Mustang Rambles

As Noel explained: “Sometimes … we need to have the courage to do nothing.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/12/utah-climate-alarmists

Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze

WASHINGTON — As millions of people along the East Coast hole up in their snowbound homes, the two sides in the climate-change debate are seizing on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments.

Skeptics of global warming are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks more like global cooling, they taunt.

Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.

But some independent climate experts say the blizzards in the Northeast no more prove that the planet is cooling than the lack of snow in Vancouver or the downpours in Southern California prove that it is warming.

As an illustration of their point of view, the family of Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, a leading climate skeptic in Congress, built a six-foot-tall igloo on Capitol Hill and put a cardboard sign on top that read “Al Gore’s New Home.”

The extreme weather, Mr. Inhofe said by e-mail, reinforced doubts about scientists’ conclusion that global warming was “unequivocal” and most likely caused by human activity.

Nonsense, responded Joseph Romm, a climate-change expert and former Energy Department official who writes about climate issues at the liberal Center for American Progress.

“Ideologues in the Senate keep pushing the anti-scientific disinformation that big snowstorms are evidence against human-caused global warming,” Mr. Romm wrote on Wednesday.

It is perhaps not coincidental that the snowstorm scuffle is playing out against a background of recent climate controversies: In recent months, global-warming critics have assailed a 2007 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and have claimed that e-mail messages and documents plucked from a server at a climate research center in Britain raise doubts about the academic integrity of some climate scientists. Earlier this week, Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators made light of the fact that the announcement of the creation of a new federal climate service on Monday had to be conducted by conference call, rather than news conference, because the federal government was shuttered by the storm.

Matt Drudge, who delights in tweaking climate-change enthusiasts, noted on his Web sitethat a Senate hearing on global warming this week was canceled because of the weather.

As the first blizzard howled last weekend, the Virginia Republican Party put up an advertisement on the Web — titled “12 Inches of Global Warming” — criticizing two Virginia Democrats, Representatives Rick Boucher and Tom Perriello, who voted for the federal cap-and-trade legislation last year. The advertisement urges voters to call Mr. Boucher and Mr. Perriello to ask if they will help with the shoveling.

Speculating on the meaning of severe weather events is not new. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and a deadly heat wave in Europe in the summer of 2003 incited similar arguments about what such extremes might — or might not — say about the planet’s climate.

But climate scientists say that no single episode of severe weather can be blamed for global climate trends while noting evidence that such events will probably become more frequent as global temperatures rise.

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on the Weather Underground blog, said that the recent snows do not, by themselves, demonstrate anything about the long-term trajectory of the planet. Climate is, by definition, a measure of decades and centuries, not months or years.

But Dr. Masters also said that government and academic studies had consistently predicted an increasing frequency of just these kinds of record-setting storms because warmer air carries more moisture.

“Of course,” he wrote on his blog Wednesday as new snows produced white-out conditions in much of the Eastern half of the country, “both climate-change contrarians and climate-change scientists agree that no single weather event can be blamed on climate change.

“However,” he continued, “one can ‘load the dice’ in favor of events that used to be rare — or unheard of — if the climate is changing to a new state.”

A federal government report issued last year, intended to be the authoritative statement of known climate trends in the United States, pointed to the likelihood of more frequent snowstorms in the Northeast and less frequent snow in the South and Southeast as a result of long-term temperature and precipitation patterns. The Climate Impacts report, from the multiagency United States Global Change Research Program, also projected more intense drought in the Southwest and more powerful Gulf Coast hurricanes because of warming.

In other words, if the government scientists are correct, look for more snow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/science/earth/11climate.html

The Mustang Says: One item in this story says that “warmer air carries more moisture.” You might want to tell the inhabitants of the Sahara Desert, The Arabian Penisula, the Namibian Desert, the Kalahari Desert, the Gobi desert, the US Southwest, and the Nazca Plain that they should protect themselves against the moisture all that warm air contains. In my living experience, it is hotter in the Mojave and in Arizona and New Mexico than it is in Georgia and Florida, yet the humidity is higher in the Southeast. Maybe the scientist should be more circumspect in choosing the words for his statement.

The great global warming collapse

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia’s nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country’s plight, Nepal’s top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

But the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.

And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.

Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.”

Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri’s own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits.

Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labelled as a climate skeptic, or worse. But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they’re bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain’s Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri’s resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn’t real, or that human activity doesn’t play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they’ve discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

“I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper skepticism,” says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed.” In his view, it’s time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors. How much the public will keep caring is another matter.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-great-global-warming-collapse/article1458206/

From The Sunday Times
February 7, 2010

I thought of killing myself, says climate scandal professor Phil Jones

THE scientist at the centre of the “climategate” email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide.

Professor Phil Jones said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times that he had thought about killing himself “several times”. He acknowledged similarities to Dr David Kelly, the scientist who committed suicide after being exposed as the source for a BBC report that alleged the government had “sexed up” evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

In emails that were hacked into and seized upon by global-warming sceptics before the Copenhagen climate summit in December, Jones appeared to call upon his colleagues to destroy scientific data rather than release it to people intent on discrediting their work monitoring climate change.

Jones, 57, said he was unprepared for the scandal: “I am just a scientist. I have no training in PR or dealing with crises.”
Background

* The IPCC’s Synthesis Report (See section 3.3.2)

* International Institute for Sustainable Development - report on how climate change might affect crop yields

* Climate change speech by Ban Ki-Moon, UN secretary-general

Related Links

* Scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

* The leak was bad. Then came the death threats

The incident has taken a severe toll on his health. He has lost more than a stone in weight and disclosed he is on beta-blockers and using sleeping pills. He said the support of his family, and especially the love of his five-year-old granddaughter, had helped him to shake off suicidal thoughts: “I wanted to see her grow up.”

He remains at risk, still receiving death threats from around the world including two in the past week: “I was shocked. People said I should go and kill myself. They said that they knew where I lived. They were coming from all over the world.”

Jones has temporarily stood down as director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia. He fiercely defends the unit’s science — “I stand by it 100%” — but now accepts that he did not treat Freedom of Information (FoI) requests for the data as seriously as he should have done. Jones believes that the unit was maliciously targeted with multiple FoI requests by climate change sceptics determined to disrupt its work.

Last week Graham Smith, the deputy information commissioner, ruled that by failing to release requested data Jones and his colleagues breached FoI regulations. The affair is now the subject of a review led by Sir Muir Russell, former vice-chancellor of Glasgow University.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017922.ece

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent and Rebecca Lefort
Published: 9:00PM GMT 30 Jan 2010
Himalayan glaciers: UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
Officials were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers Photo: GETTY

The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.

The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

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Second blunder by UN climate science panel

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.

This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected.

But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC’s use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.

Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.

“Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.

“There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense.”

The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government’s worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.

The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled “Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming”.

It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.

The report also states that the section is intended to “assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects”.

But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.

The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s.

Mr Bowen said: “I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes.”

The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps.

Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.

The IPCC has faced growing criticism over the sources it used in its last report after it emerged the panel had used unsubstantiated figures on glacial melting in the Himalayas that were contained within a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.

It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports.

One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website.

In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature.

In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999.

When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.

The chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has faced mounting pressure and calls for his resignation amid the growing controversy over the error on glacier melting and use of unreliable sources of information.

A survey of 400 authors and contributors to the IPCC report showed, however, that the majority still support Mr Pachauri and the panel’s vice chairs. They also insisted the overall findings of the report are robust despite the minor errors.

But many expressed concern at the use of non-peer reviewed information in the reports and called for a tightening of the guidelines on how information can be used.

The Met Office, which has seven researchers who contributed to the report including Professor Martin Parry who was co-chair of the working group responsible for the part of the report that contained the glacier errors, said: “The IPCC should continue to ensure that its review process is as robust and transparent as possible, that it draws only from the peer-reviewed literature, and that uncertainties in the science and projections are clearly expressed.”

Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the US research organisation Resources for the Future who also contributed to the IPCC’s latest report, added: “The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy.

“It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation tend to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives.”

The IPCC failed to respond to questions about the inclusion of unreliable sources in its report but it has insisted over the past week that despite minor errors, the findings of the report are still robust and consistent with the underlying science.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7111525/UN-climate-change-panel-based-claims-on-student-dissertation-and-magazine-article.html

Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen

Most experts believe that the Himalayan glaciers will take centuries to melt
Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”
Related Links

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.

Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350.

Mr Pallava interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week for Science and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.

“And within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never — and I can say this categorically — ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”

Dr Pacharui has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009081.ece

(This is an editorial.)

Posted 01/25/2010 07:02 PM ET

Environment: The United Nations makes a claim that can’t be supported by science, and U.S. researchers ignore temperature data from frigid regions. The crack-up of the global warming fraud is picking up speed.

With so much of the science behind climate change coming under attack, especially among scientists, it’s been a harsh winter for the global warming crowd:

• In late November, thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia were leaked to the public. The evidence strongly suggests that researchers colluded to prove the global warming scientific “consensus” by rigging, burying and destroying data that ran counter to their political agenda.

• Last week, the public learned that claims made by the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change were not based on science, but on speculation. Specifically, the IPCC’s 2007 report said the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 due to man-made global warming.

The claim, used at the U.N. Copenhagen climate change conference in cold and snowy December to rush through a restrictive greenhouse-gas-emissions treaty, was not based on a scientific study. It was based on a telephone call that a reporter had with a scientist who was speculating.

The IPCC has withdrawn the claim. Murari Lal, the scientist who included the contention in the U.N. report, admitted that he knew it wasn’t based on peer-reviewed scientific research.

• Also in the last week, it was revealed that U.S. researchers working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are excluding temperature data from cold regions for a database used by the U.N. in its global warming scare campaign.

Canwest News Service, a Canadian agency that also owns a chain of newspapers, reported Friday, “In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

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

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

Canwest also reports that Americans Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, say that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has “reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database” and has “cherry-picked” the stations.

The NASA agency uses data from “sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.”

In a paper published on the Science and Public Policy Institute Web site, D’Aleo and Smith say the “NOAA … systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

“The thermometers, in a sense, marched toward the tropics, the sea and to airport tarmacs.”

• Then, just last weekend, we find that same 2007 IPCC report included another phony claim: that “the rapidly rising costs” of natural disasters since the 1970s is linked to global warming.

British newspapers reported Sunday that that assertion was neither peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific paper when the IPCC report was issued. When the paper that the claim was based on was published in 2008, its authors said:

“We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

Now the IPCC says it is “reassessing the evidence.”

All threads of fiction unravel eventually, and the deterioration flies out of control as the end nears.

Is this what we are seeing with the contention that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are causing the planet to overheat?

We can’t see into the future, but this myth has taken so many hits from the truth that its survival is in doubt.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=519049

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forced to apologise: Chairman of the IPCC Raj Pachauri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#ixzz0dkxMGs3A

India, China won’t sign Copenhagen Accord

A giant globe placed outside a shapping mall during the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in 2009. The Indian and Chinese governments have had a rethink on signing the Copenhagen Accord, officials said on Saturday.

The Indian and Chinese governments have had a rethink on signing the Copenhagen Accord, officials said on Saturday, and the UN has also indefinitely postponed its Jan 31 deadline for countries to accede to the document.

An Indian official said that though the government had been thinking of signing the accord because it “did not have any legal teeth and would be good diplomatically”; it felt irked because of repeated messages from both UN officials and developed countries to accede to it.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has written to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon seeking a number of clarifications on the implications of the accord that India — with five other countries — had negotiated in the last moments of the Copenhagen climate summit in December, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“That letter, and the defeat of the Democrats in the Massachusetts bypoll, has forced the UN to postpone the deadline indefinitely,” an official said. “With the Democrats losing in one of their strongholds, the chances of the climate bill going through the US senate have receded dramatically.

“So if the US is not going to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent, which was a very weak target anyway, why should we make any commitment even if it does not have any legal teeth?” the official said.

China also appears in no mood to sign the accord.

“With the deadline postponed, we are not going to sign now,” said a Chinese official now here to take part in the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) meeting to chalk out a climate strategy.

The meeting of the four environment ministers Sunday is likely to end with the announcement of a fund they will set up to help other developing countries cope with the effects of climate change, said an official of the environment ministry.

Only four countries — Australia, Canada, Papua New Guinea and the Maldives — have signed the Copenhagen Accord so far, though Brazil, South Africa and South Korea have also indicated their willingness to do so.

Though Australia and Canada have signed, they have not indicated the greenhouse gas emission reductions they are committing under the accord — something developed countries are supposed to do.

Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Scientists+using+selective+temperature+data+skeptics/2468634/story.html

Public’s Priorities for 2010: Economy, Jobs, Terrorism
Energy Concerns Fall, Deficit Concerns Rise

As Barack Obama begins his second year in office, the public’s priorities for the president and Congress remain much as they were one year ago. Strengthening the nation’s economy and improving the job situation continue to top the list. And, in the wake of the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound airliner, defending the country from future terrorist attacks also remains a top priority.

At the same time, the public has shifted the emphasis it assigns to two major policy issues: dealing with the nation’s energy problem and reducing the budget deficit. About half (49%) say that dealing with the nation’s energy problem should be a top priority, down from 60% a year ago. At the same time, there has been a modest rise in the percentage saying that reducing the budget deficit should be a top priority, from 53% to 60%.

Other policy priorities show little change from a year ago. For example, despite the ongoing debate over health care reform, about as many now call reducing health care costs a top priority (57%) as did so in early 2009 (59%). In fact, the percentage rating health care costs a top priority is lower now than it was in both 2008 (69%) and 2007 (68%).

In addition, the percentage placing top priority on providing health insurance to the uninsured stands at 49%. That is little changed from a year ago and off its high of 61% in January 2001. Notably, there is now a wider partisan gap in opinion about this issue than for any of the other 20 issues in the survey: fully 75% of Democrats rate providing health insurance to the uninsured as a top priority compared with just 26% of Republicans.

More than six-in-ten Americans say securing the Social Security system (66%) and securing the Medicare system (63%) should be top priorities for Obama and Congress. About as many (65%) say that improving the educational system should be a top policy priority. For all three items, public evaluations are not significantly different than they were one year ago.

In the wake of the financial crisis, the public does not place increased financial regulation among its top policy priorities. Fewer than half (45%) say stricter regulation of financial institutions should be a top priority for the president and Congress.

http://people-press.org/report/584/policy-priorities-2010.

UN climate change expert: there could be more errors in report

The Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel’s assessment of Himalayan glaciers.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for him to resign over the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s retraction of a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

But he admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible.

“I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them,” he told The Times in an interview. “It was a collective failure by a number of people,” he said. “I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It’s best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip.”
Related Links

* UN climate chief admits mistake on glaciers alert

* World misled over glacier meltdown

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999.

The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

Dr Pachauri said that the IPCC’s report was the responsibility of the panel’s Co-Chairs at the time, both of whom have since moved on.

