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Kevin Libin: You'll just have to take our word on the global warming stuff

Posted: August 18, 2009, 8:30 AM by Kevin Libin

 

 

Though a striking number of prominent scientists have recently recanted their initial belief in manmade global warming, joining an already robust community of distinguished skeptics, those who continue to advance the theory could be their own worst enemy. Whatever the truth is about anthropogenic climate change — the contention that carbon dioxide emitted by human industrial activity — the tendency among some climate-change believers to embellish the effects of planetary warming has only served to undermine their credibility in the eyes of the public and, less so, the media.

 

For years, global warming advocates held up every calving ice shelf, failed crop or natural disaster as proof of a dawning warming apocalypse; whether it was too much rain, or not enough — either way, it was abnormal, and the fault of Big Oil and anyone questioning that, labeled a “denier.” As Vicky Pope, a senior British climatologist, citing overblown claims of rapid melting of arctic sea ice, and the ice sheet around Greenland, bemoaned earlier this year, for scientists, “overplaying natural variations in the weather as climate change is just as much a distortion of the science as underplaying them to claim that climate change has stopped or is not happening.”

 

But probably nothing could damage the credibility of climate change believers than the recent revelation by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that it has lost or destroyed all the original data used to construct historic global temperature records. The CRU, at the University of East Anglia in the UK, which has been using information collected from weather stations across the globe for decades, is probably the most widely cited source worldwide for those mounting a case that the earth has exhibited an inexorable warming trend: its website boasts that CRU’s research has “set the agenda for the major research effort in, and political preoccupation with, climate research.” The critical raw climate data responsible, which scientists of all climate-creeds have a natural interest in, is now gone, apparently, forever. With the exception of a handful of countries that the CRU has agreements with to sell its data, all that remains for the bulk of the statistics are “value added” versions, which is to say, consolidated, homogenized data. Actually, the CRU says it doesn’t even have all the data for countries it has data-sharing agreements with. “We know that there were others, but cannot locate them, possibly as we've moved offices several times during the 1980s,” the CRU writes in a rather embarrassing explanation for all this posted on its website.

 

The Unit makes this admission now, coincidentally, as it faced a flurry of requests, under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act, to make available its data to interested researchers. The CRU, it seems, had not been much in a sharing mood prior to that. UK's register reports that Professor Phil Jones, the fellow in charge of maintaining the CRU data set, told an Australian researcher a few years back that he refused to publicly share his statistics. “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” The idea that scientific progress rests completely on the constant testing and retesting, verifying and refuting, of studies, seems not to be shared by Mr. Jones, even though this particular data set had massive implications for policymaking in pretty well every country on the planet. Unfortunately for him, as part of a publicly managed and funded organization, his group was nonetheless subject to transparency laws, and so, when researchers sought to shake the data loose without his consent, it had mysteriously vanished. “We have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value,” they explained in coming up dry for the FOI requests. As Stephen McIntyre, the Canadian economist famous for his addiction to poring through volumes of mind-numbing climate statistics, and occasionally finding errors (as he did, with Ross McKitrick, in deconstructing and undermining the famous “hockey stick” graph), writes on his Climate Audit blog here, it appears that the impoverished CRU even lacked filing cabinets in which to store its records.

 

With access only to “homogenized” consolidated data, there is no way for researchers — skeptical or believers — to verify or refute the original statistics or calculations behind the CRU’s widely relied-upon weather information. The data could be accurate, or not. It could be that temperatures haven’t been warming at the rate the CRU claims, or it could be that they’re warming faster, perhaps arguing for an even direr situation for the planet. Nor can the raw data be run through different modeling programs in order to corroborate conclusions, or question them. The science is permanently frozen into the CRU’s original grid, and we are, evidently, forced to assume everything is perfectly accurate, a relatively rare thing in complex statistical calculations compiled over decades.

 

Which is why Mr. McIntyre (who has also found evidence that could, maybe, suggest that the CRU has been deleting important data files from its servers) isn’t the only one incredulous and indignant over the CRU’s missing records. Roger Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado Center for Science and Technology Policy Research is a firm believer in global warming. But even he calls this a “big” “misstep,” writing on his blog that “just because climate change is important and because there are opponents to action that will seize upon whatever they can to make their arguments, does not justify overlooking or defending this degree of scientific sloppiness and ineptitude.” Scientists of all climate creeds know that access to basic data is critical to keeping research credible. Of course, the CRU is only one of a couple key organizations whose research based on historical weather data is used to support global warming theory. Given that the Unit has admitted now that it cannot fully substantiate its work, it raises the uncomfortable question of whether CRU’s historic climate research should be used any longer at all.

 

National Post

 

 

Gee, now what am I supposed to think about them losing that data???? :rolleyes: Maybe it doesn't really hold up to close scrutiny??

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Kevin Libin: You'll just have to take our word on the global warming stuff

Posted: August 18, 2009, 8:30 AM by Kevin Libin

 

 

Though a striking number of prominent scientists have recently recanted their initial belief in manmade global warming, joining an already robust community of distinguished skeptics, those who continue to advance the theory could be their own worst enemy. Whatever the truth is about anthropogenic climate change — the contention that carbon dioxide emitted by human industrial activity — the tendency among some climate-change believers to embellish the effects of planetary warming has only served to undermine their credibility in the eyes of the public and, less so, the media.

 

For years, global warming advocates held up every calving ice shelf, failed crop or natural disaster as proof of a dawning warming apocalypse; whether it was too much rain, or not enough — either way, it was abnormal, and the fault of Big Oil and anyone questioning that, labeled a “denier.” As Vicky Pope, a senior British climatologist, citing overblown claims of rapid melting of arctic sea ice, and the ice sheet around Greenland, bemoaned earlier this year, for scientists, “overplaying natural variations in the weather as climate change is just as much a distortion of the science as underplaying them to claim that climate change has stopped or is not happening.”

 

But probably nothing could damage the credibility of climate change believers than the recent revelation by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that it has lost or destroyed all the original data used to construct historic global temperature records. The CRU, at the University of East Anglia in the UK, which has been using information collected from weather stations across the globe for decades, is probably the most widely cited source worldwide for those mounting a case that the earth has exhibited an inexorable warming trend: its website boasts that CRU’s research has “set the agenda for the major research effort in, and political preoccupation with, climate research.” The critical raw climate data responsible, which scientists of all climate-creeds have a natural interest in, is now gone, apparently, forever. With the exception of a handful of countries that the CRU has agreements with to sell its data, all that remains for the bulk of the statistics are “value added” versions, which is to say, consolidated, homogenized data. Actually, the CRU says it doesn’t even have all the data for countries it has data-sharing agreements with. “We know that there were others, but cannot locate them, possibly as we've moved offices several times during the 1980s,” the CRU writes in a rather embarrassing explanation for all this posted on its website.

 

The Unit makes this admission now, coincidentally, as it faced a flurry of requests, under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act, to make available its data to interested researchers. The CRU, it seems, had not been much in a sharing mood prior to that. UK's register reports that Professor Phil Jones, the fellow in charge of maintaining the CRU data set, told an Australian researcher a few years back that he refused to publicly share his statistics. “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” The idea that scientific progress rests completely on the constant testing and retesting, verifying and refuting, of studies, seems not to be shared by Mr. Jones, even though this particular data set had massive implications for policymaking in pretty well every country on the planet. Unfortunately for him, as part of a publicly managed and funded organization, his group was nonetheless subject to transparency laws, and so, when researchers sought to shake the data loose without his consent, it had mysteriously vanished. “We have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value,” they explained in coming up dry for the FOI requests. As Stephen McIntyre, the Canadian economist famous for his addiction to poring through volumes of mind-numbing climate statistics, and occasionally finding errors (as he did, with Ross McKitrick, in deconstructing and undermining the famous “hockey stick” graph), writes on his Climate Audit blog here, it appears that the impoverished CRU even lacked filing cabinets in which to store its records.

