The Intergovernmental Perjury over Climate Catastrophe (ctd)

mitcheltj

Melanie - it's even worse than you describe. The Stern Review relied very heavily on these two now debunked studies for its calculation of the costs of global warming - so it's down the toilet too. See very interesting article on the GWPF website http://www.thegwpf.org/news/461-stern-review-debunked.html. And since the UK Government treats Stern and IPCC 4 as gospel, should we now look forward to a apology, change of course etc from the ghastly Ed Miliband...I'm not holding my breath.

Wily Trout

In Today's Times we have Mark Lynas, an author, saying:
"The sceptics would be more useful though if they were truly sceptical, challenging evidence and examining it rigorously. Instead, most believe any new theory, however implausible, that allows them to ignore the reality of climate change. This is denial, not scepticism. Challenge the “facts” presented by the green lobby; but don’t reject the overall conclusions of the IPCC — the most important joint scientific body ever established — just because they are ideologically inconvenient." So now you know - the IPCC is the most important joint scientific body ever established!

Johnnie Log

The IPPC is not a "scientific" panel.

It is ridiculous that people keep repeating this.

It is, very simply, a government panel.

ie, a panel composed of political appointees (from various world governments).

Each and every panel "member" is simply a political appointee, appointed by the varying mechanisms of different governemnts worldwide.

(The Senate in the Usa, the Prince in Monaco, The Handlesglabattshceer in Germany or whatever the case may be.)

It's astonsihingly absurd that peiople ignore this "elephant in the room" reality and keep on referring to the "IPCC" as some sort of scientific committe.

Sure, some of them are "scientists" (whatever), but it is - very simply - A COLLECTION OF GOVERNMENT APPOINTMENTS.

Simple.

Sergey

"The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres - the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121."
Such things happen when you try to circumvent peer-review process to hype your agenda.

Dr Michael Salt

Melanie, congratulations on having had the stamina, guts and moral integrity to run with this story from the beginning. Mad Mel indeed!

You are a first rate journalist. I applaud you.

burgess

Once these errors make their way into publications like the IPCC Assessment Report and the Stern Review, they are being repeated in the peer-reviewed literature. For example John Beddington writes in the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B (Biological Sciences),

"Also impacting on food production in Asia is the potential loss of dry-season Himalayan glacial meltwater, on which hundreds of millions of people in the Indian sub-continent and China are dependent. These glaciers are expected to lose 80 per cent of their volume by 2035 (Stern 2006; IPCC 2007; Xu et al. 2009)."

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1537/61.full

It’s bad enough that the press acts as an echo-chamber for warmist fantasies, but now the errors are propagating through the scientific literature. The source of this corruption – IPCC. It’s got to go.

HarleyDavidson

Actually it is becoming clearer and clearer that the original source of much of this material used by East Anglia and in turn by the IPCC is the direct fault of NASA/GISS. Hansen is his name.

Recent revelations show Hansen of NASA/GISS/NOAA to be at center of storm.

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada.

“NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler,” the authors say.

When you start messing up the the second largest land mass on earth (Canada) in favor of using Canadian southern border station, the warmest southern weather reporting stations in the country, even a fool can see the absolute criminal intent of those AGW fanatics.

dominic lennon

Yes, all credit to you Mel for painstakingly nailing this issue. You are truly a first class journalist and lady.

Raymond in DC

And here's the next shoe to drop - scientists using selective temperature data. Some are referring to it as the case of the missing thermometers.

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Scientists+using+selective+temperature+data+skeptics/2468634/story.html?utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=co2hog&utm_source=co2hog

Original Tony

Ok, we get it, AGW is a load of bull and yet Obama is still trying to push through cap and trade. When will politicians' see the light and bring in some damage control against their electorate's rebellion? Like scrapping the stupid idea. Then maybe sky TV can cancel its stupid co2 emission reports before the main news.

Am tired of it and tired of paying for it all.

Baron

well done Melanie, and thanks.

What bothers still is that the political elites both here and it the US seem deaf to any of the revelations, as are the deluded followers. Wily Trout’s example of Mark Lynas’s stance on the IPCC isn’t an isolated example. The business goes on as usual, it’s hard to see what will kill the insanity.

Has any journalist tried to interview Lord Stern, why is he so quiet?

Dixon

The facts dont matter. The media and politicians just ignore them. How will this ever change?

