Climate Change

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DECEMBER 7, 2009

Business Fumes Over Carbon Dioxide Rule

 

By JEFFREY BALL and CHARLES FORELLE

 

Officials gather in Copenhagen this week for an international climate summit, but business leaders are focusing even more on Washington, where the Obama administration is expected as early as Monday to formally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.

 

An "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency could pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions -- even if Congress doesn't pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected.

 

Many business groups are opposed to EPA efforts to curb a gas as ubiquitous as carbon dioxide.

 

An EPA endangerment finding "could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery," he said, noting that the group supports federal legislation.

 

EPA action won't do much to combat climate change, and "is certain to come at a huge cost to the economy," said the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group that stands as a proxy for U.S. industry.

 

Dan Riedinger, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, a power-industry trade group, said the EPA would be less likely than Congress to come up with an "economywide approach" to regulating emissions. The power industry prefers such an approach because it would spread the burden of emission cuts to other industries as well.

 

Electricity generation, transportation and industry represent the three largest sources of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.

 

An EPA spokeswoman declined to comment Sunday on when the agency might finalize its proposed endangerment finding. Congressional Republicans have called on the EPA to withdraw it, saying recently disclosed emails written by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit of the U.K.'s University of East Anglia and their peers call into question the scientific rationale for regulation.

 

The spokeswoman said that the EPA is confident the basis for its decision will be "very strong," and that when it is published, "we invite the public to review the extensive scientific analysis informing" the decision.

 

EPA action would give President Barack Obama something to show leaders from other nations when he attends the Copenhagen conference on Dec. 18 and tries to persuade them that the U.S. is serious about cutting its contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions.

 

The vast majority of increased greenhouse-gas emissions is expected to come from developing countries such as China and India, not from rich countries like the U.S. But developing countries have made it clear that their willingness to reduce growth in emissions will depend on what rich countries do first. That puts a geopolitical spotlight on the U.S.

 

At the heart of the fight over whether U.S. emission constraints should come from the EPA or Congress is a high-stakes issue: which industries will have to foot the bill for a climate cleanup. A similar theme will play out in Copenhagen as rich countries wrangle over how much they should have to pay to help the developing world shift to cleaner technologies.

 

"There is no agreement without money," says Rosário Bento Pais, a top climate negotiator for the European Commission, the European Union's executive arm. "That is clear."

 

An endangerment finding would allow the EPA to use the federal Clean Air Act to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, which are produced whenever fossil fuel is burned. Under that law, the EPA could require emitters of as little as 250 tons of carbon dioxide per year to install new technology to curb their emissions starting as soon as 2012.

 

The EPA has said it will only require permits from big emitters -- facilities that put out 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. But that effort to tailor the regulations to avoid slamming small businesses with new costs is expected to be challenged in court.

 

Legislators are aware that polls show the public appetite for action that would raise energy prices to protect the environment has fallen precipitously amid the recession.

 

Congressional legislation also faces plenty of U.S. industry opposition. Under the legislation, which has been passed by the House but is now stuck in the Senate, the federal government would set a cap on the amount of greenhouse gas the economy could emit every year. The government would distribute a set number of emission permits to various industries. Companies that wanted to be able to emit more than their quota could buy extra permits from those that had figured out how to emit less.

 

Proponents of the cap-and-trade approach say emission-permit trading will encourage industries to find the least-expensive ways to curb greenhouse-gas output. But opponents say it will saddle key industries with high costs not borne by rivals in China or India, and potentially cost the U.S. jobs.

 

The oil industry has warned that climate legislation could force some U.S. refineries to shut down, because importing gasoline from countries without emission caps could be cheaper than making the gasoline on domestic soil.

 

Legislators "have decided that coal and electric users don't bear the burden" of emissions constraints for many years, said John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group. "Early in the program, oil users are the ones who are hammered."

 

The Iron and Steel Institute, which represents more than 75% of steel made in the U.S., said that successful climate policy -- whether through the EPA or Congress -- must "reduce emissions without altering the competitiveness of American steelmakers."

 

The issue of how curbing emissions would affect jobs in developed countries is likely to erupt in Copenhagen in the battle over how much rich countries should pony up for cleaner technologies in developing nations.

 

Estimates of the cost for reducing emissions in developing countries vary widely, but the European Commission said in September that the bill could reach $150 billion annually by 2020. Leaders of the EU's 27 nations have said only that the EU would pay its "fair share" of the total, without committing to an amount.

 

Yet EU industry lobbies are weighing in against that proposal. It is "not realistic," said Axel Eggert, spokesman for Eurofer, the trade group for European steelmakers. Steelmakers want to "make sure that the financing is not a subsidy for our competitors," he said.

 

-- Ian Talley and Stephen Power contributed to this article.

 

Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com and Charles Forelle at charles.forelle@wsj.com

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Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

 

Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

 

By Andrew Gilligan

Published: 10:55PM GMT 05 Dec 2009

Comments 202 | Comment on this article

 

 

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

 

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

 

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

 

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

 

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

 

At the takeaway pizza end of the spectrum, Copenhagen's clean pavements are starting to fill with slightly less well-scrubbed protesters from all over Europe. In the city's famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week "Climate Bottom Meeting," complete with a "storytelling yurt" and a "funeral of the day" for various corrupt, "heatist" concepts such as "economic growth".

 

The Danish government is cunningly spending a million kroner (£120,000) to give the protesters KlimaForum, a "parallel conference" in the magnificent DGI-byen sports centre. The hope, officials admit, is that they will work off their youthful energies on the climbing wall, state-of-the-art swimming pools and bowling alley, Just in case, however, Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.

 

And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term "carbon dating" just took on an entirely new meaning.

 

At least the sex will be C02-neutral. According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of "carbon dioxide equivalent", equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from "saving the world," the world's leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

 

Instead of swift and modest reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders at Copenhagen will even be alive, let alone still in office.

 

Even if they had agreed anything binding, past experience suggests that the participants would not, in fact, feel bound by it. Most countries – Britain excepted – are on course to break the modest pledges they made at the last major climate summit, in Kyoto.

And as the delegates meet, they do so under a shadow. For the first time, not just the methods but the entire purpose of the climate change agenda is being questioned. Leaked emails showing key scientists conspiring to fix data that undermined their case have boosted the sceptic lobby. Australia has voted down climate change laws. Last week's unusually strident attack by the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, on climate change "saboteurs" reflected real fear in government that momentum is slipping away from the cause.

In Copenhagen there was a humbler note among some delegates. "If we fail, one reason could be our overconfidence," said Simron Jit Singh, of the Institute of Social Ecology. "Because we are here, talking in a group of people who probably agree with each other, we can be blinded to the challenges of the other side. We feel that we are the good guys, the selfless saviours, and they are the bad guys."

 

As Mr Singh suggests, the interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right. Some campaigners' apocalyptic predictions and religious righteousness – funeral ceremonies for economic growth and the like – can be alienating, and may help explain why the wider public does not seem to share the urgency felt by those in Copenhagen this week.

 

In a rather perceptive recent comment, Mr Miliband said it was vital to give people a positive vision of a low-carbon future. "If Martin Luther King had come along and said 'I have a nightmare,' people would not have followed him," he said.

Over the next two weeks, that positive vision may come not from the overheated rhetoric in the conference centre, but from Copenhagen itself. Limos apart, it is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilised pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism so beloved of British greens.

 

And inside the hall, not everything is looking bad. Even the sudden rush for limos may be a good sign. It means that more top people are coming, which means they scent something could be going right here.

The US, which rejected Kyoto, is on board now, albeit too tentatively for most delegates. President Obama's decision to stay later in Copenhagen may signal some sort of agreement between America and China: a necessity for any real global action, and something that could be presented as a "victory" for the talks.

 

The hot air this week will be massive, the whole proceedings eminently mockable, but it would be far too early to write off this conference as a failure.