 

With access only to “homogenized” consolidated data, there is no way for researchers — skeptical or believers — to verify or refute the original statistics or calculations behind the CRU’s widely relied-upon weather information. The data could be accurate, or not. It could be that temperatures haven’t been warming at the rate the CRU claims, or it could be that they’re warming faster, perhaps arguing for an even direr situation for the planet. Nor can the raw data be run through different modeling programs in order to corroborate conclusions, or question them. The science is permanently frozen into the CRU’s original grid, and we are, evidently, forced to assume everything is perfectly accurate, a relatively rare thing in complex statistical calculations compiled over decades.

 

Which is why Mr. McIntyre (who has also found evidence that could, maybe, suggest that the CRU has been deleting important data files from its servers) isn’t the only one incredulous and indignant over the CRU’s missing records. Roger Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado Center for Science and Technology Policy Research is a firm believer in global warming. But even he calls this a “big” “misstep,” writing on his blog that “just because climate change is important and because there are opponents to action that will seize upon whatever they can to make their arguments, does not justify overlooking or defending this degree of scientific sloppiness and ineptitude.” Scientists of all climate creeds know that access to basic data is critical to keeping research credible. Of course, the CRU is only one of a couple key organizations whose research based on historical weather data is used to support global warming theory. Given that the Unit has admitted now that it cannot fully substantiate its work, it raises the uncomfortable question of whether CRU’s historic climate research should be used any longer at all.

 

National Post

 

 

Gee, now what am I supposed to think about them losing that data???? :rolleyes: Maybe it doesn't really hold up to close scrutiny??

WOW! In this day and age, with such important data, it hasn't been transferred to their research computers? Something's rotten in... East Anglia!

Of course it doesn't hold up to scrutiny and if they destroyed it (which I doubt), then it's because it absolutely does not prove Gore's theories and would totally disrupt the whole "sky is falling" industry.

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http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/...ctic-melts.html

 

Tears in my ice over Arctic

By BEN JACKSON

Environment Editor

 

Published: Today

 

Posted Image

 

THIS sad face, eerily etched into melting Arctic ice, has been dubbed Mother Nature in Tears by astonished environment experts.

The weeping image was "sculpted" by water pouring from a glacier retreating under the effects of global warming.

 

Lecturer Michael Nolan captured the photo at Norway's Austfonna ice-shelf. The glacier has been vanishing at the rate of 160ft a year for 12 years.

 

Michael, from Arizona, US, regularly visits the area. He said: "Every summer there is less ice. I was struck by this image of a face - a saddened, motherly face, crying about our inability to reduce global warming."

 

b.jackson@the-sun.co.uk

Edited by schumibabe

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Will someone please have a scientist call him? He clearly hasn't been keeping up with things!

 

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Obama Says U.S. 'Determined' to Combat Climate Change, Despite Senate Delay

A failure to address climate change could create an "irreversible catastrophe," President Obama warns in a speech at the United Nations.

 

FOXNews.com

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

 

 

 

President Obama promised the United Nations Tuesday that his administration is "determined" to do more to address the nation's climate change obligations.

 

But left out of the speech to the General Assembly special session on climate change was the political reality the president faces in trying to keep that promise.

 

While the House passed a sweeping climate change bill this year, it has stalled in the Senate as health care reform dominates the domestic agenda.

 

Yet Obama asserted Tuesday that, while the United States was slow to respond to the global warming threat, his administration is doing more to combat climate change than any in history.

 

He touted progress that has been made during his term, including new standards for fuel efficiency in automobiles and the House version of the so-called cap-and-trade bill -- which he called the most important part of U.S. efforts.

 

"We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act. And we will meet our responsibility to future generations," he said.

 

Obama warned that a failure to address the problem could create an "irreversible catastrophe." Obama said time is "running out" to fix the problem but that, "we can reverse it."

 

That wasn't nearly enough to blunt the criticism directed at the United States by European and Asian leaders. (Wait a minute. What's CHINA doing?)

 

He was immediately followed on stage by Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, who criticized the West for "complacency and broken promises" on climate change.

 

Former President George W. Bush rejected the 1997 Kyoto Protocol for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in part because major developing nations like China and India were left out.

 

Now the United States is being held up as an excuse by those very countries, who question why they should make strict commitments if the United States is not doing enough. (Just a stall tactic, they won't comply even if we do!)

 

John Bruton, head of the European Union delegation in Washington, also issued a statement ahead of Obama's speech blasting the U.S. Senate.

 

"I submit that asking an international conference to sit around looking out the window for months, while one chamber of the legislature of one country deals with its other business, is simply not a realistic political position," he said.

 

The U.S. House bill passed earlier in the year would set the United States' first federal mandatory limits on greenhouse gases. Factories, power plants and other sources would be required to cut emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and by 83 percent by mid-century.

 

It's unclear how long Obama has to harness the Democratic majorities in Congress to push through domestic priorities like climate change legislation. Many forecasters predict Democrats will lose congressional seats in 2010, making it all the more pressing for the Senate to make progress soon.

 

Even if the Senate passes its own version, the differences will have to be reconciled before a bill heads to the president's desk.

 

But Obama maintained confidence Tuesday that the United States will act and put added pressure on developing nations to do the same.

 

"Yes, the developed nations that caused much of the damage to our climate over the last century still have a responsibility to lead, and that includes the United States. And we will continue to do so -- by investing in renewable energy, promoting greater efficiency, and slashing our emissions to reach the targets we set for 2020 and our long-term goal for 2050," Obama said. "But those rapidly-growing developing nations that will produce nearly all the growth in global carbon emissions in the decades ahead must do their part as well.

 

"They will need to commit to strong measures at home and agree to stand behind those commitments just as the developed nations must stand behind their own. We cannot meet this challenge unless all the largest emitters of greenhouse gas pollution act together," he said, adding that wealthy nations have a responsibility to help developing nations financially to make the changes. (China considers themselves a "developing nation", as does India, which is why they were left out of the yoto agreement. Are we going to give them financial aid for this?)

 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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SEPTEMBER 21, 2009, 4:02 PM ET

Steven Chu: Americans Are Like ‘Teenage Kids’ When It Comes to Energy

 

By Ian Talley

 

This post was updated Monday evening.

 

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees Americans as unruly teenagers and the Administration as the parent that will have to teach them a few lessons.

 

 

Energy Secretary Chu: A teaching moment (AP)

Speaking on the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington, Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

 

“The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” Dr. Chu said. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” (In that case, the Energy Department has a few renegade teens of its own.)

 

The administration aims to teach them—literally. The Environmental Protection Agency is focusing on real children. Partnering with the Parent Teacher Organization, the agency earlier this month launched a cross-country tour of 6,000 schools to teach students about climate change and energy efficiency.

 

“We’re showing people across the country how energy efficiency can be part of what they do every day,” said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. “Confronting climate change, saving money on our utility bills, and reducing our use of heavily-polluting energy can be as easy as making a few small changes.”

 

Still, Secretary Chu said he didn’t think that the public would throw the same political temper tantrum over climate legislation has has happened with the healthcare debate.

Asked if he expected a town-hall style pushback, Dr. Chu said he was optimistic the public would buy the administration’s arguments that energy efficiency and caps on greenhouse-gas emissions will spark an economic rebound.

