Climate Change

[Hihomumio 168]

Those that are determined to create a new industry with global warming at the center could/should be considered deniers since they refuse to acknowledge that much of what is going on climate-wise is natural and has always gone on in a cyclic pattern.

 

Good article...thanks for posting it here MC

[MC 1]

Those that are determined to create a new industry with global warming at the center could/should be considered deniers since they refuse to acknowledge that much of what is going on climate-wise is natural and has always gone on in a cyclic pattern.

 

Good article...thanks for posting it here MC

YAY! We agree!!!

[MC 1]

Source.

 

January 11, 2010

Mother Nature's Sucker-Punch

By Vasko Kohlmayer

 

 

It could not be more ironic that all the efforts of the world's sophisticates to build Obama up have been brought to naught by Mother Nature, who exposed him for the chump he is. For only a chump could advocate economic suicide to stop global warming while the earth is about to enter a historic arctic snap.

 

Obama tried this in Copenhagen, where he feverishly pressured the assembled dignitaries to adopt measures that would drive their economies into the ground. Not surprisingly, they said, "thanks, but no thanks." They apparently did not think it was such a good idea to drag their people back into the Stone Age for the sake of a scam. On the other hand, they expressed no objections should Obama try this at home in America.

 

The arctic gust should blast away whatever is left of that bogus know-it-all mantle the doting media have tried to spin around the man. The truth is that the president has no clothes, and the world is not warming, either. The leaders of rising economic powers perceived this in Copenhagen, and they treated Obama accordingly. In a stinging snub, the Chinese prime minister did not show up for the second of two scheduled meetings with the American president, sending a low-level negotiator instead. When a frantic Obama tried to get an appointment with India's prime minister, he was curtly informed that the premier had (Elvis-like) left the building and was on his way to the airport. These were unprecedented humiliations for a sitting U.S. president. The dissing, however, is not all that surprising, given the president's comedic behavior.

 

The president indeed deserves a Nobel Prize, but for tomfoolery. It should be presented to him by Al Gore, who is often called a "prophet" by his groupies. Some prophet, he. In January of 2006, he was quoted in the Washington Post as claiming that "humans may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan." A third of the way down Gore's apocalyptic timeline, things are still not getting any warmer. Quite to the contrary, if it continues in this way, by the end of the ten years we will have all frozen to death.

 

Gore's doomsday claims notwithstanding, data for the latest decade appear to indicate that the world is actually cooling. Let us hope that the trend will not continue, because serious scientists tell us that we are due for another ice age. This is not a pleasant prospect, given that the last time this happened, the permanent ice sheet extended all the way down to New York's Central Park.

 

Gore's failed prophecies did not prevent him from leveraging his fear-mongering into an immense personal fortune. His antics and stunts easily make him the leading candidate for the title of the greatest scam-artist of all time. One cannot, in fact, think of any other man who has fooled so many people and made so much money from his swindle.

 

It comes complete with brazen hypocrisy, whereby Gore -- who himself likes to live like a king -- would force others into public transport and socialist-era high-rise buildings. When called on his environmental sins, he piously claimed that he does his penance by purchasing carbon credits. What he did not say is that he bought those credits from the company he himself founded and co-owned. Gore obviously believes that the penance money should stay in the family. By this he has proven wrong that old proverb about not being able to eat one's own cake.

 

Gore's scam has been so successful because so many people today are affected by the scourge of being oblivious to facts. But as John Adams once said, facts are stubborn things, which is why leftists have always been so eager to falsify them. Warmists are no exception, as evidenced by the now infamous e-mails by those unbiased and conscientious scientists from the University of East Anglia. What they say must be true, of course, since we all know that scientists would never lie.

 

Besides being a crushing fiasco, the East Anglia scandal has considerable educational value because it shows that scientists are inherently no more trustworthy than judges or politicians. Putting too much trust in experts can, in fact, be rather dangerous, because obtaining scientific imprimatur has become the bread-and-butter play of scammers of all kinds. Today it is virtually impossible to come across a public hoaxer -- regardless of how inane his claims may be -- who does not have a bunch of certified scientists in his tow.

 

But despite their aptitude for spinning their way out of inconvenient facts, even the most die-hard warmists will have a hard time in the fix presented by the present arctic snap. To them, it must feel like a sucker-punch from Mother Nature herself, because it bites with that knockout question: How can the world be catastrophically overheating when much of it is experiencing historic freeze, snow, and ice?

 

The warmists will, of course, wheel out their phony scientists and experts to explain it all. The most ingenious will argue that the cold is actually due to global warming. But the facts are just too glaring to be rendered ineffectual. In the end, even the most artful prevarications cannot trump the weight of clear-cut evidence and common sense. Most people know that warm weather does not cause cold weather. To argue that it does is as absurd as to claim that rain causes droughts.

 

It remains to be seen whether the boreal chill will knock some sense into Al Gore and Barack Obama. Can this frost-stricken planet still hope that these poster boys of the mindless fact-defying left will for once look the truth in the eye? In view of the damage their ill-conceived ideas and policies have already inflicted, it would be the decent thing to do.

[Hihomumio 168]

Those that are determined to create a new industry with global warming at the center could/should be considered deniers since they refuse to acknowledge that much of what is going on climate-wise is natural and has always gone on in a cyclic pattern.

 

Good article...thanks for posting it here MC

YAY! We agree!!!

 

It happens on occasion

[MC 1]

I couldn't find a thread for Danny Glover so I'm putting this here. Seriously, this is idiotic. (He also seems to be unaware of our attempts to help Haiti for decades!)

 

Source.

 

 

PACT WITH GAIA

 

Tim Blair

Friday, January 15, 2010 at 04:59am

 

 

Actor Danny Glover believes that the Haitian earthquake was caused by climate change and global warming:

 

 

Says Glover: “When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?” His obscene opinion would be bigger news if Glover had – in the manner of others – idiotically blamed a less-fashionable deity.

[MC 1]

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January 17, 2010

Climategate Redux

Jane Jamison

 

Climate-gate part I occurred in early December when a still-unknown person posted thousands of e-mails and documents on a scientific website. The e-mails showed that scientists at the leading "global warming" research institute in the world, East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU) had "changed" weather data to prove their climate-warming theories, and squelched dissenting opinions from skeptical scientists to maintain credibility for their fraud.

 

Climate-gate part II begins now: The scientists with Icecap.us website announced findings late last week that not only was the CRU involved in producing fraudulent weather data, but two United States agencies, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have also been falsifying climate reports for years. NOAA, the report concludes, is actually "ground-zero" for the fraud of global warming, not the East Anglia Institute.

 

Climate researchers have discovered that government researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as "THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD."

