Author: Co2sceptic

Article Tags: Mann Made Climate Change

RICHMOND — Virginia’s flagship university went to court Thursday to fight an effort by Virginia Attorney Gen. Ken Cuccinelli II (R) to get documents from a former climate scientist at the school, an unusual confrontation that will test the bounds of academic freedom and result in the college facing down its own lawyer in court.

In a motion filed in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia argued that Cuccinelli’s subpoena for papers and e-mail from global warming researcher Michael Mann exceeds the attorney general’s authority under state law and intrudes on the rights of professors to pursue academic inquiry free from political pressure.

Cuccinelli, a vocal skeptic of global warming who is suing the Environmental Protection Agency over the issue, has said he is investigating whether Mann committed fraud by knowingly skewing data as he sought publicly funded grants for his research. Mann left U-Va. in 2005 and now works at Penn State.

Mann’s case has been embraced by academics across the country, who wrote numerous letters encouraging the university founded by Thomas Jefferson to resist the attorney general. The university’s governing board — whose members were appointed by former governors Mark R. Warner and Timothy M. Kaine, both Democrats — had first signaled that it would likely comply with the April order but then hired a major Washington law firm and prepared to take action.

University President John T. Casteen III said in a statement that Cuccinelli’s order had “sent a chill through the Commonwealth’s colleges and universities.”

Source: washingtonpost.com

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Article Tags: BBC

The UK’s Royal Society is reviewing its public statements on climate change after 43 Fellows complained that it had oversimplified its messages

They said the communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood.

The society’s ruling council has responded by setting up a panel to produce a consensus document.

The panel should report in July and the report is to be published in September.

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

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Article Tags: Robert W. Felix

Temperatures have been warmer than today for almost all of the past 10,000 years

The revamped cap-and-trade (control-and-tax) bill that Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) are trying to foist on the American public is predicated on a flat-out lie.

The control-and-tax proponents would have you believe that our planet has been enduring unprecedented global warming (now coyly referred to as “climate change”), but the facts do not bear that out. Facts. Oh, those damnable facts.

Created by Cuffy and Clow in 1997, and based on Greenland ice core records, this chart shows global temperatures for the past 15,000 years.

Source: iceagenow.com

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Article Tags: Alan Siddons, Headline Story, John O'Sullivan, NASA

NASA covered up for forty years proof that the greenhouse gas theory was bogus. But even worse, did the U.S. space agency fudge its numbers on Earth’s energy budget to cover up the facts?

As per my article this week, forty years ago the space agency, NASA, proved there was no such thing as a greenhouse gas effect because the ‘blackbody’ numbers supporting the theory didn’t add up in a 3-dimensional universe:

“During lunar day, the lunar regolith absorbs the radiation from the sun and transports it inward and is stored in a layer approximately 50cm thick….in contrast with a precipitous drop in temperature if it was a simple black body, the regolith then proceeds to transport the stored heat back onto the surface, thus warming it up significantly over the black body approximation…“

Thus, the ‘blackbody approximations’ were proven to be as useful as a chocolate space helmet; the guesswork of using the Stefan-Boltzmann equations underpinning the man-made global warming theory was long ago debunked. If NASA had made known that Stefan-Boltzmann’s numbers were an irrelevant red-herring then the taxpayers of the world would have been spared the $50 billion wasted on global warming research; because it would have removed the only credible scientific basis to support the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide changed Earth’s climate.

But, until May 24, 2010 these facts remained swept under the carpet. For the Apollo missions NASA had successfully devised new calculations to safely put astronauts on the Moon-based on actual measured temperatures of the lunar surface. But no one appears to have told government climatologists who, to this day, insist their junk science is ‘settled’ based on their bogus ‘blackbody’ guesswork.

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Article Tags: Reply To Article, Roy Spencer

We posted the article Interview With A Global Warming Skeptic: Dr. Roy Spencer by Cameron J English from scientificblogging.com. Cameron has now posted the follow up from Dr. Roy Spencer as there was some criticism made to the interview.

We thank Cameron for sending in this additional article for us to display at this site.

Are Clouds The Main Cause Of Climate Change? by Cameron J English

Two weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Spencer is a trained atmospheric scientist and actively publishes in peer-reviewed journals – he is also a global warming skeptic. Given his background and contrarian views, I asked Spencer what evidence there is to suggest that a majority of the climate science community is wrong about global warming.

