text:
About Us
About Climate Change
Climate Library
Our Amazon Store
Thomas Richard
A new study that only looked at ocean temperatures is being trumpeted as disproving the global warming pause - it doesn't.
According to a new study, the rate of ocean warming for the past 19 years was rising nearly twice as fast than originally measured, but land temps still show a global warming pause. Previously, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were rising at 0.07C per decade, but the new paper shows it's actually .12C. But the new paper has flaws being glossed over by mainstream #News outlets to push the #Climate Change narrative. The study was published in #Science Advances and is open to the public.
First, the study only looked at ocean temperatures, not land, and didn't include the year 2016, a markedly cooler year in the latter half. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said there was no discernible warming since 2000 in its 2013 report. They wrote that global temperatures showed a "much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years."
Yet another study tries to erase "the pause" - but is missing a whole year of data.
How they did it
In this new study led by Zeke Hausfather, they homogenized buoy, satellite, and ARGO buoy records to come up with mean ocean temperatures. The authors believe that ocean temperatures have been "underestimated" for the past 20 years because ocean buoys record slightly colder sea temperatures when compared to how they were measured last century; seawater would flow into a ship's intake systems and a temperature reading would be taken.
But by ending the study on an El Nino year, estimating temperature trends that begin and end on an "El Nino curve will give a misleadingly high trend." That's according to a statement by Dr. David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Forum think-tank. He notes that researchers need to be careful when estimating temperature trends with rigid start and end dates. Adding or removing even a year or two can produce dramatically different results. Which is what happened here.
Any estimate of temperature trends that have their endpoint on the uptick of the El Nino curve will give a misleadingly high trend. It is obvious that a better trend will be obtained after the natural El Nino has ended. Likewise care must be taken if the start point is near the La Nina years of 1999-2000. The temperature trends of the oceans estimated by the new paper fall into this trap. - Dr David Whitehouse, Death Of Global Temperature 'Pause' Greatly Exaggerated
No, the pause isn't over
Because the study's authors end their temperature dataset in 2015, the linear trend shows an uptick in ocean temperatures. The new study is an apparent attempt to reinforce a two-year-old NOAA report that came under heavy criticism even by scientists that fully support the theory of climate change. In the earlier NOAA study, Karl Mears et al modified SSTs of the 1900s by adjusting them downwards, thereby making the past 15 years look warmer and eliminating the pause.
The new study led many media outlets to inaccurately claim the global warming pause is over. But this study only addressed ocean temperatures, not land temperatures. Dr. Judith Curry, a climatologist and former IPCC author, said in an emailed statement "the hiatus is still going strong in the satellite dataset of lower atmospheric temperatures."
Judith Curry:Uncertainties in sea surface temperatures https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/04/focus-on-sea-surface-temperatures/
It should be noted that Dr. Curry is not a climate skeptic. She has written extensively on global warming and believes that the Earth is indeed warming, and that carbon dioxide is just one driver given too much weight in the climate change debate. She also stated the "big El Nino last winter has temporarily stopped the slowdown in surface warming, but we need a few years yet to recover from it and see what is going on."
Dr. Roy Spencer reported:
The 2016 annual average global temperature anomaly is +0.50 deg. C, which is (a statistically insignificant) 0.02 deg. C warmer than 1998 at +0.48 deg. C. We estimate that 2016 would have had to be 0.10 C warmer than 1998 to be significantly different at the 95% confidence level. Both 2016 and 1998 were strong El Nino years.
ICECAP Note: It should be noted that in 1998, a strong La Nina kicked in during the last part of the year while 2016 was a borderline La Nina and actually ended the year in neutral territory. With that considered, two comparably strong El Ninos 18 years apart produced no difference in global temperatures implying stasis.
See this collection of papers that show the ocean in the North Atlantic has cooled dramatically.
There is no more important year than 2017 since our inception 10 years ago in 2007 during which Icecap had 78 million page hits on the 7,234 blog entries. We and other courageous bloggers have been swimming upstream against the flood not from rising sea levels but from attacks by ideologues, globalists and leftists and others riding the gravy train of $1.5 trillion of government, radical environmental NGOs, large corporations largess that has corrupted our schools, media and many politicians. Part of the strategy from the start of the movement was to starve out or silence any opposition, claim a certainty and consensus (a sanctioned science) that can not and does not exist. This next 4 years is our best chance to expose the hype and where it exists the fraud. Globalists had thought they won and our country would be ceding control to a larger entity like the UN - Agenda 21. Big money extremists were planning for the day that bureaucrats outside instead of inside our government would control our energy, policies and eventually our lives including what you can drive, where you can live, how much you can make, etc.
Revealing Quotes From the Planners:
"Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by EVERY person on Earth...it calls for specific changes in the activities of ALL people… Effective execution of Agenda 21 will REQUIRE a profound reorientation of ALL humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced..."
Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet (Earthpress, 1993). It was signed by George H.W. Bush.
We need to marshall our resources to fight this and the bad science that is supporting it. Help us fight this by studying Agenda 21 and reading about how the science has been corrupted or molded to fit their plans to scare us into compliance here, on WUWT and on Tony Heller's blog, on Francis Menton's blog and Alan Carlin's blog and many others.
We have published the first volley with this analysis and plan much more.
Donate if you can to support all our efforts. Please speak up with your own posts, link to our stories and write your own letters to local media. We need to restore our science to what it once was.
Be safe this New Year's eve and have a great and prosperous 2017.
The Impending Collapse Of The Global Warming Scare
By Francis Menton
Over the past three decades, the environmental movement has increasingly hitched its wagon to exactly one star as the overwhelming focus of the cause, namely "climate change." Sure, issues of bona fide pollution like smog and untreated sewage are still out there a little, but they are largely under control and don't really stir the emotions much any more. If you want fundraising in the billions rather than the thousands, you need a good end-of-days, sin-and-redemption scare. Human-caused global warming is your answer!
Even as this scare has advanced, a few lonely voices have warned that the radical environmentalists were taking the movement out onto a precarious limb. Isn't there a problem that there's no real evidence of impending climate disaster? But to no avail. Government funding to promote the warming scare has been lavish, and in the age of Obama has exploded. Backers of the alarm have controlled all of the relevant government bureaucracies, almost all of the scientific societies, and the access to funding and to publication for anyone who wants to have a career in the field. What could go wrong?
Now, enter President-elect Trump. During the campaign, as with many issues, it was hard to know definitively where Trump stood. Although combatting climate change with forced suppression of fossil fuels could be a multi-trillion dollar issue for the world economy, this issue was rarely mentioned by either candidate, and was only lightly touched on in the debates. Sure, Hillary had accused Trump of calling climate change a "hoax" in a November 2012 tweet. (Actual text: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make American manufacturing non-competitive.") But in an early 2016 interview, Trump walked that back to say that the statement was a joke, albeit with a kernel of truth, because "climate change is a very, very expensive form of tax" and "China does not do anything to help." Trump had also stated that he intended to exit the recent Paris climate accord, and to end the War on Coal. So, was he proposing business-as-usual with a few tweaks, or would we see a thorough-going reversal of Obama's extreme efforts to control the climate by fossil fuel restrictions?
With the recently announced appointments, this is starting to come very much into focus. In reverse order of the announcements:
Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State. As of today, we still have as our chief diplomat the world leader of smugness who somehow thinks that "climate change" caused by use of fossil fuels is the greatest threat to global security. He is shortly to be replaced with the CEO of Exxon. Could there be a bigger poke in the eye to the world climate establishment? I'm trying to envision Tillerson at the next meeting of the UN climate "conference of parties" with thousands of world bureaucrats discussing how to put the fossil fuel companies out of business. Won't he be laughing his gut out?
Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy. Not only was he the longest-serving governor of the biggest fossil fuel energy-producing state, but in his own 2012 presidential campaign he advocated for the elimination of the Department of Energy. This is the department that passes out tens of billions of dollars in crony-capitalist handouts for wind and solar energy (Solyndra!), let alone more tens of billions for funding some seventeen (seventeen!) research laboratories mostly dedicated to the hopeless task of figuring out how to make intermittent sources of energy competitive for any real purpose.
And then there's Scott Pruitt for EPA. As Attorney General of Oklahoma, another of the big fossil fuel energy-producing states, he has been a leader in litigating against the Obama EPA to stop its overreaches, including the so-called Clean Power Plan that seeks to end the use of coal for electricity and to raise everyone's cost of energy.
You might say that all of these are very controversial appointments, and will face opposition in the Senate. But then, Harry Reid did away with the filibuster for cabinet appointments. Oops! Barring a minimum of three Republican defections, these could all sail through. And even if one of these appointments founders, doesn't the combination of them strongly signal where Trump would go with his next try?
So what can we predict about where the climate scare is going? Among members of the environmental movement, when their heads stop exploding, there are plenty of predictions that this will be terrible for the United States: international ostracism, loss (to China!) of "leadership" in international climate matters, and, domestically, endless litigation battles stalling attempts to rescind or roll back regulations. I see it differently. I predict a high likelihood of substantial collapse of the global warming movement, both domestically and internationally, over the course of the next couple of years.
Start with the EPA. To the extent that the global warming movement has anything to do with "science," EPA is supposedly where that science is vetted and approved on behalf of the public before being turned into policy. In fact, under Obama, EPA's principal role on the "science" has been to prevent and stifle any debate or challenge to global warming orthodoxy. For example, when a major new Research Report came out back in September claiming to completely invalidate all of the bases on which EPA claims that CO2 is a danger to human health and welfare, and thus to undermine EPA's authority to regulate the gas under the Clean Air Act, EPA simply failed to respond. In the same vein, essentially all prominent global warming alarmists refuse to debate anyone who challenges any aspect of their orthodoxy. Well, that has worked as long as they and their allies have controlled all of the agencies and all of the money. Now, it will suddenly be put up or shut up. And in case you might think that the science on this issue is "settled," so no problem, you might enjoy this recent round-up at Climate Depot from some of the actual top scientists. A couple of excerpts:
Renowned Princeton Physicist Freeman Dyson: 'I'm 100% Democrat and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on climate issue, and the Republicans took the right side.'....
Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever: 'Global warming is a non-problem' - 'I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you're wrong. Dead wrong.'
Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years. Questions like: Why are recorded temperatures, particularly from satellites and weather balloons, so much lower than the alarmist models had predicted? How do you explain an almost-20-year "pause" in increasing temperatures even as CO2 emissions have accelerated? What are the details of the adjustments to the surface temperature record that have somehow reduced recorded temperatures from the 1930s and 40s, and thereby enabled continued claims of "warmest year ever" when raw temperature data show warmer years 70 and 80 years ago? Suddenly, the usual hand-waving ("the science is settled") is not going to be good enough any more. What now?
And how will the United States fare on the international stage when it stops promising to cripple its economy with meaningless fossil fuel restrictions? As noted above, people like Isabel Hilton predict a combination of ostracism and "loss of leadership" of the issue, most likely to China. Here's my prediction: As soon as the United States stops parroting the global warming line, the other countries will quickly start backing away from it as well. This is "The Emperor's New Clothes," with the U.S. in the role of the little kid who is the only one willing to say the obvious truth in the face of mass hysteria. Countries like Britain and Australia have already more or less quietly started the retreat from insanity. In Germany the obsession with wind and solar (solar—in the cloudiest country in the world!) has already gotten average consumer electric rates up to close to triple the cost in U.S. states that embrace fossil fuels. How long will they be willing to continue that self-destruction after the U.S. says it is not going along? And I love the business about ceding "leadership" to China. China's so-called "commitment" in the recent Paris accord is not to reduce carbon emissions at all, but rather only to build as many coal plants as they want for the next fourteen years and then cease increasing emissions after 2030! At which point, of course, they reserve their right to change their mind. Who exactly is going to embrace that "leadership" and increase their consumers' cost of electricity by triple or so starting right now? I mean, the Europeans are stupid, but are they that stupid?
And finally, there is the question of funding. Under Obama, attaching the words "global warming" or "climate change" to any proposal has been the sure-fire way to get the proposal whatever federal funding it might want. The Department of Energy has been the big factor here. Of its annual budget of about $28 billion, roughly half goes to running the facilities that provide nuclear material for the Defense Department, and the other half, broadly speaking, goes to the global warming cause: crony capitalist handouts for wind and solar energy providers, and billions per year for research at some seventeen (seventeen!) different energy research laboratories. During the eight Obama years, the energy sector of the U.S. economy has been substantially transformed by a technological revolution that has dramatically lowered the cost of energy and hugely benefited the American consumer. I'm referring, of course, to the fracking revolution. How much of the tens of billions of U.S. energy subsidies and research funding in that time went toward this revolution that actually produced cheaper energy that works? Answer: Not one single dollar! All of the money was completely wasted on things that are uneconomic and will disappear as soon as the government cuts off the funding spigot. All of this funding can and should be zeroed out in the next budget. Believe me, nobody will notice other than the parasites who have been wasting the money.
If the multi-tens-of-billions per year funding gusher for global warming alarmism quickly dries up, the large majority of the people living on these handouts will have no choice but to go and find something productive to do. Sure, some extreme zealots will find some way to soldier on. But it is not crazy at all to predict a very substantial collapse of the global warming scare over the course of the next couple of years.
The environmental movement has climbed itself way out onto the global warming limb. Now the Trump administration is about to start sawing off the limb behind them.
Michael Sununu, Union Leader
THE RECENT ELECTIONS have caused the climate alarmists' heads to spin. Without a liberal President to force green policies on America, there is little chance their agenda will move forward. Regardless of policy preferences, what elected officials need to focus on is what is actually going on in our climate and what steps need to be taken to address them. It's the data that count. The real data.
On this point, let's all agree that the world is warming. It has been since the 1800s when the world started to emerge from the Little Ice Age. We have had periods of warming, periods of cooling and periods when global temperatures didn't do much of anything.
The bigger question is "Are we seeing recent temperature trends that are out of the ordinary of what we have seen in the past?" Alarmists tend to scream that temperatures are rising out of control, in an unprecedented manner, and that we are reaching a tipping point beyond which we are doomed.
That is all a lie, but I am sure they believe it.
Let's look at the data, and just as importantly what alarmists have been doing to the data.
If you look at raw global surface temperatures, you see the rate of increase in the early part of the 20th century is the same as what occurred from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. No one has argued the first rate of change was anything but natural. So why must the more recent warming be manmade? In addition, we saw a flat/downward trend in global temperatures from the 1940s to the 1970s and we saw, at least up until recently, another almost 20 year flat temperature period to start this century.
So if what we are seeing are trends that are no different than in the past, why should we think it is anything but natural? We shouldn't. In fact, any scientist should assume that nature is driving global temperatures and prove otherwise before arguing that mankind is driving our climate. One of the dirty little secrets of the alarmists is that they haven't been able to prove that. They like to point to the correlation of rising carbon dioxide levels and temperatures as "proof", but even a third grader knows that isn't proof. Their climate models certainly make it look warmer, but the model forecasts are terrible, only proving that the models don't work.
So what is a climate alarmist to do? Well if you don't want to fix the models, you fix the temperatures. And that is exactly what has been going on.
Anyone who has closely followed the climate debate is familiar with the "adjustments" to the raw temperature data. What most Average Joes don't realize is that the adjustments are almost entirely done to accomplish one thing - cool the past and warm the present.
How did they do this? Scientists have "smoothed" regional temperatures to get better agreement between urban and rural data. But instead of adjusting city temperatures lower (because of urban heat effects) they raised rural temperatures. More recently, in order to get rid of the "pause" in temperatures, they adjusted the sea surface temperatures higher when they decided that mid-20th century temperatures taken in ship engine intakes are more accurate than the modern ocean buoys. That's right, the technology of the 1950s with the ship engine heat influencing the data was determined to be better than the network of modern electronics uninfluenced by external heat sources. And these are only a few examples of what has been going on.
On a more local level, between 2011 and 2013, the NOAA data set lowered annual Maine temperatures between three to five degrees in the early 1900s....and made almost no changes to recent temperatures. That "adjustment" is more than three times the actual warming we have seen.
When you look at how temperatures have been manipulated you start to wonder if we have any idea what the global temperature is. Over the past decade or so, the keepers of the data have cooled temperatures in the pre-1910 period the equivalent of -0.52 degrees per century. They warmed temperatures from 1980 to the early part of this century by the equivalent of +0.11 degrees per century.
Those two changes represent half the warming since 1900! And this was before the "pause buster" sea surface temperature manipulation took place.
Keep this in mind when the alarmists start demanding more action. When every iteration of the global temperature data set incrementally warms the present and cools the past, it's not science. It's manipulation. Mother Nature is still driving the climate, no matter how much they fudge the data for their agenda.
Michael Sununu is a small businessman and selectman in Newfields.
By Francis Menton
Scott Adams—known, among other things, as the cartoonist behind the Dilbert series—has an excellent blog on which he posts something thoughtful nearly every day. His particular interest is in the arts of persuasion. Recently he has dipped his toe into the subject of "climate science," with a focus on the apparent inability of partisans on either side of the debate ever to convince a single person to come over from the other side. Now, suppose you come to this debate with no scientific expertise and no ax to grind for either side. The debate has very significant public policy implications, and understanding it is important to being an informed voter. How are you to supposed to evaluate the arguments and come to a view? Adams comments:
My bottom-line belief about climate science is that non-scientists such as myself have no reliable way to evaluate any of this stuff. Our brains and experience are not up to the task. When I apply my tiny brain to sniffing out the truth about climate science I see rock-solid arguments on both sides of the debate.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with Adams on this one. If you are a reasonably intelligent person, and you are willing to spend a few hours on an issue, there is a very workable method to discern which side of a debate is not playing straight with you. This method is the same method generally used by judges and juries in deciding which side is going to win a trial. The method is this: look to which side has and provides the best answers to the hard questions posed by the other side. If one side refuses to answer hard questions, or is evasive, or refuses to provide the underlying methodology by which it came up with its answers, then that side has a problem. And rightfully so.
I'll give just a few examples of this phenomenon relevant to the climate change issue.
(1) The Hockey Stick graph. The so-called Hockey Stick graph first appeared in a paper by Mann, Bradley and Hughes that was published in Nature magazine in 1998. It purported to show a reconstruction of worldwide temperatures from the year 1000 to present, in which the temperatures had remained almost completely stable for the first 900 years (the "shaft" of the Hockey Stick), and then suddenly shot up in the twentieth century in the time of human CO2 emissions (the "blade"). This reconstruction effectively repealed the prior accepted version of climate history, in which temperatures had been warmer than the present at least in the so-called Medieval Warm Period of about 1000 - 1300, and probably also in the Roman Warm Period around the year 0. When the UN's climate-evaluation body, the IPCC, issued its next Assessment Report in 2001, the Hockey Stick graph had suddenly become the icon of the whole endeavor, appearing multiple times in the Report. The Hockey Stick seemed like the perfect proof of the proposition that global warming must be caused by humans, because anyone could see from the graph that the warming had all occurred in the era of human use of fossil fuels. Here is a version of the Hockey Stick graph from the IPCC Third Assessment Report:
Unfortunately for Mann et al. and the IPCC, numerous people—those nefarious "skeptics" --promptly began to ask questions about the source of the information behind the "shaft" of the stick. Thus these skeptics were questioning the ideas that temperatures had remained essentially stable for a millennium and that there had been no Medieval Warm Period. The most famous of the skeptical researchers was a Canadian named Stephen McIntyre. McIntyre began a blog called Climate Audit, and started writing many long posts about his efforts, all unsuccessful, to replicate the Mann et al. work. Requests to Mann et al. for their data and methodologies were met with hostility and evasion. Over time, McIntyre gradually established that Mann et al. had adopted a complex methodology that selectively emphasized certain temperature proxies over others in order to reverse-engineer the "shaft" of the stick to get a pre-determined desired outcome.