 

In a new report supported by SPPI, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government's National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina Smith and D'Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations and then ‘adjuting the data in ways that increase the apparent warming.

 

The results of Smith and D'Aleo's findings were aired in a special on KUSI-TV hosted by founder of the Weather Channel and long-time meteorologist and climate "realist", John Coleman.

 

D'Aleo's preliminary report is HERE. Segments of the KUSI-TV report are HERE. SPPI'S website will print the final report soon.

 

Not related directly to the investigation by the climate-gate scientists, but related nonetheless was another new report:

 

Polar bears are not dying or drowning due to melting icebergs caused by climate change. There are so many polars bears in Canada, they are causing problems.

 

This news is coming from Canadian wildlife agencies that have real live Inuit Indian hunters who count the real, live polar bears on the ground and in the water. The United States Geologic Survey (USGS), which has made the alarming findings about polar bear populations being extinct in 20 years, fly over in helicopters and make reports based on "analysis" of weather predictions.

 

Gabriel Nirlungayuk, director of wildlife for Nunavut Tuungavik Inc.says it is getting "beary" scary in many Canadian towns:

 

During the summer and fall, families enjoying outdoor activities must be on the look-out for bears. Many locals invite along other hunters for protection.

 

Last year, in Pelly Bay, all the bears that were captured were caught in town, Nirlungayuk says. "You now have polar bears coming into towns, getting into cabins, breaking property and just creating havoc for people up here," he says.

 

In the Western Hudson Bay area, where harvest quotas were reduced by 80 percent four years ago, communities are complaining about the number of polar bears. "Now people can look out the window and see as many as 20 polar bears at the ice-flow edge."

 

Let the scientists report further on the intricacies of the graphs, maps, and calculations of "global warming fraud," and then turn it all over to a prosecutor and make these "scientists" pay for this outrageous hoax that has continued for decades and is still having huge financial impacts on policy, commerce and the economy. "Global warming" is a crime.

 

 

 

Jane Jamison is publisher of the conservative news/commentary blog, UNCOVERAGE.net

[MC 1]

Just when you think it can't get any more entertaining.... (and sad)...

 

 

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January 17, 2010

OOOPS! Scientists goof on Himilayan glacier retreat

Rick Moran

 

If anything, this story in The Times of London is good for a laugh - except that there's nothing funny about the people who wanted to use this information to steal trillions from the world's most productive nations.

 

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

 

Got that? The IPCC Report on which the science of global warming rests - a report being used to justify ruining industrial civilization - used an old story based on a brief telephone interview with a scientist nobody ever heard of, in a general interest science magazine geared for non-scientists (The New Scientist) to push the notion that the glacier's in the Himalaya's would be gone in 25 years.

 

It would be too easy to ascribe this idiocy to conspiracy. More likely, it is simply one more indication that the proponents of AGW don't care about the science and are promoting a political agenda.

[Hihomumio 168]

This is good, I want to see these kinds of stories showing up continually until this machine that Al Gore (and his partners in crime) created is brought to a complete and utter halt. The better to see all those who have supported this farce brought down to new lows. I'm so tired of being victimized by these kinds of people.

[MC 1]

This is good, I want to see these kinds of stories showing up continually until this machine that Al Gore (and his partners in crime) created is brought to a complete and utter halt. The better to see all those who have supported this farce brought down to new lows. I'm so tired of being victimized by these kinds of people.

Amen!

 

Here's a good source for information:

Reference: 450 skeptical peer reviewed papers

[MC 1]

Source.

 

Updated January 20, 2010

U.N. Panel's Glacier-Disaster Claims Melting Away

By Gene J. Koprowski - FOXNews.com

 

The world's most famous climate change expert is in the midst of a massive controversy, as the leading environmental science institute he heads scrambled to explain data it promulgated for a U.N. report.

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

 

A satellite image of the Koettlitz Glacer in Antarctica. An oft-cited report by the U.N.'s IPCC panel that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 may soon be retracted.

 

The world's most famous climate change expert is at the center of a massive controversy as the leading environmental science institute he heads scrambled to explain its assertion that the Himalayan glaciers will melt completely in 25 years.

 

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli, India, said this week that the U.N. body was studying how its 2007 report to the United Nations derived information that led to its famous conclusion: that the glaciers will melt by 2035.

 

Today, the IPCC issued a statement offering regret for the poorly vetted statements. "The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures," the statement says, though it goes short of issuing a full retraction or reprinting the report.

 

Pachauri told Reuters on Monday that the group was looking into the issue, and planned to "take a position on it in the next two or three days."

 

The IPCC's 2007 report, simply titled AR4, claimed that "glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world, and if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

 

Hundreds of millions of people in India, Pakistan and China would be severely affected if the glaciers were actually to melt. There are some 9,500 Himalayan glaciers.

 

Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh questioned the findings of the 2007 report during a news conference.

 

"They are indeed receding and the rate is cause for great concern," Ramesh said of the glaciers. But, he said, the IPCC's 2035 forecast was "not based on an iota of scientific evidence."

 

One of the key elements in the growing scandal is the revelation that IPCC based some of its public proclamations on non-peer reviewed reports.

 

"The data, all the data, needs to come to light," says Dr. Jane M. Orient, president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and an outspoken skeptic on climate change.

 

"Thousands of scientists are capable of assessing it. The only reason to keep it hidden, locked in the clutches of the elite few, is that it decisively disproves their computer models and shows that their draconian emission controls are based on nothing except a lust for power, control and profit."

 

The IPCC "made a clear and obvious error when it stated that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035," added Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, in an interview.

 

"The absurdity was obvious to anyone who had studied the scientific literature. This was not an honest mistake. IPCC had been warned about it for a year by many scientists."

 

A letter just released to the Science Web site underscores the mistake. Written by J. Graham Cogley of the department of geography at Canada's Trent University, it points out that "the claim that Himalayan glaciers may disappear by 2035 ... conflicts with knowledge of glacier-climate relationships, and is wrong."

 

The dustup is the latest scandal in global warming science, coming after the disclosure of attempts to shade climate-science research findings at the U.K.'s East Anglia University and the failed talks in Copenhagen by environmental policymakers last month.

 

The IPCC report had indicated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers within 25 years. The study cited a 2005 report by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. The WWF study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted another expert, who speculated that Himalayan glaciers could disappear within forty years.

 

The speculative comments were not peer reviewed, and other reports have indicated that the glaciers are not retreating abnormally.

 

"Most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is two to three feet per year, and most are far lower," Don Easterbrook, a professor emeritus of the department of geology at Western Washington University, told FoxNews.com.

