Global Warming?

[Cat]

well,we will have plenty of coal for heat.To heck with crazies saying don't burn it.

[Carnut]

The Next Climate-gate?

By John Lott - FOXNews.com

The global warming scandal keeps getting worse. Revelations over the few weeks show that many important assertions in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on misquotes and false claims from environmental groups, not on published academic research as it was originally presented. This is on top of the recent mess regarding data, where the three most relied-on data series used by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 assessment report still have not been released. Other data simply never seem to have existed or cannot be provided to other scientists.

But probably the most damaging report has come from Joseph D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology and co-founder of the Weather Channel, and Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and founder of SurfaceStations.org.

In a January 29 report, they find that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began systematically eliminating climate measuring stations in cooler locations around the world. Yes, that's right. They began eliminating stations that tended to record cooler temperatures and drove up the average measured temperature. The eliminated stations had been in higher latitudes and altitudes, inland areas away from the sea, as well as more rural locations. The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.

D’Aleo and Watts show that the jumps in measured global temperature occur just when the number of weather stations is cut. But there is another bias that this change to more urban stations also exacerbates. Recorded temperatures in more urban areas rise over time simply because more densely populated areas produce more heat. Combining the greater share of weather stations in more urban areas over time with this urban heat effect also tends to increase the rate that recorded temperatures tend to rise over time.

Their report provides examples of how the systematic elimination of stations and unexplained adjustments in temperature data caused measured temperatures to rise for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. Many adjustments change what would have been a drop in temperatures into an increase. Take New Zealand, where D’Aleo and Watts note: “About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming.”

D’Aleo and Watts also criticize how these data adjustments are often unexplained or poorly documented. In one case involving James Hansen at NASA a Freedom of Information Act request has been unanswered for over two years.

The report details other fascinating temperature biases. For example, Siberia has experienced one the greatest increases in recorded warming. A large drop in the number of stations and the some missing data can explain part of the change, but apparently during the Soviet-era areas with lower recorded temperatures received more fuel and money, creating a real incentive for weather stations to lie.

The D’Aleo and Watts’ report also helps answer some puzzling questions about the report. One of the major ones questions has been the divergence in temperature data recorded by satellites in space and down here on the ground. That difference was very small when satellites first started being used during the 1980s but has grown over time, with ground observations showing a rise in temperature relative to the satellite data. The urban warming effect may also explain why land warming has between so much greater than ocean warming.

All three terrestrial global-temperature datasets (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/ National Climatic Data Center, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and University of East Anglia) really rely on the same measures of surface temperatures. These three sources do not provide independent measures of how the world’s temperatures have changed over time. The relatively small differences that do arise from these three institutions result from how they adjust the raw data.

Flawed data leads to flawed conclusions. Whether these errors were made on purpose or by accident ultimately doesn’t matter. Especially with tens of trillions of dollars at stake, science should be more transparent than this. But we can only draw one conclusion: the studies based on that data, no matter the number, are ultimately unreliable.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/02/09/john-lott-joseph-daleo-climate-change-noaa-james-hansen/

[Carnut]

World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists

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

In its last assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was "unequivocal." It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife.

New research casts doubt on such claims, however. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

"The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change," said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC. The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanization, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site. Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, California and Alabama.

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

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report. The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

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

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

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment. Some are next to air-conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous: a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/15/world-warming-say-scientists/

[Carnut]

Global Warming in Last 15 Years Insignificant, U.K.'s Top Climate Scientist Admits

The embattled ex-head of the research center at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal dropped a bombshell over the weekend, admitting in an interview with the BBC that there has been no global warming over the past 15 years.

Phil Jones, former head of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, made a number of eye-popping statements to the BBC's climate reporter on Sunday. Data from CRU, where Jones was the chief scientist, is key evidence behind the claim that the growth of cities (which are warmer than countryside) isn't a factor in global warming and was cited by the U.N.'s climate science body to bolster statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

Jones's latest statements seemed to contradict the CRU's data.

