones are broken and no bruises left on the body.
In a raid on five mosques, prayer rooms and publishing houses as well as the private residences of three Islamic preachers, police impounded data storage units, computers and banned books. Thirty establishments were targeted in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, Hesse, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony. In Lower Saxony, four establishments were involved, six in Baden-Württemberg and one each in Bavaria, Berlin and Saxony
“Women under the Protection of Islam” is the German translation of a book published in Saudi Arabia. Descriptions in the chapter “Beating the Woman” have been declared by the Federal Department for Media Likely to Endanger Young People as both discrimination and incitement to violence.
Today we can update you with the news that the credibility of the IPCC and Prime Minister Gordon Brown has taken another major blow as Britain’s highest ranked government scientist, Professor John Beddington CMG FRS admits the science for global warming is “uncertain.”
Professor Beddington today makes his stand for skeptic principle in the London Times Online:
“I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper skepticism. Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed.”
Instead, foreign money will be used to create jobs in the police and army, or in agriculture. It will also pay for housing, officials said.
U.S. special representative Richard Holbrooke said many of the lowest-level Taliban were motivated by financial need, rather than ideological factors.
Holbrooke said it is unlikely that negotiations with higher-level Taliban would ever be considered, though other Western officials and Karzai himself have said this is still a possibility.
CTV’s Tom Kennedy said international allies would like to divide the Taliban the ideological fighters from the so-called “$10 Taliban” who are poorly-paid, but depend on the money they receive for fighting as insurgents.
“These are poor Afghans who are simply fighting because the Taliban pay them a few dollars a day in order to continue the fight,” he told CTV’s Canada AM from London on Thursday morning.
“The objective is to split them up,” Kennedy said.
Earlier this week, the UN pulled the names of five former Taliban officials -- including a former confidant of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar -- from a UN sanction list, to support reconciliation efforts.
The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.Source
The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.
The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.
In an earlier post, The IPCC: Hiding the Decline…, I argued that even more egregious than the IPCC’s mistaken claim that Himalayan glaciers would be mainly gone by 2035, was the willful omission in the IPCC Working Group II’s 2007 Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) of the fact that global warming could reduce the net global population at risk of water shortage. That this was a willful decision on the part of the authors of the of the IPCC SPM is suggested by the fact that one of the Expert comments on the Second Order Draft (SOD) of the SPM had explicitly warned that: “It is disingenuous to report the population ‘new water stressed’ without also noting that as many, if not more, may no longer be water stressed (if Arnell’s analyses are to be trusted).”
In this post I will show that this was not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern. I will show that there are other sins of omission which are also very unlikely to have occurred due to ignorance of the impacts literature or careless reporting, and that it was probably due to a conscious effort to tell the truth, but not the whole truth.
In Crichton's version, the monsters of legend comprise a tribe of human cannibals preying on Viking settlements. The story is told through the eyes of an educated Arab visitor driven to the far north by circumstances. He witnesses an attack by the cannibals in which the Vikings panic and run for it, sustaining heavy casualties in the process. But then, with the assistance of their Arab visitor, the Vikings begin to analyze the behavior of their enemy, piercing through the supernatural aura to the actuality within, learning their enemy's weaknesses and the means of capitalizing on them. The Viking defense improves and becomes formidable. At last they assault the cannibal stronghold itself, where Beowulf confronts and destroys their unsavory queen-goddess, losing his life in the process.
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We saw it again this Tuesday in Massachusetts. In a nearly unimaginable upset, a seat that "belonged" to the Democrats in a state "owned" by extreme liberals was taken by an underdog Republican candidate. Scott Brown's victory over Marsha, Marcia, Ms. Coakley was substantial - 52% to 47%, with the balance going to a third-party pest. The results have shaken the political cosmos. It is impossible to see the long-term results at this point.
But one thing is clear: Brown didn't just overcome an unworthy, machine-produced opponent, or even provide the crucial vote to prevent the further socialization of the United States. He destroyed a legend -- the legend of Obama the Omnipotent.