They were Dr Martin Parry, a British scientist now at Imperial College London, and Dr Osvaldo Canziani , an Argentine meteorologist. Neither was immediately available for comment.

“I don’t want to blame them, but typically the working group reports are managed by the Co-Chairs,” Dr Pachauri said. “Of course the Chair is there to facilitate things, but we have substantial amounts of delegation.”

He declined to blame the 25 authors and editors of the erroneous part of the report , who included a Filipino, a Mongolian, a Malaysian, an Indonesian, an Iranian, an Australian and two Vietnamese.

The “co-ordinating lead authors” were Rex Victor Cruz of the Philippines, Hideo Harasawa of Japan, Murari Lal of India and Wu Shaohong of China.

But Syed Hasnain, the Indian glaciologist erroneously quoted as making the 2035 prediction, said that responsibility had to lie with them. “It is the lead authors — blame goes to them,” he told The Times. “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report.”

He and other leading glaciologists pointed out at least five glaring errors in the relevant section.

It says the total area of Himalyan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.

A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m — a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year.
Related Links

* UN climate chief admits mistake on glaciers alert

* World misled over glacier meltdown

The section says Himalayan glaciers are “receding faster than in any other part of the world” when many glaciologists say they are melting at about the same rate.

An entire paragraph is also attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from it, and the IPCC is not supposed to use such advocacy groups as sources.

Professor Hasnain, who was not involved in drafting the IPCC report, said that he noticed some of the mistakes when he first read the relevant section in 2008.

That was also the year he joined The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is headed by Dr Pachauri.

He said he realised that the 2035 prediction was based on an interview he gave to the New Scientist magazine in 1999, although he blamed the journalist for assigning the actual date.

He said that he did not tell Dr Pachauri because he was not working for the IPCC and was busy with his own programmes at the time.

“I was keeping quiet as I was working here,” he said. “My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

Dr Pachauri also said he did not learn about the mistakes until they were reported in the media about 10 days ago, at which time he contacted other IPCC members. He denied keeping quiet about the errors to avoid disrupting the UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen, or discouraging funding for TERI’s own glacier programme.

But he too admitted that it was “really odd” that none of the world’s leading glaciologists had pointed out the mistakes to him earlier. “Frankly, it was a stupid error,” he said. “But no one brought it to my attention.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999051.ece

Science News

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

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

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

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

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

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

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm

Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man’s best friend

Man’s best friend …
by Isabelle Toussaint and Jurgen Hecker Isabelle Toussaint And Jurgen Hecker – Sun Dec 20, 3:23 pm ET

PARIS (AFP) – Man’s best friend could be one of the environment’s worst enemies, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.

But the revelation in the book “Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living” by New Zealanders Robert and Brenda Vale has angered pet owners who feel they are being singled out as troublemakers.

The Vales, specialists in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington, analysed popular brands of pet food and calculated that a medium-sized dog eats around 164 kilos (360 pounds) of meat and 95 kilos of cereal a year.

Combine the land required to generate its food and a “medium” sized dog has an annual footprint of 0.84 hectares (2.07 acres) — around twice the 0.41 hectares required by a 4×4 driving 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) a year, including energy to build the car.

To confirm the results, the New Scientist magazine asked John Barrett at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, Britain, to calculate eco-pawprints based on his own data. The results were essentially the same.

“Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat,” Barrett said.

Other animals aren’t much better for the environment, the Vales say.

Cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares, slightly less than driving a Volkswagen Golf for a year, while two hamsters equates to a plasma television and even the humble goldfish burns energy equivalent to two mobile telephones.

But Reha Huttin, president of France’s 30 Million Friends animal rights foundation says the human impact of eliminating pets would be equally devastating.

“Pets are anti-depressants, they help us cope with stress, they are good for the elderly,” Huttin told AFP.

“Everyone should work out their own environmental impact. I should be allowed to say that I walk instead of using my car and that I don’t eat meat, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to have a little cat to alleviate my loneliness?”

Sylvie Comont, proud owner of seven cats and two dogs — the environmental equivalent of a small fleet of cars — says defiantly, “Our animals give us so much that I don’t feel like a polluter at all.

“I think the love we have for our animals and what they contribute to our lives outweighs the environmental considerations.

“I don’t want a life without animals,” she told AFP.

And pets’ environmental impact is not limited to their carbon footprint, as cats and dogs devastate wildlife, spread disease and pollute waterways, the Vales say.

With a total 7.7 million cats in Britain, more than 188 million wild animals are hunted, killed and eaten by feline predators per year, or an average 25 birds, mammals and frogs per cat, according to figures in the New Scientist.

Likewise, dogs decrease biodiversity in areas they are walked, while their faeces cause high bacterial levels in rivers and streams, making the water unsafe to drink, starving waterways of oxygen and killing aquatic life.

And cat poo can be even more toxic than doggy doo — owners who flush their litter down the toilet ultimately infect sea otters and other animals with toxoplasma gondii, which causes a killer brain disease.

But despite the apocalyptic visions of domesticated animals’ environmental impact, solutions exist, including reducing pets’ protein-rich meat intake.

“If pussy is scoffing ‘Fancy Feast’ — or some other food made from choice cuts of meat — then the relative impact is likely to be high,” said Robert Vale.

“If, on the other hand, the cat is fed on fish heads and other leftovers from the fishmonger, the impact will be lower.”

Other potential positive steps include avoiding walking your dog in wildlife-rich areas and keeping your cat indoors at night when it has a particular thirst for other, smaller animals’ blood.

As with buying a car, humans are also encouraged to take the environmental impact of their future possession/companion into account.

But the best way of compensating for that paw or clawprint is to make sure your animal is dual purpose, the Vales urge. Get a hen, which offsets its impact by laying edible eggs, or a rabbit, prepared to make the ultimate environmental sacrifice by ending up on the dinner table.

“Rabbits are good, provided you eat them,” said Robert Vale.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091220/sc_afp/lifestyleclimatewarminganimalsfood

European weather deaths pass 100

Freezing weather brings death and disruption in Germany, Italy and across eastern Europe

* Buzz up!
* Digg it

* Lizzy Davies
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 December 2009 17.31 GMT
* Article history

Soldiers shovel snow in Milan

Soldiers shovel snow in Milan. Photograph: Antonio Calanni/AP

More than 100 people have been killed in the cold snap across Europe, with temperatures plummeting and snowfall causing chaos from Moscow to Milan.

In Poland, where temperatures have dropped to as low as -20C in some areas, police appealed for tip-offs about people spotted lying around outside. At least 42 people, most of them homeless, died over the weekend.

In Ukraine 27 people have frozen to death since the thermometer dropped last week. Authorities in Romania said 11 people had succumbed to the chill, and in the Czech Republic the toll was 12. In Germany, where temperatures have fallen to -33C in certain parts, at least seven people are known to have lost their lives in the freezing weather.

For millions of others across the continent, the cold snap has brought severe disruption, with flight cancellations and traffic jams thwarting pre-Christmas travel plans.

The resumption of Eurostar services brought some relief to passengers travelling between France, Belgium and England, but many trains across Europe were delayed or cancelled.

Airports were struggling to cope with icy runways, with Ryanair and Easyjet among several airlines to cancel some flights.

In Frankfurt, where snowfall prompted delays and cancellations, 3,000 people were forced to spend last night inside the terminals at the city’s main airport. “It is totally chaotic today … no one knows what’s going on – neither us nor the staff,” Dorothee Schaefle, waiting in line, told Die Welt newspaper.

Roads were not exempt from the chaos. After a weekend that brought the heaviest snowfall in about 100 years, Moscow was gridlocked, with tailbacks snailing around the Russian capital.

In Italy, where winters are usually mild, motorways in the north-east were closed and the Ministry of Defence dispatched helicopters in Sicily to bring medical aid to those in need.

In Milan hundreds of soldiers worked through the night to clear the snow- and ice-covered streets.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/22/cold-weather-europe-death-toll

Winter freeze kills 79 in Poland

AFPDecember 22, 2009

WARSAW - Ten people have died of cold in Poland over the past day, taking the toll since winter set in earlier this month to 79, police said Tuesday.

A national police spokeswoman told AFP that 10 people had been found dead since Monday.

The majority of the victims were homeless men who died while drunk, police said.

Fifty-two of the 79 deaths recorded since December 1 occurred since Friday, as temperatures plunged to minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus four Fahrenheit).

By Tuesday, temperatures had risen to around zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit).

Police and municipal employees have boosted patrols in areas where the homeless gather, notably public parks and allotments, to try to persuade them to head to special hostels.

The death toll is far from unusual in Poland, which regularly faces harsh winter conditions.

In the 2008 to 2009 winter season, for example, police recorded 82 deaths from hypothermia.

Poland’s highest winter toll in recent years was in 2005 to 2006, when 233 died.
© Copyright (c) AFP
http://www.canada.com/news/Winter+freeze+kills+Poland/2370272/story.html

2 feet for Christmas? You better watch out

A storm likely to hit on Wednesday could make this “the snowiest Christmas … in 30 years” - and be a pain for last-minute travelers.

By JIM FOTI and BILL McAULIFFE, Star Tribune staff writers

Last update: December 22, 2009 - 4:33 PM
posted by rooney55387 on Dec. 22, 09 at 11:33 AM

“Enough with the pop-up advertisements! I can’t even read the first two paragraphs of this story because advertisements keep blocking the … read more screen. I close the windows and they just pop right back. The Strib should not subject their readers to pop-up ad windows, unless of course it can afford to loose even more of us.”…………… Use an ad blocker like most of us do :). Look for “Adblock Plus” for Firefox or “IE7Pro” for Internet Explorer (Also works on Internet Explorer 8).
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A large winter storm with the potential to dump a foot or more of snow is grinding its way toward Minnesota, and its arrival is likely to mess up travel plans, complicate last-minute errands and ensure a very white Christmas.

“It’s not definite yet, but it has an uncanny resemblance to the East Coast storm last Saturday,” meteorologist Paul Douglas posted Monday on his Facebook page. “I want to see one to two more computer runs, but this could be the snowiest Christmas for Minnesota in 30 years.”

According to a winter storm warning issued this afternoon for central and southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin, the mess is expected to begin Wednesday afternoon — and go on and on.

“This is major,” said James McQuirter, meteorologist at the Twin Cities office of the National Weather Service. “It might not get out of here until Saturday.”

Douglas said in an interview that, depending on the temperature, freezing rain, sleet and/or ice could enter the picture, particularly to the east and south. Either way, “I think travel conditions Christmas Eve and Christmas Day may be pretty bad,” he said, encouraging people to leave earlier on Wednesday if they have that option.

Computer models have been “all over the map,” he said, and snow totals approaching 2 feet are not out of the question, though it’s “way too early to know” exactly where in Minnesota that would happen.

The heaviest snowfall, 12 to 20 inches, likely will fall in a swath from Minneapolis to the Iowa border and west to the South Dakota border, said National Weather Service forecaster Jim Taggart. Duluth and the eastern part of the state also could see 6 inches or more of snow. The northwest part of the state will probably get clipped with 3 to 4 inches of snow, Taggart said.

“There’s no doubt that we’ll get heavy and a significant amount of snow,” he said. “The question is the timetable and the amounts. … It’s going to be wave after wave of snowfall.”
http://www.startribune.com/local/79869182.html?page=1&c=y

Carbon prices fall in wake of Copenhagen

By Chris Flood and Fiona Harvey

Published: December 22 2009 02:00 | Last updated: December 22 2009 02:00
CLICK ON LINK FOR FULL ARTICLE
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c1a7aade-ee98-11de-944c-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

Climate change alliance crumbling

By Fiona Harvey in London, Amy Kazmin in New Delhi, Geoff Dyer in Beijing and Jonathan Wheatley in Sao Paulo

Published: December 22 2009 19:20 | Last updated: December 22 2009 22:23
CLICK ON LINK FOR FULL ARTICLE
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c9453654-ef2d-11de-86c4-00144feab49a.html

Researcher: NASA hiding climate data>/H3>
By Stephen Dinan

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.

“I assume that what is there is highly damaging,” Mr. Horner said. “These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this.”

The numbers matter. Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed that data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for first, with 1934 slightly cooler.

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Mr. Horner, a noted global warming skeptic and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, wants a look at the data and the discussions that went into those changes. He said he’s given the agency until the end of the year to comply or else he’ll sue to compel the information’s release.

His fight mirrors one in Europe that has sprung up over the the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the UK after thousands of e-mails from the center were obtained and appear to show researchers shaving their data to make it conform to their expectation, and show efforts to try to drive global warming skeptics out of the conversation.

The center’s chief has stepped down pending an investigation into the e-mails.

The center has also had to acknowledge in response to a freedom of information request under British law that it tossed out much of the raw data that it used to draw up the temperature models that have underpinned much of the science behind global warming.

Mr. Horner suspects the same sort of data-shaving has happened at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), another leading global warming research center.

Mark Hess, public affairs director for the Goddard Space Flight Center which runs the GISS laboratory, said they are working on Mr. Horner’s request, though he couldn’t say why they have taken so long.

“We’re collecting the information and will respond with all the responsive relevant information to all of his requests,” Mr. Hess said. “It’s just a process you have to go through where you have to collect data that’s responsive.”

He said he was unfamiliar with the British controversy and couldn’t say whether NASA was susceptible to the same challenges to its data. The White House has dismissed the British e-mails as irrelevant.

“Several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening. I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this week.

But Republicans on Capitol Hill say the revelations deserve a congressional investigation. Republican leaders also sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson Wednesday telling her she should withdraw a series of EPA rules until the global warming science can be better substantiated. For now, climate scientists are rallying around the British researchers.

Michael Mann, a scientist at Penn State University who is under fire for his involvement in the British e-mail exchanges, said the e-mails’ release was timed to skunk up next week’s U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen. Mr. Obama is planning to attend.

“They’ve taken scientists’ words and phrases and quoted them out of context, completely misrepresenting what they were saying,” Mr. Mann told AccuWeather.com in an interview, calling it a “manufactured controversy.”

NASA’s GISS was forced to update its data in 2007 after questions were raised by Steve McIntyre, who runs ClimateAudit.com.

GISS had initially listed the warmest years as 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921 and 1931. After Mr. McIntyre’s questions GISS rejiggered the list and 1934 was warmest, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006 and then 1931. But since then, the list has been rewritten again so it now runs 1998, 2006, 1934, 1921, 1999.

The institute blamed a “minor data processing error” for the changes but says it doesn’t make much difference since the top three years remain in a “statistical tie” either way.

Mr. Horner said he’s seeking the data itself, but he also wants to see the chain of e-mails from scientists discussing the changes.

The Freedom of Information Act requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 days. Mr. Horner says he’s never received an official acknowledgement of his three separate FOIA requests, but has received e-mails showing the agency is aware of them.

He said he has provided NASA with a notice of intent to sue under FOIA, but said he also hopes members of Congress get involved and demand the information be released.