In response to the question, "do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically significant global warming?", Jones said yes, adding that the average increase of 0.12C per year over that time period "is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."

Jones is nevertheless 100% confident that the climate has warmed, he stated, admitting that the Climate-gate scandal has undermined public confidence in science. The scandal has worn down Jones as well: Since the e-mails emerged -- and were subsequently posted online at www.EastAngliaEmails.com -- Jones has stepped down from his position, been forced to admit that he “misjudged” the handling of requests for information, and even acknowledged contemplating suicide.

Jones also allowed for the possibility that the world as a whole was warmer in medieval times than it is today -- a concession that may also undermine theories that global warming is caused by man.

In addition, Jones admitted that an overall lack of organization, and his poor record keeping and office-tidying skills, had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.

"To say when you're the record keeper for the globe's temperature that you're not a good record keeper, well, that's going to come back to haunt you for a long, long time," Pat Michaels.of the Cato Institute, a public-policy think tank, told Fox News.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/15/global-warming-insignificant-years-admits-uks-climate-scientist/

[Carnut]

Scientists Retract Paper on Rising Sea Levels Due to Errors



Scientists have been forced to retract a paper that claimed sea level were rising thanks to the effects of global warming, after mistakes were discovered that undermined the results.

The study was published in Nature Geoscience and predicted that sea levels would rise by as much as 2.7 feet by the end of the twenty-first century.

The paper also highlighted that it reinforced the conclusions of the U.N.'s controversial Fourth Assessment report, which warned of the dangerous of man-made climate change.

However, mistakes in time intervals and inaccurately applied statistics have forced the authors to retract their paper -- the first official retraction ever for the three-year-old journal, notes the Guardian. In an officially published retraction of their paper, the authors acknowledged these mistakes as factors that compromised the results.

"We no longer have confidence in our projections for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and for this reason the authors retract the results pertaining to sea-level rise after 1900," wrote authors Mark Siddall, Thomas Stocker and Peter Clark.

Since the leak of e-mails from the U.K.'s top global warming scientists in early December, many other errors and sloppy mistakes have been uncovered in leading report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Flaws in weather stations have led some to question claims of rising temperatures, sloppy math led to holes in postulates that the Himalayas were rapidly melting and fears of a man-made food shortage in Africa seem unsubstantiated as well.

Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall told the Guardian,, "It's one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science." A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study's conclusion.

"Retraction is a regular part of the publication process," he said. "Science is a complicated game and there are set procedures in place that act as checks and balances."

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/22/scientist-retracts-paper-rising-sea-levels-errors/

[Poochy]

Scientists Retract Paper on Rising Sea Levels Due to Errors



Scientists have been forced to retract a paper that claimed sea level were rising thanks to the effects of global warming, after mistakes were discovered that undermined the results.

The study was published in Nature Geoscience and predicted that sea levels would rise by as much as 2.7 feet by the end of the twenty-first century.

The paper also highlighted that it reinforced the conclusions of the U.N.'s controversial Fourth Assessment report, which warned of the dangerous of man-made climate change.

However, mistakes in time intervals and inaccurately applied statistics have forced the authors to retract their paper -- the first official retraction ever for the three-year-old journal, notes the Guardian. In an officially published retraction of their paper, the authors acknowledged these mistakes as factors that compromised the results.

"We no longer have confidence in our projections for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and for this reason the authors retract the results pertaining to sea-level rise after 1900," wrote authors Mark Siddall, Thomas Stocker and Peter Clark.

Since the leak of e-mails from the U.K.'s top global warming scientists in early December, many other errors and sloppy mistakes have been uncovered in leading report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Flaws in weather stations have led some to question claims of rising temperatures, sloppy math led to holes in postulates that the Himalayas were rapidly melting and fears of a man-made food shortage in Africa seem unsubstantiated as well.

Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall told the Guardian,, "It's one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science." A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study's conclusion.

"Retraction is a regular part of the publication process," he said. "Science is a complicated game and there are set procedures in place that act as checks and balances."

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/22/scientist-retracts-paper-rising-sea-levels-errors/

Thanks for posting this Carnut.