I write this from the middle of the eastern China coastal Plain where particulate air pollution is out of control, water pollution is out of control, solid waste management is out of control, industrial conversion of Ag land is out of control, all of which is reduced to side show by fixation on the trivial warming effects of a trace gas.Source
The legitimate causes of pollution control and conservation have been hijacked by a scientific freak show, demanding that the entire world fiddle while substantial portions of the planet burn. Those forces (political and industrial) that have no interest in addressing reality will happily spar forever in the fantasy shadow game of carbon control.
The independent filmmaker who brought ACORN to its knees last year with undercover exposes was arrested this week along with three others, including the son of a federal prosecutor, and accused of trying to interfere with the phones at Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's office.
Federal officials did not say why the men wanted to interfere with Landrieu's phones or whether they were successful. She has been in the news recently because she negotiated an increase in Medicaid funds for her state before announcing her support for Senate health care legislation.
The IPCC also made false predictions on the Amazon rain forests, referenced to a non peer-reviewed paper produced by an advocacy group working with the WWF. This time though, the claim made is not even supported by the report and seems to be a complete fabrication... read it all at EUR.
Thus, following on from "Glaciergate", where the IPCC grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on Himalayan glaciers – backed by a reference to a WWF report - we now have "Amazongate", where the IPCC has grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on the Amazon rain forest.
I was thinking how it was possible that such an unusually cool January is so warm according to this global methodology. Snow was almost everywhere on our hemisphere, wasn't it? Well, it may actually be a reason.
First, I thought that a problem could exist with the satellite measurements of the solar infrared radiation reflected from the snow. But the solar infrared radiation is actually negligible.
The solar surface temperature is around 6000 °C and is about 20 times higher than the surface temperature of the Earth. In Planck's law, these low frequencies get only suppressed by a power law but that's enough. The integrated radiance (below a certain low frequency) goes like the frequency to the fourth power, and (1/20)^4 is a really small part of the energy (6 ppm or so). This is just an order-of-magnitude estimate.
[...]
However, the actual latent heat stored in the snow itself is not negligible.
[...]
First, you should remember that the latent heat of melting snow is 334 000 Joule per kilogram, i.e. one thousand times more than William Connolley thinks it is. For the sake of completeness, let me also remind you that the specific heat of water is 4200 Joule per kilogram and Kelvin for water above the freezing point and 2100 Joule per kilogram and Kelvin for ice (or snow) right below the freezing point.
You only need 1/2 of the water's thermal energy to heat up the same amount (mass) of ice or snow. And melting of 1 kilogram of snow/ice into water needs as much energy as warming 80 kilograms of water or 160 kilograms of snow by 1 degree Celsius.
Video: The video is a wonderfully done sequence of film from the WW2 Pacific Theatre. In nine short minutes it shows that in any one hour during WW2, more was done in effort, capital, and blood than takes place in a year of Afghanistan conflict.
Afghanistan, in historic terms, is a pin-prick ... a tiny little conflict where a rag-tag bunch of barbarians have been able to utterly defeat Canada's will to win.
Afghanistan has shown us that one of the most prosperous countries on earth, with a population of over 30 million people, can't sustain a lowgrade conflict where it fields a tiny force of 2000 plus soldiers.
Afghanistan has shown us that we really haven't come far since WW2, that our only ability to wage war is to fight total war, where we slaughter massive numbers of the enemy, including his civilians, in order to crush him utterly. Tiny wars are not out thing ... we simply give up and come home.
Afghanistan has shown us that NATO is an empty shell.
Afghanistan, has shown us that Canadians, in general, are unequal to the task of liberating, least of all defending over a protracted period of time, some of the world's poorest and most dispossessed people.