 

Pachauri, the IPCC chief, is under attack on another front, as well, as newspaper reports in India have commented repeatedly on his reportedly lavish lifestyle. TERI receives funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy, both of which did not respond to requests for comment from FoxNews.com. Reports indicate that there also are concerns in the United Kingdom surrounding 10 million British pounds in funding for TERI, and questions about TERI's objectivity.

 

"It's about time that somebody started following the money trail to the big interests that want to prosper from the green regime, while the rest of the economy is crushed," Orient told FoxNews.com. "It's not as though the amount were a trickle."

[MC 1]

Source.

 

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified

By DAVID ROSE

Last updated at 12:54 AM on 24th January 2010

Comments (36)

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The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

 

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

 

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

 

 

Chilling error: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrongly asserted that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035

 

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.

 

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

 

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

 

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

 

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

 

Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.

‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said.

 

Forced to apologise: Chairman of the IPCC Raj Pachauri

‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’

One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’

 

When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’.

 

Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.

 

It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.

 

For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.

 

In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.

 

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.

The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.

 

Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.

 

Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.

 

The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal, is likely to be considerable.

 

Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.

 

Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’

Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.

[MC 1]

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Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics say

 

 

BY RICHARD FOOT, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE

JANUARY 21, 2010

 

Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers.

 

Two months after “climategate” cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming.

Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

 

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

 

Worse, only one station -- at Eureka on Ellesmere Island -- is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

 

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

 

Yet as American researchers Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses “just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees.”

 

Both the authors, and the institute, are well-known in climate-change circles for their skepticism about the threat of global warming.

 

Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea -- which has a warming effect on winter weather.

 

Over the past two decades, they say, “the percentage of [Canadian] stations in the lower elevations tripled and those at higher elevations, above 300 feet, were reduced in half.”

 

Using the agency’s own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA’s Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.

 

Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S. and China.

 

They say NOAA collects no temperature data at all from Bolivia -- a high-altitude, landlocked country -- but instead “interpolates” or assigns temperature values for that country based on data from “nearby” temperature stations located at lower elevations in Peru, or in the Amazon basin.

 

The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record.

 

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

 

The NOAA database forms the basis of the influential climate modelling work, and the dire, periodic warnings on climate change, issued by James Hanson, the director of the GISS in New York.

 

Neither agency responded to a request for comment Wednesday from Canwest News Service. However Hanson did issue a public statement on the matter earlier this week.

 

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis,” he said. “The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”

 

In addition to the allegations against NOAA and GISS, climate scientists are also dealing with the embarrassment this week of the false glacier-melt warning contained in the 2007 report of the UN Panel on Climate Change. That report said Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear within three decades if current rates of melting continue.

 

This week, however, the panel admitted there is no scientific evidence to support such a claim.

 

The revelations come only two months after the “climategate” scandal, in which the leak or theft of thousands of e-mails -- private discussions between scientists in the U.S. and Britain -- showed that a group of influential climatologists tried for years to manipulate global warming data, rig the scientific peer-review process and keep their methods secret from other, contrary-minded researchers.

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Updated January 28, 2010

U.N.'s Global Warming Report Under Fresh Attack for Rainforest Claims

By Gene J. Koprowski - FOXNews.com

 

A United Nations report on climate change that has been lambasted for its faulty research is under new attack for yet another instance of what critics say is sloppy science -- guiding global warming policy based on a study of forest fires.

 

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Phil P. Harris / Wikipedia

 

 

A view of the Amazon basin forest north of Manaus, Brazil. A U.N. report stated that global warming is threatening the forests -- a statement that was recently discredited.

 

A United Nations report on climate change that has been lambasted for its faulty research is under new attack for yet another instance of what its critics say is sloppy science -- adding to a growing scandal that has undermined the credibility of scientists and policymakers who back the U.N.'s findings about global warming.

 

In the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), issued in 2007 by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists wrote that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest in South America was endangered by global warming.

 

But that assertion was discredited this week when it emerged that the findings were based on numbers from a study by the World Wildlife Federation that had nothing to do with the issue of global warming -- and that was written by a freelance journalist and green activist.

 

The IPCC report states that "up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation" -- highlighting the threat climate change poses to the Earth. The report goes on to say that "it is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems ... such as tropical savannas."

 

But it has now been revealed that the claim was based on a WWF study titled "Global Review of Forest Fires," a paper barely related to the Amazon rainforest that was written "to secure essential policy reform at national and international level to provide a legislative and economic base for controlling harmful anthropogenic forest fires."

 

EUReferendum, a blog skeptical of global warming, uncovered the WWF association. It noted that the original "40 percent" figure came from a letter published in the journal Nature that discussed harmful logging activities -- and again had nothing to do with global warming.

 

The reference to the Brazilian rainforest can be found in Chapter 13 of the IPCC Working Group II report, the same section of AR4 in which claims are made that the Himalayan glaciers are rapidly melting because of global warming. Last week, the data leading to this claim were disproved as well, a scandal being labeled "glacier-gate" or "Himalaya-gate."

 

The Himalaya controversy followed another tempest -- the disclosure of e-mails that suggested that leading global warming scientists in the U.K. and the U.S. had conspired to hide a decline in global temperatures.

 

"If it is true that IPCC has indeed faked numbers regarding the Amazon, or used unsubstantiated facts, then it is the third nail in the IPCC coffin in less than three months," Andrew Wheeler, former staff director for the U.S. Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, told FoxNews.com. "For years, we have been told that the IPCC peer review process is the gold standard in scientific review. It now appears it is more of a fool's gold process."

 

Wheeler, who is now a senior vice president with B&D Consulting's Energy, Climate and Environment Practice in Washington, said the latest scandal calls into question the "entire underpinnings" of the IPCC's assessment and peer review process.

 

The U.N. did not return calls seeking comment on the scandal.

 

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC, was quoted in the European press as saying, "I would like to submit that this could increase the credibility of the IPCC, not decrease it. Aren't mistakes human? Even the IPCC is a human institution."

 

But not everyone agrees. Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guleph in Ontario, said the U.N. needs to start from scratch on global warming research and make a "full accounting" of how much of its research findings have been "likewise compromised."

 

McKitrick said this is needed because the U.N. acknowledged the inaccuracy of the data only now that its shortcomings have been exposed. "They are admitting what they did only because they were caught," he told FoxNews.com. "The fact that so many IPCC authors kept silent all this time shows how monumental has been the breach of trust."

 

Lubos Motl, a Czech physicist and former Harvard University faculty member, said the deforestation of the Amazon has occurred, but not because of global warming. He said it was due to social and economic reasons, including the clearing of cattle pastures, subsistence agriculture, the building of infrastructure and logging.

 

"Such economically driven changes are surely unattractive for those of us who prefer mysterious and natural forests," says Motl. "But they do help the people who live in Latin America."