Interesting how it as retracted.

Over the past year I've heard the warmer Icelandic weather will greatly contribute to a vast rise in sea levels, causing much destruction.

[Carnut]

A crack in the wall; EPA administrator distances the agency from IPCC report

by  Rick Moran

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in testimony before the Environment and Public Works Committee, made it a point to declare that the agency was not using the IPCC report to develop policy.

Charlie Martin at PJ Media reports:

    During the review of the Environmental Protection Agency budget in today's Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, both Senator Barbara Boxer - the chair of the committee - and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson distanced themselves from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

    Boxer and Jackson's statements, in addition to being a striking change in policy, are problematic because U.S. climate science is very closely tied to the IPCC reports (as Christopher Horner showed in his recent PJM series on the NASA FOIA emails.)

    The statements by Boxer and Jackson followed Senator Inhofe's release (see the PJM exclusive report) in his opening statement of a minority staff report documenting many flaws in the IPCC report and the other evidence revealed in the Climategate files. (See the full hearing on CSPAN here; the exchanges with Senator Boxer and Inhofe, and Administrator Jackson begin at about 56 minutes into the video.)

    Both Boxer and Jackson appeared to be trying to distance the EPA from the IPCC report. Boxer said:

        In my opening statement, I didn't quote one international scientist or IPCC report. ... We are quoting the American scientific community here.

    When Inhofe directly asked Jackson if she still considered the IPCC report the "gold standard," she answered:

        The primary focus of the endangerment finding was on climate threat risks in this country.

    Jackson also noted:

    [The errors Inhofe had presented were] international events. The information on the glaciers and other events doesn't weaken ... the evidence we considered [to make the Endangerment Finding on CO2.]


Jackson's weak defense was notable for its lack of specificity on any scientific findings that EPA will base their "carbon is poison" policy. So much of the science the EPA is relying on is tainted by IPCC conclusions. It will be a good trick to try and separate EPA from the flawed study.

Charlie notes in this piece the news that Senator Inhofe has called for a criminal investigation into climategate principles and their actions. This might really shake something loose if it comes to pass. Threatened with jail time, some of the small fry might start to sing and bring down the whole rotten edifice.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/02/a_crack_in_the_wall_epa_admini.html

[Carnut]

Inhofe Calls for EPA Probe of Scientists' Climate Change E-Mails



The Senate's top global warming skeptic on Tuesday said he will ask the Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general to probe the use of climate change data now at the center of an international inquiry for an endangerment finding that gives the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Sen James Inhofe, R-Okla., said EPA administrator Lisa Jackson's decision to rely on information from the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change to institute the endangerment finding is

"The EPA accepted the IPCC's erroneous claims wholesale, without doing its own independent review," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said about

"So EPA's endangerment finding rests on bad science," Inhofe said at a Tuesday morning hearing.

But appearing before Inhofe at the Senate Environment and Public Works hearing on the EPA's proposed 2011 budget, Jackson said the information under question "doesn't undermine our endangerment finding."

She also rebuffed Inhofe's call to ask the agency's inspector general to investigate the data, saying the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gasses are pollutants.

"They said the EPA must make a determination on whether or not greenhouse gases endanger welfare. Rather than ignore that obligation, I believe I had no choice but to follow the law of the land.

In a letter to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent Monday Jackson wrote that new greenhouse gas emission rules for "large stationary sources" will be delayed a year.

Inhofe is also considering a request to the Department of Justice for a probe of scientists who he claims deliberately falsified data used by climate change advocates.

House Environment and Public Works Committee Republicans released a 40-page report that was used by GOPers to ask Jackson how she can continue to advocate for new global warming regulations even as the findings by the IPCC and the work of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit in Britain create doubt about climate science.

"The CRU controversy features e-mails from the world's leading climate scientists -- e-mails that show disturbing practices contrary to the practice of objective science and potentially federal law," the report reads.