The coup de grace for the Hockey Stick graph came with the so-called Climategate emails, released in 2009. These were emails between and among many of the main promoters of the climate scare (dubbed by McIntyre the "Hockey Team"). Included in the Climategate releases were emails relating specifically to the methodology of how the graph was created. From the emails, skeptical researchers were then able to identify some of the precise data series that had been used by Mann et al. Astoundingly, they discovered that the graph's creators had truncated inconvenient data in order to get the desired depiction. A website called Just the Facts has a detailed recounting of how this was uncovered. As a key example, consider this graph:
The bright pink represents data that was deleted from the Mann et al. reconstruction because, obviously, it would have thrown off the nice, flat "shaft" of the stick, while also revealing that this particular "proxy" had totally failed at predicting the twentieth century rise in temperatures. Most would call this kind of data truncation "scientific fraud."
Note that the revelations that came out of the Hockey Stick controversy do not prove that the human-caused global warming hypothesis is wrong. However, those revelations did show beyond doubt that the leading promoters of the hypothesis had resorted to fraud in the effort to get the public to accept their position. Once that was established, why would you believe anything else they say?
Even today, the Wikipedia write-up of the Hockey Stick controversy takes a position favorable to Mann et al. If you are willing to devote some time to this issue, read that article next to the write-up at Just the Facts linked above. I would call the Wikipedia article evasive in the face of highly credible allegations of fraud. See if you agree.
(2) Adjustments to the instrumental temperature record. World temperature records based on ground-based thermometers date back to about the late 19th century in most cases. These records are far more accurate than what we have from earlier times (which are mostly "proxies," like tree rings and ice cores); but the ground thermometer records still have plenty of problems. As examples, the location of a ground station could have been moved over time, sometimes multiple times in over 100 years; the physical surroundings of a station could have changed (trees could have grown up, or an adjacent parking lot could have been built); the type of instrument could have changed; and so forth. Most would agree that some sorts of adjustments to the record, known as "homogenization," are appropriate to make the earlier data comparable to the more recent data. However, here the adjustments are in the hands of small numbers of people who are committed to the global warming cause. Most of the adjusters are government employees working for weather agencies like NASA and NOAA in the U.S., and comparable agencies in other countries.
As with the Hockey Stick graph, independent researchers interested in the topic have gone to work at their own expense to try to understand the government's adjustments and evaluate if they are appropriate. Notable among these researchers are Tony Heller at the website Real Climate Science and Paul Homewood at Not a Lot of People Know That. What these researchers find is that, in literally every case, earlier temperatures have been adjusted downward, and to a lesser extent, later temperatures adjusted upward. Obviously, such adjustments can create warming trends where they do not exist in the raw data, and enhance what otherwise might be small warming trends to make them look significant and even scary. Here at Manhattan Contrarian, I have covered this issue in a now ten part series called The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time. All ten articles are collected, along with others, here.
And literally every time anyone looks at raw temperature data, and compares it to current "final" version temperature data, the same phenomenon is found. Just this week at Watts Up With That, an Australian meteorologist named Brendan Godwin reports that Australia is subject to the same pervasive corruption as other places:
The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network - Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) Technical Advisory Forum released a report in 2015 confirming that the Surface Air Temperatures were being adjusted, confirming the process is called Homogenization, confirming that other weather monitoring institutions around the world are making these same adjustments and purporting to justify why the adjustments are being made. Observing practices change, thermometers change, stations move from one location to another and new weather stations are installed. They refused to release their complex mathematical formula used to make the adjustments.
Go to the link to see how a slightly declining temperature trend at Rotherglen, Australia, has been turned into a more-than-one-degree-C-per-century increasing trend through supposed "homogenization" adjustments. Huh?
But the most important part of this story is not the suspicious nature of the adjustments themselves, but rather the flat refusal of the adjusters to reveal the methodology by which the adjustments have been made. Real, honest scientists would gladly provide the full, unedited computer code that made the adjustments, and would answer any questions that would help an independent researcher to replicate the results. Yet read through posts of people reporting on the adjustments, and you will universally find that they have been rebuffed in their attempts to find out what is going on. For example, as I reported in this post in July 2015, a heating consultant in Maine named Michael Brakey, who was just trying to get accurate temperature data to inform his business, stumbled on major recent downward adjustments of earlier temperatures in that state. Attempting to get the details of the adjustments, the best that NOAA would give him was this vague and preposterous statement:
"...improvements in the dataset, and brings our value much more in line with what was observed at the time. The new method used stations in neighboring Canada to inform estimates for data-sparse areas within Maine (a great improvement)."
All you need to do is read my series of posts on this topic, and/or some of the many links found in those posts, and you will know that what is going on is not remotely honest. You don't need any specialized scientific training to figure this out.
(3) Hottest [week/month/year] ever. Readers of my series on The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time are aware that our government bureaucrats at NASA and NOAA regularly put out breathless press releases announcing that some given month, or series of months, or year, was the hottest such period on record. For example, in this post from August 2015, I reported on government press releases as to March, May and July 2015, declaring them each to be the "hottest ever" on some or another criterion. That post also reports on how the press releases are then picked up and repeated, more or less word for word, by every news source going under the banner of "mainstream": CNN, Bloomberg, Washington Post, USA Today, BBC, AP, LA Times, CBS News, and many, many more.
But does any one of these press releases, or any one of these news sources, so much as mention that these so-called "records" are based on temperature records that have been "adjusted" to enhance warming trends? Given how widespread is the information on unexplained warming-enhancing "adjustments," it is almost incomprehensible that not one of these news sources would even ask the question, "How much of the warming is in the raw data and how much is in the adjustments?" But if such a thing exists, I can't find it.
I could give many more examples, but undoubtedly you are getting the picture. A reasonably intelligent person who investigates the situation will quickly find that the promoters of the global warming scare refuse to reveal their detailed methodology, refuse to allow independent researchers to try to replicate their work, and refuse to answer any and all hard questions. (By contrast, when, for example, skeptical scientists a few months ago released a major Research Report claiming to invalidate all the bases for the EPA's Endangerment Finding, all data and methods were released simultaneously.) This is all you need to know to make up your mind.
Now we are down to FOX News and Faux News (all the other television networks and major metro newspapers and most magazines). The lies go on and on not just about politics but everything elitists progressives want you to believe.
By Tony Heller
The fake news Huffington Post says sea level at New York will rise six feet this century and they will have more heat waves.
New York City Could See Up To Six Feet Of Sea Level Rise This Century: Report | The Huffington Post
Apparently this panel of scientific experts didn't look at any actual data. Over the past six years, sea level at both New York and Boston has fallen about two inches.
Sea level trends
There has been no increase in the number of hot days in New York, which peaked in 1955.
Away from the urban heat island effect of Manhattan, New York State has seen a sharp decline in the number of hot days.
Nationally, the percent of hot days has also plummeted.
Everything they said was fake news, but to be fair to this team of climate experts morons, NASA's top climate expert believes Lower Manhattan is already underwater.
Stormy weather - Salon.com
Note from Willie Soon:
Dear friends in New England…
This is truly a very stupid game they keep playing...they could not make themselves to show the NH resident the proper map of their own state...but blow up the tiny part where you are connected to the sea… See the latest laughable report.
See the local Climate Commission reportplanning to spend (and benefit greatly from billions
Tom Wysmuller is our local expert on sea level here.. I believe that I opted out to be on this NH sea level committee some years ago and told Tom about this and he may have attended some of the "meetings"…
Joe D'Aleo is of course our top meteorologist that can tell you all you need to know about the weather forecasting business using his analogy-based pattern
recognition method…
for a little cure on sea level scare ... here is one of my earlier insights:
Joseph D'Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
This winter has started in December with some frigid cold, especially the central. Here is the last 7 days and the forecast the next 5 days (maps courtesy of Weatherbell.com).
Though many have argued the so called 'pause' was clearly over, it appears not. The pop in 2015/16 was related to El Nino.
NCDC (now NCEI) has the Climate at a Glance tool I frequently use for temperature and precipitation trend. I have used it in recent years to examine trends in winters the last 18 to 20 years. It was argued a few years back the cooling it showed was biased by the significant El Nino of 1997/98. Even after the (1) new NOAA methodology (removal of UHI adjustment, TOBS. homogenization) that made 1997/98 less warm and (2) the 2011/12 and 2015/16 warm spikes (perhaps slightly enhanced by the changes), what was called the pause (really a cooling trend) is still there in the last 20 year period for December to March.
For the nation, we have seen a cooling rate of -1.63F/century.
The NCEI CAAG site allows you to look at regional changes. I looked first at U.S. Climate Regions (Upper Midwest/Great Lakes, Ohio Valley and Northeast.
The cooling was greatest in the Upper Midwest (an amazing rate of -11.9F/century).
The Ohio Valley has cooled at a rate of - 9.1F/century.
The northeast has cooled at a rate of - 7.4F/century for December to March periods
Then I looked at larger NWS regions (administrative):
The large 14 state central region shows a cooling rate of -5.9F/century.
The large 16 state Eastern Region a cooling of -7.1F/century even with the 2011/12 and 2015/16 spikes.
Despite some ups and downs, we expect this year will be colder than last winter and keep the trend going.
To see how far back I could go and get a negative trend, I went to 1995 for the CONUS and found no warming trend (a not statistically significant cooling of 0.25F/century) the last 22 years.
Though the jump in major snows in the east was attributed in the media to global warming and resulting more moisture. I would argue the land cooling is responsible. Sellers back in the middle 1900's speculated snow would increase after warm periods and the increased snowcover would initiate or enhance any cooling that followed.
Trump gives hope to derailment of the establishment's plans (both parties) for a New World Order - which would cede our rights and control over our lives including a redistribution of any wealth through the UN.
Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Roseburg, Oregon official USHCN temperature monitoring site shows examples of spurious heat influences that accumulate over the years, spuriously exaggerating the "global warming" signal.
An article appeared in the Washington Post yesterday entitled, "Who Will Lead NOAA Under President Trump?". Written by the Capitol Weather Gang's Jason Samenow, it lists three top contenders:
Scott Rayder, senior adviser for development and partnerships at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Barry Myers, chief executive of AccuWeather in State College, Pa.
Jonathan White, president and chief executive of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership
The article addresses important issues facing NOAA in the coming years, such as making our weather forecasting capability the best in the world while still respecting the role of the private sector in adding value to the data collection and modelling role the government has taken leadership in.