 

The rapidly accumulating scandals surrounding climate change research appear to be driving the public away from its support for government measures to intervene. On Wednesday, Yale University and George Mason University released a survey showing that just 57 percent of respondents believe global warming "is happening." That was down 14 percentage points, from 71 percent, in October 2008. Fifty percent of people said they were "very" or "somewhat" worried about global warming, down 13 points from two years ago.

 

Another poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked respondents to rank 21 issues in terms of their priority. Global warming came in last.

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Scientists broke the law by hiding climate change data: But legal loophole means they won't be prosecuted

By DAVID DERBYSHIRE

Last updated at 11:21 PM on 28th January 2010

 

Scientist at the heart of the 'Climategate' email scandal broke the law when they refused to give raw data to the public, the privacy watchdog has ruled.

The Information Commissioner's office said University of East Anglia researchers breached the Freedom of Information Act when handling requests from climate change sceptics.

But the scientists will escape prosecution because the offences took place more than six months ago.

 

The revelation comes after a string of embarrassing blunders and gaffes for climate scientists and will fuel concerns that key researchers are too secretive and too arrogant.

It will pile pressure on the director of the university's climate change unit, Professor Phil Jones, who has stood aside while an investigation is carried out, and make it harder for him to return.

 

The ruling followed a complaint from retired engineer David Holland-66, whose Freedom of Information-requests were ignored.

Last night Mr Holland welcomed the watchdog's decision but said it was disappointing the researchers would not be prosecuted.

'All we are trying to do is make the scientists follow their own professional rules by being open, transparent and honest,' he said. 'We are not trying to show that human beings don't affect the climate, but to show that the science is not settled.'

 

Scientists at the University of East Anglia were encouraged to delete emails concerning claims that man-made emissions were causing global warming

The Climategate row broke in November when hundreds of stolen emails from the world-renowned Climate Research Unit in Norwich were posted online.

 

More...

Top climate change adviser calls for honesty from scientists in global warming debate

Water vapour a 'major cause of global warming and cooling'

The emails appeared to show researchers discussing how to manipulate historical temperature data and dodge requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

 

 

One request came in 2008 from Mr Holland, a grandfather from Northampton and an engineering graduate. He was seeking evidence that scientists had cherry-picked research when preparing the previous year's UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

After the request was received, a message from one academic to another on May 28, 2008, said: 'Oh MAN! Will this c**p never end?' In other emails the researchers complained that the unit was being bombarded with FOI requests from sceptics. And in another, researchers appeared to be encouraging each other to delete emails.

 

After the emails were published, Mr Holland complained to the Information Commissioner's Office. An ICO spokesman yesterday confirmed that the UEA breached the Freedom of Information Act.

He added: 'The emails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland's requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation.'

 

Climate change sceptics welcomed the ruling and called for the Climategate inquiry to be made public. Lord Lawson, head of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said it should also investigate whether the CRU denied opportunities to scientists trying to publish dissenting views.

Last week, the IPCC was forced to apologise after wrongly claiming the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 25 years. Critics have also accused it of exaggerating the risk of tropical storms and hurricanes.

Earlier this week, Britain's chief scientific advisor, Professor John Beddington, called on climate scientists to be more honest about the uncertainties of global warming.

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DiCaprio Gathers Stars for Green Campaign

 

Environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio has gathered stars including Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker and Chace Crawford for an internet campaign in an attempt to change America's policy on pollution and climate change.

 

U.S. senators are set to vote on a piece of legislation called the Clean Energy, Jobs and American Power Act, which aims to cut U.S. reliance on foreign oil supplies, and pump up the use of sustainable energy sources.

 

And DiCaprio has filmed an online video urging the public to lobby politicians in a bid to push the bill through.

 

He has recruited Norton, Whitaker and Crawford, along with Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman, Justin Long and Emmy Rossum, who all address viewers in the short film for the This Is Our Moment campaign.

 

DiCaprio says, "There is a bill in the United States Senate that we need to pay attention to. Everyone as a nation. We're going to be watching all you senators, very closely."

 

The video provides viewers with a web link which they can use to email politicians to register their approval of the bill, as well as instructions how to pass on the message via social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook.

 

Source femalefirst

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Amazongate: new evidence of the IPCC's failures

The IPCC is beginning to melt as global tempers rise, says Christopher Booker

 

By Christopher Booker

Published: 7:12PM GMT 30 Jan 2010

 

The claim in an IPCC report that 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could disappear through global warming turned out to be unfounded.

 

It is now six weeks since I launched an investigation, with my colleague Richard North, into the affairs of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the hugely influential body which for 20 years has been the central driver of worldwide alarm about global warming. Since then the story has grown almost daily, leading to worldwide calls for Dr Pachauri's resignation. But increasingly this has also widened out to question the authority of the IPCC itself. Contrary to the tendentious claim that its reports represent a "consensus of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" (most of its contributors are not climate experts at all), it has now emerged, for instance, that one of the more widely quoted scare stories from its 2007 report was drawn from the work of a British "green activist" who occasionally writes as a freelance for The Guardian and The Independent.

 

Last week I reported on "Glaciergate", the scandal which has forced the IPCC's top officials, led by Dr Pachauri, to disown a claim originating from an Indian glaciologist, Dr Syed Husnain, that the Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035. What has made this reckless claim in the IPCC's 2007 report even more embarrassing was the fact that Dr Husnain, as we revealed, was then employed by Dr Pachauri's own Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). His baseless scaremongering about the Himalayas helped to win Teri a share in two lucrative research contracts, one funded by the EU.

 

The source the IPCC cited as its "scientific" authority for this claim, however (as Dr North first reported on his EU Referendum blog), was a propagandist pamphlet published in 2005 by the WWF, the environmentalist pressure group, citing a magazine interview with Dr Husnain six years earlier.

Dr North next uncovered "Amazongate". The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

 

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

 

Little of this has come as a surprise to those who have studied the workings of the IPCC over the years. As I show in my book The Real Global Warming Disaster, there is no greater misconception about the IPCC than that it was intended to be an impartial body, weighing scientific evidence for and against global warming. It was set up in 1988 by a small group of scientists all firmly committed to the theory of "human-induced climate change", and its chief purpose ever since has been to promote that belief.

The blatant bias of each of its four reports has been pointed out by scientists – notably the rewriting of key passages in its 1995 report after the contributing scientists had approved the final text. This provoked a magisterial blast from Professor Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, who wrote that in all his 60 years as a scientist he had never seen "a more disturbing corruption" of the scientific process, and that if the IPCC was "incapable of following its most basic procedures", it was best it should be "abandoned".