What is this guy smoking?

 

“I don’t think so…maybe I’m optimistic, but there’s very little debate” that a new green energy economy will bring economic prosperity, Mr. Chu told reporters.

 

Don’t look now, but there’s actually quite a lot of debate as to the economic merits of the new green-energy economy. Whether that will spell a healthcare-style revolt against the energy and climate bill stewing in the Senate is another question.

 

An update: Energy Department spokesman Dan Leistikow added: “Secretary Chu was not comparing the public to teenagers. He was saying that we need to educate teenagers about ways to save energy. He also recognized the need to educate the broader public about how important clean energy industries are to our competitive position in the global economy. He believes public officials do have an obligation to make their case to the American people on major legislation, and that’s what he’s doing.” No, we can read. He WAS comparing the American Public to teenagers in regards to how we act! Shame on him. Who made him our judge?

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U.N. climate meeting was propaganda: Czech president

Tue Sep 22, 2009 6:28pm EDT

Featured Broker sponsored link

 

By Louis Charbonneau

 

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Czech President Vaclav Klaus sharply criticized a U.N. meeting on climate change on Tuesday at which U.S. President Barack Obama was among the top speakers, describing it as propagandistic and undignified.

 

"It was sad and it was frustrating," said Klaus, one of the world's most vocal skeptics on the topic of global warming.

 

"It's a propagandistic exercise where 13-year-old girls from some far-away country perform a pre-rehearsed poem," he said. "It's simply not dignified."

 

At the opening of the summit attended by nearly 100 world leaders, 13-year-old Yugratna Srivastava of India told the audience that governments were not doing enough to combat the threat of climate change.

 

Klaus said there were increasing doubts in the scientific community about whether humans are causing changes in the climate or whether the changes are simply naturally occurring phenomena.

 

But politicians, he said, seem to be moving closer to a consensus on climate change.

 

"The train can't be stopped and I consider that a huge mistake," Klaus said.

 

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon organized the climate summit to help create momentum before a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen in December to reach agreement on new targets for reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions.

 

However, new proposals by China and a rallying cry from U.S. President Barack Obama did little to break a U.N. deadlock about what should be done.

 

Klaus published a book in 2007 on the worldwide campaign to stop climate change entitled "Blue Planet in Green Chains: What Is Under Threat -- Climate or Freedom?"

 

In the book, Klaus said global warming has turned into a new religion, an ideology that threatens to undermine freedom and the world's economic and social order.

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Enviros Use ACORN Tactics and Attack the Journalist (Literally)

by Phelim McAleer

 

It really is a great time to be an independent journalist/filmmaker.

With the mainstream media devoting to trying to turn policy differences into racism it leaves the task of asking hard questions to people in power open to the rest of us

Inspired by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles who have shone an uncomfortable light on Acorn by asking obvious questions and by simply letting people answer I decided to cover the New York premiere of “The Age of Stupid” – a documentary that claims the human race will be extinct by 2055 because of Climate Change.

 

 

Much of the “Age Of Stupid” is spent attacking those in the developing world who want our lives and lifestyles. The documentary is particularly critical of those in countries such as India who want to fly more for business or pleasure.

The documentary is quite clear that flying in aeroplanes is disastrous for the planet. “Apart from setting fire to a forest flying is the single worst thing an individual can do to cause climate change,” we are told.

 

So after applying for and being given press accreditation by their publicists I decided to find out whether the film makers and their celebrity supporters have stopped or even reduced their flying hours.

Or is it only the people of the developing world who must fly less while environmentalists continue with their luxuries because their campaigning is so important it has to continue.

 

I had been told that Franny Armstrong “The Age of Stupid’s” director, had been careful whilst making the film but has been on a massive flying binge promoting the documentary. Then there were the rest of the celebrity supporters such as Kofi Annan, the head of the UN, Mary Robinson, the former Irish President, actresses Gillian Anderson and Heather Graham and Moby who is apparently a famous DJ.

Are they making the sacrifices they demand be enforced on the people of the developing world?

 

Unfortunately there seems to be one thing environmentalists dislike more than flying and that is hard questions about their own flying habits.

After a few questions which revealed that none of those at the premiere had the slightest intention of living up to the standards they demand of others the film makers decided they didn’t want to be accountable. Along with their security guards they manhandled me and and forced me of the press deck despite having given me accreditation to be there.

 

I didn’t realise press accreditation now comes with provisos that you are not allowed to ask awkward questions of environmental activists and their celebrity supporters.

They then used their security team to block my camera.

 

There were lots of other press at the premiere but they didn’t seem interested in seeing if environmentalists even tried to live up to the standards they demand of some of the poorest people on the planet.

They didn’t even seem interested in covering the obvious expulsion of another reporter for asking difficult questions.

 

And they wonder why no one is watching their TV news or buying their newspapers.

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What happened to global warming?

 

By Paul Hudson

Climate correspondent, BBC News

 

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

 

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

 

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

 

So what on Earth is going on?

 

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

 

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

 

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

 

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

 

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

 

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

 

And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

 

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

 

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

 

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

 

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

 

Ocean cycles

 

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores.

 

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

 

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

 

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

 

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

 

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

 

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

 

Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

 

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

 

They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.

 

But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.

 

The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

 

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models.

 

In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

 

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

 

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

 

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers.

 

But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

 

So what can we expect in the next few years?

 

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

 

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

 

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.

 

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

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Great article, Tuba Girl. I was just coming here to post that.

 

Check this out:

 

Unfortunately for him, he looks very nervous and when he couldn't/wouldn't answer the question, they cut off the microphone of the questioner.

 

Nice to see that journalists are silenced to make the politicians look good.

 

I do like what the journalist said, "Treat big environment like you treat big politics, big government or big business. Where is the money coming from? Who is channelling it? Is this reported? Where is the independent verification of those claims?"

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October 22, 2009

Poll finds nearly 2 in 3 Americans are Manmade Global Warming 'Deniers'

Marc Sheppard

 

According to a Pew Research Poll released today, the number of Americans believing there to be “solid evidence that the earth is warming” has dropped 14% since last year. And the biggest drop – 22% -- was among those identifying themselves as independents.

 

And while 57% are still buying into the continuing warming hype, the number attributing the warming to human activity has dropped from 47% to 36%. What’s more, the number seeing global warming as a “very serious” problem is down 9 points to 35%.

 

These latest results would suggest that messages of continued scientific debate and flat or falling temperatures in the past 11 years are indeed being heard, despite a strident media campaign to silence them.

 

Only 46 days to go before climate alarmists from all over the planet are off on the road to Copenhagen, where they’ll attempt to finalize a treaty intended to control how the entire world produces and consumes energy.

 

But it appears that the de facto treaty leaders from the U.S. will not only arrive at the summit without an American climate bill with which to demonstrate their leadership, but also without the support of almost two thirds of the citizens they represent back home.

 

And happily, that doesn’t bode well for the energy governance threat, be it domestic or foreign.

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Source: NEW YORK TIMES!

 

Gore’s Dual Role: Advocate and Investor

 

By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: November 2, 2009

 

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore thought he had spotted a winner last year when a small California firm sought financing for an energy-saving technology from the venture capital firm where Mr. Gore is a partner.

 

The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient. It came to Mr. Gore’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital providers, looking for $75 million to expand its partnerships with utilities seeking to install millions of so-called smart meters in homes and businesses.

Mr. Gore and his partners decided to back the company, and in gratitude Silver Spring retained him and John Doerr, another Kleiner Perkins partner, as unpaid corporate advisers.

 

The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr. Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.