"The released CRU e-mails and documents display potentially unethical, and illegal, behavior," it continues. "Moreover, there are e-mails discussing unjustified changes to data by federal employees and federal grantees. These and other issues raise questions about the lawful use of federal funds and potential ethical misconduct."

Inhofe, whose family mocked Al Gore by building a snowman of the climate change advocate on the Capitol grounds earlier this month, said in a statement ahead of the hearing on the EPA's 2011 proposed budget that the minority staff's report covers e-mails and documents from 1996 through November 2009.

He said the research shows the world's leading climate scientists discussing obstruction of contrary data, manipulation of data, threats of journalists who questioned "consensus" on the data and activism to influence the political process.

"We knew they were cooking the science to support the flawed UN IPCC agenda," he said. "I suspect Climate-gate is only the beginning."

At the hearing, Inhofe also pressed Jackson to explain how her agency can press ahead with what he calls a "jobs-killing agenda" when Congress has not passed cap-and-trade legislation.

"How in the world can we justify doing something administratively that the Congress overwhelming rejected, saying defiantly we don't care what you do, Congress?"

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/02/23/inhofe-calls-investigation-scientists-climate-change-e-mails/

[Carnut]

Britain's Weather Office Proposes Climate-Gate Do-Over

By George Russell - FOXNews.com

After the firestorm of criticism called Climate-gate, the British government's official Meteorological Office has decided to give its modern climate data a do-over.

At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists in the quiet Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, representatives of the weather office (known in Britain as the Met Office) quietly proposed that the world's climate scientists start all over again on a "grand challenge" to produce a new, common trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.

In other words, conduct investigations into modern global warming in a way that may help to end the mammoth controversy over world temperature data that has been stirred up in the past few years.

The executive summary of the Met Office proposal to the World Meteorological Organization's Committee for Climatology was obtained by Fox News. In it, the Met Office defends its historical record of temperature readings, along with similar data collected in the U.S., as a "robust indicator of global change." But it admits that "further development" of the record is required "in particular to better assess the risks posed by changes in extremes of climate."

Among other things, its older data is maintained on a monthly basis, and the Met Office proposal says that is "grossly inadequate" to providing information on a daily and "sub-daily" basis.

A Met Office spokesman, Dave Britton, declared that the decision to re-do the data collection had been gestating for "a long time," then added: "But it would be naïve to say that [the Climate-gate controversy] didn't have an impact." He added: "It's not something that we can do alone."

As a result, the proposal says, "we feel that it is timely to propose an international effort to reanalyze surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which has the responsibility for global observing and monitoring systems for weather and climate."

The new effort, the proposal says, would provide:

• "verifiable datasets starting from a common databank of unrestricted data"
• "methods that are fully documented in the peer reviewed literature and open to scrutiny;"
• "a set of independent assessments of surface temperature produced by independent groups using independent methods,"
• "comprehensive audit trails to deliver confidence in the results;"
• "robust assessment of uncertainties associated with observational error, temporal and geographical in homogeneities."

The Met Office proposes that the new international effort to recalibrate temperature data start at a "workshop"' hosted by its Hadley Climate Research Centre, which maintains data in collaboration with the controversial Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's East Anglia University. The Met Office would invite "key players" to start the "agreed community challenge" of creating the new datasets. A Met Office spokesman said the new effort would take about three years to complete, but would not estimate the cost.

The Met Office proposal asserts that "we do not anticipate any substantial changes in the resulting global and continental-scale ... trends" as a result of the new round of data collection. But, the proposal adds, "this effort will ensure that the datasets are completely robust and that all methods are transparent."

Those strongly underlined assurances put the Met Office in strong contrast to the accusations that have been hurled at its collaborator, CRU, epicenter of the Climate-gate controversy. Among other things, the CRU had stonewalled climate skeptics who demanded to know more about its scientific methods in establishing a dramatic record of global warming, especially in the 20th century. (An inquiry established that the institution had flouted British freedom of information laws in refusing to come up with the data.)