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Saudi Arabia calls for 'climategate' investigation

 

 

By LISA LERER | 12/7/09 11:14 AM EST

 

 

COPENHAGEN — Saudi Arabia called for an independent investigation into “climategate” Monday, warning that the scandal over stolen e-mails threatened to undermine the global-warming negotiations beginning here.

 

“We believe this scandal — or what has been referred to as the ‘climategate’ scandal — we think this is definitely going to affect the nature of what could be trusted in our deliberations,” the Saudi Arabian negotiator said.

 

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has promised to investigate the scandals, although its chairman said Monday that it provided no basis for questioning the science behind global warming.

 

But the Saudi negotiator told delegates that “the level of confidence is certainty shaken.”

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Webb warns Obama on taking action in Copenhagen

 

By Kerry Picket on Dec. 2, 2009 into Water CoolerSubscribe

 

 

**UPDATE December 7, 2009

 

When asked about the recent Environment Protection Agency's endangerment finding of CO2, Senator Webb told the Washington Times and others today on Capitol Hill, "I think we need to go back and look at the Supreme Court decision in which the EPA asserts that it has that authority, because it is a derived power based on legislation, and it is a limited power. I don't think the administration can agree to anything, for instance, in Copenhagen on an endagerment finding that was based on one piece legislation in a Supreme Court decision."

 

----------------------------------

 

December 2, 2009

 

Looks like a fellow Democrat has concern with the president's handling of the the cap and trade issue upon Mr. Obama's trip to Copenhagen. Senator Jim Webb (D - Va.) wrote to the administration last week warning President Obama that the White House does not have unilateral power to commit the United States to any standards agreed upon at the upcoming climate change conference in Denmark.:

 

 

Dear Mr. President:

 

I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the Administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed upon at the upcoming United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties 15 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The phrase “politically binding” has been used.

 

Although details have not been made available, recent statements by Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern indicate that negotiators may be intending to commit the United States to a nationwide emission reduction program. As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country.

 

I would very much appreciate having this matter clarified in advance of the Copenhagen meetings.

 

Sincerely,

 

Jim Webb

United States Senator

 

Senator Webb's office told the Washington Times Water Cooler the president has not replied back in writing, and the decision to write the president a letter on this issue comes from Mr. Webb's concern about issues of constitutional checks and balances.

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Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak

Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol

 

 

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.

 

The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

 

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.

 

The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.

 

The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks".

 

A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:

 

• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;

 

• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable";

 

• Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance;

 

• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.

 

Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.

 

"It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process," said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.

 

Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: "This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed."

 

Hill continued: "It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks."

 

The text was intended by Denmark and rich countries to be a working framework, which would be adapted by countries over the next week. It is particularly inflammatory because it sidelines the UN negotiating process and suggests that rich countries are desperate for world leaders to have a text to work from when they arrive next week.

 

Few numbers or figures are included in the text because these would be filled in later by world leaders. However, it seeks to hold temperature rises to 2C and mentions the sum of $10bn a year to help poor countries adapt to climate change from 2012-15.

Edited December 8, 2009 by MC

[MC 1]

Such blatant lies from Al Gore. Not surprising, but disgusting.

 

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Climategate: Gore falsifies the record

 

Andrew Bolt

Wednesday, December 09, 2009 at 06:54pm

 

 

Al Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle:

 

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?

 

A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.

 

And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue:

 

Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.

 

A: I think it’s been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you’re referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn’t be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.

 

In fact, thrice denied:

 

These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.

 

In fact, as Watts Up With That shows, one Climategate email was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on November 12 - just a month ago. The emails which have Tom Wigley seeming (to me) to choke on the deceit are all from this year. Phil Jones’ infamous email urging other Climategate scientists to delete emails is from last year.

 

How closely did Gore read these emails? Did he actually read any at all? Was he lying or just terribly mistaken? What else has he got wrong?

 

(Thanks to readers Sinclair and Peter.)

 

UPDATE

 

Reader Barry:

 

Actually the e-mail archives are named by Unix timestamp, ranging from Thu, 07 Mar 1996 14:41:07 GMT through to Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:17:44 GMT. This is a strong indicator they are extracted from an enterprise archive, probably by the FOIA Compliance Officer and not hacked from individual’s workstations.

[esherk 0]

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/...ll/462545a.html

 

Climatologists under pressure

Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.

 

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

 

This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country's much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

 

First, Earth's cryosphere is changing as one would expect in a warming climate. These changes include glacier retreat, thinning and areal reduction of Arctic sea ice, reductions in permafrost and accelerated loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Second, the global sea level is rising. The rise is caused in part by water pouring in from melting glaciers and ice sheets, but also by thermal expansion as the oceans warm. Third, decades of biological data on blooming dates and the like suggest that spring is arriving earlier each year.

 

Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world's voracious appetite for carbon is essential (see pages 568 and 570).

 

Mail trail

A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003 and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003) and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.

 

If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden.

 

The theft highlights the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers.

The e-mail theft also highlights how difficult it can be for climate researchers to follow the canons of scientific openness, which require them to make public the data on which they base their conclusions. This is best done via open online archives, such as the ones maintained by the IPCC (http://www.ipcc-data.org) and the US National Climatic Data Center (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html).

 

Tricky business

But for much crucial information the reality is very different. Researchers are barred from publicly releasing meteorological data from many countries owing to contractual restrictions. Moreover, in countries such as Germany, France and the United Kingdom, the national meteorological services will provide data sets only when researchers specifically request them, and only after a significant delay. The lack of standard formats can also make it hard to compare and integrate data from different sources. Every aspect of this situation needs to change: if the current episode does not spur meteorological services to improve researchers' ease of access, governments should force them to do so.

 

The stolen e-mails have prompted queries about whether Nature will investigate some of the researchers' own papers. One e-mail talked of displaying the data using a 'trick' — slang for a clever (and legitimate) technique, but a word that denialists have used to accuse the researchers of fabricating their results. It is Nature's policy to investigate such matters if there are substantive reasons for concern, but nothing we have seen so far in the e-mails qualifies.

 

The UEA responded too slowly to the eruption of coverage in the media, but deserves credit for now being publicly supportive of the integrity of its scientists while also holding an independent investigation of its researchers' compliance with Britain's freedom of information requirements (see http://go.nature.com/zRBXRP).

 

In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition. After all, the pressures the UEA e-mailers experienced may be nothing compared with what will emerge as the United States debates a climate bill next year, and denialists use every means at their disposal to undermine trust in scientists and science.

Edited December 9, 2009 by esherk

[MC 1]

You're serious?

 

I see the scientific community back peddling, but the emails are damning. Plus, they weren't stolen. They were posted by a whistle-blower.

 

The emails show that the scientists became alarmed when their data didn't show that the earth was indeed warming. They admit to completely destroying their raw data (what scientist does that?) and then they decide how to switch the numbers to give the results they want! Did you know that some of the sensors across the country needed to be replaced because buildings and parking lots had been built around them (generating more heat) yet they refused to do so? The sensors aren't supposed to be on top of asphalt! There's a huge scandal around just the sensors, and that's not even included in the email stuff. I'm laughing so hard because they have been caught. HERE ARE THE EMAILS. Please tell me what Al Gore is talking about when he says that these were "ten years ago."

 

This is HUGE and of course there are going to be people trying to cover their asses. You have to understand that there's a lot of money at stake here and people will do everything they can to discredit this "find", ignore it, or destroy the messenger.

 

I urge you to look into this further, but if you don't want to... don't worry. Now that this raw data (the emails) is out there, these people will fry. Justice takes longer to come to fruition.

[esherk 0]

You're serious?

 

I see the scientific community back peddling, but the emails are damning. Plus, they weren't stolen. They were posted by a whistle-blower.

 

The emails show that the scientists became alarmed when their data didn't show that the earth was indeed warming. They admit to completely destroying their raw data (what scientist does that?) and then they decide how to switch the numbers to give the results they want! Did you know that some of the sensors across the country needed to be replaced because buildings and parking lots had been built around them (generating more heat) yet they refused to do so? The sensors aren't supposed to be on top of asphalt! There's a huge scandal around just the sensors, and that's not even included in the email stuff. I'm laughing so hard because they have been caught. HERE ARE THE EMAILS. Please tell me what Al Gore is talking about when he says that these were "ten years ago."