 

Silver Spring Networks is a foot soldier in the global green energy revolution Mr. Gore hopes to lead. Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.

 

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

 

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, asserted at a hearing this year that Mr. Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.

 

Mr. Gore says that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is.

 

“Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” Mr. Gore said. “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.”

 

In an e-mail message this week, he said his investment activities were consistent with his public advocacy over decades.

 

“I have advocated policies to promote renewable energy and accelerate reductions in global warming pollution for decades, including all of the time I was in public service,” Mr. Gore wrote. “As a private citizen, I have continued to advocate the same policies. Even though the vast majority of my business career has been in areas that do not involve renewable energy or global warming pollution reductions, I absolutely believe in investing in ways that are consistent with my values and beliefs. I encourage others to invest in the same way.”

 

Mr. Gore has invested a significant portion of the tens of millions of dollars he has earned since leaving government in 2001 in a broad array of environmentally friendly energy and technology business ventures, like carbon trading markets, solar cells and waterless urinals.

 

He has also given away millions more to finance the nonprofit he founded, the Alliance for Climate Protection, and to another group, the Climate Project, which trains people to present the slide show that was the basis of his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Royalties from his new book on climate change, “Our Choice,” printed on 100 percent recycled paper, will go to the alliance, an aide said.

 

Other public figures, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have vocally supported government financing of energy-saving technologies, have investments in alternative energy ventures. Some scientists and policy advocates also promote energy policies that personally enrich them.

 

As a private citizen, Mr. Gore does not have to disclose his income or assets, as he did in his years in Congress and the White House. When he left government in early 2001, he listed assets of less than $2 million, including homes in suburban Washington and in Tennessee.

 

Since then, his net worth has skyrocketed, helped by timely investments in Apple and Google, profits from books and his movie, and scores of speeches for which he can be paid more than $100,000, although he often speaks at no charge.

 

He is a founder of Generation Investment Management, based in London and run by David Blood, a former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (the firm was quickly dubbed Blood and Gore). Mr. Gore earns a partner’s salary at Kleiner Perkins. He has substantial personal finances invested at both firms, officials of the companies said.

 

He also serves as an adviser to high-profile technology companies including Apple and Google, relationships that have paid him handsome dividends over the last eight years.

 

Mr. Gore’s spokeswoman would not give a figure for his current net worth, but the scale of his wealth is evident in a single investment of $35 million in Capricorn Investment Group, a private equity fund started by his friend Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay.

 

Ion Yadigaroglu, a co-founder of Capricorn, said that Mr. Gore does not sit on the fund’s investment committee, but obviously agrees with the partners’ strategy of putting long-term money into promising ventures in energy, technology and health care around the globe.

 

“Aspirationally,” said Mr. Yadigaroglu, who holds a doctorate from Stanford in astrophysics, “we’re trying to make more money than others doing the same thing and do it in a way that is superior in ethics and impacts.”

 

Mr. Gore has said he invested in partnerships and funds that try to identify and support companies that are advancing cutting-edge green technologies and are paving the way toward a low-carbon economy.

 

He has a stake in the world’s pre-eminent carbon credit trading market and in an array of companies in bio-fuels, sustainable fish farming, electric vehicles and solar power.

 

Capricorn holds a major stake in Falcon Waterfree Technologies, the world’s leading maker of waterless urinals. Generation has holdings in Ausra, a solar energy company based in California, and Camco, a British firm that develops carbon dioxide emissions reduction projects. Kleiner Perkins has a green ventures fund with nearly $1 billion invested in renewable energy and efficiency concerns.

 

Mr. Gore also has substantial interests in technology, media and biotechnology ventures that have no direct tie to his environmental advocacy, an aide said.

 

Mr. Gore is not a lobbyist, and he has never asked Congress or the administration for an earmark or policy decision that would directly benefit one of his investments. But he has been a tireless advocate for policies that would move the country away from the use of coal and oil, and he has begun a $300 million campaign to end the use of fossil fuels in electricity production in 10 years.

 

But Marc Morano, a climate change skeptic who until recently was a top aide to Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said that what he saw as Mr. Gore’s alarmism and occasional exaggerations distorted the debate and also served his personal financial interests.

 

Mr. Gore has testified numerous times in support of legislation to address climate change and to revamp the nation’s energy policies.

 

He appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in April to support an energy and climate change bill that was intended to reduce global warming emissions through a cap-and-trade program for major polluting industries. (So technically not a lobbyist, but he tries to alarm everyone about his "global warming" threat, and they pass legislation that puts millions in his pockets. But he's not a lobbyist...) ;)

 

Mr. Gore, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his climate advocacy, is generally received on Capitol Hill as something of an oracle, at least by Democrats.

 

But at the hearing in April, he was challenged by Ms. Blackburn, who echoed some of the criticism of Mr. Gore that has swirled in conservative blogs and radio talk shows. She noted that Mr. Gore is a partner at Kleiner Perkins, which has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in firms that could benefit from any legislation that limits carbon dioxide emissions.

 

“I believe that the transition to a green economy is good for our economy and good for all of us, and I have invested in it,” Mr. Gore said, adding that he had put “every penny” he has made from his investments into the Alliance for Climate Protection.

 

“And, Congresswoman,” he added, “if you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me.”

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Climate bills give Obama unprecedented emergency power

 

 

This is pretty scary.

 

Both the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy approved earlier this year and the version just okayed by Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Democrats (Republicans boycotted the vote) contains an obscure but nasty bureaucratic provision that requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez.

Here’s how: The bills require a federal declaration of a “climate emergency” if world greenhouse gas levels reach 450 parts per million. Guess what? The Pacific Northwest National Lab says it is a virtual certainty that level will be reached within a few months. The bill then requires the president to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions...to address shortfalls" in achieving needed greenhouse gas reductions.

When Vitter asked EPA Administrator what would be done in such a situation, she refused to say. So it must be asked: Would the president be empowered to do things like nationalize whole sectors of industry, ban coal use, restrict private automobile use, or anything else the “emergency” requires? . . . .

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Climate bills give Obama unprecedented emergency power

 

 

This is pretty scary.

 

Both the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy approved earlier this year and the version just okayed by Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Democrats (Republicans boycotted the vote) contains an obscure but nasty bureaucratic provision that requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez.

Here’s how: The bills require a federal declaration of a “climate emergency” if world greenhouse gas levels reach 450 parts per million. Guess what? The Pacific Northwest National Lab says it is a virtual certainty that level will be reached within a few months. The bill then requires the president to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions...to address shortfalls" in achieving needed greenhouse gas reductions.

When Vitter asked EPA Administrator what would be done in such a situation, she refused to say. So it must be asked: Would the president be empowered to do things like nationalize whole sectors of industry, ban coal use, restrict private automobile use, or anything else the “emergency” requires? . . . .

Didn't I hear today that Chavez has declared that showers can only be 3 minutes long?

 

This is absurd! So they'll put meters on our utilities and shut them off after we reach our limit. But I'm betting that we'd be able to PAY A SURCHARGE to use more! Which means that the climate BS is just that.

BS.

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Brazil: Deforestation sees biggest drop in 20 yrs

 

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon dropped nearly 46 percent from August 2008 to July 2009 — the biggest annual decline in two decades, the government said Thursday.

 

Analysis of satellite imagery by the National Institute for Space Research shows an estimated 7,008 square kilometers (2,705 square miles) of forest were cleared during the 12-month period, the lowest rate since the government started monitoring deforestation in 1988.

 

"The new deforestation data represents an extraordinary and significant reduction for Brazil," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in a statement.

 

The numbers have been falling since 2004, when they reached a peak of 27,000 square kilometers (10,425 square miles) cleared in one year, according to the space research institute.