We need someone to demo. Thats the thing. Maybe a new generation, kids of AGW warmist nutters will in their teens rebel against the oppressive cult of "Gaia" and start protesting AGAINST the measures that will by then be constricting their lifestyle and choices. Flight rationing, that sort of thing.

Either that, or we need to marshal the data indicating that increased energy costs due to CO2 taxes will be killing off huge numbers of elderly people and mobilise our OAPs to conduct some sit-ins! Pity the grey army has lost its champion in Jack Jones.

We need the equivalent of Greenpeace to stage stunts to draw attention to the lies, deceit and emerging oppression of the CO2 trading oligarchies.

Philo

There has been much comment here on one piece of nonsense from the IPCC about glaciers in the Himalayas. There has been silence about the findings of the World Glacier Monitoring Service. Unfortunately, there is a pattern emerging of disingenuous "cherry-picking", which appears to indicate that the intention is to try to establish not what is most likely to be true but what best supports a prejudice in favour of climate scepticism.

John A. Davison

It is sad that over zealous advocates of AGW managed to discredit themselves. However, that does not mean they are wrong. There is no question that man has profoundly influenced the climate of the earth, especially since the advent of the Industrial Revolution little more than two centuries ago. Little is to be gained by politicizing science.

I agree with Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society that this, the twenty first, will be "Our Final Century," the title of his recent book. While our reasons are not entirely the same, the result will be. I recommend keeping an open mind even though it will probably be an exercise in futility.

"The commedia e finita."
Pagliacci

jadavison.wordpress.com

KDK

It's the UN... what would one expect from this BS organization that exists only via FEAR. It is a world-gov platform that does NOT help the avg citizen--no matter how it appears.

John Blake

Last September, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon --a second-tier South Korean bureaucrat kicked upstairs to succeed the kleptomaniacal Kofi Annan-- proclaimed that absent an immediate ten-trillion dollar [yes, $10-trillion] "contribution" by guess-who Planet Earth would transform into "a baking desert" by New Year's 2010.

Now that COP15 has gone the way of Nineveh and Tyre while Gaia braces for a 70-year Maunder Minimum, Ban Ki-moon remains strangely silent regarding his "critically urgent" forecast barely four months past. This is what normal people now expect-- ideological rantings come and go, but Green Gang extremists bloviate forever.

Abolish first Pachauri's blatantly corrupt and incompetent IPCC, then fire Ban Ki-moon's death-eating Luddite sociopaths and abolish his fatuous, parasitical UN itself. Next up, "ocean acidification"-- but this would at least deprive busily self-serving fringe-group propagandists of their junk-science cover. Gangsters promoting their cap-and-trade Thieves Market would have to seek out new venues.

AP

AGW theory is as sound now as it was before the IPCC's very bad mistake came to light. It is based on empirical evidence of an increased greenhouse effect, consistent with scientific theory, and in good agreement with predictions going back 30 years and more. This increased greenhouse-effect has been measured from space, in terms of decreasing outgoing longwave radiation, and from earth, in terms of increasing downward longwave radiation (that's radiation from the atmosphere, not the sun). The effect of this *observed* energy imbalance has been measured (NOT just modelled) in terms of warming, particularly of the oceans. There are many remaining questions, but it is simply wrong to imply that mistakes in IPCC cast any serious doubt on AGW.

The fact that deniers are reduced to sniping at the IPCC, in the face of such persuasive evidence, confirmed by many independent lines research, simply shows how utterly inane their arguments are.

Is AGW occurring? Almost certainly. Will it pose serious consequences to our grandchildren? Very likely.

Get your heads out of the sand, people! Our grandparents made huge sacrifices so that we could grow up free. Now it's our turn. Stop this 'cheap fuel in our time' idiocy!

Dixon

Philo, cherry-picking is exactly what the tight little group of AGW data-gatherers do when they selectively use readings from only 25% of the warmest weather stations in Canada, or tree-ring data from only ELEVEN out of TWO HUNDRED siberian tree cores.Cherry-picking in AGW propogation extends even to the declared policy of excluding data from December and January from future calculations of average annual temperature. In fact, thats worse than cherry-pocking, its making a complete mockery of the entire scientific process.

Philo

There seems to be some measure of agreement that "cherry-picking" is mpt a good way of getting at the truth.