NASA and CRU data are considered the backbone of much of the science that suggests the earth is warming due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions. NASA argues its data suggests this decade has been the warmest on record.

On the other hand, data from the University of Alabama-Huntsville suggests temperatures have been relatively flat for most of this decade.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/03/researcher-says-nasa-hiding-climate-data/

---

Obama science advisers grilled over hacked e-mails

Sen. Boxer: You call it Climategate I Call it E-Mail-Theft-Gate

Oh for F Sake: Jon Stewart Talks ClimateGate

Fudge Factor: UK Programmer Explains Problems With CRU Climate Data Software

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Republicans pointed to controversial e-mails leaked from climate scientists and said it was evidence of corruption. Top administration scientists looking at the same thing found no such sign, saying it doesn’t change the fact that the world is warming.

The e-mails from a British university’s climate center were obtained by computer hackers and posted online about two weeks ago. Climate change skeptics contend the messages reveal that researchers manipulated and suppressed data and stifled dissent, and conservative bloggers are dubbing it “Climategate.”

In the first Capitol Hill airing of the issue, House Republicans Wednesday read excerpts from at least eight of the e-mails, saying they showed the world needs to re-examine experts’ claims that the science on warming is settled. One e-mail from 2003 was by John Holdren, then of Harvard University and now the president’s science adviser.

The exploding controversy led Phil Jones to step aside as head of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia, the source of the e-mail exchanges. The university is investigating the matter. Penn State University also is looking into e-mails by its own researcher, Michael Mann. House Republicans asked for a separate hearing or investigation into the issue, but were rebuffed by Democrats.

“These e-mails show a pattern of suppression, manipulation and secrecy that was inspired by ideology, condescension and profit,” said U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.

The science is proper and this is about a small fraction of research on the issue, said Holdren, a physicist who has studied climate change.

“The e-mails do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus … that tells us the earth is warming, that warming is largely a result of human activity,” said another government scientist Jane Lubchenco. A marine biologist and climate researcher, she heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The e-mails don’t negate or even deal with data from both NOAA and NASA, which keep independent climate records and show dramatic warming, Lubchenco told members of the House global warming committee.

The hearing was supposed to focus on the latest in global warming scientific findings. Lubchenco even attempted a high school chemistry lesson with two quick experiments at the witness table. Donning one rubber glove, she demonstrated how adding carbon dioxide to water made it more acidic and said that is what’s now happening in the world’s oceans. Then she put chalk in acidic water compounds and showed it dissolving a bit, to demonstrate what will happen eventually to vital sea life.

But her bubble-inducing experiments were ignored in favor of the more explosive e-mails.

Among the messages that Sensenbrenner read was one from Jones, the East Anglia scientist, in which he wrote about a “trick of adding in the real temps” in an exchange about long-term climate trends. Holdren responded that the word “trick” did not mean manipulation of data, but about a “clever way” to tackle a problem. Another Jones’ e-mail read, “I would like to see the climate change happen so the science could be proved right.”

Defending the scientists, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., said somehow the e-mails aren’t stopping the Arctic from warming, the oceans from getting more acidic, and glaciers from melting. He sarcastically asked Holdren and Lubchenco if they were part of a global conspiracy that even included fictional movie villain organizations. Holdren, played along, saying he was not.

After complaining of “scientific fascism” and “scientific McCarthyism,” Sensenbrenner chastised Holdren for his 2003 e-mail, when he was at Harvard, that dealt with skeptics by “calling them names.”

What the e-mail, not read by Sensenbrenner, showed was that Holdren used ironic quotes around the word “Harvard” in describing two of his colleagues who are global warming skeptics. Holdren also had forwarded to other scientists an article he described as “for your entertainment” in which he was quoted as saying the two skeptics were “wrong.” Holdren defended his e-mail.

Sensenbrenner attacked the work of Penn State’s Mann, who is frequently brought up in the communications. Mann is the author of what is called the “hockey stick” theory, first described in the late 1990s. It suggested that the past 50 years had been the hottest in several centuries, if not 1,000 years, and that man-made global warming was to blame. That research was so controversial that the National Academy of Sciences studied the work in depth; it was used in former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary on global warming.

Sensenbrenner said the 2006 National Academy study showed Mann’s hockey stick was incorrect and that Mann’s theory was discredited. But Holdren said the NAS study had quibbles with Mann’s methods but agreed with his results.

The chairman of the Academy of Science panel, Texas A&M University atmospheric scientist Gerald North, confirmed in an interview Wednesday that Holdren was right, not Sensenbrenner.

“The conclusions that we came to were essentially the same as the hockey stick” theory that Mann proposed, North told The Associated Press. North said even if Jones, Mann and others had done no research at all, the world would still be warming and scientists would still be able to show it.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9CBFB901&show_article=1

From The Times
December 4, 2009

Copenhagen targets not tough enough, says Al Gore

Even if a deal is reached at the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen next week it will only be the first step towards the far more radical cuts that are needed in global carbon emissions, Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, told The Times last night.

Mr Gore said that to avoid the worst ravages of climate change world leaders would have to come together again to set more drastic reductions than those now planned.

“Even a final treaty will have to set the stage for other tougher reductions at a later date,” he said. “We have already overshot the safe levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

He insisted that the present goal set for Copenhagen of stabilising world emissions of carbon dioxide at or below 450 parts per million — enough to prevent a rise in average global temperatures of no more than 2C — was insufficient and a safer target would be 350 parts per million.

“Are we doing enough? The answer is obviously no — 450 is not the right target. But it is presently seen as beyond the capacity of governments around the world. We are stretching the capacity of governments even to hit a 450 target.”

“We are gambling with the future of human civilisation in accepting odds that by any definition make our present course reckless . . . But it’s still the most likely path to success.”

Speaking from San Francisco, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and veteran climate campaigner also raised the pressure on President Obama to offer more stringent cuts in US emissions than the present offer of a 17 per cent reduction by 2020.

Mr Gore said that figure from the US, the world’s second-biggest carbon polluter, was “weaker than it should be” although he expressed sympathy for the challenges that Mr Obama faces in driving tough carbon regulation through a resistant House of Representatives. He said: “I’m glad that he is putting reduction targets on the table. I wish that they were stronger but I recognise the difficulties he faces in the Senate.”

Mr Gore also threw his weight behind calls for a system of international carbon taxes in order to slash fossil-fuel consumption although he warned that huge political obstacles existed to this which meant that it would be many years before such a system could be applied globally.

He said that a system of carbon emissions trading was a more realistic first step on this path and rejected criticism from James Hansen, the pioneering climate change scientist at Nasa, who has condemned both Mr Gore and the Copenhagen meeting for their focus on carbon markets as a solution to climate change.

Mr Gore said: “The correct policy response will include both of these powerful tools. But the degree of political difficulty associated with a carbon tax is a degree of difficulty much higher than the cap and trade approach.”

He also brushed aside questions over the reliability of climate science that have followed the publication last month of leaked e-mails between climate experts. He claimed that the scientific consensus around climate change “continues to grow from strength to strength”. He added: “The naysayers are in a sunset phase with a spectacular climax just before they subside from view. This is a race between common sense and unreality.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6943447.ece

* India’s NALCO sells alumina at $318.23/T - source
Thu, Dec 3 2009
* Unitech Wireless not to join national 3G auction
Thu, Dec 3 2009
* Unitech Wireless: ops to be expanded by early 2010
Thu, Dec 3 2009
* India Unitech Wireless eyes 8pct mkt share by 2018
Thu, Dec 3 2009
* India cbank dpty: policy exit is a challenge
Thu, Dec 3 2009

NEW DELHI, Dec 3 (Reuters) - India will not accept a legally binding emission cut nor a peak year of carbon emissions at the global climate talks in Copenhagen, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday.

“There is no question of India accepting a legally binding emission reduction cut,” he told parliament, laying out India’s negotiating position ahead of the December talks.

India would however accept international verification of reductions if supported by financing and technology transfers.

(Reporting by Krittivas Mukherjee: Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
http://www.reuters.com/article/hotStocksNews/idUSDEB00309720091203

Climategate: it’s all unravelling now

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 2nd, 2009

So many new developments: which story do we pick? Maybe best to summarise, instead. After all, it’s not like you’re going to find much of this reported in the MSM.

1. Australia’s Senate rejects Emissions Trading Scheme for a second time. Or: so turkeys don’t vote Christmas. Expect to see a lot more of this: politicians starting to become aware their party’s position on AGW is completely out of kilter with the public mood and economic reality. Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme – what Andrew Bolt calls “a $114 billion green tax on everything” – would have wreaked havoc on the coal-dependent Australian economy. That’s why several opposition Liberal frontbenchers resigned rather than vote with the Government on ETS; why Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull lost his job; and why the Senate voted down the ETS.

2. Danes caught fiddling their carbon credits. (Hat tip: Philip Stott) Carbon trading is the Emperor’s New Clothes of international finance. It was invented by none other than Ken Lay, whose Enron would currently be one of the prime beneficiaries in the global alternative energy market, if it hadn’t been shown to be (nearly) as fraudulent as the current AGW scam. It is a licence to fleece, cheat and rob. Still, jolly embarrassing for the Danes to get caught red handed, what with their hosting a conference shortly in which the world’s leaders will try, straight-faced, to persuade us that carbon emissions trading is the only viable way of defeating ManBearPig.

3. Hats off to The Daily Express – the first British newspaper to make the AGW scam its front page story.

Express

The piece was inspired by another bravura performance by Professor Ian Plimer, the Aussie geologist who argues that climate change has been going on quite naturally, oblivious of human activity, for the last 4,567 million years.

4. BBC finally gets round to reporting – sort of – that Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia may have been up to no good. It’s true that this report on their website is so hedged with special pleading for the temporarily suspended director Phil Jones the man might have written it himself. But on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning, I did hear the newsreader reporting it as more than just a routine theft story. Which is a start.

5. Legal actions ahoy! Over the next few weeks, one thing we can be absolutely certain of is concerted efforts by the rich, powerful and influential AGW lobby to squash the Climategate story. We’ve seen this already in the “nothing to see here” response of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the jet-setting, troll-impersonating railway engineer who runs the IPCC and wants to stop ice being served with water in restaurants. This is why those of us who oppose his scheme to carbon-tax the global economy back to the dark ages must do everything in our power to bring the scandal to a wider audience. One way to do this is law suits.

At Ian Plimer’s lunch talk yesterday, Viscount Monckton talked of at least two in the offing – both by scientists, one British, one Canadian, who intend to pursue the CRU for criminal fraud. Their case, quite simply, is that the scientists implicated in Climategate have gained funding and career advancement by twisting data, hiding evidence, and shutting out dissenters by corrupting the peer-review process. More news on this, as I hear it.

Lord Monckton has written an indispensible summary of the Climategate revelations so far.

6. Watch out Green Dave! The Independent reports on the growing backlash within the party to Cameron’s libtard-wooing greenery. Turning to the Independent for a balanced report on environmental matters is a bit like consulting Der Sturmer for a sensible, insightful view on the Jewish question. Still, for once, the house journal of eco-loonery seems to have got it right and the point made by Tory backbencher David Davis is well made:

“The ferocious determination to impose hair-shirt policies on the public – taxes on holiday flights, or covering our beautiful countryside with wind turbines that look like props from War of the Worlds – is bound to cause a reaction in any democratic country.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018556/climategate-its-all-unravelling-now/

Australia’s Parliament defeats global warming bill

Australian MPs reject carbon laws Play Video Reuters – Australian MPs reject carbon laws

By ROHAN SULLIVAN, Associated Press Writer Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press Writer – Wed Dec 2, 2:45 am ET

SYDNEY – Australia’s plans for an emissions trading system to combat global warming were scuttled Wednesday in Parliament, handing a defeat to a government that had hoped to set an example at international climate change talks next week.

The Senate, where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s government does not hold a majority, rejected his administration’s proposal for Australia to become one of the first countries to install a so-called cap-and-trade system to slash the amount of heat-trapping pollution that industries pump into the air.

The 41-33 vote followed a tumultuous debate in which the conservative main opposition party at first agreed to support a version of the government’s bill, then dramatically dumped its leader and switched sides after bitter divisions erupted within the party.

The new leader, Tony Abbott, said Australia should not adopt an emissions trading system before the rest of the world.

“The right time, if ever, to have an ETS is if and when it becomes part of the international trading system and that is not going to happen prior to its adoption in America,” he told reporters after the vote.

Rudd had wanted the legislation passed before he attends next week’s U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen so he could portray Australia as a world leader on the issue. He discussed the issue with President Barack Obama this week during a visit to the White House from which he was still returning Wednesday.

The defeat of the Australian plan could influence the views of some delegates to the Copenhagen meetings, adding weight to the argument that developed nations should curb their emissions before poorer nations are required to tackle theirs, said Frank Jotzo, an Australian National University expert on international climate change negotiations.

“It’s not like the talks will stall because of the lack of an Australian emissions trading scheme in place,” he said. “But if the legislation had been passed that would have sent a very positive signal internationally and in particular to developing countries.”

Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the government would reintroduce the bill in February to give the opposition a last chance to overcome its divisions and support the plan.

If the bill is defeated again, Rudd could use that as a reason to call early elections. Elections are due by late 2010 anyway.

Australia is a small greenhouse gas polluter in global terms, but one of the worst per capita because it relies heavily for its electricity on its abundant reserves of coal. As the driest continent after Antarctica, it is also considered one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change.

The European Union has a carbon trading system, as do some U.S. states. Canada and New Zealand are among countries considering or in the process of implementing them.

Under the government’s plan, an annual limit would be placed on the amount of greenhouse gases allowed to be pumped into the atmosphere and permits would be issued to regulate that ceiling. The permits could be bought and sold, setting up a market system that would make reducing emissions potentially profitable for polluting companies.

Opponents of the legislation say it amounts to a huge new tax on polluting industries such as power generators, which would put a crimp on the economy and lead to higher prices for consumers.

Climate Change Minister Sen. Penny Wong accused the opposition members who voted the bill down of being climate change deniers out of step with the world.

“This is about doing our bit as part of a global agreement, this is about responding to what is a global challenge,” Wong said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091202/ap_on_re_as/climate_australia

Inhofe Asks Boxer to Investigate Possible Scientific ‘Conspiracy’ in ‘Climategate’

U.N. Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Sha Zukang, back to camera, talks to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, right, as Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, left, and Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, second from left, look on at an international conference on technology and climate change in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)
(CNSNews.com) – Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, is calling on Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to conduct hearings on a possible conspiracy between some of the world’s most prominent climatologists to, among other things, manipulate data on so-called global warming.

Inhofe said the recent disclosure of emails between several prominent climatologists reveal “possible deceitful manipulation of important data and research used by the US Global Change Research Program” and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

He suggested “a possible conspiracy by scientists, some of whom receive or have received US taxpayer funds, to stifle open, transparent debate on the most pressing issues of climate science.”

Inhofe also noted that there appeared to be “a campaign to vilify scientists who question global warming alarmism.”