 

The government credited its aggressive monitoring and enforcement measures for the drop, as well as its promotion of sustainable activities in the Amazon region, an area in northern Brazil the size of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River.

 

But Paulo Gustavo, environmental policy director of Conservation International, said a major factor is the drop in world prices for beef, soy and other products that drive people to clear land for agriculture in the rainforest.

 

"The police control has improved a little, there has been success in controlling deforestation," Gustavo said. "But the main factor is the drop in commodity prices, which are the main factor in speeding up or slowing deforestation."

 

Satellite images from the space research institute have allowed government inspectors to increase enforcement, the government said.

 

The Brazilian Environment Institute reported confiscating about 230,000 cubic meters (8.1 million cubic feet) of wood, 414 trucks and tractors and 502,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) of land linked to illegal deforestation activities from August 2008 to July 2009. The government has also issued $1.6 billion in fines, the statement said.

 

Amazon deforestation causes 75 percent of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions, according to the National Inventory of Greenhouse Gases.

 

 

source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...L#ixzz0Wq470xGa

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Birds rescued after oil spill freed in Berkeley

 

Fourteen birds rescued from last month's Dubai Star oil spill were released back into the wild on Friday, taking their first tentative swim in the bay waters in Berkeley before flying out of sight.

 

The birds seemed reluctant to leave their pet carriers and fly to freedom at first. But when one brave American coot slipped out of the cage and skipped out over the water, 10 others quickly followed, to the delight of a handful of caregivers who helped treat the birds and had come to say goodbye.

 

"It's amazing. It gives you goose bumps all over," said Nooshy Mobasher of Lafayette, a volunteer who helped wash birds at an Oiled Wildlife Care Network facility. "It's like seeing your kids go off to college."

 

Eleven American coots, one surf scoter and two tiny dunlins were released on Friday. The birds were rescued a day or two after the Oct. 30 oil spill, which dumped 400 to 800 gallons of oil into the bay. The birds were treated at the San Francisco Bay Oiled Wildlife Care and Education Center in Fairfield.

 

A total of 49 oiled birds were taken to the facility - 10 had been released before Friday and another eight are still being treated. Seventeen birds died at the facility and another 20 birds were found dead on the shore after the oil spill.

 

Most of the birds were recovered from Robert Crown Memorial State Beach in Alameda. They were released at Berkeley's Eastshore State Park because it's close enough for the birds to find their way home, but they run less risk of hitting patches of oil that may still remain in the bay, said Mike Ziccardi, director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network.

 

"This is the reward for all of our hard work. This is the best possible outcome," Ziccardi said, shortly after the birds had been released.

 

Rescuing and treating the birds is a stressful, time-consuming process, Ziccardi said.

 

When birds become coated in oil, it ruins the waterproofing affect of their feathers. Birds become hypothermic in the cold water without their feathery protection, and are forced to the shore.

 

Caregivers spend the first day or two after rescuing birds just keeping them warm and feeding them.

 

Once the birds are stable, they're thoroughly washed, usually in a mixture of water and Dawn soap. Then they're rinsed off and dried with heaters and fans.

 

If their feathers appear healthy and normal, the birds are allowed into an outdoor pool to make sure their weatherproofing is working again and that the birds are behaving in a normal birdlike fashion. If they aren't doing well they may be washed again. Treatment can take a few days or a few weeks.

 

"The washing is extremely stressful for them," said Mobasher. "You have to make sure you get the oil out of their eyes and their beaks."

 

Mobasher said she signed up for classes to learn how to care for oiled birds after the Cosco Busan oil spill in 2007, when nearly 60,000 gallons of bunker fuel were dumped in the bay and thousands of birds died.

 

"When you see the depth and extent of the damage, when you see a bird drenched in oil, unable to open its eyes and gasping for breath, you have to do something," Mobasher said. "But it's selfish too, because you feel so good about helping."

 

E-mail Erin Allday at eallday@sfchronicle.com.

 

 

 

source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...L#ixzz0Wq52QgNZ

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Five Places: As green as it gets

Eliza Hussman

 

Sure, just about everyone has hopped on the theoretical green train (electric powered and eco-friendly, of course). Here are five California places to visit, some old and some new, that have gone above and beyond to reach the gold, er, green, standard.

 

1 Bardessono Hotel, Yountville

So what does it take for a luxury hotel to claim it's the greenest in America? It was built using reused material (including limestone from an old wine cellar), it has an underground well system to heat and cool rooms, it has solar panels, and all of the furnishings are recyclable, organic or "green certified." The restaurant and spa use local, organic products. 6526 Yount St., Yountville. (877) 932-5333; www.bardes

 

sono.com.

 

2 Ukiah Brewing Co. and Restaurant, Ukiah

Kick back and enjoy an all-organic ale or lager and some live music at the first brew pub and second restaurant in the nation to become certified organic. The menu features vegan, vegetarian and dairy-free items, but don't be fooled - traditional pub dishes such as fish and chips are served as well. 102 S. State St., Ukiah. (707) 648-5898; www.ukiah

 

brewingco.com. Restaurant and bar open daily.

 

3 California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

Can you picture the Museum of Natural History in New York with a sod ceiling? No, probably not. Take the "living roof," the vehicle recharging stations, insulation made of recycled jeans and the four-story rain forest and you have arguably the world's greenest museum. 55 Music Concourse Drive, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. (415) 379-8000; www.calacademy.org. $14.95-$24.95; 6 and younger, free. Tip: Visit midweek or when the doors first open to avoid crowds.

 

4 Chez Panisse Cafe and Restaurant, Berkeley

Nearly every restaurant trying to be green is focusing on organic, locally grown, sustainable products - doing pretty much what Alice Waters of Chez Panisse restaurant started doing 40 years ago. The restaurant has a formal atmosphere, while the cafe is more casual and less pricey. 1517 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. (510) 548-5525 restaurant, (510) 548-5049 cafe; www.chezpanisse.com. Closed Sunday. Lunch only in the cafe. Reservations a must.

 

5 Frog's Leap Winery, Rutherford

Hey, even its signature animal is green. This winery, best known for its Sauvignon Blanc, is 100 percent solar-powered, uses geothermal heating and cooling methods, has an eco-friendly visitor center and dry farms on its certified organic vineyards, saving water. 8815 Conn Creek Road, Rutherford. (707) 963-4704; www.frogsleap.com. Open to the public daily except Sunday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Call for tasting and touring times.

 

- Eliza Hussman, travel@sfchronicle.com

 

 

 

source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...L#ixzz0Wq5jmw79

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Green Festival features all things eco-friendly

Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer

 

Saturday, November 14, 2009

 

Nem Jovie hooked his knees around the bright-red OmGym - a "suspension yoga system" made from a recycled parachute - and swirled backward until he was hanging upside-down.

 

"I'm getting a good feeling, very blissful and relaxed," he said, as he folded his legs into a lotus position.

 

Nearby, several toddlers assiduously shook jars of organic cream to churn it into butter, while a woman wearing a suit made of 500 plastic bags - the amount the average American discards every year - waddled past people queued up for free shots of wheatgrass juice.

 

So it goes at the Green Festival, a celebration of all things organic, sustainable and planet-friendly taking place this weekend at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition Center.

 

The event assembles 450 exhibitors peddling everything from vegan cookbooks to hemp wedding gowns, plus 125 speakers on topics such as social media and sustainability, holistic fair trade and "ecostruction."

 

"We want to show people the green economy already exists," said Kevin Danaher, co-founder of San Francisco's Global Exchange, which co-sponsors the annual event, now in its eighth year. "It's not something in the future; it's here and now."