Yet, something is missing…
You see, the names mentioned are part of the existing establishment, and we all know that President Trump is interested in "draining the swamp".
They might be perfectly fine candidates - if Hillary Clinton had won the election.
What is missing is NOAA's controversial role in promoting the U.N. plan to use global climate change as a way for the U.N. to oversee the redistribution of the world's wealth and deindustrialize the West. (Note that's not my claim...it's their claim). It is well known that most of the countries that signed on to the Paris Agreement did so because they hope to gain from those transfers of wealth.
And we also know the result of CO2 emissions reduction will be a huge amount of pain (up to $100 Trillion loss of wealth this century) for no measurable impact on global temperatures, even using the U.N.'s over-inflated warming predictions.
NOAA has been actively "adjusting" the thermometer record of global temperatures over the years by making the present warmer, and the past colder, leading to an ever increasing upward temperature trend. This supports the global warming narrative the current administration, and the U.N., favors.
In my opinion, NOAA needs leadership that will reexamine these procedures. It took a TV meteorologist, Anthony Watts, to spearhead a site inspection of nearly all of the temperature monitoring locations in the U.S., even forcing NOAA to admit that many of their temperature monitoring stations were simply of no use for monitoring climate trends, when parking lots and air conditioning exhaust fans gradually encroached on these sites, causing spurious warming. Watts' research has suggested that, after removing the contaminated stations, a substantial fraction of the reported warming in the U.S. simply disappears.
Why did it take an outsider - with no funding - to do what NOAA should have done to begin with?
Yes, providing data and analysis addressing the global warming issue is only one part of NOAA's responsibility (which includes ocean research as well).
But it is by far the most important part of NOAA's mission when it comes to the future health of the U.S. economy.
The new NOAA Administrator needs to address this issue head on, and not whitewash it. I seriously doubt any of the three candidates listed above will do that.
See this working paper from several years ago that Icecap and Anthony Watts did exposing surface temperature measurement issues.
See Anthony's paper showing half of the U.S. warming is artificial.
2016 allegedly 'hottest year' by immeasurable amount degree - While satellites show 'pause' continues
Climate Depot
Two satellite datasets agree: The Temperature Pause lives on: 'No warming for the last 18 years'
MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen on 2016 being called the 'hottest year': 'The hysteria over this issue is truly bizarre' - Warns of return 'back to the dark ages'
Dr. David Whitehouse noted the 'temperature pause never went away': 'According to NOAA 2016 was 0.07F warmer than 2015, which is 0.04C.
Considering the error in the annual temperature is +/- 0.1C this makes 2016 statistically indistinguishable from 2015, making any claim of a record using NOAA data specious.'
Dr. Lindzen also ridiculed previous 'hottest year' claims. "The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree. When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record, what are they talking about? It's just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period," Lindzen said. "If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn't certain to 2/10ths of a degree."
Donald Trump nominated the man who is the expert at running lawsuits against the EPA to run it. Naturally this threatens a lot of sacred totems, not to mention a very big trough. Protests are raging. In reply, people are speaking up in support of Pruitt.
Those who think his nomination should be opposed are confused saying that "Mr. Pruitt's backers tout it as a virtue that he has sued the EPA. ... In every instance, Mr. Pruitt has joined forces with polluting industries seeking to avoid clean up responsibilities."
The EPA is so lost, it doesn't know what real pollution is anymore. Opposing the EPA is what any good environmentalist would do.
The religious mission against plant fertilizer in the hope of holding back the tide by half a millimeter in 2100 is noxious, damaging, dangerous in so many ways. It deprives the poor of cheap energy, good jobs, and warm houses. It hurts the environment because it makes the EPA, the US, so much less effective at solving real environmental problems. The pogrom against carbon (we are carbon life forms) is anti-science, eating away at the core tenets of the scientific method, and teaching a whole generation nonsense. The CO2 fixation is over-riding every other environmental issue because the EPA makes it so. The toxic effect the EPA has on the broader community, the economy, on science and on education makes this more important than any single environmental issue today.
The EPA has run so far off the rails that only someone who has opposed it could possibly fix it. Trump can't defeat the madness on his own. The nomination hearing is Wednesday morning US time. And Dr Nan Hayworth is collecting messages and names in support. If you want to add your name and thoughts below in comments or email them to me, I will forward them to her. Thank you. And if you think that international names don't count, remember that science is bigger than any one country, and if Obama can threaten the Brits on Brexit, why can't Brits help explain what science is (and what pollution is) to Congress.
Here's one from Professor J. Scott Armstrong:
Dear Dr. Hayworth, January 15, 2017
Following up on your correspondence with Willie Soon, I strongly agree with the policies favored by Scott Pruitt.I have spent over 50 years as a forecaster and, over the past decade, have had the pleasure of working with Willie Soon, who I view as one of the leading climate scientists in the world. Along with Kesten Green, I am a Director of the primary website dealing with forecasting methods, author of Long-Range Forecasting, and of a handbook on forecasting methods, "Principles of Forecasting." Our studies have produced what we claim to be the only evidence-based forecasts of long-term global mean temperatures: there is no evidence that long-term warming is occurring.I proposed a ten-year bet with Al Gore on this issue in order to increase interest in testing predictive validity. (Ten years is not sufficient time to assess long-term trends and I expected to have only a 2/3 chance of winning, given natural variability). Mr. Gore refused to take the bet, so Kesten Green has been posting what would have happened had he done so on theclimatebet.com. Year nine just ended.We have been unable to find scientific forecasts showing that that warming would be harmful. I testified before Senator Boxer's committee on this matter with respect to polar bears. My testimony was based on this paper.We have been unable to find any scientific forecast that there are cost-effective ways to affect global temperatures, up or down.
Here is a short summary of the above studies on climate change.
Kesten Green and I have recently founded the Iron Law of Regulation website. This states that "There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it." We started the site with an attempt to get evidence about regulations that have been useful and thus to help design new regulations. No one has been able to produce scientific evidence about regulations that have violated the aforementioned Iron Law (i.e., to have actually improved human welfare, not to mention the preservation of individual liberties).
Kesten Green and I are currently involved with a paper called "Guidelines for Science." In it, we document that much research currently published in academic journals violates the basic scientific principle of objectivity: We call this "advocacy research." It allows researchers to announce their hypotheses and then to provide only the research that supports their hypotheses. This is the method used in the research papers that support the "global warming hypothesis." This is not science and scientists have warned of this non-scientific approach for centuries. We have developed a checklist that can enable clients to evaluate whether a paper complies with scientific principles; it can be completed by intelligent adults, regardless of background, in less than an hour and we find good inter-rater reliability. The latest working paper, version #378, is attached.
I look forward to a favorable outcome for your hearings and would be willing to help in any way that I can.
J. Scott Armstrong, Professor
The Wharton School, JMHH 747
Home Phone 610-622-6480
U. of Pennsylvania, Phila., PA 19104
By James Varney, RealClearInvestigations December 31, 2016
In the world of climate science, the skeptics are coming in from the cold.
Researchers who see global warming as something less than a planet-ending calamity believe the incoming Trump administration may allow their views to be developed and heard. This didn't happen under the Obama administration, which denied that a debate even existed. Now, some scientists say, a more inclusive approach - and the billions of federal dollars that might support it - could be in the offing.
"Here's to hoping the Age of Trump will herald the demise of climate change dogma, and acceptance of a broader range of perspectives in climate science and our policy options," Georgia Tech scientist Judith Curry wrote this month at her popular Climate Etc. blog.
William Happer, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is similarly optimistic. "I think we're making progress," Happer said. "I see reassuring signs."
Despite harsh criticism of their contrarian views, a few scientists like Happer and Curry have pointed to evidence that global warming is less pronounced than predicted. They have also argued that this slighter warming would bring positive developments along with problems. For the first time in years, skeptics believe they can find a path out of the wilderness into which they've been cast by the "scientific consensus." As much as they desire a more open-minded reception by their colleagues, they are hoping even more that the spigot of government research funding - which dwarfs all other sources - will trickle their way.
President-elect Donald Trump, who has called global warming a "hoax," has chosen for key cabinet posts men whom the global warming establishment considers lapdogs of the oil and gas industry: former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to run the Energy Department; Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma to run the Environmental Protection Agency; and Exxon chief executive Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.
But while general policy may be set at the cabinet level, significant and concrete changes would likely be spelled out below those three - among the very bureaucrats the Trump transition team might have had in mind when, in a move some saw as intimidation, it sent a questionnaire to the Energy Department this month (later disavowed) trying to determine who worked on global warming.
It isn't certain that federal employees working in various environmental or energy sector-related agencies would willingly implement rollbacks of regulations, let alone a redirection of scientific climate research, but the latter prospect heartens the skeptical scientists. They cite an adage: You only get answers to the questions you ask.
"In reality, it's the government, not the scientists, that asks the questions," said David Wojick, a longtime government consultant who has closely tracked climate research spending since 1992. If a federal agency wants models that focus on potential sea-level rise, for example, it can order them up. But it can also shift the focus to how warming might boost crop yields or improve drought resistance.
While it could take months for such expanded fields of research to emerge, a wider look at the possibilities excites some scientists. Happer, for one, feels emboldened in ways he rarely has throughout his career because, for many years, he knew his iconoclastic climate conclusions would hurt his professional prospects.
When asked if he would voice dissent on climate change if he were a younger, less established physicist, he said: "Oh, no, definitely not. I held my tongue for a long time because friends told me I would not be elected to the National Academy of Sciences if I didn't toe the alarmists' company line."
That sharp disagreements are real in the field may come as a shock to many people, who are regularly informed that climate science is settled and those who question this orthodoxy are akin to Holocaust deniers. Nevertheless, new organizations like the CO2 Coalition, founded in 2015, suggest the debate is more evenly matched intellectually than is commonly portrayed. In addition to Happer, the CO2 Coalition's initial members include scholars with ties to world-class institutions like MIT, Harvard and Rockefeller University. The coalition also features members of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorology Society, along with policy experts from the Manhattan Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute and Tufts University's Fletcher School.
With such voices joining in, the debate over global warming might shift. Until now, it's normally portrayed as enlightened scholars vs. anti-science simpletons. A more open debate could shift the discussion to one about global warming's extent and root causes.