 

This is HUGE and of course there are going to be people trying to cover their asses. You have to understand that there's a lot of money at stake here and people will do everything they can to discredit this "find", ignore it, or destroy the messenger.

 

I urge you to look into this further, but if you don't want to... don't worry. Now that this raw data (the emails) is out there, these people will fry. Justice takes longer to come to fruition.

Look, I do not agree with the cap and trade, etc, etc. However, I cannot believe that we can overpopulate, drill, dump, and pollute by emitting who knows what into our atmosphere without consequences and drain our resources.

[Hihomumio 168]

A whistleblower? Really? That's fabulous if true because it seems that there are very few people in places of power out there not looking to exploit the hell out of everyone that they can to make a buck. Scaring the crap out of everyone with all this climategate stuff was a stroke of genius for Al Gore--too bad (boooohoooooo) it's appearing to backfire now.

 

I'm of the opinion that we don't know anywhere near enough about the natural forces of this planet to be trying to take control over it.

[MC 1]

A whistleblower? Really? That's fabulous if true because it seems that there are very few people in places of power out there not looking to exploit the hell out of everyone that they can to make a buck. Scaring the crap out of everyone with all this climategate stuff was a stroke of genius for Al Gore--too bad (boooohoooooo) it's appearing to backfire now.

 

I'm of the opinion that we don't know anywhere near enough about the natural forces of this planet to be trying to take control over it.

We agree?

 

Yes, a whistleblower: "Actually the e-mail archives are named by Unix timestamp, ranging from Thu, 07 Mar 1996 14:41:07 GMT through to Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:17:44 GMT. This is a strong indicator they are extracted from an enterprise archive, probably by the FOIA Compliance Officer and not hacked from individual’s workstations."

 

Personally, I think it's pretty arrogant to think that we mere mortals can control anything to do with this planet we live on. Classifying CO2 as a toxin? We breathe it out. It's a plant food! I could go on and on... but for now I'll just say that I am trusting that the folks who are exposing this are taking their time to really nail those responsible and once that happens, even Al Gore won't be able to hide from the truth. Interestingly, I think this Climategate could be worse for the liberals who believe in Al Gore than any of the spending and deficits and war going on right now. It's shocking that they think they can lie about it and cover it up and that we are stupid enough to just go along with them.

 

The real tragedy here is that they actually destroyed the raw data. NASA has been calibrating their collection instrumentation based on the FAKED numbers! And now the raw data is gone.

[esherk 0]

I think that it is arrogant for people to assume we can do whatever we want to the earth through pollution, overpopulation, etc,etc. Should we deregulate and not worry about factory emissions (for example)? Have you seen the effects of pollution on places like China, India and Bangledash? Humans caused that, and I am worried we will soon allow companies to do that here.

[MC 1]

I think that it is arrogant for people to assume we can do whatever we want to the earth through pollution, overpopulation, etc,etc. Should we deregulate and not worry about factory emissions (for example)? Have you seen the effects of pollution on places like China, India and Bangledash? Humans caused that, and I am worried we will soon allow companies to do that here.

Of course not. As I said earlier, I'm all for being responsible. HOWEVER this notion that our CO2 emissions are warming the planet and we're in peril is allowing governments to rationalize controlling all sorts of things for us (because we can't be responsible on our own). Since CO2 emissions DO NOT HARM OR WARM THE PLANET...... all of this "climate change" bull is just that. Bull.

 

I'm all for clean air and water. But CO2 isn't dirty. It's plant food. We breathe it out.

[Hihomumio 168]

I think that it is arrogant for people to assume we can do whatever we want to the earth through pollution, overpopulation, etc,etc. Should we deregulate and not worry about factory emissions (for example)? Have you seen the effects of pollution on places like China, India and Bangledash? Humans caused that, and I am worried we will soon allow companies to do that here.

I don't see the pollution issue as the same as climate change. Climate change (until the shit hit the fan) has been a stroke of genius for those looking to take further advantage of people like me and you and those less fortunate...another way to take more of your money that you work so hard for. Creating an entirely new industry because other stuff has been beaten to death and they can't milk much else from what's already established. Using junk science no less, which now makes me look with a more skeptical eye at info coming from that branch now too.

 

I'll tell ya, my faith in humanity has taken a huge hit over the last 10 years or so. There are alot of really bad people out there.

[TubaGirl 7]

Yes, a whistleblower: "Actually the e-mail archives are named by Unix timestamp, ranging from Thu, 07 Mar 1996 14:41:07 GMT through to Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:17:44 GMT. This is a strong indicator they are extracted from an enterprise archive, probably by the FOIA Compliance Officer and not hacked from individual’s workstations."

13 year old email would be archived on a backup tape and stored somewhere. A hacker wouldn't be able to get to it because someone has to physically put it into the tape drive. Someone on the inside wanted those emails to get out.....

 

 

 

 

 

(edited because I can't spell)

Edited December 11, 2009 by TubaGirl

[Hihomumio 168]

It's long, but worth reading-quite the article. Here's the source.

 

 

Beyond debate?

 

10 December 2009

 

 

 

The Copenhagen summit is in full force, and so too is the idea that man-made global warming is incontrovertible. But Martin Cohen argues that the consensus is less a triumph of science and rationality than of PR and fear-mongering

 

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them (see box page 36)? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously?

 

Whether rational or not, global warming theory has become a political orthodoxy. So entrenched is it that those showing any resistance to it are described as "heretics" or even likened to "Holocaust deniers".

 

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University and columnist for The New York Times, has said: "Is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn't it politics as usual? Yes, it is - and that's why it's unforgivable ... the deniers are choosing, wilfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it's in their political interest to pretend that there's nothing to worry about. If that's not betrayal, I don't know what is."

 

Another columnist, this time for The Boston Globe, has written: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, although one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

 

Such pronouncements from these commentators and from other people highly placed in government, international organisations, the press, academia and science make the debate seem closed and the conclusion beyond dispute. Yet the plain fact is that there is something deeply unscientific about the theory of global warming. Despite this, it has gained such widespread, uncritical acceptance that any scientist expressing a doubt often finds his or her actions tarred with accusations of the rankest political and personal motivations.

 

How this situation came about says much about how science is co-opted to sway public opinion. The case is built, deliberately or not, on misleading images and interpretations that have been perpetuated by parties with a vested interest. It morphs into a tool for governments to intimidate their populations into passive acceptance of very real changes: from the tiny, such as accepting miserable fluorescent light instead of the incandescent light we've been used to; to the major, like welcoming nuclear power plants and obliging rainforest tribes to make way for biofuel plantations.

 

Indeed, much of what is presented as hard scientific evidence for the theory of global warming is false. "Second-rate myth" may be a better term, as the philosopher Paul Feyerabend called science in his 1975 polemic, Against Method.

 

"This myth is a complex explanatory system that contains numerous auxiliary hypotheses designed to cover special cases, as it easily achieves a high degree of confirmation on the basis of observation," Feyerabend writes. "It has been taught for a long time; its content is enforced by fear, prejudice and ignorance, as well as by a jealous and cruel priesthood. Its ideas penetrate the most common idiom, infect all modes of thinking and many decisions which mean a great deal in human life ... ".

 

But call it what you will, as long as you don't think that by calling it "science" it becomes irrefutable. Because that it ain't.

 

Consider the presentation in one of the most popular works arguing the case for global warming and the need for action. In Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, the scientists are reduced to a walk-on part: they are, in essence, an audience invited to applaud the decisions of politicians. The former Vice-President unveils as the "scientific" highlight of his presentation a graph offering a clear correlation between CO2 and temperature, as discovered in core samples of polar ice. He goes on to state that as levels of carbon dioxide rise, the Earth's temperature increases because the atmosphere traps more heat from the Sun.

 

Driving his point home, Gore extends the lines on the graph to terrifying, if distorted, levels (see box, opposite).