The stonewall began to crumble after a gusher of leaked emails revealed climate scientists, including the CRU's chief, Phil Jones, discussing how to keep controversial climate data out of the hands of the skeptics, keep opposing scientific viewpoints out of peer-reviewed scientific journals, and bemoaned that their climate models failed to account for more than a decade of stagnation in global temperatures.Jones later revealed that key temperature datasets used in Hadley's predictions had been lost, and could not be retrieved for verification.

Jones stepped down temporarily after the British government announced an ostensibly independent inquiry into the still-growing scandal, but that only fanned the flames, as skeptics pointed out ties between several panel members and the East Anglia center. In an interview two weeks ago, Jones also admitted that there has been no "statistically significant" global warming in the past 15 years.

The Met Office's desire for more robust and transparent data could also prove to be a blow for Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations-backed International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose most recent report, published in 2007, has been exposed by skeptics as rife with scientific errors, larded with un-reviewed and non-scientific source materials, and other failings.

As details of the report's sloppiness emerged, the ranks of skeptics of the work have swelled to include larger numbers of the scientific community, including weather specialists who worked on the sprawling IPCC report. Calls for Pachauri's resignation have come from organizations as normally opposed as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the British chapter of Greenpeace. So far, he has refused to step down.

The Met proposal argues says that its old datasets "are adequate for answering the pressing 20th Century questions of whether climate is changing and if so how. Bet they are fundamentally ill-conditioned to answer 21st Century questions such as how extremes are changing and therefore what adaptation and mitigation decisions should be taken."

Those "21st Century questions" are not small and they are very far from cheap. At Copenhagen, wealthy nations were being asked to spend trillions of dollars on answering them, a deal that only fell through when China, India, and other near-developed nations refused to join the mammoth climate-control deal.

The question after the Met Office's proposal may be whether environmentalists eager to move those mountains of cash are also ready to stand down until the 21st century questions get 21st century answers.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/23/britains-weather-office-proposes-climategate/

[Carnut]

U.N. Climate Panel to Announce Significant Changes

By Ed Barnes - FOXNews.com

Just one year ago a pronouncement from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) was all that was needed to move nations and change environmental policies around the world. But today, the panel's creditability and even its very existence are in question.

In the wake of its swift and devastating fall from grace, the panel says it will announce "within the next few days" that it plans to make significant though as yet unexplained changes in how it does business.

Brenda Abrar-Milani, an external relations officer at the IPCC's office in Geneva, Switzerland, said changes have been slow in coming because "we have to inform the governments (all 194 member States) of any planned steps, and they are the ones who eventually take decisions on any revision of procedures."

"We put everything on the table and looked at it," she said, explaining that the panel's reforms would be extensive. She refused to detail any of the changes, but she did confirm that are in response to recent scandals involving the panel.

"We used to operate in the dark, and now we seem to be in the spotlight," she said.

But critics of the IPCC say it has been slow to understand the gravity of the crisis it has created, and it is incapable of making significant internal changes. Since the crisis began, the panel's only reaction has been to post two documents to its Web site -- on Feb. 2 to explain its "principles and procedures," and on Feb. 4 to detail the procedures the panel uses in its reports.

In perhaps an indication of what changes the IPCC may unveil, the British government's official Meteorological Office proposed Monday that the world's climate scientists start all over again on a "grand challenge" to produce a new, common trove of global temperature data.

The IPCC was created in 1988 to periodically review the state of climate change science. It has has issued four reports so far, with a fifth in the works. Governments based their programs and policies on its findings solely because it was considered the "final word" on the state of the planet's climate. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, its reputation for accuracy and fairness, to a large degree, was responsible for building a consensus around the world that global warming was both real and a potentially devastating phenomenon largely caused by man.

But the panel, which has predicted massive and devastating storms as a result of global warming, ran into the perfect storm itself, beginning with the leak of thousands of e-mails from the prestigious climate program at East Anglia University in England.

Those e-mails raised troubling questions about the panel's impartiality and how deeply politics influenced its decisions. They show scientists discussing how to avoid sharing information with skeptics despite freedom of information laws and how to keep people with contrary ideas out of peer-reviewed journals. Dubbed "climate-gate," the piercing of the aura of its authority prompted many to take a deeper look at the panel's workings.