“For instance,” Inhofe wrote, “one scientist wrote of a ‘trick he employed to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperature trends, as well as discussed attempts to ‘redefine what the peer-review literature is’ to prevent papers raising questions about anthropogenic global warming from appearing in IPCC reports.

“Another scientist stated, ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming and it is a travesty that we can’t.’ Still another wrote, “I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same,’” Inhofe added.

The controversy “could have far-reaching policy implications,” Inhofe wrote,” affecting everything from (to name a few) cap-and-trade legislation, state and regional climate change programs,” and the Section 202 (a) of the EPA’s Clean Air Act – policies that “will lead to a torrent of new federal regulations that will destroy thousands of jobs and make electricity and gasoline more expensive for consumers and small businesses.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/57879

Penn State Will Investigate ‘Climategate’

Among other things, the Watergate scandal of the 1970s gave us a great naming convention for future scandals. Take “Climategate” at Penn State. That’s what people are calling the controversy surrounding leaked E-mails among climate change researchers that climate change opponents say expose the researchers’ falsification of data. One Penn State professor is involved in the scandal.

The Penn State administration plans to investigate Climategate and determine if it needs to take further action, the Daily Collegian reports. A little more than a week ago, E-mails exchanged among an English university’s climate change researchers were illegally obtained from a server and posted online, the report says.

Climate change opponents say the E-mails indicate that climate change researchers—including Penn State Prof. Michael Mann—exaggerated or fabricated global warming data. And, according to the report, some E-mails indicate that the director of the research unit in question may have contacted researchers and asked them to “delete certain E-mails.”

Penn State officials, who will not discuss the matter, are investigating the controversy. If anything requires further inspection, the school will handle it, a spokesman tells the Daily Collegian. A panel will read every E-mail leaked and determine if climate change critics have any ground for their accusations, the report says.

“I would be disappointed if the university wasn’t doing all [it] can to get as much information as possible” about the controversy, Mann tells the Daily Collegian.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2009/11/30/penn-state-will-investigate-climategate.html

Climate scientist at center of e-mail controversy to step down

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 3:45 PM

A scientist who is one of the central figures in the controversy over hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit announced Tuesday that he is stepping down while the university investigates the incident.

Climate skeptics have seized on several e-mails from Phil Jones, director of the university’s Climatic Research Unit, to other researchers as evidence that prominent scientists have sought to silence their voice in the debate over global warming. The e-mails were pirated and posted online last month.

“What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible,” Jones said in a statement. “After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director’s role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support.”

East Anglia’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Edward Acton said he had “accepted Professor Jones’s offer to stand aside during this period. It is an important step to ensure that CRU can continue to operate normally and the independent review can conduct its work into the allegations.”

Action added the university will disclose details of the probe, including who will head it and how long it will last “within days.”

Marc Morano, who edits the climate skeptic blog, ClimateDepot.com, welcomed the news with an e-mail stating, “One Down: ClimateGate Scientist Phil Jones to temporarily step down… ‘pending investigation into allegations that he overstated case for man-made climate change.’”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/01/AR2009120102737_pf.html

CLIMATE CHANGE ‘FRAUD’

CLIMATE CHANGE: Many experts claim man-made global warming is melting see ice

Wednesday December 2,2009
By John Ingham

THE scientific consensus that mankind has caused climate change was rocked yesterday as a leading academic called it a “load of hot air underpinned by fraud”.

Professor Ian Plimer condemned the climate change lobby as “climate comrades” keeping the “gravy train” going.

In a controversial talk just days before the start of a climate summit attended by world leaders in Copenhagen, Prof Plimer said Governments were treating the public like “fools” and using climate change to increase taxes.

He said carbon dioxide has had no impact on temperature and that recent warming was part of the natural cycle of climate stretching over ­billions of years.
ì
If you have to argue your science by using fraud, your science is not valid.
î

Professor Pilmer

Prof Plimer - author of Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, The Missing Science - told a London audience: “Climates always change. They always have and they always will. They are driven by a number of factors that are random and cyclical.”

His comments came days after a scandal in climate-change research emerged through the leak of emails from the world-leading research unit at the University of East Anglia. They appeared to show that scientists had been massaging data to prove that global warming was taking place

The Climate Research Unit also admitted getting rid of much of its raw climate data, which means other scientists cannot check the subsequent research. Last night the head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, said he would stand down while an independent review took place.

Professor Plimer said climate change was caused by natural events such as volcanic eruptions, the shifting of the Earth’s orbit and cosmic radiation. He said: “Carbon dioxide levels have been up to 1,000 times higher in the past. CO2 cannot be driving global warming now.

“In the past we have had rapid and significant climate change with temperature changes greater than anything we are measuring today. They are driven by processes that have been going on since the beginning of time.”

He cited periods of warming during the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages – when Vikings grew crops on Greenland – and cooler phases such as the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850.

And he predicted that the next phase would cool the planet.

Climate change is widely blamed on the burning of fossil fuels which release greenhouse gases such as CO2 into the atmosphere, where they trap the sun’s heat.

The talks at Copenhagen are expected to find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally.

But Professor Plimer, of Adelaide and Melbourne Universities, said that to stop climate change Governments should find ways to prevent changes to the Earth’s orbit and ocean currents and avoid explosions of supernovae in space. Of the saga of the leaked emails, he said: “If you have to argue your science by using fraud, your science is not valid.”

The CRU’s Professor Jones has admitted some of the emails may have had “poorly chosen words” and were sent in the “heat of the moment”. But he has categorically denied manipulating data and said he stood by the science. And yesterday he dismissed suggestions of a conspiracy to alter ­evidence to support a theory of man-made global warming as “complete rubbish”.

But mining geology professor Plimer said there was a huge momentum behind the climate-change lobby.

He suggested many scientists had a vested interest in promoting climate change because it helped secure more funding for research. He said: “The climate comrades are trying to keep the gravy train going. Governments are also keen on putting their hands as deep as possible into our pockets.

“The average person has been talked down to. He has been treated like a fool. Yet the average person has common sense.”

But Vicky Pope, head of Met Office Climate Change Advice, said: “We are seeing changes in climate on a timescale we have not seen before.

“There clearly are natural variations. But the only way we can explain these trends is when we include both man-made and natural changes to the climate.

“We have also seen declines in summer sea ice over the past 30 years, glaciers retreating for 150 years, changing rainfall patterns and increases in subsurface and surface ocean temperatures.”

And as the war of words between the rival camps intensified, leading economist Lord Stern dismissed the sceptics as “muddled”.

Lord Stern, who produced a detailed report on the issue for the Government, said evidence of ­climate change was “overwhelming”. He accepted that all views should be heard but said the degree of ­scepticism among “real scientists” was very small.
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/143573

Gibbs: Despite research dispute, ‘climate change is happening’

The White House on Monday made exceptionally clear that it wants nothing to do with the furor over documents that global warming skeptics say prove the phenomenon is not a threat.

Despite the incident, which rocked international headlines last week, climate science is sound, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stressed this afternoon, and the White House nonetheless believes “climate change is happening.”

“I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore,” he said during Monday’s press briefing.

Climate change skeptics have asserted over the past week that the publication of more than 1,000 private e-mails and documents once housed in the University of East Anglia’s computer system refutes most modern global warming evidence.

The documents, unearthed by a blogger who hacked into Climate Research Unit’s (CRU) private system, have since touched off an international debate over the veracity of those scientists’ works.

But the dispute is proving especially troublesome for the Obama administration as it prepares to head to Copenhagen next week for a climate change summit — a forum the president will attend.

Not only has the White House faced criticism from the left for offering too few concessions ahead of the meet, it is now fielding dissatisfaction from the right for participating in a summit sponsored in part by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — one of the research organs touched by the CRU spat.

“I think there’s no real scientific basis for the dispute of this,” responded Gibbs to questions about those scientists’ credibility.

Nevertheless, congressional Republicans this week hope to ramp up their criticism of both global warming policy and the science that informs it.

Most vocal seems to be Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe demanded on Friday a hearing into the IPCC’s research to determine whether it “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.”

“[T]his 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,” he told reporters, noting it was “interesting” the e-mails surfaced before the Copenhagen summit.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/69797-gibbs-despite-research-dispute-climate-change-is-happening

Climate change data dumped

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
Related Links

* The great climate change science scandal

* EU figurehead says climate change a myth

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

Leaked emails won’t harm UN climate body, says chairman

Rajendra Pachauri says there is ‘virtually no possibility’ of a few scientists biasing IPCC’s advice, after UAE hacking breach

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC

There is “virtually no possibility” of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN’s top global warming body, its chair said today.

Rajendra Pachauri defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel’s fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007.

The emails were made public this month after a hacker illegally obtained them from servers at the university.

Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered.

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he said.

“Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.”

The IPCC, which was set up by the UN in 1988, is the world’s leading authority on climate change. It advises governments on the science behind the problem and was awarded the Nobel peace prize along with Al Gore in 2007.

Pachauri was responding to one email from 2004 in which Professor Phil Jones, the head of the climatic research unit at UEA, said of two papers he regarded as flawed: “I can’t see either … being in the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Pachauri said it was not clear whether the wording of the emails reflected the scientists’ intended actions, but said: “I really think people should be discreet … in this day and age anything you write, even privately, could become public and to put anything down in writing is, to say the least, indiscreet … It is another matter to talk about this to your friends on the telephone or person to person but to put it down in writing was indiscreet. If someone was to say something like this in an IPCC authors’ meeting then there are others who would chew him up.”

Jones has denied any suggestion that he tried to suppress scientific evidence he disagreed with or that he manipulated data.

Some commentators, including the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the environmental campaigner and Guardian writer George Monbiot, have called on Jones to resign but Pachauri said he did not agree. He said an independent inquiry into the emails would achieve little, but there should be a criminal investigation into how the emails came to light.

Pachauri said he doubted that trust in the IPCC would be damaged by the affair. “People who are aware of how the IPCC functions and are appreciative of the credibility that the IPCC has attained will probably not be swayed by an incident of this kind,” he said.

He pointed out that five days after the emails were made public, Barack Obama announced a major commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/29/ipcc-climate-change-leaked-emails

Inquiry into stolen climate e-mails

By Roger Harrabin
Environment analyst, BBC News

Keyboard (EyeWire)
The supposed e-mails have been widely circulated on the web

Details of a university inquiry into e-mails stolen from scientists at one of the UK’s leading climate research units are likely to be made public next week.

Announcement of a chair of the inquiry and terms of reference will probably be made on Monday, a source says.

The University of East Anglia’s (UEA) press office did not confirm the date.

But a spokesperson said information about the investigation into the hack at UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) would be made public very soon.

Scientists will be scrutinising the choice of chair and the terms of reference.

One senior climate scientist told me that the chair would have to be a person accepted by both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics as a highly respected figure without strong connections to either group.

BBC News understands that senior individuals at UEA have acknowledged the potential damage to the university’s reputation from the CRU affair and are anxious to clear the institution’s name.

But there is a risk that some people will not accept the findings of any inquiry unless it is fully independent, as demanded by the former UK Chancellor Lord Lawson earlier in the week.

A petition is running on the 10 Downing Street website calling for CRU to be suspended from preparation of any government climate statistics until the allegations have been fully investigated.

Some researchers would not comment until they had seen UEA’s nominated chairman and terms of reference.

But Professor Sir John Houghton, chair of the IPCC’s first science panel, said he would not support an inquiry as many of those demanding one were biased.

Phil Willis MP said the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee - of which he is chair - had written to UEA asking for copies of the e-mails and an explanation. Depending on the response, the committee will decide whether to proceed further.

Professor Sir David King, the former government chief scientist, told BBC News there are three key issues:

* how did the leakage occur - was there any payment in the process?
* the alleged behaviour of the scientists indicated by the e-mails
* does this have any impact on the scientific conclusion?

If an independent inquiry encompassed all three aspects, Professor Sir David said he would support it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8383713.stm

Climategate: University of East Anglia U-turn in climate change row

By Robert Mendick
Published: 8:55PM GMT 28 Nov 2009
Leading British scientists who were accused of manipulating climate change data have agreed to publish their figures in full.
David Holland is seeking prosecutions against some of Britain’s most eminent academics for allegedly holding back information in breach of disclosure laws. Photo: DAVID ROSE

The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, “stolen” by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics.

In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.

The publication will be carried out in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre. The full data, when disclosed, is certain to be scrutinised by both sides in the fierce debate.

A grandfather with a training in electrical engineering dating back more than 40 years emerged from the leaked emails as a leading climate sceptic trying to bring down the scientific establishment on global warming.

David Holland, who describes himself as a David taking on the Goliath that is the prevailing scientific consensus, is seeking prosecutions against some of Britain’s most eminent academics for allegedly holding back information in breach of disclosure laws.

Mr Holland, of Northampton, complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) last week after the leaked emails included several Freedom of Information requests he had submitted to the CRU, and scientists’ private responses to them.

Within hours, a senior complaints officer in the ICO wrote back by email: “I have started to examine the issues that you have raised in your letter and I am currently liaising with colleagues in our Enforcement and Data Protection teams as to what steps to take next.”

The official also promised to investigate other universities linked to the CRU, which is one of the world’s leading authorities on temperature levels and has helped to prove that man-made global warming not only exists but will have catastrophic consequences if not tackled urgently. Mr Holland is convinced the threat has been greatly exaggerated.

In one email dated May 28, 2008, one academic writes to a colleague having received Mr Holland’s request: “Oh MAN! Will this crap ever end??”

Mr Holland, who graduated with an external degree in electrical engineering from London University in 1966 before going on to run his own businesses, told The Sunday Telegraph: “It’s like David versus Goliath. Thanks to these leaked emails a lot of little people can begin to make some impact on this monolithic entity that is the climate change lobby.”

He added: “These guys called climate scientists have not done any more physics or chemistry than I did. A lifetime in engineering gives you a very good antenna. It also cures people of any self belief they cannot be wrong. You clear up a lot of messes during a lifetime in engineering. I could be wrong on global warming – I know that – but the guys on the other side don’t believe they can ever be wrong.”

Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research Enterprise and Engagement, said yesterday: “CRU’s full data will be published in the interests of research transparency when we have the necessary agreements. It is worth reiterating that our conclusions correlate well to those of other scientists based on the separate data sets held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“We are grateful for the necessary support of the Met Office in requesting the permissions for releasing the information but understand that responses may take several months and that some countries may refuse permission due to the economic value of the data.”

Among the leaked emails disclosed last week were an alleged note from Professor Phil Jones, 57, the director of the CRU and a leading target of climate change sceptics, to an American colleague describing the death of a sceptic as “cheering news”; and a suggestion from Prof Jones that a “trick” is used to “hide the decline” in temperature.

They even include threats of violence. One American academic wrote to Prof Jones: “Next time I see Pat Michaels [a climate sceptic] at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”

Dr Michaels, tracked down by this newspaper to the Cato Institute in Washington DC where he is a senior fellow in environmental studies, said last night: “There were a lot of people who thought I was exaggerating when I kept insisting terrible things are going on here.