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Article Tags: Bob Carter, Book, James Delingpole, Meetings, Piers Corbyn

Just been reading Climate: The Counter Consensus (Stacey International) the new book by Bob Carter – that’s New Zealand’s Professor Robert M Carter to you, mate: he’s one of the world’s leading palaeoclimatologists – and it’s a cracker. By the end, you’re left feeling rather as I did after the Heartland Conference, that the scientific case against AGW is so overwhelming that you wonder how anyone can still speak up for so discredited a theory without dying of embarrassment.

All the same, it’s good to be reminded now and again why the “consensus” thinking on AGW simply doesn’t stand up. There are so many excellent examples from Prof Carter’s book, I might be forced to spread them out over several blogs.

Take his chapter on the oceans. The other day some troll or other was brandishing a figure he’d got from NOAA, showing that the sea was warming. Well bully for you troll, but if you understand at all how climate works that fact does precisely zilch to support the case for AGW. Why?

The good Prof explains:

The ocean covers more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and over much of its area it is 3-5km deep. Comprising water, which is one thousand times denser than air the ocean has far more mass than the atmosphere – notwithstanding that the atmosphere covers the entire planet and is 50 km high to the top of the stratosphere. The result of this is that the ocean has a much greater heat capacity than the atmosphere, specifically 3,300 times more. Put another way, all the heat energy contained in the atmosphere is matched by the heat content of only the upper 3.2 metres of the worldwide ocean.

DONT MISS IF YOUR IN LONDON FRIDAY 28th MAY – See Below for Details on Bob Carter Meeting in London

Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk

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Article Tags: Facebook, Met Office, Updated, World Temperatures, You could not make it up

Their promises of a barbecue summer and a mild winter in 2009 could hardly have been more wrong, but the Met Office is now predicting extreme droughts like the one that gripped Britain in the summer of 1976 could become much more common.

The drought of 1976 culminated in a 18-month period of below average rainfall which started in May 1975. The period was marked by daily fires and dry river beds, while agriculture suffered badly, with an estimated £500 million in failed crops.

A study by the meteorologists looked at how frequently droughts could occur in the UK by 2100 in the face of global warming.

The researchers ran a series of simulations of their climate model to see how weather patterns may change in the future, and the majority showed extreme dry spells would become more common.

There was a range of 11 different versions of the model.

Updated below with FaceBook/Ask Jeeves link for Met Office Competition TODAY!! (27th May)

Source: dailymail.co.uk

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Article Tags: Christopher C. Horner, ClimateGate, Headline Story, NASA

FOIA response long overdue

The man battling NASA for access to potential “Climategate” e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.

Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.

Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.

“What we’ve got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming,” Mr. Horner said. “We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we’ve seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA.”

He said with a global warming debate looming in the Senate, NASA may be trying to avoid having embarrassing documents come out at this time, but eventually the e-mails will be released.

“They know time is our friend,” said Mr. Horner, author of “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.”

Source: washingtontimes.com

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Article Tags: Lawrence Solomon

90 top global warming scientists have turned their sights on the biomass energy industry, until recently seen as allies, warning that biofuels sometimes increases rather than decreases greenhouse gas emissions.

“There may be a public perception that all biofuels and bioenergy are equally good for the environment and are all lower in carbon emissions than fossil fuels, but that’s not true,” said one of the signatories, Dr. William Schlesinger of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in a press release yesterday aimed at the U.S. Congress. “Many produce just as much or more carbon pollution than oil, gas, and coal. If our laws and regulations treat high-carbon-impact bioenergy sources, like today’s corn ethanol, as if they are low-carbon, we’re fooling ourselves and undercutting the purpose of those same laws and regulations.”

That ethanol in your gas tank, the climate change scientists are telling us, could be bringing us closer to Armageddon by undercutting their efforts at saving the world. “Many international treaties and domestic laws and bills account for bioenergy incorrectly by treating all bioenergy as causing a 100% reduction in emissions regardless of the source of the biomass,” the scientists explain.”Under some scenarios, this approach could eliminate most of the expected greenhouse gas reductions during the next several decades.”