AP

Dixon, "Philo, cherry-picking is exactly what the tight little group of AGW data-gatherers do when they selectively use readings from only 25% of the warmest weather stations in Canada..."

Whoah. I guess the glaciers and ice-sheets and Arctic sea-ice and oceans and corals and seasons are in on the scam eh?

"Tight little group of AGW data-gatherers," lol! Let's see, we have NASA, the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, the World Glacier Monitoring Service, the earth science departments of universities world wide...

That is one hell of a big 'tight little group.'

RICHARD M ILNE

The IPCC and the CRU should be terminated with immediate effect.

Paul Biggs

Don't forget 'Sterngate':

Disaster losses expert Roger Pielke Jr:

"There is another important story in involving the Muir-Wood et al. 2006 paper that was misrepresented by the IPCC as showing a linkage between increasing temperatures and rising damages from extreme weather events. The Stern Review Report of the UK government also relied on that paper as the sole basis for its projections of increasing damage from extreme events. In fact as much as 40% of the Stern Reivew projections for the global costs of unmitigated climate change derive from its misuse of the Muir-Wood et al. paper."

Also the error/typo in table 5.2 has been quietly corrected from 1.3% to 0.13%, but now Stern's numbers don't add up! The Stern Review - the basis for UK climate policy - turns out to be a crock of brown smelly stuff!

Sergey

AP delivered so huge load of crap that it is impossible to understand what exactly he/she tried to say. But nevertheless, I'll try to translate from his/her illiterate gibberish into scientific terms.
1)"increased greenhouse effect... measured". Increased compared to what? 30 or even 10 years ago there were no infrared orbital spectrometers, so the change of greenhouse effect in time impossible to measure. Accuracy of present time mesurments do not allow to make such comparisons even if we actually knew what was value of greenhouse effect 10 years ago.
2)"in terms of increasing downward longwave radiation (that's radiation from the atmosphere, not the sun)."
Never heard about such measurments. Again, compared to what? This is pure fantasy.
3)"The effect of this *observed* energy imbalance has been measured (NOT just modelled) in terms of warming, particularly of the oceans."
There is NO such thing as energy disbalance: earth emits EXACTLY the same amount of energy that it get from the sun. If this was not so, it would became very hot in a year, not in a 100 years. AGW theory does not claim any disbalance, it claims that for maintaining this balance earth surface shoud be slightly hotter than without greenhouse effect. This is true. Outgoing radiation has temperature -18C at the altitude 13 km, while at the surface it has temperature +13C. Nobody among sceptics denies this, that is, existence of greenhouse effect: all controverses are about its role in climate change and what gases produce it. This impossible either calculate or measure, because all measurments show only combined effect of all gases, of which water vapour is the main suspect.

Tony Allwright

For the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the AGW scam, all in one place, there is no better source than the public lecture given last October by Lord Monckton in Minnesota. You can almost hear Al Gore and the IPCC cringe and squirm.

Click and enjoy!

Straydingo

AP eagerly awaiting your reply to Sergey.

John A. Davison

I am with AP, whoever that is. Who is Sergey and why do so many insist on hiding their identity? What are they afraid of? Anonymity is cowardice. I think they are afraid of being wrong. It is as simple as that!

jadavison.wordpress.com

Jake Baker

I am fascinated by the government's intent to push this policy at all costs.
In Canada, for instance, we see the British high commissioner Anthony Cary having to contract out the communications plan on climate change to a professional PR executive. Bypassing the commission's media office must come at a considerable additional cost but there is neither oversight nor explanation. Why is the government doing this? What is the motive? Why aren't the media looking into this?

ScientistForTruth

Here:

http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/un-ipcc-rotting-from-the-head-down

I demonstrate conclusively that the scientific community knew about these Glaciergate errors by their being exposed in a peer-reviewed journal in 2005, which was essentially the substance of a chapter from a book published in 2004 by an authority on the Himalayas. Syed Hasnain’s pronouncements are shown to be myths, and worse. The paper appeared in Himalayan Journal of Sciences, entitled

“Himalayan misconceptions and distortions: What are the facts? Himalayan Delusions: Who’s kidding who and why — Science at the service of media, politics and the development agencies.”

In light of that, I find it almost certain that Pachauri and a lot of others knew that these were lies years before AR4 was published.