 

To show that these effects are already being felt, the film presents striking images of "global warming", from forlorn boats in dried-up seas to that haunting image at the end of the film of polar bears clinging desperately to a shrinking block of ice (see box, above).

 

The film - like the theory it is advancing - is not defensible in terms either of factual accuracy or of argumentative logic.

 

Fine, you may say, but even if the case for global warming really boils down to a few media tricks, how come everyone believes in it? Yet, as Solomon Asch, a social psychologist, discovered in the 1950s via a series of experiments, people are quite prepared to change their minds on even quite straightforward factual matters in order to "go along with the crowd".

 

You can't blame folk for doing that. Especially when to do otherwise would mean taking a close look at the scientific issues in climate-change theory. Much of the argument for global warming is based on modelling. The mathematics is sophisticated and certainly intimidating to everyone but experts.

 

As some of the top climate-change modellers have remarked: "Modellers have an inbuilt bias towards forced climate change because the causes and effect are clear." (That comes from the paper "General circulation modelling of Holocene climate variability", by Gavin Schmidt, Drew Shindell, Ron Miller, Michael Mann and David Rind, published in Quaternary Science Review in 2004.)

 

And there is an impressive degree of consensus in their predictions. Take the modelling of one of the key components of "greenhouse theory", the degree to which warming of the oceans leads to more water vapour in the atmosphere "trapping" the Sun's heat. Advocates of the theory rely on this to show how a little bit of warming owing to CO2 can create very significant changes in the way the climate system operates.

 

A paper by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, called "On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data", published in July 2009 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the modellers' case for CO2-induced global warming. It offered 12 graphs, 11 of them based on the most sophisticated climate models, all but one of which showed that as the temperature of the surface of the seas increases slightly, the amount of heat then trapped in the atmosphere by water vapour increases - a key element in accelerating the "greenhouse effect". We should be worried.

 

Yet there was that odd graph out, the 12th one. As Lubo? Motl, a sceptical physicist, joked, could it be that this was a tainted model - with its assumptions "tweaked" to fit prejudices by climate-change "deniers" funded by the oil industry? But no - the graph that contradicted all the others was the one based not on a model but on satellite measurements. It showed the Earth's oceans dampening the heating effect.

 

So what sort of factors mess up the models? Things like changes in ocean currents, changes in the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, changes in cloud cover - just about everything that determines climate, really. Alas, there is as yet no way to calculate these. And so, the simple fact is, in our climate modellers' own words: "At present, no climate models have included the full range of effects."

 

Policymakers seem not to be aware of what the modellers know: that the results of their climate simulations are "likely to remain speculative for some time to come" and that people should be "extremely wary of extrapolating results to longer periods".

 

This demonstrates that the present climate-change models aren't just useless - by offering spurious precision, they are worse than useless.

 

How, then, does a theory that is incomplete and missing essential data become orthodoxy?

 

The reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - whose landmark 2001 report paved the way to ratification of the Kyoto Protocol - are not based on any new or original research, but merely reflect the efforts of participants, including government representatives, to overcome uncertainties in knowledge. Policymakers then use the IPCC reports, nuanced findings or not, to demand that the public change their ways. And most of the public are inclined to fall in line.

 

Social scientists call it "cascade theory": the idea is that information cascades down the side of an "informational pyramid", like a waterfall. It is easier for people, if they do not have either the ability or the interest to find out for themselves, to adopt the views of others. This is, without doubt, a useful social instinct. As it has been put, cascade theory reconciles "herd behaviour" with rational choice, because it is often rational for individuals to rely on information passed on to them by others.

 

Unfortunately, it is less rational to follow wrong information, and that is what can often happen. We find people cascading uselessly - like so many wildebeest fleeing a non-existent lion - in so many everyday ways. A lot of economic activity and business behaviour, including management fads, the adoption of new technologies and innovations, not to mention the vexed issues of health and safety regulation, reflect exactly this tendency of the herd to follow poor information.

 

Some people say that what is needed in response is to encourage a range of views to be heard, even when they are annoying to the "majority" - for instance, one should allow people to contest global warming. Or let teachers in schools and universities decide what they are going to teach. But more people say, on the contrary, that what is needed is stricter control of information to stop "wrong views" being spread. It is that view that is cascading down the pyramid now.

 

One of the best examples of cascade theory is that of the entirely false consensus that built up in the 1970s around the danger of "fatty foods". In fact, this consensus still exists, even though it has never had any scientific basis.

 

The theory can be traced back to a single researcher, Ancel Keys, who published a paper saying that Americans were suffering from "an epidemic" of heart disease because their diet was more fatty than their bodies were used to after thousands of years of evolution.

 

In 1953, Keys added additional evidence from a comparative study of the US, Japan and four other countries. Country by country, this showed that a high-fat diet coincided with high rates of heart disease.

 

Unfortunately for this theory, it turned out that prehistoric "traditional diets" were not especially low-fat after all - indeed, even the hunter-gatherers of yore, if they relied on eating their prey, would have had more fat in their diet than most people do today. As Science magazine pointed out, in the most relevant period of 100 years before the supposed "epidemic" of heart disease, Americans were actually consuming large amounts of fatty meat, so the epidemic followed a reduction in the amount of dietary fat Americans consumed - not an increase.

 

Keys' country-by-country comparison had also been skewed, with countries that did not fit the theory (such as France and Italy with their oily, fatty cuisines) being excluded. The American Heart Association (AHA), considered to be the voice of experts, issued a report in 1957 stating plainly that the fats-cause-heart-disease claims did not "stand up to critical examination". The case for there being any such epidemic was dubious, too - the obvious cause of higher rates of heart disease was that people were living longer, long enough to develop heart disease. But it was too late: the cascade had started.

 

Three years later, the AHA issued a new statement, reversing its view. It had no new evidence but it did have some new members writing the report, in the form of Keys himself and one of his friends. The new report made the cover of Time magazine and was picked up by non-specialists at the US Department of Agriculture, who then asked a supporter of the theory to draw up "health guidelines" for them. Soon, scarcely a doctor could be found prepared to speak out against such an overwhelming "consensus", even if a few specialised researchers still protested. And all this was good enough for the highest medical officer in the US, the Surgeon General, in 1988 to issue a doom-laden warning about fat in foods, and claiming that ice-cream was a health menace on a par with tobacco smoking.

 

It was a pretty silly theory, and certainly not one based on good evidence. In fact, in recent years, in large-scale studies in which comparable groups have been put on controlled diets (low fat and high fat) a correlation has at last been found. It turns out that the low-fat diet seems to be unhealthy. But no one is quite sure why.

 

The fact is, science has always been about PR, and as this example shows, it is easy for opinion leaders and experts to be misled. These days, it is not merely fellow researchers but professional marketeers vying to press their agenda and that of their clients (see box, page 34).

 

At the Kyoto summit in 1997, Fenton Communications, a New York PR firm, was working with "green NGOs and leaders", including Gore and the IPCC, to advise on how to "mainstream the climate threat" and to "harness the public 'tipping point'" on the issue and inspire action, as its website today boasts. And indeed, the public have been well and truly tipped.

 

The IPCC reports, which are dull but widely used by governments as the basis for their policy discussions, have become steadily more dramatic. (Not for nothing does the head of the IPCC, R.K. Pachauri, have his own dedicated marketing adviser.) Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis says that "numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed (including) changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones".

 

Yet none of this is science. It certainly offends against the principle that Karl Popper calls "falsification" - in the case of climate change, there is no possibility of falsification. If you listen to proponents of climate-change theory, there is apparently nothing that counts as evidence against it. Increased rainfall in the northern hemisphere is evidence of climate change, but so is decreased rainfall in the southern hemisphere. Melting of ice in the Arctic is evidence of global warming, but cooling of the Antarctic is not evidence against, but attributed to "other effects".

 

The fact is, the IPCC report's statement quoted above is speculation and fear-mongering. So how did such language get in the report? Alas, it seems that the social and scientific reality is as Feyerabend describes, and that the language of fear has now "penetrated the most common idiom and infected all modes of thinking".