 

The centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report was Michael Mann's notorious "hockey stick", the graph purporting to show temperatures in the late 20th century soaring at an unprecedented rate – later exposed as a statistical artefact. Another new book, The Hockey Stick Illusion by A W Montford, brilliantly tells the bizarre tale of how Mann's colleagues, calling themselves "the Hockey Team" and now at the heart of the IPCC, managed to resurrect the discredited graph for inclusion in its 2007 report. Montford's book, if inevitably technical, expertly recounts a remarkable scientific detective story. And of course, it was incriminating leaked emails between members of the Hockey Team that were at the centre of the recent "Climategate" scandal at the University of East Anglia.

 

Most disturbing of all are the glimpses the story gives of the inner workings of the IPCC, an institution now so discredited and scientifically corrupted that only those determined to shut their eyes could possibly defend it. This is now compounded by the recent revelations by Dr North and myself in these pages of how its chairman, Dr Pachauri, has built a worldwide network of business links which provide his Delhi institute with a sizeable income.

 

It is noticeable how many of those now calling for Dr Pachauri's resignation, led by Professor Andrew Weaver, a senior IPCC insider, are passionate global warming believers. Fearing that Pachauri damages their cause, they want him thrown overboard in the hope of saving the IPCC itself. But it is not just Pachauri who has been holed below the waterline. So has the entire IPCC process. And beyond that – and despite the pleading of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and the BBC that none of this detracts from the evidence for man-made global warming – so has the warmist cause itself. Bereft of scientific or moral authority, the most expensive show the world has ever seen may soon be nearing its end.

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A few random quotes:

 

 

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” Alexander King Co-Founder of the Club of Rome, (premier environmental think-tank and consultants to the United Nations) from his 1991 book The First Global Revolution

 

 

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment.

 

 

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” Timothy Wirth, former US Under Sec of State, current Head of the UN Foundation

 

 

"Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?" President of the Council of the United Nations's University for Peace, Head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and Founder of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC)

 

 

“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

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Climate change emails between scientists reveal flaws in peer review

A close reading of the hacked emails exposes the real process of science, its jealousies and tribalism

 

 

Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.

 

But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.

 

Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN's top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

 

The scientists involved disagree. They say they were engaged not in suppressing dissent but in upholding scientific standards by keeping bad science out of peer-reviewed journals. Either way, when passing judgment on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.

 

The cornerstone of maintaining the quality of scientific papers is the peer review system. Under this, papers submitted to scientific journals are reviewed anonymously by experts in the field. Conducting reviews is seen as part of the job for academics, who are generally not paid for the work.

 

The papers are normally sent back to the authors for improvement and only published when the reviewers give their approval. But the system relies on trust, especially if editors send papers to reviewers whose own work is being criticised in the paper. It also relies on anonymity, so reviewers can give candid opinions.

 

Cracks in the system have been obvious for years. Yesterday it emerged that 14 leading researchers in a different field – stem cell research – have written an open letter to journal editors to highlight their dissatisfaction with the process. They allege that a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.

 

Many will see a similar pattern in the emails from UEA's Climatic Research Unit, which brutally expose what happens behind the scenes of peer review and how a chance meeting at a barbecue years earlier had led to one journal editor being suspected of being in the "greenhouse sceptics camp".

 

The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.

 

Here is how it worked in one case.

 

A key component in the story of 20th-century warming is data from sparse weather stations in Siberia. This huge area appears to have seen exceptional warming of up to 2C in the past century. But in such a remote region, actual data is sparse. So how reliable is that data, and do scientists interpret it correctly?

 

In March 2004, Jones wrote to Professor Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, saying that he had "recently rejected two papers [one for the Journal of Geophysical Research and one for Geophysical Research Letters] from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised".

 

He did not specify which papers he had reviewed, nor what his grounds for rejecting them were. But the Guardian has established that one was probably from Lars Kamel a Swedish astrophysicist formerly of the University of Uppsala. It is the only paper published on the topic in the journal that year.

 

Kamel analysed the temperature records from weather stations in part of southern Siberia, around Lake Baikal. He claimed to find much less warming than Jones, despite analysing much the same data.

 

Kamel told the Guardian: "Siberia is a test case, because it is supposed to be the land area with most warming in the 20th century." The finding sounded important, but his paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) that year.

 

Kamel was leaving academic science and never tried to publish it elsewhere. But the draft seen by the Guardian asserts that the difference between his findings on Siberia temperatures and that of Jones is "probably because the CRU compilation contains too little correction for urban warming." He does not, however, justify that conclusion with any data or analysis.Kamel says he no longer has a copy of the anonymous referee judgments on the paper, so we don't know why it was rejected. The paper could be criticised for being slight and for not revealing details about its methods of analysis. A reviewer such as Jones would certainly have been aware of Kamel's views about mainstream climate research, which he had called "pseudo-science". He would also have known that its publication in a journal like GRL would have attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. Nonetheless, the paper raised important questions about the quality of CRU's Siberian data, and was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones's analysis. On those grounds alone, some would have recommended its publication.

 

Kamel's paper admits the discrepancy "does not necessarily mean the CRU surface record for the entire globe is in error". But it argues that the result suggests it "should be checked in more regions and even globally". Jones was not able to comment on the incident.

 

Critics of Jones such as the prominent sceptical Stephen McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog have long accused him of preventing critical research from having an airing. McIntyre wrote on his web site in December: "CRU's policies of obstructing critical articles in the peer-reviewed literature and withholding data from critics have unfortunately placed issues into play that might otherwise have been settled long ago." He also says obstructing publication undermine claims that all is well in scientific peer review.

Dr Myles Allen, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford and Professor Hans von Storch, a climate scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research, in Geesthacht, Germany signed a joint column in Nature when the email hacking story broke, in which they said that "no grounds have arisen to doubt the validity of the thermometer-based temperature record since it began in about 1850." But that argument is harder to make if such evidence, flawed though it might be, is actively being kept out of the journals.

 

In another email exchange CRU scientist Dr Keith Briffa initiates what looks like an attempt to have a paper rejected. In June 2003, as an editor of an unnamed journal, Briffa emailed fellow tree-ring researcher Edward Cook, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, saying: "Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please."

 

Stahle is a tree-ring professor from the University of Arkansas. This request appears to subvert the convention that reviewers should be both independent and anonymous.

 

Cook replied later that day: "OK, today. Promise. Now, something to ask from you." The favour was to provide some data to help Cook review a paper that attacked his own tree-ring work. "If published as is, this paper could really do some damage," he said. "It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved [inverse regression] method is actually better in a practical sense."

 

Briffa was unable to comment. Cook told the Guardian: "These emails are from a long time ago and the details are not terribly fresh in my mind."