Afghanistan has shown us that the West is vulnerable and that our enemies are indeed encouraged by what they see in Canada, Europe, and to a lesser degree in America. That is why they focus their wrath on America, for it is only America that any longer has the will to win and preserve the Western way of life. The rest of the West has become a fetid progressive swamp that abhors Western and America exceptionalism and subtly seeks to rip apart all that has made the West not only successful, but the freest human society to ever exist.
Over the past few months, we've learned that:
1. Key global warming activist/scientists have corrupted the peer reveiw process and tried to block or restrict the publication of contrarian work/opinion.
2. Key global warming activist/scientists have resisted the FOI process and may have destroyed data to keep it from FOI requests.
3. Key global warming activist/scientists have used mathematical tricks to create false results in order to push the IPCC position.
4. Key global warming activist/scientists use questionable methodology in calculating global temperatures; in estimating the urban heat island effect; and in averaging data from dropped stations.
5. Key global warming activist/scientists have possibly destroyed global raw temperature data making it impossible to replicate their work.
6. Dr. Pachauri, head of the IPCC, is using his postion to enrich himself and friends.
7. The IPCC faked estimates of glacier melt in Asia in order to apply political pressure.
8. The IPCC knowingly overestimated the increase in natural disasters and the cost of such.
9. Data from the WWF, an activist non-scientific organization, is used repeatedly by the IPCC in its reports. The WWF sponsers Earth Hour.
Update: And now, we have Amazongate.
So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”
But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people.”
[...]
And not any beleaguered Democratic candidates trying to turn things around in volatile swing states like, er, Massachusetts. The Barack Obama who showed up last Sunday to help out Martha Coakley was a sad and diminished figure from the colossus of a year ago. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway. As he did with his Copenhagen pitch for the Olympics, he put his personal prestige on the line, raised the stakes, and then failed to deliver. All those cool kids on his speechwriting team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in.
The most striking aspect of his performance was how unhappy he looked, as if he doesn’t enjoy the job. You can understand why. He ran as something he’s not, and never has been: a post-partisan, centrist, transformative healer. That’d be a difficult trick to pull off even for somebody with any prior executive experience, someone who’d actually run something, like a state, or even a town, or even a commercial fishing operation, like that poor chillbilly boob Sarah Palin. At one point late in the 2008 campaign, when someone suggested that if Governor Palin was “unqualified” then surely he was too, Obama pointed out as evidence to the contrary his ability to run such an effective campaign. In other words, running for president was his main qualification for being president.
Now, have a look at the figure below which shows Table 5.2 from the Stern Review Report as it now appears on the UK government archive (PDF), look carefully at the numbers circled in red:But wait, there's more ... a Canadian Blogger finds that the WWF (Earth Hour) is a favorite IPCC source ... I'm not kidding ... the science is settled fraudsters deferred to the activist loony green WWF on a number of occasions:
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There is no note, no acknowledgment, nothing indicating that the estimated damage for hurricanes was modified after publication by an order of magnitude. The report was quietly changed to make the error go away. Of course, even with the Table corrected, now the Stern Review math does not add up, as the total GDP impact from USA, UK and Europe does not come anywhere close to the 1% global total for developed country impacts (based on Muir-Wood), much less the higher values suggested as possible in the report's text, underscoring a key point of my 2007 paper.
Consequently, anyone wanting to understand or replicate my analysis from the original source would no doubt be confused because evidence of the error in Table 5.2 was quietly changed after the publication of my paper. Had they noted the error it would have obviously led to questions about the implications, and ultimately the bottom line estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change. [SEE UPDATE BELOW. THERE WAS ANOTHER POSSIBILITY I DID NOT CONSIDER.] Rather than rewrite the report, apparently, it was decided instead to rewrite history. Fixing facts to fit a policy conclusion is not a good idea for any government, but to do so with the quiet participation of leading academic advisors is doubly bad. Once again, not good.
At its heart, the Himalayan glacier scandal that has recently shaken the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) involves a document created by the WWF.
The WWF is an activist organization. Much of its funding comes from public donations. The more successful the WWF is at persuading the public that there's a crisis, the more likely people are to give it money. (In North America, WWF stands for World Wildlife Fund. Elsewhere, it stands for World Wide Fund for Nature.)