Then came more "gates": Africa-gate, an exaggerated prediction of drought and crop losses on the continent; glacier-gate, a false claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear in two decades; disaster-gate, an unsubstantiated claim that extreme weather, caused by global warming, was responsible for growing billions in financial losses; Amazon-gate, its prediction that the Amazon rain forest was dangerously shrinking; and Pachauri-gate, named for the panel's chief.

In the first four "gates," source materials were examined to determine the scientific basis for the panel's claims, and in each case the materials used to support panel assessments were flawed or not peer-reviewed.

Then came Pachauri-gate. Press reports revealed that the head of the panel, Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian engineer, lived an opulent lifestyle despite a meager wage and ran a consulting business on the side that presented severe conflict of interest issues. Greenpeace called for Pachauri to step down. And in a severe slap to his credibility, his own country set up its own climate panel to assess emerging scientific climate studies — the same job the IPPC does.

Because the panel was supposed to conduct the most rigorous examination of data possible, one error was bad enough. But the onslaught of sloppiness and errors was so devastating that many of the panel's strongest supporters called for reform and, in some cases, abandonment of the panel.

Mike Hulme of East Anglia University in England, who has played critical roles in the panel's earlier reports, wrote in Nature magazine that the IPPC "is no longer fit" to fulfill the purpose it was set up for in the 1980s because science and public involvement had changed. He suggested breaking the panel into three parts and allowing each to focus on a different aspect of global warming. One would look at the pure science, the second would look at regional changes and the third would focus on policy analysis and propose options based on new scientific findings.

Canadian climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who helped write the last three IPCC reports, also called for a massive overhaul and the resignation of Pachauri. He said that the panel had become "tainted by political advocacy" and that its approach to science should be radically changed. He told the Canwest News Service that the panel should act only as a neutral advisory body and not as an advocate of any political goal, and he said that "there has been a dangerous crossing of that line."

Whether the as-yet-unannounced IPCC reforms will be enough to save the panel's creditability and status remains to be seen. But it will be an uphill battle.

Steve McIntyre, who also worked at the IPPC and whose blog, Climate Audit, has been one of the most vocal critics of the panel, says that while cries for reform have become loud, "very little thought has yet been put into what changes have to be made."

"I don't think they plan to change very much," he said. "They just don't know how to reform it."

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/24/exclusive-climate-panel-announce-significant-changes/

[Carnut]

Study: Global Warming Reduces Hurricanes?

Research by hurricane scientists may force the UN’s climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms.
 
The benchmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that a worldwide increase in hurricane-force storms since 1970 was probably linked to global warming.
 
It followed some of the most damaging storms in history such as Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and Hurricane Dennis which hit Cuba, both in 2005.
 
The IPCC added that humanity could expect a big increase in such storms over the 21st century unless greenhouse gas emissions were controlled.
 
The warning helped turn hurricanes into one of the most iconic threats of global warming, with politicians including Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, and Al Gore citing them as a growing threat to humanity.
 
The cover of Gore’s newest book, Our Choice, even depicts an artist's impression of a world beset by a series of huge super-hurricanes as a warning of what might happen if carbon emissions continue to rise.
 
However, the latest research, just published in Nature Geoscience, paints a very different picture.
 
It suggests that the rise in hurricane frequency since 1995 was just part of a natural cycle, and that several similar previous increases have been recorded, each followed by a decline.
 
Looking to the future, it also draws on computer modelling to predict that the most likely impact of global warming will be to decrease the frequency of tropical storms, by up to 34% by 2100.

http://www.thefoxnation.com/global-warming/2010/03/01/study-global-warming-reduces-hurricanes

[Carnut]

What Gore Missed When He Broke His Silence

By John Lott - FOXNews.com

Despite one Climate-gate revelation after another, Al Gore has been remarkably silent. Indeed, since the Copenhagen Climate Summit he hasn't said anything. That is until now. He broke his silence on Sunday in the New York Times with his 1,900+ word op-ed piece. Although some of the piece responds to recent scandals involving the "e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain" and the errors found in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, much of the response is filled with snide remarks about "climate deniers."