Should a scientific and research funding realignment occur, it could do more than shatter what some see as an orthodoxy stifling free inquiry. Bjorn Lomborg, who has spent years analyzing potential solutions to global warming, believes that a more expansive outlook toward research is necessary because too much government funding has become expensive and ineffective corporate welfare. Although not a natural scientist, the social scientist Lomborg considers climate change real but not cataclysmic.
"Maybe now we'll have a smarter conversation about what actually works," Lomborg told RealClearInvestigations. "What has been proposed costs a fortune and does very little. With more space opening up, we can invest more into research and development into green energy. We don't need subsidies to build something. They've been throwing a lot of money at projects that supposedly will cut carbon emissions but actually accomplish very little. That's not a good idea. The funding should go to universities and research institutions; you don't need to give it to companies to do it."
Such new opportunities might, in theory, calm a field tossed by acrimony and signal a detente in climate science. Yet most experts are skeptical that a kumbaya moment is at hand. The mutual bitterness instilled over the years, the research money at stake, and the bristling hostility toward Trump's appointees could actually exacerbate tensions.
"I think that the vast 'middle' will want and seek a more collegial atmosphere," Georgia Tech's Curry told RealClearInvestigations. "But there will be some hardcore people (particularly on the alarmed side) whose professional reputation, funding, media exposure, influence etc. depends on cranking up the alarm."
Michael E. Mann, another climate change veteran, is also doubtful about a rapprochement. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State and author of the "hockey stick" graph, which claims a sharp uptick in global temperatures over the past century, believes ardently that global warming is a dire threat. He concluded a Washington Post op-ed this month with this foreboding thought: "The fate of the planet hangs in the balance." Mann acknowledges a brutal war of words has engulfed climate science. But in an e-mail exchange with RealClearInvestigations, he blamed opponents led by "the Koch brothers" for the polarization.
Mann did hint, however, there may be some room for discussion.
"In that poisonous environment it is difficult to have the important, more nuanced and worthy debate about what to do about the problem," he wrote. "There are Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bob Inglis and George Shultz trying to create space for that discussion, and that gives me hope. But given that Donald Trump is appointing so many outright climate deniers to key posts in this administration, I must confess that I - and many of my fellow scientists - are rather concerned."
Neither side of the debate has been immune from harsh and sinister attacks. Happer said he stepped down from the active faculty at Princeton in part "to deal with all this craziness." Happer and Mann, like several other climate scientists, have gotten death threats. They provided RealClearInvestigations with some of the e-mails and voice messages they have received.
"You are an educated Nazi and should hang from the neck," a critic wrote Happer in October 2014.
"You and your colleagues who have promoted this scandal ought to be shot, quartered and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families," one e-mailed Mann in Dec. 2009.
Similar threats have bedeviled scientists and writers across the climate research spectrum, from Patrick Michaels, a self-described "lukewarmer" who dealt with death threats at the University of Virginia before moving to the Cato Institute, to Rajendra Pachauri, who protested anonymous death threats while heading the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Putting such ugliness aside, some experts doubt that the science will improve even if the Trump administration asks new research questions and funding spreads to myriad proposals. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and a member of the National Academy of Sciences who has long questioned climate change orthodoxy, is skeptical that a sunnier outlook is upon us.
"I actually doubt that," he said. Even if some of the roughly $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars currently spent on climate research across 13 different federal agencies now shifts to scientists less invested in the calamitous narrative, Lindzen believes groupthink has so corrupted the field that funding should be sharply curtailed rather than redirected.
"They should probably cut the funding by 80 to 90 percent until the field cleans up," he said. "Climate science has been set back two generations, and they have destroyed its intellectual foundations."
The field is cluttered with entrenched figures who must toe the established line, he said, pointing to a recent congressional report that found the Obama administration got a top Department of Energy scientist fired and generally intimidated the staff to conform with its politicized position on climate change.
"Remember this was a tiny field, a backwater, and then suddenly you increased the funding to billions and everyone got into it," Lindzen said. "Even in 1990 no one at MIT called themselves a 'climate scientist,' and then all of a sudden everyone was. They only entered it because of the bucks; they realized it was a gravy train. You have to get it back to the people who only care about the science."
By Charles Battig
President-Elect Trump has pierced the veils surrounding the holy of holies wherein reside the eco-dogmatists of the EPA and the U.N. and promises the rightful return of respect to the essence of scientific research...skepticism. In 1746, philosopher Denis Diderot penned, "Skepticism is the first step towards truth." Billions of taxpayer monies have been spent by our progressively bent government and its crony supplicants to turn that concept on its head. Mass media acolytes wordsmithed "skeptic" into a dirty word. Emulating the harsh but masterful government propaganda machine of 1930s Germany, they successfully convinced much of the public and ruling class that the life-sustaining trace gas, carbon dioxide, is an earth-destroying pollutant. Federal agencies promoted the concept and dispensed billions of dollars in lavishly funding those scientists and commercial interests willing to pervert the term "climate change," a constant feature of geohistory, into a man-made threat and a money-making commercial enterprise.
Classical scientific inquiry relies on axioms governing the formation of a tentative hypothesis, a nascent theory, and subsequent rigorous comparisons of predictions based on such a theory and real-world observations. Climate computer-derived forecasts have consistently failed to match long-term climate reality. Much of the error results from the dogmatic insistence by activist researchers that the model is reality, rather than a much simplified theoretical construct. A trusting public expects the tax monies and gifts showered on universities and researchers to result in scientific reports and validated findings based on an impartial process. What did it get?
It got Al Gore putting the carbon dioxide temperature change before the global temperature change horse. It got "ClimateGate." It got a Supreme Court that ruled that the Earth's greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. It got the "carbon dioxide endangerment finding" by the EPA administrator du jour that gave legal power to the federal bureaucracy to regulate greenhouse atmospheric concentrations because they "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." It got "ethanolized" gasoline, to the delight of corn farmers, but also a gas tank brew that gives lower mileage and more net pollution. It got wind and solar power advertised as "clean and free energy sources." It got to see the resultant mountaintop destruction of natural habitats, and the conversion of farmland into automobile fuel stock. It got to see wind turbine slaughter of eagles become a federally countenanced collateral damage cost. It also thereby got needlessly more expensive and less reliable electric energy. It got higher tax bills as complicit state legislators mandated increasing use of highly subsidized renewables. It got "free solar" residential electricity subsidized by federal and state tax giveaways paid for on the backs of the poor. It got to see the oxymoron "crony capitalism" in action. It got to see scientifically illiterate Hollywood stars become climate and energy experts, forgetting that great actors become great by making the audience believe that what is not true seems true, and by mouthing words written by others. It got to see the dire computer-generated scare stories of coming climate catastrophes fail to materialize on schedule. It got to see a progressive waning of sunspot activity, and now a renewed concern about an approaching period of significant global cooling such as characterized the "Little Ice Age" of the 15th-18th century.
Echoing Ross Perot, the next great sucking sound should be that of the Washington, D.C. swamp being drained and taking away the accumulated detritus of pseudo-science coopted in the service of false dogma and political favoritism, with the subsequent restoration of "skepticism" to its place as a benchmark for the advancement of scientific knowledge.
Soon to be ex-president Obama is throwing as much sand as possible into the energy machinery on his way out the door. What can only be interpreted as a petulant and defiant act of sabotage, he is poisoning the well of energy and environmental reform promised by president-elect Trump.
Labor employment figures may take a hit for a bit, as the newly unemployed bureaucrats, non-tenured university researchers, renewable energy businesses shorn of governmental subsidies, commercial mega-farmers of corn-for-ethanol, and the supporting cast of radical environmentalists and NGOs look for gainful employment.
Charles G. Battig, M.S., M.D., Heartland Institute policy expert on environment; VA-Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment (VA-SEEE). His website is www.climateis.com.
Alan Carlin
As the end of the year approaches, perhaps it is time to make an accounting of 2016 from a climate viewpoint. The high points of the year included the stay by the Supreme Court on implementation of the EPA's so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP) on February 9. This stay remained in effect for the rest of the year despite the death on February 13 of the author of one of the five votes cast in favor of it. The second high point was the decision by one of the candidates for President to oppose climate alarmism and his subsequent election victory in November.
The low point of the year was the decision of the Democratic Party to advocate an end to the burning of fossil fuels by 2050. This could not have been achieved, of course, but the attempt to do so would have resulted in huge adverse economic and environmental effects. Since the Democratic presidential candidate lost, these policy goals are now presumably null and void. With one added vote from a Supreme Court candidate nominated by a Democratic president, the CPP would likely have gone into effect in 2017 or 2018. A number of other EPA regulations that directly or indirectly implement climate alarmism have gone into effect, however, and may or may not be withdrawn by the new Trump Administration.
So it can be said that although climate policy was not the major issue in the election, the outcome means that there is now considerable hope that the US will avoid major damage from climate alarmism. No similar statement can be made for blue states, particularly California, that have or may adopt the anti-economic, anti-science, and anti-environmental tenets of climate alarmism.
So despite a roller coaster ride all year and several very close calls, the US as a whole appears to have escaped the devastating impact from climate alarmism at least for the next four years and possibly for eight years. Although it is much too early to be sure, there may even be hope for the demise of climate alarmism in Western Europe and other developed countries, although after much more damage has been done.
How Trump's Climate Skepticism Can Play a Crucial Role in Achieving His Larger Objectives
Alan Carlin
It is all too clear that the Climate-industrial Complex (CIC) has not abandoned its support for climate alarmism despite the shock of Donald Trump's election. Instead, the last few weeks have witnessed their first counterattack - to try to persuade Trump of the virtues of their cause. The first effort was launched by the New York Times in a meeting with Trump where they attempted to persuade him, among other things, that recent storms have been unusually strong because of alleged climate change and that there was connectivity between human activity and climate change. They did succeed in getting Trump to agree that some undefined connectivity exists and that he had an open mind on climate.