AP

Sergey and Straydingo,

1) For studies of outgoing longwave radiation, see:
Griggs and Harries, 2006, 2004, and 2001; Harries et al, 2001; Chedin et. al 2003; Strow et. al, 2005 and others.

Of particular interest is “Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997,” (Griggs and Harries, 2001):

“Here we analyse the difference between the spectra of the outgoing longwave radiation of the Earth as measured by orbiting spacecraft in 1970 and 1997. We find differences in the spectra that point to long-term changes in atmospheric CH4, CO2 and O3 as well as CFC-11 and CFC-12. Our results provide direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect that is consistent with concerns over radiative forcing of climate.”

2) For studies of downward longwave radiation, see:
Wang and Liang, 2009; Prata, 2008, and others.
Of special interest is “Measurements of the radiative forcing of climate,” Evans and Puckrin, 2006;

“…In comparison, an ensemble summary of our measurements indicates that an energy flux imbalance of 3.5 W/m2 has been created by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases since 1850. This experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming.”

and “Combined surface solar brightening and increasing greenhouse effect support recent intensification of the global land-based hydrological cycle” Wild et al, 2008:

“The surface net radiation (surface radiation balance) is the key driver behind the global hydrological cycle. Here we present a first-order trend estimate for the 15-year period 1986–2000, which suggests that surface net radiation over land has rapidly increased by about 2 Wm−2 per decade, after several decades with no evidence for an increase.”

3) For papers on ocean tempersture, see Von Schuckmann et al, 2009; Church et. al, 2009; Levitus et. al 2009.

klem

The question is: why did it take 3 years before the climate scientists spoke up? They waited until Copenhagen was a flop before they had the backbone to speak. For 3 years they reamined silent. Why? Now that Copenhagen is over, they must have felt it was safe to speak up. They used to say that the science is settled, I think they meant the science is silenced.

Dixon

So, AP, youre saying its actually a BIG group who are cherryu picking! How exactly does that help your position? Doh!

Dixon

AP, your reply to Sergey et al contains some interesting specifics, BUT, these are evidence for the OCCURRENCE of particular phenomena and not their CAUSATION. The debate about AGW is NOT about whether climate change is occurring, but its causes. The item about laboratory demonstration of the legitimacy of the contended dynamics at issue is not evidence in itself for these BEING the culpable dynamics in reality.

In other words, there is more than one way to skin a vcaty and demonstrating any one of them does not demonstrate that it is the one responsible in a given instance.

Olaf

Who will take it seriously?

Every political party, the BBC, ITV, Sky, Unions etc etc.

In fact anyone who stands to benefit from the tax rises or oppressive legislation that can come from extensive environmental willy waving.

Philo

Dixon,
So you're implying it's bad for a large group to cherry pick but not for a small group? (You still haven't clarified for me why it is okay to trumpet a piece of nonsense on glaciers by the IPCC while ignoring the World Glacier Monitoring Service.)

Sergey

AP, it seems you believe that a single publication in peer-reviewed journal proves something. No, it does not. The result must be reproduced and scrutinized by specialists, and only than it became a scientific fact. In case of the articles you cited, they failed to pass this exam. I am not a specialist in spectroscopy, and this actually is a very convoluted discipline, but my search for support of these claims produced nothing. See http://landshape.org/enm/interpretation-bias/

AP

Sergey, "AP, it seems you believe that a single publication in peer-reviewed journal proves something. No, it does not. The result must be reproduced and scrutinized by specialists, and only than it became a scientific fact. In case of the articles you cited, they failed to pass this exam. I am not a specialist in spectroscopy, and this actually is a very convoluted discipline, but my search for support of these claims produced nothing."

Sergey, I gave you MULTIPLE citations, with authors and dates. Are you not able to see my post of Jan 27th, 6:59 PM?

AP

Dixon: "So, AP, youre saying its actually a BIG group who are cherryu picking! How exactly does that help your position? Doh!"

Of course not. I'm saying any cherry-picking would be picked up and exposed very quickly, since it would produce data which did not agree with the work of other groups.

John A. Davison

Sergey, whoever that is, is an expert on all matters. If you don't believe me, just ask Sergey.

There is no question that man has severely altered the physiology of the earth largely through the Industrial Revolution beginning two centuries ago. Those who ignore the overwhelming evidence are irresponsible and dangerous.