Gore concedes "at least two mistakes" in the UN’s IPCC 2007 report – the predictions about Himalayan glaciers melting and the percentage of the Netherlands that is below sea level -- but he avoids addressing the other serious problems. Take three of the claims that have been widely used to promote the need to quickly adopt an international climate treaty:

1. The IPCC warned that, due to global warming, the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s." They cited one study to support their claim, but when the research was finally published in 2008, it had a different conclusion than reported by the IPCC: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

2. The IPCC warned that up to 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming, but the sole source for that claim was a non-refereed report authored by two people who the Sunday Times of London referred to as “two green activists,” one of them with the World Wildlife Fund.

3. The IPCC also asserted that, by 2020, global warming could have reduced crop yields in some African countries by 50 percent. It was one of the report's most widely quoted and sensationalist warnings, but, again, there was no published scientific evidence that backed it up. The original source was merely a position paper issued by the environmentalist group, the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The institute had looked at studies from three African governments, but none of those government studies linked global warming and crop disasters. As Britain’s The Telegraph reported: "The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years, cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, 'agricultural production will more than double by 2020.'" Even these calculations were not explicitly based upon based on global warming considerations.

In his commentary for The New York Times Gore dismisses the scandal of the Climate-gate e-mails as simply "e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law."

Yet, there is no evidence that the e-mails were "stolen." It is quite possible that they were leaked by a whistleblower. The researchers broke British laws by not sharing their data, but they were protected because statutes of limitations have passed and now apparently much of the raw original data are missing. If it was so difficult to share the raw data with skeptics at different universities, why could the University of East Anglia share its data with the British Met Office?
Unfortunately, however, the unwillingness to share data isn't just seen with the University of East Anglia: NASA, the British Met Office, and other institutions have all refused to release their raw temperature data. Even worse, there are concerns now that the closing of more than three-quarters of the world's weather stations starting in 1990, primarily in relatively cold areas, may have biased temperature measurements upwards.

One would think that man-made global warming believers, including Mr. Gore, would want the raw temperature data made available as soon as possible so as to clear up any confusion. But Gore makes no such request.

His op-ed also rehashes many old claims, such as the "Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea." Yet, Antarctica's ice pack, which holds 90 of the earth's ice and 80 percent of it fresh water, has remain essentially unchanged over the last few decades. Gore also ignores that while Arctic sea ice was declining until 2007, recent years have shown the opposite pattern, with it rising by 19 percent.

Politicians, such as Gore, apparently don't appreciate the role that transparency plays in science. But scientists trust others' results much more when they are actually able to examine the data themselves. Gore dismisses these concerns as mere trivialities, but if they are so easy to deal with, why not make sure that the data are provided? Memo to the former Vice President: In this day of computer files and the Internet, sharing data is actually pretty simple.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/03/01/john-lott-al-gore-climate-gate-op-ed-new-york-times/

[Carnut]

  The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.
 
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

http://www.thefoxnation.com/climate-change/2010/03/08/meltdown-climate-campaign

[Carnut]

Green Crooks

by John Stossel

People who commit their lives to going green are just better people. They're more moral, more honest. At least, they keep telling us that, and apparently many students believe it, say University of Toronto psychologists:

They initially quizzed the students on their impressions of people who buy eco-friendly products, and for the most part, they considered such consumers to be more “more cooperative, altruistic and ethical” than ordinary consumers...

Then the researchers took it an extra step: They ran a test to see who would be more likely to cheat and steal: Greens? Or conventional shoppers?

They divided the greens and conventional shoppers, and then gave the students a test that tempted them to steal money. The researchers found:

The green consumers were more likely to cheat than the conventional purchasers, and they stole more money when asked to withdraw their winnings from envelopes on their desks.

This concept of moral license has been demonstrated before, writes Wray Herbert in his blog for the Association for Psychological Science.