 

Jones did not restrict his harsh criticism of papers he saw as flawed to pre-publication reviews. He and Mann also had a reputation for harsh criticism of journals that published papers they disagreed with.

 

In March 2003, Mann discussed encouraging colleagues to "no longer submit [papers] to, or cite papers in" Climate Research. He was angry about that journal's publication of a series of sceptical papers "that couldn't get published in a reputable journal", according to Mann. His anger at the journal had evidently been building for some time, but was focused in 2003 on a paper published in January that year and written by the Harvard astrophysicists Willie Soon and Sally Balunias. The pair claimed that Mann's famous hockey stick graph of global temperatures over the past 1,000 years was wrong. After analysing 240 studies of past temperatures from tree rings and other sources, they said "the 20th century is neither the warmest century over the last 1,000 years, nor is it the most extreme". It could have been warmer a thousand years before, they suggested.

 

Harvard press-released the paper under the headline "20th century climate not so hot", which would have pleased lobbyists against the climate change consensus from the American Petroleum Institute and George C Marshall Institute, both of which had helped pay for the research. Mann told me at the time the paper was "absurd, almost laughable". He said Soon and Balunias made no attempt in the paper to show whether the warmth they found at different places and times round the world in past eras was contemporaneous in the way current global warming is. If they were just one-off scattered warm events they did not demonstrate any kind of warm era at all. Soon did not respond to Guardian requests to discuss the paper.

 

The emails show Mann debating with others what he should do. In March 2003, he told Jones: "I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted – the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper"

 

But Jones told Mann: "I think the sceptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set [the field of paleoclimate research] back a number of years if it goes unchallenged." He was right. The Soon and Balunias paper was later read into the Senate record and taken up by the Bush administration, which attempted to get it cited in a report from the Environmental Protection Agency against the wishes of the report's authors.

 

Persuaded that the paper could not be ignored, Mann assembled a group of colleagues to review it. The group included regular CRU emailers Jones, Dr Keith Briffa, Dr Tom Wigley and Dr Kevin Trenberth. They sent their findings to the journal's editorial board, arguing that Soon's study was little more than anecdote. It had cherry-picked data showing warm periods in different places over several centuries and had provided no evidence that they demonstrated any overall warming of the kind seen in the 20th century.

 

The emails reveal that when the journal failed to disown the paper, the scientists figured a "coup" had taken place, and that one editor in particular, a New Zealander called Chris de Freitas, was fast-tracking sceptical papers on to its pages. Mann saw an irony in what had happened. "This was the danger of always criticising the sceptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal." But Mann had a solution. "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

 

Was this improper pressure? Bloggers responding to the leaking of these emails believe so. Mann denies wanting to "stifle legitimate sceptical views". He maintains that he merely wanted to uphold scientific standards. "Please understand the context of this," he told the Guardian after the scandal broke. "This was in response to a very specific, particularly egregious incident in which one editor of the journal was ­letting in a paper that clearly did not meet the standards of quality for the journal."

 

Naturally de Freitas defends his actions during the incident. "I was never ever found to have done anything wrong, even in the rumpus over the Soon and Balunias paper. All accusations against me were fully investigated and my performance as editor of this journal was shown to be flawless."

 

But many on the 10-man editorial board agreed with Mann. They concluded that their colleague de Freitas had ignored the anonymous advice of four reviewers to reject the paper. There was a revolt. Their chief editor von Storch wrote an editorial saying the Soon paper shouldn't have appeared because of "severe methodological flaws". After their publisher Otto Kinne refused to publish the editorial, von Storch and four other board members resigned in protest. Subsequently Kinne himself admitted that publication had been an error and promised to strengthen the peer review process. Mann had won his argument.

 

Sceptical climatologist and Cato Institute fellow Pat Michaels alleged in the Wall Street Journal in December last year that the resignations by von Storch and his colleagues were a counter-coup initiated by Mann and Jones. This is vehemently denied by von Storch. While one of the editors who resigned was a colleague of Jones at CRU, von Storch had a track record of independence. If anything, he was regarded as a moderate sceptic. Certainly, he had annoyed both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics.

 

Also writing in the Wall Street Journal in December, he said: "I am in the pocket of neither Exxon nor Greenpeace, and for this I come under fire from both sides – the sceptics and alarmists – who have fiercely opposing views but are otherwise siblings in their methods and contempt ... I left the post [as chief editor of Climate Research] with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper – a sceptic's paper, at that."

 

The bad blood over this paper lingered. A year later, in July 2004, Jones wrote an email to Mann about two papers recently published in Climate Research – the Soon and Balunias paper and another he identified as by "MM". This was almost certainly a paper from the Canadian economist Ross McKitrick and Michaels that returned to an old sceptics' theme. It claimed to find urbanisation dominating global warming trends on land. Jones called it "garbage".

 

More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!"

 

This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for once, it means what it seems to mean. Jones and Trenberth, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, had recently become joint lead authors for a key chapter in the next IPCC assessment report, called AR4.

 

They had considerable power over what went into those chapters, and to have ruled them out in such a manner would have been a clear abuse of the IPCC process.

 

Today, neither man attempts to deny that Jones's promise to keep the papers out was a serious error of judgment. Trenberth told the Guardian: "I had no role in this whatsoever. I did not make and was not complicit in that statement of Phil's. I am a veteran of three other IPCC assessments. I am well aware that we do not keep any papers out, and none were kept out. We assessed everything [though] we cannot possibly refer to all literature … Both of the papers referred to were in fact cited and discussed in the IPCC."

 

In an additional statement agreed with Jones, he said: "AR4 was the first time Jones was on the writing team of an IPCC assessment. The comment was naive and sent before he understood the process."

 

Some will not be content with that. Jones had been a contributing author to IPCC assessment reports for more than a decade and should have been aware of the rules.

 

Climate Research is a fairly minor journal. Not so Geophysical Research Letters, published by the august American Geophysical Union (AGU). But when it began publishing what Mann, Wigley, Jones and others regarded as poor quality sceptical papers, they again responded angrily. GRL provided a home for one of a series of papers by McIntyre and McKitrick challenging the statistical methods used in the hockey stick analysis. When Mann's complaints to the journal were rebuffed, he wrote to colleagues in January 2005: "Apparently the contrarians now have an 'in' with GRL."

 

Mann had checked out the editor responsible for overseeingthe papers . a Yale chemical engineer called James Saiers, and noted his "prior connection" with the same department at the University of Virginia, where sceptic Pat Michaels worked.

 

He added, "we now know" how various other sceptically tinged papers had got into GRL.

 

Wigley appeared to agree. "This is truly awful," he said, suggesting to Mann: "If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted."