But the major effort was that by Albert Gore to meet with Trump's daughter, Ivanka, which led to a meeting with Donald Trump. We do not know what was said during the meeting except that Gore tried to find common ground between the two of them on climate. The proposed appointment of Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator announced on December 7 underlines the ineffectiveness of both the NY Times's and Gore's efforts to persuade Trump.
In Understanding This It Is Important to Keep in Mind the Main Thrust of Trump's Election Campaign
From a larger viewpoint, Trump has primarily set himself the task of reinvigorating the limping US economy and particularly the economic situation of those hurt by the Great Recession. He has even promised to revive the US coal industry. This last may be somewhat difficult since the advent of the widespread use of fracking has greatly lowered the price of natural gas by bringing huge new supplies to market. This has undercut the market for coal, although this has also been hurt by Obama's regulatory "war on coal."
It is far from clear whether Trump can do much more for coal than remove most or even all the climate-related regulations discouraging the use of coal, and this may not have a huge effect since to date the major adverse effects of the "war on coal" on raising electricity prices have not yet occurred because of the Supreme Court's stay on the so-called Clean Power Plan. But he can do a great deal with regard to encouraging greater natural gas and particularly oil development. The most important of these actions would be to greatly ease the Federal regulations on and availability of oil and natural gas and to ease the regulatory oversight on the construction of additional pipelines to bring these products to market. If the resulting development were predominantly on Federal land or waters, it would result in a much greater increase in Federal revenue than if it were on state or private lands or waters.
Both would reduce the price of oil and natural gas and result in their more widespread availability for both domestic use and export. If these actions lowered prices sufficiently one could even conceive of making the US the new Saudi Arabia of oil, natural gas, and coal. If Trump can bring this about, this should provide a huge boost for the US economy and provide many jobs in the natural gas, oil, and pipeline industries.
It Is in Trump's Interest to Support the Climate Skeptic Cause for Other Reasons
The logic of this approach should prevent Trump from any serious consideration of embracing even parts of the climate alarmist agenda and ideology. Presumably this does not bode well for the success of either the New York Times's or Albert Gore's attempts to do so. Unless Trump can show clear signs of an economic revival over the next few years, he is likely to be a one-term President. The easiest opportunity he has is probably rapid development of natural gas and oil and pipelines to carry them. It is hard to believe that Trump would give that up as a result of a little talk about climate alarmism from the Times and Gore. In the highly unlikely case that he embraces climate alarmism in any serious way, his major goal is much less likely to be achieved. So he is much more likely to lend no more than a few soothing words towards climate alarmism.
One of the most important aspects of this oil and gas strategy is that it should result in large increases in Federal revenue, particularly if the oil and gas come from Federal lands and waters. Because of the somewhat precarious Federal finances that may result from Trump's tax, military and infrastructure enhancement proposals, and budget deficits inherited from the Obama Administration, these increased revenues could be very crucial to the success of Trump's Administration as a whole and thus his chances for reelection in 2020.
The Best Approach Is to Adopt the Already Existing Case that the Alarmist "Science" Is Invalid
The easiest way to justify this approach to climate strategy is simply to adopt the arguments put forth by climate skeptics concerning climate alarmism "science." They have shown that the climate alarmist science is invalid. What better reason to abandon the Times and Gore in their continuing efforts to promote climate alarmism? A considerable portion of the research has been done by volunteers rather than the few and much maligned (by climate alarmists) paid professionals, but it is free for the asking, so why not? Many of the arguments concerning scientific invalidity can be found in my book, Environmentalism Gone Mad, and in a new research report by Wallace et al., 2016 discussed here.
Together, this and other research by climate skeptics shows that the "science" used by climate alarmists is scientifically invalid since it does not satisfy the scientific method. If Trump pursues this approach, he would be well advised to say so very publicly and very explicitly rather than attempting to hide his climate skepticism like George W. Bush. The NY Times and Al Gore will not like this, but it is better to fight it out on the basis of the alarmists' invalid science rather than the moral wisdom of their alleged attempt to "save the world" from imaginary global warming/climate change due to human-caused CO2 emissions. It would also promote the use of good science in the future.
By Calvin Beisner
Reuters reports, "Pope Francis urged national leaders on Monday to implement global environmental agreements without delay, a message that looked to be squarely aimed at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
"Addressing a group of scientists that included theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, the pope gave his strongest speech on the environment since the election of Trump, who has threatened to pull out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
The 'distraction' or delay in implementing global agreements on the environment shows that politics has become submissive to a technology and economy which seek profit above all else," Francis said."
So the pope thinks opposition to the Paris Treaty stems from profit seeking?
How about all the billions in profits sought by renewable energy corporations like wind turbine makers General Electric and Siemens or solar panel makers First Solar and Solar City, whose products can't compete economically with fossil fuels or nuclear without massive government subsidies and mandates?
How about the billions of taxpayer dollars showered on Solyndra and similar now-bankrupt renewable energy companies?
How about all the billions of taxpayers' dollars showered on the climate-change research complex to fund its continued modeling that has achieved the magnificent advance in scientific knowledge since 1978 of narrowing the estimate of the warming effect of doubled atmospheric CO2 from 1.5-4.5 C to 1.5-4.5 C? (Yes, you read that right - no narrowing achieved. Scores of billions spent over 38 years and no advance in what we really need to know.)
How about all the profits sought by carbon traders who expect to amass billions trading permits whose economic value rests on nothing but empirically falsified climate models that project 2 to 3 times the warming actually observed?
All this isn't even to mention the anti-capitalistic mentality apparent in the pope's implicit condemnation of profit seeking. "But he only condemns seeking profit "above all else," you say? Sorry, that doesn't ring true to Francis' past. Despite the fact capitalism has lifted whole societies out of poverty while socialism has only trapped them in or returned them to poverty, Francis has been committed to Liberation Theology - a Latin American variant of Marxism learned by Latin American priests while studying mostly in Marxist-dominated French seminaries - since early in his priesthood.
One can't help wondering if his embrace of climate alarmism rests on politics rather than science. That wouldn't be unique to him, as former U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretary General Christiana Figueres said as much last year.
Certainly the absence of any hard science in the four paragraphs on climate change in Francis' encyclical 'Laudato Si' suggests science didn't much factor into his opinion. That's why hundreds of scientists - including climate scientists - signed the Cornwall Alliance's Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change, and were joined by economists, theologians and ethicists.
If politics has become submissive to a technology and economy that seeks profit above all else, the technology is that of renewable energy, which is subsidized 60 (wind) to 400 (solar) times as much per megawatt-hour of electricity generated as fossil fuels. How else do you explain government's willingness to sign onto a climate treaty implementation of which will cost $70-$140 trillion by century's end while, on the IPCC's own assumptions, reducing global average temperature by no more than 0.17 C.
Perhaps Pope Francis, who purports to care so much about the world's poor, should consider how much more that money could achieve to lift people out of poverty if spent on things like water purification, sewage sanitation, nutrition supplements, infectious disease control, and health care.
Meanwhile, President-elect Trump, at whom the pontiff was preaching, should stick to his guns. He should announce that because President Obama never submitted the Paris treaty to the Senate for ratification, which the Constitution requires for the United States to be bound by any treaty, the U.S. is not a party to the treaty. Then, on the day he's inaugurated, he should submit the treaty to the Senate, where it will die the ignominious death it deserves.
E. Calvin Beisner is founder and national spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
Russia Today
one-freezing cold, heavy snowstorms, and floods have been plaguing the European continent this week, causing power outages, traffic jams, cancelled flights, and even a stream of plastic eggs with toys washing up on a German island.
On Saturday, heavy precipitation paralyzed Istanbul, Turkey. Around 6,000 passengers found themselves stranded as hundreds of flights to and from the city's main Ataturk Airport were cancelled due to the snowstorm.
People walk on the Istiklal avenue during snowfalls in Istanbul on January 7, 2017. Yasin Akgul / AFP
The Bosphorus Strait was closed to ships due to poor visibility, cutting off the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea from the Mediterranean.
Many drivers abandoned their cars and walked rather than waiting for streets to be cleaned. Istanbul's metro system operated throughout the night to deal with a sudden passenger spike.
On Friday, blizzards and snowstorms wreaked havoc across Bulgaria, forcing the closure of major roadways and the airport in the coastal city of Varna, as well as delays at Bucharest International Airport. Bulgaria also experienced power outages after a nuclear power plant reactor in neighboring Romania was shut down by operator Nuclearelectrica. The company said the snowstorm caused interference in the power grid.
n Poland, local authorities said Friday was the deadliest day of the winter, with seven victims of the elements found throughout the day.
In Serbia, the weather caused a massive car collision involving 27 vehicles on a highway connecting the capital Belgrade and the city of Nis. Reports said 22 people were injured in the incident, including six children. The entire southwestern part of the country, where 10,000 people live, was blocked off from the rest of Serbia by the storm.
In Ukraine, over 70 towns and villages throughout the country experienced power outages, the national emergency service reported. Ukraine boosted consumption of natural gas in response to the cold snap, with forecasts that in January it may burn twice more fuel from underground storage tanks than planned.
Moscow, where Orthodox Christians celebrated Christmas on Friday, experienced its coldest Christmas night in 120 years. Temperatures dropped to almost -30C in the city and as low as -32.7C in Moscow Region, the Russian national meteorological service said. It was the coldest Christmas night in Moscow since 1891, when the temperature dropped to -32.7C.
Moscow (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
Siberians Mock Muscovites for Panic Over Record Freezing Temperatures
Moscow Times
Moscow Times
Muscovites lamenting a record-breaking January freeze aren't just battling plummeting temperatures: they're also being mocked by their fellow countrymen.
Moscow's Emergency Situations Ministry told residents on Friday that temperatures would drop as low as minus 35 degrees Celsius during the night of Jan. 7-8, warning that abnormal frosts may affect the city's power grid in some areas.
"This is what it's like here today," journalist Michael Nacke wrote on Twitter, "But [Game of Thrones character John] Snow is a fool, he hasn't got a hat!"
Yet even as Muscovites have taken to social media to vent their wintertime woes, Russians from across the country's colder climes began mocking their softer countrymen in the capital.
"It's a rare day when the tweets of frozen Muscovites warm all of Russia," artist Artyom Loskutov from Novosibirsk wrote on Twitter.