 

I have seen the effects of this up close, witnessing how truth can go out of the window in the rush to save the planet. I was co-ordinator of a small Yorkshire Friends of the Earth group, charged with protecting, among other things, the local river, the Wharfe, from a water company. In 1995, Yorkshire experienced just slightly less rain than normal, and the local water company found itself faced with the prospect of empty reservoirs. As standpipes went up in the cities of Leeds and Bradford, and trucks brought water in from afar, it desperately turned to the local rivers to try to make up the shortfall. The national press featured large photos of dried-up reservoir beds, waxed lyrical about how British society would soon break down in water wars, and urged its readers to sympathise with Yorkshire Water.

 

But our local group was not sympathetic because we felt that the company had failed to invest in its reservoirs and infrastructure. We proposed to put an advert in the Yorkshire Post highlighting this. And at this point, an official of Friends of the Earth formally instructed us that this independent line could not be permitted because it was national policy to attribute the shortages of water in the county that summer to runaway climate change. The "small is beautiful", "start locally" element of environmental tradition had disappeared. We were instructed that if we continued to argue that Yorkshire's water shortages were the result of anything other than global warming, we had to do so outside Friends of the Earth.

 

This highlighted the dangerous tendency of pressure groups to make specific statements for some supposed worthy campaign end. Ten years on, with Yorkshire racked by the usual floods, the director of Friends of the Earth, Tony Juniper, was pleased to warn against companies using climate change as an excuse. In The Observer on 3 July 2005, he said: "This situation emerges with depressing regularity, where you find insufficient capacity to meet people's needs because there's been a minor fluctuation in rain."

 

But that wasn't the line in the summer of 1995. Fortunately, our local group ignored the order to abandon our river to a water company and voted to continue to highlight what we saw as the "real causes" of the water supply problems, as an independent group.

 

Alas, in the climate-change debate, there is a worrying amount of irrationality, incomplete science and skewed presentation. The scientists apparently "cherry-picking" and hiding their data revealed recently in the University of East Anglia email scandal are only following in a long tradition that includes even Galileo "cheating" by saying that the Earth must orbit round the Sun - in a perfect circle. Yet, surely most objectionable of all is the use of gullibility and fear as tactics in campaigns. And if fear requires a world of zero risk, that certainly won't include those mercury-filled light bulbs and nuclear power stations.

 

Today, global-warming "deniers" have all been told they must fall into line with "the science". But this is not science, this is propaganda. And we are not being asked to be more rational but to suspend our own judgment completely. That, not "runaway climate change", is the most dangerous threat to the world today.

 

MISLEADING PORTRAITS

 

There are many ways to fool people, and linking images with complex theories is a good one.

 

One of the most potent images used to show the impact of rising global temperatures was that of fishing boats stranded in a desert that was once the world's largest freshwater sea. It features in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.

 

But the Aral Sea is actually not a sea, but rather a huge lake supplied by rivers, which have been gradually choked off since the end of the Second World War by Soviet-era irrigation schemes. Its plight has nothing to do with global warming.

 

Nor do polar bears.

 

When Gore used a picture of two polar bears supposedly stranded on a melting iceberg to support his claims about global warming, he chose a photo that had been taken by Amanda Byrd, a marine biology student, on a research cruise in August 2004, a time of year when the fringe of the Arctic ice cap normally melts. The image was later distributed by Environment Canada, a Canadian government department, to media agencies.

 

With that polar bear picture on the screen behind him, Gore says, "Their habitat is melting ... beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet. They're in trouble, got nowhere else to go."

 

However, Byrd says that when she took the picture, the bears didn't appear to be in any danger. An Environment Canada spokesman, Denis Simard, told The National Post, a Canadian newspaper, that you "have to keep in mind that the bears aren't in danger at all. It was, if you will, their playground for 15 minutes ... they were not that far from the coast, and it was possible for them to swim."

 

The polar bear is still the symbol of the effects of global warming - but it is a cleverly designed marketing symbol, and not a rational, scientific marker.

 

GRAPHIC SLIPS

 

Although global warming theorists say they are concerned for the fate of the planet, it does not necessarily mean that their methods are beyond critique. Indeed, much of the "evidence" that makes up the "scientific case" is flawed.

 

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore unveils as the "scientific" highlight a graph offering a clear correlation between temperature and CO2, as discovered in core samples of polar ice, with these words: "The relationship is actually very complicated, but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others - and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the Sun inside."

 

He then asks "Do they go together?" and extends the lines on the graph to terrifying levels.

 

Well, hang on a minute. First of all, historically, CO2 levels and temperatures have not marched in "lock step". Over geological time, the only thing the two variables share is a random walk. The Late Ordovician period saw CO2 concentrations nearly 12 times higher than those of today - and it was also an Ice Age. In fact, over the past 600 million years, only on two occasions have CO2 levels been as low as they are now, at below 400 parts per million.

 

Even restricting our survey to the past 100,000 years, the relationship is not as Gore and others think. Far from increases in CO2 leading to higher temperatures, the ice-core record shows rises in temperatures preceding (by between 200 and 1,000 years) increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

 

Which is what you would expect. Slightly higher temperatures mean more plant and animal life, and that means more CO2.

 

Nor do claims of record high temperatures have anything to do with the theory of anthropogenic global warming. The theory concerns the amount of heat radiated back into space at night, not how much heat "gets in" during the day. It is interested only in the supposed warming of the surface of the seas at night under a cocoon of atmospheric CO2 - the greenhouse. And is that happening? Er, no, as recent satellite surveys have found.

 

But let's return to that graph. It's not that complicated. We can start by looking at the recent history of the climate and the so-called hockey stick curve. The chart, which correlates temperatures and carbon dioxide levels, is called the hockey stick because it depicts the northern hemisphere's temperatures over the past 1,000 years as a fairly regular flat line until the late 20th century, when it curves sharply upwards as runaway warming appears.

 

The graph contradicted all the previous research into climate, which had indicated that there was a warm period about 1,000 years ago followed by the "Little Ice Age" in the 14th century.

 

By the time climatologists had pointed out that the graph had missed both the well-known warm periods and ice ages alike, and by the time mathematicians had had a chance to challenge the methodology and sample size, it was too late.

 

The exact relationship between CO2 and temperature remains elusive.

 

BIG GREEN MACHINE

 

Those making the case for global warming present the theory as the unvarnished work of hard-working and sober scientists who have been guided by evidence.

 

That view would be underlined by anyone reading the glowing endorsement of the "science" behind An Inconvenient Truth published by the website RealClimate.org, which is edited by Gavin Schmidt, a mathematician at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

 

There, Eric Steig of the University of Washington's Earth and Space Sciences Centre answers the question "How well does the (Gore) film handle the science?" by saying unambiguously: "Admirably, I thought. It is remarkably up to date, with reference to some of the very latest research."

 

RealClimate's site is hosted by Environmental Media Services (EMS), which sounds very suitable until one discovers that EMS was a creation of Fenton Communications, a New York public relations firm.

 

The scientists writing on the site are not being paid for their campaigning. But clearly the debate is attracting groups outside science and policy that have interests of their own.

 

Global warming's believers are quick to note the presence of the fossil-fuel industry behind a variety of lobby groups and reports.

 

But the green side has its allies, too. Take Fenton, which prefers to be known as "a public interest communications firm". It describes itself as using "sophisticated communications tools that Madison Avenue executives and corporations use and harness[ing] them for progressive change".

 

And so, of course, it was at the Kyoto summit in 1997 working with people and groups including Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to "highlight" the climate threat.

 

It has a presence in Gore's circle through Amy "Kalee" Kreider, Gore's communications director and environmental adviser, who can be spotted standing alongside him whenever he testifies on environmental matters to Senate committees, and who was a staffer at Fenton when the firm was advising Gore. Before that, she was a campaigner for Ozone Action in charge of handing out "ozone-friendly" strawberries to the press.

 

Fenton may hold no sway over Gore, but its involvement shows how sophisticated the forces involved in the debate are.