 

A year after the row erupted, in 2006, Saiers gave up the GRL post.Sceptics have claimed that this was due to pressure from Wigley, Mann and others. Saiers says his three-year term was up. "My departure had nothing to do with attempts by Wigley or anyone else to have me sacked," he told the Guardian. "Nor was I censured, as I have seen suggested on a blog posting written by McKitrick."

 

As for Mann's allegation, Saiers does not remember ever talking to Michaels "though I did attend a barbecue at his home back in the early 1990s. Wigley and Mann were too keen to conclude that I was in league with the climate-change sceptics. This kerfuffle could have been avoided if the parties involved would have done more to control their imaginations".

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How climate-change fanatics corrupted science

By: MICHAEL BARONE

Senior Political Analyst

February 3, 2010

 

Quick, name the most distrusted occupations. Trial lawyers? Pretty scuzzy, as witness the disgraced John Edwards, kept from the vice presidency in 2004 by the electoral votes of Ohio. Used car dealers? Always near the bottom of the list, as witness the universal understanding of the word "clunker."

 

But over the last three months a new profession has moved smartly up the list and threatens to overtake all. Climate scientist.

 

First came the Climategate e-mails made public in November that showed how top-level climate scientists distorted research, plotted to destroy data and conspired to prevent publication of dissenting views. The British government concluded last week that the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit violated the nation's freedom of information act, although the violations occurred too long ago for prosecution.

 

The CRU has been a major source of data for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which for 20 years has issued alarms about supposed global warming. The e-mails conclusively establish the intellectual dishonesty of the climate scientists at the CRU and their co-conspirators.

 

Recently there have been even more shocking revelations. The IPCC has claimed that warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. It turns out that that claim was based solely on a pamphlet published by the World Wildlife Federation, based on no science at all. The head of the IPCC was informed that a 1996 report said those glaciers could melt significantly by 2350, not 2035, but he let the claim stand.

 

As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph of London, "A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviews WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority." Similarly, the Times of London reports that a claim that warming could endanger "up to 40 percent" of the Amazon rain forest came from an anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis whatever.

 

"The global warming movement as we have known it is dead," writes Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations in The American Interest. "The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics."

 

Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence. And taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty and dissembling.

 

There was some basis for concern. If carbon dioxide emissions were the only factor affecting global climate, it is clear that increased emissions would tend to produce warmer temperatures over time. Those temperatures could create problems that rational societies would want to address.

 

But carbon dioxide emissions are not the only factor affecting global climate. Solar activity and water evaporation and countless other things do too. Climate scientists do not fully understand those things, and how they interact. It is rational for society to want to learn more.

 

Unfortunately, the cadre of climate scientists who have dominated public discussion and have controlled the IPCC have been demonstrated to be far, far less than trustworthy. Like the theorists who invented epicycles to explain away the failure of Ptolemaic theory to account for astronomical observations, they have distorted science in the interest of something that resembles religious dogma.

 

The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics (global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).

 

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever flimsy source may be at hand.

 

The rest of us, and judging from polls that includes most of the American people, are free to follow a more rational path. In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama alluded to "the overwhelming evidence on climate change." But he felt obliged to add, "even if you doubt the evidence" -- an admission that the evidence is less than overwhelming. On a par with, it seems, the claims of trial lawyers and the assurances of used car salesmen.

 

Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

[Zvan Disy 0]

Over a period of 10.000 years you will find hot climate and cold climate changes, this is the Nature

[MC 1]

DUH!

 

Source.

 

February 14, 2010

World may not be warming, say scientists

Jonathan Leake

 

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

 

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

 

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

 

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

 

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

 

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

 

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

 

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

 

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

 

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

 

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.

 

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.

 

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.

 

Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

 

Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.

 

In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.

 

“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.

 

Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report.

 

“It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,” he said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.”

 

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.

 

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.

 

** Just so you know, the keepers of the raw data (in East Anglia) destroyed the raw data. So nobody has any "thermometer readings" from the past 30 years. Plus, the satellite data was calibrated using the phony data from East Anglia. It's incredible to me that there are some people who just can't let go of the cult of "global warming" aka "global climate change."

Edited February 14, 2010 by MC

[MC 1]

He's desperate to save his reputation. Sad.

 

 

Source.

 

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

By JONATHAN PETRE

Last updated at 5:12 PM on 14th February 2010

 

 

* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing

* There has been no global warming since 1995

* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

 

Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'

 

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

 

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

 

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

 

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

 

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

 

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

 

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

 

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.

 

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

 

Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.

 

Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.

 

Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.

 

That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

 

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.

 

Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.

 

But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.

 

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

 

‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

 

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

 

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

 

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

 

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

 

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

 

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

 

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

 

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

 

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

 

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

 

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.

 

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

 

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

 

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

[MC 1]

I wonder if Eric Holder will do this?

 

Source.

 

Climategate Meets the Law: Senator Inhofe To Ask for DOJ Investigation

 

Inhofe intends to ask for a probe of the embattled climate scientists for possible criminal acts. And he thinks Gore should be recalled to explain his prior congressional testimony.

 

 

February 23, 2010 - by Charlie MartinPage 1 of 2 Next -> View as Single Page

 

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate Files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

 

Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify.

 

“In [Gore's] science fiction movie, every assertion has been rebutted,” Inhofe said. He believes Vice President Gore should defend himself and his movie before Congress.

 

Just prior to a hearing at 10:00 a.m. EST, Senator Inhofe released a minority staff report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which he is ranking member. Senator Inhofe is asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether there has been research misconduct or criminal actions by the scientists involved, including Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. James Hansen of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science.

 

This report, obtained exclusively by Pajamas Media before today’s hearing, alleges:

 

[The] Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works believe the scientists involved may have violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, federal laws. In addition to these findings, we believe the emails and accompanying documents seriously compromise the IPCC -backed “consensus” and its central conclusion that anthropogenic emissions are inexorably leading to environmental catastrophes.

 

As has been reported here at Pajamas Media over the last several months, the exposure of the Climategate Files has led to a re-examination of the IPCC Assessment Reports, especially the fourth report (AR4), published in 2007. The IPCC AR4 report was named by Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson as one of the major sources of scientific support for the agency’s Endangerment Finding, the first step towards allowing the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

 

Since the Climategate Files were released, the IPCC has been forced to retract a number of specific conclusions — such as a prediction that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 — and has been forced to confirm that the report was based in large part on reports from environmental activist groups instead of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Dr. Murari Lal, an editor of the IPCC AR4 report, admitted to the London Daily Mail that he had known the 2035 date was false, but was included in the report anyway “purely to put political pressure on world leaders.”