 

Organizers expect about 45,000 attendees over the show's three days, up from last year. Needless to say, they're an eco-conscious crowd, but aren't meek about ferreting out companies that try to "green wash" themselves in a cloak of pseudo-environmentalism.

 

"The audience in San Francisco will challenge you and ask good questions," said Jennifer Sall, a marketing consultant with Gaiam, a Colorado company that sells subscriptions to inspirational and spiritual DVDs. "They're educated and know what's legitimate and what's not."

 

Casey Ridell, whose company, Beyond Borders, sells wall hangings made by Haitian artisans out of recycled oil drums, said consumers at the event "are interested in the background of things, rather than in just an item. People love the product; but here they want to hear the story of how it's made."

 

Across the aisle from her, Yonten Raza, who owns several Bay Area shops called Dolma, unfolded some of the vibrant quilts and shawls she imports from India and Nepal. "These are very gentle people," she said of customers at the festival. "They really care about the planet. They are very aware of everything."

 

Unlike many sectors, green businesses may be benefiting from hard times. The recession has spurred more interest in sustainability, said Denise Hamler, director of Green America (formerly Co-op America Business Network), the other co-sponsor.

 

"The economy taking a dive has caused people to rethink how they consume," she said. "Everyone knows they need to think about how they spend their money. Consuming less is green."

 

Event organizers try to walk their walk, placing a big emphasis on recycling, composting and reusing materials from the Green Festival. "It's an almost zero-waste event," Hamler said. "Last year we sent less than 1,800 pounds of material to landfill."

 

Becca Schwalm, the marketing director for Chico Bags, which makes reusable bags, was the lucky lady dressed up as the "Bag Monster" in a mechanics jump suit covered with 500 plastic bags that weigh about 20 pounds.

 

"People love to photograph me," she said. "It takes me hours to walk down the aisle."

 

Chico Bags actually has several Bag Monster suits and lends them to schools and nonprofits to help bring home the impact of nonrecyclable, single-use bags.

 

Danaher said organizers will add a second San Francisco Green Festival in the spring starting next year.

 

Green Festival

When: Today, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

 

Where: Concourse Exhibition Center, Brannan and Eighth streets, San Francisco

 

Price: $15 a day, discounts for students, seniors, bike riders, public transit riders and union members. Children free.

 

Info: www.greenfestivals.org

 

E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com.

 

 

source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...L#ixzz0Wq6dhfPY

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Funeral fair opens door to eco-friendly exits

 

Patricia Yollin, Special to The Chronicle

Saturday, November 14, 2009

 

It's hard to always be ecologically correct - especially when you're dead.

 

In the Bay Area, however, it's getting easier to die green. No need for embalming fluids, mortuary wakes, fancy caskets and concrete vaults. Instead, a corpse can be propped up in bed at home to receive visitors one last time before returning to the earth, wrapped in a shroud or nestled in a biodegradable coffin.

 

"It's really going back to the past, when people took care of their own dead, and to a time when the cradlemaker, cabinetmaker and casketmaker were all one," Liz O'Connell-Gates said. "People would know who to go to. Now it's more anonymous. I grew up in Ireland, where life and death are so intertwined."

 

Last Saturday, O'Connell-Gates staged a Green Funeral Fair in Berkeley's Grace North Church. It was one-stop shopping for anyone interested in making an alternative exit in a country where more than 827,000 gallons of embalming fluid are buried in the ground every year.

 

Jerrigrace Lyons, a death midwife whose Sebastopol business is called Final Passages, has facilitated more than 300 home-based funerals in 14 years. "It's a movement," Lyons said.

 

Still, there are misconceptions to overcome. Most people assume a body will decompose rapidly and smell terrible, Lyons said. But a little dry ice can do wonders. Heather Swain of Fairfax, who runs an online memorial site, pointed to a photograph on the wall.

 

"This guy looks pretty good," she said. "And he's been dead 12 hours."

 

Swain also sells biodegradable wooden coffins. "They're super comfy," she said.

 

Coffin not needed

 

For the true minimalist, a coffin is not necessary. Esmerelda Kent, founder of Kinkaraco Green Burial Products in San Francisco, makes shrouds that range from $399 to $999. One was featured in HBO's "Six Feet Under" series. Meanwhile, her 5-ounce bottles of burial wash go for $12.

 

"One bottle is enough for most bodies," Kent said. "But some big people need two bottles."

 

A tombstone is also not essential. At Fernwood Cemetery in Mill Valley, corpses can be located by means of a radio frequency tag, according to sales manager Raymond Soudah. But stone carver Chris Stinehour prefers a more traditional approach to finding the dead.

 

"Stone is green," said Stinehour, as he carved the word "life" into a slab of limestone with a chisel and mallet. "What's not green about that? It's of the earth."

 

He was among 30 exhibitors at the fair, held in a 1914 landmark building. "I think this is the first green funeral fair anywhere, ever," said the Rev. John Mabry, pastor of Grace North. "We are a very Berkeley church."

 

Ann Arnold, a children's book illustrator, came up with the idea. She wanted people to see her church and hear its remarkable acoustics, and figured a wedding fair might work. Friends suggested a funeral fair instead, saying it would be less stressful - no need to deal with the mother of the bride. It evolved into a green event.

 

"I'd grown up with 'The American Way of Death,' and I didn't know about so many of the alternative things going on," said the 57-year-old Arnold, referring to Jessica Mitford's 1963 critique of the American funeral industry.

 

Jane Hillhouse of Half Moon Bay, whose Final Footprints specializes in eco-caskets and natural burials, said England and the East Coast are far ahead of California. "But I've been getting more inquiries," she said.

 

Memory aids

 

The accoutrements of death at the fair included St. Brigid's straw crosses and ceramic life masks to help people remember what the deceased looked like in livelier times.

 

Karen Stern was selling another memory aid: "sentimental keepsake pouches" made of recycled fabric. "If it's a dog, you might want to put in the collar," she said. "If it's a person, maybe their jewelry, eyeglasses, driver's license and false teeth."

 

No matter what kind of funeral it is, there's always the question of what to wear.

 

Funeral hats

 

"More people are being buried in hats," said May Henderson, owner of the Hat Library in Oakland. "I told my family, 'Do not bury me without a hat, whatever you do.' "

 

Seon O'Neill of Berkeley was among many fair visitors surprised by the facts and figures on display. "One thing I learned is that the energy used in cremation is the equivalent of driving a car 4,800 miles," she said.

 

For the cremation-minded, however, Funeria arts agency in Sonoma County offers everything from a $2,500 urn sculpture called "Their Last Love Shack," bought by a New York couple, to a $435 cast bronze scattering spoon.

 

"The spoon makes things easier to control," Funeria founder Maureen Lomasney said. "Everyone has an urn story, where something tragic has happened to the urn."

 

E-mail Patricia Yollin at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

 

 

source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...L#ixzz0Wq9TlkOG

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Leaders Will Delay Deal on Climate Change

By HELENE COOPER

New York Times

11/14/2009

 

SINGAPORE — President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.

 

At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.

 

“There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen, which starts in 22 days,” said Michael Froman, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. “I don’t think the negotiations have proceeded in such a way that any of the leaders thought it was likely that we were going to achieve a final agreement in Copenhagen, and yet thought that it was important that Copenhagen be an important step forward, including with operational impact.”

 

With the clock running out and deep differences unresolved, it has, for several months, appeared increasingly unlikely that the climate change negotiations in Denmark would produce a comprehensive and binding new treaty on global warming, as its organizers had intended.