 

Fenton's campaigns are never random issues. It specialises in scary stories of the potential human health dangers of many substances such as Alar (a chemical used to control the growth of apples and improve their appearance), plasticisers (chemicals, especially phthalates, used in plastics) and bovine growth hormones.

 

In 1989, the firm played a pivotal role in the anti-Alar campaign, which resulted in sales of apples and apple products plummeting in the US.

 

Years after what would come to be known as "the great Alar scare", Fenton's biggest project is climate change. Among its clients are all the most respected names in the environmental business, from Greenpeace USA and Friends of the Earth US to the National Geographic Society and the UN Environment Programme.

 

Climate change is a big business, and it's not surprising that they want to have the world's biggest "public interest" PR firm running the campaign.

 

WITH ALL THE GAS AROUND, THERE'S SOME BLOAT

 

"We are witnessing the birth of the greatest and most complex commodity market the world has seen," wrote The Times' environment editor, Jonathan Leake, in a November 2008 article.

 

Carbon-trading schemes originate from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Governments adhering to the protocol impose limits on the CO2 that companies can emit; the firms are then obliged to buy annual permits to exceed them. Permits are bought from governments or from carbon traders in the City who charge a commission. In terms of dollars, the World Bank has estimated that the size of the carbon market was $11 billion (£6.6 billion) in 2005, $30 billion in 2006 and $64 billion in 2007. The money collected by the UK Treasury, for example, came mainly from UK power companies, with the cost added directly to heating bills.

 

Meanwhile Russia - because when the Kremlin signed up to the Kyoto treaty it was given an annual emissions limit based on the dirty old Soviet industries - has accumulated emissions permits for about 4 billion tonnes of CO2. Call it a £50 billion early Christmas present from Western consumers.

 

Many companies, too, have found the initiative profitable. SRF Ltd, which produces refrigeration gases at a chemical plant in India, made £300 million from selling certificates to transnationals including Shell and Barclays. It spent just £1.4 million on equipment to reduce its emissions, and used the profit to expand production of another greenhouse gas 1,000-fold.

 

 

Postscript :

 

Martin Cohen is editor of The Philosopher, and himself an environmental activist involved in many campaigns. His latest book is Mind Games (in press), which discusses the psychology of societies, and he is actively researching a critique of climate change for Pluto Press provisionally titled Climate, Chaos and Irrationality: How the Green Agenda Was Hijacked by Global Warming Theorists.

[MC 1]

Isn't it amazing that they're still going to try to pass world-wide regulations to keep us all in line? Our own Congress was warned that if they don't pass Cap and Trade (Tax), the EPA is just going to impose strict regulations and if they're forced to go that route, there will be no negotiation. Article HERE.

I've never understood how it's going to help "the environment" if we just pay more money for the energy we use. I loved this line from the above article: " how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity?" And just where does this "electricity" come from? Lots of it comes from coal!

Have you seen this?

 

One thin September soon

A floating continent disappears

In midnight sun

 

Vapors rise as

Fever settles on an acid sea

Neptune's bones dissolve

 

Snow glides from the mountain

Ice fathers floods for a season

A hard rain comes quickly

 

Then dirt is parched

Kindling is placed in the forest

For the lightning's celebration

 

Unknown creatures

Take their leave, unmourned

Horsemen ready their stirrups

 

Passion seeks heroes and friends

The bell of the city

On the hill is rung

 

The shepherd cries

The hour of choosing has arrived

Here are your tools

~~ Al Gore

:wacko:

(Will someone PLEASE get this guy medicated?)

[MC 1]

SOURCE.

 

UN Security Stops Journalist’s Questions About ClimateGate

by Mike Flynn

 

A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions” during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book.

 

 

McAleer, a veteran journalist and film maker, has recently made a documentary “Not Evil Just Wrong’ which takes a sceptical look at the science and politics behind Global Warming concerns.

He asked Professor Schneider about his opinions on Climategate – where leaked emails have revealed that a senior British professor deleted data and encouraged colleagues to do likewise if it contradicted their belief in Global Warming.

Professor Phil Jones, the head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, has temporarily stood down pending an investigation into the scandal.

 

Professor Schneider, who is a senior member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he would not comment on emails that may have been incomplete or edited.

During some testy exchanges with McAleer, UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistants twice tried to cut short McAleer’s question.

 

However as the press conference drew to a close Professor Schneider’s assistant called armed UN security guards to the room. They held McAleer and aggressively ordered cameraman Ian Foster to stop filming. The guard threatened to take away the camera and expel the film crew from the conference if they did not obey his instructions to stop filming Professor Schneider.

 

The guard demanded to look at the film crews press credentials and refused to allow them to film until Professor Schneider left the room.

McAleer said he was disappointed by Professor Schneider’s behaviour.

 

“It was a press conference. Climategate is a major story – it goes to the heart of the Global Warming debate by calling into question the scientific data and the integrity of many scientists involved.”

 

“These questions should be answered. The attempts by UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistant to remove my microphone were hamfisted but events took a more sinister turn when they called an armed UN security officer to silence a journalist.”

Two officers corralled the film crew and one officer can be seen on tape threatening the cameraman. The Guard can also be heard warning that if the crew did not stop filming their would seize the equipment and the journalists expelled from the conference.

McAleer says he has made an official complaint about the incident.

 

“I have met Mr Christopher Ankerson the UN’s head of security for the conference and he has confirmed it was Professor Schneider’s staff who asked the security guards to come corral us at the press conference. Mr Ankerson could not say what grounds the security guard had for ordering us to stop filming.”

 

“This is a blatant attempt to stop journalists doing journalism and asking hard questions. It is not the job of armed UN security officers to stop legitimate journalists asking legitimate questions of senior members of the UN’s IPCC.”

Professor Schneider was interviewed for McAleer’s “Not Evil Just Wrong” documentary but lawyers later wrote to McAleer saying he was withdrawing permission for the interview to be used.

 

McAleer, who is from Ireland, has gained quite a reputation for asking difficult questions of those who have been promoting the idea of man-made Global Warming.

His microphone was cut off after he asked former vice-president Al Gore about the British court case which found that An Inconvenient Truth had a nine significant errors and exaggerations. Almost 500,000 people have watched the incident on youtube.

[MC 1]

Source.

 

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL: 100 REASONS WHY

 

Tuesday December 15,2009

 

HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:

 

1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

 

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

 

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

 

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

 

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.

 

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

 

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.

 

 

SEARCH UK NEWS for:

 

8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

 

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

 

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

 

11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

 

12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds

 

13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.

 

14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions

 

15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”

 

16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

 

17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.

 

18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control

 

19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.

 

20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates

 

21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

 

22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades

 

23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries

 

24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder

 

25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research

 

26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles

 

27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.

 

28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population

 

29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago

 

30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles

 

31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming

 

32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures

 

33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere

 

34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere

 

35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything

 

36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes

 

37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”

 

38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC

 

39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally

 

40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms

 

41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful

 

42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical

 

43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests

 

44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years

 

45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

 

46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations

 

47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.

 

48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change

 

49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.

 

50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are “no direct subsidies” but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve Wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.

 

51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.

 

52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”

 

53) Climate alarmists have raised the concern over acidification of the oceans but Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway , and others, have noted that the composition of ocean water – including CO2, calcium, and water – can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans.

 

54) The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics. Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot

 

55) The argument that climate change is a of result of global warming caused by human activity is the argument of flat Earthers.

 

56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.

 

57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”

 

58) Canada has shown the world targets derived from the existing Kyoto commitments were always unrealistic and did not work for the country.

 

59) In the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, David Davis MP said of previous climate summits, at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 that many had promised greater cuts, but “neither happened”, but we are continuing along the same lines.

 

60) The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth.

 

61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

 

62) Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.

 

63) It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.

 

64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.

 

65) The globe’s current approach to climate change in which major industrialised countries agree to nonsensical targets for their CO2 emissions by a given date, as it has been under the Kyoto system, is very expensive.