Many of those associated with the WWF are lovely human beings. But that doesn't change the fact that the WWF is not a neutral, disinterested party. It has an agenda, an ax to grind, a definite point-of-view. Rather than being a scientific organization, it is a political one. In the UK, the media aptly calls the WWF a "pressure-group."
image: ReaperHe [Gavin Schmidt] said any long-term temperature changes recorded at the high Arctic station at Eureka, would likely be "representative" of changes elsewhere in the region, even in a sub-Arctic city like Yellowknife.... right Gavin, representative of temperature changes in different climactic zones where so much as a slight ocean current shift or prevailing wind shift can change one region while leaving the other untouched. All one can do anymore is shake one's head ... science? ... perhaps guano, but not science.
image: The doctor had his tv on in his office when the news of the military base shootings came on. The husband of one of his employees was stationed there.“I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”When it comes to geopolitics there is a lot of buyer's remorse right now; W is looking pretty good.
When President George W. Bush spoke through a bullhorn to emergency rescue workers at Ground Zero just two days after 9/11, he put the world on notice: We are coming to get those who did this, and we will not stop until we do.
The British media appears to be on a relentless campaign against UN Climate Change Guru R-K Pachauri. The Sunday Telegraph claims Pachauri has been minting millions of dollars from various positions he holds in banks to oil companies. The newspaper says Pachauri is accused of making a fortune from his links with carbon trading companies. The news report highlights a conflict of interest between Pachauri's role as a climate expert and positions he holds in companies and institutes that benefit economically from stopping climate change.Source: Dr. Richard North (IPCC Slayer)
A deal was cut today in the trial of Rifqa Bary. In exchange for pleading guilty to the charge of being "unruly", Rifqa will not have to return home.
Here's the hijabed Heagney reporting:The long legal dispute over runaway teen convert Fathima Rifqa Bary apparently ended in Franklin County Juvenile Court late this afternoon when the girl and her parents agreed that she'll stay in the custody of Children Services and the family will try to resolve their issues with counseling.
That leaves two options for Rifqa, who is in foster care: She could eventually reconcile with her parents and go home or stay in foster care until her 18th birthday on Aug. 10.
Rifqa admitted she was unruly when she fled her parents' home last July to live with a Christian pastor and his family in Florida. She said at the time that her father, Mohamed, had threatened to kill her for abandoning the family's Muslim faith, although authorities say they never found credible evidence that that was true.
Mohamed and Aysha Bary and their daughter all agreed today not to continue with the Juvenile Court dependency case. The next hearing, besides a minor hearing regarding a gag order on Monday, is set for her birthday.
Today's decision ends months of legal action in Florida and Ohio.
In a statement read by Rifqa's attorneys, both she and her parents said they loved each other and believe counseling is the best route.
As the man-made global warming fear movement collapses and the climate establishment lay in a Climategate ridden tatters, many are asking what next? (For latest on climate movement's demise go to www.ClimateDepot.com)... read about the next global paroxysm of eco-terror.
As man-made global warming fears enter the ashbin of history, what will environmentalists, UN activists and politicians do to fill the void of a failed eco-scare?
Well, wonder no more....
To His Excellency Ban Ki Moon,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:
I can scarcely believe it but, as I write, it’s snowing again. This is the third big dump in a week and means, of course, all those poor sods who work for the BBC’s news programmes will be putting on their horrible anoraks and making their way to various gritting depots to provide live coverage of how Britain is locked in what the Daily Mail calls “ice chaos”.
This means that tonight, yet again, I shall be watching Robert Hall, in his 1980s skiing clobber, standing up to his testes in a drift, telling me not to go out unless it’s a matter of life and death and that if it is a matter of life and death I should take a shovel, some soup, a blanket and, for reasons that are not clear, a high-visibility jacket.