 

The agreement on Sunday codifies what negotiators had already accepted as all but inevitable: that representatives of the 192 nations in the talks would not resolve the outstanding issues in time. The gulf between rich and poor countries, and even among the wealthiest nations, was just too wide.

 

Among the chief barriers to a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen was Congress’s inability to enact climate and energy legislation that sets binding targets on greenhouse gases in the United States. Without such a commitment, other nations are loath to make their own pledges.

 

Administration officials and Congressional leaders have said that final legislative action on a climate bill would not occur before the first half of next year.

 

After his breakfast meeting in Singapore, Mr. Obama was scheduled to meet with Asian leaders and to hold a number of one-on-one sessions, including one with the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev.

 

After his meeting with Mr. Medvedev, Mr. Obama will attend a symbolically important regional meeting of Southeast Asian nations, in which representatives of Myanmar’s government will also be present. Mr. Obama, who has made a point of his willingness to engage with adversaries, noted that for the first time an American president would be at the table with Myanmar’s military junta. But he has also called on the government to release the leader of the country’s beleaguered democracy movement, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

 

APEC summit meetings are not known for accomplishing much that is substantive. The most memorable moments often involve the photo opportunities, in which leaders wear colorful matching shirts. And often communiqués issued on dismantling trade barriers are undermined by the attending countries almost as soon as they are signed.

 

Speaking to world leaders at the APEC summit meeting Sunday morning, Mr. Obama said he would hold the 2011 gathering in Hawaii.

 

“The United States was there at the first meeting of APEC at Blake Island when President Clinton started the tradition of having leaders wear outfits picked out by the host nation,” Mr. Obama said. “And when America hosts APEC in a few years, I look forward to seeing you all decked out in flowered shirts and grass skirts because today I am announcing that my home state of Hawaii will be hosting this forum in 2011.”

 

This year’s meeting promises more of the same, complete with charges and countercharges of protectionism.

 

President Felipe Calderón of Mexico got things going early Saturday when he lashed out at what he called politically driven protectionism in the United States. He complained that Congressional coddling of the Teamsters had prevented the United States from opening its borders to Mexican trucks, which it was supposed to do years ago after it signed Nafta.

 

“Protectionism is killing North American companies,” Mr. Calderón said in Singapore. “The American government is facing political pressure that has not been counteracted.”

 

Mr. Obama is facing high expectations, which may be difficult to meet. For instance, while he has spoken about reducing trade barriers, he also talked during his speech in Tokyo on Saturday of making sure that the United States and Asia did not return to a cycle — which he termed “imbalanced” — in which American consumerism caused Asians to look at the United States as mainly an export market.

 

There are also high hopes among American companies and some Asian countries that the United States will commit to joining a regional trading group called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Although Mr. Obama did open the door during his speech in Tokyo on Asia policy, he did not explicitly say that the United States would join the pact. A formal announcement that the United States is beginning negotiations would undoubtedly kick off criticism from free-trade opponents in the United States and pushback from Congress.

 

Mr. Obama spoke, instead, of “engaging the Trans-Pacific Partnership countries with the goal of shaping a regional agreement that will have broad-based membership and the high standards worthy of a 21st-century trade agreement.”

 

That line left many trade envoys already in Singapore scratching their heads: did Mr. Obama mean that the United States would begin formal talks to join the regional trade pact, which presently includes Singapore, Brunei and New Zealand, and could later include Vietnam — an addition that could lead to more Congressional pressure at home?

 

Many regional officials have been waiting for the United States to join the initiative as a demonstration that Washington will play a more active role in the region. But the Obama administration has yet to establish a firm trade policy, as it is still reviewing its options.

 

White House officials were not much clearer on what Mr. Obama meant when they were pressed on this after the speech. Mr. Froman, the deputy national security adviser, said that what Mr. Obama meant was that he would engage with the initiative “to see if this is something that could prove to be an important platform going further.”

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UN: Fight climate change with free condoms

 

By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng, Ap Medical Writer

 

 

LONDON – The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the U.N. Population Fund said Wednesday.

 

The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: "Women with access to reproductive health services ... have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions."

 

"As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth's capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic," the report said.

 

The world's population will likely rise from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050, with most of the growth in less developed regions, according to a 2006 report by the United Nations.

 

The U.N. Population Fund acknowledged it had no proof of the effect that population control would have on climate change. "The linkages between population and climate change are in most cases complex and indirect," the report said.

 

It also said that while there is no doubt that "people cause climate change," the developing world has been responsible for a much smaller share of world's greenhouse gas emissions than developed countries.

 

Still, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, the U.N. Population Fund's executive director, told a news conference in London on Wednesday that global warming could be catastrophic for people in poor countries, particularly women.

 

"We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster," she said.

 

In three weeks, a global conference will be held in Copenhagen aimed at reaching a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required 37 industrial countries to cut heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.

 

On Wednesday, one analyst criticized the U.N. Population Fund's pronouncements as alarmist and unhelpful.

 

"It requires a major leap of imagination to believe that free condoms will cool down the climate," said Caroline Boin, a policy analyst at International Policy Network, a London-based think tank.

 

She also questioned earlier efforts by the agency to control the world's population.

 

In its 1987 report, the U.N. Population Fund warned that once the global population hit 5 billion, the world "could degenerate into disaster." At the time, the agency said "more vigorous attempts to slow undue population growth" were needed in many countries.

 

According to Boin, "Numerous environmental indicators show that with development and economic growth we are able to preserve more natural habitats. There is no causal relationship between population density and poverty."

 

In this month's Bulletin, the World Health Organization's journal, two experts also warned about the dangers of linking fertility to climate change.

 

"Using the need to reduce climate change as a justification for curbing the fertility of individual women at best provokes controversy and at worst provides a mandate to suppress individual freedoms," wrote WHO's Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum and Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan.

 

____

 

On the Net:

 

http://www.unfpa.org

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NBC’s ObamaVision: Changing the Channel

by James Hudnall

 

“If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.”

–Kurt Vonnegut

 

NBC, which is last place in network ratings, has decided to double down on their green propaganda push this week by putting environmentalist messages in five of its shows: 30 Rock, Heroes, Community, The Office and The Biggest Loser. NBC is owned by GE. GE has positioned itself to make loads of money if “green technology” becomes dominant, so they’ve not only invested a lot of capital in the Obama administration, they’re trying to get everyone on their bandwagon.

 

Posted Image

 

It seems none of them remember junior high and the way students reacted to all those anti-drug scare films because that sure worked out well. The people who didn’t approve of drugs weren’t going to do them anyway and the rest laughed at the videos they were shown. People in general don’t like scolds. They don’t like being preached to unless they asked for it. And certainly, when people tune in for entertainment, they do not want a lecture.

They have seen advertising in all its forms and certainly propaganda. They either agree with it or they don’t.

 

It’s bad enough we get a sermon from many shows already, or that we’re lectured everywhere we turn. But the fact is, most of what they’re trying to say is inaccurate or just plan wrong in many cases. There is no solid evidence that human beings are causing global warming. More and more scientists are speaking out against that theory all the time. More people are feeling that the whole thing has been exaggerated.

But of course, that’s not stopping NBC from lecturing us. I guess ratings aren’t an issue over there.

 

There was a time when Hollywood used to fill TV shows with propaganda from their sponsors. Now the spam comes from the Obama administration and their buddies at GE who want expensive windmills and solar cells to replace cheaper energy sources we already use. And to do that they want to pound on our heads until we scream uncle.

 

A better idea is to change the channel.