“This is business as usual for them. The world might be surprised but I am not. These guys have an attitude.”

Prof Jones, who has refused to quit despite calls even from within the green movement, said last week in a statement issued through University of East Anglia, “My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.”

He suggested the theft of emails and publication first on a Russian server was “a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks”.

He added: “Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6678469/Climategate-University-of-East-Anglia-U-turn-in-climate-change-row.html

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009

Comments 280 | Comment on this article
Who’s to blame for Climategate?
CO2 emissions will be on top of the agenda at the Copenhagen summit in December Photo: Getty

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html

James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com

Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust over carbon tax

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: November 26th, 2009

153 Comments Comment on this article

Australia is leading the revolt against Al Gore’s great big AGW conspiracy – just as the Aussie geologist and AGW sceptic Professor Ian Plimer predicted it would.

ABC news reports that five frontbenchers from Australia’s opposition Liberal party have resigned their portfolios rather than follow their leader Malcolm Turnbull in voting with Kevin Rudd’s Government on a new Emissions Trading Scheme.

The Liberal Party is in turmoil with the resignations of five frontbenchers from their portfolios this afternoon in protest against the emissions trading scheme.

Tony Abbott, Sophie Mirabella, Tony Smith and Senators Nick Minchin and Eric Abetz have all quit their portfolios because they cannot vote for the legislation.

Senate whip Stephen Parry has also relinquished his position.

The ETS is Australia’s version of America’s proposed Cap and Trade and the EU’s various carbon reduction schemes: a way of taxing business on its CO2 output. As Professor Plimer pointed out when I interviewed him in the summer, this threatens to cause enormous economic damage in Australia’s industrial and mining heartlands, not least because both are massively dependent on Australia’s vast reserves of coal. It is correspondingly extremely unpopular with Aussie’s outside the pinko, libtard metropolitan fleshpots.

Though the ETS squeaked narrowly through Australia’s House of Representatives, its Senate is proving more robust – thanks not least to the widespread disgust by the many Senators who have read Professor Plimer’s book Heaven And Earth at the dishonesty and corruption of the AGW industry. If the Senate keeps rejecting the scheme, then the Australian government will be forced to dissolve.

For the rapidly increasing number of us who believe that AGW is little more than a scheme by bullying eco-fascists to deprive us of our liberty, by big government to spread its controlling tentacles into every aspect our lives, and scheming industrialists such as Al Gore to enrich themselves through carbon trading, this principled act by Australia’s Carbon Five is fantastic news.

Where they lead, the rest of the world’s politicians will eventually be forced to follow: their appalled electorates will make sure of it.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018003/climategate-five-aussie-mps-lead-the-way-by-resigning-in-disgust-over-carbon-tax/

Rigging a Climate ‘Consensus’

The climatologists at the center of the leaked email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science. They’re ignoring the damage they’ve done to public confidence in the arbiters of climate science.

“What they’ve done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world,” Penn State’s Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made “something innocent into something nefarious.”

Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. “My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues,” he said this week.

We don’t doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. He’s right that it doesn’t look good that his May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.’s Fourth Assessment Report said “Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?” Mr. Mann says he didn’t delete any such emails, but the point is that Mr. Jones wanted them hidden.

The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced. The impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.

According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the “peer-review” process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges from critics outside this clique are dismissed and disparaged.

This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: “Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.” Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted in a March 2003 email, after the journal “Climate Research” published a paper not to Mr. Mann’s liking, that “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!”

Mr. Mann went on to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: “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.” In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, redefine what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.

A more thoughtful response to the emails comes from Mike Hulme, another climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, as reported by a New York Times blogger:

“This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”

The response from the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science. The proof for this is circular. It’s the best, we’re told, because it’s the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature. The public has every reason to ask why they felt the need to rig the game if their science is as indisputable as they claim.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574559630382048494.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Posted by George Monbiot Wednesday 25 November 2009 17.23 GMT guardian.co.uk

Pretending the climate email leak isn’t a crisis won’t make it go away

Climate sceptics have lied, obscured and cheated for years. That’s why we climate rationalists must uphold the highest standards of science

• Climate email hackers had access for more than a month

ice drill peru

Research and rationalism: ice core drilling on the summit of Quelccaya ice cap, Peru. Photograph: Peter Essick/Getty

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.

The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people’s denial. Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

It is true that much of what has been revealed could be explained as the usual cut and thrust of the peer review process, exacerbated by the extraordinary pressure the scientists were facing from a denial industry determined to crush them. One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief. Jones knew that any incorrect papers by sceptical scientists would be picked up and amplified by climate change deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry, who often – as I documented in my book Heat – use all sorts of dirty tricks to advance their cause.

Even so, his message looks awful. It gives the impression of confirming a potent meme circulated by those who campaign against taking action on climate change: that the IPCC process is biased. However good the detailed explanations may be, most people aren’t going to follow or understand them. Jones’s statement, on the other hand, is stark and easy to grasp.

In this case you could argue that technically he has done nothing wrong. But a fat lot of good that will do. Think of the MPs’ expenses scandal: complaints about stolen data, denials and huffy responses achieved nothing at all. Most of the MPs could demonstrate that technically they were innocent: their expenses had been approved by the Commons office. It didn’t change public perceptions one jot. The only responses that have helped to restore public trust in Parliament are humility, openness and promises of reform.

When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.

I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. He has a few days left in which to make an honourable exit. Otherwise, like the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, he will linger on until his remaining credibility vanishes, inflicting continuing damage to climate science.

Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.

The crisis has been exacerbated by the university’s handling of it, which has been a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond. RealClimate reports that “We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.” In other words, the university knew what was coming three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike.

When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU’s opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no comment” and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”. When I got hold of him on Saturday, his answer was to send me a pdf called “WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999″. Had I a couple of hours to spare I might have been able to work out what the heck this had to do with the current crisis, but he offered no explanation.

By then he should have been touring the TV studios for the past 36 hours, confronting his critics, making his case and apologising for his mistakes. Instead, he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Now, far too late, he has given an interview to the Press Association, which has done nothing to change the story.

The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline. They appear to have no idea what they’re up against or how to confront it. Their opponents might be scumbags, but their media strategy is exemplary.

The greatest tragedy here is that despite many years of outright fabrication, fraud and deceit on the part of the climate change denial industry, documented in James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore’s brilliant new book Climate Cover-up, it is now the climate scientists who look bad. By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow. Hoggan and Littlemore have shown how fossil fuel industries have employed “experts” to lie, cheat and manipulate on their behalf. The revelations in their book (as well as in Heat and in Ross Gelbspan’s book The Heat Is On) are 100 times graver than anything contained in these emails.

But the deniers’ campaign of lies, grotesque as it is, does not justify secrecy and suppression on the part of climate scientists. Far from it: it means that they must distinguish themselves from their opponents in every way. No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that it is unimpeachable, not the last.

monbiot.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov/25/monbiot-climate-leak-crisis-response

telegraph.co.uk
Gerald Warner
Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator who writes about politics, religion, history, culture and society in general.
Climategate e-mails sweep America, may scuttle Barack Obama’s Cap and Trade laws

By Gerald Warner Politics Last updated: November 26th, 2009

212 Comments Comment on this article

Just a few considerations in addition to previous remarks about the explosion of the East Anglia Climategate e-mails in America. The reaction is growing exponentially there. Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, is now on the case, trampling all over Al Gore’s organic vegetable patch and breaking the White House windows. It has extracted some of the juiciest quotes from the e-mails and displayed them on-screen, with commentaries. Joe Public, coast-to-coast, now knows, thanks to the clowns at East Anglia’s CRU, just how royally he has been screwed.

Senator James Inhofe’s Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has written to all the relevant US Government agencies, acquainting them with the nature of the e-mails. But the real car crash for Obama is on Capitol Hill where it is now confidently believed his Cap and Trade climate legislation is toast. It was always problematic; but with a growing awakening to the scale of the scientific imposture sweeping the world, as far as the Antipodes, the clever money is on Cap and Trade laws failing to pass, with many legislators sceptical and the mid-term elections looming ever closer.

At the more domestic level, the proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs, so supinely accepted in this servile state of Britain, is now provoking a huge backlash in America. US citizens do not like the government coming into their houses and putting their lights out. Voters may not understand the cut and thrust of climate debate at the technical level, but they know when the Man from Washington has crossed their threshold uninvited.

The term that Fox News is now applying to the Climategate e-mails is “game-changer”. For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as “You can be sceptical, not denial.” Gee, thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.

At this rate, Copenhagen is going to turn into a comedy convention with the real world laughing at these liars. Now is the time to mount massive resistance to the petty tyrants and hit them where it hurts – in the wallet. Further down the line there may be, in many countries, a question of criminal prosecution of anybody who has falsified data to secure funds and impose potentially disastrous fiscal restraints on the world in deference to a massive hoax. It’s a new world out there, Al, and, as you may have noticed, the climate is very cold indeed.
http://mustangrambles.com/wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=274

E-Mails Of Climate Researchers Buttress Case Of Warming Fraud

Junk Science: Hacked e-mails from Britain’s Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA’s James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact.

For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests.

Now, it turns out, it’s the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth.

We don’t know who “Deep Throat” is. But according to an interview in Investigate Magazine’s TGIF edition with Philip Jones, director of the Hadley Climate Research Unit at Britain’s East Anglia University, the incriminating e-mails documenting collusion and fraud among top global warming scientists, including a few from Jones himself, are genuine.

In one e-mail sent to Michael Mann, director of Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center, Raymond Bradley, a climatologist at the University of Massachusetts, and Malcolm Hughes, a professor of dendrochronology at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research, Jones speaks of the “trick” of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Hide the decline? “Keith” is Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit, also involved in the bogus manipulation of data.

An e-mail from scientist Mick Kelly to Jones also speaks of manipulating data to hide the fact that Earth is actually cooling: “I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again, as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent coldish years.”

In another e-mail to Mann from Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, copied to Dr. James Hansen of NASA, Trenberth says: “Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming. We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow.”

Trenberth also says: “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.” He goes on to say that “the data is surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Well, that much is true. We have reported on information obtained by Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat on the inaccuracy of temperature-monitoring stations around the country and the screwy places these scientific stations are located. Daily temperature data are gathered by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and the 1,221 or so weather observation stations it monitors around the country.

Watts and a few volunteers decided to check a few of them out. They found one station in Forest Grove, Ore., that stands just 10 feet from an air-conditioning exhaust vent. Another station in Roseburg, Ore., is on a rooftop near an AC unit. In Tahoe, Calif., one is near a drum where trash is burned.

When bad numbers aren’t enough to show global warming, it’s okay to just make them up. Hansen, the NASA scientist who began the climate scare, was himself caught fudging the numbers when he declared October 2008 the warmest October on record.

This despite the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s registering of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranking it the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So how did Hansen claim it was the warmest October ever? As Christopher Booker wrote in the U.K.’s Telegraph: “The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.”

As it turns out, Mann is the creator of the discredited “hockey stick” graph used in reports from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Bradley and Hughes were also involved in the famous graph, which purports to show a sudden and sharp spike in global temperatures the day man first dreamed of taking an SUV to the mall.

Canadian researchers and others have thoroughly debunked the hockey stick, finding serious problems with the study, including calculation errors, data used twice and a faulty computer program that produced a hockey stick out of whatever data were fed into it.

Their study also totally ignored major events such as the widely recognized Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850).

The warming debate was never over, only censored. We have noted how the Environmental Protection Agency has engaged in an ongoing cover-up of its own analyses of climate change and discouraged public dissent.

EPA lawyers Laurie Williams and Alan Zabel produced a video in which they said cap-and-trade is a “Big Lie” and carbon offsets are a “Big Rip-off.” At the EPA’s insistence, Zabel and Williams took down the video from their Web site, but not before it was copied and widely circulated.

Alan Carlin, senior research analyst at the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, dared to say, in essence, that Emperor Al Gore and his toadies at EPA were wearing no clothes.

After examining numerous global warming studies, Carlin, who holds a doctorate in economics with an undergraduate degree in physics, said his research showed that “available observable data … invalidate the hypothesis” that humans cause dangerous global warming.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg who has received death threats for citing how Earth’s history doesn’t quite jibe with current prophecies of doom, says: “CO2 never was a problem, and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing.”

Ball says he has “watched climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists.” “Surely,” he says, “this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the carbon credits shell game.”

These inconvenient truths may be just the tip of the iceberg.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=513329

Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center

Scientists’ e-mails deriding skeptics of warming become public

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 21, 2009

Hackers broke into the electronic files of one of the world’s foremost climate research centers this week and posted an array of e-mails in which prominent scientists engaged in a blunt discussion of global warming research and disparaged climate-change skeptics.

The skeptics have seized upon e-mails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain as evidence that scientific data have been rigged to make it appear as if humans are causing global warming. The researchers, however, say the e-mails have been taken out of context and merely reflect an honest exchange of ideas.

University officials confirmed the data breach, which involves more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents, but said they could not say how many of the stolen items were authentic.

"We are aware that information from a server in one area of the university has been made available on public websites," the statement says. "We are extremely concerned that personal information about individuals may have been compromised. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm what proportion of this material is genuine."

Michael E. Mann, who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said in a telephone interview from Paris that skeptics are "taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious."

In one e-mail from 1999, the center’s director, Phil Jones, alludes to one of Mann’s articles in the journal Nature and writes, "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

Mann said the "trick" Jones referred to was placing a chart of proxy temperature records, which ended in 1980, next to a line showing the temperature record collected by instruments from that time onward. "It’s hardly anything you would call a trick," Mann said, adding that both charts were differentiated and clearly marked.

But Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said this and other exchanges show researchers have colluded to establish the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change.

"It is clear that some of the ‘world’s leading climate scientists,’ as they are always described, are more dedicated to promoting the alarmist political agenda than in scientific research," said Ebell, whose group is funded in part by energy companies. "Some of the e-mails that I have read are blatant displays of personal pettiness, unethical conniving, and twisting the science to support their political position."

In one e-mail, Ben Santer, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, offered to beat up skeptic Pat Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, out of sympathy for Jones.

Neither Jones nor Santer could be reached for comment.
http://mustangrambles.com/wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=274

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

By Gerald Traufetter

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

Reached a Plateau

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

"It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. "We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point."

Just a few weeks ago, Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius — in other words, a standstill.

The differences among individual regions of the world are considerable. In the Arctic, for example, temperatures rose by almost three degrees Celsius, which led to a dramatic melting of sea ice. At the same time, temperatures declined in large areas of North America, the western Pacific and the Arabian Peninsula. Europe, including Germany, remains slightly in positive warming territory.

Mixed Messages

But a few scientists simply refuse to believe the British calculations. "Warming has continued in the last few years," says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). However, Rahmstorf is more or less alone in his view. Hamburg Max Planck Institute scientist Jochem Marotzke, on the other hand, says: "I hardly know any colleagues who would deny that it hasn’t gotten warmer in recent years."