He will then lavish praise on the snowplough drivers for their round-the-clock public-spiritedness and, in turn, round on their bosses for not seeing the big freeze coming. I will then throw something at the television.
When it snowed in the olden days, everyone had snowball fights and a sense of delicious anarchy descended on the land. Not any more. Now, someone is to blame.
This, of course, is a problem for the BBC’s news programmes because normally when something goes wrong they point the finger at global warming. But for obvious reasons that won’t wash this time around so they’ve decided it’s all the fault of the council gritting departments.
click image"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.
Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else." ~ Theodore Roosevelt
A research institute headed by Dr Pachauri will receive up to £10 million funding over the next five years from the Department for International Development (DfID).But, no matter how deep in AGW guano Pachauri may be, he is really only a small fish, nibbling on the droppings. There are, however, much bigger specimens feeding on the AGW scam:
The grant comes amid question marks over the finances of The Energy and Resources Institute's (TERI) London operation. Last week its UK head called in independent accountants after admitting 'anomalies' – described as 'unintentional' – in its accounts that have prompted demands for the Charity Commission to investigate.
For all that Dr R K Pachauri has his hands deeply embedded in the till, he is actually a small-time chancer, made good. The really big money lies elsewhere, and he is just on the edge of it, picking up the crumbs. This comes home when we return to look at the mysterious European Climate Foundation (ECF) and follow through some of the sponsors – or "funding partners" as they prefer to call them.... keep reading EUR.
One of those was the Ecofin Research Foundation, which we looked yesterday, finding that it had donated just a few pounds short of £1 million to get the ECF off the ground. But this is small beer compared with what other "funding partners" have given.
A much more generous "partner", for instance, has been the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) - an unlikely sponsor on the face of it as this charity's "mission" is "to demonstrably improve the lives of children living in poverty in developing countries by achieving large scale and sustainable impact" (as well as splitting infinitives).
Yet, despite this, in the financial year ending 31 August 2008, the foundation funded the ECF with a £2,527,973 grant "to support advocacy issues on climate change and energy in the European Union aimed at dramatically reducing the region's greenhouse gas emissions and helping the EU play a leadership role in multilateral climate protection.
This latest poll is the now the 14th survey of which I am aware that wholly defies the received wisdom (which is to say the fashionable delusions and popular frenzies) abroad in the rich countries of the world about Afghanistan, and about "what Afghans think." I am aware of no poll - not one - that supports the self-obsessed and fraudulent "anti-war" opinion in Canada on these subjects, or that does not expose bourgeois "left-wing" opinion to be objectively far-right, reactionary, and in opposition to the hopes and aspirations of the Afghan people.
'Troops Out Now!'
Most of the warming in the global data analyses is in higher latitude areas like Russia and Canada and in higher mountainous regions. These areas have seen significant dropout of stations. The warming comes from interpolations from regions further south, at lower elevations and more urbanized.
* Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change had probably tampered with Russian climate data. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory and that the Hadley Center had used data from only 25% of such stations in its reports so over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global temperature calculations. The data of stations located in areas not used in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
* In Canada the number of stations dropped from 600 to 35 in 2009. The percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet) tripled and those at higher elevations above 3000 feet were reduced in half. Canada’s semi-permanent depicted warmth comes from interpolating from more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as a pure average of the available stations shows a COOLING. Just 1 thermometer remains for everything north of latitude 65N – that station is Eureka. Eureka according to Wikipedia has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to the flora and fauna abundant around the Eureka area, more so than anywhere else in the High Arctic. Winters are frigid but summers are slightly warmer than at other places in the Canadian Arctic.
It all makes one wonder how much digging the MSM would do, had say, Palin, won a Nobel Prize and promised to donate the winnings. I'm sure though, if we wait, The Big O will honour his pledge.The other day I pointed out the fact that President Obama has yet to donate the money he was awarded as the Nobel recipient. Obama stated he would donate the $1.4 million prize to charity. It’s been several weeks since he received the money and no one knows what’s happened to it.