 

As for that Kurt Vonnegut quote above, it should be stated over and over again that the reason we have technology is to protect us from the environment, not to destroy it. All those green scolds should give back their inoculations, dental work and factory-made clothes and go live in some country like the Congo with no electricity and/or indoor plumbing. After they’ve really “gone green” for awhile they can talk about it. But never try to force it on the rest of us. We’re not interested.

Climate change is a part of nature, and it’s a good thing we have the means to survive it when it comes. What they want is for us to disarm ourselves.

 

No thanks.

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Scientific Community "cooks their books" !! Click for article and audio.

 

Listen: Inhofe Says He Will Call for Investigation on "Climategate" on Washington Times Americas Morning Show

November 23, 2009

 

Posted by Matt Dempsey matt_dempsey@epw.senate.gov

 

Note: This post will be updated throughout the day.

 

Update: The Hill: Inhofe to call for hearing into CRU, U.N. climate change research

 

Update: Inhofe Talks with Hot Air's Ed Morrissey about "ClimateGate"

 

IBD Editorial: The Day Global Warming Stood Still

 

Link to 2005 Inhofe Senate Floor Speech: "Today, I will discuss something else – scientific integrity and how to improve it. Specifically, I will discuss the systematic and documented abuse of the scientific process by an international body that claims it provides the most complete and objective scientific assessment in the world on the subject of climate change – the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. I will conclude with a series of recommendations as to the minimum changes the IPCC must make if it is to restore its credibility."

 

Listen: Inhofe Says He Will Call for Investigation on "Climategate"

Interview on Washington Times America's Morning Show

 

Transcript From Inhofe Radio Interview

 

Monday, November 23, 2009

Senator Inhofe: This is a huge issue and of course we have the Gitmo issue and we have the, of course, cap-and-trade is now taking a new turn. Jed, if I could…

 

Jed Babbin: Yeah.

 

Senator Inhofe: Would you let me make one sentence?

 

Jed Babbin: Please.

 

Senator Inhofe: This is out of a speech that I made, Melanie, back on the floor of the Senate, and it was repeated, John Gizzi picked it up and put it in Human Events. This was 4 years ago, in talking about the science, cooking the science. I said I would discuss the “systematic and documented abuse of the scientific process by which an international body that claims it provides the most complete and objective science assessment in the world on the subject of climate change, the United Nations IPCC.” Now that was four years ago; so we knew they were cooking the science back then, and you’ve been talking about the, you know, what’s happened recently with the bloggers coming up with what they did, what they…

 

Jed Babbin: Let me interrupt you there Senator, because I think that’s a really important point. Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t followed that story, what Senator Inhofe’s talking about, in Britain, a blogger got into some of the official government records about climate change and how the measurements were being taken to show…

 

Melanie Morgan: And the politics behind it.

 

Jed Babbin: And the – well but they were basically saying, “Oh yea, hey, let’s make it look like Jim so-and-so did that, and let’s help him cook the books, and let’s change the data…”

 

Melanie Morgan: And “let’s beat up those who don’t agree with us.”

 

Jed Babbin: Yea, but it’s all a huge fraud! I mean, Senator, am I exaggerating?

 

Senator Inhofe: No you’re not. If you remember, mine was the hoax statement, and that was, what, five years ago I guess.

 

Jed Babbin: Well, we ought to give you a big pat on the back for being …

 

Melanie Morgan: Yea, you deserve an an ‘atta boy, and now you are finally being vindicated.

 

Senator Inhofe: Well, on this thing, it is pretty serious. And since, you know, Barabara Boxer is the Chairman and I’m the Ranking Member on Environment and Public Works, if nothing happens in the next seven days when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation. ‘Cause this thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with.

 

Melanie Morgan: So what will you be calling for an investigation of?

 

Senator Inhofe: On the IPCC and on the United Nations on the way that they cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.

 

Jed Babbin: Should somebody stop further spending on this until we get this investigation, Senator?

 

Senator Inhofe: Well, I don’t know how you do that, though, ‘cause we’re not the ones that are calling the shots. The interesting part of this is it’s happening right before Copenhagen. And, so, the timing couldn’t be better. Whoever is on the ball in Great Britain, their time was good.

 

Melanie Morgan: Well, Senator, thank you very much for coming back and handling a little bit, a tiny little bit of heat from the kitchen.

 

Senator Inhofe: Okay.

 

Jed Babbin: Thanks very much Senator.

 

Senator Inhofe: Thanks, you bet.

 

Jed Babbin: Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma on the Environment Committee over there, and one of the real fighters.

 

Melanie Morgan: He certainly is…

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Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

 

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: November 20th, 2009

497 Comments Comment on this article

 

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

 

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

 

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

 

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

 

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

 

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

 

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

 

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

 

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat

the crap out of him. Very tempted.

 

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

 

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

 

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community 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…What do others think?”

 

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

 

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

 

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

 

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

 

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

 

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

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November 24, 2009 11:40 AM

Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails

 

Posted by Declan McCullagh

 

 

 

A few days after leaked e-mail messages appeared on the Internet, the U.S. Congress may probe whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change.

 

Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said on Monday the leaked correspondence suggested researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not," according to a transcript of a radio interview posted on his Web site. Aides for Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, are also looking into the disclosure.

 

The leaked documents (see our previous coverage) come from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

 

Last week's leaked e-mails range from innocuous to embarrassing and, critics believe, scandalous. They show that some of the field's most prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data ("have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots"), cheered the deaths of skeptical journalists, and plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

 

One e-mail message, apparently from CRU director Phil Jones, references the U.K.'s Freedom of Information Act when asking another researcher to delete correspondence that might be disclosed in response to public records law: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise." Another, also apparently from Jones: global warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." (Jones was a contributing author to the chapter of the U.N.'s IPCC report titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.")

 

In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named "Harry" -- possibly the CRU's Ian "Harry" Harris -- was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added:

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

 

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

 

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

 

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

 

Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...

 

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.

 

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."

 

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

 

It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

 

For its part, the University of East Anglia has posted a statement calling the disclosure "mischievous" and saying it is aiding the police in an investigation.

 

The statement also quotes Jones, CRU's director, explaining his November 1999 e-mail, which said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Jones said that the word trick was used "colloquially as in a clever thing to do" and that it "is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward."

 

Also unclear is the ultimate impact of the leak, which came before next month's Copenhagen summit and Democratic plans for cap and trade legislation.

 

On one hand, over at RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt, a modeler for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been downplaying the leak. Schmidt wrote: "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research ... no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords."

 

On the other, groups like the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, the target of repeated derision in the leaked e-mails, have said: "We have argued for many years that much of the scientific case for global warming alarmism was weak and some of it was phony. It now looks like a lot of it may be phony."

 

ScienceMag.org published an article noting that deleting e-mail messages to hide them from a FOI request is a crime in the United Kingdom. George Monbiot, a U.K. activist and journalist who previously called for dramatic action to deal with global warming, wrote: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging."

 

Complicating matters for congressional Republicans who'd like to hold hearings is that East Anglia, of course, is a U.K. university. The GOP may intend to press the Obama administration for details on how the EPA came to rely on the CRU's predictions, and whether the recent disclosure will change the agency's position. Another approach lies in e-mail messages discussing grants from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to East Anglia; one says: "We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious."

 

The irony of this situation is that most of us expect science to be conducted in the open, without unpublished secret data, hidden agendas, and computer programs of dubious reliability. East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way.

Declan McCullagh is a correspondent for CBSNews.com. He can be reached at declan@cbsnews.com and can be followed on Twitter as declanm. You can bookmark Declan's Taking Liberties site here, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

 

 

(there's a lot of links in the article)

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