 

Based on this Minority Staff report, Senator Inhofe will be calling for an investigation into potential research misconduct and possible criminal acts by the researchers involved. At the same time, Inhofe will ask the Environmental Protection Agency to reopen its consideration of an Endangerment Finding for carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Federal Clean Air Act, and will ask Congress to withdraw funding for further consideration of carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

 

In requesting that the EPA reopen the Endangerment Finding, Inhofe joins with firms such as the Peabody Energy Company and several state Attorneys General (such as Texas and Virginia) in objecting to the Obama administration’s attempt to extend regulatory control over carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. Senator Inhofe believes this staff report “strengthens the case” for the Texas and Virginia Attorneys General.

 

Senator Inhofe’s announcement today appears to be the first time a member of Congress has formally called for an investigation into research misconduct and potential criminal acts by the scientists involved.

 

The staff report describes four major issues revealed by the Climategate Files and the subsequent revelations:

 

The emails suggest some climate scientists were cooperating to obstruct the release of damaging information and counter-evidence.

They suggest scientists were manipulating the data to reach predetermined conclusions.

They show some climate scientists colluding to pressure journal editors not to publish work questioning the “consensus.”

They show that scientists involved in the report were assuming the role of climate activists attempting to influence public opinion while claiming scientific objectivity.

The report notes a number of potential legal issues raised by their Climategate investigation:

 

It suggests scientific misconduct that may violate the Shelby Amendment — requiring open access to the results of government-funded research — and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) policies on scientific misconduct (which were announced December 12, 2000).

It notes the potential for violations of the Federal False Statements and False Claims Acts, which may have both civil and criminal penalties.

The report also notes the possibility of there having been an obstruction of Congress in Congressional Proceeds, which may constitute an obstruction of justice.

If proven, these charges could subject the scientists involved to debarment from federally funded research, and even to criminal penalties.

 

By naming potential criminal offenses, Senator Inhofe raises the stakes for climate scientists and others involved. Dr. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has already been forced to step aside because of the Climategate FOIA issues, and Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State is currently under investigation by the university for potential misconduct. Adding possible criminal charges to the mix increases the possibility that some of the people involved may choose to blow the whistle in order to protect themselves.

 

Senator Inhofe believes that Dr. Hansen and Dr. Mann should be “let go” from their posts “for the good of the institutions involved.”

 

The question, of course, is whether the Senate Democratic majority will allow this investigation to proceed, in the face of the Obama administration’s stated intention to regulate CO2 following the apparent death of cap and trade legislation. The Democratic majority has blocked previous attempts by Inhofe to investigate issues with climate science.

 

For more of PJM’s most recent Climategate coverage, read Charlie Martin’s “Climategate: The World’s Biggest Story, Everywhere but Here“.

[MC 1]

Cap and Tax is back! So this obviously isn't about climate change caused by C02 emissions, as anyone who reads knows that that myth has been debunked. So now it's about control and how the Feds can make money off of us, and control what we drive, how we light, how we heat, and when. This is the first step. I hope it goes down in flames, but after how the Chicago thugs got the votes for healthcare... anything is possible.

 

Source.

 

US Senate climate bill to be unveiled April 26

15 Apr 2010 22:04:19 GMT

Source: Reuters

* Backers hope for Senate vote in June or July

* Measure could affect states' climate control activities (Adds reaction from American Petroleum Institute)

By Richard Cowan

 

WASHINGTON, April 15 (Reuters) - A long-awaited compromise bill to reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming will be unveiled by a group of senators on April 26, sources said on Thursday.

The legislative language to be sketched out in 11 days, according to government and environmental sources, is being drafted by Democratic Senator John Kerry, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and independent Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Backers of the environmental bill hope the unveiling will pave the way for the full Senate to debate and pass a measure in June or July if the compromise attracts enough support from a group of moderate Republicans and Democrats.

 

Republican Senator Judd Gregg told Reuters he was "committed to getting something that addresses our energy needs in a constructive and comprehensive way." He added he did not know yet whether he would support the bill being developed.

President Barack Obama has made climate change one of his top priorities and took steps recently to show Republicans he was serious, including expanding federal aid for building nuclear power facilities and allowing more domestic offshore oil drilling -- initiatives to be included in the Senate compromise.

 

The White House is also eager to show the rest of the world the United States is ready to take a leadership role on global warming, including to help kick-start stalled international efforts to tackle the problem.

Despite vocal climate change skeptics in the United States, leading scientific groups have been hoping the United States, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China, would take action.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on Thursday the world's combined land and ocean surface temperatures in March were the hottest on record.

 

Once the senators formally sketch out their bill, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid will decide the next steps in a year crowded with competing legislative priorities and congressional elections in November.

The bill could face stiff opposition from lawmakers in states with economies heavily dependent on oil and coal.

 

Lou Hayden, a policy expert at the American Petroleum Institute, said his group would not support the bill unless it went through an economic analysis by the Energy Information Administration, an independent arm of the Energy Department.

The bill is already slated to be analyzed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Congressional Budget Office, which could take more than a month.

 

BILL MIGHT END STATE/REGIONAL CARBON TRADE PROGRAMS

 

Kerry, Lieberman and Graham have been working for months on a global warming compromise significantly different from a measure passed last year by the House of Representatives and a bill approved by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It also takes many elements from those bills.

 

Like the House-passed bill and Obama administration policy, it would set a target of 17 percent reductions in smokestack emissions of carbon dioxide by 2020, from 2005 levels.

 

Point Carbon, an energy markets consulting service, estimated the anticipated Senate bill would result in U.S. gasoline prices rising an average of 27 cents a gallon from 2013 to 2020. The bill is expected to contain a fee on motor fuels.

On Wednesday, a Senate source told Reuters the legislation would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide emissions. It would also end state and regional carbon-trading programs, such as the one several Northeastern states participate in, to be replaced by a national carbon reduction policy. [N14150360]

 

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, with 10 participating states from Vermont to Maryland, has raised over $582 million for state efficiency and climate programs, said Environment Northeast, a Boston research group.

Peter Shattuck, a carbon markets policy analyst there, said shutting the program could create concerns among the states over lost revenues.

 

A group of nine senators, mostly from Midwestern manufacturing states, urged Kerry, Graham and Lieberman in a letter on Thursday to take into account jobs in their states.

"Without such a plan, we are concerned that the legislation will ultimately be unsuccessful," Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and others wrote. (Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington and Ros Krasny in Boston; Editing by Peter Cooney)

[Hihomumio 168]

Just knew this was coming around again I'm completely against it because I don't believe the push has anything at all to do with "saving the planet", it's all about the money to be made from all of us over this business and pretending otherwise is bs.