 

66) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures when looking at the history of the Earth’s temperature.

 

67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”.

 

68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.

 

69) In explaining the average temperature standstill we are currently experiencing, the Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions and found in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills but none for 15 years – so it expects global warming to resume swiftly.

 

70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”

 

71) Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s status as the flagship of the fight against climate change it has been a failure.

 

72) The first phase of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which ran from 2005 to 2007 was a failure. Huge over-allocation of permits to pollute led to a collapse in the price of carbon from €33 to just €0.20 per tonne meaning the system did not reduce emissions at all.

 

73) The EU trading scheme, to manage carbon emissions has completely failed and actually allows European businesses to duck out of making their emissions reductions at home by offsetting, which means paying for cuts to be made overseas instead.

 

74) To date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions.

 

75) In the United States , the cap-and-trade is an approach designed to control carbon emissions and will impose huge costs upon American citizens via a carbon tax on all goods and services produced in the United States. The average family of four can expect to pay an additional $1700, or £1,043, more each year. It is predicted that the United States will lose more than 2 million jobs as the result of cap-and-trade schemes.

 

76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.

 

77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.

 

78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.

 

79) Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).

 

80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.

 

81) The UK’s Met Office has been forced this year to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by revelations about the data.

 

82) Politicians and activists push for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines under the rhetoric of climate change, but it is essentially about money – under the system of Renewable Obligations. Much of the money is paid for by consumers in electricity bills. It amounts to £1 billion a year.

 

83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.

 

84) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase science for political purposes.

 

85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.

 

86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.

 

87) The Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy contains a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power costing around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years. The benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion overall (not per annum). So costs will outnumber benefits by a range of between eleven and seventeen times.

 

88) Whilst CO2 levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout history, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years.

 

89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.

 

90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.

 

91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.

 

92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

 

93) US President Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions by 2050 to equal those of 1910 when there were 92 million Americans. In 2050, there will be 420 million Americans, so Obama’s promise means that emissions per head will be approximately what they were in 1875. It simply will not happen.

 

94) The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent to 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and is willing to increase the target to 30 percent. However, these are unachievable and the EU has already massively failed with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), as EU emissions actually rose by 0.8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and are known to be well above the Kyoto goal.

 

95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic.

 

96) Canada plans to reduce emissions by 20 percent compared with 2006 levels by 2020, representing approximately a 3 percent cut from 1990 levels but it simultaneously defends its Alberta tar sands emissions and its record as one of the world’s highest per-capita emissions setters.

 

97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.

 

98) The Leipzig Declaration in 1996, was signed by 110 scientists who said: “We – along with many of our fellow citizens – are apprehensive about the climate treaty conference scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997” and “based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions.”

 

99) A US Oregon Petition Project stated “We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of CO2, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

 

100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”

[sanlee 49]

Gore: Polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years

 

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

 

New computer modeling suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014, Al Gore said Monday at the U.N. climate conference. This new projection, following several years of dramatic retreat by polar sea ice, suggests that the ice cap may nearly vanish in the summer much sooner than the year 2030, as was forecast by a U.S. government agency eight months ago.

 

One U.S. government scientist Monday questioned the new prediction as too severe, but other researchers previously have projected a quicker end than 2030 to the Arctic summer ice cap.

 

"It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice felt when they saw this," said former U.S. Vice President Gore, who joined Scandinavian officials and scientists to brief journalists and delegates. It was Gore's first appearance at the two-week conference.

 

The group presented two new reports updating fast-moving developments in Antarctica, the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, and the rest of the Arctic.

 

"The time for collective and immediate action on climate change is now," said Denmark's foreign minister, Per Stig Moeller.

 

But delegates from 192 nations were bogged down in disputes over key issues. This further dimmed hopes for immediate action to cut more deeply into global emissions of greenhouse gases.

 

Gore and Danish ice scientist Dorthe Dahl Jensen clicked through two slide shows for a standing-room-only crowd of hundreds in a side event at the Bella Center conference site.

 

One report, on the Greenland ice sheet, was issued by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, an expert group formed by eight Arctic governments, including the United States. The other, commissioned by Gore and Norway's government, was compiled by the Norwegian Polar Institute on the status of ice melt worldwide.

 

Average global temperatures have increased 0.74 degrees C (1.3 degrees F) in the past century, but the mercury has risen at least twice as quickly in the Arctic. Scientists say the makeup of the frozen north polar sea has shifted significantly in recent years as much of the thick multiyear ice has given way to thin seasonal ice.

 

In the summer of 2007, the Arctic ice cap dwindled to a record-low minimum extent of 4.3 million square kilometers (1.7 million square miles) in September. The melting in 2008 and 2009 was not as extensive, but still ranked as the second- and third-greatest decreases on record.

 

Last April, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that Arctic summers could be almost ice-free within 30 years, not at the 21st century's end as earlier predicted.

 

Gore cited new scientific work at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, whose Arctic ice research is important for planning polar voyages by Navy submarines. The computer modeling there stresses the "volumetric," looking not just at the surface extent of ice but its thickness as well.

 

"Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years," Gore said. His office later said he meant nearly ice-free, because ice would be expected to survive in island channels and other locations.

 

Asked for comment, one U.S. government scientist questioned what he called this "aggressive" projection.

 

"It's possible but not likely," said Mark Serreze of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. "We're sticking with 2030."

 

On the other hand, a leading NASA ice scientist, Jay Zwally, said last year that the Arctic could be essentially ice-free within "five to less than 10 years."

 

Meanwhile, what's happening to Greenland's titanic ice sheet "has really surprised us," said Jensen of the University of Copenhagen.

 

She cited one huge glacier in west Greenland, at Jakobshavn, that in recent years has doubled its rate of dumping ice into the sea. Between melted land ice and heat expansion of ocean waters, the sea-level rise has increased from 1.8 millimeters a year to 3.4 millimeters (.07 inch a year to .13 inch) in the past 10 years.

 

Jensen said the biggest ice sheets — Greenland and West Antarctica — were already contributing 1 millimeter (.04 inch) a year to those rising sea levels. She said this could double within the next decade.

 

"With global warming, we have woken giants," she said.

 

source:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/12/14/international/i062638S00.DTL

[MC 1]

Al Gore? He lies! He's not a scientist and won't even discuss this with scientists. But speaking of "scientists"..... this article is a must read for everyone (in my opinion). Want to know how the scientists faked it all of these years, what they faked, how it affects the satellites? This is long, and sometimes requires a little patience and re-reading, but it's worth it if you want to find out the truth about this horrible crime!

 

Caught Green Handed!

[MC 1]

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Obama: 'Time for talk is over'

By GLENN THRUSH | 12/18/09 5:40 AM EST

Updated: 12/18/09 10:40 AM EST

 

 

COPENHAGEN — A visibly angry Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet at China and other developing nations Friday, declaring that the time has come "not to talk but to act" on climate change.

 

Emerging from a multinational meeting boycotted by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Obama warned delegates that U.S. offers of funding for poor nations would remain on the table “if and only if” developing nations, including China, agreed to international monitoring of their greenhouse gas emissions.

 

"I have to be honest, as the world watches us ... I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt and it hangs in the balance,” Obama told the COP-15 plenary session as hope faded for anything more than a vague political agreement.

 

“The time for talk is over, this is the bottom line: We can embrace this accord, take a substantial step forward. We can do that, and everyone who is in this room will be part of an historic endeavor, or we can choose delay,” he said.

 

He added, “The question is whether we will move forward together, or split apart. … We know the fault lines because we’ve been imprisoned by them for years.”

 

Back home, senators critical to getting a climate bill through Congress have stressed that developing nations must submit to international monitoring — particularly if they want the U.S. to pay hundreds of billions to help combat the destructive impact of climate change.

 

"The only way we'll be successful in America is for countries like China and India to make an equivalent commitment," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is crafting a bipartisan climate bill. "We're not going to unilaterally disarm."

 

While Obama emphasized the U.S. commitment to taking action on climate change, he did not set a deadline for specific Senate action on the climate bill.