The controversy sends confusing and mixed messages to the lay public. Why is there such a vigorous debate over climate change, even though it isn’t getting warmer at the moment? And how can it be that scientists cannot even arrive at a consensus on changes in temperatures, even though temperatures are constantly being measured?

The global temperature-monitoring network consists of 517 weather stations. But each reading is only a tiny dot on the big world map, and it has to be extrapolated to the entire region with the help of supercomputers. Besides, there are still many blind spots, the largest being the Arctic, where there are only about 20 measuring stations to cover a vast area. Climatologists refer to the problem as the "Arctic hole."

The scientists at the Hadley Center simply used the global average value for the hole, ignoring the fact that it has become significantly warmer in the Arctic, says Rahmstorf. But a NASA team from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which does make the kinds of adjustments for the Arctic data that Rahmstorf believes are necessary, arrives at a flat temperature curve for the last five years that is similar to that of their British colleagues.

Marotzke and Leibniz Institute meteorologist Mojib Latif are even convinced that the fuzzy computing done by Rahmstorf is counterproductive. "We have to explain to the public that greenhouse gases will not cause temperatures to keep rising from one record temperature to the next, but that they are still subject to natural fluctuations," says Latif. For this reason, he adds, it is dangerous to cite individual weather-related occurrences, such as a drought in Mali or a hurricane, as proof positive that climate change is already fully underway.

"Perhaps we suggested too strongly in the past that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line. In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal," says Latif.
More of article on second page at link.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662092,00.html

National Overview:

* Temperature Highlights - October
* The average October temperature of 50.8°F was 4.0°F below the 20th Century average and ranked as the 3rd coolest based on preliminary data.
* For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record. The month was marked by an active weather pattern that reinforced unseasonably cold air behind a series of cold fronts. Temperatures were below normal in eight of the nation’s nine climate regions, and of the nine, five were much below normal. Only the Southeast climate region had near normal temperatures for October.
* Statewide temperatures coincided with the regional values as all but six states had below normal temperatures. Oklahoma had its coolest October on record and ten other states had their top five coolest such months.
* Florida was the only state to have an above normal temperature average in October. It was the sixth consecutive month that the Florida’s temperature was above normal, resulting in the third warmest such period (May-October).
* The three-month period (August-October) was the coolest on record for three states: Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Five other states had top five cool periods: Missouri (2nd), Iowa (3rd) , Arkansas (5th) , Illinois (5th) and South Dakota (5th) . Every climate division in Kansas (nine) and Nebraska (eight) recorded a record cool such period.
* For the year-to-date (January - October) period, the contiguous U.S. temperature ranked 43rd warmest. No state had a top or bottom ten temperature value for this period.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=national&year=2009&month=10&submitted=Get+Report

WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL
Gore upbeat on climate bill

By MATTHEW DeFOUR mdefour@madison.com 608-252-6144 | Posted: Saturday, October 10, 2009 7:55 am | 109 Comments

Former Vice President Al Gore shared his optimism about the "shifting momentum" of the climate change debate with about 500 environmental journalists Friday in Madison.

"We’re very close to that political tipping point," Gore said at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference at the Madison Concourse Hotel. "Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions."

He said he expects the Senate to pass a carbon emissions reduction bill before a December United Nations conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. The House passed a similar bill in June.

He also said he expects President Barack Obama to attend the Copenhagen conference, which could boost an international framework for emissions reduction. Obama hasn’t announced his plans.

"I am optimistic," Gore said. "I think there has been a very powerful recognition, not only in this country, but in many countries, that there is a linkage between the climate crisis and the economic crisis and the national security crisis that is in part derivative of the world’s ridiculous over-dependence on carbon-based fuels."

Some who attended the speech tempered Gore’s hopefulness, characteristic of his lauded yet controversial effort to educate the public about carbon dioxide emissions and their link to rising temperatures.

"His optimism isn’t shared by a lot of other folks," said Tim Wheeler, an environmental reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Gore may have been trying to push politicians to action, Wheeler added.

Conservative groups led by Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow and Americans for Prosperity held a demonstration Downtown that drew about 200 people, including U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Menomonee Falls, who also participated in the conference’s panel discussion following Gore’s speech. The demonstrators worried Gore’s policies would push American jobs overseas.

Gore has been criticized for not publicly debating his position since the release of his 2006 Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

In what organizers said was a rarity, Gore took half a dozen questions from journalists, including one from Phelim McAleer, an Irish filmmaker who asked Gore to address nine errors in his film identified by a British court in 2007.

Gore responded that the court ruling supported the showing of his film in British schools. When McAleer tried to debate further, his microphone was cut off by the moderators.

In a nod to a local supporter, Gore recognized former UW-Madison professor Henry Hart, who attended the speech and at 93 is the oldest person to have been trained to present the climate change slide show featured in Gore’s film.

"You are really an inspiration to me," Gore said.
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/article_dacf39c7-c2f8-5718-a5a0-d0cfb39f80bc.html

Austrian Times.
Early snow records set to be broken

By Lisa Chapman

Austria’s provincial capitals are expected to see their earliest snowfalls in history today (Mon) as Arctic air sweeps the country.

Josef Haselhofer from Vienna’s Central Agency for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG) said today (Mon) Arctic air would probably result in the first snow cover in provincial capitals before 20 October in history and said Innsbruck, Salzburg and St. Pölten were likely to see snow.

He said as much as 30 to 40 centimetres of snow was likely down to 1,200 metres and snow could fall as low as 400 metres later this week, adding it had already begun to fall in Vorarlberg. He also predicted low temperatures would be minus five degrees at higher elevations and zero degrees in the lowlands by Thursday morning.

Haselhofer warned of possible impassable snow drifts in some places and the danger of avalanches in low-lying areas.

Car club ÖAMTC reported today that chains were mandatory for all vehicles on stretches of the Arlbergstraße (L197), Lechtalstraße (L198) and the Silvretta-Hochalpenstraße (L188) in Vorarlberg.

The club said snow was falling down to 1,500 metres and the snow line would drop to as low as 900 metres in the province before it stopped snowing there.

The record for early snow in provincial capitals was set in 2007, when snow remained on the ground in some of them from 20 to 24 October. The average high in October, according to ZAMG, is 15 degrees.

The snow warnings come after weather records tumbled last week, with a number of places seeing records for the highest October temperature in many years, according to ZAMG.

It said records had been set on 7 October in Vienna-Donaufeld, with a high of 28.6 degrees, the highest in 50 years, and in Großenzersdorf, Lower Austria, with a high of 28.5 degrees, the warmest October day there in history.

Austrian Times
http://austriantimes.at/news/General_News/2009-10-12/17147/Early_snow_records_set_to_be_broken

Cold temperatures threaten seed potato crop

* Story
* Discussion

By the Associated Press | Posted: Monday, October 12, 2009 5:45 am | Loading…

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BOZEMAN - Record-low temperatures in southwestern Idaho are threatening to destroy at least a portion of this season’s crop of seed potatoes.

Spuds still in the ground could be saved by a layer of snow; a dusting had fallen on Bozeman and the surrounding region by Sunday.

Nina Zydak, director of the Montana State University Potato Lab, said most area farmers have already started digging.

But many farmers expect to lose some of their potatoes.

"It’s over," Larry Van Dyke, who owns Van Dyke Farms in Townsend, told the Bozeman Chronicle.

He says when it’s this cold for too long, the frost penetrates and the taters are toast.

The main goal now is to make sure the spoiled potatoes don’t make it into his cellar.

Temperatures on Saturday evening dipped to 17 degrees; the last time it was this cold, this early, in southwestern Idaho was more than two decades ago, in 1985.
http://www.missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/article_c1c13d5e-b6a4-11de-a09c-001cc4c002e0.html

Western MT cold breaks records

Posted: Oct 11, 2009 04:06 PM

Updated: Oct 12, 2009 02:46 PM

Western MT Weather: Record cold continues

If you’ve spent any time outdoors the past four days in Western Montana, you could probably guess that we’ve hit record low temperatures, without your local weather guy confirming this fact.

We haven’t just set knew records, we’ve blown them out of the water. The lowes have been 10, 11 and 8 the last three mornings in Missoula, and we’ve gone at least nine degrees lower than the old record each morning.

In addition, wind chill values have been in the teens during the afternoon Saturday and Sunday.

Not that it’s any comfort, the lowest average temperature for the entire year comes in late December and early January. That number is 15 degrees.

Click here to find out how to stay safe during this extreme cold snap

A record low of 8 degrees was set at the Missoula Airport on Monday morning, breaking the old record of 22, which was set in 2002.

Meanwhile, Kalispell say a very cold 2 degrees, breaking the record of 14, set back in 2002.

Not to be left out, Butte checked in with a record low temperature for October 12th of 6 degrees, breaking the old record of 10 which was set in 2008.

Record low temps were set around Montana on Monday morning. In Billings, the mercury dipped to 14 degrees on Sunday, breaking the 1959 record of 22 degrees.

On Monday morning, the National Weather Service reported the temp had fallen to 13, breaking the old mark of 22 degrees set in 1969. But weather officials warm the thermometer could drop even further in the Magic City.

- Additional reporting from Mark Thorsell in Missoula

(from October 11, 2009)

The National Weather Service predicted freezing temperatures and snow flurries both Saturday and Sunday for most of Eastern Montana.

Meanwhile, temperatures in parts of western Montana were near zero overnight and record lows were set in Missoula, Kalispell and Butte on Sunday.

With chilly temperatures expected to sweep across the state over the weekend, school marching bands were pulled from the University of Montana’s homecoming parade Saturday under threat of frigid weather.

John Combs, Fine Arts Director for Missoula County Public Schools, says it was difficult to yank hundreds of students from the parade lineup. But, the alternative was kids possibly slipping on ice or getting sick.

It’s unexpected for early October, but forecasters are warning Western Montanans to be on their guard for frostbite the rest of the weekend.

A cold, Arctic air mass flowing from Canada pushed temperatures well below season normals and set records on Saturday and Sunday.

Missoula’s official low temperature of 10 degrees Saturday broke a 36-year record. Kalispell was just 5 degrees, well below the previous record of 16 degrees set in October of 1987.

National Weather Service officials say that outflow winds from east of the Divide will push through gaps in the mountains like Hellgate and Badrock canyons through Sunday.

The winds are expected to blow up to 25 miles per hour, creating wind chill of up to 20 below for the Flathead and Mission valleys, and around 10 below in the Missoula Valley.
http://www.montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=11295113

Three Decades Of Global Cooling

Posted 06:21 PM ET

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming?

Al Gore wasn’t there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday’s playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year.

It seems that ice at both poles hasn’t been paying attention to the computer models. The National Snow and Ice Data Center released its summary of summer sea-ice conditions in the Arctic last week and reported a substantial expansion of "second-year ice" — ice thick enough to have persisted through two summers of seasonal melting.

According to the NSIDC, second-year ice this summer made up 32% of the total ice cover on the Arctic Ocean, compared with 21% in 2007 and 9% in 2008. Clearly, Arctic sea ice is not following the consensus touted by Gore and the warm-mongers.

This news coincides with a finding published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last month by Marco Tedesco, a research scientist at the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology. He reported that ice melt on Antarctica was the lowest in three decades during the ice-melt season.

Each year, millions of square miles of sea ice melt and refreeze. The amount varies from season to season. Despite pictures taken in summer of floating polar bears, data reported by the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center at the beginning of this year showed global sea ice levels the same as they were in 1979, when satellite observations began.

At the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by the Heartland Institute, the keynote speaker, Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute and the University of Virginia, debunked claims of "unprecedented" melting of Arctic ice. He showed how Arctic temperatures were warmer during the 1930s and that most of Antarctica is indeed cooling.

At the other end of the earth, we are told the Larsen B ice shelf on the western side of Antarctica is collapsing. That part is warming and has been for decades. But it comprises just 2% of the continent. The rest of the continent is cooling.

A report prepared by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research for last April’s meeting of the Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington notes that the South Pole has in fact shown "significant cooling in recent decades."

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison says sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years have been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of East Antarctica. "Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally," Allison says.

So what gives? Earth’s climate is influenced by many things, the least of which is the internal combustion engine. We and reputable scientists have noted the earth has cooled during the last decade, a period in which the sun has grown very quiet with little or no sunspot activity.

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University, the oceans and global temperatures are closely related. They have, he says, a natural cycle of warming and cooling that affects the planet.

The most important ocean cycle is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Easterbrook notes that in the 1980s and ’90s it was in a warming cycle, as was the earth. The global cooling from 1940 to 1975, which had some experts warning of an ice age, coincided with a Pacific cooling cycle.

Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of three decades of global cooling." Such solar and ocean cycles explain why the earth can cool and polar ice thicken even as carbon dioxide levels can continue to increase.

Will any of this be brought up at the climate conference in Copenhagen this December? Not unless hell freezes over. Then again …
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=508767

What happened to global warming?

By Paul Hudson
Climate correspondent, BBC News

Planet Earth (Nasa)
Average temperatures have not increased for over a decade

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.
The Sun (BBC)
Recent research has ruled out solar influences on temperature increases

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.

Pacific ocean (BBC)
In the last few years [the Pacific Ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down

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.
Iceberg melting (BBC)
The UK Met Office says that warming is set to resume

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.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

No Kidding: Snow on Sunday!
What’s worse than the snow is the below freezing temperatures that are expected to accompany it
By ANDREW GREINER
Updated 1:59 PM CDT, Thu, Oct 8, 2009

Start cursing the weather gods, Chicago.

Snow could be coming to town as early as this weekend. That’s right, snow. Flurries and flakes.

The forecast says that Saturday night rain will turn into the white stuff early Sunday morning.

If the snow sticks, it would be the earliest recorded measurable snowfall in Chicago. The record was set just three years ago when it snowed on Oct. 12.

But it won’t be a complete anomaly – Chicagoans are accustomed to strange, disappointing weather.

Chicago has played host to October snowstorms before. Back in 1989 we got hit with 6.3 inches for the month.

What’s worse than the snow is the below freezing temperatures that are expected to accompany it.

It’s not too late to get out of town for the Columbus Day Weekend!
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local-beat/No-Kidding-Snow-on-Sunday–63751227.html

Las Vegas Ski & Snowboard Resort Now Open
Resort Opening Earlier Than Ever Before

UPDATED: 11:25 am PDT October 7, 2009

LAS VEGAS — The 2009-2010 season at the Las Vegas Ski & Snowboard Resort is underway, the earliest the resort has ever been open.

Unseasonably cold nighttime temperatures and aggressive snowmaking efforts have produced snow on Chair Three, Rabbit Peak, the only lift and trail scheduled to open.

“There are many skiers and snowboarders who love to jib on our freestyle terrain features, and we expect many families to take advantage of this great opportunity to learn the sport and have fun so early in the season,” said Base Operations Manager Craig Baldwin.