(W)hen they have reason to feel a little superior, that positive self image triggers a sense of moral license. That is, the righteous feel they have some latitude to stray a bit in order to compensate. It’s like working in a soup kitchen gives you the right to cheat on your taxes later in the week.

Maybe that’s why sanctimonious stewards of the environment like Al Gore are comfortable lecturing the rest of us while living large in mega-mansions.

http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/03/18/green-crooks/

[Carnut]

NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, Space Agency Admits

By Blake Snow - FOXNews.com

NASA was able to put a man on the moon, but the space agency can't tell you what the temperature was when it did. By its own admission, NASA's temperature records are in even worse shape than the besmirched Climate-gate data.

E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) -- the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails -- and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center.

The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA's data "was more accurate" than other climate-change data sets, NASA's Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said "the National Climatic Data Center's procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate," admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings.

"My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC's data for the U.S. means and [East Anglia] data for the global means," Ruedy told the reporter.

"NASA's temperature data is worse than the Climate-gate temperature data. According to NASA," wrote Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who uncovered the e-mails. Horner is skeptical of NCDC's data as well, stating plainly: "Three out of the four temperature data sets stink."

Global warming critics call this a crucial blow to advocates' arguments that minor flaws in the "Climate-gate" data are unimportant, since all the major data sets arrive at the same conclusion -- that the Earth is getting warmer. But there's a good reason for that, the skeptics say: They all use the same data.

"There is far too much overlap among the surface temperature data sets to assert with a straight face that they independently verify each other's results," says James M. Taylor, senior fellow of environment policy at The Heartland Institute.

"The different groups have cooperated in a very friendly way to try to understand different conclusions when they arise," said Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in the same 2007 e-mail thread. Earlier this month, in an updated analysis of the surface temperature data, GISS restated that the separate analyses by the different agencies "are not independent, as they must use much of the same input observations."

Neither NASA nor NOAA responded to requests for comment. But Dr. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground, still believes the validity of data from NASA, NOAA and East Anglia would be in jeopardy only if the comparative analysis didn't match. "I see no reason to question the integrity of the raw data," he says. "Since the three organizations are all using mostly the same raw data, collected by the official weather agency of each individual country, the only issue here is whether the corrections done to the raw data were done correctly by CRU."

Corrections are needed, Masters says, "since there are only a few thousand surface temperature recording sites with records going back 100+ years." As such, climate agencies estimate temperatures in various ways for areas where there aren't any thermometers, to account for the overall incomplete global picture.

"It would be nice if we had more global stations to enable the groups to do independent estimates using completely different raw data, but we don't have that luxury," Masters adds. "All three groups came up with very similar global temperature trends using mostly the same raw data but independent corrections. This should give us confidence that the three groups are probably doing reasonable corrections, given that the three final data sets match pretty well."

But NASA is somewhat less confident, having quietly decided to tweak its corrections to the climate data earlier this month.

In an updated analysis of the surface temperature data released on March 19, NASA adjusted the raw temperature station data to account for inaccurate readings caused by heat-absorbing paved surfaces and buildings in a slightly different way. NASA determines which stations are urban with nighttime satellite photos, looking for stations near light sources as seen from space.

Of course, this doesn't solve problems with NASA's data, as the newest paper admits: "Much higher resolution would be needed to check for local problems with the placement of thermometers relative to possible building obstructions," a problem repeatedly underscored by meteorologist Anthony Watts on his SurfaceStations.org Web site. Last month, Watts told FoxNews.com that "90 percent of them don't meet [the government's] old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule' for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we've got documentation."

Still, "confidence" is not the same as scientific law, something the public obviously recognizes. According to a December survey, only 25 percent of Americans believed there was agreement within the scientific community on climate change. And unless things fundamentally change, it could remain that way, said Taylor.

"Until surface temperature data sets are truly independent of one another and are entrusted to scientists whose objectivity is beyond question, the satellite temperature record alone will not have any credibility," he said.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/30/nasa-data-worse-than-climategate-data/