 

Former Vice President Al Gore and other environmental activists have pushed the Senate to pass legislation by April 22, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, in hope of providing momentum to international talks next year.

 

The lack of specific domestic and international commitments in Obama's address indicated that an international agreement still hung in the balance — even as the talks moved into the final weekend.

 

Overnight reports that world leaders had agreed to a tentative final climate change deal in Copenhagen were greatly exaggerated — and the outcome of the COP-15 conference was still very much up in the air when Air Force One touched down at 9:01 a.m. local time.

 

“What’s on the table still has large gaps and unanswered questions," said David Waskow, climate change program director at Oxfam America. "The United States must get more specific to make a real deal possible.”

 

After addressing the delegates, Obama met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao for close to an hour to discuss emissions goals, verification mechanisms and climate financing. The lack of agreement between China and the U.S. — the world's two largest greenhouse gas emitters — has been a major stumbling block in the talks.

 

A White house official described the discussion as “constructive” and said that the two leaders asked their negotiators to get together one-on-one after the meeting.

 

Obama had been expected to meet one-on-one with Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen immediately after landing in Copenhagen Friday morning, followed by an 11 a.m. speech to the conference's plenary session. But recognizing the urgency of the situation, he quickly cancelled those plans to sit in on a much larger session with Rasmussen, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, a Chinese representative, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and others.

 

"There are big problems, it is moving very slowly, and China and India are blocking," Sarkozy told the Danish daily Politiken after leaving the meeting, which broke up at 11:30 a.m.

 

Weary and frustrated negotiators described a process that still involved the nibbling of policy appetizers at a time when prior conferences were already on to the coffee and dessert of their valedictory speeches.

 

They warned that none of the several drafts circulating in Copenhagen represented even the bones of a final deal, with many key issues still in flux and time running out. Moreover, U.S. predictions that roadblocks could be thrown up by smaller countries seemed to be coming true, with last-minute objections voiced by Venezuela, Bolivia, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, according to people familiar with talks.

 

"There are deep differences in opinion and views on how we should solve this. We'll try our best, until the last minutes of this conference," Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt told reporters as overnight talks ended.

 

Negotiators from nearly 200 nations, working around the clock, did agree to a broad mandate to cap the global temperature increase from pre-industrial levels at two degrees Celsius. But there was no deal on emissions caps or specific carbon cuts, according to officials briefed on the talks.

 

One key sticking point: a demand by industrialized nations that the document produced here be legally binding, the so-called "operational" agreement Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about yesterday.

 

Developing countries, led by China, India and the African Union, still seemed unwilling to sign off on a final document, despite a new deal sweetener that could add as much as $30 billion to the $100 billion annual international fund for poor nations by 2020 outlined by Clinton on Thursday.

 

An official with a developing nation told Reuters that rich nations were offering to cut their carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a proposal that had been rejected by developing nations. Developing nations have always insisted on the need for mid-term targets.

 

"The situation is desperate," a top Indian negotiator told the wire service. "There is no agreement on even what to call the text — a declaration, a statement or whatever. They (rich nations) want to make it a politically binding document, which we oppose."

 

And the U.S. was still wrestling with China and India over international monitoring of their emissions cuts, a sticking point that ground the entire conference to a halt early Thursday.

 

Danes monitored the progress of Obama's arrival obsessively, with cabbies craning at dashboard TV sets to monitor the approach of Air Force One from distant dot to Obama's arrival. He was accompanied by environment czar Carol Browner, aide Valerie Jarrett, press secretary Robert Gibbs and National Security Adviser Jim Jones.

[MC 1]

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No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds

 

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.

 

However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase.

Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.

 

To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

 

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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As Britain told to expect snow for 'next 10 days', how is the rest of the world is coping with this Arctic weather?

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Last updated at 7:46 PM on 03rd January 2010

 

When Britain woke up on the first day of the New Year it was met with freezing cold temperatures, feet of snow in places and the promise of travel chaos.

And now, three days into 2010, forecasters have warned to expect continued snowfall for the next 10 days - bringing with it added stress for commuters heading back to work after a festive break and children returning to school tomorrow.

Yet as Britain struggles to cope with the freezing weather conditions, other countries throughout the world are also finding themselves in the same predicament.

 

CHINA

Snow storms today have caused chaos in China's capital of Beijing, grinding aeroplanes to a halt and causing severe traffic delays.

Around 90 per cent of all flights were either delayed or cancelled, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.

 

 

In addition, major roads in Beijing and Tianjin, as well as nearby provinces Hebei, Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, were forced to close due to the heavy snow.

The snow shows no sign of stopping, however, and temperatures are expected to drop to -16C in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday, causing more problems for those attempting to returning to work after a three-day New Year holiday.

 

Authorities in Beijing and Tianjin announced today there will be no classes at primary and middle schools tomorrow as the snow had caused traffic chaos.

INDIA

Not a country usually associated with snow, India has experienced severe problems since Saturday when snowfall and a dense blanket of fog began to cause chaos.

More than 30 people died in cold-weather related incidents in Northern India over the past 24 hours, with 10 of those losing their lives in train accidents caused by the fog.

Meanwhile, 24 homeless people have also died in the Uttar Pradesh state since Saturday due to the severe drop in temperature.

Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir were all hit with heavy snow, while Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and Delhi also recorded snowfall over the past 24 hours.

 

A Kashmiri man struggles to see through the snow as he walks in Srinagar

 

Flights from New Delhi were grounded or delayed yesterday because of poor visibility, Shashanka Nanda, a spokesman for the Delhi International Airport Limited said, before adding that conditions had improved today.

 

RUSSIA

A country much more used to dealing with high levels of snow, Russia saw temperature lows of a chilling -20C in Moscow today.

 

Those travelling on trains at stations near the Russian city of Vorkuta, attempted to continue their journeys despite the freezing conditions.

 

 

Workers also tried to sweep snow from the train tracks, but found it was falling too fast to clear.

However, two men making the most of the snow were Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin who decided to take to the slopes in Krasnaya Polyana near the Black Sea resort of Sochi in southern Russia.

 

 

 

The duo donned heavy jackets and goggles as they skiied together, with Putin looking serious as the pair indulged in some seemingly serious political conversations.

 

GERMANY

The snow caused more problems with flights in Germany, with one jet veering off the runway at Dortmund airport in western Germany.

The Air Berlin Boeing 737-800 broke to abort the take-off due to a 'technical irregularity', but none of the 165 passengers and six crew members were injured

 

The plane was not damaged but flights from the airport were cancelled or diverted for a large part of the day.

Airline spokeswoman Diane Daedelow said: 'A combination of the snowy weather and the speed the plane was travelling at forced the plane to skid off the runway.'

Over 30 flights from Frankfurt airport were also cancelled this morning.

 

 

Snow covers the trees on the mountain Schauinsland in the Black Forest, Germany

 

AUSTRIA

While they are much more accustomed to dealing with snow, even native Austrians were struggling to cope with the freezing lows of -8C at night and -3C during the day.

But one creature happy to bound around in the fluffy snow was a mix breed dog called Lotta, who seemed entirely unconcerned as she became coated in snow during her run in Unken, in the Austrian province of Salzburg.

 

 

Meteorologists have predicted continued light snowfalls for the upcoming days in Austria.

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The mini ice age starts here

By DAVID ROSE

Last updated at 11:17 AM on 10th January 2010

 

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in

summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

 

 

 

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

 

 

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.

However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.

 

 

Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.

Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.

 

Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.

He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’

 

As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.

Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.

The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view.

On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.

Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.

As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

 

 

However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).

For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.

 

But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.

'They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.

'We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’

Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

 

 

But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.

Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.

 

For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.

It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer.

'Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared.’

As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted.

Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole.

 

In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.

‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’

He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.

 

For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’

Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’

Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.

 

'This isn't just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while'

 

But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.

'These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’

 

Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.

He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’

 

He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.

The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?

Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.

Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.

William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.

 

 

According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’

But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.

In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.

 

Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.

 

'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’

The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.