Resort hours will be 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. through Sunday, and then the resort is scheduled to open on weekends only until conditions allow additional terrain to open. Lift ticket prices are reduced to $20. Base area services will include equipment rental, instruction, BBQ and bar.

More information on snow conditions and tickets can be found at the resort’s Web site.

“We are extremely excited to open over seven weeks early, a record early opening by far. Kudos to our snowmaking crew for making this possible, they deserve a ton of credit,” Baldwin said.
http://www.fox5vegas.com/news/21223890/detail.html

Loveland ski opens today, A-Basin on Friday
By John Meyer
The Denver Post
Posted: 10/06/2009 02:56:45 PM MDT
Updated: 10/07/2009 11:35:24 AM MDT

From left, Nate (who said his last name is Dogggg), 31; Jeff Meyer, 31; and Jesse Csincsak, 27, all of Breckenridge, got first chair during the earliest opening day in 40 years, at Loveland Ski Area. The three camped out overnight to get their spot in line. (THE DENVER POST | RJ SANGOSTI)
Slideshow

* View a slide show of photos from Loveland as ski season returns to Colorado.

And the winner is … Loveland.

Boasting its earliest opening day in 40 years, Loveland officials opened for skiing today. Arapahoe Basin announced it would open Friday.

Loveland is the first ski area in North America to open its season, with $44 lift tickets. Loveland trail crews were able to begin snowmaking operations on Sept. 21.

"We took advantage of the cold temperatures and got an early start making snow this year," said Eric Johnstone, snowmaking and trail maintenance manager. "Now we can move some equipment to other trails and try to open more terrain as quickly as possible."

As usual on opening day, Loveland opened Chair 1 with 1,000 vertical feet of terrain on Catwalk, Mambo and Homerun.

Friday will mark the earliest opening in Arapahoe Basin’s 64-year history. The Exhibition chairlift will open at 9 a.m. Friday with skiing on the intermediate High Noon run and six features in the High Divide Terrain Park. There will be no beginner skiing.

Both areas say they have a manmade base of 18 inches.
http://www.denverpost.com/extremes/ci_13498572

Some Idaho school kids enjoy an early snow day

11:52 AM MDT on Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Alyson O?ten/KTVB

Schools caught off guard

WOW: Check out photos of the snow

BELLEVUE — Just one week ago, we were bracing for a "cool down" from the 80s to the 60s.

Now, it’s getting downright wintry. And in some parts of our viewing area, snow is piling up.

This may be one for the record books, not only how early this heavy fall snowstorm is, but the fact that it appears to have created the earliest snow day in the history of the Blaine County School District.

“We got dumped on last night, you can see that by looking around here. We weren’t quite ready for it. It did cause us some issues in the school district," Lonnie Barber, Blaine County Superintendent.

Not just the school district, but throughout the county. At least 3,500 Idaho Power customers in the Wood River Valley were without electricty today. Utility officials blame heavy wet snow for knocking out power in Bellevue and Hailey. Outages were also reported in Fairfield and Carey.

Since the trees haven’t had time to shed their leaves, the snow accumulated and burdened the branches to their breaking point. Many of which landed on power lines.

After about an hour and a half, the Blaine County superintendent said it was time to call it a day for those at Bellevue Elementary School — the only school left in the dark.

"At about 9:30 this morning we mobilized and started making calls. We didn’t want students in the cold, very quick response. Within minutes parents had picked up all but 18 kids, an hour later, all students were at home. Unfortunately we lost one day of school, but only in one of our schools. This is the only school that had the power outage," said Barber.

And, as luck would have it the power got restored just as the last few students were reunited with their parents.
http://www.ktvb.com/news/nearyou/woodriver/ktvbn-oct0509-wood_river_power.1e96b181a.html

Record heat wave continues in Seattle, Portland
Email this Story

Jul 29, 3:27 AM (ET)

By RYAN KOST

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - "Brutal" temperatures are predicted for the Seattle area on Wednesday as a record heat wave afflicting the Pacific Northwest continues to bake everything west of the Cascades, a National Weather Service meteorologist said.

The high temperature could easily tie or break the all-time record temperature of 100 degrees set July 20, 1994, at Sea-Tac, the weather service’s Jay Albrecht said.

"There’s not going to be a whole lot of places to get away from the heat tomorrow," he said Tuesday.

Another day of high heat for the normally temperate region follows a Tuesday that saw the thermometer hit 106 at Portland International Airport, just short of the 107 all-time mark for the area set in 1981.

"The thing about a place like Portland is there are some buildings and residences that don’t have air conditioning," said Andy Bryant, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service. "You go to Phoenix or Dallas, yes it would be very hot there, too, but they have more of a system in place to deal with it."

A Home Depot in Portland had to order up air conditioners from one of its stores on the cooler Oregon coast to restock for the week. The units arrived Tuesday morning only to sell out three hours later, Home Depot employee Cliff Baker said.

"Fans are even getting hard to find," he said.

Shaved ice was also in high demand, said Matthew Ho, owner of Portland’s Ohana Hawaiian Cafe. Normally the cafe sells about 20 a day, but lately it’s at least double that, he said.

"We actually have a friend from Hawaii who pretty much just flew in to run the shaved ice machine," he said.

Temperatures pushed up to 108 Tuesday in Medford in southern Oregon, and the 93 degrees in Hoquiam on Grays Harbor in Washington state crushed the old record of 81 degrees that dated back to 1965.

Even some normally cool spots on the coast were hotter than normal, with Astoria, Ore., at the mouth of the Columbia River reaching 92, busting the city’s old record of 82 set in 2003.

Cooling centers for the elderly were open late in Portland, and the city of Seattle extended hours for the International Fountain, where hundreds of people soaked in sprays that were timed to move along with recorded music.

In Washougal, Wash., the fire department opened up an air-conditioned training room to help cool folks off, and set up a shower in a city park during the afternoon.

Relief was in sight, however, as temperatures were expected to begin dropping into the 90s by Thursday in areas where the high has been over 100, said Miles Higa, a weather service meteorologist in Portland.

In eastern Washington, temperatures around Spokane are forecast in the 90s for the rest of the week, which is a little above normal. More worrisome is a forecast for thunderstorms that could produce lightning that ignites wildfires.

Heat advisories were issued throughout the region. In Portland, where residents are used to temperate summer days that come with overcast mornings and crisp evenings, the warning is in effect until 10 p.m. Wednesday.

—

Associated Press Writers George Tibbits in Seattle and Nick Geranios in Spokane, Wash. contributed to this report.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090729/D99NVJR00.html

Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites

Geologist Ian Plimer takes a contrary view, arguing that man-made climate change is a con trick perpetuated by environmentalists

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver SunJuly 28, 2009

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour — cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks — can reverse the trend.

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science, draws together much of his previous work. It springs especially from A Short History of Plant Earth, which was based on a decade of radio broadcasts in Australia.

That book, published in 2001, was a best-seller and won several prizes. But Plimer found it hard to find anyone willing to publish this latest book, so intimidating has the environmental lobby become.

But he did eventually find a small publishing house willing to take the gamble and the book has already sold about 30,000 copies in Australia. It seems also to be doing well in Britain and the United States in the first days of publication.

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years.

The dynamic and changing character of the Earth’s climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behaviour.

Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth’s evolution.

(Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.)

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth’s daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

jmanthorpe@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Global+warming+religion+First+World+urban+elites/1835847/story.html

Chicago Sees Coldest July In 66 Years
Average Temperature Only 68.9 Degrees
CHICAGO (CBS) ?

Related Stories

* Near Record Cold July Means Shrinking Bills
(7/17/2009)

Have you left your air conditioner in the closet this summer, and worn long pants more often than shorts? If so, you may not be surprised to find out that Chicago is seeing its coldest July in more than 65 years.

The National Weather Service says 2009 has seen the coldest July since the official recording station was moved away from the lakefront in 1942. The average temperature this month in Chicago has been a mere 68.9 degrees.

Even in the years before 1942, when the National Weather Service recorded temperatures at the cooler lakefront, there are only three years that had colder Julys through the 26th.

There have also been far fewer days than usual with high temperatures less than 80 degrees this year. In 2009, there were 13 days where the temperature did not exceed 80 degrees. Only three Julys in the past 67 years have had more days in Chicago with highs less than 80 – there were 18 such days in 1992, and 14 in 1996 and 2000.

We have also failed to reach 90 degrees at any time this month.

But the good news is that homeowners this summer have been seeing a big break on their electric bills. Air conditioning usage, according to ComEd earlier this month, is way down from last year and has saved residents an average of $50 since June, compared with last year.

In addition to the mild weather, Com Ed’s cost of power was also down 9 percent as of July 17, a savings passed on to you. Your natural gas price has been down even more, 27 percent. Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas estimate a typical home customer will pay $500 less this year than last year.

(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

http://cbs2chicago.com/local/chicago.coldest.july.2.1103959.html

3,000 Low Temp Records Set This July!
UPDATE: It’s not just the surface land temps — Blog reader Tim points out "Water temps at Frying Pan Shoals (off Cape Fear) fell to 78 degrees a few days ago; NDBC historical data shows this occurs only 0.3% of the time in July!" Here’s a look at the weekly departure from normal sea-surface temperatures:

This is not the case away from the Carolina coast; most of the Atlantic that we would be concerned with for Hurricane season is normal or slightly above normal - there are other factors keeping that activity down.

ORIGINAL ENTRY: Here are some stats and maps regarding the unusually cold July that is happening over a large portion of the U.S., especially the Northeast quadrant (yes, it’s been unusually hot in the SW, see below). Note: Since I am on vacation at the end of the month, I will not be able to update these but AccuWeather.com will be running news articles about how cool July was in these areas, come the first week in August.

First, some stats. 1,044 daily record low temperatures have been broken this month nationwide according to NCDC — count record "low highs" and the number increases to 2,925, surely to pass 3,000 before the end of the month. Some thoughts on the ‘low highs" below.*

graph of low lows and low highs for July

The period of July 17-20 was the worst, with over 1,600 stations breaking records. It’s worth noting that these stats include all records across the nation. Of the record lows, through July 20th (thanks to William Schmitz @ SERCC, check out their Twitter Feed), this was the regional breakdown:

Nationwide: 966
Southeast (AL/GA/FL/NC/SC/VA): 248
Northeast (MD/DE/PA/NJ/NY/CT/RI/MA/NH/VT/ME): 193

Next, a map of the Departure from Average temperatures so far in July (yes, we have one week left). Yes, that’s a "-10.0" in Pennsylvania - double digit deficits over a month are rare indeed. Note that there are no positive numbers.

Even if you zoom out to the U.S. you’ll see the majority of stations are reporting departures below normal thus far — only Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have all stations reporting above normal.

The lowest temperatures of the month are also impressive, with 50s in every state and 40s in most, some 30s. Normally temperatures are peaking in July.

And finally I’ll repeat this map which shows the lack of 85-degree days in the Northeast through July 20th. Note that the Northern Plains are not immune from the chilly weather either; Mark Vogan says that Minneapolis hasn’t failed to hit 90 in the last 15 years. (Mark has some other good stats too).

*I was especially impressed by the latter stat and I think it speaks more to the cool summer people have been experiencing - more people are out and about during the peak of the day then they are early in the morning, so they see that the temperatures in the middle of the afternoon are much lower than they should be this time of year. For perception, this may be even more important than morning lows.

http://www.accuweather.com/mt-news-blogs.asp?blog=weathermatrix&partner=&pgUrl=/mtweb/content/weathermatrix/archives/2009/07/1000_low_temp_records_set_this_july.asp

(Gore’s Home town)
Coolest July 21 recorded in Nashville as cool wave continues in Tenn.

By Associated Press

7:59 AM CDT, July 21, 2009
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Cool weather has broken a previous low temperature for July 21 in Nashville that was set when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

When the temperature at the National Weather Service station dipped to 58 degrees at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, it wiped out the previous record low for the date of 60 degrees, which was set in 1877.

NWS forecaster Bobby Boyd noted it was the third consecutive morning when Nashville either tied or broke a daily low temperature record.

Temperatures were cool, but did not break records at several Tennessee cities.

Knoxville dropped to 59 degrees Tuesday morning, Chattanooga had 60 degrees, Tri-Cities recorded 58 degrees and Memphis was 69 degrees.
http://www.whnt.com/news/sns-ap-tn–recordcool,0,4032125.story

On The Farm: Nick`s Wheat

7/15/2009

With a summer like this, you can`t tell my Dad there`s global warming.

"I think Al Gore and his group should be out here and tell us about this global warming stuff. I think he might have a change of mind. We`ve had a cool July,” says Orlan Dreyer, Willow City Farmer
July mornings aren`t supposed to be 50 degrees, but once again today, we`re seeing temperatures well below normal. With two inches of rain on my wheat crop in the last two weeks, we have plenty of moisture to carry us for awhile.
"All in all we had a late start, but you have a lot of potential here,” says Dreyer.
Dad got the crop sprayed but since we were a little late getting to it and the crop was more advanced, chemical cost were almost $17 an acre. But the spraying did the trick and the crop is flourishing under the cool, wet conditions, but has it been too cold?
"This is a little extreme. You have to push the crop a little too to get it to mature. We`re running late and we could run into problems, I`ve seen frost in August. It hurt bad,” explains Dreyer.
Along with an early frost, disease is a concern out here as we enter the heading stage. Dad has his own theory on that.
"We might end up with Norwegian wheat, big heads and nothing in them,” says Dreyer. (laughing)
This is one Norwegian hoping that his heads aren`t empty.
(Nick Dreyer raises 145 acres of wheat on his family farm near Willow City, ND)
(Line Spacing Edited to conserve space.)

http://www.kfyrtv.com/News_Stories.asp?news=32084

June 10, 2009
ultiple frosts that have blanketed Western Canada in the last week are the most widespread in the top canola-growing province of Saskatchewan in at least five years, the Canola Council of Canada said on Tuesday.

Two overnight frosts last week have already resulted in some Saskatchewan farmers reseeding their canola, a Canadian variant of rapeseed, said Jim Bessel, senior agronomy specialist in the province for the industry group Canola Council.

Other farmers are waiting to see growth signs that would suggest their canola plants have survived the frost, which lasted for up to five hours at a stretch. That new growth is slow to appear with generally cool temperatures holding crop development behind schedule.

"We just don’t see a lot of activity happening from a crop development perspective," Bessel said. "(The extent of frost damage) is a really difficult one to call right now … It’s very erratic."

In Manitoba, the frost is the worst in memory for its frequency and area covered, said Derwyn Hammond, the province’s senior agronomy specialist for the Canola Council.

"Certainly (it’s) the worst year I’ve seen," said Hammond, who has worked for the Canola Council for 15 years.

With deadlines for full canola crop insurance ranging between June 10 and 20 in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Hammond said he expects most farmers will choose not to reseed.

Cool weather may have actually saved some of the new crop that was at such an early growing stage that it wasn’t yet vulnerable to frost, said Doon Pauly, crop specialist for the government of the western province of Alberta.