Many Siberians were keen to show their friends in the capital a real Russian winter. Ilya Yablokov in the Siberian city of Tomsk shared his post on Facebook, showing the temperature hovering at a cool minus 46 degrees. "I'm heading all this whining from Muscovites about the weather," he wrote. "I just want to show them this."
Moscow politician Vladimir Milov, originally from Kemerovo, was less amused, writing, "Today my news feed is filled with the traditional Siberian and Ural bullying about the Moscow "frost" (-25). Nice to know they love Muscovites.
Russian political activist Natalia Pelevina, possibly left speechless due to the bitter cold, simply posted a picture of the Mona Lisa bundled up in a warm blanket.
The Moscow government has advised residents to avoid going outdoors as much as possible and to wear appropriate clothing.
Temperatures in the capital are expected to rise to a balmy minus 19 by Monday Jan. 9.
Anthony Watts
From Wire and Twitter reports:
We know the northern hemisphere has been getting colder, for example we reported earlier this week that the USA was colder than any time last year with an average temperature of 16 degrees F. It isn't just the USA, in northern Africa, reports suggest that it is only the second time in living memory that snow has fallen on the Sahara desert. The last record is for February 18, 1979, when the snow storm lasted just half an hour.
Snow falling on the Saharan mountain ranges is very rare, let alone on the sandy dunes of the continent's largest desert.
Photo by Karim Bouchetata of Meteo Algerie
Amateur photographer Karim Bouchetata says he took the incredible pictures of snow covering the sand in the small Saharan desert town of Ain Sefra, Algeria, on December 19. The unforgiving red dunes looked pristine and picturesque.
"It looked amazing as the snow settled on the sand and made a great set of photos. The snow stayed for about a day and has now melted away." he added.
Quote via The India Times
Dr. Milton Wolf@MiltonWolfMD
Paul Driessen
Having achieved major goals, US should refocus EPA and other environmental agencies
Donald Trump plans to "roll back progress" on climate change, energy and the environment, activists, regulators and their media allies assert. The claim depends on one's definition of "progress."
These interest groups define "progress" as ever-expanding laws, regulations, bureaucracies and power, to bring air and water emissions of every description down to zero, to prevent diseases that they attribute to manmade pollutants and forestall "dangerous manmade climate change." Achieving those goals requires controlling nearly every facet of our economy, industries, lives, livelihoods and living standards.
If we are talking about halting and reversing this unbridled federal control, President-Elect Trump has promised to roll "progress" back - and not a moment too soon, if we are to rejuvenate our economy.
Federal land, resource and environmental agencies have unleashed tsunamis of regulations in recent years, and President Obama is poised to issue many more before January 20. The total cost of complying with federal rules was about $1 trillion annually in 2006. It has since doubled, raising the federal reporting and compliance burden to $6,000 per person per year, through late-2016.
The Obama Administration has thus far imposed some $743 billion of those new costs, via 4,432 new rules requiring 754 million hours of paperwork, according to a new American Action Forum analysis. The $2 trillion cumulative annual tab is more than all federal individual and corporate taxes collected in 2015; includes 10 billion hours dealing with paperwork; and does not include state or local regulations. Land use and environmental compliance costs account for a sizable and growing portion of this total.
These costs hogtie innovation, job creation and economic growth. They make millions unemployed.
So let us examine "progress" against two other standards: (1) pollution reductions to date; and (2) the validity of claims used to justify ever more burdensome and expensive environmental regulations.
We can never have zero pollution. The laws of diminishing returns increasingly come into play: getting rid of the last 10% can cost as much as eliminating the initial 90% and is rarely needed. And we cannot control nature's pollution: volcanoes, forest fires, poisonous algae blooms, deep ocean vents, erosion of rocks bearing mercury and other toxic substances, and other sources.
However, we can reach the point where remaining pollutants pose few or no health risks - and we have largely done so. Since 1970, America's cars have eliminated nearly 99% of pollutants that once came out of tailpipes, notes Air Quality in America co-author Joel Schwartz. Refiners have eliminated lead from gasoline and reduced its sulfur content by some 95% - while coal-fired power plants now remove 80-95% of the particulates, mercury, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide that they emitted in 1970.
Asthma may be rising, but it's certainly not because of pollution rates that have fallen dramatically.
Water quality has also skyrocketed. Along the river where I grew up in Wisconsin, a dozen pairs of bald eagles now nest where there were none when I was a kid, when you couldn't eat the fish or swim in the polluted water. The same thing happened across the USA. Other problems remain to be addressed.
As President-Elect Trump has quipped,
"It used to be that cars were made in Flint, and you couldn't drink the water in Mexico. Now our cars are made in Mexico, and you can't drink the water in Flint."
That's because local officials and the USEPA didn't do their jobs - didn't monitor or fix failing, corroded lead water pipes. Repairing Flint's system, and addressing water and sewer problems in other cities, will cost billions of dollars. If we are forced to spend tens or hundreds of billions on exaggerated, fabricated or imaginary risks, there will be little left to resolve our remaining real health problems.
Let us celebrate our progress, and turn our attention to real problems that still must be corrected. Let us also examine claims used to justify regulations - and roll back rules that don't pass scientific muster.
EPA insists that saving fuel and reducing pollution from now super-clean vehicles requires that cars and light trucks get 54.5 mpg by 2025. But achieving this will force people to drive smaller, lighter, more plasticized, less safe cars - and millions more will be maimed and killed. EPA doesn't mention that, or acknowledge that fracking ensures another century of oil and gasoline: time to devise new energy sources.
Above all, though, the Environmental Protection Agency's reason for being, for wanting to steadily expand its budget and personnel, for seeking to regulate our farms, factories, homes and energy supplies, for trying to drive entire industries into bankruptcy - is its assertion that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, thereby endangering human health and welfare. The claims do not withstand scrutiny.
Even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise - spurring plant growth worldwide - except during the strong 2015/16 El Nino, average global temperatures have remained steady for 18 years. Polar and Greenland ice caps, sea levels, hurricanes, floods and droughts refuse to behave in accord with climate chaos claims, computer model predictions, or EPA and Obama White House assertions.
Meanwhile, as EPA moves to impose its "Clean Power Plan" and other draconian rules, developed and developing nations alike are building new coal-fired power plants every week, greatly expanding their oil and gas use, and reducing wind and solar subsidies. Even EPA analyses recognize that ending nearly all US fossil fuel use will prevent an undetectable global temperature rise of just 0.02 degrees by 2100.
So EPA has tried to justify its job and economy-killing climate change and coal eradication rules by claiming they will bring huge "ancillary" health benefits. Those claims too are pure hogwash.
US coal-fired power plants emit less than 0.5% of all the mercury that enters Earth's atmosphere every year from Asian power plants, forest fires, volcanoes, subsea vents and geysers. EPA nonetheless claims its rules will magically bring benefits like an imperceptible 0.00209-point improvement in IQ scores!
The agency also says banning coal-fired power plants will reduce "carcinogenic" and "lethal" levels of microscopic particulate matter (soot) in America's air. But EPA has no medical evidence that what is still in our air poses actual problems. In fact, EPA-funded researchers illegally subjected human test subjects - including elderly, asthmatic, diabetic and cardiac patients - to 8, 30 or even 60 times more soot per volume (for up to two hours) than what EPA claims is dangerous or lethal. And yet, no one got sick.
Obviously, EPA's air quality standards and dire warnings about soot are totally out of whack with reality.
The federal government next concocted what it calls the "social cost of carbon" framework. It assigns a price to using carbon-based fuels and emitting carbon dioxide, by blaming US fossil fuels and CO2 for every imaginable and imaginary "harm" to wildlife, climate and humans worldwide. It completely ignores the enormous and undeniable benefits of using those fuels, the equally important benefits of plant-fertilizing CO2, and horrendous damage that would result from eliminating 81% of America's energy.
Indeed, EPA and other regulators routinely ignore the impacts that their draconian regulations have on people's jobs, living standards, health and welfare - including reduced or lost incomes, lower nutrition, welfare dependency, drug and alcohol abuse, and shorter life spans. They then present scientists, "health" and "environmental" organizations and advisory committees that approve and applaud the regulations anyway - often because the agencies pay them millions of dollars a year to do so.
That's how bureaucrats remain powerful, unaccountable and immune from being fired or having to compensate victims for their incompetent or even deliberate falsifications and actions. We end up being protected from exaggerated and fabricated risks, years or decades from now - by having jobs, companies, industries, families, communities, and our overall health and welfare hammered by over-regulation today.
America's voters rejected this agenda. Over 90% of the nation's counties voted to Trump the bridge hand to tyranny. We do not want to roll back true environmental progress. But we do demand a return to sanity, science, and honest consideration of our overall health, welfare and "human environment" in approving regulations that govern our lives. Let's insist that the new Congress and Administration do exactly that.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.
Trump gives hope to derailment of the establishment's plans (both parties) for a New World Order - which would cede our rights and control over our lives including a redistribution of any wealth to the UN.
Update: see the whole story behind the story in their own words in Global Warming Quotes & Climate Change Quotes: Human-Caused Global Warming Advocates/Supporters by C3 Headlines.
Quotes by H.L. Mencken, famous columnist: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." And, "The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it."
We start with Mencken's quotes because they are so well known from the past, but yet still so relevant so many years later. His past insights to those whose lives are addicted to the seeking of power, or control, or fame, or money is still as valid today, as it was 70 years ago. Below are quotes from the powerful; the rich; the religious; the studious; the famous; the fanatics; and, the aspiring, all sharing a common theme of keeping "the populace alarmed" to further their own personal, selfish goals.
The threat to the world is not man-made global warming or climate change. The threat to the world, as is always the case, is a current group(s) of humans who want to impose their values and desires on others. The people below represent such a group, and they are not saints as individuals; in fact, quite the opposite, unfortunately.
Once you read the below quotes, come back and re-read the previous paragraph. The threat to the world is not man-made global warming or climate change. The threat to the world, as is always the case, is a current group(s) of humans who want to impose an 'Agenda' based on their elite values and self-importance. The people below represent such a group, and they are not saints as individuals; in fact, quite the opposite, unfortunately.
See the quotes here.