The US Code is very clear in Receipt and Disposition of Foreign Gifts and Decorations. The code states:
1) The Congress consents to—
(A) the accepting and retaining by an employee of a gift of minimal value tendered and received as a souvenir or mark of courtesy; and
(B) the accepting by an employee of a gift of more than minimal value when such gift is in the nature of an educational scholarship or medical treatment or when it appears that to refuse the gift would likely cause offense or embarrassment or otherwise adversely affect the foreign relations of the United States, except that—
(i) a tangible gift of more than minimal value is deemed to have been accepted on behalf of the United States and, upon acceptance, shall become the property of the United States; and
(ii) an employee may accept gifts of travel or expenses for travel taking place entirely outside the United States (such as transportation, food, and lodging) of more than minimal value if such acceptance is appropriate, consistent with the interests of the United States, and permitted by the employing agency and any regulations which may be prescribed by the employing agency.
(2) Within 60 days after accepting a tangible gift of more than minimal value (other than a gift described in paragraph (1)(B)(ii)), an employee shall—
(A) deposit the gift for disposal with his or her employing agency; or
(B) subject to the approval of the employing agency, deposit the gift with that agency for official use.
While I have seen many dissections of how this code should be interpreted, as well as its history, there has been silence on it from the White House. And, there have been no further inquiries as to what Obama will do or has done with the prize money. I think it is fair to follow up–even if the 60 days have not passed–because the money, according to US law, should have been immediately turned over.
I guess we’ll just have to wait for Obama’s tax returns in April to see where the money went.
Climate researchers have discovered that NASA researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” KUSI-TV meteorologist, Weather Channel founder, and iconic weatherman John Coleman will present these findings in a one-hour special airing on KUSI-TV on Jan.14 at 9 p.m. A related report will be made available on the Internet at 6 p.m. EST on January 14th at www.kusi.com.... and from the comments at WUWT:
In a new report, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government’s two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Ashville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. Smith and D’Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations. The report is available online at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf.
The report reveals that there were no actual temperatures left in the computer database when NASA/NCDC proclaimed 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” The NCDC deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it changed to a system of global grid points, each of which is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more adjacent weather observation stations. So the NCDC grid map contains only averaged, not real temperatures, giving rise to significant doubt that the result is a valid representation of Earth temperatures.
The cost of setting up all those monitoring stations and then destroying the data that can never be replicated is just unthinkable as a scientist.... and this:
I am deeply alarmed that all the raw data is lost. It is more then theft. It is pure vandalism or the desire to deprive a scientific treasure to others. It is like burning rare papyrus scripts.... hubris, corruption, or just plain stupidity ... words fail.
“Earth type planetary atmospheres, having partial cloud cover and sufficient reservoir of water; maintain an energetically uniquely determined, constant, maximized greenhouse effect that cannot be increased further by emissions. The greenhouse temperature must fluctuate around this theoretical equilibrium constant; [change] is possible only if the incoming available energy changes.”... more details.
Let’s get more basic in dismantling the IPCC’s “theory” of climate. If one takes Earth’s greenhouse gasses away, the planet would be about -18 degrees C (4 Degrees F) on a global average. Add in the greenhouse gasses and their influence back in using the Miskolczi Constant and you get a 33 degree C increase to approximately 15 degrees C (59 Degrees F). This value is constant, and maximized on a global scale. It also matches observed data. Raw data, not manipulated or computer processed data. Using Miskolczi’s law and constant, there is no need for manipulated data, only the real observations, and that is the reason this discovery is so significant. If you double the amount of current CO2 emissions and add that to the equation, and you cannot come up with the 35 to 38 Degree C increase that the IPCC and Al Gore have been preaching about. It is physically and mathematically impossible, and thanks to the Miskolczi Law and Constant, provable and repeatable by scientists the world over.