"It’s the equivalent to a frost in the second or third week of May," Pauly said. "That’s the bright side."

The downside of the cool weather is that it has left crops in general well behind schedule, he said. The Alberta canola crop is two to three weeks behind development, Pauly said, while the Canadian Wheat Board estimated on Monday that Western Canada wheat and barley crops are at least 10 days behind.

Fields with frost damage can develop bare pockets or a thinned-down plant population that gives weeds more room to grow, said Pauly, adding that some Alberta areas reported frost as recently as Tuesday morning.

But despite frosts and cool weather, it’s too early to say if canola yields will suffer, he said.

"Canola is so plastic. If the remainder of June we get good moisture and reasonable heat, the yields can recover."

(Editing by Marguerita Choy)

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20090606/GPG0101/90606042/1261/GPG05/Weather++Record+temperature+set+in+Green+Bay+Saturday

June 7, 2009
Global warming? Not so fast, skeptics say at meeting
Posted to: Environment News

* For more information about critical research and questions on global warming, visit several Web sites: www.heartland.org, www.iceagenow.com, www.icecap.us, www.sepp.org.
* To read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports, visit www.ipc.ch.
* To read the Governor’s Commission on Climate Change’s final report about global warming and Virginia, go to www.deq.virginia.gov/info/climatechange.

By Scott Harper
The Virginian-Pilot
© June 6, 2009

WASHINGTON

U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher was in a froth, and his audience loved it.

The California Republican was talking about global warming and could barely contain his disgust.

"Al Gore has been wrong all along!" Rohrabacher yelled into the microphone. "This is outrageous! All of this is wrong! The people who have stifled this debate have an agenda that is just frightening!"

Welcome to the third annual International Conference on Climate Change, a daylong session of speeches and scientific presentations that took place Tuesday just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Almost no media covered the event.

Organized by The Heartland Institute and other conservative think tanks and groups, the conference drew about 250 guests, most of them researchers and policy analysts, some from as far away as Japan and Australia.

There was plenty of wry laughter during the day, especially when former Vice President Gore and his award-winning movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," were brought up, which was often.

The conference hall also was filled with a tangible air of frustrated defeat, like the brainy kid in math class who thinks he knows all the answers, raises his hand time and again, but is never called upon.

"We are seldom heard in the policy debate," said Joseph L. Bast, president of The Heartland Institute. "If you open your newspaper, turn on your TV set, you’re likely to see global warming alarmism, and nothing else."

Bast labeled as "popular delusion" the current conventional wisdom on the issue - that man-made emissions, notably carbon dioxide, from the burning of fossil fuels is dangerously heating up the planet, causing sea levels to rise and is increasing the ferocity of storms and drought.

As such, the conference represents a lingering - and still powerful - sentiment that global warming is not such a big deal after all.

Instead, attendees argued, the slow and slight increase in air, water and atmospheric temperatures during much of the 20th century is part of a natural cycle of the Earth’s unpredictable, roller-coaster weather patterns.

Carbon dioxide, they debated, is not a pollutant that should be regulated, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Supreme Court now hold; it is an attribute that helps plant and sea life.

Bast acknowledged that the conference was hurriedly organized, and moved from New York City to Washington, to counteract proposals from President Barack Obama for a "cap-and-trade" program aimed at fighting global warming by drastically limiting carbon emissions.

Bast and others described the proposed programs as a complete waste of money, with potentially crippling consequences for the economy, and without any attainable goals.

"How do you control the weather?" asked Bob Carter, an Australian scholar from James Cook University. "For us to assume we can somehow control nature and regulate weather patterns, when we cannot even predict them correctly, is patently absurd."

Others saw darker motives in the climate debate.

These skeptics, including Rohrabacher, contended that global warming is a liberal-inspired hoax, intended to wrest control of world energy policy and wealth from Western countries so the United Nations can have its way.

To them, liberty, capitalism and the U.S. economy are at stake.

"I have to wonder what has happened to the sovereignty of the United States," said U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the keynote speaker at the conference and the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which debates climate policy.

Skeptics, or "realists," as they call themselves, focus much of their scorn on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Gore in 2007.

The IPCC consists of hundreds of scientists from across the globe who, for two decades, have tracked climate research and temperature trends, and attempted to interpret what they mean for policymakers.

Its most famous pronouncement, in 2007, was that a marked increase in greenhouse gases from mostly man-made sources is "very likely" causing climate change.

"Very likely," the IPCC wrote, means a 90 percent certainty that human activity, not natural variability, is the driving force.

The IPCC also noted that many geographical areas seem especially susceptible to climate change, including low-lying coastal areas, such as southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina.

But scientist after scientist at the conference pointed out flaws and shortcomings in the calculations of the IPCC, especially its reliance on computer models to make forecasts.

One researcher, Roy Spencer, a professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, noted that the IPCC did not adequately calculate how clouds play a major role in ground temperatures.

When there are few clouds in the sky, temperatures typically are warmer, Spencer said, and when it is cloudy outside, conditions typically are cooler.

Is it possible then, Spencer asked, that decreasing clouds in recent decades caused the warmings recorded on Earth?

Spencer said he asked the IPCC about this and was surprised to learn that the organization had not researched this point and had assumed that cloud cover does not change over time but is fairly consistent.

The two revelations sparked more wry laughter from the audience.

"If a 1 percent change in cloudiness could trigger global warming, or global cooling, wouldn’t you think that’d be a pretty important thing to nail down?" Spencer asked. "They have never gone there."

Skepticism over climate science is hardly new. Indeed, skepticism has always been a part of scientific discourse and has been around global warming since the 1970s, when the theory first gained credence.

William "Skip" Stiles, a Norfolk environmentalist, was working as a congressional aide back then, and he remembers the committee hearings, the charges and countercharges of bias and flawed science.

"I will agree that these models are only as good as the data that goes into them," Stiles said. "But when you think of all the shots these folks have had at this, and all the years of research by the IPCC - we’re talking 25 years! - you have to think we’ve reached some fairly solid conclusions that global warming is real and we, as humans, are playing a major role in it."

Carl Hershner, a researcher and professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science who has tracked sea level rise in Virginia for years, expressed similar thoughts.

"One thing about science is that you never get rid of all the naysayers," Hershner said. He described the IPCC as "an extremely conservative group" that "constantly looks at achieving consensus, and updates its findings regularly."

In his keynote address Tuesday, Sen. Inhofe predicted that cap-and-trade will pass the House of Representatives - "Nancy Pelosi has the votes," he said - but will stall in the Senate, where previous climate-change programs have similarly died.

Last year, without any action coming from Washington, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine appointed a Climate Change Commission to suggest ways Virginia can reduce carbon emissions and lessen its role in accelerating warming.

The theory that global warming is a natural phenomenon, and not man-made, was not part of commission deliberations.

"The fact that global climate change is happening and is largely human-caused is now widely accepted," reads the commission’s final report, published in December.

At the bottom of the page, however, is a footnote: "While we have concluded that the overwhelming evidence supports these points, we have heard testimony providing contrary information during public comment periods at our meetings."

State Sen. Frank Wagner, a Republican from Virginia Beach, was a member of the climate commission. He also has attended one of the skeptics’ conferences in New York City.

"I’ve tried to keep an open mind," Wagner said. "There are so many theories out there, and so much detail, you’re kind of overwhelmed.

"I mean, even the scientists themselves are debating with each other at these meetings. You’re left wondering what the truth really is."

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com

http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2009/06/global-warming-not-so-fast-skeptics-say-meeting

June 7, 2009
APNewsNow. Will be led.

Bismarck, N.D. (AP) Snow has fallen in Dickinson in June, the first time in nearly 60 years the city has seen snow past May.

National Weather Service meteorologist Janine Vining in Bismarck says there were unofficial reports of a couple of inches of snow in Dickinson on Saturday.

Vining says snow in North Dakota in June is uncommon, though it’s not unheard of. She says other parts of the state have seen June snow within the past 10 years.

Williston and Bismarck had received only rain as of mid-Saturday, but Vining said snow was possible in those cities later in the day.

http://www.kxmc.com/News/386720.asp

Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof
Posted: October 20, 2008, 10:26 AM by Kelly McParland
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/10/20/lorne-gunter-thirty-years-of-warmer-temperatures-go-poof.aspx

Alaska glaciers grew this year, thanks to colder weather
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/53884.html

Weekend cold set new record lows
Pendleton breaks 118-year-old record

The East Oregonian

(Requires subscription fees etc.)

http://www.eastoregonian.info/main.asp?SectionID=13&SubSectionID=48&ArticleID=83885&TM=29612.53
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Frost ‘one more thing’ for grape growers

By GLENDA ANDERSON
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Published: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 4:41 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 5:26 a.m.
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20081014/NEWS/810140335/-1/frontpage?Title=Frost__one_more_thing__for_grape_growers

UTICA, N.Y. (WKTV) - Student volunteers from colleges around New York State braved freezing cold temperatures on their bikes Wednesday to send a message to state and federal political candidates: pay attention to climate change
http://www.wktv.com/news/local/32477839.html

Gore effect comes to Harvard University
Dictionaries explain the term as
The phenomenon that leads to unseasonably cold temperatures, driving rain, hail, or snow whenever Al Gore visits an area to discuss global warming. Hence, the Gore Effect.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/10/gore-effect-arrives-to-harvard.html

Climate pushing lemmings to cliff
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7711709.stm

Dried Mushrooms Slow Climate Warming In Northern Forests
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081103084045.htm

BBC SHUNNED ME FOR DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE
SHUNNED: Naturalist David Bellamy
Wednesday November 5,2008
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/69623

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2008/oct/01_10_2008_DvTempRank_pg.gif

Snow arrives early at Snowbird
REQUIRES ARCHIVE RESEARCH FEE.
Snowbird marks its second-earliest start in 38 years
By Maggie Thach
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 11/10/2008 06:39:17 AM MST
http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_10945505

The world has never seen such freezing heat
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml

From November article:
Fresh arctic air will spread over the East today, leading to more lake-effect snow downwind of the Great Lakes. Record lows will be challenged across the South tonight.
http://www.accuweather.com/news-top-headline.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=0&date=2008-11-21_07:51&month=11&year=2008

Over 200 whales trapped in Canadian ice
November 22, 2008 - 7:55AM
http://news.smh.com.au/world/over-200-whales-trapped-in-canadian-ice-20081122-6eas.html

Lawyers call for international court for the environment
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
Last Updated: 1:29PM GMT 28 Nov 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/3530607/Lawyers-call-for-international-court-for-the-environment.html

UN climate talks to create 13,000 tonnes of carbon
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=081201131355.uc8jrd7g&show_article=1

Dec 1 09:14 AM US/Eastern

Palm oil offers no green solution

Forests are cleared by burning, which increases carbon emissions
A major international study says palm oil plantations reduce plant and animal diversity, and do little to reduce carbon emissions.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7758542.stm

Rare 50 year Arctic Blast Sets Sights On Southern California.
Joshua Young
Monday, December 8, 2008
http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/dec/08/rare-50-year-arctic-blast-sets-sights-on/

Thousands Negotiate New Climate Treaty
By Arthur Max, The Associated Press
posted: 10 December 2008 09:07 am ET
http://www.livescience.com/environment/081210-ap-climate-treaty.html

UN Blowback: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims
l December 10, 2008
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2158072e-802a-23ad-45f0-274616db87e6

White stuff fell across much of the Houston area Wednesday evening, as temperatures hovered just above freezing, tying a record for the city’s earliest ever snowfall
eric.berger@chron.com
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6156862.html I could not find this story in the archives in the Chronicle. I do have a copy on my computer.

Sleet, snow tail off in New Orleans
by The Times-Picayune
Thursday December 11, 2008, 12:00 PM
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/12/the_new_orleans_area_is.html

Southern US hit by rare snowfall
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7780562.stm

Cold weather sets records in several cities
Tribune staff • December 14, 2008
http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20081214/NEWS01/81214005

Obama left with little time to curb global warming

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20081214/D952LKP00.html

The National Weather Service says this could end up being the biggest snowstorm to impact Las Vegas since 1979 when 7.8 inches of snow was measured at McCarran International Airport
http://www.lasvegasnow.com/global/story.asp?s=9533950

CNN Meteorologist: Manmade Global Warming Theory ‘Arrogant’
Network’s second meteorologist to challenge notion man can alter climate.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
12/18/2008 11:02:44 PM
Climate of Bias: BMI’s page devoted entirely to global warming and climate change in the media.
http://businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20081218205953.aspx

Will Canada see its first white Christmas since ‘71?
Updated Sun. Dec. 21 2008 9:19 PM ET
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20081221/winter_storm_081221/20081221?hub=CTVNewsAt11

Joe Bastardi European Blog
Joe Bastardi’s Europe Column
POSTED: 6:40 a.m. December 19, 2008
SEVERE COLD WAVE TO HIT EUROPE
http://www.accuweather.com/ukie/bastardi-europe-blog.asp?partner=accuweather

Beijing’s coldest December day in 57 years
Posted by Eric Mu, December 22, 2008 12:37 PM
http://www.danwei.org/front_page_of_the_day/beijing_winter.php

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 5:51PM GMT 27 Dec 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3982101/2008-was-the-year-man-made-global-warming-was-disproved.html

Environment minister Sammy Wilson: I still think man-made climate change is a con
Wednesday, 31 December 2008
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/environment/environment-minister-sammy-wilson-i-still-think-manmade-climate-change-is-a-con-14123972.html

The Warm Turns
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 12/30/2008
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=315533893763712

Madrid airport closed as Europe seized by frigid weather
Jan 9 01:48 PM US/Eastern
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.21b9f80a72bb7683998eb76cc8354aff.791&show_article=1

Exxon supports carbon tax
Herald News Services
Published: Friday, January 09, 2009
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/calgarybusiness/story.html?id=e8aecbbb-16c6-412d-8054-7e64e2b176ef

The Coldest Weather Possible In Nearly 15 Years
http://www.accuweather.com/news-top-headline.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=0&date=2009-01-09_21:55

Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age
11.01.2009 Source: Pravda.Ru
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-earth_ice_age-0

Snow continues to trap thousands at Madrid airport
Sat Jan 10, 2009 11:35am EST
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssIndustryMaterialsUtilitiesNews/idUSLA46960720090110

Doug Zellmer column: Record snow steals spotlight from frigid temperatures
January 10, 2009
http://www.thenorthwestern.com/article/20090110/OSH04/90109104

Obama climate czar has socialist ties
Group sees ‘global governance’ as solution
Stephen Dinan (Contact)
Originally published 05:45 a.m., January 12, 2009, updated 05:45 a.m., January 12, 2009
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/12/obama-climate-czar-has-socialist-ties/

http://www.mysuburbanlife.com/indianheadpark/homepage/x1017440124/Record-snowfall-plunging-temperatures-hit-the-area
Flint, Michigan breaks 95-year-old record…
Blowing snow, frigid temps pound nation…