Australia PM's adviser: climate change is UN hoax to create new world order
Maurice Newman, chairman of Tony Abbott's business advisory council, says UN is using debunked climate change science to impose authoritarian rule.
The Australian prime minister's chief business adviser has accused the United Nations of using debunked climate change science to lead a new world order - provocative claims made to coincide with a visit from the top UN climate negotiator.
Christiana Figueres, who heads the UN framework convention on climate change, touring Australia this week, urged the country to move away from heavily polluting coal production.
Under Tony Abbott's leadership, Australia has been reluctant to engage in global climate change politics, unsuccessfully attempting to keep the issue off the agenda of the G20 leaders' summit in Brisbane last year.
Maurice Newman, the chairman of Abbott's business advisory council and a climate change sceptic with a history of making provocative statements, said the UN was using false models showing sustained temperature increases to end democracy and impose authoritarian rule.
"The real agenda is concentrated political authority," Newman wrote in an opinion piece published in the Australian newspaper. "Global warming is the hook. It's about a new world order under the control of the UN....
"It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective."
Figueres used an address in Melbourne to urge Australia to move away from coal, the country's second-largest export, as the world grapples with global warming.
"Economic diversification will be a challenge that Australia faces," she said.
Abbott has described coal as "good for humanity" and the "foundation of prosperity" for the foreseeable future.
Figueres also urged Australia to play a leading role at the climate summit in Paris in December, a call unlikely to be heeded given Abbott's track record.
At the Brisbane G20 meeting, he warned that the Paris summit would fail if world leaders decided to put cutting carbon emissions ahead of economic growth.
At home, Abbott, who in 2009 said the science behind climate change was "crap", repealed a tax on carbon pricing and abolished the independent Climate Commission advisory body.
Asked on the Canberra leg of her trip if the politics around renewable energy was as toxic elsewhere in the world, Figueres said: "No. At the global level what we see is increased participation of renewables, increased investment in renewables, increased excitement about renewables."
Abbott's office and the UN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Derek Alker
Updated: Public and many to most real scientists are unconvinced.
From: Malcolm Roberts [mailto:firstname.lastname@example.com]
Sent: Friday, 24 April 2015 12:07 PM
To: UQ VC OFFICE
Cc: John Cook; Ove Hoegh-Guldberg; FORBES VIV; Carter Bob; Plimer Ian; Jennifer Marohasy
Subject: D15/7927: Complaint of serious corruption of science by UQ's John Cook and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
Dear Professor Hoj:
As an honours engineering graduate from the University of Queensland I am inquiring of you as to the reasons our university supports the work of John Cook who serially misrepresents climate and science? Specifically, why is our university wasting valuable funds to mislead the public through a free course and by producing associated international video material? Course
Please refer to the lower half of page 4 of Appendix 5, here.
It details John Cook's fabrication of an unscientific 'consensus'. Science is not decided by claims of consensus. Resorting to claims of consensus is unscientific and contradicts the scientific process.
Fabricating false claims of scientific consensus is not honest.
Science is decided by empirical scientific evidence. John Cook has repeatedly failed to provide any such evidence that use of hydrocarbon fuels is causing the entirely natural climate variability we experience.
A succinct summary of John Cook's fabrication of a consensus, and of the corruption of science upon which his claims rely and that is furthered by his claims, and of the empirical scientific evidence he blatantly contradicts, are discussed in pages 6-18 of my report to federal MPs Senator Simon Birmingham and Bob Baldwin. It is available at this link.
My seven years of independent investigation have proven that there is no such empirical scientific evidence anywhere in the world. Climate alarm is unfounded and is a purely political construct pushing a political agenda. Please refer to Appendices 2, 6, 6a, 7 and 8 at this link.
John Cook's core public climate claims are false and blatantly contradict empirical scientific evidence. Please refer to appendix 4 at the same link.
Further, John Cook and / or his employer are receiving funds in return for his deceiving the public, politicians and journalists and I'm wondering if that would make his work a serious offense.
As you likely know, John Cook works closely with the university's Ove Hoegh-Guldberg who reportedly has many serious conflicts of financial interest surrounding his false climate claims. These are discussed on pages 54-59 of Appendix 9 at this link and briefly on pages 16 and 17 of my report to Senator Birmingham and Bob Baldwin MP.
I draw your attention to my formal complain dated Wednesday 10 November 2010 to the university senate about the work of Ove Hoegh-Guldberg misrepresenting climate and science. That was not independently investigated by then Vice Chancellor Paul Greenberg who was subsequently dismissed over another event, reportedly for a breach of ethics. My formal complaint is discussed on pages 57 and 58 of Appendix 9 at this link.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg's responses to my request for empirical scientific evidence of human causation of climate variability have repeatedly and always failed to provide such evidence.
This email is openly copied to both Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and John Cook and to reputable Australian scientists and academics expert on climate and to Viv Forbes an honours graduate in geology from our university. Viv Forbes understands the key facts on climate and on the corruption of climate science by beneficiaries of unfounded climate alarm perpetrated falsely by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and John Cook.
Please stop John Cook's misrepresentations and restore scientific integrity to our university. I please request a meeting with you to discuss our university's role in deceiving the public and to discuss restoring scientific integrity. I would be pleased for that meeting to be in the company of John Cook and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg if that suits you.
Pages 19-26 of my report to Senator Birmingham and Bob Baldwin discuss the serious damage to our nation and to humanity and our natural environment worldwide as a result of unfounded climate alarm spread by our university's staff. I hope that you will fulfil your responsibility for investigating and ending such corruption. To neglect to do so will mean that you condone such damage and dishonesty. I seek confidence that you will restore the university's scientific integrity and look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely,
Malcolm Roberts
BE (Hons) UQ, MB U Chicago, Member Beta Gamma Sigma Honours Society
Fellow AICD, MAIM, MAusIMM, MAME (USA), MIMM (UK), Fellow ASQ (USA, Aust)
The 97% "consensus" study, Cook et al. (2013) has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, highly credentialed scientists and extensively in the climate blogosphere. The shoddy methodology of Cook's study has been shown to be so fatally flawed that well known climate scientists have publicly spoken out against it,
"The '97% consensus' article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it."
Mike Hulme, Ph.D. Professor of Climate Change, University of East Anglia (UEA)
Only 65 Scientists of 12,000 Make up Alleged 97% on Climate Change and Global Warming Consensus According to Breakdown of Cook et al study, say Friends of Science
In response to multiple inquiries from media and global warming advocates, Friends of Science issue this release to expose the statistical manipulation evident from the break down of the Cook et al paper. Friends of Science decry the linking of this flawed study with alleged danger from man-made carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) as there has been no global warming in 16 years despite a rise in CO2 levels; Friends of Science say the sun and oceanic oscillations are the main drivers of climate change, not CO2.
See faulty methodology of Cook study.
The following is a list of 97 articles that refute Cook's (poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed) 97% "consensus" study. The fact that anyone continues to bring up such soundly debunked nonsense like Cook's study is an embarrassment to science. See the list here.
See the Galileo Movement here. Visit Then click on the blue text: "9.2.12 Evidence of Political Fraud - Malcolm Roberts"
See Dr. Doug Hoyt's Greenhouse Scorecard on Warwick Hughes site here.
From Jack Black's Climate Change Dictionary
PEER REVIEW: The act of banding together a group of like-minded academics with a funding conflict of interest, for the purpose of squeezing out any research voices that threaten the multi-million dollar government grant gravy train.
SETTLED SCIENCE: Betrayal of the scientific method for politics or money or both.
DENIER: Anyone who suspects the truth.
CLIMATE CHANGE: What has been happening for billions of years, but should now be flogged to produce 'panic for profit.'
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Leftist Nutcase Prize, unrelated to "Peace" in any meaningful way.
DATA, EVIDENCE: Unnecessary details. If anyone asks for this, see "DENIER," above.
CLIMATE SCIENTIST: A person skilled in spouting obscure, scientific-sounding jargon that has the effect of deflecting requests for "DATA" by "DENIERS.' Also skilled at affecting an aura of "Smartest Person in the Room" to buffalo gullible legislators and journalists.
JUNK SCIENCE: The use of invalid scientific evidence resulting in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge
Speaking of junk science, see Lubos Motl's excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here.
See all the talks at the latest ICCC9 Conference in Las Vegas in 2014 here.
Heartland has the presentations and powerpoints posted for the Heartland ICCC IV. If you could not go, there is plenty to see there. Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.
See C3 Headlines excellent collection of graphs and charts that show AGW is nonsense here.
See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additional scientific youtubes here.
The left loves to reference desmogblog.com when any skeptic produce an analysis or paper challenging CAGW - see the real story about this looney left green PR firm here.
1350+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming Alarm and here a list of 1000 stories suggesting global cooling has begun.
"The above papers support skepticism of "man-made" global warming or the environmental or economic effects of. Addendums, comments, corrections, erratum, replies, responses and submitted papers are not included in the peer-reviewed paper count. These are included as references in defense of various papers. There are many more listings than just the 900-1000 papers. Ordering of the papers is alphabetical by title except for the Hockey Stick, Cosmic Rays and Solar sections which are chronological. This list will be updated and corrected as necessary."
The less intelligent alarmists have written a paper allegedly connecting the scientists to Exxon Mobil. Here is the detailed response from some of the featured scientists. Note that though this continues to be a knee jerk reaction by some of the followers, there is no funding of skeptic causes by big oil BUT Exxon has funded Stanford warmists to the tune of $100 million and BP UC Berkeley to $500,000,000. Climategate emails showed CRU/Hadley soliciting oil dollars and receiving $23,000,000 in funding.
See still more annotated here.
Many more papers are catalogued at Pete's Place here.
The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under "What's New" or "A Primer on Global Warming." Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.
See the ICECAP Amazon Book store. Icecap benefits with small commission for your purchases via this link.
Go to and become a member of WeatherBell Analytics here.
Website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) here. It's latest report (2013) details information from almost 4,000 papers.
Science and Public Policy Institute here.
Intellicast Dr. Dewpoint Library here.
RedNeck Engineer Energy and Innovation here.
The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. "Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel" - Socrates (470--399 BC)