Dr. Miskolczi first published his work in the Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Services in 2004, Volume 108, No 4. He published further statistical proof in the same Journal in 2007, Volume 111, No. 1. In the five years since he first published his results, not one peer review has come back disproving his theory, or his Constant. To date, not one scientist has come forward to disprove Miskolczi’s theory that the Earth’s climate is at equilibrium, and that Carbon Dioxide cannot be released in amounts great enough to upset that equilibrium.
“During the 61-year period, in correspondence with the rise in CO2 concentration, the global average absolute humidity diminished about 1 per cent. This decrease in absolute humidity has exactly countered all of the warming effect that our CO2 emissions have had since 1948.”
As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.
On Tuesday November 17th I was at my desk, browsing the web and moderating at the same time when the now infamous post came in from user FOIA at 6:25 PST.... read The Rest of the Story.
We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.
We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.
This is a limited time offer, download now:
http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip
Sample:
0926010576.txt * Mann: working towards a common goal
… and so on.
As I noted previously in The CRUtape Letters™, an Alternative Explanation, when I saw this comment I immediately embargoed the comment and placed warning brackets around it for the other moderators. I have been a ‘net user long enough to be very very concerned about downloading files off a Russian server, so the first thing I was concerned about was that this was an attack on us and our users. I downloaded the file and scanned it for viruses and Trojans and it came up clean. Then I stated viewing the contents and once I saw what we had, I started firing off emails to Anthony who was in Europe at the time – such as this one less than 2 hours later:
image: That'd be your green friend bending over for the Global Warming establishment ... by the time it all shakes out, we'll have to start a new tradition ... the exchanging of Preparation H among Greens once a year to commemorate Climategate. Government projects costing respectively £1,436,162 and £30,417 miraculously shrink when MPs are formally told about them, to become a mere £543,816 and £5,800 – "losing" nearly a million pounds in the process.... the details.
Welcome to the second instalment of our look at the bizarre world of climate change politics, where nothing is what it seems and governments indulge in behaviour which, in other circumstances, would look very much like money laundering.
When causes are popular it can be uncomfortable and inconvenient to realize that experts who render politically desired advice have potential conflicts of interest. Perhaps this helps to explain why investigative journalists (with only several exceptions), especially those who cover science, have turned a blind eye to the obvious and egregious conflicts of interest present in the case of Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC. The longer this issue is allowed to percolate in plain view, the worse the outcome will be for the scientific community and perhaps also those whose job it is to hold experts accountable to basic standards of conduct.
[...]
There is no problem with profit, enterprise or investment. There is a serious problem of rendering advice when that advice has a direct influence on money that one's organization receives. Isn't this fairly obvious? Do some people actually believe that the case for action on climate change will be made stronger by looking the other way when climate science advisors have conflicts of interest? Is it possible that climate science will be stronger by holding scientists to well-accepted standards of behavior? If Dr. Pachauri was an advisor on pharmaceuticals, and had parallel interests in drug companies, I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't be getting a free pass.
There is more to discuss. Such as how a venture capital firm associated with Al Gore invested $10 million in a company founded by Dr. Pachauri. TERI was also a primary investor in the company. The company -- the aptly named Glorioil -- is focused on getting even more oil out of seemingly spent wells. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill references enhanced oil recovery as a potential opportunity for offset credits. Would Glorioil's technology qualify? I don't know (and neither does anyone else, as that is all to be determined, and Glorioil's various technologies are mostly out of sight). Given the various shenanigans associated with cap and trade it is not too much of a stretch to think that it could. Is it worth looking into? Seems like it. But I've already see enough.
The sum total of the above signifies that at a minimum climate science needs to set forth and follow basic standards of conflict of interest. Otherwise, the apparent anything-goes approach is giving opponents of action to address accumulating carbon dioxide emissions plenty of legitimate material to work with. Journalists and others who turn a blind eye are their unwitting allies.
Joining the David Viner school of climate prediction, we now have John Hammond from the Met Office confidently telling us that, severe winter freezes, "like the one gripping parts of Europe over the last few weeks," will become increasingly rare.