The letter by the 90 scientists is a response to the American Power Act, which was recently introduced by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman. This proposed legislation promotes the bioenergy sector while downplaying wind and solar. Under the Kerry-Lieberman proposal, the National Academies of Sciences would study the role that biomass could play in reducing greenhouse gases while contributing to energy independence. The Environmental Protection Agency would then submit recommendations to Congress based on the NAS study and another study, this one a joint effort by EPA, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Agriculture Congress would then act on the basis of the new information before it.

Source: opinion.financialpost.com

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Article Tags: Doug L. Hoffman, MalariaGate

Many climate change alarmists have predicted a wide range of calamitous side-effects to be caused by global warming. One such link that frequently surfaces is that global warming will cause the spread of malaria, leading to a world wide pandemic. A new study, just published in the journal Nature, has shown that malaria is actually declining worldwide. Furthermore, proposed future climate induced effects are insignificant compared with the observed natural trend and easily overcome by current disease control mechanisms. In short, claiming that malaria will spread around the globe due to climate change is an outright lie.

An increased malarial threat has been popular with the media and global warming alarmists for decades. Conscientious scientists like Paul Reiter, a medical entomology researcher at the Institut Pasteur, have denounced such exaggerated claims for more than a decade. “Environmental activists use the ‘big talk’ of science to create a simple but false paradigm,” Reiter said in testimony before the US Senate in 2006. “Malaria specialists who protest this are generally ignored, or labelled as ‘sceptics’.” Now he and others have who have fought against such non-science have been vindicated. A new article, entitled “Climate change and the global malaria recession,” by Peter W. Gething et al. has driven a stake into the heart of this blatant nonsense. Writing in the May 20, 2010, issue of the respected scientific journal Nature the international team of researchers explain their study:

The current and potential future impact of climate change on malaria is of major public health interest. The proposed effects of rising global temperatures on the future spread and intensification of the disease, and on existing malaria morbidity and mortality rates, substantively influence global health policy. The contemporary spatial limits of Plasmodium falciparum malaria and its endemicity within this range, when compared with comparable historical maps, offer unique insights into the changing global epidemiology of malaria over the last century. It has long been known that the range of malaria has contracted through a century of economic development and disease control. Here, for the first time, we quantify this contraction and the global decreases in malaria endemicity since approximately 1900.

Click source to read FULL report from Doug L. Hoffman

Source: theresilientearth.com

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Article Tags: James Delingpole

“Can’t you find something else to talk about?” someone (a nice, sympathetic person, not one of my house herd of festering libtard trolls) commented below one of my previous blogs.

So let me explain, briefly, why I rarely can – with reference to the ludicrous story which was given the front page of today’s Times (formerly a newspaper of some note).

The story, enthusiastically headlined EU SETS TOUGHEST TARGETS TO FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING goes like this:

Europe will introduce a surprise new plan today to combat global warming, committing Britain and the rest of the EU to the most ambitious targets in the world. The plan proposes a massive increase in the target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in this decade.

The existing target of a 20 per cent cut is already due to cost £48 billion. The Commission will argue that the lower target has become much easier to meet because of the recession, which resulted in the EU’s emissions falling more than 10 per cent last year as thousands of factories closed or cut production. Emissions last year were already 14 per cent below 1990 levels.

Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk

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Article Tags: ClimateGate, Iain Murray

Climategate starkly revealed to the public how many global-warming scientists speak and act like politicians.

The news that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who popularized the idea of a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism, has been struck off the register of general practitioners in the United Kingdom testifies to the fact that, in many scientific fields, objectivity still reigns. Britain’s General Medical Council found that Wakefield had used unethical and dishonest research methods and that when his conclusions became common knowledge, the result was that far more children were exposed to the risk of those diseases than would have been the case otherwise. Unfortunately, in other areas, some scientists have been getting away with blatant disregard for the scientific method.

The most prominent example, “Climategate,” highlights how dangerous the politicization of science can be. The public reaction to Climategate should motivate politicians to curb such abuses in the future. Yet it was politicians who facilitated this politicization of science in the first place.

The economic historians Terence Kealey (The Economic Laws of Scientific Research) and Joel Mokyr (The Gifts of Athena) help us understand just how science progresses. Their central insight involves the recursive nature of the scientific process. In Mokyr’s terms, propositional knowledge (what politicians term “basic” science) can inform prescriptive knowledge (“applied” science). However, the reverse happens just as often.