This is, of course, because of our old friend "climate change", the news brought to us by Reuters, which seems have resisted the temptation to put its report in the entertainment section.
Hammond represents the latest attempt of the warmists at damage limitation – evident in the change of tone since the freezing weather hit us. Gone is the daily diet of catastrophic predictions, to be replaced by diverse offerings on the "weather is not climate" theme, combined with increasingly frantic reiterations that "climate change" is continuing.
Thus do we get the man telling us that the winter so far has been one of the coldest for nearly 30 years in Britain – something that even the Met Office has not been able to hide (but no mention that but it has been just as cold throughout most of the northern hemisphere).
Not just the weather, but democracy, is in suspended animation, locked in a perpetual winter like the fictional Narnia, awaiting the arrival of an Aslan figure to break the spell of the wicked witch.
While a major catastrophe in Haiti dominates the world news (not yet blamed on global warming, but give it time), this country is going through an extraordinary, if low-grade crisis precipitated not by the weather but by our lack of preparedness for it.
Thus we have the unprecedented situation where a minister of the Crown is issuing fiats instructing local authorities to cut their grit usage by half, causing chaos and disruption on the roads and lethal conditions on the pavements.
With a partial thaw yesterday, freezing conditions returned overnight leaving surfaces coated with thin layers of ices, untreated by ministerial fiat – bringing busses to a halt locally and drastically limiting traffic (and economic activity).
[...]
Then, what used to be the basic fare of politics is no more. The agenda is no longer set by our local politicians, whether in town halls or Westminster, but by trans-national groups like the IPCC, accountable to no one but dominating policy. Our politicians no longer govern, but react to the agendas set by others, and then play silly party political games when things go wrong.
Thus it is that while Cameron was prattling about turning the nation "green", Mother Nature was turning it white. Aslan, where art thou?
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.... and now for the Rest of the Story.
There is only one cure, only one way of stopping this rising epidemic of extinctions. The solution requires an extraordinarily immense effort by all of human society but it is achievable.
We need to re-wild the planet. We need to "get ourselves back to the garden" as Joni Mitchell once so poetically framed it.
This is a process that will require a complete overhaul of all of humanities economic, cultural, and life style systems. Within the context of our present anthropocentric mind-set the solution is impossible. It will require a complete transformation of all human realities.
But the alternative is unimaginable. Unless we address the problem, we will be faced with the complete transformation of the planet from one of diversity to ecosystems shattered, weakened, and destroyed by mass extinction and the collapse of bio-diversity.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Henry David Thoreau wrote that "in wildness is the preservation of the world."
We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities.
In other words, people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks placed in human communities. We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.
We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings. And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings. This is a planet of incredible diversity of life-forms; it is not a planet of one species as many of us believe.
We need to stop burning fossil fuels and utilize only wind, water, and solar power with all generation of power coming from individual or small community units like windmills, waterwheels, and solar panels.
Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.
All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand.
Preferably vegan and vegetarian diets can be adopted. We need to eliminate herds of ungulates like cows and sheep and replace them with wild ungulates like bison and caribou and allow those species to fulfill the proper roles in nature. We need to restore the prey predator relationship and bring back the wolf and the bear. We need the large predators and ungulates, not as food, but as custodians of the land that absorbs the carbon dioxide and produces the oxygen. We need to live with them in mutual respect.
We need to remove and destroy all fences and barriers that bar wildlife from moving freely across the land. We need to lower populations of domestic housecats and dogs. Already the world's housecats consume more fish than all the world's seals and we have made the cow into the largest aquatic predator on the planet because more than one half of all fish taken from the sea is converted into meal for animal feed.
We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without cars and so can the rest of us.
We can retain technology but within the context of Henry David Thoreau's simple message to "simplify, simplify, simplify."
We need an economic system that provides all people with educational, medical, security, and support systems without mass production and vast utilization of resources. This will only work within the context of a much smaller global population.
Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child.