Source: article.nationalreview.com

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Article Tags: Blast From the Past, William Pinn

“On a warm day CO2 will heat up faster than the other air molecules, but on a cold day it will cool faster and lose its heat. So how exactly is CO2 supposed to warm the planet if it loses its heat?

HERE is how science is supposed to be done, with research, empirical verification, and a healthy dose of native intelligence and humor. Citing Specific Heats and Thermodynamics, Pinn follows a simple yet sound approach. Indeed, if the key to an atmospheric greenhouse effect is just the ability of certain gases to hold onto heat, thus yielding up the warmth they’ve stored when the earth rotates into night, Pinn’s conclusions are very solid. The most important hint the earth offers us is that it is cooler than predicted by day and warmer at night. With only minor quibbles here and there (for instance, the confusion between the specific heats of water vs water vapor) I’d call this essay quite a gem.

Surrounded by a vacuum, the earth can only lose heat by radiation. And what are ‘greenhouse gases’ famous for? Radiating. AS.

Why Carbon Dioxide is Not a Greenhouse Gas
Published August 26, 2008 by: William Pinn

I’m sitting here typing on my computer and basking in the coolness of another summer day here in Roseville, California. Did I say coolness? Yes I did. You see, we folks in Roseville are experiencing a summer with record cool temperatures.

Source: associatedcontent.com

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Article Tags: Marc Morano, Video Link

‘World News’ segment cut skeptic interview from 11 minute to just 10 seconds, then links it with white supremacists.

We’ve all sort of known the media have been in the tank for the global warming alarmist movement. For evidence, look no further than a March 2008 segment that aired on ABC “World News” attacking leading climate skeptic, University of Virginia environmental scientist Professor Emeritus Fred Singer.

And the same culprit behind that 2008 segment, “World News” weekend anchor Dan Harris, was at it again with a piece that aired on May 23 attempting to link climate change skeptics to white supremacists.

But for balance, Harris included a few brief remarks, all of 10 seconds, from Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, a news aggregator website Harris called “aggressive.” But the actual interview Harris conducted with Morano was much more extensive and in depth. Throughout the interview, Harris asked Morano questions, but with premises that weren’t necessarily true.

During the back-and-forth, Harris asked Morano about the “threat” from people who challenged global warming skeptics, the validity that ClimateGate was a real scandal, the charges from Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., that ClimateGate exposed fraud, how someone could be skeptical of global warming with such a broad consensus and what Harris deemed as “interesting,” that climate skeptics were susceptible to threats as well. However, 99 percent of that was left out of the segment. What was left out of the ABC News segment? Transcript as follows:

Click source to read FULL report from Jeff Poor Inc. Video Link

Source: businessandmedia.org

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Article Tags: World Temperatures

The Heartland Institute’s James M. Taylor, an environmental policy expert, said global cooling is already happening. Figures from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab show snow records from the last 10 years exceeded the records set in the 1960s and 1970s.

The past “decade set a record for largest average global snow extent,” Taylor said.

There is this too: “Eight straight years’ global temperature downtrend: The authoritative SPPI composite index of global mean surface temperature anomalies, taking the mean of two surface and two satellite datasets and updated through November 2008, shows a pronounced downtrend for eight full years. Not one of the climate models relied upon by the IPCC had predicted this downturn.” – Lord Christopher Monckton

Click source to read FULL report from Mark Landsbaum

Source: orangepunch.freedomblogging

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Article Tags: Editorial

$6 million study is used to lobby for cap-and-tax

With public faith in the global-warming myth on the wane, leftist zealots are desperate to spin a new tale – and they’re spending your tax money to do it. Three years ago, Congress appropriated $5,856,600 for the National Academy of Sciences to complete a climate-change study. This bureaucratic attempt to cook the books, which was completed last week, may be too late to save this dying religion.

The academy now offers the taxpayer-funded research for download in three separate sections for $44 each. The first volume presents the case that human activities are warming the planet and that this “poses significant risks.” A second report urges that a cap-and-trade taxing system be implemented to reduce so-called greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The final section of the study explores strategies on adapting to the “reality” of climate change, meaning purported “extreme weather events like heavy precipitation and heat waves.”

None of the big-government recommendations are worth the 1,089 pages of presumably recycled paper on which they are to be printed if planetary warming is actually a phenomenon beyond human control, so the first volume is of primary interest. “Advancing the Science of Climate Change” asserts that the Earth’s temperature has risen over the past 100 years and that human activities have resulted in sharp increases in carbon dioxide. The coincidence of these facts on their own, of course, proves nothing. The Earth has been as warm or warmer in past periods, such as the medieval and Roman warm periods, long before the internal combustion engine and coal plants were around to take the heat for a particularly sweltering summer day.

Source: washingtontimes.com

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Article Tags: Alan Siddons, Hans Schreuder, Martin Hertzberg

Introduction

We’ve been told that the earth’s surface is quite a bit warmer than calculations predict. Theory has it that heat-trapping “greenhouse gases” account for a 33° Celsius disparity. But it turns out that our airless moon is also quite a bit warmer than predicted. Might something be wrong with the prediction method itself, then? It’s a natural question to ask, so let’s look into it.

The Theory

Climate science’s method of deriving a surface temperature from incoming radiant energy (whose intensity is measured in watts per square meter) is based on the Stefan-Boltzmann formula [1], which in turn refers to a theoretical surface known as a blackbody – something that absorbs and emits all of the radiance it’s exposed to. Since by definition a blackbody cannot emit less than 100% of what it absorbs, this fictional entity has no option of drawing heat into itself, for that would compromise its temperature response and thus its thermal emission. Its 100% thermal emission effectively means that a blackbody is a twodimensional surface with no depth.

Source: ilovemycarbondioxide.com

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Article Tags: Jeffrey Glassman

FINALLY, Dr Jeffrey Glassman’s recent paper is available in pdf form: its hosting site also offers a good summary of the direction his research has been taking.

The CrossFit Journal is proud to present this extraordinary article by Dr. Jeff Glassman. Formerly the Division Chief Scientist for Missile Development and Microelectronics Systems Divisions for Hughes Aircraft, Dr. Glassman has dedicated his career to improving the quality of science methodology among his peers and the community at large.

For years he has been disturbed by the lack of credible science identifying human activity as a cause of global warming. This paper is the latest of six papers published on his blog, Rocket Scientist’s Journal, and the first to advance the Sun as the cause of global climate change in the fine detail of the temperature record since the invention of the thermometer.

Source: library.crossfit.com

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Article Tags: You could not make it up

Tony Blair has been hired as an adviser on climate change by Californian billionaire Vinod Khosla, the latest in a string of jobs the former prime minister has taken.

The agreement will see Tony Blair Associates give strategic advice to Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in companies pursuing green technologies. Mr Khosla, who made his fortune as co-founder of computing giant Sun Microsystems, is hoping that Mr Blair’s decade on the global stage helps unlock doors for the companies that California-based Khosla Ventures invests in.

Mr Khosla said that “with Tony’s advice and influence’ we will create opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to devise practical solutions that can solve today’s most pressing problems.”

Click source for more!!! Thanks to Nick for sending this article

Source: telegraph.co.uk

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Article Tags: Roy Spencer

The strongest piece of evidence the IPCC has for connecting anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to global warming (er, I mean climate change) is the computerized climate model. Over 20 climate models tracked by the IPCC now predict anywhere from moderate to dramatic levels of warming for our future in response to increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In many peoples’ minds this constitutes some sort of “proof” that global warming is manmade.

Yet, if we stick to science rather than hyperbole, we might remember that science cannot “prove” a hypothesis….but sometimes it can disprove one. The advancement of scientific knowledge comes through new hypotheses for how things work which replace old hypotheses that are either not as good at explaining nature, or which are simply proved to be wrong.

Each climate model represents a hypothesis for how the climate system works. I must disagree with my good friend Dick Lindzen’s recent point he made during his keynote speech at the 4th ICCC meeting in Chicago, in which he asserted that the IPCC’s global warming hypothesis is not even plausible. I think it is plausible.

And from months of comparing climate model output to satellite observations of the Earth’s radiative budget, I am increasingly convinced that climate models can not be disproved. Sure, there are many details of today’s climate system they get wrong, but that does not disprove their projections of long-term global warming.

Source: drroyspencer.com

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